On Inconvenient Boundaries

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH
OF SAINT JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
SECOND SUNDAY OF CHRISTMAS
(January 5^th) 2014

 

Readings:        Sirach 24.1-12
                        Psalm: Wisdom of Solomon 10.15-21
                        Ephesians 3.3-14
                        John 1.10-18

Amongst the many themes of the Hebrew Scriptures that were allowed to infiltrate and inform the thought of the early followers o Jesus was the identification of Jesus with Wisdom. He becomes many things, of course, as the Christians, like Mary, pondered these things. He became the Suffering Servant of the Isaiah tradition. He became the sacrificial scapegoat of the Leviticus tradition. He becomes the Son of God, the Christ of God, he becomes most powerfully Lord, challenging the supremacy of Caesar and almost risking the oneness of the Hebrew God. Less popular in some circles, he becomes Wisdom, she who searches for and even embodies the search for meaning in human existence. It is perhaps for that reason that I am loathe to restrict the workings of God merely to some identifiable organization – church or, worse, denomination. The search for meaning breaks out of the straight-jackets of institutional religion. While there will be few surprises in this cathedral culture at that dismantling of boundaries, there are many circles in which the thought is abhorrent: God’s saving work is too often restricted to human boundaries.

There can be sloppiness entailed in the blurring of boundaries. In some circles of faith there is a kind of ‘anything goes’, in which the central elements of our faith are blancmanged into a pot pourri of compromises: anything goes because nothing matters. Such faith is a demonic parody of the faith that was being midwifed by writers like the author of the Fourth Gospel and the author of the letter we call Ephesians. The centrality of Christ was non-negotiable. Where and when that Wisdom Christ emerged was a broader issue: there are others not of this flock, warned Jesus.

I prefer to see the Wisdom-Christ at work in lives that radiate that same commitment to love, compassion and justice that I see incarnated in Jesus’ own life. Those who have heard me before will know that I bang on endlessly about the work of the Spirit embodied in the lives of an Aung San Suu Kyi, a Fred Hollows, a Steve Biko, a Malala Yousafzai: they, incidentally, represent the best of Theravada Buddhism, atheism, a-religious political activism and Islam for starters.  I see disgustingly much that is unChristlike in practitioners of my own religion, in all its shades of high and low, liberal and conservative. Nevertheless it is to this odd faith that you and I have been called by God and that leaves us little wriggle room: the narrative if Jesus, in all its subsequent flaws, is the narrative in which God has called us to walk. There is a specificity about Jesus to which we are called to anchor ourselves – however inconvenient his abuse by others might be – and to that we are to remain faithful.

Within that sometimes inconvenient set of boundaries we have a responsibility placed on our shoulders: the responsibility to be Jesus to those around us. You don’t have to know me for long to know that I fall far short of that task – and you might too! That is why in liturgy we must spend that little bit of time in the process we call confession and absolution, that little bit of time enacting a ritual drama to remind ourselves that we are not as good as we should be, and that it is only be the workings of God that we can enter into relationship with the divine and divine eternities at all. We leave these small rites out of our liturgy at the peril of becoming sloppy in relationship with God, and that is a peril that I take seriously. But if we allow these strange rites and others to shape us we can become the ambassadors to the community that God calls us to be: we may not be wise, as Paul reminds us in his famous address to the Corinthians, but we can become sufficiently saturated in Christ that we can reflect his wisdom in and to the world around us. By being saturated in Christ through our exposure to him in worship, in fellowship, in scripture and in discipline we can reflect and bear his love to the community into which God has called us, we can ‘bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ’, as the writer to Ephesus put it.

As we enter into a new calendar year, full of challenges and changes, resolutions, successes and failures, we are called, as we were in the beginnings of our church year several weeks ago, to make a place for the Wisdom of Christ. By allowing that wisdom to transform and re-make us, individually and collectively, we can be bearers of Christ into a world often unaware of his benefits or the need of humanity for him, but which is all too dysfunctional without him (as we are!). May God go with us in that responsibility to bear witness to the wisdom of the child of Bethlehem, the man of Nazareth, the victim of Jerusalem, the here and yet coming Messiah.

