Aesthetics, fiddlesticks, and the heart-cry of God

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST  

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16
(9^th August) 2015

Readings:           

2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2
John 6:51-58
              

It was a freezing cold night, sub-zero in the town in which I was living, when the phone rang. Could I come up to the Emergency Department immediately? Such calls are rare these days in clergy life, and this was more than twenty years ago. It is though a night that I will never forget. The nurses met me at the ward entrance. A young mother, expecting healthy triplets, had contracted listeriosis, food poisoning, close to the completion of gestation. The three infants, previously healthy and viable, had died in utero. There are no words for the grief I encountered that night.

I speak cautiously, pray God. Amongst us there will be some of you, and some among those who you love, who have faced the brutal reversal of outliving a child. There are no words. My own extended family has known the grief, and there are in any case, if grief can be measured on a Richter scale of sorts, the comparable if lesser griefs of children and loved ones effectively torn form the heart through marital breakdown or sometimes just the vicissitudes of the tyranny of distance. “Shall I ever see, hold, hear this child again?” may be slightly easier than the heart cry of David, “I shall never see, hold, hear this child again,” but it too is a cry that in Hebrew terms is wrung from the viscera of the human soul. “O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you—O Absalom, my son, my son!” I have no doubt that words close to those were etched into the soul of that young mother that bitter winter’s night, as together we cried, and stuttered prayers, and tried to find Christlight in the literal and metaphorical dark. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!

I am not a social worker, nor called to be one. I was staggered at a clergy meeting once when I heard a group of priests discuss their role as ordained persons without once making reference to the great sacraments of resurrection hope that we are commissioned to bear with and within us from the moment our ordaining bishops place their hands upon us. We all, as Christians, are priests, though some of us are called to bear that extra signage of presbuteral priesthood, a reminder to us all of the priesthood of Christ who takes human suffering into the heart of God, and who brings divine forgiveness and hope deep into the heart of human suffering. I was not a social worker that winter’s night in rural New South Wales, nor was I called to the hospital to be one. I was called there to bring some hope that was greater than the stark reality of three tiny, stillborn but otherwise viable babies.

Did I achieve anything that night? I’ll never know. The young woman was from a town 300 kms away, and the follow-up in resurrection-breathing fell to one of my most gifted colleagues. I know he spent many months whispering not words of social work, though they too may help, but words of resurrection hope into the world of that young woman and her partner. I moved from the region soon after, and never heard the end of the story, not least because I’m sure it has not ended yet, two decades later. I’m sure that that to me nameless woman somewhere still inevitably grieves those three missing babies in her life. I’m sure she will until that great moment that the disciples came to believe in, that moment of eternal joy when the new heavens and the new earth are unfolded, and we step back into connection with all who we have loved and lost.

Because the scriptures, Hebrew and Christian alike, are adamant that this is where the sometimes abstract world of faith-speak connects with the all too concrete realm of human experience. As David cries out in that almost most poignant of all scriptural heart-cries he cries out in a voice that any one of us might have wrenched from our guts on any day. It is the cry of a parent or a partner who receives a police officer’s knock at the door. It is the cry of the patient who hears the strained words of their doctor. Globally it is the cry of the desperate refugees who are turned away by the Australian or British or US government, or conveniently ignored by the New Zealand government, or who reach the comparative safety of the Turkish border or Italian coastline only to count the cost of those who are left behind.

Yet that cry of David is not the end of the story. It is too often the end of the dark movies and novels that are the expression of the mood of a post-holocaust, post-Hiroshima world that has for various reasons deserted hope (I think of my tragic all-time favourite, The Unbearable Lightness of Being). But Christianity in all its foolishness rumours a different ending. I suggested that the cry of King David as he laments his third born son is “that almost most poignant of all scriptural heart-cries.” The cry of dereliction of Christ on the cross, the heart-cry of Jesus on the cross, is greater. We can of course all play academic games in which we point out that those words from Psalm 22, still perhaps best rendered as “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  were placed into the mouth of Jesus by the early church and the gospel writers. Fiddle-sticks, I suggest. For the practice of lament, of crying out to God with the deepest of human anguish (even psalm 137 verse 9’s obscene anguish) dwells at the heart (the Hebrews would say bowel) of relationship between God and God’s people, and the heart of the Messiah.

