God of the wrong places

KAUWHAU (SERMON) GIVEN at

TE POU HERENGA WAKA O TE WHAKAPONO

(SOUTH NAPIER)

PALM SUNDAY

(April 9^th) 2016

Reading: Matthew 21.1-11

So much of preaching comes out of sharing a journey together, paddling the same waka^[1] in the same awa^[2] or moana.^[3] Worship practices of Anglicans in Aotearoa and Ahitereria^[4] are quite different in many ways, mainly in terms of high and low (Sydney is different again!). Since my ordination thirty years ago, I have usually practiced a very intense form of liturgy during Holy Week and Easter. Palm or Passion Sunday forms with Holy Week and Easter one great eight day liturgy, deeply solemn, a tangi in which a long and profound journey is taken through death, grief, reconciliation; often embracing more than one marae, we finally reach the hope of release of a lost one to be with tipuna^[5] in a better place and a better state. But what a loved one, what a release, what a better state! On Easter Day the dance of mad joy begins!

Today we begin a descent. This was when I was a kid a day of palm waving and celebration better almost than Easter (except for the Easter eggs!). Today starts a descent down from a sort of wrongly directed expectation, believing that a political liberator has come to set a people free, down deep to the depths of disappointment and darkness on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. The one who was to set us free has died. Where now, what hope now?

Only then the gobsmacking joy of Easter and resurrection hope and a message far greater than merely political revolution, defeat of mere political opponents. That is defeat of suffering and death and sorrow themselves.

Today is the Sunday on which acknowledge how we get it all wrong. On Friday, wherever we are and whatever we do, we will remember the day on which the extent of God’s love for humans and all creation and all time will be revealed – reaching even, as St Paul put it, to death on a cross, for all who suffer (and then even those who don’t).

On Sunday, in places where an Easter or Paschal candle is lit, priests will intone words that remind us that God’s love embraces all history, all time, all universes. The priest will quietly intone two prayers in particular:

Eternal God,

who made this most holy night

to shine with the brightness of your one true light:

set us aflame with the fire of your love,

and bring us to the radiance of your

heavenly glory;

and

Christ yesterday and today,

the beginning and the end,

Alpha and Omega,

all time belongs to him,

and all ages;

It as if when we have travelled that mysterious journey through this Holy Week we can finally grasp the breadth and width and depth of God’s love for us and all creation.

But today we remember how wrong we get it. Today we look for a saviour in the White House, firing 59 missiles at Syria, or on a white charger leading us to military victory, or a saviour in Ivory Towers leading us to intellectual insight, or a saviour at the back of the All Black scrum making us proud of our nation, and in doing so we get it wrong.

We will in just four days’ time stand with all humanity and cry for our Saviour’s blood. “Why, what has my Lord done,” says the hymnist, “what makes this rage and spite?” Today we acknowledge that we look for God in wrong places, in polished places: in cathedrals and cohorts and palaces and parliaments, not an ugly cross.

The God revealed in Jesus is not in those polished places.

God is found instead in aching human hearts, breathing resurrection hope. God is found in honest human hearts breathing resurrection hope. God is found in loving human hearts breathing resurrection hope. In each case God is there even when the owner of the heart can’t identify the Christ-light dawning there.

I tend to see far more of the face of Jesus in the broken and uncertain than in the sure and complacent gate-keepers of our religious institutions. I often find far more of the face of Jesus in the uncertain and sometimes downtrodden hitchhiker trying to find a way to live after a stint in prison than I do in the wearers of designer labels who stand sentinel at the door of some of our most conspicuous churches.

In saying that I am over-simplifying. Dig deep and all of us know that we have unpleasant sides, that we have grot and darkness into which we need the light of Christ to shine and the healing love of the risen Christ to work God’s redeeming love. It is so whether we are paupers of kings, prisoners or princesses. But I suspect that the hungover hitch-hiker more easily knows her or his need than the Pierre Cardin-suited gate-keeper, more than custodians of religious purity.

