giggling with god

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

 (23^rd SEPTEMBER) 2007

Readings: 

Jeremiah 8.18 – 9.1

Psalm 79.1-9

1 Timothy 2.1-7

Luke 16.1-13

 It is not surprising that only Luke that recalls this teaching of Jesus. Matthew is concerned to demonstrate that the community of Jesus is beyond reproach, and this story is slightly embarrassing: excuse me? The followers of Jesus are supposed to emulate a corrupt and self-serving petty middle manager? To Matthew it seems awkward.

Luke sees the potential of the story: Luke’s telling of the Jesus story often focuses on priorities, and in particular the need for followers of Jesus to place their possessions in the service of the gospel. So Luke can take the words of Jesus and use them to emphasize the complete claims that Jesus makes on us, claiming not just our religious practices, but our financial, moral, environmental practices. The list of whole of life claims made by Jesus is inexhaustible, for it is a whole of life surrender to him that he demands.

It is okay to see the humour of Jesus in the Parable of the Disingenuous Steward.  The humour of Jesus should not escape us here. So often we portray him as some kind of sombre and joyless teacher-figure. Matthew was perhaps troubled, or concerned at the vulnerability to criticism, entailed in retelling this story. But it is funny. A worthless and corrupt person as a sign of the values of the Reign of God? The parable acknowledges that we are all, followers and non-followers of Jesus alike, a crazy mix of honour and dishonour. Commentators who have attempted to clean up this parable by suggesting that the steward was simply sacrificing his own commission from the debtor’ bills have missed the point: this man was desperate, and desperation is the mother of ingenuity. We too are called, as Luke tells the story, to be this desperate in both in our longing for and our service of the gospel.

Luke’s presentation of this Jesus story offers some other angles, too. The desperation of the steward is the desperation of a person whose life has reached crisis point. It is the desperation of a life that has reached rock-bottom and can see no way out but for the course of action he takes. We have probably all heard conversion stories from those who have reached a similar crisis point, and we know well that many who have battled with the various isms of alcohol, gambling and other forms of addiction have reached that point before allowing their lives to be invaded by the presence of a higher power and sobriety or its equivalents. But there are also many who have never reached that point: as a society, we, like every society in history, find ways to numb ourselves from the deeper questions of existence. Perhaps we need to, psychologically, but nevertheless this makes proclamation of the gospel a difficult task. Why would we need Jesus – whoever he might be – when we have sport, sex, television, the accrual of wealth and power? The list is endless, but we who would live and proclaim Christ in the twenty-first century West are swimming against a tide of anaesthesia and disinterest.

So if we are to proclaim Christ into our culture and our era we must do so with credibility. There has been much that has no more than masqueraded as Christianity in our culture, and our culture is highly critical of religious hypocrisy. We tolerate hypocrisy in other fields, such as industry and politics, but not in religion. Perhaps this is because as a society we find the last vestiges of religion irritating and embarrassing, and want to be rid of them, though with what we are replacing the narratives of hope I am not sure. Perhaps as a society we want to be rid of religion because, for all its faults, it speaks, at least in its Christian form, of a God who judges us, and we prefer to be unanswerable for our actions.

Ours is a society that will see through any form of phoneyism in the sphere of faith. To avoid phoneyism we must surrender, daily, the whole to Jesus and to the reforming work of his Spirit. We can do that by recovering the passion of the disingenuous steward: some who have been converts to the way of Jesus will remember the first flushes of faith in early months and years. Others who grew up in the faith will remember days of great closeness to Jesus, of the high points along the journey. They can’t be sustained day after day, decade after decade.

But there can be moments, thin moments as the Celts call them, when the Spirit of God breaks through, enfolding and renewing us, and we rediscover the passion of the unjust and devious but desperate steward. As a church and as individuals we can but pray for those moments of touch once more. Moments of touch that are never manufactured, but are the result of God’s response to our prayer: Lord, touch, transform, renew us in the service of your gospel, that we may again know the urgency of faith and the potency of your love.