To steal that hope from the witness of the Christian community, presumably out of a misguided desire to make Christianity more comprehensible to a post-Enlightenment world, is both larceny (theft) and one of the greatest enactments of that fourth of the Ten Commandments,  “thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” To stand at the hospital bed of my grieving mother of triplets with nothing more to say than what a social worker or a psychologist might say, however profound their work might be, and however bumbling my efforts might be, is to sell the gospel short. To say or believe nothing more than a social worker or a psychologist is not to proclaim the Living Word of the fourth gospel, but a truncated word of humanism, however noble the particular stream of humanism might be, and many are.

By the end of the nineteenth century Enlightened Christianity had placidly done away with radical and other-wordly words of hope and its prickly counterpart, judgement. We may speak of judgement another time, except for now to say it is a doctrine badly represented and mistreated, but a doctrine too that is jettisoned at peril. But by the end of the nineteenth century Enlightened Christianity had only platitudes about the brotherhood (sic!) of Man (sic!) and the Fatherhood (sic!) of God to utter. We stand in a similar quagmire today, embracing either a self-satisfied and sometimes hedonistic liberalism or a self-righteous fundamentalist judgmentalism.

If our Christianity is no more than an aesthetic of niceness in every facet of cathedral life then we have nothing to say to the weeping David as he cradles Absalom (not, you will recall, his first child to die) or to say to the mother who clutches three still-born infants. If though our gospel is based on our daily, weekly, over and again encounter with the God in Christ who in Godself cries out “My God my God, why have you forsaken me,” if that is the case then our God can turn every pain-filled lament into hope. Our God can and does turn ashes into beauty, Good Friday into Easter, David’s cry into the hope of resurrection (which evolves long after David’s journey, but God is a timey-wimey God). Our God can and does turn your life and mine and the lives of those we love into the dance of eternity.

That is the gospel we share if we are indeed a resurrection people, unfettered by the small perspectives of science and the intellect or the limitations of a mere aesthetic faith. That is the God of the Cross and Easter, the God who transforms the lament of David and the psalmist (who may be different!) and the mother of triplets and you and me and even Godself on the Cross into the joyful, angel-thrilling dance of the eternity that is God’s and yours and mine.

It is to that God we will shortly sing (with our hearts) “Blessing and honour and glory and power (though In Aotearoa we seem scared of that last noun) are yours, now and for ever …

... Amen.”

Jesus and the rubber duckie fetishists

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST  

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16

(26^th July) 2015

Readings:        

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21
           

David, the great icon both of divine choice and subsequent leadership, is no advertisement for the flawlessness of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. David was gutsy and testosteroney, but serves at times as a classic example of Lord Acton’s “all power corrupts.” He gets it wrong, and no time more tragically than in the narrative we enter into today (and might, in a family friendly eucharist, omit next week! Indeed it should never have been separated into a two week story). So X-rated is David’s failure at this point that the unparalleled, brilliant Veggie Tales (bible stories that are for children but should be compulsory for all adults who think they understand Christianity) turn Bathsheba into a rubber duckie and add her, in that guise, to the wayward king’s collection.

It was of course Jesus in John 8 who made famous the saying “let the one without sin cast the first stone.” Interestingly that Jesus-saying took a long time to be accepted into the liturgical cycles of Christianity. For four or five centuries liturgical readings avoided any indication that forgiveness might readily reach out to embrace the most conspicuously sinful in society. These days we tell the story of the woman caught in adultery, from which the stone-throwing saying comes, late in Lent. We tell the story of David’s atrocious sin on this Sunday of every third year, and the story of God’s dealings with him next Sunday every third year. Perhaps a gospel of sin and forgiveness is too hot to handle with anything but reluctance.

But the gospel is about forgiveness. We might even say it is fundamentally about forgiveness before anything else. David and the woman of John 8 (not read today), are stories of sexual sin, and sadly as a Christian community we too often tend too closely to associate sin and sex, so that we forget those more fundamental structures of sin: idolatry and greed. Perhaps the rubber duckie version is right, for David coveted long before he committed the more dramatic sins of adultery and murder. And, as I often remind gatherings at baptismal services, our entire capitalist society is based on covetousness, the promise that this coffee or this car or this medication will bring us the fulfilment that we lack.

The Christian messages of forgiveness and reconciliation are not messages about waving a wand and making, as Annie Lennox put it, the bad things go away. The Christian messages of forgiveness and reconciliation operate horizontally and vertically, taking us to the dark places where we face our penchant for accumulating, by stealing if necessary, rubber duckies or sexual partners, or even with our studied nonchalance stealing the future from generations of mokopuna and the present from peoples facing rising sea levels, growing deserts, or simply economic and ecological devastation. The Christian messages of forgiveness and reconciliation operate horizontally and vertically, taking us to face a God who is not a plaything, a stern God who will next week (or would, if we had the reading) deliver fiercely harsh judgement (though not karma) to the wayward King David.