Today we acknowledge our humanness. We acknowledge that we have often looked for the triumph of God in the wrong places. It is a great thing to wave and dance and sing, to create beauty and awe and mystery, but, as every alcoholic and other addict will tell us, to begin to think we are the triumphant crowd, to begin to think that God admires our greatness, to begin to think, as the prophets warned, that our glamorous programmes and smooth administrations and loudest of hosannas are what God really needs, is to forget to find God in the broken figure of a criminal on a cross.

When we lose sight of a criminal on a cross we lose ability to be shocked and awed and wowed by the good news that will break in on us next Sunday. Then we are seized by the awe of an open, empty tomb, and by the news not only that he is not here, he is risen, but that he goes before us into our every stumble, and lifts us slowly, gently, lovingly up to the eternal glories of God. There Christ, the same yesterday and today, is the King of glorious eternity share with us and those broken, stumbling people he has loved.

Lord God, who sits upon the cherubim, who has reaffirmed your power and sent your only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, to save the world through his Cross, Burial and Resurrection: when he drew near to Jerusalem for His voluntary Passion, the people that sat in darkness and the shadow of death took, as tokens of victory, boughs of trees and branches of palms, foretelling his Resurrection. Lord, keep and preserve us also, who, following their example, carry in our hands palms and branches, and who like the crowds and the children cry out, Hosanna! May we who offer you hymns and spiritual songs be accounted worthy to attain the life-giving Resurrection on the third day: in Jesus Christ our Lord, with whom Thou art blessed, together with your all-holy, good and life-giving Spirit, world without end. Amen.

^[1] waka: vessel, vehicle

^[2] awa: waterway (river, stream etc)

^[3] moana: sea or lake

^[4] Ahitereria: te reo Māori designation for Australia

^[5] tipuna: ancestors

Note: as a mark of respect for te Reo Māori as an official language of Aotearoa New Zealand I do not italicize words in either English or Māori except for emphasis.

on religious correctness and the loss of faith

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT

9^th March 2008

Readings:

Ezekiel 37.1-14

Ps. 130

Romans 8.6-11

John 11.1-45

From the valley of dry bones to the calling forth of Lazarus there is much in today’s cluster of readings that should speak to us of new life. The famous and vivid scene from Ezekiel has spoken to Jewish and Christian societies for two thousand years and more, speaking of the God who breathes new life into dead humanity and dead human institutions. Similarly, if less poetically, Paul has spoken, even if he did not mean to, for two thousand years, contrasting the fleshliness of lives turned away from God and his Christ with the spirit-filled existence of lives open to God.

We don’t need to be Einsteins to see the contrast between lives invaded by love and lives closed to all that is positive and life-giving. Sadly we see the contrast around us all the time and every time we turn on our news. My sympathies, for example, may well be with the Palestinian people in the never-ending Middle Eastern conflict, but no-one in their wildest dreams could see the gunning down of eight students at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem as a life-giving or peace-breathing act.

But of our readings the raising of Lazarus is the most complex and demanding. It too speaks of new life, or of life called forth out of death. However it makes many demands on us. The event may or may not have been good news for Lazarus (it certainly was for his sisters) but in what way is it good news or edifying for us?  Our loved ones do not return from their tombs, and neither, we can assume will we. Or we cannot at least until God’s end of time. In what way is the peculiar event of Lazarus, whether we understand it literally or not, good news for us?

This moment in John’s gospel story is the seventh and last of the “signs” Jesus performs to elicit or provoke belief in his people. But, as if to prove that the spectacular will never convince the sceptical, this last miracle of bringing life out of death also initiates the beginning of the end for Jesus. Jesus himself announces to the bewildered onlookers, ‘this sickness will not end in death,’ but, ironically it will: in the verse that follow we find a new tone of darkness in the Fourth Gospel, as we make the transition from the story of the Signs of Jesus to the story of the Passion: Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what he had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council, and said, ‘What are we to do? This man is performing many signs.’