 

Amen

Pah ruppa pum pum

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH
OF SAINT JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
CHRISTMAS DAY 2013

Biblical scholar N.T. or Tom Wright in a now famous sermon from 2007 challenged his listeners to rediscover their inner child at Christmas time. Citing that other Tom, T.S. Eliot’s enigmatic line ‘There was a birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt,’ Wright correctly in my opinion sees the two great festivals of the Christian calendar to be intrinsically entwined, life and death and in each case so much more, and to know that both these festivals do not genuflect to but critique the short-sighted analysis of human rational thought.  The Magi of Eliot’s poem entwine Christmas and Easter perhaps because they have grown old and the tendrils of dementia are tangling their memory banks, but perhaps also because there is and can always be no birth without death, no death without birth, and each is a tentative step into the miracles of God and of God’s universe.

There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

The magi, at the end of their lives, remember a transition, effected by an encounter with something beyond even or especially the comprehension of the wise of the powerful, and know that their lives were changed irreversibly, confusingly, bewilderingly, but irreversibly.

It is de rigueur to sneer at simplicity. Not, paradoxically at simplicity of visual art, where a simple transept of lines or indeed an interconnection of wiggles can evoke deep analysis and awe-inspired reverence in an art display, but simplicity of faith and thought. The awe of a child at Christmas is seen to be cringeworthy, surpassed only by the silliness of adults who continue to believe six impossible things before breakfast. The birth of a child from a peasant girl’s womb, or the mysterious transcendence of that other inescapable Tomb on Easter morning, these are seen to be the things of ridicule. Not least clergy and theologians back away from any sense that God might break out of human expectation, transcend our myopia, and in one mysterious solitary life two thousand years ago permit the mysteries of eternity to be incarnate in the mundanity and sometimes sheer tedium of human being.

Theologians and clergy will sneer, too, at simplicity, losing sight of its profundity in their satisfaction with their own erudition. It is popular to sneer for example at the gentle wisdom of the Romantic Centuries’ telling of the Incarnation in the carols of Christmas: no one is pretending, really, that the birth of Jesus was quite as the carols suggest, but that most of these have been useful if sometimes flawed vehicles of the unpretentious awe and mystery of a God who invades and transforms human existence. Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today. Even the folksy tale of the Little Drummer Boy, considered infradig by religious purists, and made famous originally by the Trapp Family Singers of Sound of Music fame in the 1950s, points to a profound truth: what is the best from our poor lives that we can give as appreciation to the God who draws near to us in Christ? 

We can’t intellectualize our way to faith. Paul referred to faith as foolishness to the wise, and we like to see ourselves as wise. Indeed we as adults have so lost touch with the inner child that we have taught our children not to be children. With deft and determined strokes of the sociological pen we have forced then to grow up too fast in a myriad of ways, some more deeply demonic than others. In doing so we have been stripping from them and ultimately from ourselves the awe inspired by a God who draws near, touches, transforms human lives.

Can I explain all this? The magi of Eliot’s poem flounder: ‘were we lead all that way for / Birth or Death?’ I suggest we cannot encounter the resurrection hope of Christ until we allow ourselves to learn awe and mystery and awe once more: was this a birth, or a death? The answer is “yes”. The God who infiltrated the womb of Mary, who transcended the Tomb of Joseph of Aramathea, and who still enters and transforms willing human lives can turn both birth and death into a God-filled, sacred journey into fullness of existence: the onus is on us to discover again the childlike, un-cynical expectation that says “Oh Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray”

TLBWY

Be born in us - even today

SERMON PREACHED AT THE ORMOND CHAPEL NAPIER
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT
(22nd DECEMBER) 2013

Readings:
Isaiah 7: 10-16
Psalm 80: 1-7, 17-19
Romans 1: 1-7
Matthew 1.18-25

The contemporary routines of Christmas – probably contemporary for nearly a hundred years now – create a psychological ‘disconnect,’ a parallel narrative of which even Dr Who might be proud. Our readings, prayers and intercessions take us on a journey that begins with expectation of the second-coming of Christ, and then segue clumsily into preparation for the first coming of Christ at Bethlehem to millennia ago. In the meantime our secular western world celebrates the madness of the Capitalist frenzy, with retailers doing their utmost, understandably, to ensure that all their survival needs and then their profit needs are met and hopefully exceeded in a gut-busting orgy of marketing and selling. In the midst of all this the Christchild and Saint Nicholas, in his commercialised rebadging as Santa, compete for attention, with the Christchild losing badly, and both in any case sneeringly dismissed as ‘fairy tales’ about an ‘invisible friend.’

