faith amidst hate?

SERMON PREACHED at EVENSONG

St PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, DUNEDIN

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (March 17^th) 2019

READINGS:

• Jeremiah 22: 1-9, 13-17
• Psalm 135
• Luke 14: 27-33

In the various apocalyptic writings of Christian and Jewish faith lurid images of destruction occur over and again. In a cynical post-Enlightenment world we tend to dismiss them, relegate them to idiot fringes. Many religious leaders generate destruction by abusing apocalyptic writings, propping up cynical self-interests and power structures. Apocalyptic is a articular genre, designed to bring hope to those who are suffering. Denude it of its coordinates of suffering and it can become one more page of hatred, like the supremacist narratives of hate that turned into the slaughter of fifty people in Christchurch his past week. Destruction. Hate. These are weapons of evil. The actual purpose of biblical apocalyptic was very different, no matter how it has come to be abused.

Biblical (and other) narratives of apocalyptic were designed to critique evil. They critiqued narratives of hate, narratives that demonise otherness, narratives of xenophobia. But they have been distorted by religious leaders in every given time in which Christian and other religious leaders and practitioners have become a full of their own exceptionalism and self-importance. In Christchurch we saw religionless hatred dressed up in a manifesto of supremacy. It is no different.

Hatred is hatred, and it is our task to ensure hatred and its reverberating “no” is not the final word. Our task is to proclaim active, outspoken love, to whisper God’s mysterious “yes.”

Hatred is hatred. Even before the unspeakable atrocities of the Al Noor mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre, hatred and abuse were dominating news cycles. Across the ditch Australian Cardinal Pell is beginning a gaol term from which, however lenient some think it, he may never emerge alive (if probable appeals are unsuccessful). Royal Commissions on both sides of the Tasman have been, are or will be exposing heart-chilling betrayal and predation within religious organizations.

Sure: it is not only religious bodies and narratives that have betrayed the vulnerable. Michael Jackson is a tragic reminder that money blinds even parental eyes. Roman Polanski, Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Bill Cosby, a roll call of abuse, remind us that many corridors have housed and protected evil. Debra Lafave, if we Google her, reminds us that predation is about power not gender.  And now forty-nine people are dead in Christchurch; hatred is hatred, and all acts of sexual abuse and xenophobic terrorism are attempts to eradicate the lights of love and hope about which we too languidly sing and pray.

Lists of perfidy should never have included ostensible bearers of Christ. Yet Christian structures of power and authority, Catholic, Anglican, Protestant and Pentecostal alike, have been for centuries formidable Petrie dishes of predation. We have at best merely mumbled in the face of evil.

Lent is a fine time to repent and change and act in the name of Jesus, the Christ who lived and died to dismantle power and hate.

Jesus stood deliberately in the footsteps of Jeremiah. Jeremiah, the iconoclastic prophet who turned his rage on the politico-religious leadership of his day. Jeremiah, who like Jesus after him put into the mouth of his God and ours fearsome words that we gloss so easily: “I swear that I will make you a desert, an uninhabited city.” Today they are words spoken to the global north, or as we used to call it, “first” or “western” world. We the community of the homeless messiah have aided and abetted narratives of corruption, abuse, and death. We as pray-ers and singers, as Christ-bearers of varied beliefs do not escape the prophet’s brutal gaze.

Jeremiah turned on the self-consciously holier-than-thou practitioners, the elite religious castes of his day and spat his rancid words: “In the prophets I saw a disgusting thing …”.

In the case of Pell and others the same religious leaders who have noisily barred those seeking love and companionship from the experiences of inclusion in the Christ community have themselves perpetrated sexual abuse, and our structures protected the perpetrators. In the case of Al Noor and Linwood we have not spoken out to counter waves of hatred directed at our Muslim sisters and brothers. Our silence chastises us.  Jeremiah’s finger is pointed fearlessly, timelessly and especially at our religious bodies today. We have harboured predators, and have remained silent in the face of hate.

There is no room for complacency, as the Royal Commission will soon remind us in the case of the predation, and Al Noor and Linwood tells us in the face of hatred.

At which point there appears very little attraction to persevere with a faith, let alone an institution, that has nurtured so dark a hypocrisy. Where is God, when evil has been so deep? This Lent perhaps more than any other I find my replies to that question, called in academic circles the “theodicy question,” are stuttered. George Pell … Brenton Tarrant … Where is hope?

And yet … and yet … “Oh love that will not let me go …”

I stumble on.

