being church after Pennsylvania (etc)

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

and the COMMUNITY CHURCH, GLENORCHY

ORDINARY SUNDAY 21 (August 26^th) 2018

READINGS:

1 Kings 8: 22-30, 41-44

Psalm 84

Ephesians 6: 10-20

John 6: 56-69

I mentioned in passing last week the sense of heaviness that many of us feel as we digest revelations coming from inquiries around the world into exploitation and predation that has gone on behind closed doors in institutions that claim to be the churches of God. I referred to the sheer horror of revelations emerging from the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania and elsewhere; I could have just as easily mentioned the horrors that emerged from two Royal Commissions in Australia, from which the Anglican Church definitely does not emerge unscathed. I would imagine many more horrors will emerge in the coming decade, and I’m sure few of us will find that our own networks of faith are untarnished.

It is not a pleasant observation with which to begin that process of breaking open the word that is my duty and ours week by week. Yet as we wrestle with the texts we have to be honest about ourselves as individuals and our-self as an institution. I am convinced that the Christian community is at the moment undergoing its greatest reformation since the sixteen century, and perhaps its most significant since the fourth century. I’ll be happy to explore those claims at another time, but for now let us just accept that these are tumultuous times, if not for us personally, then for the Christian community of God collectively. It is worth us recalling in passing that it is not just the monolithic institutions like ours and that of our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers, but that many of the independent – and sometimes rabid! – Protestant and Pentecostal churches, especially those whose almost cultic practices and often fiercely patriarchal authority structures have provided a bulwark to scrutiny, have been found to be harbouring predation and abuse.

Few if any of us are above reproach – certainly if the standards of Jesus or his apostle Paul are applied to us. As St Paul famously noted, none of us can sashay up to the pearly gates declaring our perfection.  We need to take Paul’s observations about the human condition very seriously if we are to be effective proclaimers of the Reign of God. We all fall short of perfection.

Most of us fall short in reasonably insignificant ways, though. Errors, what the bible names as sins, are writ reasonably large in my own history, and I have never ignored or denied that. On the other hand, when you read of the atrocities of predatory networks within the churches and other organizations, or the wholesale treachery that is exemplified in the politics of our neighbouring nation, or the utter corruption that is currently writ large across the consciousness of the United States, our sins are reasonably unimportant. Most of us are not called to be a King David, a King Solomon. – I’m not really sure I would have enjoyed that many wives and concubines. Most o0f us are not a Donald Trump, nor even a Scott Morrison (or whoever is the ephemeral Australian Prime Minister of the Day) or a Jacinda. Not many of us, as Paul says, are powerful.

We are called to be us. But we are also called to be people of integrity. Our lives are designed to be advertisements of the compassion and love and light and hope of the God we serve. Christian doctrine suggests we can’t do that on our own, that despite President Trump’s demonic declaration that he doesn’t need forgiveness, we do. I’d add that there are rather a lot of indications surrounding Trump’s tawdry life that suggest he does, too. “Be strong in the Lord,” commands the author of Ephesians, but in adding “and in the strength of his power” he is not suggesting that we should engage in histrionic showmanship, snake-handling or demon-delivering under neon lights, but we should open ourselves again and again to the persistent but un-showy Spirit who touches the deepest recesses of our being.

To be us and authentic we do need again and again to turn back and open ourselves to the searing gaze of God. The psalmist often suggests that in part that is achieved by turning away from ourselves, by turning instead to praise the unfathomable depths of the creator revealed in Jesus Christ, made known to us in the Spirit.

It is a rare thing for me to be out on walks in this region without being gobsmacked by the majesty and might of the God who twists mountain ranges, lays down schist, carves glacial valleys, yet cares for the sparrow or the tui, the chaffinch or the riroriro that watches as I pass. The psalmist gets that: “Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself and to lay her young” in the presence of the author of the universe.

In the midst of such awe, and despite the calamities on-going in world and church, we can do worse that to breathe a prayer to God, seeking the continued strengthening of our faith and life, modification of the dark places within our being, edification of our sometimes flimsy attempts to be good and compassionate and just human beings.

I will admit, though, that as I watch the tumult around me in world and church (and so select Luther’s famous hymn for this day) I have been and often am tempted to chuck away my association with the institution that, like me, so often and so conspicuously lets God down. I certainly don’t want to suggest that the Church, despite being called “body of Christ,” is God. Yet I often find poor fallible St Peter’s words powerfully appropriate: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” The Church is a horribly flawed institution, and I believe it must crumble from its present forms. The Church is not God. Yet it is what God in Christ initiated: “You are Peter, and on you...”