Faced with the grief of the family of Lazarus Jesus asks hard questions. Jesus has just that moment identified himself with one of the great ‘I am’ statements of his ministry: ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ He confronts the grieving Martha with what might well be considered the key question of faith: ‘do you believe.’ It is not altogether an approach that would win the admiration of pastoral care courses, but it is a question that drives to the heart of this scene. Do you believe? And Martha says ‘yes.’ But there is no encounter with the heart of Martha, and it is instead the broken, belligerent, angry grief-stricken Mary who makes heart connection with Jesus. There is no need to ask the question when confronted by Mary’s pain: she is too broken to believe anything, except that her world has collapsed and her brother is dead.

At that moment of brokenness that the encounter with Jesus begins. Jesus, in the Greek, is both saddened and angered as Mary weeps at his feet, now joined by throngs of mourners. The anger may be at a society that leaves a woman’s life meaningless without her brother to own her and protect her. Or it may be because Jesus must now confront that deepest of all scars, untimely death, the very death he too is soon to face. He may even be angry because, no matter what he does in the minutes that follow, the crowd will not believe, and will be, symbolically, the same crowd that is soon to chant for his execution. It is the story we will sing on Good Friday:

Why, what hath my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
He gave the blind their sight,
Sweet injuries! Yet they at these
Themselves displease, and ’gainst Him rise.

The Lazarus story is not about resurrection, although some aspects of the way it is told may well give us a sense of looking ahead to the resurrection once we know the two stories. To this point in the Jesus story there is a temporary abeyance of death. It is a little like the healing ministries in our own experience. But as yet there is no resurrection and conquest of death as such. There is though an indication that both the tellers of the story and the Christian community since have felt this encounter was a sign of the divinity of Jesus, the one whose command is action. Come out, says Jesus, and Lazarus does, albeit still bound in the bindings of death. Later, when Jesus conquers death, the robes of death are cast aside.

We can’t tell what happened on that day long ago in Bethany. The story was set down some fifty years later, when all but one of the eye-witnesses of Jesus had gone to their reward. We can assume, since John was so emphatic that he was a reliable witness to the truth, that at the very least a miracle happened that day. The fact that early Christians were prepared to live and die by these claims they made about Jesus indicate that they felt there was more than an elaborate hoax going on here.

In the middle of our long passage though we get at least one very clear indication of how we should read the story. Jesus said to Martha , ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ Martha replies, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ,  the Son of God, the one coming into the world.’ Yet for all her words she fails to grasp the potential that the Messiah represents. It is Martha, the one who professes, rather than Mary, the one who weeps, who tries to stop Jesus from rolling away the tomb. Perhaps Martha is the sign of the modern Church, limiting the risen Christ with professions of belief that are not really transformed into a living faith. Perhaps it is only when, like Mary, we throw ourselves in tears into the arms of Christ, that we will have leaned the meaning of prayer, and dry bones will walk.

TLBWY

when gate-keepers are spiritually blind

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT

2^nd March 2008

Readings:

1 Sam. 16.1-13

Ps. 23 
Ephesians 5.8-14

John 9.1-41

When John was telling the Jesus story he was doing so some five or six decades after the events. He told the story, as did Matthew, Mark and Luke, to ensure that his faith-community stayed anchored in the actualities of the Jesus event and Jesus’ teachings, rather than redefining the Way of Jesus along lines that suited them. He told the story, too, to ensure that the event of the Incarnation continued to speak to a later generation. He had no doubt that this telling was a critical and urgent work of the Spirit – and that those who heard what Jesus was saying to them would be embraced and strengthened by the Spirit of God.

The Fourth gospel (like the other three) is intentionally addressing two situations. As it happens, in the purposes of God, it addresses a third, unforeseen by John: that of Whangarei in the twenty first century. John the story-teller is aware both of the tension between Jesus and authorities of Jerusalem and the tension between the Jewish and Christian communities where John was living five decades later. The unfortunate phrase ‘fear of the Jews’ is intended to represent fear of all corrupt authorities; the unfortunate shorthand that has so tragically dogged Christian history came about because it was to the Jewish community that John’s people were primarily exposed, but it was designed to designate any anti-Christ community.

