wasps and dolphins

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St AIDAN’S, ALEXANDRA and ST JAMES’, ROXBURGH

SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

(May 10^th) 2026

READINGS 

 Acts 17:22-31                                               

Ps 66:7-19                                                     

1 Pet 3:13-22

John 14:15-21

Eternal God, light of the minds that know you,

joy of the hearts that love you, strength of the wills that serve you;

grant us so to know you that we may truly love you,

and so to love you that we may gladly serve you,

now and always. 

 

In the collect we prayed a few minutes ago, both the representative words I spoke and the scattered, uncollected thoughts of all our hearts, we sought a deeper journey into the heart of the Creator. In the psalm we found the psalmist bursting out with joy at the experience of seeing God’s footprints, fingerprints, love prints in the visible world.

The psalmist or psalmists often found those prints in the natural world, and, somewhat less palatable to us now, in the great movements of history. In military success, for example, though before we feel too horrified at that, we might remember that it’s not so long since our forebears emblazoned praise to God on plinths of statues rejoicing in military victories.

We simply have to acknowledge that this has been a part of the human story, that we are flawed, that we live together uneasily, that we shed blood either literally or through the exploitation of our planet and its species. Not you and I specifically, not very often. That's why our confession is plural. We have. I may have, but that’s not the point. 

Few of us have sinned extraordinarily badly. Unless we take to heart the animal liberationists’ heartfelt cry, “meat is murder”?

Despite having a few vegetarian offspring, I for one have never quite mastered the dissonance between my love for animals and … well, you know? Perhaps C. S. Lewis was right when he made Aslan differentiate between the dumb animals and the talking beasts – trees included?

I don’t know.

Part of me wants to be a Jain, sweeping the streets so I don’t kill living beings with my footsteps. Part of me will stop off at Jimmy’s Pies after the service and see if they have a venison or a steak and pepper left over. I’m worse – I apologize to inanimate objects, hoping desperately that a tree that I chop down or even a stone that I move doesn’t mind too much.

I drew the line at apologizing to a colony of wasps that I had destroyed a couple of weeks ago – they attacked me first! Nature is red in tooth and claw after all, and perhaps even the psalmists knew that.

Definitely even the psalmists knew that, though the words are Tennyson’s.

Though I was reminded, as I muttered about the wasps that attacked me, of the words of a pest destructor who destroyed a nest for me in Napier. “Wasp stings only last a few days,” he said. “Human stings last for ever.”

Do I digress? St Paul, as he stood in the Areopagus, knew only too well the brute forces of nature. While possibly the shape of this speech that Luke recalls reflect Luke’s style as much as Paul’s, we can be very sure that it was consistent with the latter.

We know that Paul knew the ups and downs of nature – human nature and the mysteries of what I’ll  have to call “natural nature.”  In a remarkable and powerful passage in second Corinthians he even boasts of all he has endured in the service of the gospel. It’s an ugly list, far worse than a few wasp stings gained not in the service of the gospel but in a random moment on a dog walk.

I have been writing this week of the suffering of a group of missionaries, some from this diocese, who sought to bring Christ love to China in the 1930s. They weren’t bible-bashers, they were bearers of compassion. Some of them died for their attempts. Or – if we look at the honours board at St James Roxburgh, we will see the name of Nurse Esther Tubman. I was writing of her, too, recently. Like the missionaries ten years later she, in the best way she knew, was seeking to bring hope and healing to those in dire need.

Paul looked at the plinth in the Areopagus and saw the good in divinity and humanity alike. He spent the last couple of decades of his life seeking to demonstrate that goodness and justice and love was embodied not in po-faced religiosity, in laws and regulations and trying to look good, but in the life and teachings and actions and death and above all resurrection of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

He was executed for his troubles of course, because he poked the bear of civic and religious hypocrisy.

While most of us are living more sedate lives it’s worth remembering that not so long ago Alex Pretti and Renee Good poked the bears of brutality and injustice in the Unites States. So too did Martin Luther King, in a manner much more programmatic and direct. So too is Pope Leo, and Bishop of Washington Mariann Budde.  It is only the mysteries of time and space that prevent you and me from the dangerous underbellies of existence in Trump’s USA or Chiang Kai-shek’s China or the Kaiser’s war.

We are called to be who and where we are. That too is mystery, unfathomable. Our task is to respond to the God who has called us by worshipping, and by allowing our lives to be a waling advertisement of Gospel hope.

By proclaiming with our mainly quiet lives, that this same God who casts universes across heavens and inexplicably creates wasps and dolphins, mountains and mudslides alike, is the God revealed in the life, teachings, death and the craziness of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ.

That’s what Paul dared to proclaim, respectfully, as he stood amongst the people of Athens.

 

Easter, 1989: Follow

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 8^th) 1989

  

READINGS

 

Acts 5:27-32
Psalm 118:14-29
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31

 

One of the advantages in having pew bibles in a church is that there are occasions when we can turn from the individual text that we are considering on the day to the broader context of that text’s place in the complete gospel, epistle, or whatever it might come from. It is also possible to compare texts with other passages.