 

Amen

fairy floss free faith

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

TWELFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

 (19^th AUGUST) 2007

Readings:

Isaiah 5.1-7

Hebrews 11.29 – 12.2

Luke 12.49-56

Often in our Christian communities we become a people of the Good Times. An awful lot of contemporary Christian worship is about the good time God, and the wonderful times we have in relationship with that God. And, to be fair, the word ‘gospel’ does mean – at surface level, good news.

In fact the word “gospel” has more complex overtones than that, and it was never intended to mean something about warm fuzzies and glowing good times. The Christians stole the word from the Roman Empire, where it was mainly used for the routine of announcing the birth of a new heir to the Empire. It was a solemn announcement, and nothing in it suggested that everything would be rosy for the citizens of the empire from that moment. It was about celebration, but not about fairy floss. The Christian community chose wisely: the gospel of Jesus that we share is not about fairy floss but about a challenging commitment whose benefits reach far beyond our sight.

So when we turn to Isaiah, in the Hebrew tradition, we find far from warm fuzzies. The prickly prophet, like all the Hebrew prophets, approaches his people with discomforting and unsettling challenges, blasting those who are willing to hear out of cosy comfort zones. Just as they were very happy being the people of God, keeping their God cosily in their back pockets, Isaiah tears their complacency apart: I will ruin my field. It will not be trimmed or hoed, and weeds and thorns will grow there. This is far from the stuff of fairy floss, though it may be that it is precisely what God has been saying to the cosy and complacent Christian community in the last decade. I will ruin my field. It will not be trimmed or hoed, and weeds and thorns will grow there. And this is gospel how?

It is gospel, as we read first through the Hebrew Scriptures, because the same God who punishes is also the God who heals. God punishes but does not desert The People of God. When Isaiah proclaimed the words of God he took his audience out of their comfort zone: God … looked for justice, but there was only killing. God hoped for right living, but there were only cries of pain. As we of the post-Christian West look at our history of exploitation we might just sense that these are words on target for us, too. The nations from which the West gained its wealth have not been hugely recompensed over the years. Even the fertile soils of God’s earth, of Papatuanuku, if you like, have not been greatly rewarded for their offerings.

Which is not to lay a guilt trip on you that I don’t lay on myself. But perhaps as we watch the patterns of global warming and weather extremes we are hearing again Isaiah’s word to God’s people: I will ruin my field. It will not be trimmed or hoed, and weeds and thorns will grow there. The Spirit, the great Enemy of Apathy of John Bell’s wonderful hymn, is whispering stern warnings to us.

Yet in this we are called still to be a people of faith – faith, as we said last week, which is the knee-jerk or automatic response to the encounter with Jesus in scriptures, prayer, fellowship and worship. Faith is the fourth dimension (or is it fifth?) that looks beyond the here and now. ‘Faith,’ said Paul, ‘is the assurance of things hoped for.’ Following in Paul’s tradition the author of Hebrews put it another way: by faith they conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.  Faith is the dimension that lifted the perspective of our Jewish and Christian ancestors beyond the here and now, beyond present difficulties, to another realm.

For the Christian believer that realm, though just beyond our sight, beckons back to us. In the eucharistic feast of our faith, as Jesus gave it to us, the future dimension is always present together with the past. The past saving acts of God are present in the communion – Creation, salvation in the Passovers of Exodus and Cross – but so too are the future dimensions: the future coming of Jesus, the parousia, and the new heavens and the new earth of the Book of Revelation.

These future dimensions become an entelechy, an energy from God’s future that draws us on and in: ‘God gives us a future’, writes Liz Smith in the hymn many of us sang at Onerahi last Thursday, ‘daring us to go, into dreams and dangers on a path unknown.’ Liz is right, but we remember that God is just ahead of us as we are led into that future, keeping our footfalls warm even when it seems otherwise, as sometimes it will. 

 Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses … let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, ^ looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of^ the joy that was set before him endured the cross.