Not a monolithic institution, no, but a body. “Wherever two or three gather there God is”: I cannot be a faith-bearer on my own. We must find ways to be authentic gatherers-together, ways to ingest, as I have been saying these past weeks, the mysterious life force of Jesus, ways to be body and blood of Christ and bearers of Christlight in an always rapidly changing world. That was what the author of Ephesians was telling us. That was what Peter didn’t realise he was saying but later knew to be true. It was so true that he was prepared to be crucified, perhaps upside-down, for his faith. And though we are small players on the stage that is what we offer ourselves for, again and again. We offer ourselves collectively first and as individuals second, always holding tenaciously to the belief that just beyond our sight and understanding is the eternity to which we are summoned, in which we are judged, and in which all things can become clear.

TLBWY

life force of the broken god

SERMON PREACHED at St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 20 (August 19^th) 2018

READINGS:

1 Kings 2: 10-12, 3:3-14

Psalm 111

Ephesians 5: 15-20

John 6: 51-58

It is little comfort for those who have lost friends and family in the 35 years or so since HIVAIDS spread across the globe, but the pandemic nevertheless brought to the consciousness of the postmodern world a renewed ancient awareness that had long been suppressed. We had tended to forget, unless we were hippies, the powerful image of blood as force, energy for life or death. That imagery runs throughout the scriptures of our faith and through the oral and written traditions of most if not all ancient faiths.

I find it a useful image as we attempt to understand the Eucharistic imagery that has been running through our John passages for three weeks now. John dwells on Jesus’ own image of eating bread, or consuming the life force of Jesus, presumably in the ancient rites of Eucharist. As I suggested last week, John is a master of what scholars call metonymy, of using a single image to encapsulate vastly greater meaning – as when “Washington” means “The USA and its government,” or “nukes” refers to the entire military arsenal of a powerful nation.

So for three weeks we have concentrated – laboured, really – on this imagery of ingesting the life force of all that Jesus is and did. We know from the doctrine of the Trinity that the task of the Spirit is to make available to believers all that we need of that life force of Jesus. It’s a simple equation: if we don’t need it (in the purposes of God) then it will not be available to us. Even the glimpse we get on this day of the Old Testament relationship between Solomon and God gives is a sighting of that equation, if effectively in reverse. So John reminds us of the powerful words of Jesus, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”

If you have been following the revelations surrounding the Roman Catholic Church in the USA, and Australia, and even hints here in New Zealand for that matter, you will be tragically aware of the extent to which the privileges of faith can be manipulated and abused. As many writers have pointed out, the moment at which the Church got into bed with the State, at least symbolically at the time of the Edict of Constantine in 313 A.D., was the moment we began to lose our integrity. 

The other day I was passing St Peter’s when I saw two young, rather giggly women walk into the church. Within seconds they were pulling faces and fleeing out again, still giggling. Who knows why? But it clearly wasn’t simpatico with their beliefs, tradition and aesthetic Perhaps it was in itself a metaphor for all that we have got wrong since the Emperor made us official more than seventeen centuries ago. 

As we watch the brutal and deserved exposure of corruption in the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania we cannot be too complacent: no branch of the church, since Constantine, has been immune from corruption. As I have suggested here already, the current dismantling of our potentially demonic power structures is God’s judgement.

Too often in ingesting the body and blood of Jesus we have inoculated ourselves against its true demands. It demands not that we become rich, powerful and sleek players in society, but that we become vulnerable, even broken followers in the Way of the Cross. For too long our church leaders – and the more hierarchically empowered the more corruptible they have often been – for too long our church leaders have seen themselves as princes and politicians,  deserving the admiration of the faithful, and expecting society to tremble at their pronouncements.

While some – I’m tempted to say few – have been walking embodiments of the humble servant king, they have been so despite rather than because of their inherited place in society. Let it be quite clear here that I am not pointing fingers at anyone or any station in the church, but rather observing that the more priests, bishops, and even lay-leaders set themselves – ourselves – up as heroes in our own narratives the further we stray from the humble, soon to be broken Jesus.

Instead Jesus invites us to ingest his life force; his humble birth and homeless ministry, his lonely death abandoned by all but the faithful, powerless women, his teachings of love and compassion and justice. Only after these does he impart his mysterious yet universe-altering resurrection and inconceivable future, and invite us to join in them. I suggest our bearing of the cross in Wakatipu should not primarily be in the spit and polish of magnificence, but in gentle acts of compassion for those who are hurting in our midst, for the lonely and bedridden and those who are frightened by the future.