I am going to ask you to turn in your pew bibles to the end of John’s account of the gospel (incidentally I won't refer to it as John’s gospel because each gospel account is not the author’s but Christ’s good news). And we will read the verses immediately preceding today’s gospel account – don’t close the bibles after Jan has read the passage!

Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look  into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew,“Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and she told them that he had said these things to her.

 

What you have heard there is the original ending of the fourth gospel account. If you glance down the text to John 21: 24-25 you will find a second ending.

Most scholars will tell us that the hand that wrote most of the fourth gospel is not the same as the hand that wrote today’s reading. So we must ask the essential question that we must ask of every scripture reading: why? Why is there a second ending?

Each of our four gospel accounts was written for a different community. With a little bit of educated guesswork, scholars are able to identify the location or make up of each community involved. John’s gospel account, for example, is fairly anti-Jewish, and was almost certainly written for a Gentile Christian community.

It would seem that soon after the original author of John finished writing or narrating his memories of the Jesus event, something changed dramatically within his community. The most likely thing is that he died, and that following his death disputes broke out over his importance. Wether he or Peter was the “right” evangelist to follow. By the end of the third letter of John, for example, we find a writer expressing quite different attitudes to those expressed in the gospel account.

So we find the author concerned to portray Peter and the “beloved disciple” alongside one another. To compare their strengths and weaknesses, and to emphasise that it is not they, but the Christ they preach, who is the focus of attention.

The reading draws the attention – our attention – to Jesus’ central command.

Follow me.

It is this, not the command to Peter to feed lambs and or sheep, or the various questions as to the quality of Peter’s love, that lies at the heart of this reading.

Follow me.

It is this message that lies at the heart of the gospel. If we turn to the opening of John’s gospel account we will find the same command being obeyed.

The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.

 

In Mark’s gospel account we find this again.

As he was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.

 

So the desired response to the gospel message – to an encounter with the risen Lord – is as Jesus here commands: “follow.” At the end of Mark’s gospel accounts he simply tells the women that he has gone ahead of them, that he will always go ahead of us.

The response that Jesus seeks from us is to follow. To follow him out into the community with the message “Christ is risen.” Squabbles over whether we prefer Peter or John – or Rome or Canterbury – pale into insignificance as we learn to obey the greater command: follow.

Are we following Christ?

Heraclitian Fire

 

EASTER MEDITATION AT HOLY TRINITY, 

RINGWOOD EAST
March 26^th, 1989

 

It was but a few days ago that I attempted to grapple with the tragedy of Good Friday. At the heart of all the agony and despair of Good Friday there is Good News. There is the news that God is not impartial or uncaring. There is the news that God is not “out there,” neither merely a “Higher Power” nor a “Grand Architect.”

Much, much more. He is the God who is lonely with the lonely and who dies with the dying. He is the God of darkness. And that is Good News.

Where is God when it hurts? God is hurting, suffering, dying too.

But there is more, much more. God is not merely a God who identifies with and enters into the suffering of creation. God is the God who breathes hope into human despair. God is the God of Easter.

When we were baptised into Christ Jesus, we were baptised into his death. So by our baptism into his death we were buried with him, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glorious power, we too should begin a new life. If we have been joined to him by dying a death like his, so we shall be by a resurrection like his … we believe that, if we died with Christ, then we shall live with him too.

 

It is normal in the church for baptisms to take place on Easter day. As it is we today could find no candidates for baptism, but we shall all renew our baptismal vows. Baptism is the sign and seal of faith in Christ. Today is the birthday of faith and hope in Christ.

Death, where is your victory?

Death where is your sting?

                           (1 Cor. 15:55).

 

Today we all burst forth out of the waters of baptism, we all burst out of the tomb – we all burst forth out of the womb of death and proclaim,

“Jesus is Lord”

King of kings and Lord of Lords.

And he shall reign forever and ever.

Hallelujah!

 

This does not mean that we shall not die. It does not mean we shall not suffer. It does not mean that we shall not at times doubt the very existence of God. It does not mean we shall not catch colds, or cancer. We are human. We may even fear death: our fears make no difference to the great Christian belief,

Christ is risen, Hallelujah, Hallelujah!

 

So shall we all, in the twinkling of an eye, in the passing of our life, be transformed and resurrected into his resurrection life.

And the scientific world seeks proof. I ask for proof of love. For proof of beauty.

There is no proof. Christ is risen. The testimony of the church is our proof, the faith of the saints our proof. Christ is risen, Hallelujah, Hallelujah!

The waters of the sea will vanish,

      The rivers stop flowing and run dry:

a human being, once laid to rest,

      will never rise again,

the heavens will wear out

      before he wakes up

or before he is roused from his sleep.

                                    (Job 14:11-12)

 

Such is the wisdom of Job. Even the wisest and most pious human being cannot logically make the leap to belief in the resurrection – that is the realm of faith. “I believe, Lord, helpest thou my unbelief.”

So what is this resurrection that the Easter faith asks us to believe in? I guess the answer is that we do not know. The gospels seemed to be asking us to believe in more than merely the immortality of the soul, and certainly more than reincarnation. They seem to be telling us that we will again be flesh and blood. “We shall be raised,” says Paul, “incorruptible.” The hows and whats, too, belong to the realm of faith and mystery.