Judgement, not karma? I may leave that for another time, except to say that the mad crazy irrational grace that is present in the doctrines of reconciliation can break brutal cycles of suffering and revenge. The David story is an Old Covenant story, but by the time Jesus breathes new life into the wayward, deserting disciples or the persecuting Paul in the new dispensation, a new rhythm is making itself heard, a caesura for those of you familiar with the notation of both music and poetry, a radical, restorative break in proceedings. “Can we start again, please?” sings Mary Magdalene in Superstar. Yes, says the gospel of Jesus Christ: oh yes.

But it is the Fourth Gospel that sees the inseparable bond between forgiveness and eucharistic feeding. It is possible that John borrowed the feeding of thousands story from Mark, from the version we should have had (if lectionaries were better constructed!) last week. In Mark and John alike this feeding of thousands has internal hints of feeding as the way by which humanity is reconciled to God. In Mark’s gospel-account the story seems a little disjointed, hard on the heels of that other X-rated story, the beheading of the Baptiser. But is it disjointed, or has Mark the instinctive storyteller left us with a hint about human propensity for darkness and its contrast in eucharistic and justice-feeding?  Those terms need unpacking another time, but the mystical feeding on saving elements of body and blood and the justice-dimension of feeding the hungry bellies of community and world must never be separated.

John is more subtle: the passage before this is a contretemps between Jesus and the hypocrisy of the religious leaders: it is as if John were enacting that other much neglected biblical saying of James: “True religion is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained.” The entire Hebrew Scriptures would shout “amen.”

The reason liturgy came to be so carefully crafted in its current shape is to take us on a journey through our acknowledgement that we are not good enough, even if ironically it forgot readings about grace in its early centuries. Liturgy takes us through forgiveness and enacted reconciliation, for we can all be David and his rubber duckie fetish, all be greedy and destructive. The sharing of the Peace reminds us that reconciliation is never just abstract and vertical, with a distant God on a distant throne: that will be hollow until we recreate it in our horizontal relationships with our neighbour of present experience and even our neighbours of future generations. Talk about reconciliation and forgiveness will be dead like the religiosity of the Jewish elders in the passage before ours, dead until we do justice not only for those who we like but those who we find unpleasant, and those who we don’t know, and those who are not yet born (with all the implications of that challenge for rising sea levels and nonchalant abortion rates).

All the feeding miracles make it clear that God’s grace operates in crazy, over the top, over abundant ways. I have mentioned to some of you that this is why I insist that our administration of communion  does not recycle the last mean drip of wine in the bottom of a near dry-chalice, making that drip go round and round for the last many people, but is generous and abundant and crazy-superfluous. Ingestion of alcohol means that we probably shouldn’t go the whole hog of sacramental craziness (and the Corinthian correspondence from Paul makes it clear that some early Christians got this wrong too far that way!). Still:  we must attempt to avoid the implication that ours is a stingy faith of candle stubs and recycled wine dregs. Our cruets should always be crazy-filled before we start and our consumption of these good things of God at least symbolically generous.

But the feeding miracle is not only about the endlessness and manic-generous hospitality of eucharistic feeding but also about the justice-feeding of those who have nothing. Our giving for the food bank and our giving for offertory and our targeting for missions should be erring well on the side of twelve-baskets-left-over generosity, not can-we-afford-it calculation. I have not yet heard of a church community go bankrupt through generosity, but rather through mismanagement of morals and properties. We could do worse that to heed the recent words of Pope Francis: “You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That’s how prayer works.”

The gospel reading goes on to be about the storms of nature and of life and about the presence of God in them. As the globe warms and tides rise and Daesh expands and certainties wobble we might well understand that storms can be literal and can be metaphorical. We will leave for three years’ hence and for each Holy Week and Easter the unpacking of the mysteries of God’s presence in those wobbles, but for now we are challenged to take seriously reconciliation and forgiveness, grace and the mad generosity of God, and to hold that hand in hand with the challenge to be a people who are in Christ a people of forgiveness, grace and mad generosity. For we all have a little of the failed, foibled David in us. That’s why we don’t throw stones.

