God in the meh

 

SERMON PREACHED

AT

St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

ORDINARY SUNDAY 6 (14^th February) 2021

 

 

 

Readings

2 Kings 5: 1-14

Psalm 30

1 Cor 9:24-27

Mark 1:40-45

 

As we encounter Naaman the General we encounter a strange aspect of our own Christian humanity. Here in Waikouaiti, around the diocese, and I suggest around the western world in mainstream churches we are aware of the struggle to keep our infrastructure alive and well, our churches earthquake standardised and insured, our buildings painted and polished, our liturgical vestments distinct, our prayers formalised and carefully structured. I for one am deeply committed to all these aspects of Christian life. But they are not the be all and end all, and we live in a faith-era when God’s Spirit may well be driving us back to bedrock. What is the core of our faith and its practice?

What, says Elisha, if we are looking for the saving works of God in the wrong place? Clinging to the wrong things? What if the works of God, the access to God, the gifts of God are right there before us as we walk and talk and sleep, and we need only to set aside our busy-ness and blindness to see them, experience them, be immersed in them? Or, to put it a more meaningful, active way, what if we set about seeing the hand of God in the everyday, in the ordinary, and indeed discovering that the ordinary is indeed extra-ordinary. Many who work the land are deeply aware of this: nature red in tooth and claw is nature the generous, too: the soils are turned, the rains come, the earth yields its crop (which is not to suggest that the work involved is not often brutally hard). The ordinary is miraculous, and Elisha sends Naaman off to bathe in the river.

Perhaps not an ordinary wash. Bathe seven times, says Elisha. Not an ordinary river, either. In the Jordan, says Elisha. Still, to Naaman the General it seems a little ordinary. I am reminded of the simple rites we have of communion. Go, says Jesus, eat bread and wine. But perhaps not eat as we would at a picnic. Eat with intent, eat with blessing, eat with the knowledge that this is the rite he gives us to knit together once more, to member together again, the whole history of God’s dealing with humankind and indeed all creation. This is the rite we must perform long after our buidings are gone.

As a people of God we must also be able, willing, and ready to see the spectacular in the ordinary. I have been a part of liturgies in which God is powerfully,  over­whelmingly present. I have been a part of (and admittedly conducted) liturgies which been a bit “meh” – preaching sermons is the same. Yet strangely I have often found that what I experience as a “meh” day others experience as a wow day. God will not be limited, thank you very much, to my small feelings.

Naaman was blinded by his own sense of privilege. A leper is normally a pariah, and he was certainly forced further towards the fringes of his society by the debilitating disease. But even in his condition he demands obsequiousness, demands privileged treatment, demands five-star treatment. He receives the outcome he longs for, but not the methodology he thought appropriate. Privilege will blind us to the places where might see God. He attempts to place demands on the ways and places in which God might work: God will have none of it.

I opened with a litany of the issues we face as a western, privileged people of God. Over and over again I have found signs and messages of the harsh warnings the western Christian community is being delivered: we have sat for too long in a privileged state, demanding that our privilege be preserved by God, and demanding simultaneously that God rescue us from the closures that are threating our existence as a visible people of God. As Western Church we are undergoing death by a thousand cuts. Like Naaman we are telling God how it must be stopped and how we must be redeemed. The history of the people of God tells us that God does not desert the People of God – but God also delivers some very harsh reprimands.

I reserve the word “resurrection” for the historically unique event of the action of God in resurrecting Jesus from the dead. My theology is conservative enough to believe in that – however shakily at times – as an event in history. Unseen by humans, though the resurrecting Christ was seen by some and their accounts still reverberate around the globe. Unseen because we cannot see so great a sight as eternity defeating death – but let’s leave talk of that till Easter. I reserve the word “resurrection” for that Easter event – and for the yet to be event of our own resurrection after the last great mystery of our death.

Many of my colleagues through my career have spoken of resurrection as a cyclical thing – daffodils after the winter, church rebirths after closure. I prefer to think of these as “phoenix rising.” Cycles of life – more prosaic than God’s utter, immeasurable redemption of creation. But as a part of the warp and weft of existence they can remind us that God is as miraculously present in the normalities. Then, every now and again God asks us to reach beyond the normalities – to let bread and wine be for us body and blood – to let a moment be charged with the grandeur of God, saturated with the promise of God. Naaman wouldn’t accept that.