                           Faith fade, and mortal trash

            Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

                           in a flash, at a trumpet crash,

            I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

            This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond

                          is immortal diamond.

 

The Easter faith is that you and I are immortal diamond. We shall die, but as Christ rose from the tomb, as one baptised rises from the waters, so shall we mortals be raised immortal from the grave, and dine with the risen Christ at the Great Banquet. You are immortal diamond.

Christ is risen, Hallelujah.

huddling upstairs

 

my first sermon since June 29th

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN
SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 12^th) 2026

 

READINGS 

Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Psalm 16
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31 

Eternal Father, through the resurrection of your Son, help us to face the future with courage and assurance, knowing that nothing in death or life can ever separate us from your love. This we ask through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. 
Amen.

 

A few moments ago I prayed a “collect,” a prayer gathering together in one voice the many prayers, the many angles and nuances that we could whisper in our minds in the guided silence a few seconds before I spoke. There is a reason for praying a collect in that way rather than all “reading” it together – in fact there are a number of reasons, but one in particular I want us to hold in mind as we journey into John’s telling of the resurrection stories. 

And that is that no one person, not, sadly to say even me, has a copyright on the truth of those events on and following the first Easter day. As I will say over and over again we are now into the language of that which is beyond words. So the stuttered whispers in our silence are every bit as valid an expression of our hopes and fears in Christ as are the stuttered whispers of the person next to us. 

A week ago in the Dunston parish I did what I may or may not have done when I was with you, and that was simply to read CS Lewis’ great vision of the end of time from the Chronicles of Narnia. For the doctrines of resurrection, ascension, second coming and eternity take us into realms which our mere words, even the mere words of the gospel writers, can never grasp.

But those words can create a space in which we can dare to believe. The writer of our collect, the writers of all out collects, I hope, knew that. He or she pulled together words that express something of the hope that is brought to us in that unfathomable mystery of resurrection, and with it the unfathomable mystery of Second Coming, the belief that one day our Messiah our Christ will return and wrap up all human and celestial history, and bring us into the inexplicable reign of God.

To turn to John’s resurrection story that we just read, as he tries to narrate these beyond-words events, we find some important navigation aids for the somewhat crazy world in which we are currently living – even in far-from-it-all Aotearoa - New Zealand. Let me confess that I am very conservative in my reading of the resurrection appearances. They seen to me to carry deep truths that operate at both a literal and symbolic level.

The disciples were afraid. Having just lost, in horrific circumstances, their friend and leader, this is unsurprising. It is far worse than waking up each day to find out that a war that we are surprised to find existing, exists. That a war engaged by a man who promised no more wars, is being fought with massive loss of life on one side, by a man who wants a Nobel Peace Prize. That escalating fuel costs and the cost of living are rising almost exponentially, despite promises that were the opposite of what said man said he would implement. 

Of knowing that, despite learning over a 10 year period now that truth and falsehood are slippery concepts, and that the one claiming to be the sole arbiter of truth is the father of lies, knowing that despite all this, our weird 2026 world is not nearly as disturbing as that experienced by those who gathered in the upper room, terrified.

We need to pause for a moment with that phrase “for fear of the Jews.” That phrase  has caused so much aggression towards one racial group on earth. It will hardly be surprising to know that I am no fan of the current state of Israel; neither would I defend the indefensible of singling out any one religion or ethnic group for persecution or genocide. This applies whether the perpetrators are Aryan supremacists, Nationalists of any form, or leaders of any wing of politics. 

If we take time to understand the context in which John was writing we might err on the side of translating “for fear of the Jews” as “for fear of oppressive authorities,” no matter their ethnic or political alignment.

That said we know the disciples were huddled in terror and into that terror broke, despite locked doors, the bodily presence, unrecognisable at first, of the one who had inspired hope in this motley group for somewhere between 12 and 36 months. 

This unrecognisable figure spoke to the frightened few with reality transforming calm and spoke the word “peace.”

Peace in any language is never merely the absence of war, though that would be a wonderful thing, but the presence of justice, the presence of hope on macro and micro scales. Hope in the presence of horrendous international geopolitics, hope in the presence of ecological and economic vulnerability, hope in the presence of our own illnesses, or other aspects of our daily lives that have been wracked by unsettlement, even despair.

So powerful was the transformation that took place in that other upper room, that we hear about it still. Sometimes we too experience our lives touched and transformed by peace and hope that transcends all that we are experiencing personally or globally.

“Peace be with you” is no trivial “chin up mate, but an invitation to open ourselves up to the life and world-transforming hope that was embodied in the very tangible, if not at first recognisable man. This man who incomprehensibly entered the room and the lives of the huddled few who were gathered there, who equally incomprehensively still carried in his hands, his torso, his feet, the scars that human hatred had drilled into his body just hours before.

We are invited. no matter how inevitably inadequate we are, simply to be a people, and individual persons, who allow that hope, that love, that death- and despair-transforming life to infiltrate and direct our lives, individually and collectively.