John had no doubt that the same Spirit of God was able to achieve God’s intentions in each context. At the time of writing the Jewish authorities had finally expelled the Christian believers from the synagogues, and the Christians were experiencing all the bewilderment and disillusionment that this entailed: who were they and how were they to operate as God’s end time people if they were rejected and exposed in this way? Unbeknown to them Paul’s audiences had faced similar issues half a generation earlier, but John’s community was cut off from those of Paul’s world, and he knew nothing of this.

The blind man is physically blind, but there is much more than mere physicality going on here. What we see is a role reversal, in which the physically blind become increasingly sighted, and the physically sighted oppressors, oppressing a human being in the name of religion, become increasingly blind.[1]

This is a story of the Spirit, the Comforter, who works in and through the encounter between the un-named blind man and the corrupt religious authorities. The man has never asked to encounter Jesus or to be dragged into a confrontation with the authorities, but he gradually grows into the role that Jesus places on his shoulders. Elsewhere Paul writes to the Corinthians in a similar vein: No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

The western Christian community is engaged in a time of trial. Headlines that probably embarrassed Sir Richard Branson, but which nevertheless proclaim him to be what the Beatles never were, remind us that we and our story of resurrection hope, judgement and justice are being sidelined. It is possible, eventually, that worse may lie ahead. But the road we face is nowhere near as cataclysmic as that faced by the community for which John was writing. Yet he reassured them, in the telling of the story of a once-blind man, that Jesus does nurture his faithful through times of trial. Empowered by the Spirit the weak overcomes the machinations of the strong and the blind overcomes the disempowerment of darkness. And the story offers a further hope that has inspired Christians through the centuries since: the corrupt authorities who dare to judge eventually betray themselves into a place of judgment – by a greater judge.

In the end this is a story about many things. It is a story about healing and about hope, about corruption and redemption. It is a story too about sin. Sin that not the ‘naughty things that we do or think about after breakfast’, but sin that is a crippling human and societal state. Sin in this story from the life of Jesus is theological state not a moral category. The Pharisees who are sighted are trapped in endemic, constitutional sin, and do not see. The blind man sees all along from the moment he is first touched by Jesus. Sin is wrong-response to Jesus, ignoring the finger of demand that God places on our lives, as seen in the blindness of the Pharisees. Sin is mis-prioritization of gospel demand, which is, primarily in John’s gospel, to ‘witness to the light.’ The once blind man does that despite life threatening opposition. Sin is not ‘naughty things’ but a mis-focussed state. Salvation is the embrace of Jesus and the re-orientation he demands.

In the ancient church the story was a part of the Lenten preparation of the catechumens, representing the journey from darkness to light. May it be our journey too.

TLBWY

[1]  Did I mention at the end of the previous post that there is much that church leaders and gatekeepers might learn from this?

on the Möbius strip of faith

(a slightly timey wimey approach to these sermons, as I did not preach on the Third Sunday of Lent in 2008 .. so this from three years after the previous two ... )

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

SUNDAY, MARCH 27^th 2011

(THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT)

Readings:      Exodus 17.1-7

                       Psalm 95

                       Romans 5.1-11

                       John 4.5-42

In the reading of scriptures, no less than any great works of literature, it is important to seek passages, sentences and words that provide a key to the author’s aims and intentions. There will always be debate about the keys and about interpretation, but that is precisely where understanding grows, in the dialogue between perspectives. It has been so since John put down his quill, and all the more so since, thank God, his creative masterpiece of Jesus-story-telling entered the canon of Christian scripture a century or so later. It cannot be emphasized too much that the verses 39-42 provide a critical key by which to understand this moment in the life of Jesus.

Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’ ⁴⁰So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there for two days. ⁴¹And many more believed because of his word. ⁴²They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.’