But at a time when we are watching God’s stern pruning of our complacent western church, we might find messages of hope amidst the warf and weft of financial and administrative and architectural normalities. Our infrastructures collapse and close and that may be just one more message of God’s work in the world. But God is with us – with us in the closures, in the uncertainties. God, in a sense, asks us to bathe seven times in the Jordan – to take a slightly unusual approach to the strange times we live in, to find the sacred despite the mundanity. Our privileged existence as Western Christians has blinded us to much that we are called to see and be. But God calls us to hold tenaciously to the promise that God is with us always, even to the end of the age: as things get tough we can enter into our phoenix experience of so much crumbling around us, to hold to that promise, that God is beckoning to us to emerge cleansed from the waters into which we are challenged to dip ourselves.

 

eagles' wings

 

SERMON PREACHED

AT

St LUKE’S ON THE TAIERI (MOSGIEL)

ORDINARY SUNDAY 5 (7^th February) 2021

 

 

 

Readings

Isaiah 40:21-31

Psalm 147:1-11, 20c

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Mark 1:29-39

 

To understand the magnificent poetry of second Isaiah we have to place our passage into the context of the passage in which he originally framed it – that of course should always be the case with biblical passages. For once the historical setting of the passage is a little less important to know, except that Isaiah’s people were an utterly crushed and broken people. They had lost their spirit. We have probably seen pictures conquered or enslaved victims of colonial expansion: Second Isaiah’s people were as them.

And to them Isaiah spoke a word of hope:

those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; 
they shall mount up with wings like eagles, 
they shall run and not be weary, 
they shall walk and not faint.

It is deservedly one of the most well-known and loved passages of Hebrew and Christian Scripture. Some with long cinematographic memories will remember Chariots of Fire and the stirring rendition of these words by Ian Charleson, playing the part of Eric Liddell. “They shall mount up with wings like eagles.”

It is a timeless passage, but it is at its most timely when a people are broken. In 1981, when I was a young undergrad seeing Chariots of Fire for the first of many times, I was not a broken person, nor part of a broken people. I was cock-a-hoop in the full flush of youth and of new-found faith: “they shall mount up with wings like eagles.” But my country, our country, too was a place of confidence. Waitangi Day and its Treaty were quaint excuses for a last gasp of Summer holidays, often accompanied in the Manawatu by disappointing wind and rain. Western society, too, was cock-a-hoop. Ecological and economic collapse were still only faint and largely disregarded rumours.

As it happens Chariots of Fire and the Springbok Tour occurred in the same year in New Zealand. But 1981, surely, was the year cracks appeared in New Zealand’s cosy colonial complacency. Wei began to tear apart and were brought face to face with some of the darknesses of our past. Post-contact New Zealand has had it easy in so many ways, when we think of the Hebrew People, or of the brutal conflict that nations like Myanmar, Belarus or even the United States face today, or the brutal conflict that has often been the story of colonised nations.

Isaiah though was not welcomed by his audience. He spoke of hope – but he spoke too of the cost of following the Creator God. The Hebrew people had been crushed by Babylon, but ironically even “crushed” may seem, sometimes, preferable to the demands of a God. Am I truly free if I permit a Supreme God to infiltrate my life? The Babylonians may be oppressive, but at least they’re the masters we know.

The comparisons with our own era are not direct, but there are connections. Do we really want to believe in a God who makes certain demands of us? Moral demands, ritual demands, “cognitive” demands? Or to put it another way, do we really want to believe in a God when science appears to tell us we’re nincompoops for doing so? Might not the light of God – we would add “revealed in Christ” – penetrate too deeply to our darkest recesses? Do we – can we really believe in God – and do I admit that I struggle?

Yet can we not? Can I not? Isaiah, like Jesus centuries later, answered by turning to the world around him. Who determined the earth’s measurements? It’s not a conclusive argument. But it’s an argument of love. Did both the beauty and the tyranny of our universe just appear? We can argue either way, but as we allow ourselves to be overawed by the infinite beauty and glory of the cosmos around us, something may begin, if we do not drown it out, to whisper to us. Beauty, yes, and terror, yes, but in the stories of our faith even the hint of a goodness, a greatness that may reach beyond the darkest horrors. To me it seems to, and may for for you: beyond the horror of Good Friday is there a glimpse of Light? Beyond the collapse of Empires, from which we are not protected, or the collapse of our lives, from which we are not protected, is there a whisper of something greater. Yes, says Isaiah. And they shall mount up, with wings.

