SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
SUNDAY, JUNE 19th 2011
(TRINITY SUNDAY)
Readings: Genesis 1.1-2.4a
Ps 8
2 Corinthians 13.1-11
Matthew 28.16-23
I remember too clearly the abysmal attempts of those who produced sermons in the chapels of my youth, laboriously producing inadequate and misleading images of the Trinity to instruct their less than impressed young audiences. I remember only too clearly the ubiquitous blue or red carpets, imprinted with the fleur de lis, representing some imagined form of the trinity – or perhaps an obsession with the Ace of Clubs – prevalent in churches I suspect from Reykjavik to Invercargill. I remember learned dissertations on water, ice and steam – probably one of the more heretical representations of the Trinity – or visual demonstrations of the relationship between a projector light-bulb, the stream of light emanating from it, and the area enlightened by that light-stream as it terminated on a wall or paper or some other illuminated surface.
The illustrations were as creative as they were misguided: there is no illustration of the Trinity. The Trinity is divine, unique, and utterly, as the so-called Creed of Athanasius (which is neither a creed nor by Athanasius, though it is deeply profound, nevertheless) put it, utterly incomprehensible. Like the doctrines of Ascension and Pentecost that we have observed in past weeks (doctrines which pave the way in both the liturgical year and in the language of faith), the doctrine of the trinity is not a mathematical formula to be applied to problem solving, nor a complex puzzle to be solved, but a mystery before which to kneel in adoration. It is not for purposes of random routine that I cross myself at the name of the Triune God, but because an act of worship is the only appropriate response to a mystery that can never be unravelled, and whose extent is ultimately encountered only in the stark brutal simplicity of the Cross of Christ.
Language will fail – even art will fail – in attempts to describe the Trinity because language and indeed all human understanding is necessarily finite. When we master the language of the trinity we will have usurped the place of God – and, as people like to say, that’s not going to happen. The attempts of humankind to build a tower to the heavens to usurp the place of God, as told in Genesis after our creation story, are a timeless parable. To find the origins of the universe, to define the source of energy that began the magnificence of creation: these, even these, though impossible to the finite processes of your brains and mine, are child’s play alongside the incomprehensibility of a Creator God who is three in one.
Nevertheless the language of trinity began to invade the very first utterances of the Christian community. The linking in sentence structures, linking in prayer and in blessing of the words God, father, son and spirit, was an unavoidable outworking of the first Christians’ experience of encountering the Creator and redeemer of the universe in the person and story of of Jesus Christ, inexplicably made known and present to them in worship, in fellowship, and in the exploration of the Hebrew scriptures and later of the writings that came to be known as the New Testament Christian scriptures.
So let us not look for cerebral explanations or visual demonstrations of this most central of Christian doctrines, this doctrine that is a sine qua non of Christian belief. A sine qua non? A ‘without which not’: we may, as Anne reflected in her Ascension sermon, believe many things by jettisoning this doctrine, but we will not believe in Christianity or even in Christ. This belief is that which sets more than any others the boundaries of collective Christian belief. But it is not about cerebral, rational belief. It is about receiving and hanging tenaciously to the belief that God was in Christ, and that Christ is made known to us in our own lives even yesterday and today and tomorrow. Above all, perhaps, it is about knowing that God is love.
This may appear to be a sudden shift of thought. But while we may never comprehend the trinity, we can nevertheless experience God’s love, God’s essence (for God is love) in triune form. Out of God’s creativity God creates beauty and vastness and complexity – and creates humanity with which to share and enjoy it. We can sit as it were at the feet of the fact of creation and its source the Creator and marvel at the complexity of the labyrinthine connections of the universe, the vast intricate intersections of fluke and chance that have brought you and me into being, sustained our being, and will continue to sustain the being of all the vast web of intricacy that is yet to come. We can marvel at the complexity of the universe and the delicacy of the human eye that beholds some infinitely small aspect of it, we can marvel at the inexplicability of the human capacity for love – while acknowledging our too often revealed capacity for hatred – and gasp with the psalmist ‘what is a human being, that you, Creator God, care about us’. For as long as we have life and love life – and that is of course not a universal experience – we can whisper our halle, halle, halle to the Creator whose acts of sharing love breathe creation into being.
We might note also, though, that life is not always as it should be. Our lives, no matter how carefully we live them, will sometimes experience darkness, and many lives appear to experience inexplicable paroxysms of darkness. Sometimes, of course, these are self-inflicted, sometimes they are inflicted by others, sometimes the darknesses are afflicted by nature. No life is devoid of darkness, and in some lives – those for example caught in the hells of sexual abuse, substance abuse, or the economic and military greed that produces the world’s refugee camps and killing fields – in some lives the darkness seems unconquered. Yet there are enough testimonies in history to remind us that even in some of humanity’s deepest darknesses sparks of love have been fired, and Good Fridays – individually or even en masse – have turned into Easter hope. We can give thanks from the depths of our being for the experience of the Trinitarian God made known to us in the person of Jesus Christ, entering into human experience, and transforming even the heart-cry ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me’ into the hope of resurrection. We can note, too, with awe the surprising claim that within decades of his death his followers were worshipping the crucified criminal carpenter, naming him in the same breath as the Creator, and claiming not only that he had been raised from death, but that, even at the beginning of Creation, he had been present as the command, the Logos of God, creating a universe to share with us.
In the same breath – and that word breath is the same word as spirit – we can give thanks that the touching, transforming, healing love of the God-revealing man of Nazareth is not restricted to a short passage of three years in an obscure region two thousand years ago. From the first breathings of God that massaged order into chaos, that massaged being into the void of non-being, and that manufactured you and me and our loved ones into our infinitesimally yet God-breathed niches in cosmic history, from those first stirrings of divine breath to the present and on to an infinite future, there has been a way, a means, a method by which all that we need to know of God is available to us. God, the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the always-available even to us throughout space and time and eternity; incomprehensible God, God: mystery to be worshipped and adored, not understood.
TLBWY
Saturday, 16 July 2011
Friday, 15 July 2011
God's Hongi
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
SUNDAY, JUNE 12th 2011
(DAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: Numbers 11.16-30
(For the psalm: James K. Baxter, "Song to the Holy Spirit")
1 Corinthians 12.3-13
John 20.19-23
In the wind-down – or is it perhaps the final crescendo? – of John’s gospel-telling the Risen Christ carries out a number of actions and conversations that are of no small significance to the mission and self-understanding of the people of God. In these verses, chapters 20 and 21, we are given example after example of the ways we might embrace the Good News of resurrection and act upon it in our own world, how it might alter our beliefs and actions in the world in which we as John’s audience are called to exist and do mission. These scenes and verses are effectively the flick pass from the half-back of faith, and it is up to us to decide how to use the ball we are fed.
