dancing in the footsteps

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION (13^th April) 2018

READINGS:

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

Ps 1

1 John 5:9-13

John 17:6-19

The wonderfully poetic author John, perhaps the most lyrical of the New Testament authors, struggles valiantly to convey the experience of the first post-Easter followers of Jesus. Like falling in love it was beyond words. Like the pinnacles of human experience, it was beyond words.

What is there when we reach beyond words? Some biblical interpreters argue that the rot set in for Christianity the moment the first New Testament story teller, Mark, set the experiences to papyrus. I have had friends challenge me to conduct an entire liturgy with no words, only the silence and the gestures and the love that are the deepest entrails of God.

Yet after all, as John made clear, the One we call the Christ and Lord and Son is Word, is Wisdom and Word and words must be a big part of all we’ve got, to tell of him, to keep the Jesus-rumour alive.

So: words, I’m afraid. And while John the evangelist is using his words to tell a story, we might also see it as a love-story, a love poem perhaps. His demand of us as listeners to the story is that we participate in that love, in divine love. His prayer is that we participate in ways that only the Spirit, the “Comforter” whose empowerment we celebrate next week, makes possible. God is love, is John’s equation, and love is God, and where one is the other is. We can glimpse that divine love humanised only in the life of Jesus, John indicates, and the life of Jesus is made known to us only in the inadequacies of words. Those words, though, are enflamed by the Spirit, so we can feel their impact, timelessly. And – I think I am being true to John here – as we feel that impact and allow our lives to be saturated by it, so we become a people of love, and through us others may know the love that is Divine, death-conquering, life resurrecting eternal love.

As we move into the great liturgical stanza of Ascension, Pentecost and Trinity words fail. Explanations fall short. You are now entering, as Janet Frame put it in another context, the human heart. But this is the human heart enflamed by divine love. This is far beyond the mere rational, as love language often is. Sometimes we can find at least partially rational explanations for it, but the God who dances beyond the universes will not be limited to our small imaginations, and John knows it. “They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” These words are designed to have us dance in the footsteps of the Creating, Redeeming, Holy-making God. Those who reduce biblical witness to a “how to” manual miss the point. Love, in John’s view of the world, is the result of saturation in the presence of God.

There are measurements of our lovingness. Are we as a faith community hospitable to the stranger? I think this faith community is exemplary in this regard. Are we hospitable to God’s future, ushering in new ways of experiencing and expressing the experience of God? We may have to make changes in the months ahead. Are we hospitable to one another, seeing the presence and the signs, the artistry and the God-gifts in those we meet in and through our interactions in the church community? Do we look for the giftings in one another, affirm them, rejoice in them?

In Gethsemane Jesus prays not for uniformity, where we all clone each other, but unity, whereby we rejoice in our differences, allow ourselves to be edified by the gifts of those we rub shoulders with, allow ourselves some giving of our own gifts knowing they will be enhanced by God’s spirit, utilised by God’s people as we seek together to proclaim the Risen Christ. Our job, as Thomas Merton put it, is to love others without stopping to enquire whether they are worthy. John would argue we are enabled in this task only by the presence of the Spirit-Comforter, of whom more next week.

TLBWY

and five thousand believed?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN

FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (22^nd April) 2018

READINGS:

Acts 4.5-12

Psalm 23

1 John 3.16-24

John 10.11-18

The document we know as Acts reminds me of film makers whose first movie was great (or at least okay), but the second and subsequent additions were at best lamentable. I have not been, you may surmise, a fan of Acts. One scholar I have heard redeems the issue by suggesting that Acts was written before Luke’s gospel-account, and that therefore the sequence does improve after all. Perhaps that’s just academic chicanery!

But what do we do with slices of the scriptures we don’t like? Unlike the compilers of the New Zealand Prayer Book I believe we stand judge over the scriptures of our faith at great peril. The scriptures depict darkness and light, and if we deny there is darkness alongside the light in our lives then we deceive only ourselves.

Yes, there are occasional glitches in the text that we must approach with caution, but even a would-be cynic like me should not dare to chuck out or at best avoid whole texts because they don’t suit our comprehension of events. I find Luke’s emphasis on exponential growth in the Christian community to be both disheartening and dubious; though the early Christian faith undoubtedly did spread rapidly I doubt there were many if any occasions on which thousands of people were converted at a single Petrine sermon.

Luke’s story is psychologically and even architecturally improbable. Yet I can’t jettison Luke because I don’t like his second volume. I must wrestle with the text: what is going on as he depicts the phenomenal growth of Christianity across the Empire? This passage I think gives us a clue.