Jesus’ speaks to us even as our institutions rightly crumble and the shibboleths, the false gods that TS Eliot called “the old certainties” collapse. Unless we heed the bare, raw, frightening yet eventually comfort-filled words of Jeremiah and Jesus we will not eradicate abuse, predation or xenophobia.

The cross: take it up. Raw, bloodied, unimaginably stripped of pretention, romance, power, or prestige. Take it up, says Jesus, and stumble with me. In following his broken, powerless footsteps we find love that conquers: O love that will not let me go. We find hate-conquering resurrection belief though it seems like nonsense to ears that will not hear, hearts that will not feel, eyes that will not see beyond the limits of the rational. In the powerless broken footsteps of Jesus we find the way to hope that whispers that neither George Pell nor Michael Jackson, Brenton Tarrant nor Anders Breivik, Osama bin Laden or Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi have the final word on life and death.

Take up a cross, Jesus said, with the aid of him who has been there, staggered with it, and there breathed judgement and hope into sin and suffering. Take it up, but unlike the predators who have abused it, used it, (in some case literally) as a weapon of victimization, stay with its renunciation of power. Only then and there do we find the healing resurrection touch of the Easter God.

all welcome here? yeah, right.

SERMON PREACHED at St LUKE’S, MOSGIEL

ORDINARY SUNDAY 7 (24^th February) 2019

READINGS:

            Genesis 45: 3-11, 15

Psalm 37: 1-11, 39-40

1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50

Luke 6:27-38

In letters written to the Corinthian Christians, Paul drew one line more prominent than any other in the sand. No resurrection: no gospel. As some will have heard, some years ago, when I was Dean of Waiapu, I sat aghast as a clerical colleague drew, fortunately for a tiny mid-week congregation, an eloquent case for dismissing any belief in resurrection in the narrative of the Christian community.

He began with a satirical attack on the doctrines of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, mocked their (now somewhat modified) teachings regarding the salvation of 144,000 faithful, then moved on to maintain that any idea that those we love or we ourselves could believe in any doctrine of afterlife is nonsense. Sadly, I was so deeply winded, spiritually speaking, that I sat in flabbergasted silence. Thoughts of Paul’s fierce defence of the doctrine of resurrection reverberating in my speechless mind.

I am reminded of that moment today, not only because our Corinthians passage is one in which Paul turns to the centrality of the death and resurrection of Jesus, but because Jesus himself is dwelling on images of largesse, of the responsibility of his followers to offer more than mere equivalence to the actions and thoughts of those amongst whom God calls us to dwell. Jesus calls us, as bearers of his name, as disciples, to surpass the expected, to go beyond the merely normal.

In these sayings Jesus is focussing on the pragmatisms of succour (coats) and of restorative (as against retributive) justice (slaps). Elsewhere Jesus demands extra miles, and reminds us to give fish, not stones, bread, not scorpions, to the hungry.

In a confused world where truth is called fake news and old certainties have crumbled it is not the task of Christian preachers to dismantle the central tenets of our faith. Perhaps as he wrote to the recalcitrant and faith-corrupted Corinthians Paul had in mind the Jesus-sayings about generosity and largesse, applying them to the hope at the heart of Christian doctrine. Fish, or stone? Hope, or despair? Paul warned those who deny the resurrection that they are more to be pitied than all people. Deny the central doctrine of faith and we betray the very core of Christ-following, and offer the world only hopelessness and darkness for hope and light, exclusion for embrace. Do we offer bread, or a scorpion to God’s world?

So I want us for a moment to be outside the church we (mainly) love, outside the institution in which we live looking in. What entices, what impels, what forbids?

Perhaps let’s look at it a different way. It is a bitterly cold Otago night. We have been cast for whatever reason from the warmth of our home and fireplace – perhaps our car is broken down as we drive from Invercargill to Picton. We glance through glass doors at a lively group gathered in an unfamiliar room, laughing, talking around a table, sharing a drink and fine food. Between us and the door – a notice on which assures us we are welcome – there is vast impenetrable chasm. It could be anything. A salivating rottweiler, a racial divide, a dress code. All are welcome, except those who do not fit. With heavy hearts we turn away and trudge into the night.

As we watched momentarily from outside we could hear what was being said inside. A figure, well-dressed, was speaking, enthusing vigorously about the love that is shared between those gathered in the room. Aren’t we good? “They will know we are Christians by our love,” he sang for a moment or two. Aren’t we a welcoming people? See how we love each other! The rottweiler growled, menacingly, as we turned and sadly walked into the winter’s night.

