look to the kauri

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St AIDAN’S, ALEXANDRA
and ST JAMES’, ROXBURGH
SIXTEENTH ORDINARY SUNDAY
(July 12^th) 2026

 

READINGS 
 
Isaiah 55:10-13
Romans 7: 1-11
Psalm 119: 105-112
Matthew 13 : 1-9 & 18- 23                                      

 

Praise to you, God, for all your work among us.

Yours is the vigour in creation,

yours is the impulse in our new discoveries.

Make us adventurous,

yet reverent and hopeful in all we do.

This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

 

Just over 40 years ago, when I was ordained, the world was living in the thaw of the cold war. I was no fan of President Reagan, but he and Gorbachev were seemingly talking like civilised human beings. “Star Wars” – the military defence system, not the movie after which it was named – and Glasnost were things.

For what it’s worth New Zealand was entering the era of the second term of Prime Minister Lange, though I was living under a different regime, that of Bob Hawke, across the ditch. It was an optimistic time.

The past is a foreign country.

It was a mirage. Or at least in part. It was at time of idyllic days when the Berlin Wall came down, apartheid collapsed, Lady Di got married. But we forgot to keep our eyes on the ball of ongoing justice, costly compassion. Faith, too. We became complacent. We thought the finishing line, whatever it was, was ours.

It’s been a rocky road since then. For me the pivotal moment was in 2015 when some ostentatious squillionare that I’d never heard of rode an escalator down into the foyer of a gauche building somewhere in the USA.

He was, he told the world, going to be President. America – or perhaps just white masculine privilege – would be great again. I suppose it had been once, but really? Earth’s proud empires pass away.

I don’t think that Trump has ever read Romans 8, and St Paul’s famous analysis of the human condition, of humanity’s need for God’s intervention. Because in the same year that Trump declared his tilt at the presidency, he also declared that he was not a person who needed forgiveness.

I suspect the great emperors of, Rome or, earlier, of Babylon, emperors like Nero or Nebuchadnezzar, weren’t too hot on the idea of forgiveness either. Why bother with it, when one is oneself a god? The centre of the universe.

Isaiah – probably the second prophet of that name and tradition – was daring to speak to his people of hope. That doesn’t sound daring. Except it was at a time when the divine light of hope was pretty much extinguished. By complacency.

Isaiah was daring to speak to his people of a memory that they had lost. Some of us have known personally that to talk of the past can trigger unpredictable responses in sufferers of dementia. The Hebrews to whom Isaiah was speaking were suffering a collective amnesia, collective dementia, forgotten the land God had given their ancestors. Land from which they had been exiled, once a bitter separation, but now just a distant “meh.” They were far from interested in returning to a bunch of old religious laws. Babylon was fine, thanks.

Isaiah was not winning any popularity stakes. To dare to speak of a God of justice and compassion at a time when cruising along with corruption was the flavour of the century was a Not Good Thing.  

Reading Isaiah reminds us of the importance of reading Isaiah. Seriously. Reminds us of the importance of hearing the voices of the prophets, ancient and contemporary, in the not altogether edifying times in which we live. The past is a different country. But dear God, we can learn from it.

Just over 40 years ago, I was no fan of Reagan and his ’nomics, no fan of military build-up, no fan of the growing and spuriously Christian Religious Right centred around figures like Jerry Falwell.

But nothing was preparing me for the deep-seated corruption and cronyism that is the hallmark of that once proud empire across the far north east side of the Pacific Ocean.

No matter what their personal beliefs might be, and probably are not, Trump and Putin have in common the absolute inability to read faith for meaning. Each has turned the glorification of something called “nation,” into their highest priority – or, more particularly, to use that concept as a means by which to enhance glorification and financial enrichment of their own selves.

Their false gods of Christian nationalism (Putinism and Trumpism alike) are tearing the world apart. In such a time the brave God-focus of Isaiah has something powerful to say to us.

Isaiah and the prophets incessantly called God’s people to dare to hope. To hope not in the strength of armies, but in the strength of the love and compassion and justice of God. Hosea put it succinctly when he spoke about the command to focus on “the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” Amos, when he spoke of “Justice flowing like torrents of water, righteous actions like a stream that never dries up.”

Isaiah, in a time of national amnesia, dared to speak of hope and joy. But not any old hope and joy, but hope and joy based on the deep and intimate knowledge of God and God’s justice for the vulnerable.

In the passage just before ours Isaiah cried out to his complacent people, “let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.”

Turn from corruption. Turn from calling good evil and evil good. Turn, as Isaiah would go on to say, to “bind up the broken hearted,” to feed the hungry, heal the wounded, rescue the refugee. Turn from fast-growing glitz of superficiality to the hard work of creating a place for the cedar and the kauri and the totara that grows slowly but with awe-inspiring structural and visual integrity.

Create  space for what Isaiah called “the word that goes forth from God’s mouth,” birthing light and life.

Isaiah was determined to put God at the centre of his people’s experience once again. Compassion, love justice. It is our task to find, to listen to work with those who are speaking Isaiah-esque words of compassion and love at a time when shallow glitz and cheap nationalism, “make x-nation or y-nation great again,” have become society’s mantra. It is our task to take the less glamorous way of the Cross, challenging corruption and proclaiming gospel in whatever small ways we can. 

Even in our small world.