Moments before our scene today, five thousand individuals have converted to Christianity after hearing one of Peter’s sermons. Disheartened? Moi? Beyond the rather situation-specific crusades of Billy Graham few of us called to preach have or will ever see such impact from our words. Are we then failures, and are our churches failures (I’m not letting you off the hook) because we don’t see such growth?

I think Luke is being more subtle than that. In this Acts passage we do not see a mass conversion, though the message Peter delivers, the central, universe-altering miracle of the resurrection, is central to both speeches, the one we heard and the one before it. Peter’s second audience, though, is cynical. Peter and John have cast gauntlets at the feet of corrupt, decaying religious and civic leadership. To one audience, hungry for meaning in life, they have spoken of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Easter message. The spiritually hungry populace has absorbed their authenticity, opened their hearts and been transformed by the proclamation.

But the second preachment falls on hearts of stone. Corrupted by power and self-interest the audience seek only to plot and destroy the Jesus movement and its message. Truth is suppressed, as it always will be by evil leaders. Democracy, The Washington Post warns us, dies in darkness. So too does hope and meaning to existence. Luke, sometimes more subtle than I give him credit for, makes it clear that very fact that the cynics do not succeed is authentication of the gospel. As John puts it elsewhere, darkness does not overcome.

The word of resurrection hope, with all its ramifications of reconciling love and justice, will not be suppressed. It will not be suppressed by my petty cynicism about the Book of Acts. It will not be suppressed who by those whose desire to make God manageable leads them to preach a meaningless, resurrectionless faux-gospel. It will not even be suppressed by the evil of leaders who call truth “fake news” and attempt to silence truth-speakers. In the end, as Paul puts it elsewhere, every knee shall bow before the truth of Jesus.

But what do we make of Peter’s proclamation “no other name”? For much of the history of Christianity this has been turned into a loveless, bleak message of “turn or burn.” Believers whose loved ones fail to embrace their faith are ... (if we believe in an afterlife at all, and we should, for reasons I will explore another time) ... are left with the horror of contemplating something called “eternity” divorced from those to whom they have given love and life. Is the good news of Jesus Christ good news if its reach is incomplete?

I think not. I do not believe that is the implication of Peter’s “no other name.” I do believe that the event of Jesus Christ is unique. I do believe that alone in all of history the life of Jesus of Nazareth is God’s redeeming intervention into human darkness. I do not believe that its impact depends solely on our response, nor that the response of those who do not get the Jesus thing, or who find meaning on other paths, is the gateway to some sort of eternal condemnation. Some of you may have seen the video of the Pope assuring a young boy that his recently deceased atheist father has a very special place in the heaven of God.

So what for us? Certainly, I must accept that thousands will not embrace the faith I try to proclaim each time I preach. We may all have to accept that the institutional church that we love and rightly struggle to keep afloat, may sooner or later collapse into the morass of meaninglessness, even corruption, that it sometimes seems to represent. That may or may not be the judgement of God, and all we can seek to be is authentic in our lives, individually and collectively. Not perfect – or I for one would long have been condemned. But as we seek to follow and proclaim the Good Shepherd we are warmed by the integrity of his voice: my sheep – probably the Dorpas or Barbados that I write of elsewhere[1] – recognize, connect with my voice, says Jesus. Even where our institution fails to have integrity, and it often does, we must search our own lives and strive to find integrity there. Sometimes we will fail, and there again and again we will meet the beckoning Good Shepherd. But we must strive, and strive together, to be the authentic bearers of good news that Luke depicts Peter and John as being.

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[1] From my notes on the readings: “The Good Shepherd was no purveyor of candy floss. The Palestinian shepherd fought brutal heat, brutal cold, and brutal predators to preserve his flock. His sheep weren’t pussy cats, either. this Shepherd was more a rampaging Jonah Lomu than the sweet- lamby-cuddler of Romantic religious art. For those in the know, the Good Shepherd was more of a Maremma sheepdog than our toga-wearing friend in the St Peter’s [Queenstown] west window, and the sheep were more Dorper or even Barbados than docile Perendale or Romney.”

mad crazy invisible love

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (8^th April) 2018

READINGS:

Acts 4:32-35

Psalm 133

1 John 1.2 – 2.2

John 20.19-31

When the early Christians began to spread out into the Roman community they were noticed primarily for two criteria: ridiculous beliefs and powerful love. The near exponential growth of the Christian sect in the decades that followed was a result of these strange bedfellows. Over two millennia the cutting edge of these ingredients has been brutally blunted.