In his best-known book What’s So Amazing About Grace, the Christ-bearing writer Philip Yancey tells a tale about a prostitute. Asked why she has not sought help in her predicament by attending a Christian gathering, a church, she responds exclaiming that she feels bad enough about herself without entering a place where she will be made to feel worse. All are welcome here, so many Christian churches proclaim, except those not clean enough, literate enough, white enough, heterosexual enough, sober enough to enter. “Do not judge, and you will not be judged,” says Jesus. “Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.” And we don’t. Not in so many words.

And yet I wonder. I once knew a fine and dignified church in a place far from here. A young Māori woman walked in – she lived nearby and had often wondered what went on there. “Have you come to the right place?” a gentleman asked. Was it that she was Māori? Tattooed? Unfamiliar, other in some other way? What if she had come with a wife? In the same place during the week a man came looking for shelter from the weather. He’d had a drink or two, sure, but all he wanted was a place to rest awhile. He was moved along, unwelcome. “Give, and it will be given to you.” An eccentric woman with a bird on a shoulder was barred from communion. So too was a woman with a dog. You’re welcome, but only if you clone those of us cosily here already.

We tend to forget how foreign and even hostile a place we have become in a post Christendom society. As we approach Lent, we might ask some deep questions of ourselves. If there has been a work of the Holy Spirit – and I believe there has in recent years – it is that many of our false beliefs about ourselves have been exploded. Those who dress like us, believe like us, read what we read, all those are welcome here. But most of society doesn’t. Many of our behaviours have either been exposed as mere façades, or have been drowned out by our messages of intolerance: why would I go to church, says the prostitute at the opening scene of What’s So Amazing About Grace?

As a corporate body we have forgotten our brokenness. We have often rejoiced in our salvation, but forgotten our need for it at the beginnng. “I’ve been redeemed,” we sing and chant happily, emphasizing our singularity and our satisfaction. But our need for God’s touch? We’ve forgotten or never known it, parceled God into our lives as a habit or a convenience or a panacea or an insurance policy in case there’s a judgement and a hell. We have forgotten that the one who reaches across the abyss of the universe to edify our lives was the broken one, the hated one, the one who despite belonging in the place of the man of heaven, despite being the man of heaven, becomes for us the man of dust, real dust, real brokenness, and there touches our lives. Paul is saying something like that when he reminds the recalcitrant, self-satisfied Corinthians, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” God in Christ gets pretty dusty to meet and penetrate our dusty lives, and we forget that at great peril.

The Church community is by God’s Spirit being forced to reassess itself. Are we a place of welcome, a whare oranga in which all may feel the love-touch of resurrection hope? Let us in the week to come ask ourselves how we look from outside, ask the Spirit of God to remind us where we have created barriers, ask the Spirit of God to dismantle those barriers that assure the seekers and the broken and the not good enough neighbours that they are not welcome. For this table fellowship we share is not the Feast of Hope for the Good Enough, but the feast of those who know they are not good enough, yet even so are touched by the warmth and the love of the risen Lord

TLBWY

non-sense faith

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN, and

ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ALL SAINTS’ (November 4^th) 2018

(translated from November 1^st)

READINGS:

• Wisdom 3: 1-9
• Psalm 24
• Revelation 21: 1-6a
• John 11: 32-44

It was a pivotal moments that I will not forget. The gospel was read in the small chapel, and the proportionately small congregation sat down to hear my colleague, presiding priest for the day, break open the scriptures.

He began with a tale about Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on his door, and how we all knew that their reduction of the roll call for the Reign of God to 144,000 was fatuous.  We nodded in agreement. We nodded too as he made a few more points about Jehovah’s Witnesses. I have never been a huge fan of their theology, and though I wasn’t sure it was the time or the place the points were well made.

We were still nodding in happy agreement when said priest went on to affirm that of course we all knew that the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead was nonsense. I nodded happily. Then I realised what he had said. No, he maintained. It was obvious, he maintained, that if all followers of Jesus were in some way to rise from the dead there would not be room for them, so clearly this was nonsense.

How do you withdraw a nod? I sat with my most vacuous look for the next few minutes as he explained that we were all far more intelligent than those silly Christians who believed that boloney. I suspect I was still sitting with my jaw on the floor when he concluded, and we moved into a time of prayer and thanksgiving.

Prayer and thanksgiving for what and for why and to whom I wondered.

