John-Michael Tebelak and the craziness of God

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 11
(14^th June) 2015

Readings:        

 

• 1 Samuel 15:34 – 16:13
• Psalm 20
• 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17
• Mark 4:26-34

 

In the solemn delivery of liturgical reading, especially in an acoustic chamber as echoing as ours, we constantly lose the playfulness, humour, and divine madness that permeates so many of the texts of our faith. (Perhaps this is all the more so now I have opted for the longer and more demanding continuous cycle of readings instead of the ostensibly “related” readings we were using). No matter how good our readers – and you are good! – we are, especially as Anglicans, trained to deliver the text with theatrical gravitas. When we read or chant the psalms we do so with all the joie de vivre of the announcement of a death, the terrible heaviness of a police officer’s knock on the door at night. Do we dare to notice, for example, the craziness of God that gives the second portion of our Samuel reading a glorious and Godly inanity? Do we notice the wry humour with which the psalmist notes the trust some will place in tools of war, while he prefers to trust a God greater even than death? It’s not thigh-slapping, belly-wobbling humour, but it is humour nevertheless and it runs through many of our biblical texts.

We are, after all, Anglican, and we all the more so, for we are cathedral. In the lead up to Pentecost I mentioned the mad in-breaking of the Spirit that was the Charismatic movement of the 1960s and ’70s and perhaps even ’80s. It had its limitations, made its mistakes, danced ultimately on wrong paths, but I suggest that somewhere in the tiggeresque bounce of its ministrations there was an important truth.

That aside, in 1971 a young graduate student named John-Michael Tebelak went for a walk. He should have been finishing his dissertation, but, wearing overalls and a tee-shirt, meandered into the Cathedral of St Paul in Pittsburgh. He had been writing his thesis on ancient Greek and Roman mythology (people did that in those days!) but had become enraptured by the joy he found in the Christian gospels. He sought that joy in St Paul’s Cathedral, and felt that the Easter vigil above all should radiate irrepressible happiness. For his troubles he was frisked by police and left only with the sense that Christians had poured cement on to the tomb that was already sealed by a rock.

Over the next few days he wrote Godspell. He wrote Godspell in all its manic zaniness, and many Christian leaders dismissed the musical as demonic and anti-Christian, metaphorically frisking its lyrics as it was asked to leave the cathedrals and churches of the English-speaking liturgical world. I am less sure that the musical is demonic or anti-Christian, more sure that it is profoundly insightful and Christ-bearing. In the clowns’ mad manic dance there is a search for truth. It is a search that circumnavigates again and again and inescapably around the sayings of Jesus, but also by implication around the very being of Jesus.  (Tebelak was granted his Masters for the lyrics by his school, Carnegie-Mellon University. Coincidentally, amongst its alumni Carnegie-Mellon numbers two of the astronauts killed in the Challenger space shuttle disaster, but also John Forbes Nash, the subject of A Beautiful Mind, and Andy Warhol, whose mind was also arguably beautiful).

Amongst the manic, surreal joy of Godspell is the telling of the Parable of the Sower, that same parable that we haven’t read today. We aren’t reading the Parable of the Sower because it isn’t read in Year B, through which we are now travelling, but the mini-parables we have read this morning are Jesus’ own enlargements on the theme. There was seed that fell amongst weeds, that rose up, and was choked by the worries and concerns of the world, seed that died whilst carefully ensuring that anyone who wore overalls and a tee-shirt, tattoos or a nose stud was firmly frisked by police as they were sent out of the near-empty building.

In Godspell’s telling of the Parable of the Sower the young female narrator grows in confidence as the words break out of her. Under the watchful encouragement of the Jesus-character she journeys from stage-fright to eloquence, and from eloquence to holy madness, as the story crescendos and the final seed yields fruit, thirty and sixty and an improbable hundredfold. But before that she tells of the seed that fell amongst weeds, seed which rose up, and was choked by the worries and concerns of the world. She tells of the seed that, like Samuel, looked on appearance and height of stature, on mission statements and economic viability plans, on demographic assessments and ecological impacts, on canon laws and corporate memories of previous attempts, seed that waxed eloquent on the importance of horses and chariots but forgot the possibilities of God. And that seed choked.

In the minor seed-parables with which we are re-engaging Mark’s gospel-telling we find seed quietly germinating in the dark, or seed that is tiny bursting out in luxurious, manic, tangled mustard seed growth in which the birds of the air can find shade even if they have nose rings and tattoos. We find that the seed manically scattered by a dancing clown, (for in Godspell if not in the gospel itself that is the profound image), in the fruits of frenzied adoration of and devotion to God the ingredients of gospel, ingredients of resurrection hope and compassionate justice and uncontainable cruciform love are irrepressibly spread, and spread, and spread.

As we make our pledges of giving this understated Stewardship Sunday we should be looking far deeper into ourselves: as we reflect this day on our giving to the life of the church, and as we later hear the call to give generously to an appeal to empower women attempting to study at St John’s University in Tanzania, we should respond, madly, manically, to those calls. Alongside those responses we should look deeper still within ourselves, beyond even the linings of our pockets; we should assess anew the viability of the soils of our spirit, question whether we are able to be a place of mad, maniacal God-filled dance, of ridiculous giving of time and energy and love, a place where the light breaks in (as Leonard Cohen put it) or whether the weeds are already or for too long reaching out with choking tendrils. If John-Michael Tebelak were to walk into our midst would he find a dance or a dirge, dancing clowns or frisking police? The choice is ours if we wish to be a place of fertile faith for the generations who at this stage are voting firmly with their absence.