TLBWY

love on the slagheap

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

TWELFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

 (19^th AUGUST) 2007

Readings: 

Jeremiah 1.4-10

Psalm 71.1-6

Hebrews 12.18-29

Luke 13.10-17

I cannot imagine the pain of the woman of our story. I have had moments of my life that have been dark and filled with relative pain, but hers is a story of degenerative and crippling pain. There are many such in our society, and some will be known to you. For some there seems to be no healing touch of God. For some the healing touch of God is to be seen not in miraculous healing, but in the equally miraculous ability and God given ability to live on through pain, suffering yet still finding a place in their lives for the miracle of faith and prayer.

 There is, incidentally, no miracle in conceited and doubtless faith. For some that is the journey of life: some never find room for darkness or doubt in their life-journey. Yet despite the attempts of some callous atheistic barrow pushers to turn it into a proof of the absence of God, the news that so great a Christian as Theresa of Calcutta experienced dark nights of the soul, pain-filled periods of doubt, is not a diminution but an increase in the testimony of their faith. To believe as Theresa did, surrounded by the deepest degradation of humanity, is to testify to sainthood. To cry out, as Jesus himself did, ‘My God my God why have you forsaken me’ is to enter in to the deepest darknesses of existence, and yet to testify eventually, perhaps even retrospectively, that even there God was to be found. To continue to believe when every horizon is black is the greatest testimony and miracle of faith imaginable. I am no fan of the Roman Catholic processes of canonization, but I have no doubt that in all we know and even more in what we now newly know of Theresa we have seen the life of a saint.

But the story of our lady of the gospel is also a story of an outcast. Her doubts may well have been myriad. The gospel vignettes tell us little of the interior journeyings of the characters we encounter. But here is no doubt that in first century Palestine a widow was cast upon the slag heaps of society. One of the reasons for the rapid impact of Christianity on the Roman Empire was the love and Theresa-like, Christ-like compassion the Christians showed to those on the slag-heap of the Empire. A widow was an encumbrance.

But this woman was worse. She was crippled by the collapse of her body. In her society she would be seen as a dreadful sinner, receiving justly the wrath of God for her or her relations’ sinfulness. Jesus cut through the religious holier than thou pomposity: this woman was no sinner but a hurting human being made in the image of God. Those who stand and pass judgement on the ‘can’t be helped’ aspects of human life, on those whose life circumstances or lifestyles don’t fit a presupposed moral correctness, need to be very careful that they aren’t recreating judgementalism in the image of the Pharisees.

Jesus, though, reaches out. If we are to be a centre for urban mission* we need to see who it is that we are called to reach out to likewise. Who are the vulnerable in urban Whangarei? Some will be at the low end of the socio-economic spectrum. The street people who may make our church dirty if we let them in. Many of these are the rejects, the flotsam and jetsam of callous government Mental Health policies. Others will be the overworked and overstressed executives working longer and longer weeks for less and less return, frustrated by policies of successive governments which seem to do nothing to keep them and their circumstances afloat. Some will be assets rich, some will be broken poor. But they will be the people to whom we are called, Sabbath or not, to speak words of hope and healing.

May it be our prayer this week that each of us may touch such a life with Christ love in the week to come.

TLBWY

* The Parish centred on Christ Church Whangarei was for a period badged ‘centre for urban mission.’

 

God's enemies as God's servants

In an arbitrary attempt to bring this series in line with the current lectionary I have now jumped forward three years from my last post ... but we're still back with sermons written in the dark ages of 2007 ... no longer in the semi outback Australian town of Charleville (and environs) but the New Zealand provincial city Whangarei)

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

(2^nd SEPTEMBER) 2007

Readings:

Jeremiah 2.4-13

Psalm 81.1, 10-16

          Heb. 13.1-8, 15-16

         Luke 14.1, 7-14

At this time in history, as much as at any other time, the word spoken to the people of God by and through the pre-exilic prophets has become a word on target. The ‘pre-exilic prophets’ are those who expended their lives speaking to a complacent People of God, warning them that their haphazard approach to justice, compassion and worship would lead God to turn away from them.