Perhaps there was a time when I would have agreed. I recall a brief window in my theological journey when I jettisoned all metaphysical dimensions to our faith. Our faith was a political program, liberate the oppressed, and that was it. The phase lasted a few weeks and died. It died because why bother? It died because what had seized my life some years earlier was not some political manifesto, though they are important, but an experience that, in the ilk of St Paul, I would call an encounter with the risen Christ. My life was not transformed by Karl Marx or Rachel Carson or I dunno, Robert Muldoon or Ronald Reagan or someone from the other side of politics.

Call it subjective fantasy if you like, and certainly the complexities of psychology come into it, but my coming to faith was not some sort of make-believe. It was powerfully experiential. Not everyone has the privilege that I have of a risen Christ invading my self-satisfied if crumbling time-before-faith. But I’m not sure that the magnificence of the God we encounter can be reduced to some sort of infantile loopiness, nor that contemporary Sadducees should steal the hope most human beings feel in the face of that greatest of oppressions, Death.

As I worked with Indigenous people in Australia and later with Māori here I became increasingly convinced that the narrow rationalism of western culture could be a real hurdle as we attempt to understand the radiance of the breadth and depth of God and God’s dealing with creation and humanity. We know so little! So often I hear a rationalist cry that my faith is a load of nonsense, that of course we know it’s nonsense, that it is irrational.

Increasingly I am unconvinced. So often I hear Christian practitioners themselves who, like the presiding priest with whom I began, feel the need to reduce the gospel to the measurements of their own mind. Fr David was telling me the other day of a golf professional who, when asked the width of a golf course, would answer “six inches,” that being the distance between the players’ ears. Wisdom, that.

There is a different wisdom-dynamic at work in the dimensions of faith. In faith the possibilities of God are beyond the distance from left ear to right ear travelling away from the skull. In faith the possibilities of God are as far as the east is from the west, as far as the journey to the boundaries of an expanding universe and beyond and back in a circuit to the place where the thoughts began. In faith the possibilities of God are infinite.

Yet they become localised in the life of the man of Nazareth, localised still more in the tiny symbols of bread and wine and the tiny words of scripture, and there begin to transform human lives. They become like the beat of a butterfly’s wing, infinitesimally small, yet they can reverberate through life and death and all eternity. They become the spark of hope that inspires men and women to sacrifice their lives in the service of a crucified God.

I think for example of the 20 Coptic martyrs of Libya who in 2015 refused under threat of death to deny their Christ, our Christ. So powerful was their witness to the unseen God, in the face of imminent execution, that a 21^st captive, Ghanaian Matthew Ayariga, declared “their God is my God,” and while it is uncertain whether he was a follower of Jesus beforehand, he elected in that moment to be executed with the Libyan Christians. One does not have the sense that he or they died for a fairy tale or for a piece of romantic nonsense that should be dismantled by those with more powerful minds. One has the sense that he died for a living, death-transcending Messiah of God who in death and in resurrection was revealed as Lord. They are numbered this day amongst the saints and martyrs who gather with us and all Christians as we pray.

Faced with a bevy of pseudo-followers of Christ, a group who had chosen to dismantle the message of resurrection because it was too hard to believe, Paul the Apostle angrily, or perhaps sadly pronounced “they are more to be pitied than all people.”

As the people of God – or a branch thereof – in the Wakatipu, while it is unlikely that we will be called upon to be martyred for our faith, we are called to so open ourselves up to the mysteries, the beyond rational mysteries of resurrection faith, that we cannot imagine life or death without him beside us and within us in our living and our dying. The saints who we celebrate this day are those who by the initiative of God have transformed rationality to faith. To be honest there are good, bad and ugly amongst them, as there probably is amongst any group of Christ followers and even within each of us as individuals. The process for recognizing and naming saints becomes a little bit silly at times.

Biblical doctrine suggests that all who are in Christ Jesus are the saints, made holy by his belief, his self-sacrifice, his faith. The idea is captured well by William Bright in his great and heartfelt hymn:

Look, Father, look on his anointed face,

and only look on us as found in him;

look not on our misusings of your grace,

our prayer so languid and our faith so dim;

for, set between our sins and their reward,

we see the cross of Christ, your Son, our Lord.

The saints continue to gather around us as we pray, make eucharist, and serve in God’s world. Their lives continue to serve to remind us of the power of a life transformed by faith, hope, love beyond rationality. The response to such miraculous lives is not to dismantle faith and its mysteries, but to allow our arrogance to be dismantled by God’s Spirit. May God help us so to do.

