Three sermons from long ago: (3) an unnamed servant

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
and at St. Luke’s, Augathella
FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(17th June) 2005

 Readings:
      Genesis 24.1-67
      Psalm 45.10-17
      Matthew 11.15-30


Here we dwell on one of those most powerful Hebrew tales – a novella, a short novel telling of the getting of a wife for Isaac, son of the promise received by Abraham and Sarah and generation and four weeks ago. The psalm fits our text, for it is a celebration of the bride as a gift of God.

Previously we journeyed with Abraham and Sarah as they received from God promise of the impossible. Their lives were barren, and yet God whispered a word of hope into their barrenness. Sarah laughed, and it was not the laughter of joy, but a perhaps-bitter, perhaps-mocking, at least doubting laugh heard only by the angel.

The promises long stays latent, and Abraham and Sarah bark up the wrong tree for some time, but eventually Isaac is born. Then, in one of the darkest tales of the Hebrew Scriptures, Abraham is obedient to God even to the point of offering the son of the promise to God in sacrifice. God intervenes – and we are not expected to dwell on the psychological impacts of that event, but on the extreme fidelity of Abraham. A ram instead is sacrificed, and history has in its sacred story a tale of the unimaginable extent to which our love of God should reach.

Although we don’t hear this part of the story in our Readers Digest liturgical version, Sarah now has died. Before she dies she laughs a very different laugh. It is the Easter laugh of the mad fool for Christ – the laugh of the one who has seen that God defeats the odds. It is an infectious laugh, and its echoes are not silenced by her peace-filled death. Like the dance of Jesus, from our gospel-glimpse at  Matthew 11.15-30, it is a moment we are invited to continue in our present. Her burial becomes an amusing tail of bartering for a grave, and if we read it we would find echoes of its financial opportunism in Genesis 24.1-67; note the noserings and bracelets that speak volumes to Rebecca's brother Laban!

For the narrative now has moved on to a new generation. Abraham is still alive, but the central player is now to be Isaac, for whom Abraham commissions an unnamed but remarkable servant to find a son. The promise realized in Isaac needs a future, and Isaac must marry if the generations are to continue even to “many nations.”

Isaac must have a wife. The servant who finds Rebecca is a parable in himself. He remains a nameless hero in the narrative of God. Often when I enter a church I wonder at the nameless heroes of faith who have believed and lived and rumoured the dreams of God and who are now forgotten in all but the memory of God: this is one such hero of faith.

Abraham is a great man of faith, but so too is this servant. He carries out his master’s bidding and more. He is unswerving in his belief that his task is the work of God, that God alone can make the journey succeed. It is no accident that the beginning and the end of the servant’s search is marked by prayer. His story begins “He knelt down and prayed …”, and concludes “Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his steadfast love and his faithfulness toward my master. As for me, the Lord has led me on the way to the house of my master’s kin.” This is the work of God and there can be no mistake about that.

The servant’s speech to Laban, the brother, and Bethuel, the father of Rebecca, also begins and ends with a focus on God. There can be no doubt who is the major, unseen player in this narrative. There is a hint that Laban has been greatly impressed less by the theology of the servant than by the expensive jewels bestowed on Rebecca and her household, but either way the brother is no fool, and the will of God is done.

Significantly the story ends with new words of blessing, spoken to Rebecca. They echo the words spoken a generation earlier to Abraham and the now dead Sarah, into whose family and line Rebecca now enters. They are the words of divine blessing spoken to the generations of those who have stood faithful in the tradition of Abraham, those who have seized the promises of God and clung to them in times if darkness and of light.

We could say so much more about this dense narrative. For now we are left with a demonstration of the promise of God in action. It is an inspirational promise – it lay more than almost anything at the heart of Paul’s faith, and his realization that in all the struggles of faith and life we are called to cling on to the promises of a God who proclaims “Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the ages.”

In the twenty first century, as the tide of orthodox Christian faith appears to ebb lower and lower and we find ourselves in the unfamiliar territory of a post-Christian society, we are challenged to recall that the promises of God to the ancients were not of instant gratification, nor easy to swallow. Our job is to keep on clinging to the God of Easter promise, and to place God at the beginning and the end of our daily journeyings. God is not a visible character in the journey of the servant, yet the servant clings to his task and to the promise received by his master Abraham. God is the unseen enabler of the story, and we are called to place ourselves into God’s hands, as individuals and as a corporate community of faith. To that task we are commissioned once again, believing against all odds, as Paul puts it, hoping against hope.