In simple actions Jesus, and John his faithful recorder and interpreter, tell us much. The greeting of peace that Jesus shared – suddenly and miraculously entering the room where the disciples were huddled in fear and uncertainty – is no casual greeting. It is, of course, the greeting we in turn share in the liturgies of our faith when we exchange the peace, and, as I have said in the context of that rite it is not mere greeting but an enactment of the birth of God’s eternity. It is liturgically, as I have said before, not ‘hello, how’s the mokopuna [grandchildren]?’, but ‘may God’s eternity be foreknown now and experienced eternally in your life’. It is scripturally not a casual ‘hi, guys, I’m back’ from Jesus, but: ‘may eternity begin now, in your life, drawing you into the future that is inescapably imprinted with the “yes” of God the Creator’. It is of course an echo of that first creative hongi* of God bestowed on Adam in the Garden. God the Father’s hongi of Adam was the birthing, the out-breathing of creation, the bestowing of wairua or life-force. God the Son’s hongi of the frightened disciples is bestowal, out-breathing of the energies of eternity, the new creation, drawing us forward into its dynamic for-ever-ness.
The breath of God is never stale, never static. Adam without wairua [spirit/breath] is no more than meaningless sinew, bone and corpuscle. The disciples without the new-yet-eternal wairua-experience are mere frightened automatons, broken and defeated. The peace Jesus bestows is that which Paul elsewhere calls ‘peace … beyond comprehension.’ Perhaps you have, as I have, experienced something life it from time to time: I have spoken before of the overwhelming peace I once experienced on a beach on the Awhitu Peninsular, or the overwhelming peace I have sometimes experienced from time to time in the Australian outback. There have been, too, moments of overpowering peace in liturgy, not least when I have sometimes been transported Godwards here at Christ Church by the mana of Richard Gillard’s Lord’s Prayer setting, or for example the powerful peace I once experienced at a Taizé service conducted by Brother Ghislain in Alice Springs (or again at Ghislain’s leadership of liturgy on a beach in Perth), or as I heard a cantor’s voice rise up into the dome of St. Paul’s in London a decade ago.
Those moments, though, while they are a gift of God, are no more than dross if they do not lead us to practice not only the peace that is the absence of strife, but the peace that is the presence of justice and of hope. Peace of the kind breathed by Christ in the disciples’ locked room is never merely experiential and static, but compelling, leading us to action that proclaims God’s Reign in the world in which we are called to minister, in which you and I alike are called to be priests and prophets.
Priests and prophets? The Old Testament mantle of those roles, indeed the entire priestly and prophetic role of the ancient people of God, called to be a sign to the nations around them and us, descends on the disciples and their successors in the locked room, as Jesus breathes on them. They could of course remain in the locked room, but that is not a gospel action: the gospel is an imperative, catapulting us outwards to proclaim resurrection hope and gospel justice. As Jesus gives his hongi to the disciples he offers peace, he offers nurture, and he offers the energies of God, for the Wairua Tapu [Holy Spirit] is never static or self-centred.
Yet the final words of this scene are enigmatic: what are these words of forgiveness doing here? They were often taken in the mediaeval church to be as if words spoken to the priests – the presbyter-priests or ordained priests – about their power to absolve or withhold absolution in sacramental and pastoral ministry. They became obscenely a message of power imbalance, always a distortion of the gospel of the powerlessness of the Cross. It unfortunately was a destructive distortion – except insofar as we are all priests, participating in the ἱεράτευμα (priesthood) of Christ, with the power to forgive and absolve, or to withhold forgiveness and absolution. We cannot proclaim the eternal Reign and justice of God if we practice unforgiveness – the kingdom parable of the unforgiving servant makes that abundantly and unambiguously clear. We can harbour resentments, or we can get on with bearing Christ and proclaiming him and his cycles of forgiveness and reconciliation. We are called to be proclaiming and enacting those cycles to a world that prefers unforgiveness and revenge, or at best disinterest and amnesia. Presbyter-priests should by their liturgical actions remind us all that the power of hope is in our hands: it is up to us to decide whether we’ll stay in a locked room, frightened and trapped in myopia, or whether we’ll allow ourselves to break out as agents of God’s Pentecostal Reign.
TLBWY
*The hongi is the traditional touching of noses in Maori greeting, by which the two participants effectively breathe one another's life force.
SUNDAY, JUNE 12th 2011
(DAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: Numbers 11.16-30
(For the psalm: James K. Baxter, "Song to the Holy Spirit")
1 Corinthians 12.3-13
John 20.19-23
In the wind-down – or is it perhaps the final crescendo? – of John’s gospel-telling the Risen Christ carries out a number of actions and conversations that are of no small significance to the mission and self-understanding of the people of God. In these verses, chapters 20 and 21, we are given example after example of the ways we might embrace the Good News of resurrection and act upon it in our own world, how it might alter our beliefs and actions in the world in which we as John’s audience are called to exist and do mission. These scenes and verses are effectively the flick pass from the half-back of faith, and it is up to us to decide how to use the ball we are fed.
In simple actions Jesus, and John his faithful recorder and interpreter, tell us much. The greeting of peace that Jesus shared – suddenly and miraculously entering the room where the disciples were huddled in fear and uncertainty – is no casual greeting. It is, of course, the greeting we in turn share in the liturgies of our faith when we exchange the peace, and, as I have said in the context of that rite it is not mere greeting but an enactment of the birth of God’s eternity. It is liturgically, as I have said before, not ‘hello, how’s the mokopuna [grandchildren]?’, but ‘may God’s eternity be foreknown now and experienced eternally in your life’. It is scripturally not a casual ‘hi, guys, I’m back’ from Jesus, but: ‘may eternity begin now, in your life, drawing you into the future that is inescapably imprinted with the “yes” of God the Creator’. It is of course an echo of that first creative hongi* of God bestowed on Adam in the Garden. God the Father’s hongi of Adam was the birthing, the out-breathing of creation, the bestowing of wairua or life-force. God the Son’s hongi of the frightened disciples is bestowal, out-breathing of the energies of eternity, the new creation, drawing us forward into its dynamic for-ever-ness.
The breath of God is never stale, never static. Adam without wairua [spirit/breath] is no more than meaningless sinew, bone and corpuscle. The disciples without the new-yet-eternal wairua-experience are mere frightened automatons, broken and defeated. The peace Jesus bestows is that which Paul elsewhere calls ‘peace … beyond comprehension.’ Perhaps you have, as I have, experienced something life it from time to time: I have spoken before of the overwhelming peace I once experienced on a beach on the Awhitu Peninsular, or the overwhelming peace I have sometimes experienced from time to time in the Australian outback. There have been, too, moments of overpowering peace in liturgy, not least when I have sometimes been transported Godwards here at Christ Church by the mana of Richard Gillard’s Lord’s Prayer setting, or for example the powerful peace I once experienced at a Taizé service conducted by Brother Ghislain in Alice Springs (or again at Ghislain’s leadership of liturgy on a beach in Perth), or as I heard a cantor’s voice rise up into the dome of St. Paul’s in London a decade ago.
Those moments, though, while they are a gift of God, are no more than dross if they do not lead us to practice not only the peace that is the absence of strife, but the peace that is the presence of justice and of hope. Peace of the kind breathed by Christ in the disciples’ locked room is never merely experiential and static, but compelling, leading us to action that proclaims God’s Reign in the world in which we are called to minister, in which you and I alike are called to be priests and prophets.