Amen.

***

NB. This will be my last regular sermon for a while as I conclude my interim ministry in the Wakatipu faith communities. This week I enter a new role as Diocesan Ministry Educator in the Diocese of Dunedin. 

My thanks to those amongst whom I have ministered in the Wakatipu, and before that the whanau at Te Pou Herenga Waka o te Whakapono; to my referees, to my friends, and family, who have have continued to support me through interesting times past, and to the Bishop and panel from this diocese who have entrusted this role to me.
Kia kaha. 

Be little Melchizedeks

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the COMMUNITY CHURCH, GLENORCHY

ORDINARY SUNDAY 29 (October 28^th) 2018

READINGS:

• Job 38: 1-7
• Psalm 104: 1-9, 24, 35c
• Hebrews 5: 1-10
• Mark 10: 35-45

In the powerful, often heavily ironic narrative of Job, our Lord challenges the arrogance even of a seemingly righteous human being, Job, who dares to question the actions and plans of God. This absolute right of God often becomes a flash point in theological debate. The sense that the author of Job has, and the prophet Jeremiah has, and that the apostle Paul has, that the actions and decisions of God are beyond reproach, are often deeply challenged. The response of the biblical God was  to lay down the challenge: “tell me, if you understand.” If we think we can second-guess the author of an infinitely expanding universe, biblical authors suggest, then we may just be growing a little big for our boots.

This is not a pastoral answer, nor designed as one. If we have lost a loved one, we do not need a platitudinous statement about the authority of God to do whatever God wants. Times of pastoral crisis are not the time for theological abstraction. Times of pastoral crisis are the time for the silence of love, for a smile, for a hug if the sufferer is a willing “huggee.” This is not to suggest that there are two Gods, a stern “I can do what I like God” and a caring, loving God. Times of suffering, when the bodies of refugees wash up on Mediterranean beaches, or asylum-seekers suicide in Nauruan hellcamps,  or when our loved ones dwell in city morgues, these are not the time for erudite theology. These are times for compassionate love. But as we journey through the scriptures we find an endless both/and. God is the God whose will is unfathomable, and God is the tissue silently offered to a weeping, bereaved mother.

The psalmist turns to the heavens and quivers in awe at the incomprehensibility of the author, the creator of their near-infinite vastness. Though I do not have a scientific cell in my body, I am aware of scientists’ growing glimpses of the complexity not only of vast and potentially parallel universes but of the infinitesimally small intricacies of atoms and their component parts. These complexities do not deaden but heighten  my sense of the impossible, unfathomable majesty of the Creator. When I used to stand beneath the desert skies in outback Australia I had no words for my awe. When I see the impossible beauty of a sunrise over the Remarkables I have no words for my awe. 

Yet this is the God who cares for the fall, as Jesus put it, of a sparrow. This is the God who I, for example, have experienced taken me through some incomprehensibly dark times (and mine are small league) in recent years, yet nudged me onwards to this point. This is the God who led me here to where I have found new energies and purpose, not least in the love that I have experienced in and amongst you people of this Parish of Wakatipu. The God whose hands fling stars across space, who is also the God, as Kendrick expresses it, whose hands in Christ are nailed to a cross, is the God who has brought me through my small crucible of fire and is now leading me to new challenges and ministries,. This God will one day will lead me through my own death, not necessarily a benign and pretty one, through my own dying and on to the incomprehensible realms of eternity (more, I think, than just a nitrogen cycle).

And though the author of Hebrews uses vastly complex imagery, this is, I believe, what she is beginning to tell us. She links the suffering priesthood of Jesus with the strange, shadowy priesthood of Melchizedek, then calls all of us to walk in those same warm footsteps of suffering and rising Jesus. Though her symbolism is often all but incompre­hensible to a twenty-first century believer, she is wrestling with the mystery of an infinite God who enters into the misery and grot of human life – far worse than the small darknesses I stumbled though in the past two or three years. This God enters human suffering and there breathes the magnificence of resurrection-life, however shadowy as yet. 