The task of the prophet is not in some crystal ball way to predict the future, but with prayer-filled and God-given wisdom to see and interpret the hand of God in the present and the past, and thereafter to make insightful suggestions about the road ahead. Their task was almost always a road to unpopularity. After Solomon the people of Israel experienced cycles of unity and division, cultic loyalty to their God and nonchalant disinterest in their God. Eventually the prophetic role was born: when the northern kingdom’s King Ahab married the pagan and anti-God Jezebel it was too much, and first Elijah and then Elisha spoke up, warning of God’s anger.

The religious life of Israel and Judah went in cycles. Sometimes they showed some signs of improvement, and the laxities and compromises were driven out of the practices of the nation. Times of peace would then lead to renewed religious complacency and compromise. It was into one of these times of religious malaise that the major prophets exploded, warning a complacent people of shattering events ahead. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah warned and warned again, but the Hebrews paid no heed. The population believed that God was in heaven and all was well, that eternal cosy comfort was theirs. They ignored the plight of the poor, and turned worship into platitudinous mouthing about a docile God.

Assyria swept down from the north, taking all before it. Israel and Judah were first compromised, and then shattered. For a while it seemed, however, that the prophesies of Isaiah and the attempts of King Hezekiah to bring his kingdom back to acceptable standards of justice and worship saved the day. Assyria over-reached her limits. Waves of invasions and counter-invasions took place, but miraculously Jerusalem was not destroyed. Eventually the king Josiah rebuilt his nation’s faith and confidence in God. The Ancient Law of Israel was reinstated, and the people Israel were briefly an independent nation once more.

But the reforms were too brief, too quickly forgotten, and our prophet Jeremiah arose in this moral vacuum to warn his people that, if they did not hear God’s call to justice, this time there would be no miracle. Jerusalem would fall. My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.

There are warnings in this history for the New Testament people of God. Jeremiah spoke to a people who had ears, but even so refused to listen. They had been given, over the centuries, lesson after lesson. The messages in our era, in recent decades and centuries, have perhaps been given by methods other than bloody invasions, but the messages are no less clear for those who will hear the voice of God in past and present. There have been never-ending lessons for the western world, and there are stern warnings for the West in the events since 9/11. The warnings were already there: the complacency and unchecked inhumanity that led to Auschwitz and Hiroshima should remind us that we are far from the people we could be. As Paul put, reflecting on the place of the Law, ‘I do the things I do not wish to do.’ Humankind and you and I as individuals will do the same, falling short of the image of God, let alone the glory of God.

But the warning of the prophets is in this secular post-Christendom age a warning to the community of Christ. The author of Hebrews challenged the Jesus-community to show exemplary standards of love. In doing so she was standing in the tradition of Paul, who wrote to the wayward and increasingly loveless Corinthians: ‘let all that you do be done in love’ (1 Cor 16.14). Hers is a call to conspicuous integrity. It is a call that recognizes, that, like the people of Israel, we will fall short. The Lord is my helper. It is in private and corporate prayer, in constant turning and re-turning to God, that we become the people we are called to be.

When the leaders of Israel returned their people to the standards of God they did so by calling them back to the disciplines of faith. Our task is to call ourselves back. From Israel we learn: do we hanker after values and standards of the society around us, or do we cling tenaciously to values our story should instil in us? Where we are a people who care for those around us, and do so more than anyone else, self-sacrificially and prophetically, then we bear witness to Christ. When we buy into dominant paradigms of instant gratification, then we fail to be the counterculture, the sign to the people, that Israel was called to be. ‘For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted’ is not the way of commerce, of advertising, of the dominant me-now paradigms of society. But it is the way of Jesus and of his antecedents the Hebrew prophets of Israel and Judah.