Priests and prophets? The Old Testament mantle of those roles, indeed the entire priestly and prophetic role of the ancient people of God, called to be a sign to the nations around them and us, descends on the disciples and their successors in the locked room, as Jesus breathes on them. They could of course remain in the locked room, but that is not a gospel action: the gospel is an imperative, catapulting us outwards to proclaim resurrection hope and gospel justice. As Jesus gives his hongi to the disciples he offers peace, he offers nurture, and he offers the energies of God, for the Wairua Tapu [Holy Spirit] is never static or self-centred.
Yet the final words of this scene are enigmatic: what are these words of forgiveness doing here? They were often taken in the mediaeval church to be as if words spoken to the priests – the presbyter-priests or ordained priests – about their power to absolve or withhold absolution in sacramental and pastoral ministry. They became obscenely a message of power imbalance, always a distortion of the gospel of the powerlessness of the Cross. It unfortunately was a destructive distortion – except insofar as we are all priests, participating in the ἱεράτευμα (priesthood) of Christ, with the power to forgive and absolve, or to withhold forgiveness and absolution. We cannot proclaim the eternal Reign and justice of God if we practice unforgiveness – the kingdom parable of the unforgiving servant makes that abundantly and unambiguously clear. We can harbour resentments, or we can get on with bearing Christ and proclaiming him and his cycles of forgiveness and reconciliation. We are called to be proclaiming and enacting those cycles to a world that prefers unforgiveness and revenge, or at best disinterest and amnesia. Presbyter-priests should by their liturgical actions remind us all that the power of hope is in our hands: it is up to us to decide whether we’ll stay in a locked room, frightened and trapped in myopia, or whether we’ll allow ourselves to break out as agents of God’s Pentecostal Reign.
TLBWY
*The hongi is the traditional touching of noses in Maori greeting, by which the two participants effectively breathe one another's life force.
Monday, 11 July 2011
Hanging Sandals
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
SUNDAY, JUNE 5th 2011
(SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER, SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION)
Readings:
Acts 1.6-14
Ps 68. 1-10, 32-55
1 Peter 4.12-14, 5.6-11
John 17.1-11
As Anne mentioned in her Ascension Day sermon last week there is both embarrassment and humour in traditional (more or less) Christian circles with regards to the doctrine of the ascension of Jesus Christ. There have been many jests about the appropriate symbol for this season being a pair of sandals hanging from a cotton wool cloud – perhaps had the past week not been so debilitatingly frenetic I might have replaced our butterflies with sandals collected from op shops around the town! But – and in her reference to the levitating sandals Anne was making a serious point – there is a real sense in which the doctrine of ascension is one of those stumbling blocks that many Christian theologians would rather jettison in order to make our faith more so-called ‘accessible’, more so-called ‘relevant’, to the purported person in the street.
The doctrine of the ascension of Jesus Christ, like the doctrine of the resurrection, and even, dare I say it, like the doctrine of the virgin birth, are fundamental corollaries of the doctrine of the incarnation, and that doctrine is a fundamental corollary of the doctrine of the trinity. Remove them and we may have a comprehensible faith, but we do not have Christianity. We may approach Islam, we may approach Judaism – we may approach many other variants of monotheism, but we do not have Christianity.
So what is this moment we observed last Thursday, which informs our transitional thoughts today, as we strive towards the celebration of the coming of God’s Pentecostal Spirit? What we do not have, and do not have in any of the Christological doctrines I have just referred to, is a description of the mechanics of how God achieved divine aims. In exactly the same way the doctrine of creation is misunderstood if it is reduced to a mere mechanical six or seven day process, so the great Christological moments are rendered impotent and banal if we see them as merely mechanical descriptions of process. This of course is easy for me, the rigorous non-scientist, to say. If I may draw comparison from the other great love of my life that parallels my faith, I have no understanding whatsoever of the workings of a motor vehicle. Few things give me more pleasure than flinging a car – preferably manual so the driving pleasures are not depleted! – through the variants of its potential, hour after hour if possible (always, I hasten to add, within the boundaries of legal and sensible responsibility). I love driving, and take pride in it. I have absolutely no idea of the mechanics of the process, either with regards to the internal combustion engine or other centrifugal and centripetal forces that allow the vehicle to handle as it does.
Of course the parallel breaks down. Many of you, and many others even more so, totally understand the principles of mechanics and physics that make automotive transport possible. No one, not one person, has a copyright on the recesses of divine method. The ancient adage ‘no man looks on my face and lives’ still to this extent applies: we cannot claim, like some modern variant of the arrogant builders of the Tower of Babel, to usurp the mind of God. The workings of the Trinity are God’s business, and must remain so. They are a mystery before which we can kneel in adoration, but they are not a celestial carburettor to be dismantled or a piston shaft to be re-bored.
What then are we left with when we kneel at the throne of this mysterious God and this bewildering moment on God’s relations with us? Not, we are suggesting, merely sandals hanging from the clouds. Nor are we left with a departed God, deus absconditus. Jesus in John’s gospel-telling has been at pains to make clear to us that we are not, no matter what befalls the Christ, going to be left bereft in a Godless universe. We can of course choose to disregard the promise of Jesus, ‘lo I am with you always’, just as we can choose to drive our vehicle with the handbrake on. It is not, however, given the circumstances with which we and our forebears have been presented, the most sensible choice.
There is a theological college chapel in Melbourne – not my alma mater (though that of my future bishop!) – that has, emblazoned across the front of what they would call the communion table, the words ‘he is not here, he is risen’. They are of course words from the resurrection scene, and not directly related to the ascension. Except that John makes little separation between the two events, and even Luke would allow that they are a part of the one magnificent supernatural, divine purpose: the conquest of darkness and mortality by the incarnation of God in Christ. The theological college in question was attempting in its chapel architecture to make a doctrinal point: doctrines of the presence of Christ in the elements of communion were abhorrent to the evangelical founders of that college and to their Reformer forebears. They were however powerfully wrong: he is there – and here – precisely because he is risen and ascended.
This celebration of Ascensiontide, and the event it points to, is the liberation and the release of the Christ event – Jesus Christ and all that he has achieved – so that it is effective throughout all time and space, and no longer limited to a huddle of bewildered rag and tag itinerants from first century Palestine. He is here, yet he is risen. He is here in fellowship, in scripture, in elements of bread, wine, and (as we shall shortly observe) water. He is here. He is not visible – in part because, as the poet R.S. Thomas put it, he is always moving just beyond our sight, leading us into his future. He is not visible, too, because we are too limited in our comprehension to grasp the dimension into which he has entered. It is though the dimension of eternity to which you and I, too are invited, and of which we receive foretaste in word, sacrament and fellowship.
Next week we will celebrate Pentecost. In that celebration we acknowledge and rejoice in the coming of the one who makes all this possible, the liberating Pentecostal Spirit, third person of the Trinity. For now we simply acknowledge that it is in the departure from our sight – or from our forebears’ sight – that our experience of God is made possible, even here and now, in the mysterious purposes of God.