In a region with the fastest growing property prices in New Zealand that is no easy task, but around us many are hurting; our task is neither more nor less than to ask God to show us ways to bring resurrection life and hope to them.

TLBWY

rumouring resurrection

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 18 (August 5^th) 2018

READINGS:

2 Samuel 18: 5-9, 15, 31-33

Psalm 130

Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2

John 6:35, 41-51

There are current movements, consciousness-raising movements, in our society that I believe are deep stirrings of the Spirit of God. The work of the Spirit reaches far beyond the confines of the Church. She was, after all, the one who “hovered over the face of the deep,” the one who, as James K. Baxter puts it, “blow[s] like the wind in a thousand paddocks.”

In stressing her work beyond and ahead of the Church I don’t refer to the secular movements such as mindfulness, or the passion in the last decade for “mission statements,” all those nonsenses that are generally psycho-babble and business-babble. Those are too often rites and foci that are processes borrowed from Christian traditions and then denuded of all reference to God.

I refer rather to movements that have advanced ahead of the Christian community, showing love, compassion and justice at times when we are left wringing our hands, wondering about how to advance past our next financial crisis, or finding new ways to make those not within our community feel worse about themselves than they may or may not do already.

One wonderful movement of God’s Spirit in society is the movement known in Australia as “Beyond Blue”; in New Zealand and elsewhere it hasn’t a catchy programmatic title, but is the movement around the world to raise consciousness about the struggles of those suffering depression, and simultaneously remind us all that there is help available when all seems too heavy to go on. In New Zealand of course the popular face of the movement is that of Sir John Kirwan. The campaigns are powerful vehicles of hope to all who struggle with depression and other mental illnesses, the immediate sufferer and his or her family and friends. They remind us all, sufferers or not, that we are not alone. John Kirwan I believe deserves every iota of his knighthood and other accolades. 

There will be few of us untouched by mental health, and in particular by depression, though the shades of mental health and depression are often intertwined. For many centuries church and society acted hand in hand, stigmatizing and deploring those who struggle with and especially those who succumb to mental health issues. But these days we have grown to better understanding. We are learning to reach out. As I said last week: are you okay are powerful words.

When we see in the Scriptures Jesus reaching out across the abysses of social stigma to touch those who are ostracized, we are seeing God’s love, God’s compassion incarnated. In Jesus God’s love is made visible for those struggling with the chemical imbalances that generate all mental illness. We are reminded that it’s okay to seek help, and it’s okay (and more) to offer help.

It’s probable than many of us here can hear echoes of moments in our own life journey as the psalmist cries out in today’s psalm. I make no secret of the fact that there has been more than one moment in my own journey, without wanting to sensationalise matters, where I have felt that those around me would be better off without me. 

They are long past now, but that is not the case for everyone. Only weeks ago I heard that an old school friend had taken his own life, and was saddened to hear what I had not known, that he had battled with depression for years. I say again: I am reminded over and over that as Christ-bearers and indeed simply as decent human beings the words “are you okay?” are amongst the most powerful in our satchel. They were words that kept me from the brink during some dark times. They are words that we must learn to utter – and follow up on – as we attempt, enabled by God’s Spirit, to be the hands and feet and body and blood of Jesus, to be living bread of life because our risen Lord is living bread of life, to be living bread in the world into which we have been called.

When the psalmist cries out from the depths across the universe it is still with vestiges of hope; “with the Lord there is steadfast love.” Sometimes, inexplicably even that hope dissipates. Interestingly, in Psalm 51, which we read last week, the psalmist cries: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Paradoxically it is God, God in Jesus, Godself in the very depths of divine being that cries those words from the cross. 

The scriptural authors went to great trouble to communicate the inconceivable belief that God’s light and life and hope as revealed in Jesus reaches even into that experience of utter god-forsakenness. It is God-self, God present and revealed in Jesus, who cries out to an empty universe. Were that the end of the story our narrative of hope would be hope-less indeed. We would remain, as Paul put it, crushed, perplexed, with no in-breaking of light and life at the end of the tunnel and the end of all tunnels. But we are not called to be a people of hopelessness.