TLBWY

eros at the feet of Jesus

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE
FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (28^th March) 2004

Readings: 

Isaiah 43.16-21

Psalm 126

Philippians 3.3-14
John 12.1-8

As the Jesus stories circulated in and beyond the early Christian community, one of the widest known and seemingly oft repeated was that of an anointing. The details differ: Mark and Matthew tell of an anointing of Jesus’ head by a nameless woman that takes place at the house of Simon the leper at Bethany during the action-filled final week in Jerusalem. Luke has the feet of Jesus anointed by an unnamed woman, but clearly one clearly known as loose in her sexual practice. In that account the event occurs in Galilee. John, like Mark, has the anointing at Bethany but in his account it takes place before he enters into Jerusalem. John, like Luke, tells of an anointing of Jesus’ feet, but provides a name for the woman, Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, while the house is now that of Simon the Pharisee. Perhaps we are dealing here with two or three different occasions, though to me it seems more likely that each of the gospel writers is drawing on an oral tradition and flexing its muscles in different ways to address the need of their differing faith communities.

The presence of Jesus back at the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus is a powerful signifier, a signpost from John as to how we should hear – hear – this event. This place and these people has been a place and a people in which life has been miraculously breathed into death, where the dead man Lazarus was emphatically not merely resuscitated but raised from the death and the tomb into which he had passed. Martha serves at table, as we would expect from the account of her in Luke’s gospel story. Lazarus, the subject of the earlier miracle, eats with Jesus, just as the resurrected Jesus is later to eat on a beach with his disciples. These same disciples also join the feast, the good, the bad, and most emphatically the ugly, Judas Iscariot, who constantly joins in the table fellowship of Jesus.

We know from the earlier account, in the preceding chapter, that Mary has a deep devotion to Jesus, so deep that she is able effectively to reprimand him for his delay in coming to see her brother: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Despite her pain she continues to trust her Lord – in some ways with a greater and more dignified passion than does her sister, who produces only a formulaic response to the possibilities of God: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus clearly loves both women, and their brother, and John is at pains to let us know here the depths of feeling in the heart of the Messiah.

But not in his heart alone – for the response of Mary here defies all logic. This is the response of passion. This is the response of the one who does the inordinately stupid in the name of devotion to the Lord. Judas Iscariot here provides the response of caution; as the ointment, worth in today’s terms, some $30,000, a year’s wages, flows over the calloused feet of the carpenter, Judas appeals to the pragmatism of compassion for the poor. John is at pains to make sure we know that even this apparent compassion was a front, but the point is nevertheless made: there is a time for manic, mad devotion as well as a time for pragmatic action in the service of the Christ.

As if to reemphasize this, Mary continues with the utterly impractical but erotically devotional action of wiping his feet with her hair. We should not be afraid of the erotic undertones of such a passage. John wants us precisely to feel the depth-charges of longing that charge the room and so offend Judas and, no doubt, the others. For John, we may recall, is associated with the beloved disciple, the unnamed one who constantly leans close to the heart of Jesus. This is meant not to depict any homo-eroticism in the fourth gospel, but simply a depth of closeness and of devotion that goes far beyond the merely practical, far beyond even the merely religious, but into the realms of the absolute and illogical,. These are the same realms that drive the crazy Paul, as he gasps some years later “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”

John does not want to leave us here with an either/or. The words of Jesus, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me,” left out because too puzzling by some early manuscript copyists, are not designed to suggest that the followers of Christ should have a nonchalant disregard for the broken of the earth. Indeed the whole story of the challenges Jesus put to the religious elite of his day makes it clear that no such thing was in his heart. Nevertheless he makes clear that there can be no excuse for skimping in the service of devotion, no place for a hardened Marxism that may feed the broken but fails to breathe light into the hearts of rich or poor alike. Jesus stands firmly in the tradition of Isaiah, whose obedience is to the God who pours

rivers in the desert,
to give drink to my chosen people,
the people whom I formed for myself

but who does so not merely and pragmatically to fill their bellies, but

so that they might declare my praise.

It is in the lavish and ridiculous acts of praise and of worship that the rumour of resurrection, of justice, and of judgement begin. We are called to be a practical people, caring with our energies and our monies for the broken, but we are called also to be a lavish people, surrendering our logic in heartfelt devotion to the God we cannot see, but who is God of sorrow and of joy, of Good Friday and of Easter, and above all of utter, over-the-top, and unnecessary love.

TLBWY