TLBWY
SUNDAY, JUNE 5th 2011
(SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER, SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION)
Readings:
Acts 1.6-14
Ps 68. 1-10, 32-55
1 Peter 4.12-14, 5.6-11
John 17.1-11
As Anne mentioned in her Ascension Day sermon last week there is both embarrassment and humour in traditional (more or less) Christian circles with regards to the doctrine of the ascension of Jesus Christ. There have been many jests about the appropriate symbol for this season being a pair of sandals hanging from a cotton wool cloud – perhaps had the past week not been so debilitatingly frenetic I might have replaced our butterflies with sandals collected from op shops around the town! But – and in her reference to the levitating sandals Anne was making a serious point – there is a real sense in which the doctrine of ascension is one of those stumbling blocks that many Christian theologians would rather jettison in order to make our faith more so-called ‘accessible’, more so-called ‘relevant’, to the purported person in the street.
The doctrine of the ascension of Jesus Christ, like the doctrine of the resurrection, and even, dare I say it, like the doctrine of the virgin birth, are fundamental corollaries of the doctrine of the incarnation, and that doctrine is a fundamental corollary of the doctrine of the trinity. Remove them and we may have a comprehensible faith, but we do not have Christianity. We may approach Islam, we may approach Judaism – we may approach many other variants of monotheism, but we do not have Christianity.
So what is this moment we observed last Thursday, which informs our transitional thoughts today, as we strive towards the celebration of the coming of God’s Pentecostal Spirit? What we do not have, and do not have in any of the Christological doctrines I have just referred to, is a description of the mechanics of how God achieved divine aims. In exactly the same way the doctrine of creation is misunderstood if it is reduced to a mere mechanical six or seven day process, so the great Christological moments are rendered impotent and banal if we see them as merely mechanical descriptions of process. This of course is easy for me, the rigorous non-scientist, to say. If I may draw comparison from the other great love of my life that parallels my faith, I have no understanding whatsoever of the workings of a motor vehicle. Few things give me more pleasure than flinging a car – preferably manual so the driving pleasures are not depleted! – through the variants of its potential, hour after hour if possible (always, I hasten to add, within the boundaries of legal and sensible responsibility). I love driving, and take pride in it. I have absolutely no idea of the mechanics of the process, either with regards to the internal combustion engine or other centrifugal and centripetal forces that allow the vehicle to handle as it does.
Of course the parallel breaks down. Many of you, and many others even more so, totally understand the principles of mechanics and physics that make automotive transport possible. No one, not one person, has a copyright on the recesses of divine method. The ancient adage ‘no man looks on my face and lives’ still to this extent applies: we cannot claim, like some modern variant of the arrogant builders of the Tower of Babel, to usurp the mind of God. The workings of the Trinity are God’s business, and must remain so. They are a mystery before which we can kneel in adoration, but they are not a celestial carburettor to be dismantled or a piston shaft to be re-bored.
What then are we left with when we kneel at the throne of this mysterious God and this bewildering moment on God’s relations with us? Not, we are suggesting, merely sandals hanging from the clouds. Nor are we left with a departed God, deus absconditus. Jesus in John’s gospel-telling has been at pains to make clear to us that we are not, no matter what befalls the Christ, going to be left bereft in a Godless universe. We can of course choose to disregard the promise of Jesus, ‘lo I am with you always’, just as we can choose to drive our vehicle with the handbrake on. It is not, however, given the circumstances with which we and our forebears have been presented, the most sensible choice.
There is a theological college chapel in Melbourne – not my alma mater (though that of my future bishop!) – that has, emblazoned across the front of what they would call the communion table, the words ‘he is not here, he is risen’. They are of course words from the resurrection scene, and not directly related to the ascension. Except that John makes little separation between the two events, and even Luke would allow that they are a part of the one magnificent supernatural, divine purpose: the conquest of darkness and mortality by the incarnation of God in Christ. The theological college in question was attempting in its chapel architecture to make a doctrinal point: doctrines of the presence of Christ in the elements of communion were abhorrent to the evangelical founders of that college and to their Reformer forebears. They were however powerfully wrong: he is there – and here – precisely because he is risen and ascended.
This celebration of Ascensiontide, and the event it points to, is the liberation and the release of the Christ event – Jesus Christ and all that he has achieved – so that it is effective throughout all time and space, and no longer limited to a huddle of bewildered rag and tag itinerants from first century Palestine. He is here, yet he is risen. He is here in fellowship, in scripture, in elements of bread, wine, and (as we shall shortly observe) water. He is here. He is not visible – in part because, as the poet R.S. Thomas put it, he is always moving just beyond our sight, leading us into his future. He is not visible, too, because we are too limited in our comprehension to grasp the dimension into which he has entered. It is though the dimension of eternity to which you and I, too are invited, and of which we receive foretaste in word, sacrament and fellowship.
Next week we will celebrate Pentecost. In that celebration we acknowledge and rejoice in the coming of the one who makes all this possible, the liberating Pentecostal Spirit, third person of the Trinity. For now we simply acknowledge that it is in the departure from our sight – or from our forebears’ sight – that our experience of God is made possible, even here and now, in the mysterious purposes of God.
TLBWY
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Aroha and Ice-cream
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
SUNDAY, MAY 29th 2011
(SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings: Acts 17.22-31
Ps 66.8-20 (ish)
1 Peter 3.13-22
John 14.15-21
Reverberating through the commands and instructions of God (in both testaments!) there is that powerful construction that is known to grammarians as the conditional tense. For Māori speakers here the same constructions is generated by use of the ka … ana formula, while in English it is usually generated by the combination of “if” and “then”. If you love me, then you’ll buy me an ice-cream. The “then”, though, is often hidden: if you love me, buy me an ice-cream.
In that childlike sentence, as in our biblical gospel passage, there is another hidden construction that we are going to have to take seriously if we are to extrapolate meaning for a twenty-first century multi-cultural, multi-dimensional, multi-optional world. For there, both in the child’s manipulative tantrum and our gospel-reading lurks that strongest of all tenses, the imperative. Often it is rendered in English with an explanation mark – and in spoken language with a raised or otherwise emphatic voice. In some forms it will earn a green wiggly line from Bill Gates, particularly when used with the verb “to be”: “be healed”, often appearing in the gospels, is an imperative, a command, whether or not Mr. Gates understands that to be so.
In our passage Jesus, as rendered by John, does not render the command to love as an optional extra. The construction is not a soft “if you love (aroha) me then perhaps you might give consideration to keeping my commandments”, which would be a conditional but not an imperative. Nor is it what we call an indicative, “because you love me you are keeping my commandments”. This is a conditional imperative, and as such it allows no wriggle room for the hearer or observer of the words of Jesus. It has a mathematical symmetry, too. “If you do not love me then you will not keep …”, and “if you do not keep, then you do not aroha”. These are stern, hard words of Jesus – so stern that some early scribes fudged and weakened them as they reproduced John’s writings.