The God who dies on the cross breaks out of death. This is beyond our comprehension. Perhaps all we should try to comprehend is that the disciples, the women and the first witnesses after the women, were dumbfounded by the events of the first Easter morning, yet they went on to risk and, in many cases, sacrifice their lives to tell the story. He is risen. If we seize against all odds and hold to against all odds our “amen,” to that affirmation, if we become the walking, talking amen, the ratification and even embodiment of the light and life bringing joy of the resurrection, if we rejoice in the resurrection that is affirmed in almost every syllable of our liturgies, then we can be the magnets to Jesus that he calls us to be. 

That is why in eucharist we take the strange action of ingesting that which we are commanded to believe is body and blood for us. By doing that, we absorb as it were life-giving energies of the resurrecting and resurrected, sorrow and even death-transcending God. We can deaden our message of hope if we perpetrate only doubts and barriers of innumerable kinds to the community around us. Let us instead make it our prayer that we be the resurrection-rumouring people of God in Wakatipu – or wherever we might be.

TLBWY

being bread in the world

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 18 (August 5^th) 2018

READINGS:

2 Sam 11.26 – 12.13a

Ps 51.1-12

Eph 4.1-16

John 6.24-35

I avoided David last week, though it is worth noting that as a murderer he rates as one of the most abject sinners of the biblical witness. Psalm 51, if not written by David, certainly captures the essence of a failed human being recognizing his need for divine, unmerited, life-restoring grace. For those of us who have not ever laid claim to a blameless life, the words ring powerfully true:

Have mercy on me, O God,
    according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
    blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
    and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions,
    and my sin is ever before me.

Sadly the Church, in many of its forms from left to right, liberal to conservative, has forgotten the radical nature of the grace that David’s abject fall and divine restoration represent. Those from left to right, from liberal to conservative, who have turned God into either a domestic plaything or a distant abstract concept, those who play self-interested games with the gospel tend to forget how powerful, or as John Newton and later Philip Yancey emphasized, how amazing divine grace is.

Grace and restoration are no get out of gaol free ticket. Where civil law contradicts the tenets of our faith by perpetrating injustice and other evils, we are invited by the gospel to civil disobedience and peaceful protest. Otherwise the gospel demands that we adhere to standards and expectations of our given societies’ law. But what of this grace, as depicted in the psalm and in the story of David? 

For a moment let’s not dwell too much on the narrative tragedy of the death of the son of David. The low life expectancy of David’s era provided ample opportunity to believe the punitive wrath of God was at work in myriad ways, and caution is needed if we apply the interpretations of his time to our own. God does not kill babies. But the greater, timeless message is that grace is a measureless invasion of God’s life-redeeming love.

This is not, I emphasize, the sort of airy wave of a hand that has seen sexual predators protected from due justice across the churches. Churches must submit themselves to the authority of a Royal Commission in New Zealand as they eventually did in Australia. Grace is not about the continued protection and employment of predators, but about restitution even of the most despicable human beings after dues have been paid and sentences served. Grace is about ensuring that potential victims are protected and actual victims recompensed as best as is humanly possible. But thereafter, grace is about healing the human heart. Much of its meaning may even dwell beyond our sight, beyond our understanding in those unfathomable realms we loosely call “eternity.” Divine grace is bigger than human deaths.

It has to be so. To believe less, or to dismantle the possibility of healing and redemption, is to leave evil and sin in a state in which it dominates the love and redemption that is at the heart of God. The David story tells us, unfortunately in quite brutal ways, of a God who does not breezily wave a hand at sin and evil, but who demands that perpetrators face their actions. The gospels may have something important to say about restorative justice, but not about some limp and meaningless avoidance of questions of evil.

Christ-followers must hold on to the belief, no matter how difficult it is in an age of disregarded intellect and celebrated infotainment, that God is in control of cosmic and of human history. To believe less is to trivialize the gospel. We must incorporate into our faith the difficult demands of forgiveness, but we must not ignore the demands of judgement. The litmus test for us must be the life and actions and teachings of Jesus. Jesus refused to breezily wave away sin and responsibility, especially as perpetrated by religious hypocrites, but set about restoring the hope of those victimised by society and its prejudices.

 

The challenge for us is to find ways to be Christlike. This is a challenge that can only be met, as we put it in liturgies, by the help of God. We daily participate in and perpetrate an unjust world, and need the help of God to see and redress that. Only as we open ourselves up to the Spirit of the God who is revealed in Christ can we be a people who practise sensible judgement – or at least its more human shadow form, sensible analysis and evaluation. We are called to practise this in the world in which God has called us to live. We are called to sensible action to redress the wrongs, the sin around us. With the help of God we can become signs of those justice-principles that God calls us to be.