And even in the cycles of history, are there not hints of hope? For four years on the international scene where we have seen the brutality of a nation handed over (in Paul’s sense of the word) to its own darkest urges, are we being invited to see a glimpse of decency reborn? And while Myanmar or Belarus today may seem dark, have there not been hints of hope in the history of nations around the world, of people around the world, of lives around us? Flawed hints, yes, but shadows of dawn’s reddening light.

As bearers of Christlight that is what we are called to live and to proclaim by actions and if necessary by words. Brutal death and destruction, corruption, insurrection and military take-over have their day, but are they the final word? A Gorbachev replaces a Chernenko, yes, and yes is replaced by a Yeltsin and a Putin, yes, but may not a Navalny yet rise despite Putin’s deepest fears? QAnon and KKK offshoots may arise in the USA, but might they not be replaced in God’s time by agents of justice and compassion even for those at the bottom of the socio-economic heap of humans and species? And sometimes it is hard to believe it, but while weeping may last a night time, joy comes in the morning (Ps 30:5).

Against, sometimes, all signs, we are called to be bearers of that joy and clingers to that hope. In a world reeling from Covid and from economic shockwaves and ecological collapse we are called to be messages and signs of hope. We are called to be hope. As our churches close we are called to be hope. As the Jesus story fades from society’s memory we are called to be agents of fresh energy in that story. We are called – and when we struggle are called again – to be “those who wait for the Lord.” We will do that by actions of love, compassion, and justice, most of us on a tiny, micro-scale. We are called, most of us on a tiny, micro-scale; called to be agents of hope, speaking words that drive out demons of hopelessness, loneliness, despair, of abuse and hatred, exploitation and corruption. We won’t be particularly good at it, but by the Spirit of God we will be enabled, as Bruno Bettleheim once put it, to be “good enough” at it. We are called to be a stumbling but Spirit-enflamed contrast society of Jesus, rumouring a world in which they shall and we and all shall “mount up with wings as eagles,” and God shall be all in all.

 

beginnings: when empires wane and tyrants fall

 

SERMON PREACHED

AT

St JOHN’S WAIKOUAITI

FIRST SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY  (10^th January) 2021

 

 

 

Readings

Genesis 1:1-5

Psalm 29

Acts 19:1-7

Mark 1:4-11

 

It is appropriate as I come to you for the first time in a new calendar year  that we find ourselves reading of new beginnings in God. We are told of those who recognize the presence of God, and of those who become themselves to be the messengers of God.

Mark’s energized gospel-telling is of course not given to us for entertainment, but for imitation. Where are we to be in this story – in the first century in which he wrote or the twenty-first in which we read?

Mark constructs his gospel account carefully. He wants us to see – for spoilers are allowed twenty-one centuries later! – that when we encounter Christ, when we are seized by the one who transcends all oppression, even the oppression of execution and death, then we too can become like the once-frightened women who at the end of Mark’s gospel story will whisper that God-in-Christ has gone before us. Mark tells us that God-in-Christ is before us no matter where or when or how we encounter him, that God-in-Christ is the one who overthrows all oppression and despair.

Mark begins his story by telling about John the Baptist, who declares that Jesus is coming, has come, and will overthrow evil. He ends his story by telling of the women who, like John, cannot refrain from speaking of Good News even though they are afraid. In between these moments Mark will tells us all he believes we need to know of Jesus: he will tell us of the one who overthrows doubt and evil and oppression and fear, of the one who brings healing and comfort and hope and justice, of the one who touches and transforms the lives of lepers and Syrophoenician children and demoniacs and your life and mine and the lives of others we might touch with good news about him. Above all he challenges us to ask where we belong in the story.

Mark is careful in his construction: he opens his gospel-account by telling us that it is a beginning – John does the same in his gospel story that we will explore at times this year.  It is the beginning of good news that is personal and corporate: good news that personal darkness in our own lives can be overthrown. It is good news that tells that corporate darkness in our community life can be overthrown: unemployment and bank closures and changing social norms are not the final word. It is good news that tells us that the mayhems of Trumpism and globalism of pandemic can and will be overthrown.