They are stern words, but they are words issued with what a former prime minister of Australia somewhat bizarrely called “incentivization” – more normally known as incentive. They are words that lay a gauntlet at the feet of those who would follow Jesus. But – as some of us noted a week or so ago – the apostle John, like the apostle Paul, is well aware of the enormity and indeed impossibility of the interconnected tasks of loving and following Christ. To follow Christ is inevitably to fail – unless you rate better on the perfection scale than anyone else! Jesus, though, provides a promise: “I will not leave you orphaned”. It is of course a metaphorical promise – Jesus effectively picturing himself, in a rare departure from his norms, as our father who will provide, uncannily, an alternative parent. Language breaks down – our human parents can provide substitute guardians, but not, technically, alternative parents. John’s gospel is striving towards the Trinitarian language that became the language of faith in the centuries that followed, language that we jettison only at the cost of jettisoning orthodoxy. But – and the difficulties in the first and second centuries were not greatly different to our own – the emphasis is on the presence of the one John records as being called Paraclete, the one called alongside to make known to us all that we need of Jesus to carry on the journey to which he commissions us.
By opening ourselves up to receive that Spirit, by disciplining ourselves to obey the imperative of aroha – aroha well described by Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians, the famous thirteenth chapter – we can experience the life-transforming benefits of relationship – eternal relationship, transcending even our mortality – with the Creator of heavens and earth. We will know ourselves to be immersed in that aroha, embraced by that aroha, and indeed channels of that aroha to those around us.
TLBWY
SUNDAY, MAY 29th 2011
(SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings: Acts 17.22-31
Ps 66.8-20 (ish)
1 Peter 3.13-22
John 14.15-21
Reverberating through the commands and instructions of God (in both testaments!) there is that powerful construction that is known to grammarians as the conditional tense. For Māori speakers here the same constructions is generated by use of the ka … ana formula, while in English it is usually generated by the combination of “if” and “then”. If you love me, then you’ll buy me an ice-cream. The “then”, though, is often hidden: if you love me, buy me an ice-cream.
In that childlike sentence, as in our biblical gospel passage, there is another hidden construction that we are going to have to take seriously if we are to extrapolate meaning for a twenty-first century multi-cultural, multi-dimensional, multi-optional world. For there, both in the child’s manipulative tantrum and our gospel-reading lurks that strongest of all tenses, the imperative. Often it is rendered in English with an explanation mark – and in spoken language with a raised or otherwise emphatic voice. In some forms it will earn a green wiggly line from Bill Gates, particularly when used with the verb “to be”: “be healed”, often appearing in the gospels, is an imperative, a command, whether or not Mr. Gates understands that to be so.
In our passage Jesus, as rendered by John, does not render the command to love as an optional extra. The construction is not a soft “if you love (aroha) me then perhaps you might give consideration to keeping my commandments”, which would be a conditional but not an imperative. Nor is it what we call an indicative, “because you love me you are keeping my commandments”. This is a conditional imperative, and as such it allows no wriggle room for the hearer or observer of the words of Jesus. It has a mathematical symmetry, too. “If you do not love me then you will not keep …”, and “if you do not keep, then you do not aroha”. These are stern, hard words of Jesus – so stern that some early scribes fudged and weakened them as they reproduced John’s writings.
They are stern words, but they are words issued with what a former prime minister of Australia somewhat bizarrely called “incentivization” – more normally known as incentive. They are words that lay a gauntlet at the feet of those who would follow Jesus. But – as some of us noted a week or so ago – the apostle John, like the apostle Paul, is well aware of the enormity and indeed impossibility of the interconnected tasks of loving and following Christ. To follow Christ is inevitably to fail – unless you rate better on the perfection scale than anyone else! Jesus, though, provides a promise: “I will not leave you orphaned”. It is of course a metaphorical promise – Jesus effectively picturing himself, in a rare departure from his norms, as our father who will provide, uncannily, an alternative parent. Language breaks down – our human parents can provide substitute guardians, but not, technically, alternative parents. John’s gospel is striving towards the Trinitarian language that became the language of faith in the centuries that followed, language that we jettison only at the cost of jettisoning orthodoxy. But – and the difficulties in the first and second centuries were not greatly different to our own – the emphasis is on the presence of the one John records as being called Paraclete, the one called alongside to make known to us all that we need of Jesus to carry on the journey to which he commissions us.
By opening ourselves up to receive that Spirit, by disciplining ourselves to obey the imperative of aroha – aroha well described by Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians, the famous thirteenth chapter – we can experience the life-transforming benefits of relationship – eternal relationship, transcending even our mortality – with the Creator of heavens and earth. We will know ourselves to be immersed in that aroha, embraced by that aroha, and indeed channels of that aroha to those around us.
TLBWY
Monday, 27 June 2011
Don't Worry, Mene
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
SUNDAY, MAY 22nd 2011
(FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings: Acts 7. 55-60
Ps 31.1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2.2-10
John 14.1-14
The story of the network of early Christian communities was not all one glorious narrative of victories and of harmonious co-existence, despite the attempts of Luke, which I discussed a fortnight ago, to harmonize all in the service of his story. If (as most scholars say!) John’s was the last of the more-or-less eye-witness accounts of Jesus to be related it is also the most the most obviously theologized. It is a document carefully shaped to meet the needs of the author and his perceived needs for his faith community. That much is true of each of the documents of the New Testament: we need to be honest about this if we are going to extrapolate genuine meaning from these documents today.
This does not mean we all need to be at theological college. It does however mean that those who have responsibility to preach and teach in the faith community must be well trained and must be prepared to be intellectually honest. The kind of gnosticism I have referred to elsewhere, practiced by scoundrels like Harold Camping, preying on the vulnerable, is best avoided by application of a modicum of intelligent understanding. Unfortunately this is no trivial issue: peddlers of false expectation sometimes have on their hands the blood of those whose lives are shattered.
The hallmark of John’s telling of the Jesus-story is that he wrote for a community in which the rule of love was the rule of life. Basing his Jesus story on the original eyewitness John’s experience of Jesus, both incarnate and risen, seen and experienced as the embodiment of divine love, the author (John or someone who knew him) founded and nurtured a faith-community built on principles of re-embodying, re-enacting that love.
“They’ll know we are Christians by our love”, some of us sang, occasionally and with unfounded optimism, in the 1960s and ’70s. But that unfounded optimism was exactly the problem faced by John’s community, too: as time went on the quality of love began to founder and dissipate, and the gloriously optimistic community degenerated into an all-too human narrative of power plays and the strife and jealousy I also spoke of in recent weeks. We see something similar in Paul’s bitter experience, as we watch in particular the Corinthian community stray from his idealized pathways.
Rules such as “love one another” or today’s “do not let your hearts be troubled” are, if we are to be honest, easier said than done. It is not some sign of epic spiritual failure if we fall short of their demands. Most of will experience a failure to love from time to time – I am reminded of the mother who once told us of placing her baby just a little more firmly than usual on the change table after being woken for the umpteenth time in one single night (this controlled but human response to the seemingly endless broken nights is a long way removed from tragic statistics of domestic and infant violence that so mar New Zealand’s contemporary society). Similarly, who does not worry from time to time as bills come in or the teenage children or grandchildren play up?
These sayings of Jesus are not mere guidelines, but they are (as Paul recognized) perfections to which we must strive yet by which we will always fall short. If we recognize that inevitability we need not be ashamed at our humanness. At the same time, as we hear Jesus’ command not to worry, held in tension with our knowledge of our humanness, we need not strain for the false optimism satirized by Bobby McFerrin in the late ’80s: “Don’t Worry Be Happy”.