We live on a small stage. Nevertheless, however small the stage, we need to practise forgiveness and reconciliation, up-building, edifying love, mutual support and encouragement on that small stage, finding our small part to play. We must be informed participants in the world around us, naming injustices. We must be signs (as the great bearers of God, even King David, were to become) of God’s concern for the hurting. With God’s help and informed dialogue we can learn to avoid knee-jerk and uninformed responses to personal, local, and international events. Instead we can use our strange but profound traditions and scriptures as lenses through which to bear Christlight in our community: sowing love where there is hatred, peace where there is discord – we know the prayer.

As Paul put it to the Corinthians, “as often as we eat this bread, and drink this cup, we proclaim Christ’s death until his coming again.” Our task is to receive this bread charged with the meaning of God’s reconstituting love. But our task also is to be that love, to be God’s bread  in God’s world. Our task is to look beyond a world obsessed with itself and its own entertainment or self-aggrandisement. Our task, as Jon Sobrino reminded us, consists in making “someone else’s pain our very own” and allowing that pain to move us to respond to their need and the unjust structure that created it.

Our task, aided by God’s Spirit, is to be a people who know that if God’s love, revealed in Christ, active and effective in Christ’s life and death and resurrection, can touch and warm and transform us, so it can through our lives touch and warm and transform lives around us, even despite us. Our task is to become bread, Christ’s living bread to those around us. Our task is to be the hands and feet and body and blood of transforming Jesus in the world in which God has placed us. We will do so imperfectly, but assuming our imperfections are not predatory or criminal, and that we turn repentant again and again to the God who transforms us, then we can be the signposts God wants us to be.

TLBWY

sand-papering the match ball of faith

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 17 (July 29^th) 2018

READINGS:

2 Sam 11.1-15

Psalm 14

Ephesians 3.14-21

John 6.1-21

Even when I (briefly!) moved in fundamentalist Pentecostal circles, in the late 1970s, I felt deeply uncomfortable when I heard this psalm, and its near-counterpart in Psalm 53. It was delivered as a sort of spiritual QED, the definitive put-down to anyone who does not believe there is a God. Even in those heady first flushes of faith I felt uneasy. I had been an atheist, and admired then as I continue to admire today those who’s committed searching leads them to conclude that there is not and cannot be a God.

This is not the same as lazy disinterest. This is the weighing up of probability and eventual decision that, despite the complexity of the question, we must decide that we are going to live on in a universe without a Creator, without any external source or guide. It is a brave finding, and one in the end that I was and am unable to maintain. To those atheists I apologize that solitary texts have been torn from their context by adherents of Christian traditions, used as a weapon in a war of spiritual dogma.

The context of this psalm was far more complex that such sneering dismissal of atheism indicates. The psalmist was writing for those for whom there was no question that there is a God. His QED is more akin to what I would prefer to deliver to those who continue to practice within the context of faith, but who dismantle the faith of those around them. Such people declare that, for example, there is no such thing as resurrection (and you have heard me on that before) or that “God” is no more than a useful construct of human intellect.

While I am not altogether a believer in hell, I could despatch such as these to the Judecca, the deepest human realm of Dante’s Inferno. There they would meet with those who have used religious prestige to persecute and prey on the vulnerable. I am in good company: Saint Paul poured contempt on those who considered themselves strong enough in faith to trample on the beliefs of those more vulnerable, more dependent on God and God’s grace (see e.g. the heavy sarcasm of 2 Cor 12.9-12, 13.9). Resurrection may not be comprehensible, and never was, but to stand within a community of faith and debunk it from pulpits and other soapboxes (very different to expressing personal and understandable doubts) is a crime far more despicable than professing a love of cricket while sand-papering the match ball.

Contemporary evildoers akin to those of the psalm, then, are not atheists, but those who stand within a faith-filled world-view and then dismantle the faith and hope of believers. To stand with a family who have lost a child and declare only a bleak and empty universe, when such a family are clinging to some hope of future reunion, this is betrayal. It is not the same as standing and with those who have no other-worldly beliefs.  There are other ways for non-believers to find hope amidst grief, and we can affirm their search, with love.

Our psalm can be allied in a similar way to religious leaders who use their power within a faith-institution to build up their own wealth, prestige or sexual gratification. This is common, and is deeply evil. Those who exploit the poor with imposed prosperity gospels (be faithful to my version of God and grow rich), who impose tithing (a bitter distortion of Hebrew Scriptural teachings), those who use religious influence to gain sexual gratification, these are deeply evil; these are the focus of our psalm.