When John-Michael Tebelak (who tragically died of a heart-attack at the age of 32) left St Paul’s, Pittsburgh, he wrote Godspell. He incorporated into his clowns’ telling of the parable of the Sower a well-known and once popular hymn, though it may well be one we have not sung here in recent years. The clowns form a circle and dance, in the way we don’t dance, singing and dancing to these words:

We thank you, our provider,

for all things bright and good,
the seed-time and the harvest,
our life, our health, our food.
Accept the gifts we offer
for all your love imparts,
and, what thou most desirest:
our humble, thankful hearts.

All good gifts around us
are sent from heaven above;
we thank you, Lord, we thank you, Lord
for all your love.

Perhaps we too might one day find our inner clown and dance the mad, manic, mystic dance of thankful faith, the dance John-Michael Tebelak had to leave a cathedral to find. David whose ruddy face and clear eyes ultimately foreshadowed his status as God’s chosen, David the great king, was also the one that as Leonard Cohen again reminded us, danced before the Lord, earning the scorn of Milcah and the admiration of God. Perhaps we can be fertile soil, and  find that dance within these hallowed walls, and take it with us, with no frisking police to stop us, take it with us out into the streets and lanes into which God is calling us.

TLBWY                                                                                                        

Daddy-o, Laddy-o and Spook

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
TRINITY SUNDAY

(31^st May) 2015

Readings:   Isaiah 6:1-8      

                   Psalm 29
                   Romans 8:12-17
                   John 3:1-17

I was well into my thirties before I first heard the expression “Daddy-o, Laddy-o and Spook” – perhaps under the influence of James K. Baxter we might say “chook”[1] – as a description of the Most Sacred and Mysterious Trinity. It tickled my fancy, and while I might be wrong I suspect the Most Sacred and Mysterious Trinity has (not have!) sufficient humour to understand and enjoy the irony of it: it exemplifies humanity struggling with the impossibility of encapturing the mystery of divinity. If we are offended by the gentle playfulness of the expression, or dismiss it as disrespectful, then we are ourselves missing the point that the mystery of tri-unity is simply beyond the fumblings of human expression or the meanderings of human comprehension.

I remember well as I entered theological college the despair of those of my colleagues who had entered training from a scientific or pragmatic background. If we are used to a world in which e = mc², or in which one foot equals 30.48 centimetres, or the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides (a² + b² = c²) then there is something desperately bewildering about three-in-one and one-in-three, or even about a human who is simultaneously divine, and indeed a triune divinity who has eternally absorbed humanity. I watched the theologs struggle, and wondered why. I came from a world in which

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune – without the words,
And never stops at all

(Emily Dickenson)

I saw no need to reduce God, the source of hope and love and faith and life and light to mere equations. Which is not to say, incidentally, that I accepted the much touted theological equation that “God is a metaphor,” because I maintain God the Creator is far beyond the limitations even of metaphorical language: God needs no vehicle, in grammatical terms.

Still: metaphor is a useful tool, and probably more useful than the modern penchant for scientific rationalism, when we come to explore the mysteries of God. The Trinity, I emphasize, is the doctrine by which Christianity stands or falls. Jettison Trinity and we no longer have the God of our sacred scriptures, no matter what Jehovah’s Witnesses might tell us. Anne had a friend who once declared to her that, if Christianity got rid of the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity he could go along with it. Ali was a Muslim. Rid ourselves of the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity and we are likely to find ourselves either Muslim or Jewish. Both are fine faiths, but neither of them is the Christian faith (nor, I suggest, is Unitarianism or the Jehovah’s Witness faith).

The Trinity is the doctrine by which Christianity stands or falls. But if all we have is a divine and even darker version of the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, then we have no good news to share, just a murderous god. So much of our language of faith has hooked into the imagery of blood-sacrifice and failed to move on from there. We are left with Daddy-o murdering Laddy-o, for us. To be left there is to be left with an image unrelenting in its brutality, an image out of which much inhumaneness in the name of God has been spawned, not least against God’s chosen Jewish people. To be left there is to be left too with a binitarian, rather than a trinitarian faith. To be left there is to be left with no language of love, and it is no accident that this God-as-murderer binitarian faith often spawns the language of anti-Semitic, anti-gay, anti-other hatred.

The language of the Trinity, deeply immersed in the exploration by the first Christians of countless Hebrew and Greek Testament texts, the language of the Trinity is the language of love-making. It is the language of God making love and making creation and making redemption and making hope. It is the language of making possible our reciprocal making of love to God. Just as the rhythms of human love-making are not merely about procreation, not merely explicable by the need to propagate a species, so the language of the Trinity is the language of eternal love, interpenetration, and the making of room even for us in the complexities of the universe and its eternities.