By use of the word “beginning” Mark carefully hints at the association between the story of Jesus and the story of Creation.  The story of Jesus, he is telling us, is one with the story of the beginning of All Things – no matter whether we interpret and express that mythologically or scientifically. The story of Jesus, he is telling us, inseparably links all that Jesus is with all that the God of Creation is. From that he challenges us to extrapolate that this is universal, cosmic good news, that global mayhems of planetary warming and plastic sludge oceans and mass extinction and of all the darkness that bombards our news feeds can and will be and are overthrown.

Mark gives no details of the divine plan, except that it is embodied in the teachings and the life of the man that John the Baptiser recognizes and baptises in the wilderness. In the place of fear Mark tells of hope, and in the closing of the gospel we realize that in our being seized by the Christ story fear cannot silence us.

As we watched in recent days the chaotic fall of the Trumpian Empire, as we watch and read each day of the chaos of pandemic and a myriad other warnings of human fallibility, Mark challenges us to fix our hopes and our lives on a greater perspective. In the man who succumbs to John’s baptism we find a God who immerses the divine self into all human suffering and frailty, and there gives birth to a greater hope.

In the events that fill our news feed we see light and dark, good and evil: the message we will encounter in the person and work of Jesus Christ is that God will and does enter into all and will and does bring all into the glorious hope of resurrection: he is not here, he is risen. Our task is to immerse ourselves in the one who immersed himself in the waters of baptism, to immerse ourselves in the God revealed in Jesus Christ, to immerse ourselves in the knowledge and love of the Christ of compassion and justice who we find in prayer, liturgy, scripture and fellowship. May the Christ of water and Spirit help us so to do.

 (Whangarei basin loop walk)

Go. Tell. Maybe with words.

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St BARNABAS’, WARRINGTON

SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT

6^th December, 2020

 

Readings:       

Isaiah 40:1-11

Psalm 85: 1-2, 8-13                             

2 Peter 3:8-15a

Mark 1:1-8

 

 The author of the second gospel, who we call Mark though he deliberately avoids identifying himself for reasons we will explore in a moment, throws a gauntlet at the feet of corrupt authorities from the very outset of his work: Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ. The very first word in Greek is “beginning,” but it carries all the weight of bedrock and foundation, the absolute basis, as well as subject, of all that follows. The third word in Greek, nonchalantly thrown around in the centuries since, we translate as “gospel,” εὐαγγελίοv. Really the only person entitled to fling that word across the Roman Empire was the Caesar: announcing the birth of new heir. Mark was already trading dangerous ground – and all the more so as he was probably writing for the church in Rome.

This gospel-εὐαγγελίοv had nothing to do with Caesar: it was about a crucified criminal who, we will go on to discover, transcends the authority even of Caesar and his henchmen. The opening of this remarkable new form of writing trumpets the beginning of good news. As it does so it simultaneously trumpets the end of “ungood” or ersatz­- or fake-good news, the end of corruption. And as if that were not enough it unambiguously and contentiously anchors the source and subject of that good news in the words and actions and life and death and hinted resurrection of the Executed Jew, Jesus.  This is something akin to but immeasurably greater than US Democrats declaring a new president, only to meet the denial of the current president and his supporters. This is greater even than the king is dead, long live the king. But it is of the ilk of these comparisons.

As if to underscore this Mark says nothing of himself. Was it Mark? Was this the John Mark who accompanied but fell out with Paul, the cousin as it happens of your patron saint Barnabas? I’m old fashioned in my interpretation – I suspect we do get a glimpse of the author, but only as he flees naked at the arrest of Jesus, using a rare word to depict the frightened figure. But he uses that word, neaniskos, again, for there is a neaniskos sitting at the tomb of Jesus as the two women named Mary and a third named Salome prepare to anoint the body of their dead friend Jesus. The one who was frightened and fled becomes the one who proclaims good news to the women, and the women become the ones who proclaim good news to the world, and we become the ones who hear it and try to live it long after Caesar or any other corrupt leader has been torn down from his throne. But he has no name, because not Mark but Jesus is the good news, and the good news is never gospel of Mark but always Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, as if to underscore that, this brilliant but instinctive writer goes on to use another literary quirk. For he begins to tell us not about Jesus but about someone else, probably better known in many circles at the time: he begins to tell us about John the Baptist. Yet then he delivers a body blow: even this greatest of holy men, greatest of divine prophets, must dwindle in comparison to the man-god whose tale this really is, who will baptize not merely with water but with the Holy Spirit.