Those huddling in the upper room, however imperfectly, did just that. So we hear and we are challenged to live their story today.

I finish as I began …

Eternal Father, through the resurrection of your Son, help us to face the future with courage and assurance, knowing that nothing in death or life can ever separate us from your love. This we ask through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

let the dark come upon you

 

GOOD FRIDAY MEDITATION AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST

March 24^th, 1989

 

 

Carrying his own cross he went out to the Place of the Skull.

 

It was a brutal sight. Flayed almost to death, bruised and bloodied, staggering under the weight of a heavy wooden beam, staggering out the main road of the city to crucified just beyond the city walls, in the sight of all passers-by.

The Romans must have believed in the death sentence as a deterrent. Not merely death, but up to four or five days of sheer uncontrollable agony: dehydration, cramp, stung by insects and by human tormentors, shifting weight from torn feet to buttocks to torn feet again in an effort to stop the body from slumping down and cutting off all air supply, and yet longing to die. Naked, defecating and urinating without control, to the mirth of the gathered crowd below.

Where is God in this? Where is the God who created the heavens and the earth? Where is the God who slew the Egyptian oppressors and delivered his people Israel through the Red Sea?

From the sixth hour until the ninth hour 

darkness came over all the land

says Matthew. Where is God when the lights have gone out, when all is darkness, and when the one longed for as Messiah is choking to death on a harsh wooden cross?

Christianity is a religion fraught with contradiction. A king who serves.  A saviour who will not save himself. A God who dies. The light that comes into the world but who is executed in darkness. The sinless one who dies a criminal’s death between two thieves.

Where is God in this?

Where is God when it hurts?

Where is God when I am lonely?

Why is this Friday Good?

There is nothing romantic about the cross. popular jewellery though it is, it is a ghastly symbol. Superstitious save-all though it has become it has of itself only the power to destroy, and to destroy torturously. What place has a nice God like you doing in a scene like this?

That of course is the good news. A nice saviour on a white horse saves only the nice people. A powerful saviour heading a vast army saves only the powerful. But a poor, lonely and detested saviour has something to offer to us all.

For the message that Christianity has to offer to the world is now clear. God identifies utterly with the pain and suffering and shame experienced by humanity. God is not a God “out there.”  He is a God who enters the darkness.

The light shines in the darkness.

 

He is not a god of magic tricks. He is the God who suffers death, “even death on a cross,” and does so not because he has sinned but because we, his wayward people, have sinned.

Where is God when it hurts?

God too is hurting.

God is dying with the dying.

God is lonely with the lonely.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you,
which shall be the darkness of God.

 

It is in the darkness of Good Friday that we find the mystery of a God who experiences all of the suffering experienced by humanity.

The light shines in the darkness 

and the darkness has not overcome it.

 

As we await Easter we shall discover that God is more, more even than the God of the raw and bloody cross.

 Amen

and it was dark

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST

MAUNDY THURSDAY

March 23^rd, 1989

 

It must have been a strange night, that night of our Lord’s last supper. It had been a strange week. First, his glorious entry into Jerusalem, and then he's going on and on about glory and about the coming of his “hour,” at the very same time that the crowds were becoming impatient with him and he was beginning to lose popularity.

Judas in particular was getting cross. He had waited for years for this wonderful hour, and now it seemed to be slipping away from him. For years he had been telling the people that the Messiah was coming, and in these past three years had swung all his support behind Jesus. He would relate to stories about the magnificent liberation of Israel in the old days and how now once more the state of Israel would be established, freed from the tyranny of Rome. He even talked of a racially pure state – expelling from the Jewish lands all who were not the chosen people of God.

And now this Jesus that Judas trusted and expected so much of seemed to be letting the side down. Early in the week it had been great. He had the crowd eating out of his hand, and the word was that Pilate was getting quite nervous about an uprising. A man named Barabbas had been arrested when he became over-excited, speaking of glorious revolution, and had killed some Roman citizens.

But then it had started to go wrong. Jesus was losing his popularity. He was shilly shallying around, speaking of being “a servant” and even of dying. He seemed to be losing his nerve, and Judas wanted none of it.

It was all a bit beyond the disciples, the events of this week. Judas was not alone in expecting decisive political events to take place following the entry into Jerusalem. Even Peter, ever faithful to Jesus, has been polishing his sword, ready for God’s decisive victory about to be worked through this Messiah, Jesus.

But Jesus now was behaving most strangely. Rather than using this Passover meal as an opportunity to rally the disciples and to regain the popularity of the previous Sunday, Jesus was now wandering around washing feet. Peter wasn’t too pleased about that at all, and Judas was looking very sour at it all.

Washing feet? No self-respecting Messiah would do that. The public must never hear of this bizarre behaviour. Jesus would lose all credibility. Could it be that the glorious chosen one of God was cracking under the strain? Was this the beginning of a nervous breakdown?

Yes, the disciples were very confused that night. What kind of a hero grovels at the feet of his followers? What kind of hero takes upon himself the task even the servants sought to rise above?

                              I think you’ve made your point now.  
                              Perhaps even gone a little bit too far.