It is not an easy time in which to recapture the heart and soul of the gospel writers’ tale. Of course, as I suggest in my notes on the gospel elsewhere (see my Pivotal Pokes blog of December 21st), it was not easy for them either. They were using the best tools available to them to express the inexpressible, the God incarnate in the person and work and life and death and resurrection of a prickly prophet, the son of the wife of a carpenter from Nazareth. Those tolls can still work two millennia late, but as John Lennon wrote (though he meant the words in a very different way) ‘Christ, you know it ain’t easy.’

The stories do not translate easily into our world. They can be distorted by well-intending or less well-intending believers, or mocked by those who for whatever reasons are antagonistic to the message of Christianity. We must wear that, as the early Christians did: the first known non-Christian reference to Christians and their message is not of the ‘boy born in manger saves world’ type much loved by somewhat clichéd Christian signposts, but graffiti portraying Jesus as a crucified donkey. The artist is conflating no doubt the Triumphal Entrance story with the Good Friday story, but demonstrates incidentally that the Christian gospel was not altogether easy to convey. Oh how I wish, sometimes, that God had performed these revelations of the saving self, the saving purpose of God in other ways!

But it is not our job to second guess God. What in any case can God do? Can there be a message more intimate than incarnation? A sort of celestial email pleading, bribing or otherwise coercing humans into belief and acceptable behaviour is poor substitute for enfleshment in the midst of human experience. A series of neon lights across the sky telling us what to do, believe, say, is unlikely ultimately to touch and transform the yearning human heart (and in any case is not every almost every sunset, almost every sunrise, almost every awesome display of aurora borealis or its southern cousin, is not every display of a peacock’s tail or a monarch butterfly’s wing or a chameleon’s mind-blowing transitions a display of the poetry of the Creator, and even yet so easily dismissed with the sneering superiority of some science?). Neither a divine email nor an inescapably bellowed divine voice is substitute for the gentle, nurturing presence of God that can but only can be experienced in worship, in fellowship, in meditation and in study of God’s story.

The Hebrew people longed for a coming Messiah – and indeed still do. We long for the touch of Christ in celestial return, winding up the suffering of the cosmos that we are blithely destroying, winding up, too, the sometimes immeasurable suffering of human lives that we witness either around us in person or around our world via the media. We cry, perhaps with puzzlement and with the first Christians ‘come lord, come, maranatha.’ As the psalmist put it, ‘how long will you be angry with you people’s prayers … let your face shine that we may be saved.’ Isaiah’s people longed for a sign, and perhaps they missed it, though in saying that we need to recognize the way, the many ways we their cousins in faith continue to miss signs of the work of God in our midst. Paul spoke over and again of grace, the invasion of human lives, undeserving all, by divine love. Matthew spoke of an angel’s words, ‘God is with us.’ Sometimes, as so much changes and our churches seem to collapse around our ears, symbolically and literally, it seems as though Joseph must have been misled, fooling himself and his successors. I though don’t think that’s true: it is fashionable to belittle our romantic carols, but there are few lyrics that resonate more within my own life experience than Phillips Brooks’ famous words ‘Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today,’ and ‘where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.’

It may not be fashionable to hang on to the seemingly archaic, odd, even risible tales of the birth narratives of Luke and Matthew but I believe, though they were never meant as scientific analysis of the DNA of Jesus, they point to an essential truth of the gospel: God does not email us from a distant star but, by invitation, enters into our very essence, transforming even our journey from darkness into light, and ensuring that, while it may not yet be apparent, even humanity’s deepest darknesses are penetrated by resurrection light.