More than anything else, this is a story about belief. It is a commonplace in Johannine interpretation to note that all that will be of importance in the fourth gospel is foreshadowed in the Prologue, the opening verses of chapter one: one scholar, Simon Ross Valentine, neatly observes ‘the Prologue is nothing less than the theological matrix from which the themes of the gospel arise’ [Simon Ross Valentine, “The Johannine Prologue – a Microcosm of the Gospel” (Evangelical Quarterly, 68:3, 1996, 291-304), 292]. Remember the resounding words, He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him? Here, by contrast, Jesus comes to those who are not, in ethnic terms, his own, and they do believe him. We are meant to hear the contrast, meant to observe above all that this is a litmus test of our own response to Jesus: belief, or unbelief? This is, paradoxically, about us.

The believers, those who believe, are in this passage the outsiders. The themes of outsider and insider run throughout the scriptures of our faith, often with a complex, porous ambiguity. Like an Escher sketching (or a Hogwarts stairwell!) in which up-side becomes down-side, the biblical outsider often becomes the insider, and, perhaps of even greater concern, the insider becomes outsider.[1] We are warned that we should not be afraid when we see greater faith and Christlikeness in those outside the boundaries of the faith community than we do from those within. The Spirit of God goes always before, ahead and around us, and here appears to be at work in the life of the Samaritan woman long before the followers of Jesus were willing to be so progressive (if ever they have). Woe to those, the Beatitudes might say, who strive to keep the outsiders out by word or deed while keeping the insides pure, tidy, and well-oiled!

In this scene, as always in John, there are key words floating around, appropriate to the characters’ lives, but appropriate too to ours. There is much about water, living or otherwise, that clearly signifies something more than merely a means of re-hydration, as the woman first interprets it. We will find later in the gospel that water, signifying it seems new life, flows from the side of the crucified messiah, and that waters of rebirth are a key motif: there are some 20 references to water in John’s gospel-account, and half or more of these appear to represent something far more eternal than mere H₂0. There are suggestions of immorality – though a deeper scratch may suggest that this woman’s five husbands may have far more to do with Samaria’s relationship with what were known at the time as the ‘five idolatrous peoples of the East’ of 2 Kings 17 than to any individual serial monogamy, despite the later life-choices of Elizabeth Taylor. There is language about reaping and sowing, language about hospitality and rejection, all of which has clear implications for our own applications of this scene to our individual and church-communal lives.

There is above all language about Jesus venturing into unexpected and unclean places – and finding belief there. We often tend to expect to find God within the comfortable armchair zones of society and faith, rather than in the exposed, risky and unpleasant places. Would we find God in a brothel, or does God belong only in nature walks, churches, cathedrals? The witness of both New and Old Testament is clear: God will escape our comfort zones, as God-in-Christ here clearly demonstrates. But this is not merely about comfort zones: this is about hatred zones. Here it is as though a Benghazi Gaddafi-opponent were chin-wagging with a Tripoli Gaddafi-loyalist. This is the stuff of God at deep risk, a risky edginess that continued on into the life of the Christian community, for it is almost certain that this story is told to both Jewish and Samaritan, as well as gentile Christian members of John’s faith-community.

Ultimately this is a story about belief that transcends of hatred and the healing of hurts. This is the story of belief that transcends ethnic barriers, gender barriers, even creedal barriers, and all those artificial barriers that forget that we are one and all created in the image of the Creator. This is not a story about a wimpish anything goes love-in, a hippie commune or Helen Steiner Rice lovefest of meaningless platitudes, ignoring destructive behaviour and letting it ride on unabated. This is the story of a socially challenging God and openness to God that transcends deep-seated human hatreds. This is a story that challenges us not to plastic platitudes but to transcendent culture-changing belief. Does our belief transcend prejudice?  

TLBWY

[1] This was written in 2011, but since then I have encountered church leaders and gate-keepers desperately keen to protect the "always done it this way" of churches; those leaders and gate-keepers might well want to note that the Gospel of the Troublesome Christ does not respect the boundaries of aesthetics or propriety.