TLBWY

Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST  

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16

(19^th July) 2015

Readings:        

2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Psalm 89:20-17
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
           

As an internet junkie I watch with shame the demonic carry-on of those religious practitioners who perpetrate hatred in the name of Christ. The evil machinations of the Westboro Baptist Church, infamous for their picketing of the funerals of anyone who they consider to be less Christian than they are, are perhaps the most infamous demonstration of such bigotry, but to be honest they are no more than an extreme form of many such groups. Outpourings of hatred directed at various shades of gays, socialists, Muslims, and any form of liberal are de rigueur in some circles, and all attempts at intelligent engagement is curtailed with appeal to their version of biblical interpretation: the bible says.

It’s no wonder that such forms of Christianity have given fuel to the words “bibliolatry” and “bibliolatrous.” Confusion regarding the way in which the scriptures of our faith became “word,” or the way in which they may still be referred to as “word,” has led to fossilization and even deification of words that were never meant to be a rod for human backs, never meant to be set indelibly in the concrete corners of atrophied human hearts and souls. Jesus, who would often dig into Hebrew scripture, even asserting that he would never subtract from sacred Torah (Mt 5:18), while portraying himself as “fulfilment” of that pool of sacred thought, never saw himself as replacement for it. It is even more doubtful, and some liberal theologians would say tragic, that he expected a new set of writings, those we call “New Testament,” to come to be used as a weapon in religious and moral warfare. Jesus was no bibliolater; nor were any of the great characters of earliest Christianity.

 

Sadly that all changed, and the one who is Living Word, the Risen Lord, is often conveyed as God’s vehement nay-sayer to life. Scratch beneath the surface of the community that by and large no longer cares whether Christianity and its gospel exist, and if there were some strand of thought about us it would be that we are wowsers. We are, in Jesus’ own terms, the placers of millstones around the necks of those who want to live and love.

 

I say “we,” but wasn’t I speaking of the fundamentalists of the Deep South USA and their far-flung imitators? Few of us would endorse the bigotry or bibliolatry that pickets funerals of returning servicemen and women on the basis that they fight for a nation that increasingly tolerates homosexuals. Even members of the KKK have objected to Westboro’s filth-spewings, and it could well be argued that even mentioning them provides oxygen for their paroxysms of hatred. Few of us would endorse even a moderate form of anti-gay-activism, and most of us sanction an expression of liberal Christianity that is tolerant and all-embracing.

 

As an aside I might suggest that there are forms of liberalism within Christianity that are as intolerant as some forms of fundamentalism. There are varying forms of Christianity that assume a sardonic sneer if a visitor can’t find their way around a prayer book, believes that Moses wrote the first five books of the bible, David wrote the psalms, or Paul wrote Ephesians, doesn’t know the difference between a sursum corda and a prie-dieu, or a demi-cul and morendo,[1] and gets its knickers in a knot if someone comes to church with ear expanders, full body tats or a parrot on their shoulder. And it is precisely variations on a theme of this kind of exclusivism that we much search for within our own corporate and individual souls if we are to be a people of God who have genuinely “abolished the law” and “proclaimed peace to those who are far off.”

 

For our task as a people of “resurrection, life and hope” is to be conduits of radical welcome: “peace to those who are far off, peace to those who are near.” This will always mean welcoming that which makes us uncomfortable. It was encouraging to see Helen Jacobi on the news the other night reminding the media that St Matthew’s in the City is a church that will not turn away the homeless with sprinklers, as some churches around the world have done. But there are more ways than mere sprinklers by which to turn people away: our challenge if we are to be bearers of Christ-peace is to ascertain what there might be in our attitudes and behaviour that pushes away the troubled and the broken, the confused and the strung-out, the not-quite clean and the very unclean. If we are to be bearers of the leper-lover Jesus then we need to dig deep and ascertain what forms of leprosy in our community most unsettle and offend us, what discomforts us, what irritates us so much, creates so much noise in our heads, that we lose focus on the sacred things of God and worship instead at our own shrines of self-importance.