This, then is to be the story that is the greatest of stories, Mark and we believe. It will be a story of one who is fully and utterly human as humans could be if we were saturated with God’s intention for us, God’s image in us. Yet it will be the story of one whose humanness is so perfected on obedient holiness that it becomes translucent, allowing the light of God to pass through him so that we who, in Hebrew tradition, cannot see the face or the light of God can look instead on the man Jesus and see all that we need to know of God.

Mark is here showing himself to be well-versed in the profound theology of Paul and his school of Christ-followers, proclaiming the deep mystery that the man Jesus is in fact the “image of the invisible, “unsee-able,” the “un-knowable” God, making God visible, making God knowable, making God as comprehensible as God can be to human minds. Jesus embodies, Mark is flagging, and as we read in Colossians, that all the kindness, all the justice, all the compassion, all the goodness, the “Godness” of God is visible in the Christ we meet in Mark’s story. Mark might well sit down with the great hymn-writer Walter Chalmers Smith (but following the author of 1 Timothy 1:17) and write of the one who is “immortal, invisible, God only wise.” Mark though would emphasize that he is made mortal and visible, dwells no longer “in light inaccessible hid from our eyes,” but made visible in in the events that Mark is about to narrate.

And what does Mark go on to narrate? Sparsely, selecting and weaving together only skeletal yet critical moments in the life of the one whose arrest he fled in the garden, Mark tells of one who immeasurably embodies hope, justice, compassion, love (though it is John who will go on to stress that last facet most completely). Mark will tell of one who will by his absolute integrity challenge corruption, self-interest, selfishness, and greed (especially on the part of those who claim God on their side but oppress in the name of their God). He will even, and most provocatively of all, tell of one who transcends execution and death, but he will do so sparsely with few words, because that event above all surpasses words: “He has been raised: he is not here.” And he will add a command, his only command: “Go, tell.”

And against all odds, and even as the odds of continuous proclamation appear to crumble around us as our institution crumbles and our knees creek and our civilizations looks shaky and few of our off-spring or neigbours seem interested, we are still commanded to go and tell. And, empowered by the Holy Spirit that John the Baptist flags, we will do so with our lives and, if necessary, our words, by our worship and pray God by at least hints of integrity as we continue to permit our lives to be invaded by the risen Christ.  And if we do that then we like Mark-the-Young-Neaniskos-Who-Fled will continue to throw gauntlets at the feet of Caesars of corruption in church and society alike.

 

TLBWY

 

indiscernible breaths of new beginning

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT

29^th November, 2020

 

Readings:       

Isaiah 64:1-9

Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19                                         

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 12:34-37

 

 It is both deeply peculiar and deeply profound that the Church year begins with endings. As we leap into Year B (and perhaps begin to hope that the calendar year 2020 might be put to bed), we turn to readings about doctrines of the second coming, the end of chronological time, what the visionary of Revelation calls the New Heavens and the New Earth. Speech of new beginnings after utter, complete terminations must needs be strange, surreal speech. We have nothing bit strange and surreal available to us. This is beyond our understanding, and, despite the screeds written on it, is beyond all human understanding.

And that’s okay, because while understanding is useful, it isn’t everything. I don’t understand the intricacies of my body. Fortunately, doctors and medical specialists understand much that I don’t. There remains much that they don’t understand, mind you, and I suspect the confidence we experienced in the 1970s that there would one day be no gaps in our understanding have somewhat dwindled in the years since. Still: medical understanding is impressive, and most of us have benefitted far more from it than our ancestors did, or indeed many people in poorer nations still do, today.

There remains much, even in simple human experience, that is unknown. Why does the human heart, as Hopkins put it, stir for a bird? Why do we care for music, why are we moved, not all of us, but many, by certain forms of music, certain types of food, activities, books or flowers or sunsets or sunrises?

Human understanding: so many limitations. As western society, we have tended to reject faith in matters spiritual, or religious, except in small sub-cultures. The sway held by churches through the Middle Ages and on through the Reformation has fragmented and crumbled, often deservedly so, and believers in the messages of the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures are fewer and further between;  markedly so in the Europeanized nations. If our scriptural readings today speak of a hope beyond the collapse of our own lives, beyond the death that awaits us all, but beyond, too, the death of our planet, by and large we are considered fools for believing. What a fool believes! And, given the terrible ways in which we have in the past proclaimed Christ with brutality I suspect our diminishment is well-deserved. Isaiah saw that, too: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” Our churches empty, our stipends dried up, our families long gone from the places where we have prayed or the hopes that once sustained us or our forebears.