In his telling of the Jesus story John emphasized what we might call the grace of abiding – the Greek word mene appears no fewer than 40 times in John’s gospel-account, albeit not always with full theological weight. The sign that a believer was abiding in Christ – I have tended to prefer the later phrase “practicing the presence of Christ” – was the quality of his or her ability to fulfill the demands of Jesus. Demands to love, demands not to worry – there are not many of them, in John’s gospel-account, but they are not to be taken lightly. They are in the end, though, the result of, not the prerequisite to, exposure to faith of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who draws all people to himself, not the brutal examiner who ensures that a certain percentage haplessly fail. So often in our proclamation of the gospel we make it appear that the latter is the priority.
We do this not least when we turn to the passages that were in their original context intended to be passages of invitation. Too often we turn the words of Jesus, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” into words not of invitation but of condemnation. Too often these become words that proclaim not the theological miracle that a way of access to the Creator has been gained in Christ, but a condemnatory claim that those who do not appear to us to be on that way will stand eternally condemned – like those of us who missed the so-called rapture of last evening in the thoughts of a small minded preacher-man from California. This saying of Jesus was designed to invite and not to terrify: for those who do not join us on the journey we pray nevertheless the grace and love of Christ in God’s time, that for them, too, may await the experience of seeing, as Paul put it, the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”.
For us, then may this be a passage not of exclusion but of joy-filled inclusion, as we rejoice in the encounter with the one who leads us on the way.
TLBWY
SUNDAY, MAY 22nd 2011
(FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings: Acts 7. 55-60
Ps 31.1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2.2-10
John 14.1-14
The story of the network of early Christian communities was not all one glorious narrative of victories and of harmonious co-existence, despite the attempts of Luke, which I discussed a fortnight ago, to harmonize all in the service of his story. If (as most scholars say!) John’s was the last of the more-or-less eye-witness accounts of Jesus to be related it is also the most the most obviously theologized. It is a document carefully shaped to meet the needs of the author and his perceived needs for his faith community. That much is true of each of the documents of the New Testament: we need to be honest about this if we are going to extrapolate genuine meaning from these documents today.
This does not mean we all need to be at theological college. It does however mean that those who have responsibility to preach and teach in the faith community must be well trained and must be prepared to be intellectually honest. The kind of gnosticism I have referred to elsewhere, practiced by scoundrels like Harold Camping, preying on the vulnerable, is best avoided by application of a modicum of intelligent understanding. Unfortunately this is no trivial issue: peddlers of false expectation sometimes have on their hands the blood of those whose lives are shattered.
The hallmark of John’s telling of the Jesus-story is that he wrote for a community in which the rule of love was the rule of life. Basing his Jesus story on the original eyewitness John’s experience of Jesus, both incarnate and risen, seen and experienced as the embodiment of divine love, the author (John or someone who knew him) founded and nurtured a faith-community built on principles of re-embodying, re-enacting that love.
“They’ll know we are Christians by our love”, some of us sang, occasionally and with unfounded optimism, in the 1960s and ’70s. But that unfounded optimism was exactly the problem faced by John’s community, too: as time went on the quality of love began to founder and dissipate, and the gloriously optimistic community degenerated into an all-too human narrative of power plays and the strife and jealousy I also spoke of in recent weeks. We see something similar in Paul’s bitter experience, as we watch in particular the Corinthian community stray from his idealized pathways.
Rules such as “love one another” or today’s “do not let your hearts be troubled” are, if we are to be honest, easier said than done. It is not some sign of epic spiritual failure if we fall short of their demands. Most of will experience a failure to love from time to time – I am reminded of the mother who once told us of placing her baby just a little more firmly than usual on the change table after being woken for the umpteenth time in one single night (this controlled but human response to the seemingly endless broken nights is a long way removed from tragic statistics of domestic and infant violence that so mar New Zealand’s contemporary society). Similarly, who does not worry from time to time as bills come in or the teenage children or grandchildren play up?
These sayings of Jesus are not mere guidelines, but they are (as Paul recognized) perfections to which we must strive yet by which we will always fall short. If we recognize that inevitability we need not be ashamed at our humanness. At the same time, as we hear Jesus’ command not to worry, held in tension with our knowledge of our humanness, we need not strain for the false optimism satirized by Bobby McFerrin in the late ’80s: “Don’t Worry Be Happy”.
In his telling of the Jesus story John emphasized what we might call the grace of abiding – the Greek word mene appears no fewer than 40 times in John’s gospel-account, albeit not always with full theological weight. The sign that a believer was abiding in Christ – I have tended to prefer the later phrase “practicing the presence of Christ” – was the quality of his or her ability to fulfill the demands of Jesus. Demands to love, demands not to worry – there are not many of them, in John’s gospel-account, but they are not to be taken lightly. They are in the end, though, the result of, not the prerequisite to, exposure to faith of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who draws all people to himself, not the brutal examiner who ensures that a certain percentage haplessly fail. So often in our proclamation of the gospel we make it appear that the latter is the priority.
We do this not least when we turn to the passages that were in their original context intended to be passages of invitation. Too often we turn the words of Jesus, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” into words not of invitation but of condemnation. Too often these become words that proclaim not the theological miracle that a way of access to the Creator has been gained in Christ, but a condemnatory claim that those who do not appear to us to be on that way will stand eternally condemned – like those of us who missed the so-called rapture of last evening in the thoughts of a small minded preacher-man from California. This saying of Jesus was designed to invite and not to terrify: for those who do not join us on the journey we pray nevertheless the grace and love of Christ in God’s time, that for them, too, may await the experience of seeing, as Paul put it, the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”.
For us, then may this be a passage not of exclusion but of joy-filled inclusion, as we rejoice in the encounter with the one who leads us on the way.
TLBWY
Sunday, 15 May 2011
Bashing Gays for Jesus?
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH,
WHANGAREI
SUNDAY,
MAY 15th 2011
(FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings:
Acts 2.42-47
Ps 23
1 Peter 2.19-25
John 10.1-10
When we turn to the letters bearing the name of Peter we are given a glimpse of the life of the early church community of which some aspects are as pertinent as at any time since. (For those who know the author’s recommendation of the subjection of wives to their husbands’ authority – more often attributed to Paul but here narrated in Peter’s name – those are not the passages to which I refer). This author’s instructions to a generalised Christian community, unlike Paul’s, which were written for specific communities facing highly topical issues, were written to a world in which Christianity was an unimportant sideshow, a minority perspective, quaint to the most of the masses, downright subversive and destructive to others.
Our community has many similarities to that of our author, whether that author was Peter or someone writing in his name. We too are increasingly marginalised, parodied or ignored, trying to find voice and identity for ancient wisdom in a changing world. As part of his attempt to establish security amidst change, Peter (for such I shall call him, though I suspect these letters were written some 30 years after the death of the Fisherman of the gospels) reaches back and anchors his message in the scriptures we know as Old Testament. Peter knew only one Testament, for our “New” Testament was not yet compiled: he knew, though, the importance of written testament, of story, and he anchors his instruction deeply in that bedrock.