The language of the Trinity is the language that is born deep in the bowels of Jewish and Christian people as they were grasped by the magnificence of a Creator, who didn’t need to create, yet a Creator who does not leave humanity or creation abandoned, a Creator who cares and redeems. It is language that is born deep in the bowels of Christians as they realized that all the justice and forgiveness and righteousness and healing and redemption that the God of the Hebrews had made known to the Old Covenant People of God, all that was now available to them in the person and life and death and above all resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, our Christ-Messiah. It is the language that is born deep in the bowels of worshipping Christians as they realized that all the meaning and pressure and impact of Jesus of Nazareth the Christ-Messiah was not limited to a few years in first century Palestine but was spreading out through space and time to all who would open themselves up to that meaning and pressure and impact no matter where or when. Trinitarian language is the language of praise and adoration and love-making to and from God in an eternal interchange, an eternal dance that is far beyond mere human rationality.

The language of the Trinity is the language that says the experience of humans journeying through birth and suffering and death, through grief as well as through laughter, through war as well as peace, reunion as well as separation, depression and elation, through the whole gamut of human experience, is taken up in the Ascension, deep and inexplicably into the eternal heart of Godhead; there God the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the Vivifier participates in your experience and mine, even when we don’t know or acknowledge or understand it and even to the point where we might cry out “there is no God”, for Jesus did that too. There in the heart of the triune God our whole experience is transformed into, caught up in the Easter promise of eternity and we are invited to journey eternally in Christlight.

 

TLBWY                                                                                                        

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[1] See James K. Baxter, “Ode to Auckland”, line 46.

Pentecostal thoughts

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FEAST OF PENTECOST
(24th May) 2015


There are some three hundred biblical mentions of the One who came to be known as the Holy Spirit and Third Person of the Trinity, running through both testaments. and particularly prevalent in that pneumatological book that we know as the Acts of the Apostles, but which might be called something like the Act of the Spirit in and through the Church. A year ago a handful of you shared something of your experience and understanding of the Spirit. Those tellings provided profound insight, and it would be lovely to hear more in another year or two. At the very least though we should have the idea that there are a myriad biblical and post-biblical experiences, now and in the span of biblical times, of the One we have come to know as Spirit, the ruarch or the pneuma of God. There are also many heresies, defined as such by the early Church, into which we can neatly fall if we try too hard to define who this Person of the Trinity. I shall probably embrace many if not all not only in the next few minutes of reflection but in the remaining years of my life.

Since this has been a chaotic week I shall permit myself a personal reflection, a story from the heart. As a convert to Christianity all those years ago I hold a privileged position, that glorious contrast between being and not-being. Because there is a day and an hour when for me the journey towards faith in the Risen Lord solidified in commitment there are memories of contrast, of the is and the was not. A psychologist could dismiss all my contrasts of experience in that quasi- or perhaps pseudo-rational language of the so-called social sciences. I have a suspicion that the language and world view of the social sciences is at least if not more irrational and unquantifiable as the weird and wonderful poetic language of faith.

So there I was, the morning after the evening when I surrendered my life to the God I had for several years refused to believe existed. There I was on the roadside, in a state no doubt of religious euphoria, with all sorts of psychological explanations possible, a state not unlike but far less chemically engineered than the states I had often sought to generate with illegal substances in the years leading up to that moment. There I was with my thumb out, hitching home to Palmerston North after coming to faith. Across the road as I waited foals frolicked in a paddock. Suddenly with all the force of an epiphany I realized that I was now in relationship with the Creator of those animals and their frolic. It was, yes, an epiphanous moment. It was not a rational or scientific moment.

But neither is the God of the Cross a rational or a scientific God. What I was experiencing that Sunday afternoon was the liberation of the soul, and yes the psyche too, that is in some circumstances an overwhelming human need. There are a myriad ways in which that moment can be psychoanalysed away, but what I was experiencing that Sunday afternoon was also the much needed liberating force of God’s Pneuma, God’s Ruarch. Choose your language, God’s Wairua, God’s Spirit.

The winds of change were blowing undeservedly through the life of this not particularly important individual, liberating him from God alone knows what incarcerations and restrictions and yes insecurities and failings too – and God alone knows plenty of insecurities and failings remain too because the work of transformation is, at least until the New Heavens and the New Earth, a work of the Spirit of God still in progress. It was though the work of initial liberation of a troubled soul, just as in the previous decade or so a wind of liberation had, as I noted over the last couple of weeks, blown through the institutionalised insecurities of Anglican ecclesiology, blowing us apart, never to be the same again.

For that had been the God-given gift of Charismatic renewal that had been blasting through the corridors of Anglicanism for nearly two decades before I caught that bus of faith and renewal. The old institutional mindset of salvation by propriety and of cleanliness next to godliness God knows needed blowing apart. I had caught the very tail end of a wind that had blown through the institution, and it blew through me and liberated me just as it had liberated many Anglican Christians.

Naturally, as is almost always the case, the first fires, the first flush of what St Paul cleverly refers to as enthusiasm settled down during the years after I watched those horses in a Whanganui paddock.