How then do we have faith? The desertion of faith did not begin yesterday: at the very least I believe its seeds were sown in the fragmentation and persecutions of the Reformation, yet of course the seeds were sown long before that. Before that we imposed faith far too often by the sword: I tend to think our credibility – our ­collective credibility as bearers of Christ – crumbled at around the time Pope and Emperor climbed into a political bed together, church and state entwined, and Constantine proclaimed those dreadful words “in this sign (we) conquer” as he at least allegedly held a cross on high.

We got it badly wrong. If it’s any comfort out Jewish forebears did, long before us: at least 26 kings of the Hebrew kingdoms, according to my head count, got things badly wrong, and no doubt were supported in their wrong-doing by at least many of their people. Yet God loved and stood by the Hebrews (and still does it seems). For what it’s worth Manasseh, probably the worst of the Hebrew kings, stands firmly in Matthew’s version of the genealogy of Jesus (Mt. 1:10). Hebrews and Christians alike have often got it badly wrong, and as the Royal Commission will be starkly reminding us, far too little has changed in our own lifetimes. Yet there have also been profound sparks of integrity, diamonds of faith amidst the coal dust of religious mediocrity or worse.

How then do we believe, do we have faith in the light of so much wrongdoing, and when our society has so much scepticism towards the key claims of our faith? Much of the doubt and scepticism is not unwarranted, too: how then do we believe? Can we really believe in the Coming Christ of Advent, as one book title put it? Is it shocking if I acknowledge that there is much that I find hard to believe in our faith? As I often say, and will probably have said before now in this place, there is much that I gather together amongst the famous six impossible things to believe before breakfast, like those things  to which the Red Queen of Alice in Wonderland holds daily.

At the very least the benefits outweigh the cost of ridicule. The breath of hope in our lives that seems at times to envelope us, the breath of hope in times of personal darkness, is an immeasurable benefit of faith. There are times when, like all breath, it seems impossible to cling to the passing air, and yet it can, as we let it, envelope us in its mystery. There have been times of darkness in my own life when the breath has become undiscernible, and yet the support and love of others has sustained the dying shadows of belief. Perhaps, writ large, that is precisely the situation for the western, global north church: our self-assured complacency has been stripped from us in recent years and decades, and we are thrown back on the bedrock of faith as our infrastructures crumble. Sometimes even the bedrock seems to have turned to sand – as perhaps it must when it is poorly formed – yet in other parts of the world the followers of Christ are growing in number and tenacity, and praying for us as they do.

For us, the task is one of perseverance. What are the errors of our past that must be jettisoned if we are to have credible faith in the decades ahead? Our presuppositions and bigotries, as an institution, though probably as individuals too, are being stripped from us. We are being taught by the inclusive Spirit of God to be an inclusive People of God. Our reliance on prestige and on false sources of security are being stripped from us by the Christ who was stripped of all protection on the Cross. Our obfuscation, our muddling of gospel love in high-sounding words (like obfuscation!) and wordy rites need at the very least a deep, searching edit so we speak with attractive magnetism of the welcoming embrace of the Saviour who enters deepest human darkness and there breathes light (though at the same time we must by the help of God avoid cheap and meaningless clichés and trite faith).

All this, we are reminded as Advent descends on us again, dwells in the realms of grace. “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you,” we mumble in many of our prayers. It does, no matter what some psychologists may tell us, no harm to remind ourselves of that. We do the things, Paul said (and Cranmer after him), that we do not wish to do, and leave undone the things we should do. Advent is a time when we recall again that we are far removed from the person we could be, or the people we could be, and we turn again to invite the transforming love of God into our lives.  Advent is a time when we turn again to the God-in-Christ who reaches to us from the end of all time and from the end of our own times. Advent is the time when we implore God that we might not be barren fig trees, but conduits of life and hope. Advent is when the Coming Christ beckons us be made whole, beckons us to turn from dark to light, from despair to hope, and be filled once more with the life giving love of God, the God of the Cross.