Peter challenges his audience to live exemplary lives in the community, shunning the standards that were coming to dominate his world and which he felt were objectionable to God. We, too, need to look at our world and see what within in is likely to be incompatible with the aims and purposes of God. Many Christians however, having said that, tend to major in the minors, dwelling on the obvious matters of difference between the speaker’s life and the lives of the various designated sinners. It is so much easier to use the gospel as a platform for minority-bashing, picking on ethnic and behavioural minorities than it is to look at the hard questions more frequently addressed in the scriptures (old and new). Only yesterday in Adelaide a group of Christians stalked a gay pride march, allegedly waving banners berating the marchers with declarations of God’s wrath against gays, lesbians, transgendered people: was this a proclamation of the values of God’s reign, or public out-workings of private and collective phobias? The protestors, possibly after some less than peaceful corrective directives from the marchers, were taken away by police.
Even if just a statistical analysis of biblical references is used, it would appear that God is far more concerned at those who cause division and strife and jealousy and social iniquity than with those who don’t follow the hetero-sexual “mum, dad and the kids” models of family living. This is not to say that God approves of family life in which a child knows nothing of his or her biological whakapapa, of families in which partnerships are swapped as often as many of us change our shirts. Broken lives, broken families, substance and emotional and financial and sexual abuse deeply grieve the heart of God, now as then, now as two thousand years ago. But dedicated love can appear in forms not imagined by the New Testament world in which women were property and children an investment commodity.
Our author, Peter, was expecting the imminent return of Jesus, Christus Victor, striding as it were across the heavens to set history to rights. Perhaps, despite those pundits who have decided that next Sunday is to be the day of the Second Coming (!), we are less likely to see the parousia and the end of time in these terms. We are called to live our lives in the shadow of judgement, but to place our lives before God, to be the subject of that judgment, rather than expecting the wrath of God to fall on those whose lifestyles differ to our own.
As the gay, lesbian and transgender marchers of Adelaide encountered their Christian antagonists, they were confronted by declarations of God’s hatred. As one of the marchers, Uniting Church Minister Sue Wickham said, any placard beginning with the words “God hates …” is unlikely to have been written in the Spirit of Christ.
Peter’s expectation of the imminent triumph of God and end of history gave him a sort of anti-revolutionary perspective, cajoling slaves and wives and others to remain acquiescent in their social place. By and large I do not believe in revolutionary interpretations of the Gospel, those proclaimed by the more radical liberation theologies: political triumphs tend to breed new forms of political oppression or neglect, as the Egyptian populace may currently be discovering: with the tyrannies of Mubarak gone, they are faced with the realization that military rule is no utopia either. Instead I believe we are called to revolutionise our own lives so that we stand out, even if at great personal cost, in contrast to anti-divine standards and practices in our world: die to sin and live to righteousness. This, as the charismatic movement of the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s reminded us, is something we cannot do in our own strength, but only in the strength of the Spirit of God. It is arguably much harder than the grind of overthrowing governments, though perhaps I say that only because I would probably never be brave enough to stand in protest against an armed Syrian government. I thank God I get a chance to overthrow governments peacefully every few years, though I often lament the detail that those who control and manipulate the media and therefore popular perspectives will not always lean address the concerns of the social underdogs.
To allow ourselves to be opened up to personal revolution by the scrutinizing gaze of God is to participate in the process of what John and Luke in our other readings call ‘being saved’. The language of salvation is often translated as though it were a solitary event, getting saved. Only the other day I was in a conversation with a friend who asked when I ‘got saved’. I was tempted to answer ‘two thousand years ago’.
For the only way in which salvation is a solitary event is in the moment of the Cross, and even that is not altogether event, but process. It is that great process of Incarnation that culminates in what that John calls the ‘lifting up’ of the Saviour. That saving event is a unique passage, standing alone in God’s dealings with humanity. For those of us who are the sheep of the shepherd there is a life-long process of what the Orthodox call divinization, and what Protestants traditionally called sanctification, the long slow process of becoming what we are called to be. It is to that process that we are invited by the Shepherd. To that process of healing and transformation of abuse and of the ordinariness of being fallen humans in a fallen world we are invited by Jesus, and in that process we are shepherded by Jesus, known to us in the Spirit of Pentecost. By submitting to that transformational process we can be the advertisement of resurrection hope that we are called to be in a resurrectionless world. Jesus called it ‘having abundant life’, and showed that for those who ‘abide in him’ it can be possibility for us and for those we love and live amongst.
TLBWY
WHANGAREI
SUNDAY,
MAY 15th 2011
(FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings:
Acts 2.42-47
Ps 23
1 Peter 2.19-25
John 10.1-10
When we turn to the letters bearing the name of Peter we are given a glimpse of the life of the early church community of which some aspects are as pertinent as at any time since. (For those who know the author’s recommendation of the subjection of wives to their husbands’ authority – more often attributed to Paul but here narrated in Peter’s name – those are not the passages to which I refer). This author’s instructions to a generalised Christian community, unlike Paul’s, which were written for specific communities facing highly topical issues, were written to a world in which Christianity was an unimportant sideshow, a minority perspective, quaint to the most of the masses, downright subversive and destructive to others.
Our community has many similarities to that of our author, whether that author was Peter or someone writing in his name. We too are increasingly marginalised, parodied or ignored, trying to find voice and identity for ancient wisdom in a changing world. As part of his attempt to establish security amidst change, Peter (for such I shall call him, though I suspect these letters were written some 30 years after the death of the Fisherman of the gospels) reaches back and anchors his message in the scriptures we know as Old Testament. Peter knew only one Testament, for our “New” Testament was not yet compiled: he knew, though, the importance of written testament, of story, and he anchors his instruction deeply in that bedrock.
Peter challenges his audience to live exemplary lives in the community, shunning the standards that were coming to dominate his world and which he felt were objectionable to God. We, too, need to look at our world and see what within in is likely to be incompatible with the aims and purposes of God. Many Christians however, having said that, tend to major in the minors, dwelling on the obvious matters of difference between the speaker’s life and the lives of the various designated sinners. It is so much easier to use the gospel as a platform for minority-bashing, picking on ethnic and behavioural minorities than it is to look at the hard questions more frequently addressed in the scriptures (old and new). Only yesterday in Adelaide a group of Christians stalked a gay pride march, allegedly waving banners berating the marchers with declarations of God’s wrath against gays, lesbians, transgendered people: was this a proclamation of the values of God’s reign, or public out-workings of private and collective phobias? The protestors, possibly after some less than peaceful corrective directives from the marchers, were taken away by police.
Even if just a statistical analysis of biblical references is used, it would appear that God is far more concerned at those who cause division and strife and jealousy and social iniquity than with those who don’t follow the hetero-sexual “mum, dad and the kids” models of family living. This is not to say that God approves of family life in which a child knows nothing of his or her biological whakapapa, of families in which partnerships are swapped as often as many of us change our shirts. Broken lives, broken families, substance and emotional and financial and sexual abuse deeply grieve the heart of God, now as then, now as two thousand years ago. But dedicated love can appear in forms not imagined by the New Testament world in which women were property and children an investment commodity.