 
It was only later, months and years later, that they realise that it is in precisely the shameful and disparaged things of the world that God reveals his nature. And that realisation came only after Jesus had sunk even lower than washing feet. It came after he died, alone, naked, and fly-blown, on a cross.

Only then did he become bread and wine to a hungry and thirsty world.

Only in the stupidity, the stupidness of the Cross does Jesus become Saviour of the World. Only in the shame, the scandal of the Cross does Jesus become revealed as the Messiah.

But Judas never realised that.

Judas went out into the night.

And it was dark.

finding the way

SERMON PREACHED AT SHELFORD GIRLS’ GRAMMAR

March 21^st, 1989

 

Some years ago in New Zealand a geography teacher from my school became lost in dense bush on the mountain ranges off the central North Island. You may or may not be aware of the geography of New Zealand, but there are many mountain ranges which are rugged and all but impassable. Steep razor back ridges and deep V-shaped valleys make travel exhausting, and the thick bush ensures that landmarks are almost impossible to see. The teacher had a map, but had lost his compass in a fall, and navigation to safety was proving difficult. As in any context where a person is lost, it is too easy to begin to go around in circles.

Are there any fans of David Bowie left these days? In one of his earliest and strangest hits he sings these words:

Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles

          I’m feeling very still,

and I think my spaceship knows

         which way to go.

 

The irony is that his spaceship is in fact drawing him out into endless space, breaking free of its orbit around earth, and carrying him to a phenomenally lonely death.

Tell my wife I love her very much. 

             She knows.

 

My geography teacher, and the character in Bowie’s song, Major Tom, was each faced with a big problem. Which way to go? Each faced the probability of a lonely death if the right decision was not made. Each was utterly alone, with no one else to guide their decision. One had a spaceship claiming to know the way, but leading him deathwards. The other had a map, but a map is useless without a compass.

We too are faced with serious decisions about the way to go. On a global scale we are faced with the problems of nuclear weapons – not only in the now cooling tensions between the Soviets and the USA, but elsewhere – and ecological disaster, the greenhouse effect. Five years ago the average person dismissed such concerns as being the foolish cries of greenies. Now even governments are taking notice.

And we are faced with personal questions about the way that we will go. What will be way? Do we make a god of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll? Of money? Of power? Do we want to be a Debbie Flintoff-King? Or an Annie Lennox? Or will we be content to be ourselves instead?

My geography teacher discovered something in the bush. He discovered that in that part of New Zealand a certain kind of moss grows only on the seaward or west side of the forest trees. By that discovery he was able to set his path for the coast, keeping a straight course, and he walked out of the bush near a main road, after two days, tired, but alive.

Debbie Flintoff-King and Annie Lennox too have their compasses. Their compass may turn out to be fulfilling and life saving, like my geography teacher’s moss. Or it may be self-seeking and destructive, like that of David Bowie’s Major Tom, or rather, of his spaceship.

It is up to you now, to find the way. It is up to you to choose your compass and your gods. You may, like Major Tom, make a God out of something that ultimately destroys you. Or you may find something that guides you into life.

Thomas said, “Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

Jesus said, “I am the way, I am truth, and life.”

                                                (John 14: 6)

 

During this Holy Week and Easter it should become clear to us all that there is nothing either soft or easy about the way of Christ. There is however the unexpected message that somehow the horror of Good Friday is changed into the hope of Easter. Just what your horrors and hopes are is your own concern. But it is my belief that, like the moss on the trees, the way of Christ is a good and ultimately rewarding choice.

our naked selves

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT (5^th March) 1989

 

READINGS

Joshua 5:2-12

Psalm 34:1-10

2 Corinthians 5:14-21

Luke 15:1-32

 

If one were at the same time both a priest and a sadist, one of the more cruel tricks one can play is to ask a senior girl in a co-ed school to read in chapel the reading we heard as our Old Testament reading this morning. Rather than inciting mirth and jocularity the ploy tends instead to bring down on the congregation a form of hush, an embarrassed silence. It is an unusual effect to experience in chapel at a co-ed or any school.

Actually, it is rather a surprising effect. I managed to pass through years of church boarding school before I realised that such rites as circumcision existed, and still more before I discovered what the rite involved. Still more time passed before I learned that such things were mentioned in the Bible.

For ten years of childhood and adolescent exposure to Christianity I heard only clinically censored and hermetically sealed versions of the scriptures. The harlots and the seductions, the genital rites of passage and other apparently un-Anglican moments were carefully excised, leaving only a cotton wool god and a cotton wool people of god. It was to be even more years before I learned of some of the even more atrocious and male-initiated practices carried out in the name of Christianity to placate the male distrust of womankind.

I tell you all this because I believe it is far too easy to ignore the earthiness of our Judaeo-Christian heritage. Our history is not all clad in sandals of gold, and during Lent we would do well to remember that. Before pointing the finger at the Ayatollah Khomeini’s condemnation of Salman Rushdie, abominable though it is, we should remember that it is only a few weeks since Christians were slashing the screens of cinemas that showed The Last Temptation of Christ. That too showed intolerance and irresponsibility in the name of God.