TLBWY

Though devils all devour us

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT (1^st December) 2013

 

Readings:       Isaiah 2.1-5

                        Psalm 122
                        Romans 13.11-14
                        Matthew 24.36-44

 A week ago Anne reminded some of us that, as the Christians drew together what, over the next three hundred years, were to become the New Testament scriptures, they did so by anchoring their new experience in and explaining their new experience by the more ancient texts of the Hebrews. Anne referred us to what we call the inter-testamental or pseudepigraphal writings and their descriptions of the divine light that conquers darkness. This week we find, as we begin a new church year, that the prophets were also a powerful lens of interpretation as the early Christians tried to convey their unprecedented experience of the triune God and of the Risen Christ.

The prophetic literature was a rich resource. Over and again, centuries before Christ, the prophets had cast their thoughts to the future, telling of a time when a person, chosen by God, would come to redeem the wayward and hurting Hebrews. Sometimes they predicted this Coming One as a kingly figure, sometimes, bizarrely, the later Isaiah appears to depict him as a suffering servant figure. Other portrayals emerge too, not all but many resonating with the Christians’ experience of the risen Christ. They expected this figure, who they rapidly identified not only as the historical Jesus of Nazareth, but as uniquely “Son” and “Lord”, to wind up human and even cosmic history. They knew too that the completion of that project still lay ahead of them, nearby or far off, and that they must weave a doctrine not only of “coming” but of “second coming” into their understanding of the universe. It is this complexity that we explore in our Advent journeying.

Complex it is. The long passage of time since the events of our New Testament means that any sense of second coming was for centuries repressed in all but the wackiest of Christian teaching.  At most preparation for the encounter with Christ was relegated to a sense of personal encounter with God in some form at the hour of our death or perhaps some future day of judgement – the dies irae so beloved by Mozart. We can retain that sense, but since that dreadful day when the obscenely named Trinity Bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert, humanity has been far more acutely aware of its own capacity to destroy itself. Since July 16^th 1945 we have had at our hands the means of our own destruction. Subsequent ecological crises, in particular those of increasing rates of species annihilation and accelerated climate change serve to remind us that the sword of Damocles dwells with us all, corporately as well as individually.  At the same time most of us remain reasonably well aware of our own mortality, too, at least after we reach the milestones of middle.

Christians – though they were by no means the first to do so – linked mortality, immortality and judgement in an unbreakable chain, and saw that the events of the life, death and resurrection, and the hoped for return of Jesus of Nazareth were inseparably linked with all these dimensions of their experience. Post-Enlightenment generations of Christianity have produced some degrees of scepticism about any dimension of existence beyond that which we can physically measure and experience, either in the life of Jesus or in our own future, but we hold Enlightenment values over the head of God at great peril. A god who is quantifiable, beholden to our tiny apparatuses of analysis, is frankly risible, and is not the God that I find pulsing through the veins of the scriptures of our faith.  As the early Christians turned for example to Isaiah and his great vision of a future interpreted, transformed and blessed by the creating and calling God, they did not see that future spluttering to completion in their own dying. They saw a God who reached beyond human comprehension, who their successor in faith would one day describe as possessing treasures beyond that which “human eye has seen or ear heard or heart conceived.” They found in the Isaiah-writings, for example, a God who would transform the shattering of human experience through which the Hebrews were to travel, eventually turning “swords to ploughshares, and … spears into pruning hooks.”

Was Isaiah speaking only of a transformation of present experience? Was he looking only to a time when his people returned to the holy Hill of Zion, free to live at peace without threat from bullying neighbours?  Was Isaiah’s vision of no more than a transformation of the political map of the Middle East seven centuries before Christ? Or indeed, was he speaking only of peace and justice at a global level – the eradication of military and fiscal disparity and oppression? Was his beatific vision – as yet unfulfilled we might add – only of Israel and for example Egypt or Babylon shaking hands and living together in peace? The Christians were adamant that in the events they had witnessed or heard of and experienced in worship, fellowship and exploration of scripture there was a greater reconciliation: that not merely Egypt or Rome or Babylon but all oppression and injustice, even the oppression and injustice by mortality and death itself, was conquered.  It was for this they were prepared to live and die, certain that the resounding “no” of death was not the final word.