This is the God who renounces the glamour of the heavens, as it were, and enters into the struggling grot of being human. Perhaps I should re-emphasise: the small nastinesses I experienced over the past three years or so before I came to you are mere parentheses compared to the suffering experienced by those in the deeper darknesses of human experience, in Syria or Nauru, or trapped in cycles of chemical or economic despair. But the author of Hebrews is trying to tell us of the infinite God who cares enough to enter our small or great hell-holes and there breathe eternal hope, and will again even when our journeys lead us into the complexities of loss of life and love. For this God – whose majesty the psalmist praises to the heavens – is the God who “deals gently” with us, offers us love’s embrace in myriad forms, and leads us through doubt and despair to resurrection and its light.

And, in turn, we are called to be, however imperfectly, bearers of that light. We are called to be “little Melchizedeks,” caring for others in their need. The mysterious figure of Melchizedek, who became associated with high priesthood and with the high priesthood of Jesus, is originally encountered as a care-giver. That above all is the way by which we can breathe the mysteries of eternity in the lives of those around us. Two years ago, as some of you know, my life seemed to be crumbling around me. In the wisdom of God, the love of family and friends nudged me through those seemingly impenetrable darknesses. The God of infinity mysteriously orchestrated beacons of light for me, and I stumbled on. We  –  me too ­ –  are called to be light-bringers to others, to be blessing to those around us. May the God of infinity draw near and help us to be bearers of Christlight to all who we meet.

Amen.

We become what we meditate

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 25 (September 23^3d) 2018

READINGS:

Proverbs 31: 10-31

Psalm 1

James 3: 13 – 4:3, 4: 7-8a

Mark 9: 30-37

It is not often, even as a fairly liberal sort of a fellow, that I begin a sermon by quoting the Buddha. Actually Professor Google has made it a little difficult for me, and I am unsure whether the saying I want to quote originated with Gautama Buddha 2500 year ago or with twentieth century Buddhist teacher Eknath Easwaran. Either way, I first heard the saying from one of my earliest mentors, an Anglican monk, Alan Lewis, who indicated that he had borrowed it from Brother Roger of the Taizé Community. Since both Buddhist Eknath Easwaran and Protestant Brother Roger drew heavily on Roman Catholic and interfaith contemplative traditions it’s probably a sort of cosmic, universal truth:

We become what we meditate.

For what it’s worth I think the notion if not the actual words that we “become what we meditate” predates Gautama Buddha. The psalmist was probably about two hundred years before Buddha, and in any case the game of “the source of my wisdom is older than the source of your wisdom” can become one of those sorts of contests that I won’t name in a sermon but that males are allegedly very good at, and are probably best not undertaken when the wind is blowing. They represent an ancient wisdom, the sort of wisdom that C. S. Lewis’ Aslan is referring to when he observes that “though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know.” Or perhaps, since Aslan is an image of Christ, that is a deeper wisdom still, the wisdom of a crucified God. But the point remains: “we become what we meditate.”

What the psalmist and – roughly in chronological order – Buddha and Jesus and his ostensible brother James and Eknath Easwaran and Brother Roger and countless others are trying to tell us: where our treasure is, where our deepest moments of focus are, there will our heart also be. Walk not in the counsel of the wicked. And most of us can take a moment of self-congratulation, because on the whole we don’t hang out with too many wicked people, and on the whole our hearts are not allied with too immoral and decadent a treasure. We are all too aware, sadly, of the tales of predation and abuse that have emerged from around the world from within and beyond the Christian community, our consciences raised not least by the #MeToo movement, but most of us dwell reasonably comfortable in the range of not too great a sinfulness.

Stephen Colbert, incidentally, while interviewing David Tennant during a very funny, but disturbing segment recently, asked Tennant to read a series of Scrooge McDuck and Donald Trump quotes and identify which sayings came from which source. “My money’s the best friend I ever had” was a McDuck saying. Other sayings, such as “Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich” and “You’re fired. And don’t come back until you’ve discovered the joy of the enchantment, the sheer ecstasy of making big bucks,” were more difficult to source-critique. Neither “we become what we meditate” nor “do not lay-up treasures on earth” were attributable to either McDuck or Trump.

But money is not the only false god that can distract us from the task of becoming who we are called, formed, shaped to be. Within the Christian community there are many demons of distraction. Power, prestige, piety, to focus on just one letter of the alphabet, are seductive deviations from the Way of the Cross to which Jesus invites us. The scandals of sexual abuse that have emerged from around the Christian world are brutal examples of all that can go wrong when we permit ourselves to displace the self-effacing, power-rejecting Jesus from centre stage. Jesus himself of course, despite the attempts of some publicity-seeking Christian gimmick-mongers, rejects performances of power display, suggesting to Satan at the time of the Temptations exactly where he can get off. False gods are not the Way of the Cross, and the genuine power of Jesus will eventually be revealed not in neon lights or phoney miracles, but in brokenness on a criminal’s cross. As it happens wherever we turn the cross into a display of power and prestige we are abusing the gospel, spitting on Christ, parodying love, blaspheming the Holy Spirit.