Such as these stand, as biblical commentator Hans-Joachim Krauss eloquently put it, under the “scrutinizing look of God.” Unless we completely cauterize our hearts and souls (and many, sadly do) that scrutinizing look is an uncomfortable place to stand. For those that do cauterize their souls I suggest there may be some awkward truths in the doctrine of divine judgement. That doctrine is often conveniently dismantled by those same people, modern day Sadducees.

Our primary task is to scrutinize our own lives. What in me is hypocritical, abusive, predatory? I’m not going to tell you! Yet I must always turn Krauss’s “scrutinizing look of God” on myself. What in me takes a chance on the universe and acts as if there is no scrutinizing look of God? Can I, having deadened that searing scrutiny, then exploit, abuse, pillage without fear of judgement? The truly great atheist, agnostic, Hindu or Muslim can utilise the same criterion. What in me exploits, abuses, pillages, lives comfortably at the expense of the comfort and security of others around me or others yet to come? Psalm 14 put that question to us, not to the authentic adherent of other faiths or none. Psalm 14 challenges hypocrisy, not, as was implied when I moved in fundamentalist circles all those years ago, honest dis- or unbelief.

Our liturgy implies that. This is why we undergo a representative rite of confession before we break open the word – or, I suggest in Lent and Advent, after we have broken open the word. We have undertaken that symbolic rite today. So where now – if for a moment we accept that we have opened our lives to the scrutinizing look of God?

The psalmist recognizes that the prevalence of religious hypocrisy should throw us back on our knees. He challenges us to pray that God will exorcise the double standards in our own lives. In liturgy we go on to enter a sort of pre-enactment of the grace-filled world to which God’s energies are drawing us, the world in which we gather with all redeemed sinners and hypocrites around the table of God.  We gather knowing that God is drawing us towards that glorious, all-inclusive eternity. The processes remain mystery und unfulfilled as yet, but we will remember that we personally are unworthy and need a whole lot of fine-tuning in our lives. We should remember and lament too that there is some spectacular evil-doing still continued in the name of Christ, not least by those who use the name of Jesus to exploit others to buy their Lear jets, or build their mansions, or satisfy their depraved appetites.

Having pre-enacted that completion we will offer our flawed selves, “soul and body,” to go out in the world and live out God’s love and justice. To the author of Ephesians that means we go out, having “bent our knees to the Father” and touched “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” We go out to be channels of the power not of our own egos but of “him who is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” Then and only then can our self-sacrificing love begin to be that love that feeds the bellies and the souls of the thousands who are hungry on the hillsides of human existence.[1] May we go out cleansed of all hypocrisy and renewed in the faith of Christ.

TLBWY

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[1] See – I did preach on the gospel passage!

Mad Mary

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

FEAST of St. MARY MAGDALENE (July 22nd) 2018

READINGS:

Song of Solomon 3.1-4

Psalm 42.1-10

2 Corinthians 5.14-17

John 20.1-2, 11-18

There has been much written and spoken about a predominantly Christian, perhaps Jewish too, reticence if not terror of the energies of sexuality. On a scale of reading interest Christian books on sexuality, certainly back in the days when I worked in a Christian bookshop, rated alongside books about flossing.

They were the better ones: others merely reinforced the subjection of women to the will of their male partners, reminding them that it was only in practising something called “submission” that they could find true worthiness as women. Police and social workers three, four decades later have a different way to describe the experience of many married women of that era. The scar tissue of many women is such that belief in a loving God became impossible because the brutality of oppressive partners shouted down all dreams of nurture and of enrichment.

That I should raise the issue at all on the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene highlights a twisted history of Christian interpretation, or “hermeneutics” as it becomes named in academic circles. The fact that a woman from whom demons were driven comes to be, by the Mediaeval era at the latest, associated with prostitution says more about the interpreters and controllers of Christian thought than it does about the woman Mary of Magdala, or indeed women in general.

Mary of Magdala gets sucked into a vortex that declares women must be either virgins or whores, and historical role models for women tended to nestle uneasily at one or the other of those extremes. In fact we know nothing much about Mary of Magdala beyond two immeasurable facts: one that Jesus clearly loved her deeply, and two, that this faceless woman becomes the first in human history to proclaim the rumour that is at the heart of Christian faith: “I have seen the Lord.”