TLBWY

Three sermons from long ago: (2) Sarah's bitter laughter

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
and at St. Luke’s, Augathella
THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(12th June) 2005

Readings:
 Genesis 18.1-15
 Psalm 116.1-2, 11-18
 Romans 5.1-115
 Matthew 9.35-10.8

A week ago we were confronted and hopefully challenged by the cry of dereliction not of Christ on the Cross, but of Sarah in her barrenness. Where there was no human way to go on, where her meaning for existence was removed from her, she and Abraham cry out and hear a word of promise from God.

We need to know, though, something that the Hebrew scriptures are not. They are not a story of instant gratification: they are not, that is to say, an advertisement for a sugar fix or a coffee fix. Nowhere in the scriptures, Hebrew or for that matter Christian, is the promise that all shall be made right now. The biblical literature a story of promise.

As we return to Genesis this week we find that, although we have skipped a few chapters of narrative, the promise remains unfulfilled. Abraham and Sarah have left their country, in accordance with the command of God, but they remain childless. Worse, they have become accustomed to their barrenness, and it has become a place of comfort. Indeed, if you know the story, you will know that Abraham and Sarah have fundamentally if humanly failed to maintain their belief in the promise.

They have elected for the easy and un-divine option; Abraham has had a child by Sarah’s slave girl, Hagar. They have stayed within the limitations of human insight, rather than raising their eyes to the heavens. It should not ever be forgotten that the Jewish scriptures reveal a God who is compassionate and promise-making also in his dealings with the slave girl Hagar. Her son “Ishmael”, the nomadic peoples of the east, is given a wild life, but it too is one breathed into being by God. That fact alone should be the basis for constructive conversation between Christian, Jew and Muslim, cousins as we are in faith.

Now we find further development in the saga. Abraham is the key character in the first half of our passage, and he is a person in a hurry. He runs from the tent to meet the stranger who is also strangers, he hastens back to Sarah, and demands that she likewise hastens in the preparation of the bread. He runs to choose a beast from the herd, orders his slaves hastily to prepare it, and only then slows down to stand with the strangers who are his guests.

The story slows down in the second half, as the camera shifts to focus on the “three men” who visit. One of these three – Christianity has always found significance in the fact that the narrative mentions both three and one – recounts the promise made my God in last week’s story, the promise of offspring. But the repetition of the promise is met only with the laughter of Sarah. It  is the laughter of disbelief, and of the human failure to hold to the divine promise of impossibility. Their hopelessness is normality, and the call of faith nonsensical. Theirs is a very twenty first century existence. Yet it is into their world that the stranger(s) speak again the promise of God.

The answer of God is, in playful Hebrew fashion, a question: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” It is a question we should wrestle with ourselves, as we witness the complexities of our existence.  Is anything too hard for the Lord: Is Iraq a question that the world has sought to answer with its armies, or Zimbabwe, a question we have sought to answer with feather-sized reprimands? Is illness, ours or the illness and suffering of our loved ones “too hard for the Lord?” Is drought? Is death, the last enemy that we do all possible in our society to avoid and to deny and to hide? Is this “last enemy” “too hard for the Lord?”

If our answer or Abraham’s is “yes”, then the Lord is simply not Lord, for there is a greater something beyond the grasp and capabilities of the one we have called “God”. Funnily enough and sadly enough, even within the Christian community, I find much speech and action that turns death and suffering into a demon seemingly greater than God.

The author of Genesis does not want us to answer yes to God’s rhetorical question. We are expected to let God be God, answering “No: there is not and cannot e anything greater than our god.” There may be “yeses” to our vision – we may have good reason to believe that our barrenness or even our death is the final and therefore tragic word, but we are asked by faith to see through the eyes of God.

Sarah laughs. It is the laugh of science at the possibility of a Creator God, or at the possibility of resurrection, at the possibility of life beyond death, or at the possibility of the New Heaven and New Earth envisioned by the seer of the Book of Revelation. It is the laugh of a society that will mock the God we love and seek to serve, dancing on sacred sites or beliefs, or maybe just too busy in the service of gods called money or security to pause before the God we believe in. Sarah is not mocked for her laughter and neither should we ever dare to mock or knock those who do not share our strange faith.