Psychologists would (rightly I suspect) suggest that the human being can only sustain so much ecstasy. I discovered new dimensions and new disciplines and new responsibilities attached to this Way of the Cross I had elected to follow. In some circles the liberation of the Spirit itself came to be corrupted, to that the ecstasy and the inanity became the Thing, rather than the aroha and the demanding commitment to justice and compassion that is the heart and soul of the Way of the Cross. In some circles sensationalism and the externalisation of infantile fantasies became the Thing and the voice of Jesus-the-compassionate was lost, cats were exorcised, normally intelligent people crawled around barking for Jesus, and much that was no more than charlatanism grew in the fertile soils of faith. Sometimes it’s enough to make me believe in a devil, though those same people were the ones who sensationalised the demonic to the extent that I decided it was wiser to re-mythologise evil in ways unknown to the biblical writers (though that perhaps is another theological discourse for another time altogether!).

Somehow by the grace of God I and others with whom I came into orbit found that the Spirit of Pentecost was always only ever leading us into relationship with and emulation of the Christ of the Cross. Somehow by the grace of God I and others with whom I came into orbit found that the Spirit of Pentecost was leading us into tough disciplines of social justice – not ever party politically based – and the sometimes if not often disciplines of cycles of prayer. It was not an easy journey and for this dissipated believer it took nearly two decades to even begin to learn the way of prayer shaped by the Christ-bringing Spirit of Pentecost.

I am far from “there”, wherever “there” is, yet. But slowly the Spirit of Pentecost shaped me in the belief that all experience of God must lead me and you and all of us towards the justice-proclaiming, compassion-exercising Jesus of the Cross of the gospels. Such justice-proclaiming, compassion-exercising participation in the work of the Jesus-presenting Spirit had and has sociological implications, often leading us to the wrong side of the tracks, had and has environmental dimensions, leading us to proclaim justice for the hurting species and peoples of the earth, had and has compassion dimension, often leading us to hold the hand and take the cause of the unlovely. If I do it at all I could never do it without the inflammation of the Pentecostal Spirit, for I am about as closeted, still, and as middle-class privileged as a white boy can get.

Yet in the ongoing surrender to this strange Spirit of the Cross, whose interconnections with Creator-Parent and Incarnate Child we shall explore more next week, there is the impetus to participate in, strive for the healing for and renewal of creation, even if I believe personally that this aim can be fulfilled only in the as yet unseen but coming new heaven and earth. In the ongoing surrender to this strange Spirit of the Cross is the renewal of the self, which though never complete this side of the grave nevertheless begins to prepare us for the encounter with the blinding light of the creating, judging God revealed in the beckoning Christ of the Cross. In the ongoing surrender to this strange Spirit of the Cross is the redemption that we sing of in our hymns and pray for in our prayers. May that Spirit continue to nudge on the journey.

Amen.

Setting the captive free

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION

(17^thy May) 2015

       
Readings:      Acts 1:15-17, 21-26      

          Psalm 1

          1 John 5:9-13

          John 17:6-19

 

Some years ago I was privileged to interview a well-respected Rabbi about his faith. As we approached the end of the conversation I asked him about Jewish attitudes to evangelism. While speaking for himself, he echoed the voice of not-quite-all Judaism: why would we evangelise? Who would wish to carry on their shoulders the burdens of our faith and our relationship to God? A few weeks ago I was reminded of that response when I was reading the British Chief Rabbi’s response to a similar question:  “Their [Israelites’] vocation represents not a privilege but a responsibility”,[1] and “If we live well, becoming a blessing to others, we become witnesses to the transformative power of the divine presence.”[2] Do we “live well, becoming a blessing to others”?

So Rabbi Raymond Apple described faith as a burden. Who would wish to carry this burden? I suspect Christianity has much to learn from this attitude. I doubt if it has ever been a temptation propagated from this traditionally liberal pulpit to door-knock like Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses in the name of Cathedral Christian outreach; I am prepared to a point to concur with that avoidance. My observation of much door knocking and many door knockers is that, while it may produce some bottoms on seats (and certainly the Mormons and JWs often feature well in growth statistics)  there is often a vast credibility gap between the subject of the missionaries, some form of salvation, and the integrity of the institutions sending them out. On the other hand there have been many occasions on which our institution, too, has lacked integrity, and it is no mistake that, when a few moments ago we gathered on our knees to seek God’s forgiveness in rites of general confession, we were “we”, not “I” (though there is a place for both).

If we take seriously the glimpse of eternity that we have in the words we sing and the prayers we pray then there is a vast burden of responsibility on our shoulders. The other day the Archbishop of Canterbury delivered some weighty challenges:

The Kingdom is elusive and invisible. The proofs and promises will be disbelieved by many. The victory offers no conclusive culmination, only a beginning; while being a witness invites danger, leading to sacrifice and suffering, if not death.

The power that comes [in Pentecost] is to be given away not hung onto; Jesus was no Mugabe clinging to power. There would be no public glory or acclaim, merely hard work and sacrifice, like most of those who serve the church round the world today.