 

I don’t think we should give oxygen to the fuels of hatred-fire that burn in the bellies of a small number, perhaps three dozen ultra-fundamentalist and self-satisfied haters in down-town Kansas City. Westboro Baptist in a sense need not trouble us. Yet I fear there is more than one way to be a community that rigorously and assiduously rebuilds the wall that Jesus, according to the Paul of Ephesians, has torn down, the wall that divides the seeker from the saved. There can too easily be forms of Westboro Baptist in us, too, and we need to cry out to the God who heals and redeems so that they may be broken down, or we, too, will remains just a few dozen people, albeit a quieter few dozen people, on the edge of town. Where we strive for some kind of excellence but forget accessibility, where we strive for efficiency but forget fun, where we polish our liturgical and organizational and musical and other forms of operational machinery but forget the manic, mad warmth of the Spirit, then it may just be that there is a mote in our eyes disempowering our ability to remove the specks from eyes around us; if that is the case we are on the same sad spectrum as the Kansas human-haters, for we too are barring those around us from the love-touch of Jesus.

 

We commit violence to Mark’s gospel-account when we deconstruct his carefully crafted passages and remove his key point. In the missing verses from our gospel-reading there is the inconvenient truth of a Jesus who feeds the sheep who have no shepherd. Jesus has, in Greek, bowel-moving compassion on the seekers and the searchers, the hung-out and the strung-out. With all the statistics of loneliness and alienation and chemical dependence and domestic violence that leak into our lives from our giggle-boxes and other media every day we should be top of the pops in our desire to be a place of “resurrection, life and hope.” The fact that we are not may just mean that the walls Paul yearned to see torn down, walls that Jesus tore down, are firmly back in place. We need to seek God’s help to find out where they are, and the empowerment of God’s wild manic Spirit to tear them down once more.

 

TLBWY.

---

[1] Or know the irony of Beethoven’s “Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso.” Sort of “have fun, but not too much fun”!

God calling

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST  

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 14

(5^th July) 2015

Readings:        

2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10

Psalm 48

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Mark 6:1-13
           

 

 

We speak too often in church circles of vocation, or calling, as if there were blinding flashes, Pauline conversions, or voices in the night. For those who suspect the Dean climbed out of a loony-bin window it would come as no shock to know that I experienced no such cataclysmic awakening. Certainly my coming to faith was something of a struggle, albeit an ineffectual one, against the God I didn’t believe in, but from there the journey to the bishop’s door and ultimately to a very different bishop’s altar rail was a reasonably unspectacular one. There were stumbles and nudges along the way, but no epiphany, no voice in the night, no blinding signs on the road to Damascus. Just once, when I was picked up hitch-hiking south from Tauranga, there was an unexpected conversation with a half drunk lapsed catholic, driving home from the races more or less on the correct side of the road, chattering at length about his dream that one of his many sons would become a priest, and encouraging this stranger to think about it.

That aside, I suggest the calling of God dwells far deeper back in the divine construction of our whakapapa [back-story] and our DNA (the two not unrelated). What were the forces that coalesced to make a chaotic Arts student ready to hear that drunken angel’s message that May afternoon in 1979? For me there were various confluences of experiences and gifts, later tested through various trials of application, discernment, evaluation and training. Along the way there were mistakes and discoveries, joys and tears, and still I stagger on and will for a good few years yet. But this is not about me, not even about priesthood, not even about leadership, but about the gifts the Creator God sows into our psyches and our souls, into our stories and opportunities, our blind alleys and our sweeping open highways.

For “vocation” is not about wearing a collar backwards, but about growing into the person we are called to be. The gifts that wriggle their way through the helixes of our DNA are the gifts God has conjured up for us, and we are called to utilise them in ways that breathe light into the life of others, ways that midwife the coming Reign of God, ways that touch and transform the lives of those whose paths we cross. Paul, long before he wrote the bizarre passage that opened the epistle reading today, was adamant (as every good Jew was) that there must never, could never be room for boasting in the human journey. To boast, to the Jew, was to deny the source of our abilities and opportunities, to take to oneself the kudos that belongs to God. While some psychologists might suggest that ascribing the sourcing of talent to God belittles or downplays the human self, I suggest it is otherwise, that our perspective is maintained in an appropriate focus, and we are placed where we belong, far from the centre of the universe, enmeshed in the goodness and grace of the Creator who calls us into being. 

Having been called into being we are then called to grow into the person God longs for us to be. We are, in biblical terms, made in God’s image, but the variations on that theme are infinite. Personality profiling schemes like Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram give us glimpses of the variations of being human, the variations that Paul called “diverse gifts.” Collectively we bring them together and begin to represent the Body of Christ, despite our limitations. The “I”s and “E”s, “N”s and “S”s, “F”s and “T”s, “P”s and “J”s of a Myers-Brigg profile begin to resemble a community that can exist and proclaim and radiate divine love, and as we share those divine gifts we grow in interaction with one another and with the tasks and contexts God provides.