There were probably very good reasons for the origins of the rite of circumcision among the people of the Middle East. The ritual was predominantly a puberty rite among the nomadic tribes of that region. The Jews adopted it as a rite of infancy. But whether we believe it to be a rite handed down by God to Moses or an already existing rite of medical significance that accrued religious meaning, it was certain to have had pragmatic beginnings.

But what was the point of this form of barbarism? Unless we are avid readers of James Bond we don’t have to be clever to realise that circumcision is a very ineffective form of religious advertisement. The Jews were a prudish people. The great shame of Christ was not merely that he was crucified –  hung up on a tree – but that he would have almost certainly been hung naked on the Cross. It is a fact that our sculptors manage conveniently to forget. To the Jew, public nakedness was a shame beyond comprehension. No Jewish man paraded his circumcision in the bath houses of Rome. And any advertising executive will tell you that a form of advertising seen only by a man’s wife or wives is an ineffective use of resources.

So what significance could this seemingly unnecessary rite have had in the relationship between God and the people of God? The simple fact was that the Jewish man (and I do not mean woman!) knew as he stood naked before God that there was an unerasable contract, a covenant between them. In the same way as when he stood naked before his wife he knew himself to be contracted to her, for as patriarch of a family he knew that he was responsible before God for them.

And so, before God alone he would stand, reminded of his failure, and in need of God’s forgiveness. He had a choice: to make amends to God, or to ignore God. We always have that choice.

Penitence, then, is as much a private and personal act as the procreative act. For that reason, I have no time for the public penitential displays of the Jim and Tammy Bakkers of this world. I have no time for long and dramatic testimonies. I have no time for passionate beating of breasts by over-zealous Anglo Catholic priests, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Or, as James Joyce would have it, “may he colp her, may he colp her, may he mixandmass colp her.” (Finnegans Wake, 238). Such displays are a parody of penitence.

I know my sin. I know my participation in a world of sin. And I seek and know the forgiveness of God, God who in Christ revealed the very nature of God as being prepared to be utterly shamed by and for us. The God who knows our naked selves is naked before us on the Cross.

So our penitence, to which we are called this Lent, must be a private act. No ostentatious statements about our giving up of wine, women, or sugar. But instead a wrestling with God in the privacy of our hearts, the circumcised nakedness of our hearts, knowing our participation in sin and in the sin of a fallen world. Even if we had, as I hope we will in future years, undergone the imposition of ashes, we would provide a cloth so that our acts of penitence were not paraded beyond the context of our worship. Before God alone we repent. Before God alone, male and female alike, we must expose the circumcision of our hearts. Our Lenten liturgies remind us of that responsibility.

Sadly, though, as Anglicans we tend to be too used to being penitential. For centuries we have spent our time on our knees, imploring the forgiveness of God for the sins we have committed, acknowledging and bewailing our most manifold sins and wickedness. It would be remiss of us to forget our shortfallings, but at the same time we must never forget the miracle of Easter, the miracle of God’s forgiveness. We must not neglect to celebrate the Easter faith that proclaims mercy, pardon and deliverance to us, and which pronounces the wonderful if unmerited sentence of eternal life.

So I urge you to continue your disciplined observance of Lent. But I want you also to sneak a look ahead to the other side of Easter, to the time when we with Christ burst forth from the tomb of sin and penitence and death and shame, to the time when we burst out and advance into the community with the glorious news, “He is not here, he is risen,” the message that was carried out into the world by those first women on the first Easter morning. With Saint Paul, and with those first women, we must proclaim to the people of Ringwood,

For our sake God made the sinless one

             a victim for sin,

so that we might in him become 

            the righteousness of God.

A repentant people, privately, we must be. But, following Easter, we will have a task to do. That task is to discover and to act on the discovery of how we might best proclaim, in liturgy and in evangelism, Christ to the world. The Christ of Easter.

 

after the siren blows

 

SERMON PREACHED AT MELBOURNE GRAMMAR

LENT 3 (February 26^th, 1989)

 

Been beat up and battered ‘round
Been sent up, and I’ve been shot down
You’re the best thing that I’ve ever found
Handle me with care

Reputations changeable
Situations tolerable
Baby, you’re adorable
Handle me with care

I’m so tired of being lonely
I still have some love to give
Won’t you show me that you really care?

Everybody’s got somebody to lean on

 

Often when I have a few days to spare I will take myself for either on my motorbike or in my car out into the Outback of South Australia or New Southy Wales and explore some of the lonely roads available to me there. It is a way of renewing my batteries – and that of whichever vehicle I take – after too much running around, too much pressure. I usually return greatly refreshed, at the same time glad to be back with my family, but sad to return to the city, with all its smell and bustle.

Often after one of those trips someone will ask me whether I was lonely, alone out there in the wilds of inland Australia.

The question always surprises me. I admit that I have sometimes taken my dog with me, but I have done so more for security than for company. I have often felt utterly alone out there under the stars or the desert moon, but never lonely. There is a great difference.