Sarah’s laughter does not have the final word. God’s promise is not dependent on her response, or on Abraham’s response. God has spoken and it will be done – in Italian it is called a “fiat”. God’s word is action, and, though Sarah laughs and has taken a poor option in the past and laughs in the present, the will of God, the promise of God, will be done.

Only the promise of God is a “definite”, not human longing. Long as they might to break through human barrenness, even using alternative tools to do so, the wok of God will be the only way in which their human predicament can be solved. It is sometimes the case that the “Yes” of God is a long time or an alternative way in coming, but we are called, as Paul clearly sees to be a people believing in the promise of God. The ultimate promise of God is that darkness and death are not the final word, but resurrection and light. It is that promise that we are called to bear in our lives

TLBWY

Three sermons from long ago: (1) Go out, risk living

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
and at St. Luke’s, Augathella
SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(5th June) 2005

Readings:
            Genesis 12.1-19
            Psalm 33.1-12
            Romans 4.13-25
            Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26

Walter Brueggemann describes Genesis 12.1 as “perhaps the most important structural break in the Old Testament, and certainly in Genesis.” Another, and perhaps the greatest modern Old Testament scholar, places the break just three verses before our passage: Claus Westermann breaks his magnificent three volume commentary on Genesis at 11.27, after the resounding cry: “Sarah was barren; she had no child.” This is the beginning of the human encounter with God.

At this point, were we reading through Genesis, we would find that we come to an end of the story of God’s creation and providence through nature. However we under­stand Genesis, we have so far been reading of God’s dealing with all creation, including all humanity. Tales of the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the species of the earth, tales of the creation and the fall of humankind, and of the results of that fall, have filled the first 11 chapters of Genesis.

Now the story changes. We move into what we call salvation history rather than creation history. In all but nine of the preceding previous 53 verses the focus has simply been begetting, generation after generation of begats to tell the story of the expansion of humanity. The sole interruption is the strategic and tragic tale of the Tower of Babel, the story of humankind’s attempts to build its own path to the heavens. But now, as the story teller’s camera zooms in, the story of begetting has reached a dead end: Sarah was barren. Only the intervention of God can save the story.

So God’s intervention is needed, for humankind can go no further. Sarah is barren. The history of humankind has encountered desperation and hopelessness. Sarah is barren. This, the biblical author wants us to realize, is the place where the encounter with God begins. It is only when we encounter barrenness and hopelessness and the realization that in ourselves we can be or do nothing that the encounter with God begins. It is no accident that barrenness as rhe place of salvation is a recurring theme in the Hebrew Scriptures: Rebekah (Gen. 25.21), Rachel (29.31) and Hannah (1 Sam. 1.2), as well as Israel itself (Is. 54.1) must all encounter their own barrenness before they become the person or nation God calls them to be.

It is into this context that God speaks. Not for the first time the book of Genesis makes very clear the message that lies at the heart of Christianity’s Christmas readings: when God speaks it is done. God’s speech God’s word, is action. In the beginning “God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.” God’s word is action.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. God’s word is action, and in Genesis 12 God speaks a word of hope into Sarah and Abraham’s world of hopelessness.

This is what Paul means when in our Romans passage he cites Genesis, saying that the God of Abraham “calls into existence things that are not.” At a literal level, God “calls into existence” the child that was not available to Abraham and Sarah through the processes of nature – through begetting when begetting was merely the process of history and of biology without desperate need for God. But God speaks into Abraham and Sarah’s lives, and therefore into the lives of the people Israel, and therefore into the life of all humanity, speaking a word of salvation. Where we are broken and surrender the purposes of God, there we can hear and receive God’s word of healing.

We live in a world of change. Like Abraham and Sarah we are confronted with much barrenness. We see the barrenness of western civilization, with a comparative obsession with the execution of God. We see our culture and so much of what we grew to believe in unravelling before our eyes. Some of what we see is no more than a media distortion – it is arguable whether chemical dependence or violent crime today are worse than they were, say, in the time of Ned Kelly. But we are seeing increased pressures on the rural economy, as well as changing climates, economic and meteorological. We live at a time of renewed biological threat – bird flu, for example – and of the apparent clash of civilizations, of the West and of Islam. We live in the shadow always of nuclear warfare. Are we as a world reaching a time of brokenness?