There are other – only arguably lesser – forms of abuse. When faith becomes all about performance – still as it happens sticking with the letter “P” – a temptation particularly attractive to so-called liturgical traditions, but at least equally tempting to Pentecostal and charismatic leadership, then we become proclaimers of a false god. Our buildings, grounds, robes, reputations – all potentially fine and deserving of love in themselves – become, as Paul puts it, so much dross if they are not used in the service of that greater good, the proclamation of the divine love proclaimed to us and even to all the universe in the brutal, unspectacular, hope-proclaiming moment of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The psalmist, James, Jesus, and countless followers of that God-revealing tradition of self-denial speak with one voice. We become what we meditate. Walk not in the company of the ungodly – or ungodliness. Lay not your treasure on earth. Instead welcome the one who places a child in the midst of a crown and says “become powerless as this child is powerless.” Become a child – as indeed God-in-Christ becomes a child. Become powerless. It is there and thus that the eternities of God are revealed.

TLBWY

be opened

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 22 (September 9^th) 2018

READINGS:

• Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23
• Psalm 125
• James 2:1-10, 14-17
• Mark 7:24-37

Every now and again the readings seem to throw up combinations that are almost contradictory. How often I have seen churches and church institutions that have taken – I could say “mis-taken” – how often I have seen churches and church institutions that have taken Proverbs 22:1 to heart as a motto and a mission statement. (Have I ever mentioned how much I hate mission statements, sweated over for hours and then posted in a corner, to participants’ self-satisfaction, there to collect dust and be forgotten. Our mission statement is there in Matthew’s gospel account: “Go ... make disciples … baptize.”)

So there is a sense in which the claim of the author of the Proverbs (probably a collection of wise humans over many decades or centuries) can be played off against James: Show me your “good name … more desirable than great riches” and “I’ll show you my “if you show partiality, you commit sin.” Those who are obsessed with a “good name” are often obsessed with appearance, with looking good, with keeping noses and pews and record books squeaky clean. There are many church bodies and even church representatives, especially in allegedly “high places,” far more focussed on appearances and reputations than on being the loving welcoming hands and feet of Christ for all comers. One is reminded of the famous hospital with no patients of Yes Minister fame. For as long as the church is peopled with, concentrates on, those who are decked out  “with gold rings and …  fine clothes,” and none of the poor with dirty clothes, then it will tick the box of the authors of Proverbs, with fine desirability and repute, but will not be ticking the box of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The imagery of James can be taken literally and spiritually – many is the church that rejoices in its important standing in the community, the fine nature of its music and robes and buildings, but which turns away the hurting and the damaged who may disrupt its polished performances and procedures.

James, author of this right strawy epistle that Martin Luther so resented, recalibrates our spiritual and our moral compass. As church we should evaluate our mission by the presence of the broken. God knows we are all broken a little, or should be, but are we as an institution prepared to face our brokenness, to own up to and confess our sins, and to throw open our encounter with the living Christ to those who are the most broken in our midst?

Because what James has seen is what Jesus demonstrates in the sequences of healing actions that form so large a part of the gospel stories. Ephphatha. Be opened. Effectively: Be healed. Jesus does not show partiality – unless it is what the liberation theologians have long called a “bias to the poor” (and “poor in spirit”) – but exposes himself to hatred by caring for the un-beautiful and the raw and the vulnerable on the fringes of society. He ends up, at least in human terms, not with the “good name” of the author of Proverbs expectation, but with ostracism and crucifixion.

And there dwells the irony. For it is in being prepared to extend divine love to the most hated and broken – and we can only conjecture who they might be in our community, and indeed we should perhaps discuss that very question – it is in being prepared to extend divine love to the most hated and broken that Jesus gains or is recognized as having the “name above all names.” The authors of Proverbs did however see that: “The generous will themselves be blessed, for they share their food with the poor.” It is only by acting like the generous, self-risking Jesus that we can claim to be vehicles, bearers of the righteousness and hope (temporal and eternal) that he embodies. Only then, in stepping outside the realms of slick and polish do we become the “upright in their hearts” of the psalm.