So, then, the seemingly terrifying imagery of apocalyptic, in all its weird and wonderful but in reality totally accessible codes of fearsome figures and events, was no more than the language of encouragement. As Luther would put it centuries later, Though devils all the world should fill, all eager to devour us. We tremble not, we fear no ill, they shall not overpower us. Or, in less poetic language, no matter how great the evils that befall us – and they might – sorrow and separation and suffering and death are not the final word, but the precursor to God’s glorious and incomprehensible action of loving judgement and restoration, the “yes” that conquers every “no.”

It is to rehearse that dimension of hope, the dimension of a God whose love transforms all mortal experience, that we are commissioned in Advent. We prepare to hear, both personally and cosmically, God’s beckoning words, as the author of Revelation put it, “come, all you who are thirsty.”

 TLBWY

Sir Bob Jones: Nero redivivus?

 

You may, for better or for worse, be aware  of a recent toxic outpouring from the quill of erstwhile boxing mogul Sir Bob Jones.(1) In it he does his best to satirize Wellington’s Bishop Justin Duckworth and the entire Anglican tradition in one fell swoop. Jones is not Shakespeare, Einstein, nor even Lange or Muldoon, so his vitriolic tirade failed to excite any except those who are already convinced that every Anglican is either dead or a paedophile. It is therefore probably a good thing I failed to give him oxygen, having missed the brain explosion at the time and therefore failed to engage with the good pugilist. I doubt much would have been achieved by rational debate. The narrative of Jones’ history, if I recall correctly from the ancient depths of my memory, is not renowned for subtle or intellectual discourse.

Amongst the suggestions made in Jones’ tirade, apart from ad hominem attacks on Duckworth’s sartorial standards, were 1) that clearly  Duckworth was misguided because God did not send a thunderbolt of penal reform during his sojourn in the cathedral precinct, and 2) that Anglicans almost all engage in sexual libertinism every time they gather, so that synods boost the coffers of the sex-worker industry exponentially. Or something like that. Sadly I have to say that in 30 years of synod attendances around Australia and New Zealand I appear to have missed this recreational side-line, but Sir Bob would undoubtedly know the scene more comprehensively than I do.

In the last decade or two I have been suggesting that credible Christianity in the West is undergoing a form of persecution by exclusion and/or ridicule. Somehow I don’t think Sir Bob’s un-nuanced rampage quite fits the bill of “persecution.” Rowan Williams has been fairly outspoken in his attacks on comfortable western Christians who think they are being persecuted: “When you’ve had contact with real persecuted minorities you learn to use the word very chastely”, he warned, back in August.(2) Nevertheless, while he has a point, it is worth recalling that the greatest pogrom in history began with ridicule of the Jews. The fact that Jones can have his brain explosion published without censure by editors may point to the great values of free speech, but I suspect any similar attack on an Ayatollah, a roshi, a lama or a kaumatua would result in a media meltdown. Bishops are fair game.

There are many ways we have brought this on ourselves. For too long we viewed society with a degree of supercilious superiority. The days of that uncharitable self-satisfaction and sometimes outright hypocrisy are long gone in most quarters. We the Christbearers of the 21^st century are beholden to ensure we speak and act with integrity, as Duckworth has. No thunderbolts will ensue, but we might one day and by the grace of God once more earn the exclamation “see how those Christians love one another”.

 Є̀ν Χριστω

 

(1) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11151481

(2) http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/15/rowan-williams-persecuted-christians-grow-up

 

The post that disappeared

REFLECTION FOR THE ANGLICAN DIOCESAN  REGISTRARS
VIGIL OF ALL SAINTS’, 31st OCTOBER 2013

John 21.1-10

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ 3Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. 4The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10Then the disciples returned to their homes.