So, when Paul climbs down from the surreal language of hallucinations and visions he reminds us of something important. We are called into different roles with different gifts, gifts of administration and compassion and vision and application, of empathy and leadership and musicality and numeracy and skills of baking and carpentry and singing and big vision and small detail. We are called, as he wrote earlier to the Corinthians, to use the gifts to build up and not to tear down, to support one another and to be as Christ to one another and to the world into which God places us.

Paul wished often that he had gifts that he did not have. Perhaps he too was an administrative flibbertigibbet, perhaps he felt he lacked oratorical skills, perhaps he was physically or emotionally damaged in some way: it is not our business! The outcome though (as every Alcoholics Anonymous adherent knows) is that he knew he could not rely on his own strength, but was cast back incessantly on the guidance and goodness of God. It’s not a bad place to start, and one I have come to know well in the years since the then Archbishop of Melbourne placed his hands on my head, the ordination that was in turn nearly a decade after a half drunk catholic picked up a hitch-hiker on the way home from the Tauranga race track.

As we, to borrow the Alcoholics Anonymous phrase, “let go and let God” (which does not mean becoming vacuous and passive automatons), we create space for God to dwell and work in (the reverse of the holy process by which God, by withdrawing Godself from the universe, created space for the universe to dwell in). By knowing our own weaknesses as the place in which God can meet us, and our strengths as the gift of God for the service of love, we can grow into and even become the calling, the vocation that God entrusts to us. Individually and corporately as a cathedral people of God we are challenged to set aside, metaphorically at the very least, bread, bag, money, and above all ego, and simply allow the gifts of God to work in us and through us.

 

 

Amen.

Dollar towards a beer? Let the light in.

SERMON PREACHED AT THE ORMOND CHAPEL

HOSPITAL HILL, NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 13
(28^th June) 2015

Readings:        

2 Samuel  1:1, 11-27
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43
           

There are some desperately broken hearts in the stories of our faith on this day. The bereaved heart of David cries out from the pages of faith-history, reverberates through time as he grieves beyond words the loss of his beloved friend Jonathan. We need not turn this into a celebration of gay love, as some have done, though nor need we decry the love of human beings for members of their own sex, sexually expressed or not.

 

This though is greater than the love of eros-passion, as the these days derogatory-sounding aside of “surpassing the love of women” is designed to tell us. This is the love of those who stand side by side, through thick and thin, who have as we like to say today, one another’s back. But as the hard words of the psalmist (always a part of a funeral if it is to be correctly taken) remind us “our days are like the grass: we flourish like a flower of the field. When the wind goes over it, it is gone.” So are the deepest human loves and friendships, including those of married love but not limited to them. Such loves are restored to us only in the promise “but your loving-kindness O Lord endures…” and in the belief that God’s resurrective love conquers even the brutal separation that death is.

 

Strangely the brief and timeless lament of David over the slain Jonathan has given us the cry “how are the mighty fallen,” yet in more recent parlance that has been turned not into a heart-cry at the fallibility of all human aspirations and achievements but into a tall poppy syndrome sneer at the fall of those who over-reach their allotted place. Such a reversal of the original meaning is a travesty: here David laments the highest degrees of love, for one day even they must, having flourished like a flower of the field, nevertheless succumb to the wind, sudden or gradual, of mortality. We know that.

 

Though disguised in the cut and thrust of first century church politics, Paul too is crying out at the plight of those whose lives are experiences of brokenness and neglect. He and the Jerusalem Christians, probably including Peter and James the brother of Jesus, agreed on very little. When though it came to the compassion to be shown to the poor and especially to those starving for their faith (for that is a theme previously addressed between the lines in 1 Thessalonians) there Paul and the Jerusalem pillars could agree: “It is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need.” Amen and amen, though we churches of the Global North or former West too often forget to remember the redressing of obscene disparity that may well dull the reverberations of our prayers.

 

But it is to the desperate hearts around Jesus that we must most often turn. What of the soldier whose child is dying? Childhood mortality was brutally common in the first century, but ever since soon after our ancestors climbed out of the primeval swamp we have desperately loved and wanted to pre-decease our children. This man dwells at the threshold of the grief that only those who have outlived their children know or understand. Yet greater even than his desperation is that of the hated and abused and unclean woman who scared-dares to touch the hem of the passing robe of Jesus.