Lest Justin Welby’s words be seen as hyperbole it is worth remembering that at this time 100 million Christians are being threatened or persecuted for their faith, not allowed to build churches, buy Bibles or obtain jobs.[3] Others, as the February martyrdom of 21 Copts in Libya reminds us, are being executed for their belief. There has never been a time that has not been what millennialists and apocalpticists like to call “great persecution,” what Jesus called “the time of trial.” Nor despite the cosiness of a New Zealand context, is there guarantee that we too could not face persecution for our faith.

There is no doubt that what we once easily believed is now eagerly mocked. Often we have deserved it, with our self-satisfied grasp of what Rabbi Sacks calls “desecrations” of God’s name. We have used the name of God in vain when we have turned a blind eye to sexual abuse, psychological abuse, physical and fiscal abuse in our churches and our homes. We have used the name of God in vain when we have turned a blind eye to the suffering of individuals and groups and species and contexts around us. Rabbi Sacks suggests “As a radio converts waves into sound so a holy life translates God’s word into deed.”[4] I suggest we become static when we fail to do so, or at best the sibilant sound of a poorly tuned radio when we do so lackadaisically. To change metaphor, we fail to become the spark of light that our pre-dawn Easter service challenged us to be. “Those who do not believe in God have made him a liar by not believing in the testimony that God has given concerning his Son” says John. He is potentially referring to us.

So we are burdened-yet-blessed by the vision of eternity that is in our language of liturgy, word and song.  We are mockable, yes: there is endless derision directed at us in the infinite columns of ether-print, directed at us because we cling to an Invisible Friend . Sometimes it is overwhelming. None of it is pretty, little is repeatable. Even so wonderful a figure as Pope Francis is, in the ether-columns, all but drowned out by the hatred of Christianity.  Our glimpse of eternity, seen primarily in the Resurrection, and secondarily in the subsequent 2000 years of rumouring resurrection in word and deed, is a burden. It is a burden frankly I often feel I could do without. Yet, and I quote Justin Welby again,

What could be more important than the message Jesus’ followers are left to proclaim? What can be more essential to that message than the gift of power from God; power to liberate not dominate, to bring life not law, freedom not fear?”[5]

We are called to be sparks of compassionate, death-defying hope and justice and liberation, practicing individually and as a congregation acts that demonstrate that derision is not the final word in the world.

One of Michelangelo’s great gifts to the world was a series of captive sculptures. “The Awakening Slave”, “The Young Slave”, “The Bearded Slave” and “The Atlas (or Bound)” were never finished, but they show Michelangelo’s vision appearing from unyielding stone. It is sometimes claimed Michelangelo left them trapped to remind us of humanity’s struggle for fulfilment, liberation, completion. Our own individual lives will be completed in our surrender to God in our dying, but before that we are like Michelangelo’s captives, emerging from the stone.  We are challenged to be living hints of the credibility and integrity of Jesus, hints that in Jesus, and with the help of God’s Spirit in our lifelong surrender to Jesus, the eternal love and compassion and justice of God can be fore-tasted, and can even break out of the stone of our being. That’s what Rabbi Sacks means: “we become witnesses to the transformative power of the divine presence.” In a week we will celebrate Pentecost, that great Feast of the coming of God’s Spirit. That coming makes transformation possible,  releases the possibilities of Jesus in space and time so that we too can experience and witness to him and to his resurrection.  Let us pray this week that we may be transformed by the often burdensome yet liberating Spirit of God.

Amen.

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[1] Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World, 66.

[2] Ibid., 67.

[3] http://abcnews.go.com/International/christian-martyrs-victims-radical-islam/story?id=9976549&singlePage=true

[4] Sacks, Fractured World, 67.

[5] For Justin Welby’s sermon see http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/5553/archbishop-of-canterburys-ascension-day-sermon

Re-finding Nine O'Clock in the Morning.

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
SIXTH  SUNDAY OF EASTER

(10^th May) 2015

       
Readings:        Acts 10:44-48

                        Psalm 98

                        1 John 5:1-6

                        John 15: 9-17

 

A week ago I suggested that Luke’s Acts-volume has often distressed me. It has struck me as an odd and embellished narrative, even though I am painfully aware that much of the impetus for the charismatic movement that was to sweep through the mainstream churches in the 1960s and 1970s was re-readings of many of the Spiritual out-pouring scenes in Acts, the second chapter of Acts in particular. It is no coincidence that two significant elements of charismatic renewal were a family-based music group called The Second Chapter of Acts, and a book by Dennis Bennett entitled Nine O’clock in the Morning; together these fuelled many experiences of uplift and ecstasy. (We may even sing Annie Herring’s Easter Song here, one day!) Dennis Bennett is described on one (slightly self-serving!) website as “the Episcopal priest who verbally fired the shot that was heard around the world.”

I am not entirely a fan of the charismatic movement, though I believe it provided a necessary re-invigoration of the mainline churches, and certainly turned my then new-found faith in unexpected and heart-warming directions. Like many movements it later became self-aggrandizing and elitist. It served however to remind mainstream Christians that there is indeed a Third Person of the Trinity, and while sometimes charismatic excesses turned the manifestations of that Third Person in to demented and ridiculous Cross-denying behaviour, at its best the encounter with the Spirit of the God of the Cross took us back into an encounter with a living and dying and living again saviour who proclaims justice and love throughout time and space.