Can we reclaim them? The author of the several documents we name “John” pleads with us to do so. So does Paul. And every iota of the teaching and life of Jesus embodied love.

Embodied, too the ridiculous nature of Christian doctrine: the God man, the celestial human, a God who in ancient thought could never suffer becomes the suffering, executed God on a Cross. Paul called it offensive and foolish. Paul spent his life and death preaching it anyway: Jesus, Christ, God, human, crucified, risen.

For the writer we call John love was the essence. In the passage from Luke’s Acts we get a glimpse of love so powerful that followers of Christ had ceased to own goods individually, pooling resources as an expectant, communal body, eagerly awaiting the return of their Lord.

John was less interested in questions of property: he was adamant that every aspect of a Christ-follower’s life should radiate self-sacrificial love. God is love. Where love is, there is God. Where love is not, there God is not. The equation was simple. The psalmist had seen it centuries before: “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!” Because there, the poem suggests, dwells the fullness of God’s blessing.

We can for now leave the questions of ridiculous beliefs. Suffice it to say that the ridicule was not directed as it is in some quarters today at Christians’ belief in an “invisible friend.” The ancients took seriously the proximity of humanity to nature, the latter centuries later defined as “red in tooth and claw.”

The ancients had little need to explain away the complexities of spirit and a spiritual world, or even the existence of an external Creator or Creative Force. Humans did not consider themselves so superior that they could giggle at the gods or God, for spiritual handiwork was evident at every twist and turn. As our intellects destroy our earth we might pause and wonder if we shouldn’t listen to the ancients and their readiness to believe.

Nor was the ridiculousness of early Christian faith the sort of embarrassing spectacle that comes out of militant modern forms of Christianity. The first, exponentially effective, transformative Christians were not the sort that see God as a belligerent punitive being, one who militantly hates minorities, militantly hates non-whites, militantly hates those who adopt beliefs or lifestyles different to those claimed to be lived by the haters. I allude of course to the sick parodies of Christianity that confuse God with any one nation, but most obviously the United States. I allude to forms of Christianity that turn blind eyes to the obvious darkness and predation embodied in the person of an elected leader.

The God of the Cross does not choose predatory opportunists to be a chosen leader. But God may well allow blind humans to live, for a season, with the results of foolish choices. The world is doing that, I fear.

But I partially digress. The ridiculous ways in which God chose to reveal the sacred, the divine redeeming love that is God’s nature were chosen precisely because we must never intellectualize our way to God. God’s love reaches to the darkest darknesses, and there gives birth to light in which there is no darkness at all. Ridiculous, but I’ve not come across a better explanation. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

In response, we are called to be a people of love. Generous love. Forgiving love. Redeeming love. Love that overlooks otherness and overlooks foibles and overlooks human fallibility. Love that does not demand that all are perfect – or I would have been cactus long ago, but so might you. Love that embraces the other, celebrates the foible, acknowledges the fallible. Love that says “come as you are.” Love that says “come” to the lonely and the broken, but also accepts that some of the loneliest and most broken do not at first sight appear to be so, and says “come” even so. Love that says “come” to the refugee and the abused and the dependent even when those states of existence are dressed up in Pierre Cardin and Louis Vuitton. But love, too, which says “come” to those arrive without access to a shower or fine words or polished intellects. Love that just says “come … stay, worship our mad maniacal communal God of love, ridiculously revealed on an ancient cross and rumoured in transformed lives of a resurrection-believing people.”

My God, my God, why?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (18^thMarch) 2018

READINGS:

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Psalm 51:1-12

Hebrews 5:5-10

John 12:20-33

In another place and another time I was frequently confronted by otherwise arguably normal clergy foaming at the virtual mouth and expostulating wildly whenever mention was made in any form of the blood of Jesus. As we sang the classic hymn "Glory Be To Jesus" a few moments ago I wondered yet again: is such powerful, if dark imagery to be excised from the vocabulary of Christianity? Are we to consider Christians so obtuse that we cannot de-mythologise, break open the powerful metaphors of our faith?

As we approach the pointy end of the most solemn time of the Christian year we will traditionally be exposed to much liturgical prayer and hymnody that takes us deep into the language of blood sacrifice and an abandoned, suffering Son of God. Do we therefore close our eyes, look the other way, read innocuous poems about being nice and having nice attitudes to each other?

Or do we engage with the scriptures of our faith and what they actually do tell us?