On the other hand I have in life felt lonely. Take for example the moment when in an inter-house or inter-school cricket match a key player has lobbed a sitter of a catch in your direction and you have dropped it, and you trudge slowly back to your mark. Well the moment at a party when you realise that all your friends have paired off with a girl but you are not sure that you have the same get up and go. Or your friends may not care that you are there at all. Or more recently in life, the moments when I have walked into a hotel bar and realised that I am the only person not covered in tattoos, or perhaps the only person not wearing a tie.

Those are the moments of loneliness. Lonely in a crowd, they call it. The greatest one of all was when I was cox of my school VIII and we had finished and won the national championships, for which we had trained all season. Suddenly I realised that these people with whom I had trained hundreds of kilometres were no longer thrown together with me as my friends, and I ran the risk of being utterly alone. They might no longer need or want me. Lonely in a crowd.

Some members of that crew I have not seen for ten years now.[That was 1989 ... we've caught up many times since]

Then they spat in his face and hit him with their fists.

Others said as they struck him, 

“Prophecy to us, Christ …  who hit you then?”

 

It was the experience of Jesus also to be lonely, actually lonely and rejected by all his closest followers. Lonely in a crowd. Worse than dropping a catch, he was betrayed to death by one of his closest friends, a friend who no longer agreed with the way he was running, as it were, his campaign. And in tonight’s reading we hear of him being deserted even to die alone. Some desertion! In a matter of hours he would cry from the grizzly, fly-blown cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Yet that is precisely why I’m prepared to be a Christian. Somewhere in the tragedy that we will remember on Good Friday is the gospel, the good news that Christians have held dear ever since the first Easter. For as Christians we believe that the experience of Jesus is at the same time the experience of Father and Spirit, and that in some mysterious way all Godhead have experienced the pain of dying alone, after rejection on a fly-blown cross.

If this is true, and of course no one can conclusively prove that, but if this is true then the Jesus Christ of Christianity has something to offer not only to the beautiful people, but to the lonely people, the broken people, the disfigured people, even the normal people.

As we prepare for the second great silly season, the season of Easter eggs and more glossy wrapping, it is this that I would ask you to remember: the founder of Christianity, who was no meep, was prepared at the same time to be both God and to be utterly, utterly lonely.

 

 

then you can cut it down

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT (26^th February) 1989

 

Yackatoon Cross

READINGS

Isaiah 55:1-9

Psalm 63:1-8

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Luke 13:1-9

 

It may bear fruit next year; if not then you can cut it down.

In the early church converts to Christianity spent up to three years undergoing a process of preparation for admission to the church, preparation for admission to the sacrament of baptism that marks the beginning of the Christian journey.

It was in that same era of Christian history that the period in the church year that we know as Lent came to take its present shape. Lent came to be the period not only for the preparation of all the faithful for the celebration of Easter, but also the crisis, the last desperate sprint in the preparation of candidates for baptism.

In that time this third Sunday in Lent came to be the particular time for reflection on God’s call to his people to repentance. It was the time to remember the disobedience of God’s people of Israel in the desert and in their subsequent pilgrimage. But it was also traditionally a time to remember God’s forgiveness, his seemingly inexhaustible ability to love his wayward children. It was time to remember and to reflect on the compassion of Yahweh, as we have done this morning.

Yahweh is tenderness and pity; 

slow to anger and rich in faithful love. 

                                       (Ps. 103:8)

 

It was a time also to remember the errors of the early church. What better way to remember them then to turn again to Paul’s repeated entreaties to the Corinthian church, repeated calls not to distort or abuse the gospel he himself had taught them. And at the end of three years of preparation and soul searching, the candidates knew only too well their weaknesses, their potential for failure.

I watched last week one episode of the ABC series on women in the army. I was left with a deep sense not only of the brutality of the army, but of the tragedy of failure within such an unforgiving system, the tragedy faced by those who were simply unable to keep up, that the demands of the system placed on them.

Thankfully God is more forgiving than the army. For we all will fail. We will fail simply because we are a part of a human race that has failed, part of a world that fails. We will sin. We will ourselves commit acts of sin, and we will continue to participate in the tragic sins of a fallen world.

But we will also, as we are soon to do in this liturgy, turn again to God to seek and receive his forgiveness.

How many times? Seventy times seven.

We must forgive our neighbour an infinite number of times, precisely because we have likewise been forgiven an infinite number of times.

It must also be remembered that an essential part of Christian belief is that there will come a time when there will be no further opportunities for repentance.

He will come in glory to judge the living and the dead 
and his Kingdom will have no end.

There must come a time when our death or the end of history as we know it brings us face to face with our failures, a time when excuses no longer prevail. There must be in our faith that the God who is all loving and all knowing is also the God who will ultimately judge his people by their lives, by their readiness to proclaim a gospel of love by their deeds and their words.

The responsibility for us as Christians is great. We must find ways in which to alleviate the human suffering that is the visible result of a sinful world. We must find God’s strength to rise above our own tendency or vortex towards sin. We must find ways effectively to proclaim the Christ event, the good news of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, proclaim it to the world. By this we shall be judged.