My suspicion – or perhaps I project too much of my own damaged psyche? – is that the Judaeo-Christian fear of womanhood, embodied in part in our treatment of Mary Magdalene, reveals far more about ourselves, or at least our hetero-sexual male-selves, than we care to admit. Lovers of film, literature, or French culture will know that the French use the phrase “la petite mort” to describe a serious aspect of human experience. You will know too that my cautious circumlocution (or beating round the bush) at this moment is living proof that I like many of us feel uneasy in talking about human sexuality in the context of liturgy and faith and worship.

I suggest in fact that “la petite mort” and liturgy are both wonderful foretastes of the eternities that dwell ahead of us. Literary philosopher Roland Barthes argues that la petite mort is what we should experience when we read fine literature. To me it is certainly no stretch to apply that notion to liturgy too. Billy Joel’s more mundane phrase “to forget about life for a while” possibly alludes to something similar (less eschatological, perhaps). But for me all these experiences hint at the inexpressible joy of an eternal existence in the presence of the Risen Christ, where the light of the eternal city is the Glory of God. That experience begins with Mary Magdalene’s famous pronouncement: “I have seen the Lord.”

What history has done to this remarkable woman, this first proclaimer of the unique event of The Resurrection, is to turn her into some sort of sanitised sinner. When Jesus Christ Superstar came out in the 1970s it was panned in some circles for suggesting there was some degree of hanky-panky between Jesus and this woman – or this conflation of women – but my response has long been “meh.”

That Jesus and Mary alike were sexual human beings is obvious. What they or anyone else did with that great divine gift of being human is strictly their business not ours. But the brutal application of a lens of saint or sinner, Madonna-virgin or street-wise whore to this woman probably does as much as anything to explain why two generations of human beings are absent from our pews, and why we are so woefully out of touch as an institution, with the mainstream of our society.

Whoever Mary was, and whatever her relationship with Jesus was, she GETS the Resurrection. I don’t think at this point, as some theologies suggest, that in her mourning she held a committee meeting and passed a motion saying that we’d better get on with doing whatever it was that Jesus was doing, bible-bashing or cleaning up waterways, to choose two extremes popular in different wings of Anglican Christianity.

No. Mary was seized, transfixed, and then empowered beyond social paradigms and beyond human sociology, empowered to be the first witness to the impossible.

That the Risen Jesus chose her may partly reflect his highly charged love for her, but more importantly it affirms what Paul was trying to express in his letter to the Corinthians as we read a couple of weeks ago: God chose the foolish in the world to shame the wise (1 Cor 1.27).

Mary had no credibility as a witness in first century Palestine. Regardless of any details of her sexual history, she was a woman, alone, her word uncorroborated by any passing bearer of Y chromosomes. Yet Jesus chose her. “God chose the weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, that which is not, to reduce to nothing things that are so that no one might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor 1.27-28). God chose irrationality. God chose Mary.

Resurrection is not rational. Our response for two thousand years has generally been to impose rationality and logic and lifelessness and power paradigms on the texts of our faith, silencing Mary. Our response has been to rely on hierarchical power structures that exclude the vulnerable and the broken, that exclude mainly, but not only women, that exclude the confused and the misused and the abused and, as Dylan put it, “the mistitled prostitute.”

Weeping Mary Magdalene stands as a powerful symbol, a potent reminder that human integrity and authenticity, not hierarchical power (or dare I say it a purple shirt and silly pointy hat) stand at the heart of the Good News of Resurrection. For Mary Magdalene was the first, and she went and proclaimed “I have seen the Lord,” and while we are still sceptical and cling to our power structures, her rumour is still reverberating against all odds around the universe.

TLBWY

which dance?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 15 (July 15th) 2018

READINGS:

2 Samuel 6.1-5, 12b-19

Psalm 24

Ephesians 1.3-14

Mark 6: 14-29

I’m not sure that a person walking into our church today, armed with no prior knowledge of the scriptures of our faith, would feel enticed by the gospel we attempt to proclaim. Two readings depict cynical and destructive human nature with such eloquence that we might feel nothing more than reinforcement of the despair, or near-despair, that emanates from almost every daily news-cast.

For when the great Jewish peasant-king David dances in ecstasy before the Ark of God, Princess Micah, who once loved David deeply, now responds only with cynicism and loathing. Strangely she had good reason.

Let’s not make this a gender-based scene. It is so easy to loathe, so easy and tragic to allow love to turn to hate. It should be said, in fairness to this all but unknown Hebrew woman, that she has good reason to hate the man she once loved, for his treatment of her is at best ordinary, at worst abhorrent. But hatred kills the human soul.