We could risk knowing to the depth of our souls that the original authors found the concept of a suffering, dying saviour every bit as challenging and offensive as their twenty-first century successors do. Yet our predecessors in faith wrote these things anyway. They did so knowing that such imagery was offensive, foolish, a stumbling block, as Paul poignantly reminded his correspondents in Corinth. Are we, in our cosy, articulate, middle class cathedrals and churches, better than Saint Paul? 

They did so because they believed that in the events we follow over these next two weeks hope was born for humanity and creation. To tell any lesser story is to eviscerate the gospel, to disembowel Good News until it becomes no more than a lame fairy tale. Weak words, weak and watered down pseudo-gospel words, disemboweled words of nothingness are not the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Watered-down words are as evil as the toxic words of escalation so beloved of a different wing of Christianity. That wing is a huddle of the Chosen, that sees the words of Jesus as excluding outsiders, providing excuse to hate those who do not look, speak, act or live as the speakers think people should. Such words are exemplified by many US and US-influenced fundamentalists. 

Politicians, exemplified by Leslie Gibson, who last week mocked a teenage survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as a “skinhead lesbian.” The words of exclusion and hate can never be the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Bland and toxic words alike  words leave us in a world in which cycles of hatred escalate unchallenged. The escalation of toxicity needs no explanation: you bomb my city and I’ll bomb your city with a bigger bomb. As it happens the much-maligned Jewish law of an eye for an eye was designed to correct precisely that escalation. 

As a corrective though, Jesus suggested, it did not go far enough. The stories we encounter this week tell of a deeper corrective: if you attack me then I will enter your deepest fears and there offer comfort, hope and succour. The birth, life, teachings, suffering, death and resurrection – and the future coming that you will address in far-off Advent – these moments of Jesus demonstrate the extent to which divine love enters and transforms the human condition. These moments begin what Jeremiah referred to as a new covenant relationship, written on human hearts.

That passage of Jeremiah follows the bitter scene of Rachel weeping for her children in Ramah. Hers is pain known to every parent who has outlived a child. Hers was pain that is one of the deepest sorrows of the human condition. In Hosea we find it is God’s own tears that are falling, while humanity continues to worship itself and its own imagined importance.

Jeremiah’s words of hope follow portrayal of sorrow because it is precisely to the deepest darknesses of being human that God enters in the event of Jesus of Nazareth. In Hosea, Jeremiah and the New Testament, indeed throughout Scripture, the entrance of God into human darkness – even cosmic darkness – is always an undeserved, unmerited act of grace.

God becomes enfleshed in suffering. Psalm 51, that Christians used to articulate the suffering of Jesus, is another, powerfully poetic expression of the depth to which God in Christ descends. Glimpses like Jeremiah’s covenant amidst bitter weeping, the Psalmist’s “my God my God, why have you forsaken me?", and some would say even the self-restricting act of creating humanity in the first place demonstrate the depths of God’s love. God enters human darkness. God enters the darkest stories of our news cycles. God weeps.

And there the story does not end.

Because, as our Hebrews author and John alike hint, we, unlike the poor disciples, can glance ahead to Easter Day. We can even, in hope, glance to that glorious day, the Dies Irae beloved of Haydn, Liszt, Mahler and others, the day told of in the mysterious Book of Revelation and elsewhere. For, based on their (and our) encounter by faith with the day of resurrection, the early Christians and their successors have been daring enough to believe in that Other Day. Then all shall be revealed and all shall be healed. And all this despite the growing sickness of our planet, economic foreboding, and a general sense that humanity is doing its best to destroy all things living.

John and the Hebrews author alike speak of the glorification of God in Christ. This is when language breaks down, for there is no language to communicate that which is beyond language. This is when, as Charles Wesley put it, we stand, “lost in wonder love and praise.”

But if we denude the biblical witnesses of the brutal language used to convey the depths of suffering to which God’s love descends then we destroy the Gospel. If we do that then we are left on Easter Day with only mumbled meaningless mutterings about nice things: daffodils in spring, chocolate bunnies (however nice they may be), and the well-being or mindfulness or good intentions of Jesus going on after his death.

And if that, like the message of some expostulating ersatz Christians, is all we have, then we as Paul said are more to be pitied then all people.

In the next two weeks we will enact a journey with Jesus. Then, on Easter Day we, and all those who we love and pray, for can burst out of the tomb of suffering and despair and meaninglessness. We can burst out of the tomb of economic and ecological and personal and universal collapse. We can gasp our stuttered amazement at the birth of hope for all who ever have and ever will have wept. We can sing our amens and that word we don’t say in Lent. We can fill our hearts with joy for all who have ever cried out “my God, my God, why have your forsaken me” – even God, when God has cried that out – for those words are not nor ever will be the final words in God’s dealings with Creation and its humans.