It is with this question in mind that at this point in our journey through Lent we must turn and seek once more the forgiveness of God for our sins, as individuals, and for our sins as part of a tragic and fallen world. For the tree that is left standing one more year will, if it does not bear fruit, eventually run out of reprieves, and be cut down.

For that reason, when we say our confession together in a few moments, let us remember that we are not recalling before God our own sins only, but in the first person plural, remembering the sins of the whole world, and as a royal priesthood offering them to God for forgiveness.

Let us therefore at this time in Lent be most critically tuned to our failings and to the failings of this world, and seek that God may breathe forgiveness into us.

 

gutslog

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY RINGWOOD EAST
SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT (19^th February) 1989

 

READINGS

Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18

Psalm 27:10-18

Philippians 3:17-4:1

Luke 9:28-36

 

 

 

What is this bizarre and seemingly surreal experience of which we have read today? What were the disciples, Peter, James and John, doing with Jesus on the mountain? What did they experience there, this experience so out of the ordinary that the gospel writers struggled to find words to identify it?

To begin unpacking these questions we must first place this passage, this account of the event we know as the Transfiguration of Jesus, back within the context of the events given to us by the gospel writers. If we go back a handful of verses from these events, we find that Peter has just made his momentous confession of faith. Jesus has asked the disciples “Who do people say that I am?” and followed that question with the more telling, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter has responded rightly, “You the Christ of God.”

Although Peter is right, Jesus is not happy with his answer. Jesus alone knows that the meaning of his “Christhood” or “Messiah-hood” cannot be made clear until after the terrible event of Good Friday, the event of the Cross. So Jesus attempts to persuade his followers that the way in which they must follow him is the way of suffering and misunderstanding, far, far removed from the course of glorious victories and good times that they have in mind.

If anyone would follow me let them deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me.

                                              (Luke 9:23)

The events of the mountain take place chronologically a few days later – six or eight, depending on whether you read Matthew and Mark on the one hand, or Luke on the other. Chronologically they take place a few days later, but in terms of the narrative, they take place immediately. And so it is by way of an explanation of his earlier words that Jesus takes his closest disciples with him to the mountain.

What mountain? Again we must speak symbolically here. In Luke’s usage a “mountain” or other high place is a symbol for a state of proximity to God. In Luke 6:12 Jesus ascends into the hills to pray alone. The experience is the same here, except that on this occasion he allows his disciples to accompany him on his journey to the inner depths of God.

A little less than a year ago I was standing in the desert two or three hundred kilometres south of Alice Springs. The temperature was pushing up towards 40°C and I was alone in a basin, with not even a trace of wind. There was not a sound to be heard. It is in those moments that we become a powerfully aware of our spirituality, of our vulnerability and seeming insignificance, and yet of the undeniable truth that we are thinking, feeling, spiritual creatures. We are alive, with all the potential that entails. We can care, we can love, we can, if we choose to, sing praises to the Creator that I believe placed us in this universe.

It was an awe-inspiring moment.

A couple of years ago I sat with a man and his family in hospital as he finally gave up a brief but brutal battle with cancer and slipped away into death. It was the early hours of New Year’s Day, and as I sat there holding the hands of the man and his grieving wife and daughter an enormous sense of peace descended on us all, punctuating the sense of sorrow.

It was an unforgettable moment.

I told these stories because I believe each of us will experience from time to time the sense of stillness and peace that is the signature of God’s presence with us. It is an experience not unique to Christianity, but it is most certainly an occasional part of the Christian experience of God. A sunrise or sunset, a powerful moment in a piece of classical or rock music, a moment of enormous sensuality: each can be a moment akin to the mountain experience of transfiguration.

In their moment of proximity, with Jesus, to God the disciples could not grasp the central truth that Jesus sought  to teach them. The overwhelming knowledge that they were with the long-awaited Messiah of God as he sought God in prayer proved to be too much for them. The blinding discovery that this charismatic carpenter from Nazareth was the Son of God, the Chosen One, was too much. The wanted to seize the moment, to make it their own, to fossilize themselves, Jesus, and the moment so that it might never be lost – or at least lost to them. The Romantic poet Keating well knew that vain hope.

      Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal – yet do not grieve;

      She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair.

 But it is not enough to remain frozen on a Grecian urn. It is not possible to remain immobile on the edge of the Simpson Desert. The family of the dead man, and their pastor, must leave the hospital room and pick up once more their lives. Neither we nor the disciples can stay on the mountain of transfiguration.

It is then that Jesus’ words of a few days earlier ring true. It is then that we adopt the ghastly reality of the Cross and the sheer hard gutslog of true Christianity, and come down from the mountain. We too must come down from the mountain and turn our face towards Jerusalem and towards Good Friday.

Christianity can be no easy option, opting out of the brutal facts of life and death.

It is to face that truth that we must now accept the discipline of Lent. With that discipline in mind we must journey with Jesus and the disciples down from the mountain towards the tragedy of Good Friday.

Only then will we be prepared to grasp and to eternalise the joy of Easter. The joy of the coming of the light into the world. The joy of the resurrection and the hope of meaning that it brings to our lives.

TLBWY