 

These are cries of desperate hearts. Where is God when it hurts, when the heart-crush is so great we can no longer carry on? Suicide and substance abuse rates suggest that the rates of loneliness and despair are as high now as at any time in history. Prayers stay unanswered – and I won’t even attempt to gloss that statement with the kinder “appear to stay” unanswered. Prayers stay unanswered – and as our communities increasingly harden our hearts either to the naïve capitalist trickle-down theories of noblesse oblige or the social capital theories of communal responsibility more and more desperate human beings fall through cracks. Where is God when it hurts, and where is God when our neighbour hurts?

 

Where is God when a pan-handler approaches us, a beggar confronts us, a busker from the hard end of the economic equation plays for us? I am not naïve: we can’t solve the suffering of our world by handing out our loose change, but at a time when there are few safety nets and not even many ambulances at the bottom of the cliff I suspect we are cauterizing our compassion when we set ourselves a steely stare and walk past those who are or who purport to be needy. Aid agencies may well tell us that institutional change needs to be made to address the plight of the poor, but that doesn’t help the broken alcoholic sleeping under a bridge. Slowly our hearts are hardened and in any case we find more and more reasons to keep the dollar in the bottom of our purse or pocket.

 

In cauterising our hearts to the cry of the grieving or the hungry or any of those who Jesus calls “blessed” in the Beatitudes, we are generating a sclerosis of our own spirits. I am increasingly moved by the Jewish teaching of the sparks of light that we are commissioned to carry across our corners of the universe. It may not be profoundly sensible in terms of social theory, but the dollar you place in a beggar’s hand – or of course the sandwich or coffee you buy her – may just be the in-breaking of divine light into a hurting heart. It may and probably will not achieve lasting change to unjust social structures, or even to the beggar’s long-term future, and there will be some who have the gift to address those too (as our Marks of Mission remind us), but it will momentarily touch a life with warmth and Christ-light, and as a side-effect  chip away at the unfeelingness, the sclerosis of our own hearts and souls. The hippies are right: practice random acts of human kindness, for these sparks of compassion are sparks of the love to which we as bearers of Christ are challenged.

 

We will be ripped off. We will see our dollar for a sandwich turned into a dollar for a beer. We will find that the recipients of random acts of kindness are not always sycophantically grateful or obsequiously appreciative. Why should they be, or more to the point, why should we be expecting thanks? Jesus challenges his followers to act out their compassion and justice in secret. It’s not a bad rule, saving our heads from swelling and our hearts from making generosity all about us. It may however be a part of, as Leonard Cohen put it with Jewish wisdom, “the crack in everything that’s where the light gets in” for donor and recipient alike.

 

Jesus went on his way and two lives were restored, and many more touched, as they would later be by the Jerusalem Collection so feistily championed by his follower Paul. That touching of lives dwells at the heart of Jesus’ challenge to us to do likewise: never to be so hardened of heart that we cannot touch and strangely warm and encourage the lives of those we meet each day, however foolish our actions are in eyes of the wise and the prudent. Similarly we must never be so hardened of heart that we cannot open our lives to the love of a friend or a lover. In both cases our hearts must be so set beyond the limitations of human sight that we begin to see glimpses of the source of the light that gets in through moments and actions of love.

 

Amen.

Dylann Roof and a napping God?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY
(21^st June) 2015

Readings:        

1 Sam 17:a, 4-11, 32-49

Psalm 9:9-20
2 Corinthians 6:1-13
Mark 4:35-41

There are a handful of bible stories I remember from my childhood – and it’s worth remembering that most children today won’t even know that many – then it is the story of David and Goliath. The glorious Veggie Tale rendition of this story from recent years is Dave and the Giant Pickle, well worth a squiz if you have a few spare moments of YouTube. The gist is of course the same: vulnerable person chosen by God fronts up to powerful figure chosen according to traditional human standards, and big fella loses the battle.

Whatever the origins of the story were deep in the bowels of the whakapapa of the Hebrew people, somehow the Hebrews came to define a victory scored against all odds against the powerful Philistines. The biblical story was for millennia a narrative that championed the origins of the Hebrews royal line, championed the triumph of the little fella over the powerful bully, and for the pious above all a narrative that champions the victory of God’s choices over human machinations.