We may encounter moments of brokenness on a micro scale. Times of pain in our own lives, times when we realize we cannot make it on our own, relying on our own strength or even the strength of those we love. Are we as a world reaching a time of brokenness?

The call to Abraham is a call to move into God’s future. In the midst of brokenness and barrenness Abraham and Sarah are commanded not to stay petrified or fossilized, but to go out from their comfort zone. There is an all too human temptation to stay in the state or the place we know, even if it is a place of hopelessness. God challenges us, as he challenged Abraham. Like frogs in slowly heating water humanity has a tendency to stay put, never to move and take the challenging escape that God offers.

Abraham’s story offers an alternative. We are invited to discover it by treading out towards alternative places, places as yet unknown but places that are foot-printed by God. God gives us a future. That future is ours to grasp

TLBWY

Is this a kissing book?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
PENTECOST (8^th June) 2014
           

Readings:       Acts 2:1-21
                       Psalm 104:24-35
                       1 Corinthians 12:3-13
                       John 7:37-52

Pentecost is a love story. Not, of course one of those love stories: some of you may remember the wonderful lines from early in The Princess Bride:

The Grandson:                                  Is this a kissing book?

              Grandpa:                                           Wait, just wait.
              The Grandson:                                  Well, when does it get good?
              Grandpa:                                           Keep your shirt on, and let me read.

It’s not like that at all. It is probably best captured in the words of the creative arts, in great literature, film or poetry, because we have over the centuries become inured to the passion of the biblical texts. Ironically, by becoming a part of our sacred liturgies – which in turn we have robbed of their wonder, drama and intrigue – they have developed a “meh” factor, and we no longer, usually, hear the drama and the passion and the love. Pentecost is a love story.

We have in many ways been reading a love story since Maundy Thursday. We read of the gut-wrenching love-lost of that night of betray and arrest, and the shocking tragedy of death on Good Friday. Some of us at this Cathedral heard the sickening crunch of the falling cross, a kind of creatively mixed metaphor, on Good Friday. And, from Easter morning on, we have been hearing a new motif, hope breaking into human darkness, light breaking into human despair (I mix my pairs deliberately), eternity breaking into mortality, and joy breaking in to the deepest human mourning. I am of course echoing in part Psalm 30:

You have turned my mourning into dancing;
    you have taken off my sackcloth
    and clothed me with joy,
so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
    O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you for ever.

But, for the first Christians to be able to turn, following the events of Good Friday and Easter, to texts such as Psalm 30 these words had to ring with the truth of their experience.  In other words, there had to be more than a minute issued following a committee meeting of the disciples that said, in the infamous and much abused words of German theologian Willi Marxsen, die Ursache von Jesus geht (“the cause of Jesus goes on”). The telling out of the good news in the early post Easter growth of the church was not the result of a procedural directive issued by a meeting of the disciples’ executive. It was a result of the powerful observations and experiences of the first Christians as their fear and dejection was turned to joy and empowerment by the resurrection appearances of the one they had lost.

Nor, despite the implications of some contemporary theology, was the transformation that took place in the lives of the first disciples just a matter of them collecting together a whole heap of images and stories common to other religions of their day and mixing them into a mishmash of new religion. The doctrine of resurrection itself was not a heady concept borrowed from Egyptian or Mesopotamian or any other mythology of a dying and returning redeemer, but a woefully inadequate way of expressing the facts that they encountered in the first days of the new revelation of God’s love. Shattered, broken, disillusioned, they encountered restoration of hope and the birth of a whole new inexpressible understanding of God’s relationship with humanity.

Later, though words fall short in describing the impossible, they were able to let go of their experience of the risen Lord, allow him to pass from their sight, yet experience anew in the coming of the Comforter, the one whose coming we celebrate today, a renewed and equally powerful if invisible experience of the presence of that same Lord. As they gathered in worship, and particularly in the sacramental signs of bread water and wine that we celebrate this day, they knew the risen Christ to be so powerfully present that not even death could dim their experiential vision. (Which is not to say some didn’t lapse: they did. But enough were so transformed that they story spread outwards and downwards even to our present time and place).

Above all they continued to experience in fellowship and scripture and sacramental liturgy that same warm love, made present by the Spirit who we celebrate, that some of them had known in the flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth. This was inexplicable, and in many ways inescapable, unless they deliberately turned their backs on the experience. This was the love that was made eternally possible by the coming of the Pentecostal Spirit of Christ. Pentecost is a love story.