The narrations of spiritual renewal were, as I say, based in re-readings of the Book of Acts. In today’s reading of Acts we find Peter preaching a (twice interrupted!) sermon that takes us into the experience of spiritual re-invigoration. By the 1960s mainline Christianity was tired and confused, and whether Dennis Bennett was the catalyst or not, something re-invigorating swept through its corridors from that time. Scholar Colin Brown suggested that the New Zealand movement began at my former parish, All Saints’ Palmerston North, and my alma mater, Massey University, from the mid-1960s,[1] and was associated primarily with the teaching of then curate Ray Muller, who was later Parish Development Co-ordinator for Wellington Diocese. Whatever happened back then, many lives were changed, and ordinary people were enriched and transformed. Perhaps for that period we of the mainline churches were yet to grow into the transformation of unjust structures, that key mark of mission in Anglican ecclesiology, yet even if not especially that must begin (but not end!) with the transformation of our own sometimes deadened lives. The Holy Spirit of Christ came to be known as the empowerer of human lives (even though as yet she was not the feminine of God that I will be suggesting she is at the next service!).

The charismatic movement, then, enflamed (but did not destroy), a wooden church. The Book of Acts however stands as a testimony to a movement of God that went outward and onward from Jerusalem, its place of origin. Like the man who put his hand to the plough, the Book of Acts challenges the Church of God not to look back, except in so far as it clings tenaciously to its whakapapa, its energised story. A spiritually extraverted worship that forgets to look back to that extent will be thistledown, blowing like Dylan’s answer on the wind. A spiritually energised movement that tenaciously holds only to the past and its own good times will stultify and turn into the wooden structure it sought to replace. Sometimes the charismatic movement did that, but there have been signs of God’s hand since, too, leading us into greater awareness of the call to social justice and the deep spirit-enriched possibilities of the liturgies of the millennia. It is to these combinations that we in general and we as a Cathedral people of God specifically are called.

We might do worse than to learn, even if our circumstances are thank God less dramatic, from our brothers and sisters of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town. I was privileged to visit there a few weeks ago: it formed so big a part in big picture terms in the overthrow of the demon of apartheid in South Africa and in small picture terms in Anne’s reinvigoration in faith a quarter of a century ago. There liturgy, the great poetry of our faith, and social action came together as they must if we are to speak of and pray to a God who has compassion, as the God of Exodus and Cross clearly does, on the grieving and the broken and the outcast of the earth. In liturgy the Spirit falls upon us to reinvigorate us to become the hands and feet, or as James K Baxter once put it, the body and blood of Christ in the world.

Liturgy, indwelt by the Spirit of Pentecost, challenges us and simultaneously empowers us to be the place of God’s hospitality, the place of welcome and homecoming to the marginalised. Who are the marginalised in Napier? Where are the marginalised in Napier? How can we find and be the empowerment of God’s Spirit to make them welcome in this place that is theirs, at least if not more than ours? These are the questions to which the Spirit challenges us. The search, the prayerful search, for answers is yours and mine alike as we learn to stutter and then sing a new song to and for the Lord who has done and is doing, as the psalmist puts it in powerful understatement, “marvellous things.” The litmus test though will always be along the line of: “what are these actions of liturgy or evangelism or outreach or social justice doing to touch the outsider and the hungry and the seeker?” We have much to do together to seek answers to that question, but if our search for answers continues to be grounded in prayer, in a spirit of cooperation and openness to the future-birthing Spirit then we will be the people of cooperative love that Jesus, in the Fourth Gospel, challenges us by God’s Spirit, to become: abide in my love … love one another.”

 

Amen.

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[1] Brown, Colin, “How Significant is the Charismatic Movement?”, in Colless and Donovan (eds), Religion in New Zealand Society, first edition (1980), 105. Given that Colless and Donovan were Palmerston North’s Massey University academics there may be some historical bias, though Colin Brown himself was less associated with Palmerston North.

Love at the bottom of the food chain

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

(3^rd May) 2015

       
Readings:        Acts 8:26-40

                        Psalm 22:25-31

                        1 John 4:7-21

                        John 15:1-8

 

I make no secret of the fact that I have often found the second volume of Luke’s history fiercely disheartening.  Like the infinite extensions of movies, Ice Age excepted, by which the second, third, fourth extension becomes progressively more insipid (think of the Airport and Rocky series somewhere in the Dark Ages when I was still alive), it has always seemed to me that Luke should have got out while he was ahead. In Luke, the gospel-telling, he narrates a theologically infused, tight tale, with powerful imagery and characters, nuanced especially for women in the church, and leaves us with powerful images of the resurrection that we are called to bear to the uttermost ends of the earth.

In Acts it turns to custard. In his attempt to tell of the glorious and miraculous expansion of Christianity from Jerusalem through the Roman Empire and to the theoretical ends of the earth (by which I do not mean Invercargill) he pushes credulity and my patience beyond the pale. Every time an apostle sneezes, it seems, thousands are converted. A recent glorious three minute condensation of Acts in cartoon form conveys the problem well: “the disciples are gathered together on Pentecost when the Holy Spirit arrives. Tongues of fire hover over them, the disciples speak in tongues, Peter preaches the first sermon, three thousand are converted. God: One. Satan: zero.” And so on.  And so on. Paul is converted. Paul preaches. Thousands are converted.  Paul’s own autobiographical statements are more circumspect.