Our author, Peter, was expecting the imminent return of Jesus, Christus Victor, striding as it were across the heavens to set history to rights. Perhaps, despite those pundits who have decided that next Sunday is to be the day of the Second Coming (!), we are less likely to see the parousia and the end of time in these terms. We are called to live our lives in the shadow of judgement, but to place our lives before God, to be the subject of that judgment, rather than expecting the wrath of God to fall on those whose lifestyles differ to our own.
As the gay, lesbian and transgender marchers of Adelaide encountered their Christian antagonists, they were confronted by declarations of God’s hatred. As one of the marchers, Uniting Church Minister Sue Wickham said, any placard beginning with the words “God hates …” is unlikely to have been written in the Spirit of Christ.
Peter’s expectation of the imminent triumph of God and end of history gave him a sort of anti-revolutionary perspective, cajoling slaves and wives and others to remain acquiescent in their social place. By and large I do not believe in revolutionary interpretations of the Gospel, those proclaimed by the more radical liberation theologies: political triumphs tend to breed new forms of political oppression or neglect, as the Egyptian populace may currently be discovering: with the tyrannies of Mubarak gone, they are faced with the realization that military rule is no utopia either. Instead I believe we are called to revolutionise our own lives so that we stand out, even if at great personal cost, in contrast to anti-divine standards and practices in our world: die to sin and live to righteousness. This, as the charismatic movement of the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s reminded us, is something we cannot do in our own strength, but only in the strength of the Spirit of God. It is arguably much harder than the grind of overthrowing governments, though perhaps I say that only because I would probably never be brave enough to stand in protest against an armed Syrian government. I thank God I get a chance to overthrow governments peacefully every few years, though I often lament the detail that those who control and manipulate the media and therefore popular perspectives will not always lean address the concerns of the social underdogs.
To allow ourselves to be opened up to personal revolution by the scrutinizing gaze of God is to participate in the process of what John and Luke in our other readings call ‘being saved’. The language of salvation is often translated as though it were a solitary event, getting saved. Only the other day I was in a conversation with a friend who asked when I ‘got saved’. I was tempted to answer ‘two thousand years ago’.
For the only way in which salvation is a solitary event is in the moment of the Cross, and even that is not altogether event, but process. It is that great process of Incarnation that culminates in what that John calls the ‘lifting up’ of the Saviour. That saving event is a unique passage, standing alone in God’s dealings with humanity. For those of us who are the sheep of the shepherd there is a life-long process of what the Orthodox call divinization, and what Protestants traditionally called sanctification, the long slow process of becoming what we are called to be. It is to that process that we are invited by the Shepherd. To that process of healing and transformation of abuse and of the ordinariness of being fallen humans in a fallen world we are invited by Jesus, and in that process we are shepherded by Jesus, known to us in the Spirit of Pentecost. By submitting to that transformational process we can be the advertisement of resurrection hope that we are called to be in a resurrectionless world. Jesus called it ‘having abundant life’, and showed that for those who ‘abide in him’ it can be possibility for us and for those we love and live amongst.
TLBWY
Saturday, 26 March 2011
I'm thinking I might change this into a sermon blog - or maybe both. After all, I'm the only person who reads it! So: thoughts on Lent Three, Year A, 2011 (or some such catchy title):
In the reading of scriptures, no less than any great works of literature, it is important to seek passages, sentences and words that provide a key to the author’s aims and intentions. There will always be debate about the keys and about interpretation, but that is precisely where understanding grows, in the dialogue between perspectives. It has been so since John put down his quill, and all the more so since, thank God, his creative masterpiece of Jesus-story-telling entered the canon of Christian scripture a century or so later. It cannot be emphasized too much that the verses 39-42 provide a critical key by which to understand this moment in the life of Jesus.
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’ So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there for two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.’
More than anything else, this is a story about belief. It is a commonplace in Johannine interpretation to note that all that will be of importance in the fourth gospel is foreshadowed in the Prologue, the opening verses of chapter one: one scholar, Simon Ross Valentine, neatly observes ‘the Prologue is nothing less than the theological matrix from which the themes of the gospel arise’ [Simon Ross Valentine, “The Johannine Prologue – a Microcosm of the Gospel” (Evangelical Quarterly, 68:3, 1996, 291-304), 292]. Remember the resounding words, He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him? Here, by contrast, Jesus comes to those who are not, in ethnic terms, his own, and they do believe him. We are meant to hear the contrast, meant to observe above all that this is a litmus test of our own response to Jesus: belief, or unbelief? This is, paradoxically, about us.
The believers, those who believe, are in this passage the outsiders. The themes of outsider and insider run throughout the scriptures of our faith, often with a complex, porous ambiguity. Like an Escher sketching (or a Hogwarts stairwell!) in which up-side becomes down-side, the biblical outsider often becomes the insider, and, perhaps of even greater concern, the insider becomes outsider. Perhaps we are warned that we should not be afraid when we see greater faith and Christlikeness in those outsider the boundaries of the faith community than we do from those within. The Spirit of God goes always before, ahead and around us, and here appears to be at work in the life of the Samaritan woman long before the followers of Jesus were willing to be so progressive (if ever they have).
In this scene, as always in John, there are key words floating around, appropriate to the characters’ lives, but appropriate too to ours. There is much about water, living or otherwise, that clearly signifies something more than merely a means of rehydration, as the woman first interprets it. We will find later in the gospel that water, signifying it seems new life, flows from then side of the crucified messiah, and that waters of rebirth are a key motif: there are some 20 references to water in John’s gospel-account, and half or more of these appear to represent something far more eternal than mere H20. There are suggestions of immorality – though a deeper scratch may suggest that this woman’s five husbands may have far more to do with Samaria’s relationship with what were known at the time as the ‘five idolatrous peoples of the East’ of 2 Kings 17 than to any individual serial monogamy, despite the later lifer-choices of Elizabeth Taylor! There is language about reaping and sowing, language about hospitality and rejection, all of which has clear implications for our own applications of this scene to our individual lives.
There is above all language about Jesus venturing into unexpected and unclean places – and finding belief there. We often tend to expect to find God within the comfortable armchair zones of society and faith, rather than in the exposed, risky and unpleasant places. Would we find God in a brothel, or does God belong only in nature walks and churches? The witness of both New and Old Testament is clear: God will escape our comfort zones, as God-in-Christ here clearly demonstrates. But this is not merely about comfort zones: this is about hatred zones. Here it is as though a Benghazi Gaddafi-opponent were chin-wagging with a Tripoli Gaddafi-loyalist. This is the stuff of God at deep risk, a risky edginess that continued on into the life of the Christian community, for it is almost certain that this story is told to both Jewish and Samaritan, as well as gentile Christian members of John’s faith-community.
For ultimately this is a story about belief that transcends of hatred and the healing of hurts. This is the story of belief that transcends ethnic barriers, gender barriers, even creedal barriers, and all those artificial barriers that forget that we are one and all created in the image of the Creator. This is not a story about a wimpish anything goes love-in, a hippie commune or Helen Steiner Rice lovefest of meaningless platitudes, ignoring destructive behaviour and letting it ride on unabated. This is the story of a socially challenging God and openness to God that transcends deep-seated human hatreds. This is a story that challenges us not to plastic platitudes but to transcendent culture-changing belief. Does our belief transcend prejudice?
TLBWY
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