We have not always lived out that love story that begins on this birthday that we celebrate. Even as early as the letters of Paul we find radical failures to love as we should love – that is why his letters to the Corinthians and Galatians in particular are so strident, even angry, as they experience the implications of tough love and his opponents’ betrayal of love. We too will let love's demands down from time to time – or each day – abut can turn and turn again to God’s redemptive healing. Pentecost is a love story, and slowly we can be transformed into the face of love – if we let God’s in-dwelling Spirit seize our lives.

If and as we do that – and it’s a lifetime journey touching every aspect of our lives from care of the environment to the love of our friends, families and enemies, but as we do that we can be an enactment of the dream of the great John after whom our cathedral is named: “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living waters.”  Pentecost is a love story. Today is an invitation to be a part of that story.

TLBWY

Cosy and unified, and all things sweet hereafter?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (1^st June) 2014
           

Readings:       Acts 1:6-14
                        Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35
                        1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:4-11
                        John 17:1-11

 

I rarely watch television and even more rarely watch “got talent” shows (at least not since C’mon showed on New Zealand television screens) but I once happened to be in a room when the infamous Simon Cowell (I’ve learned his name since) asked a fresh faced and eager contestant to turn around and show Simon the back of his shirt. With a sneer cold enough to sink the Titanic Cowell then expressed surprise that he could not see a broken line painted down the middle of the contestant’s back, as the poor boy was so middle of the road. It was nasty and unnecessary, and while I am no fan of the “everybody is a wonderful winner” attitude of some class room etiquette, this seemed to this non-viewer to be like an act of wanton psychological vandalism, and if it is no more than a part of the acceptable discourse of twenty-first century entertainment then I have some serious questions to ask about western values.

Be that as it may, though, when it comes to biblical and theological interpretation I should have a broken line painted firmly down the back of my shirt. There is a school of thought that sees every syllable of biblical record as dictated by God, and another that starts from the assumption that if the bible or bible characters are recorded as saying something then they clearly didn’t. I stand firmly in the via media (as every Anglican should!), the middle way between these two fundamentalisms. I believe primarily that we have very good, if interpreted, records of the sayings and actions of Jesus. Even if the author of John was not in the inner-recesses of the mind of Jesus as the latter prayed privately, he was close enough to be able to recreate the likely scenarios and patterns of Jesus’ thoughts and prayers. What he tells of the thoughts and prayers and actions of Jesus must have resonated with the experience of the earliest Christians and one-remove witnesses of Jesus in order to be come so trusted and revered that his words became canonised as scripture. This is no fabrication.

It is a deep journey into the prayer life of the one we know to be Son (whatever that means: perhaps “incarnate-emanation”?) of God. In it Jesus prays three fundamental elements, though our liturgical slice provides only two. He prays for the glorification of the Son. He prays for the safe-keeping of his witnesses. And outside our liturgical slice he prays for the unity of his on-going followers. I should add that I do not believe that in his mind’s eye Jesus had some sort of clairvoyant foresight into the bear-pit behaviour of Anglicans at for example a General Synod or an Electoral Synod in Aotearoa nearly 2,000 years after the prayer was whispered: the prayer is a genuine insight into the disruption that disunity causes to what Paul would call the body of Christ, the marring or authenticity that comes from our ability to cooperate through all our differences of personality and priority.

But, if the one who I have called “emanation” (the word is inadequate, but so is “Son”) of God remains by and large unanswered, what hope have we, and what integrity is there to our witness to the resurrected Christ who is our founder and raison d’être? So often our personal prayers, for ourselves, for those we love, for those around us, and our bigger-picture prayers for God’s tortured and fallen world seem unanswered. Indeed let us not play around with the let-off word “seem”: our prayers are unanswered.

And I guess I can’t answer the un-answer. I pray as I’m sure you do for family, for friends, for the strangers who share this planet with me. I pray for Syria and watch the thousands die. I find my prayers dry up as I read of the rape and murder of Malaysian and Indian and Pakistani teenage girls all in the last few days. I find my prayers dry up, though I try to stutter them still, as I see the growing gap between the richest and the poorest on the earth, and as I watch the wanton ignorance that is the response of the world’s most powerful people to the ecological collapse that will devour the lives of the world’s most vulnerable (and more). I stutter prayers, and even when I do see invasions of what I might consider the miraculous I know only too well that they are exceptions to the rule and are in any case, perfectly explicable to the sceptical by references to causes other than divine intervention.