TLBWY

deaf church, broken woman

SERMON PREACHED at St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 22 (September 2^nd) 2018

READINGS:

Song of Solomon 2: 8-13

Psalm 45: 1-2, 6-9

James 1: 17-27

Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-33

If you wondered why we end up with a hotchpotch selection of verses from a chapter in Mark it is because we are forced by our worship patterns to bend his writings into an unsuitable form. We have for several weeks been loitering with intent amongst the writings of John. His dense cyclical and poetic prose makes scene selections almost impossible. Similarly we now are confronted with the much more instinctive writer Mark. His different technique is to knit together fire-side yarns in a way that gave his original listeners a sense of the momentum of the journey of Jesus towards Good Friday (and eventual hints of the day of resurrection). His pace is relentless.

Mark takes stories, splits them open, somewhat clumsily at times, and inserts other stories into them. But, while he is an instinctive storyteller, he is like most story tellers, no fool. He always has his eyes on the implication of the Jesus moments he narrates. His insertions of stories within stories always serve not only to make their own narrative- or “story-point” but to expand and develop missiological points in the story: how then, he is always asking, should we behave? What priorities appear in these scenes?

In the verses we omit we find Jesus delivering some telling blows to the hypocrisy of religious leaders of his day. It appears that those who design the lectionary are wary of litigation, neatly sidestepping verses that might be used by preachers to expose double standards in places of religious leadership. Ironically the nuances of Jesus and Mark are probably wasted on those who exercise hypocrisy from ivory towers and carved seats of authority: in my experience hypocritical religious leaders never quite discern any way in which harsh sayings of Jesus might apply to them. But we are called to rise above hypocrisy.

Always a primary tool of interpreting the scriptures must be that of asking what the Spirit of God might be saying to the hidden recesses of our own lives. What behaviours of mine might Jesus be highlighting when he speaks of those who “honour God with their lips but set their hearts far from God”? Do I have dark recesses in my life where I am not keen for the light of Christ to shine?

The suggestion of much of our Scripture is that if we hide our true selves, our true colours from the searing light of Christ, we can be fairly sure that any merit in our public profession will be deeply tarnished. The searing gaze of Christ focusses on all of us who dare to call ourselves Christian. Do I publicly wring my hands about global warming, injustice, racism, sexism – while quietly doing little or nothing about it? Do I stand crippled by my immobility, while lives are torn around me? I fear so, and whisper words of thanks for a forgiving God. But I must whisper words asking that I be changed, too, journeying towards the likeness of Christ.

We all fall short, and we as an institution fall short. In large part this is because of our self-absorption, our selfish survival obsession, our determination to rely on a crumbling infra­structure. God is currently stripping away our Linus blankets, our reliance on false gods. The Syrophoenician woman is desperate, with nowhere else to turn. ‘To whom else shall I turn for words of salvation,’ asked Peter last week.

We are called to throw ourselves at the mercy of the God who always has reached and always will reach out to those who throw themselves at God’s feet in the search for hope and comfort. We are also called to be there for those who come into our orbit, seeking compassion, love, and hope. We must give as we have received.

We must do all in the power that God gives us to be truly compassionate. We learn from Jesus, and we are empowered by the Spirit of Jesus, to touch the lives of the broken. Where are the Syrophoenician women of our society crying out for children they cannot sustain, households they cannot hold together? Do we dare ask God to show us?

It is this call to compassionate action that James sees so clearly as he somewhat sternly addresses his church: “every generous act of giving … is from above.” Bitter struggles between wings of the church (in all its forms, but ours, too) that claim theirs is the true gospel, these are demonic distortions. We are called to be truly evangelical, truly liberal, truly catholic, truly all those things that point to a God prepared to touch and transform the untouchables and the lonely and the broken. We are called to give: to give hospitality, to give justice, to give light and love and hope to those around us. We can do that, those who have the skills, through the big institutional methodologies of social change. Others amongst us might offer water to a stranger, a lift to a hitch-hiker, a coin to a busker or a smile to passing eyes. The saying is right: it does no harm to practice random acts of kindness.

The searing light of divine judgement that I refer to often, is currently turning on our institutions. Where we have been hypocritical we are being exposed. Where we have relied on false securities we are being exposed. Where we have been too quick to judge others we are being exposed. This applies to us as individuals, too of course.

The challenge put to us by the gospel is the challenge of rumouring the compassion and the life and the light of Jesus wherever God places us. If we dare to ask how we might do that in Queenstown we might find answers.

TLBWY