We learn in the passage that follows ours that the dance of David in our strange scene was so ecstatic and manic that he forgot the limited power of robes to conceal the graphic details of the human form (he says, discretely!). Princess Michal had good reason to look on and scorn the man whose life she once saved, the man she once loved (1 Sam 18.20). He treated her badly. Love is a risk.  

But for the purposes of our story we might just recognize that in this moment David was so ecstatic, so manic in his love for God, that all propriety is lost. Perhaps we should dwell somewhere in the balance between propriety and ecstasy, but for a moment let us just be reminded that it is possible to be so awed, so overwhelmed by the experience of God that we lose sight of proportionality. Perhaps, if only for a moment, let us forget the back-story of Princess Michal’s wounded heart, and see only that she has seen something she does not understand, and shut down her heart contemptuously.

For the risk is that we too can do that too easily, seeing and scorning and “dissing” the views and enthusiasms and ecstasies of others. Too easily we make our own experience the criterion, the normative, by which all else is judged. When we do this we shut ourselves off from the learning experiences we might gain from seeing the art and love of God at work in people and cultures and even faiths that we do not understand.

But we have a second dancer. The obscene dance of Herodias’ daughter Salome has been powerfully depicted in the arts, especially, as some of you will know, by Richard Strauss, by Gustave Flaubert, and especially by Oscar Wilde. It is a brutal twist on the theme of honey trap, a cruel reminder that sexuality and seduction are among the Achilles heels of humanity. It is a deeply disturbing New Testament scene.

Yet sometimes we need to be disturbed – as we reminded ourselves at Pentecost when we sang in praise of the disturbing Spirit of God, the “enemy of apathy” who hovers over the waters of creation. As we watch the extent to which some forms of Christianity have been seduced by power and privilege, dancing with programmes of hatred and exclusion, we might pause to realize how easy it is to become Herod. He wrings his hands pathetically as he is seduced to immeasurable evil by the machinations of his enraged and vengeful wife (and let’s remember to rise above gender stereotypes, here, too.)

Trump’s supporters remind us that it is far too easy to distort the gospel to a dance of self-interested privilege. Too easily we create a white pseudo-Jesus, false-Jesus. To easily we condemn those we don’t like to live in poverty, exposing them to receive brutal racist attacks, or turning a blind eye, as Europe’s Christians did in the 1930s, as the vulnerable are taken away by brown-shirts or their modern equivalents in the night.

It can all seem so far away. Yet though we live on the other side of the world we need to make sure our attitudes or even our complacencies don’t subscribe to an evil dance. To make sure we don’t, we need to look again and again at the attitudes and teachings and actions of the real Jesus. The real Jesus constantly reaches across divisions of hatred and exclusion, walks with and talks with and heals the underprivileged and the powerless and the broken and the outsider.

It’s not too much of a distortion of our texts to remind ourselves that the author of Ephesians gives us a strong hint, a clue as to how we can be bearers of real Jesus. For the relationship with Jesus begins with grace, an undeserved gift, not privilege.

It begins, continues, and ends with our not being good enough. It begins and continues and ends with the knowledge that we too can be callous Davids. That great king of the Jews is to say the least an ambivalent servant of God. We can be hurting Michals, scheming Herodiases. We can be seducing Salomes, dancing a honey trap (or, in the interests of equality, let’s remember too, the predators who have used power imbalance as their trap). We can be hand-wringing Herod Antipas, who leaves the prophet that he admires hung out to dry and die.  

Our challenge is to reach, as Jesus did, and always with the help of the Spirit of Jesus, to reach across the abyss, with actions and with words, to those who are hurting, broken, excluded.  Who are they? Even in Queenstown they are all around us. We might even risk asking God to show us.

If we do enough as individuals, as church, as servants (as we will shortly sing in Richard Gillard’s “Servant Song”), if by the Spirit of God we reach out with Christ-light in the night-time of human fear, then we will be dancing the dance of God. There is no guarantee that there will not be the cynical glares of those we have hurt in the past, as Princess Michal was hurt, but our dance of faith may rumour resurrection hope in empty lives. 

That’s the dance that we are called to perform. Can we even envisage being so ecstatic, so manic in love for God, that all propriety is lost? Yet this our God is the God whose promise, far beyond our small ken, is eternity. Perhaps we can learn to dance God’s “yes” to all that God made, all that God pronounced good, all that is. Perhaps we can learn to dance with God.

TLBWY