Jesus prayed in the garden for the glorification of his name. Actually his name today is more often a swearword that a glorified acknowledgement of his relationship to the Creator, but I’m not sure that is what is at stake. We might though acknowledge that even two millennia later there are lives transformed, healed, and emboldened by the acknowledgement of the “lordship” claims of the one that the first witnesses believed to have conquered death. Yesterday was the 80th Anniversary of the Barmen Declaration, one of public theology’s and Christianity’s finest hours as the German Confessing Church stood up to Hitler. It did not stop Hitler, and our declarations when eventually we make them may not change the world, but it spoke of the integrity of a group of men and women who dared to confess Jesus as Lord and simultaneously address the world’s deep injustices: “As Jesus Christ is God’s assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so, in the same way and with the same seriousness he is also God’s mighty claim upon our whole life. Through him befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his creatures.” They were brave words that cast a gauntlet at Hitler’s feet, and reflected the belief of the confessing Christians that God was greater than evil. “Lord”, said Jesus, “Glorify my name.” While many so-called believers continue to mar the name of Jesus, witnesses such as these will ensure that name still has credibility at least in circles where eyes and ears are not stopped.

“Father … protect them in your name.” While the source of the Fourth Gospel was probably one of few eye-witnesses of Jesus to live to an old age, many countless who have served Jesus then or since, have died prematurely. Professing Christ is hardly a protection – and if our prayer-book and its allusions to Paul’s writings are to be believed then it is the opposite, an invitation or calling to suffer. “Father … protect them in your name” is not it seems, a magical formula to make sure bad things don’t happen. It is, I suspect, a prayer that no matter what befalls us, we will in the pain of suffering, of trial, continue to stutter the words of belief: Jesus is Lord. Bad things will not have the final word. Over and again, against the claims of Hitler to Lordship, the Confessing Christians of Germany dared to pray to a greater Lord. Many of them died, as did many early Christians and Christians in between, and Christians today, yet the prayer “Father … protect them in your name” remains mysteriously valid. It is linked not to protection from suffering or death, but protection from the loss of faith, the loss of way, the loss of place in the heart of the God who will transcend death.

The prayer for unity is not included in our readings, and I shall leave it until it is. Suffice it to say at this stage that a unity of believers does not gloss over differences in doctrine and practice. It wrestles to stay in love-relationship despite them. The unity that is the spirit of ecumenism and the œcumene or in Māori kotahitanga symbolised in the carving above my head [see picture], is a sign that even after two thousand years our Lord’s prayer still resonates around the universes of God, and we are still within the embrace of divine, unifying, as yet not wholly known love.

The futures of God and of our relationship to the purposes of God remain a “not-yet.” I see signs around the international church, even in Western Christianity, that we are beginning to rediscover our core purposes, the mission that begins deep in the heart of the prayers of Jesus. I am beginning to see signs of a future Church thrown back not into sillinesses and trivialisations of faith, but into witness that is consistent with those first witnesses who dared to believe that the prayers of Jesus were meaningful even when all around them often seemed lost. As we can be reminded each time we see the paschal candle, our time is embraced within the alpha and the omega of God, and our future will be the future that is embraced by God. May the Christ of the Cross be glorified in our small lives, individual and corporate as the Spirit of God (whose coming we celebrate next week) keep us complete, steady, strong, firm in the faith of the risen Christ.

 

TLBWY

Alexander Beetle and a Resurrection faith

SERMON PREACHED AT THE ORMOND CHAPEL

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (25^th May) 2014
           

Readings:       Acts 17:22-31
                        Psalm 66:8-20
                        1 Peter 3:13-22
                        John 14:15-21

To read Luke’s history of the expansion of Christianity in the Roman Empire, his history of the early impact of the post-Pentecost Holy Spirit, is to read a type of history that does not resonate well with our post-Enlightenment, categorizing, quantifying, classifying brains. Since the Enlightenment we have wanted all facts, all matter, all experience to be neatly ordered in ever-decreasing categories, so that in the end A.A. Milne’s beetle is not a mere resident of an infamously porous matchbox, not merely “a little beetle; so that Beetle was his name,” but Animalia > Anthropoda > Insecta > Coleoptera > Belidae > Rhinotia > Hemistictus, before finally becoming the famous Alexander Beetle of the famous poem:

It was Alexander Beetle I’m as certain as can be,
And he had a sort of look as if he thought it must be Me,
And he had a sort of look as if he thought he ought to say:
“I’m very very sorry that I tried to run away.