 

 

TLBWY       

gospel hope renewed

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, OAMARU
and at St ALBAN’S, KUROW
30th ORDINARY SUNDAY (October 25th) 2020



READINGS

Deuteronomy 34: 1-12
Psalm 90: 1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2: 1-18
Matthew 22:24-36

 

As you probably know well, Jesus is in our gospel-scene (Matthew 22:24-3) engaged in a series of conflicts with the religious elite of his day. While acknowledging the complexity of his time, our first task may well be to determine who might be the equivalent in our own time and space? Who today might be the “religious elite,” who seek to destabilise and dismantle the signs of God’s action in the world? The answer, I suggest will change from generation to generation, but, amongst the litmus tests we might apply, is the question, “who dismantles hope, who dismantles justice, who dismantles compassion in the world in which God has called us to live?”

Taking a leaf from Jesus’ own book I might not altogether provide an answer, but I will suggest, contrary to those who see governments and secular authorities as the enemy of the, that God is far more concerned in the twenty-first century with those who play games with faith, who profess a faith that exploits and burdens its adherents.

This is not to say God is disinterested in the organizations that perpetrate corruption outside the mantle of faith: governments that exploit, persecute, corrupt those in the care are not nonchalantly ignored by the God of Hebrew and Christian Testaments. But time in such matters tends to move more slowly than we mere humans might wish, but it has been the pattern of history that tyrants overreach, that empires crumble; the Ozymandiases and other tyrants of history have always eventually seen their hopes dashed and their golden cows melted. perhaps one remarkable example in our lifetime has been the dissolution of the corruptions of apartheid South Africa. Perhaps for other reasons we are currently witnessing the frightening spectacle of God’s wrath turned on the exploitative capitalist greed of the United States Empire, seeing the American experiment turned over to the ramifications of its own lust for power.

Which is not, incidentally, to say that there has not been great goodness in the history of the United States – and of course of many individuals with its realms – but rather to say that, having attained untrammelled power, it, like the Sadducees and the Pharisees, has not turned its might to the compassion and justice that are the hallmark of the God in whom it claims to trust.

All of which is far from removed from life in in provincial or rural Kiwiland! So let’s come back to us in a moment. We are a small country; exploitation of the sort maintained by the Sadducees and, at least in the biblical telling, the Pharisees, is not a huge characteristic of our country. Governments come and go, peacefully, with decency and grace by and large, and we like some and not others. Forms of exploitation and corruption exist of course: those who entrap others in cycles of sexual or chemical abuse, those who victimise children, those who exploit the vulnerable.

Many, sadly, dress their evil up in the finery of religion – and I don’t just mean the robes and titles of the formal liturgical churches, but the heavy burdens that are laid on believers’ shoulders by so-called “free” or “free-form” churches and those who emulate them. There are many forms of oppression and exploitation, from sexual and financial exploitation, victimisation, belittlement, and countless other forms of spiritual hypocrisy.

None of this is good news, none of this is Gospel. Yet Jesus spoke into a similar culture. The Roman Empire – another that waxed and waned in the timespans of God – was corrupt. Jesus’ own religious milieu was corrupted by those – not all – who had become lackeys of Rome. There was much at which Jesus could and did point the finger, and pay for it with his life (though we would add, redeem by his resurrection).

So Jesus turns and addresses those who place impossibly heavy burdens on the shoulders of the vulnerable. Jesus challenges those who steal from the hearts of simple women and men what we might call the hope of heaven, the hope of reunion with lost loved ones, the hope that death is merely a parenthesis on the journey to God. Religious leaders who refuse to offer relief because they see themselves as too sophisticated for simple beliefs, religious leaders who demand impossible time and financial commitments from their faithful – the list is endless.

There are many forms of “Pharisaism” and “Saduceeism” in the world and church today. Indeed, at its worst, the Church has been known for its Pharisaic rejection of the not brave enough, not good enough, not articulate enough, not middle class enough, and many other “enoughs,” known for these rejections far more than we have been known for our inclusive, all-embracing love and manaakitanga (hospitality).

But we are in a remarkable time of reformation. Jesus – we might say “in the form of the Spirit” which is by whom and through whom we encounter him – is challenging the Church today, stripping away its false securities and leaving us, like the Pharisees and Sadducees, silent in his gaze.

