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.