The narrative depresses me: it has caused many Christians to hype up their expectations of the gospel, to over-emphasize the miraculous, to distort the impact of their own preaching ministries, while the more pedestrian amongst us plod on with few if any signs of exuberant outcome. Are we the unholy, the unspiritual? For many years I all but boycotted Acts. With time I came to see the narrative for what it is – a highly symbolised portrayal of the admittedly remarkable expansion of the gospel-message through the labyrinths of the Roman Empire.

Sometimes I have been tempted to play off the gospel writers against one another. I so much prefer John’s at first quiet but increasingly strident narrative of love. Assuming that the Johannine Epistles come from the same source as the Fourth Gospel, and I hold to more or less that view, then we find a powerful if sometimes convoluted story of the embodiment of love, and the challenge to the followers of Jesus to embody that love in turn following the departure of Jesus from human sight. I find John simple to follow: hang on to love, embody love, be love. If you fail to do that then you fail in the Christian task.

 For John no less than for Luke the gospel is unstoppable. Where there is love there is God. John – whoever he was – lived and proclaimed the gospel in a very different culture to our own.  But in a sense he didn’t.  Perhaps I’m wrong, and socio-historical evidence would be hard to produce, but I suspect the need for up-building love has never changed. John played carefully with linkages of love and God: God is love and while, grammatically, that may not be quite the same as love is God the telling of the gospel pulls the equation closer and closer together. Where we, or anyone, exhibit the edifying forces of divine love, justice, righteous­ness, there we are exhibiting the influence of divine love, and God is at work in the exhibitor. But the love John’s Jesus exemplifies, embodies and makes possible is no sloppy love. It is the unpopular love that restores human beings, even the most broken, to their feet. It is love that gives the unloved and unlovable a new start. It is love that that says even those at the very bottom of the human chain of being are created in the image of God’s love and can be given a place in the heart of God’s eternities.

There is an opposite of John’s equation. Where love is not, God is not. I have watched this past week the outpourings of somewhat naïve hope and the outpourings of somewhat embittered hatred towards the death row candidates Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Under any circumstances I am opposed to the death penalty, but, that aside, what has sickened me most has been the hatred and anger directed towards those who have seen the possibility of restitution and forgiveness in the lives of these and the other Bali Nine “executionees,” not least my doctoral alma mater, the Australian Catholic University. There has been in many quarters a black and white “they knew what they were doing, let them rot” attitude if not in the media than at least in the column-square metres of feedback on media websites. There has been little room for the belief that a human being who makes a dreadful mistake can be restored, forgiven, presented with life once more. The doctrines of Jesus who is God who is love are as unpopular today as they were in the first century. Where love, with all its ramifications of forgiveness and rebirth, is not, God is not, and a genuine Christ-centred gospel of hope and restoration remains as critically unpopular today as it was in first century Roman brutality.

For the Christ-follower, Christ-bearer, there is an exhausting challenge. It is not easy to forgive, to restore, to nurture. It is easier to perpetrate cycles of hatred and revenge. These, though, are not the way of the cross, and it is to that which we are called.

Which brings me back to Luke’s second volume, Acts. Forgiveness is and always will be the work of the Spirit of God who makes the possibilities of God as they are embodied in Jesus available to human beings. Restoration or even the slow lifelong journey towards full humanity is and always will be the work of the Spirit of God. Luke got that:  the numbers of thousands of converts may be symbolic, embellished even, though the exponential growth of Christianity down through its early centuries gives him some credibility. But his point was ultimately spiritual, not statistical: where we practice the cruciform shape of divine, self-sacrificial love their lives will be changed exponentially. Our job is to make our lives and our church communities an embodiment of that love.

Amen.

A Cross, oozing antiseptic?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
THIRD  SUNDAY OF LENT
(8^th March) 2015

       
Readings:        Exodus 20:1-17

                        Psalm 19
                        1 Corinthians 1:18-25
                        John 2:13-22

 

There is a form of rather self-serving Christianity that likes to see Paul as the great destroyer of the liberating teachings of Jesus. I think we should have no doubt, and our ancestors in faith had no doubt, that Paul was the great intellectual gift of God to the embryonic Jesus-movement. Paul interpreted Jesus not just as moral teacher but as event in the service of God’s salvation of the world. To the proclaimers of a shape-shifting gospel Paul destroyed the unanchored freedom of Jesus’ wind-blown words. But the kind of freedom that unanchored teaching in the wind provides is the freedom that Glover’s thistledown in the wind[1] provides: transient good feeling followed by rampant thorny chaos.

Paul did what Jesus could not do. He anchored Jesus’ words deep in the events of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection. He anchored teaching in event. He did so after nearly two decades of reflection on his own conversion experience and the insight that provided into the relationship between Jesus, Judaism, and the eternal truths of God. He did do not least by realising that whether we cite 10 or 613 commandments backwards, sideways and in our sleep, they will never and can never take us into the heart of God and the salvation God offers. He did so by recognising that the commandments point us on a journey towards God and God’s redeeming, transforming, justice-demanding love, but can never take us there. They are a signpost, not a taxi. He recognized, in opposition to the same sorts of religious hypocrites that Jesus had faced two decades earlier, (and these are not representative of Judaism but of all religious hypocrisy) that the service of God is not a burden but a joy-filled responsibility, and that our access to that joy is available only in relationship to the Creator. He saw that this relationship in turn was available only in and through and by relationship with the one who the Christians were by then proclaiming as Lord.