It is the set reading for the day, nothing special, except that it is the reading that dwells as close as any to the heart of all that we are – you! – are doing here. Let me though perhaps explain a bit about the lens through which I see our task: it is a lens that I would describe as the lens of core business. I fret often in church circles, not least in Anglican church circles, because it seems to me that our core business is so often displaced to the peripheries.

As it happens I have this week read the autobiography of Malala Yousoufzai, the Pakistani Muslim girl shot in the head but not killed in a Taliban assassination attempt just over a year ago. Very rarely does the biography, much less the autobiography, of a young person move me: when we are for example a closeted young person who has known nothing but a single sports obsession we know little enough about life to inform others. Malala is a rare exception … and I mention it because, though a Muslim, she has never lost sight of the simple fact that for her the justice demanded by Allah for all people is her core business.

Am I digressing? If so it is a scripted digression. I digress because our reading takes us to the core business of Christian witness. As it happens I am a universalist – not a pluralist, but that’s another matter – so I have no problem linking arms with the core business of Malala Yousoufzai. I would say though that the motivation for all our work as witnesses to Christ – which is surely what the nickname “Christian” first meant – is to bear witness to the resurrection of Christ. I am not here engaging with Malala – her God-breathed path is elsewhere, deeply profound, and deeply close to the beating heart of the triune God.

But I am not Malala. I am instead in the footsteps of those frightened men and women who first discovered not only an empty tomb but a resurrected Christ. It is from that encounter that all else that I do must stem: My re-memberance (and I explain that word elsewhere) of Christ in Eucharist and liturgy, my commitment to stewardship of God’s resources in and around my life, my proclamation of justice for all peoples and species in God’s garden, my preaching, my most of the time trying to be a half decent sort of a husband and father and citizen and Christian all begin with the encounter with the Risen Lord, the one made known to the faithful women and the less-faithful disciples in the appearances, and made known to me and subsequent struggling followers of Jesus in Eucharist and Koinonia and Canon and Liturgy and study and perhaps after that in nature.

The disciples who leave the tomb have not yet encountered the Risen Lord. Sometimes I feel contemporary Christianity has slipped back into their shoes, muttering about justice or money or sex or buildings but with no real interest in the underlying motivation, so that we sound like just one more interest lobby group in the community, and return to our homes saying nothing more. Soon, though, in the narrative, the frightened women (and then men) will begin to stutter the important words “he is not here, he is risen”. These are not words about an absent god, ironically, but about a God who is more powerfully present then they or we had ever dared to believe, the God who defeats the no of death and all “no”s of injustice, grief, and despair.

I don’t care whether we are registrars or deans or bishops or archbishops, these words and no other are the beginning of the work we do, because these words lead on to that unbelievable gauntlet cast down at the feat of Caesar and all Caesars: Jesus Christ is Lord.
 

Sadducees, Bishops of Bling ...

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 32 (10th November) 2013

(Oh ... with apologies for the last invisible post!)

Readings: Haggai 1.15b – 2.9
                 Psalm 145.1-5, 17-21
                 2 Thessalonians 2.1-5, 13-17
                 Luke 20.27-38

If you were to read through the Gospel accounts for the first time you would very soon get the impression that there is a bunch of bad guys called the Pharisees. They are often depicted as the opponents of Jesus, and some may have been (there are bad eggs in many baskets), but we need to be a little careful in our reading of scripture.  Historical scholarship today would emphasize that at the time of Jesus his own theological and missiological position was not too far removed from the Pharisees, and it is highly probably that the antagonism between the Pharisees and Jesus depicted by the four evangelists reflects a different situation, some decades later, by which time circumstances had driven a bitter wedge between Christians and their Jewish cousins in faith. 

This matters today not only because of a tragic fifteen hundred year history of more on than off oppression of Jews by Christians, but because in our world it is far more important to look for cohesion than enmity between warring faith-parties, and to condemn our cousins in faith on the basis of some reasonably volatile and even jaundiced first century writing – however understandable that jaundice may have been when Matthew Luke, Mark and John were writing – is to perpetrate evils far from the heart and purposes of God.