TLBWY

Find love here, perhaps?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the MISSION HALL, GENORCHY

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (25^th February) 2018

(first Sunday of an Interim Ministry)

READINGS:

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16                   

Psalm 22:23-31                                

Romans 4:13-25                              

Mark 8:31-38                                    

If I were to set a Lenten challenge for us as a people of God I would not ask for herculean commitments of self-denial. I wouldn’t overloading busy days with new commitments. I’d simply challenge me and you to ask “where is the love of God is revealed in each of our weekly readings?” I’m not going to labour through microdetails of each reading over the next several weeks – much less the next several months. I’m not going to forcibly extrapolate love letters from ancient texts. But so often as Anglican Christians we sit here stupefied, passive, hearing readings read beautifully, making little connection between the visions of the great saints and prophets of God and our own lives. So rarely can we make connection between a whole lot of verbiage and the triune God we worship?

Or am I the only reprobate who sites in liturgy hearing “Blah blah blah blah Spirit saying to the church”?

And in Lent? So often we hear only “Blah blah blah miserable sinner blah blah blah Spirit saying to the church.”

Or am I the only reprobate in church? Perhaps it’s too early in our time together for me to confess how mediocre a Christ-follower your Interim Priest is!

Let love be conspicuous. Let hope be conspicuous. Let justice be conspicuous. Mercy, too. All of these and more. “This is my covenant with you,” says God – somehow, who knows how God speaks? He is speaking to a tired old man. God speaks also to his even more burnt out, embittered almost, woman, his fellow-traveller.

Abraham and Sarah: tired, disappointed, yet recipients of words of love.

Actually, at 99 I would not be ecstatic to hear I was to be a father, but let’s assume Abraham and the more reluctant Sarah are products of a different world. Let’s assume the message is more akin to “I will make meaning of all your life and days and you will know eternal love, my friends.” Because I think most of us would like to think that at the closure of our life the God we have sometimes struggled to find might say, “Well done my friend, and welcome, and here’s meaning to it all.” Some like Sarah might laugh bitterly, but God persists, and she too will eventually know the warmth of divine hope. Some, like the billionaires buying up Wakatipu and Wanaka real-estate in apocalyptic binges might mock or panic as God acts in the world. As a Christ-community, our writers suggest, we must see the hand of God even in turmoil, and trust in divine promises however hard it is at times.[1]

God issues a covenant. It all sounds strange to us and I doubt many of the men in the room would leap for joy at the thought that their most private parts were about to be modified, sans anaesthetic, with a knife, but let’s leave the medical specifics. Well done, my friends, and I, the distant remote God, will be your friend and your descendants’ friends beyond all sight and understanding.

For this covenant was a word of love ... of hope, justice, all of that … but let’s stick with love. Love when there seemed to be no more love … okay, or hope, justice. But love. The word “yes” spoken to a people who had lost “yes” and were hearing and uttering only “no”.

A people not unlike our own western, global north – whatever – civilization – who are hearing only the life-denying words of climate change, economic and ecological collapse, US school shootings, failing infrastructure, and the collapse of institutions, our church amongst them. Yet God says “dream a new dream.” As the psalmist in an equally desperate time puts it, “Future generations will be told,” will hear a word and see sights and signs of hope and love. Paul will reassure the wobbling Roman Christians, referring to the Abraham story, that hope trumps despair.

Even the all too human, faltering Jesus deep in the despair of Gethsemane, is given words of reassurance and hope. In the next few weeks we will walk symbolically in Lent towards Gethsemane.  Lent is an “as if,” as if we are practising for the tough times of our own and our earth’s Gethsemane.  In a way it is not a rehearsal, either, for both Western Civilization and Mother Earth groan under the weight of our abuse. But we are a people of promise; with Abraham, with the reluctant Sarah, against all odds, all appearance and even all seeming experiences of being let down by life, we are dared to hope.

We are called to be a people looking beyond the apparent, looking to the unseen and sometimes even unbelievable. We walk with each other encourage each other (that, by the way, is why at high points in the liturgy we exchange the conversation “the Lord be with you / and also with you”), laugh and weep together in the shadow of the Cross and its never-to-be-denied resurrection. Together we will walk looking towards Easter and the greater hope Easter foreshadows, the hope of the new heavens, new earth.

It’s kind of nice that for a few months our paths have crossed and we can nudge each other along on that sometimes challenging journey of faith.

TLBWY

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[1] See https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand. Retrieved Friday, 16^th February 2018.