But within the terms of reference of the story this is the pitting of the choices of God against somewhat blinkered human standards. We can see the narrative point: the will of God will overcome obstacles. Does that however resonate with our experience? Does that resonate with the story of the Charleston massacre in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church these last few days? Where is God’s victory over Goliath when a prayer meeting is gunned down by a man who had been invited to be a part of the prayers, who had for over an hour received the love and hospitality of the African Americans he hated so much that he would eventually kill them mercilessly? Where is God when people are gunned down primarily for the colour of their skin? If the psalmist tells us “The Lord is a stronghold in times of trouble” where was he as alleged gunman Dylann Roof donned his apartheid-era flags-adorned jacket and carried out his dream of a race-based multiple murder? Was God napping?

Or for that matter, if we take as a metaphor the story of Jesus in the boat, calming the storm, where was this nature-transcending Christ when the gun was raised in Mother Emmanuel church, or when a myriad other killings which will not have made the news were carried out around the world in any given week?

God was not, as some right-wing US politicians are actually and inevitably proclaiming, mourning the fact that Pastor Clementa Pinckney and his co-prayers were not better armed. Had they been armed (and the likelihood of an amateur shooter hitting a target who has a head start and evil intent is minimal) had they been armed the return of fire would have done no more than escalate hatred and killing still further across the streets and lanes of Charleston and South Carolina and the USA.

God is not an escalator of cycles of hatred and revenge. Nor is God, whose prophet Isaiah longed for that day when swords would become ploughshares, applauding the mindset of a nation that believes peace comes from a weapon, that makes weapons available to all and sundry, and continues to permit narratives of race-based hatred to dominate much print media and airwaves and pixels. The fact that police-sourced killing of blacks in the USA outstrips killing of whites by a factor of three,[1] the fact that this includes a hidden statistic of economic as well as racial injustice, though the two are intertwined of course, is not a source of joy to the God of the plough-share and the cross. The fact that race or gender or religion or sexuality-based hatred exists at all in any nation does not gladden the heart of God.

But while the psalmist cried out “Rise up, O Lord! Do not let mortals prevail” the answer to the heart-felt cry is seemingly as far off now as it was three millennia ago, and the presence of injustice, ecological and economic, racial and gender-based, is as utterly universal now as in every time in human history. Where is God in this?

Still weeping, one suspects. But the writings of both Testaments do again and again provide at least two pronged answer. One prong is our human response as we practice the values of God. Allow a simple story. In 1996 a young black woman Keshia Thomas attended a clash of rallies in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  As the KKK and human rights and other protestors faced off against each other her actions almost certainly saved the life of her KKK opponent. As the tension mounted the counter protestors attacked a Klan sympathizer who had become isolated. He fled the blows, but fell, and was set upon by an angry crowd. Keshia Thomas threw herself over him to protect him, later saying simply that “someone had to break the cycle of mob mentality.[2]

In breaking cycles of hatred, motivated in part by her own faith beliefs and in part by her back-story of suffering, Keshia Thomas saved a life, and her actions transformed many lives in the crowd that witnessed them. That crowd – on both sides of the hate divide – had lost its coordinates of humanity, compassion, and no doubt for some, faith, just as those who gun down blacks and those who seek cycles of revenge have lost coordinates. God is present when figures like Keshia Thomas risk their own lives to save the life of an enemy.

There is a second prong to God’s presence. Actions like Thomas’s can be inspired by what I call a pre-memory of God transformation of swords to ploughshares. Actions like that of Keshia Thomas pre-enact the future coming of God for which the psalmist cries with heartfelt longing: “For the needy shall not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor perish for ever.” Such actions will be enacted again if the death of nine prayer-partners in Charleston spark not cycles of revenge but words of forgiveness.

These words are already being spoken, as the daughter of victim Ethel Lance told Dylann Roof yesterday that she forgives him for the white terrorism action that killed of her mother. These are words of the in-breaking of God’s Reign; these are pre-memories of the eternity of justice that the resurrection foreshadows. These are pre-figurements of the eternally calmed storm of which the temporary storm-calming in Mark’s gospel story is pre-figurement. These are the hints of the coming Reign of God for which we pray each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, and which hints not at the impossibility of a human reign of justice and peace but the in-breaking of the divine and eternal reign in which peace and justice are never again shattered and lost. These are even what we “pre-enact” as we share the peace together and then break bread together, no matter how scarred we or our neighbours might be. These are we pray for and hope in and pre-act upon, and where we do not we must fall again on God’s forgivenness: e te Karaiti, kia aroha mai.

Amen.

---

[1] Source: Channel 4 FactCheck. See http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-killed-police/19423. Retrieved 20 June 2015.

[2] “Alone in the Mob.” The Day. Jul 11, 1996. Retrieved 20 June 2015.

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