The Sadducees however were a corrupt religious cult, a group of powerful and influential figures, with friends in high places. Their chief effect was to exploit the vulnerable in the service of feathering their own nest. Religious leadership of many forms, not least those perpetrating evil in the name of Jesus, are not above such practice today, as we see in the sensationalist religions and cults whose leaders demand tithes from economically vulnerable followers, pointing to their personal wealth as a sign of the efficacy of faith and prayer, but those who have used their positions of power in the church to serve their own search for personal and especially sexual gratification.  The notorious Roman Catholic “Bishop of Bling,” Bishop Tebartz-van Elst who resided in notorious wealth in the diocese of Limburg has at least been brought to heel by Pope Francis, but there are many charlatans in more free-wheeling so-called Christian churches who continue to perpetrate their exploitation unopposed.

These many “users of the Lord’s name in vain” are able carry out their exploitations by deadening – cauterizing – the voice of conscience within their being, a process made far easier when any theology of afterlife or judgement is excised from the story of faith and of human relationship to God. The Sadducees had a vested interest in denying resurrection, for resurrection is a doctrine that, while it has sometimes been abused, on the whole inspires the oppressed to stand up to oppressors and exploiters, or, at the very worst, to find at least a narrative of hope in the midst of their lives of potential despair.

If I am an Afro-American slave in the nineteenth century I may not overcome my masters with a Marxist revolution – yet­ – but I may find hope in the midst of despair so that I can battle on in providing my children with love and warmth and the touch of God. While the narratives of a Te Kooti or a Ratana may not be orthodox in a Christian sense, there is no doubt that they succeeded, alongside orthodox Christian teachings, to bring narratives of hope to oppressed peoples.  The Sadducees denied hope – as many contemporary Christians risk doing – and rejoiced in the outcomes of exploiting others.

Consequently there is no suggestion that they are entering in dialogue when they come to Jesus with their loaded question. This is not an open engagement with Jesus in theological korero­, as a genuine seeker or dialogue partner might bring, but a conversation of entrapment. The gospel writers portray Jesus as again and again rising above entrapment – but as engaging genuinely and often playfully with those who willingly listen. The Sadducees do not.

The tradition of so-called Levirate marriage was in itself not to be automatically condemned. It is highly doubtful that Jesus approved wholeheartedly in the practice, reflecting as it did the notion of women as property, but there is no doubt also that, like Paul’s infamous but often de-contextualised “wives obey”, it provided at least some channel of hope in a society in which women were valued only for their ability to provide an heir for men. A woman was protected by the doctrine – still extant in some cultures today – and, while no one would advise such a practice today, it is probable that many otherwise disposable female lives were saved by it.

Jesus does not engage with the practice itself, but with the hypocrisy of the exploitative religious leadership who are raising the question only in order to ensure that his narrative of resurrection hope, judgement and justice is silenced.  I hint elsewhere that we as a Christian community today should think very carefully before we denude our narratives of their internal words of resurrection hope and divine judgement: that is what Paul referred to when he warned the Corinthians against stripping the gospel of its hope of resurrection, and the words resound no less truly today.

There is much in this tiny scene that we could explore, but ultimately I want us to dwell with that one denuding dimension of faithlessness: if we strip our faith of the dimension of God’s compassionate judgement, and of the “eschatological” or “after-time” dimension of that judgement, then we not only trivialize all that the early Christians stood for, lived and often suffered and sometimes died for, but we shift our own existence outside the scope of God’s loving, searching, caring and eternal gaze.

If we do not stand and live our lives in the light of that miraculous, death-transcending light of the first Easter morn – and its inseparable promise of judgement – then our own potential to perpetrate evil – (or at least to perpetrate Not Very Good as most of us will have only small dimensions to our lives) – is left to have the final word. Jesus is unremitting in his response: that which dwells beyond our sight is more than we can imagine in its goodness, a pie in the sky beyond human comprehension.  It is also, however, a magnet drawing us on to see God face to face. In preparation for that encounter, we, unlike the Sadducees, should be practising and proclaiming resurrection hope, not exploitation and despair.

May the magnetism of God’s eternity draw us and those we love and pray for on towards God’s judgement and to mysteries and reconciliations and loves beyond comprehension.

Amen.