If we pause for a moment with traditional Judaeo-Christian teaching about God we find that the Creator of the universe is infinite and infinitely good. Less than that is less than God, and while that is a thought-choice we might want to take, it is not the choice of Judaeo-Christian teaching. If we pause for a moment with traditional Jewish relationship to the Commandments we realise that we are not infinitely good, or perhaps even not much good at all. Later, when not writing with quite as much haste as he was experiencing when he wrote to Corinth, Paul would put it eloquently: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

I suggest if we do not believe that applies to us then we know ourselves very poorly indeed. Even if we convince ourselves that we are pretty good people and do not break too many of the ten commandments, we are entrapped in a society that ensures we corporately make idols, worship them, exploit and by our nonchalance or greed murder the poor, covet that which is not ours, engage in the gossiping world that thrives on bearing false witness. By our failure to observe an economic Sabbath, leaving land or boundaries or time fallow symbolically or literally, we trap the earth in cycles of exploitation, creating dust bowls and widening the gap between the richest and the poorest nations and peoples and species of God’s earth. Paul saw that, Paul got that.

Paul saw and got, too, that this vortex to sinfulness in which we are trapped leaves an unbridgeable chasm between us and the perfection that is the Creator God. At this point in much Christian preaching it is traditional to insert images of atonement, of surrender to Jesus, of being washed in redeeming blood. Some of those images are unhelpful in a world in which blood has flowed too often in the name of Christendom’s exploitation of others. But it is babies and bathwater once more: the Cross, which Paul declares in our Corinthians reading was the sole content of his proclamation, must still be the sole content of ours. We might well find the traditional atonement imagery of washing ourselves or others in blood deeply offensive: it is. But in jettisoning it we need to make sure that we are not left with some good-time fairy god who waves magic wands and makes us all nice people. God does not wave a wand. The Cross is not a wand, oozing antiseptic blood or otherwise.

The Cross and the Cross alone is God’s entry into failure. The Cross is God’s entry into loneliness and doubt and oppression and defeat. It is not for nothing that, as black radical theologian James Cone reminds us,[2] the Cross is a powerful symbol of hope for oppressed peoples, for the Cross is God’s entry into despair. In the little scene of Jesus in the temple we glimpse the power of institutional religion to exploit and oppress. The Cross stands in opposition to exploitation and oppression. The Cross is God’s entry into every lynching of the Deep South USA (often perpetrated by Christians), God’s entry into colonial persecution of Indigenous peoples everywhere, God’s entry into the deaths of the victims of Boko Haram in East and North Africa and Daesh in the Levant, God’s entry into the suffering and deaths of those who are victims of Indonesian government genocide in West Papua and the silence of the world’s response.

That is why we have Matthew and Mark telling us that Jesus cried out in the words of the psalmist “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The Cross is God’s entry into every soul’s existence when the owner of the soul has cried out “How can there be a God?” We might almost say that the Cross means that God is closer to most genuine atheists than to those of us who cosily cuddle God in the complacency of our selfish existence. Certainly the Cross is God’s entry into the atheism that sees so much corruption and injustice perpetrated by believers that it sets out to do without a god, though perhaps not to the cosy atheism that is really “can’t be botheredism” more than a genuine decision to go without the possibility of a loving, judging Creator of All.

But to those of us who live cosily the Cross is not entirely a word of exclusion. Particularly in the so-called “liberal” churches, though, we need to recall and re-learn the language of evangelical Christianity. The Cross is something we on the powerful side of economic and ecological and sociological and intellectual and aesthetic and sexual opportunity need deliberately and self-consciously to accept. We need, as I reminded us all last week, to “forswear our foolish ways,” or as T.S. Eliot put it, to turn, and turn again, to renounce our narcissism (for I doubt I’m the only one that suffers that disease) “And pray to God to have mercy upon us.”[3] The cross, when we invite it and its victim into our being can be again and again the place where God begins the work of transformation, redemption, divinization, sanctification, whatever we might call it, as God shrives from us the grot and grime of being less than we should be. But we must learn again and again to surrender, to allow the invasion that is God’s searing redemption to infiltrate us and our small lives.

We must surrender our intellectual and aesthetic and economic and sexual power over and again so that we can find again the truth that Paul battled and died so hard in proclaiming, the truth that is “stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,” or to put it another way, grotty to the religiously complacent and dumb to the intellectually sophisticated.

 

May God help us so to do.

Amen.

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[1] “Once I followed horses,

And once I followed whores

And marched once with a banner

For some great cause

sings Harry

But that was thistledown planted on the wind.”

Denis Glover, “Thistledown.”

 

[2] James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2011.

 

[3] See T.S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”:

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgement not be too heavy upon us 

 

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still. 

 

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.