Among the expressions of this need to classify were the great orderings of the animal and plant kingdoms, together with the great Dewey Decimal System, the great thesaurus writings of post-Enlightenment Europe, even the great concordances of the bible. Many of the designers of such systems went mad in their brave attempt to make categorization of the world their life’s work. Strong, the concordance writer, did not go mad, but pulled together a team of hundreds to help him in his work. The earlier Cruden sadly did undergo many stints in mental asylums (is this the moment to point out that he missed out Buz the brother of Huz in Gen 22:21?), having spent his spare time attempting to preserve the King’s English and eradicate graffiti with a sponge. Roget, author of the famous Thesaurus that bears his name did not go mad, and indeed used the categorizations of words as an antidote to the depression with which he struggled throughout his adult life. Dewey, of the decimal system, did not technically go mad, but was highly antisocial, and dangerously eccentric. They were however masters of category and classification.

It was probably most poignantly revealed to me during my recent sojourn in the Northern Territory, how western and often paternalistic such a view can be. Its worst expressions are to be found in the attempt to classify humans as numbers, so that for example representatives of indigenous communities are categorized according to series of groups of descending size, so that ultimately a skull in a Global North museum becomes no longer the remains of a cherished human being but a code and sub code and goodness knows what other forms of sub-classification in a small drawer in an air-conditioned museum basement.

It was my privilege three years ago to take part in a combined Anglican and Traditional Indigenous burial ceremony in which remains from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington were returned to their ancestral home and their spirits released to freedom and peace. A clinical classification system that erodes values of freedom and peace can ultimately so dehumanise its subjects that their bones are mere exhibits. The most horrendous classification system of all was that of Hitler and his accomplices as Jewish and other minority peoples were reduced to tagging as a number and their lives callously snuffed out in the gas ovens of Nazi Europe.

Luke knew none of this. For Luke the glorious sweeping work of the Holy Spirit was described with flamboyant and symbolic numbers: thousands became believers that day. I used to find myself depressed, and suspect some Christian professionals still do, as they compared the numbers of converts at Luke’s scenes with the impacts generated by our ministries. To the best of my knowledge no person has come to faith through my ministry, and while I lament that, I leave it altogether in the hands of God. But it is important not to throw out the symbolic baby in the quantifiable bathwater of Luke’s story. There is no doubt that the enthusiasm and vigour and determination and indeed sheer brave certainty of the earliest Christians had enormous impact in the spiritual vacuum of the late Caesarean Roman Empire, and that the spread of Christianity was nothing short of miraculous.

For us though it is the baby in the Lukan bathwater that matters. Luke would not have used the vastly symbolic depictions of the work of the Spirit in making Jesus known to members and observers of the Jesus Community had his symbols not resonated with the experience of his audiences. They knew the power of Christ’s risen and death-transcending, death-conquering presence in their midst. Observers of the Jesus Community saw him in the behaviour and attitudes of the believers. The challenge of course is whether the same can be said of us.

Are we testifying to a powerful, transcendent Christ in our midst, or are we focussed on a struggling and frankly collapsing institution and collapsing wider society? It is not easy in a post-Enlightenment world to believe in a thoroughly pre-Enlightenment, un-quantifiable, un-classifiable event. It is not easy to believe in the impact of the God of Jesus Christ in lives in, around and through and since that event. As an Easter people in a post-Enlightenment world we slide into attempts to classify and categorize and minimize that which the early Christian writers knew to be greater than the human imagination. We reduce Alexander Beetle to a mere concept.

We shrink or marginalize our churches either by attempting to rationalise away the magnificence of the experience of those who are saturated in God, or by demanding that God behave in the ways we dictate (be we fundamentalist readers of the minutiae of scriptural events or liberal categorizers and classifiers of the same events). We must acknowledge all lives saturated in the experience of the spiritual in and beyond Christian understanding, for I would not limit the resurrection Spirit of God to Western experiences, though privately I would name Christ as the True Spirit of all authentic life.

So, finally, when Peter speaks of Christ “in heaven” we can get bogged down in arguments that trivialize his point by either defining an “up there” place or by paternalistically sneering the concept away altogether. Instead the scriptures invite us to recognize that he was speaking of the powerful experience of the first – and subsequent – Christians, the experience that the risen Christ is close, is drawing us inexorably forward in to the eternities of God’s death-conquering love. I suspect we can find the unquantifiable but almost tangible energies of the risen Christ only as we turn again and again to God seeking forgiveness, restoration and renewal in the irrational faith of Christ.

 TLBWY

Thoughts in honour of the crews past and present of HMNZS Otago

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL

OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (11^th May) 2014

MATTINS, WITH THE CREWS PAST AND PRESENT OF THE HMNZ OTAGO
           

Readings:       Psalm 107:23-28
                        & Psalm 23
                        Mark 4:35-41

For some of you this will be the second week running in which I have begun my thoughts with what Bob Dylan calls “too personal a tail.” My I first though pay tribute to our guests, the Past shipmates, partners and friends of HMNZS Otago, as well as students of Hukerenui College. I know I have welcomed you already but even twice is not enough. I wish to mihi you because I have great admiration for those who serve their country, whatever the context. Even in times in which governments have taken their military forces into crazy situations I have admired the tenacity, loyalty and courage of you who are perhaps more than anyone else, public servants (though probably you might not welcome the title!).

Had I been a time traveller, and undertaken that unforgivable sin that neither Dr Who nor Hermione Granger was quite caught in committing, the sin of spying on myself, then I think my once-self would have received a nasty shock to hear my present self pronounce those words of mihi and of sort of pōhiri. It may shock some here, though I doubt it, to know that your dean was once a would-be mung-bean chewing, muslin-wearing, herb-ingesting, tie-dye wearing hippie-dude, who thought that Led Zeppelin and The Doors would save the world, that religion was for the credibility-challenged, and that the armed forces, along with the police, were off the scale of inacceptable humanity. I was incidentally always a little sad that my hair never quite like that of Jim Morrison (my school in any case would not allow it) and that the nearest I ever got, not least because I was ten years too young, to hippiedom  was owning (as I still do) the complete works of Bob Dylan, along with a guitar that I never learned to play (I still have it and still can’t fathom its mysteries).

The readings this day of course float around ideas of naval service – except for the psalm of the day that has far more to do with sheep than ships. Yet, by and large, and regardless of your faith or otherwise, I suspect they don’t entirely connect with your actual experience. Military chaplains tell me that many of their charges in the forces know far more than they or I do about praying in extremis, but most military that I have worked with are fairly coy about matters of faith. At any rate few have quite emulated the stilling of the sea of the Jesus story read to us by Rear Admiral Jack Steer, though more may relate to the cry of the heart from the psalmist, as read Association president Jim Blackburn. That of course can be both metaphorical – life can for most of us chuck out a few storms – or literal, as sea-goers know only too well.

That’s actually the point of the psalms, by the way, and why I maintain they are so important: they run the gamut of human emotions from hatred to terror to ecstasy to depression, yet somehow stutter into an awareness of the presence of God in all that range of human experience. It’s not a bad lesson to learn.  

In fact it’s the one lesson I want us to if not learn at least pause with momentarily this day. The hippie me eventually learned that life is bigger than my personal cruisy comfort, and out there were men and women, especially military men and women, who for whatever reason were willing to give up cruisy comfort to make the world a safe place. I admire that, I mihi that, I thank you of the Otago for that. I want, too, to thank as it were those who have lived credible lives of faith, who have learned not to advertise their piety but to discover the presence of God in every nook and cranny of human experience. The mung-bean munching me didn’t get God because I thought God was some magic trickster in the sky, and I could do without him (and it was a him). Slowly though I found a different God: a God who is with me when I cry out in every storm but also every sunny day of life. I grew to kinda like that God, and I’m proud that whatever your personal beliefs we can for a moment pause and acknowledge a God who is “Trinity of (both) love and power,” God of  storm and calm, literal, and metaphorical.

Thank you, crew members past and present of the Otago, and to your absent colleagues too, for all you have done in the service of the greater good, and thank you for sharing this moment of God-focus with us.

TLBWY