But that is not the end of the story. As I move around this diocese and elsewhere I am seeing exciting hints of renewal, no longer led by infrastructure, by paid clergy, social capital, some sort of social standing in society. I happen to be one that hopes we can hold on to our buildings so that they can become sanctuaries of peace in the midst of a chaotic world, but I may lose that battle.

More important though is you … you and me. More important is that we continue to break open scriptures together, using new spiritual gifts of Zoom and Skype if we want to, that we share the open table of bread and wine and other less liturgical forms of fellowship. That when there are times of loss and grief in our communities we can be just visible enough and never judgemental at all so that our hurting neighbours can find a shoulder to cry on and those without hope behind the obscenely high suicide statistics may find words of comfort and resurrection hope.

I am seeing pockets of this rebirth as I move around the traps. I hope in coming months to – with others – help little faith communities find other little faith communities, rural, urban, even “virtual.” To tell stories, share experiences and ideas and resources, to renew one another’s hope and strength in the Christ from whom the Pharisees and Sadducees turned silently away.

As 2020’s paroxysms continue to rock us I believe it is in this new movement of God’s spirit in ti­­ny churches and church communities that we will find the gospel hope renewed.

a gig for a son

 

SERMON PREACHED at ALL SAINTS’, GLADSTONE

28^th ORDINARY SUNDAY (September 6^th) 2020

 

 

READINGS

Exodus 32:1-14

Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23                    

Philippians 4:1-9

Matthew 22:1-14

 

 

It is frustratingly critical that we take a constructive engagement with difficult passages like our Gospel passage today, however much I’d like to wriggle out of it. We need to break them open to find the context in which they were written, and to see if we can extrapolate from their first century world anything for our twenty first century world. Can we? Whatever context Jesus was originally addressing when  he uttered this quite dark parable, that context is lost to us now, and probably was almost lost even when Matthew pick up his quill and turned to a blank papyrus. But when Matthew was writing, not when Jesus was speaking, cataclysms had taken place: the Second Temple had been destroyed by angry Roman overlords, and Jewish confidence was shattered. Things weren’t altogether easy for the Christians, either, for Romans and Jews alike were turning their wrath on us.

Whatever disconnects exist between Jesus’ teaching and Matthew’s re-telling of the parable, the finger is firmly pointed at hypocrisy. Again and again Matthew records Jesus attacks on religious hypocrisy. There is an Empire (a “kingdom”). There is a king. But let’s not too readily think these are portrayals of God and God’s “Empire.” Jesus plays fast and loose with some of his symbols, and Matthew does too. This king is not very godlike (though even the ungodly become signs of God in other Jesus parables!). This king seems a whole lot tyrannical in a way that the God of the Cross (despite dangerous “penal substitutionary atonement” theories) is not. This king throws a gig for his son, but can we equate this with Father God and Son Jesus?

At any rate the invitees reject the invite, in the end doing so with grotesque, picaresque violence. Christians have tragically often found here a form of what we call “supersessionism”: the Jews blew their chance so aren’t we Christians blessed? (Well yes, we are … but not at the expense of their blessedness).

Certainly a city is burned, reminiscent of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.e. Slaves are sent out to replace the first invitees. But one new guest fails to wear the correct clobber, and God punishes him mercilessly, with stylized brutality. Is this the God we find revealed in the actions of Jesus Christ? Does God brutally punish failures? Much Christian teaching revels in this thought – and to some extent, when the first and second century equivalent of brownshirts or Gestapo come marching for our families in the dead of night that is not surprising. But ion the parable this last dramatic moment emphasizes the punishment of an “insider,” not an “outsider.” This man is part of the new in-crowd, and it is to in-crowd – to us – that these stern scenes are addressed.

In other words, however God may or may not treat those outside the faith community – and God does that by handing them over to the ramifications of their own volition (as Paul tells us in the opening of his letter to the Romans) – God also hands those who are sloppy in faith over to the ramifications of their sloppiness.

So what of us of the Comfortable Western Church? While the Gospel, even Matthew’s starkest Gospel-account with its much wailing and gnashing of teeth – is always Good News of grace, it is clear that we are challenged to look long and hard at ourselves. In a Covid-19 post-Christendom world we are called to do just that: look at ourselves.

The parable is an illustration, not an instruction manual.  God does not “send” Covid-a9 to punish innocent and guilty haphazardly. God does, I feel, “hand us over” to the ramifications of our greed, to our denuding of Planet Earth, to our exploitations of earth’s resources (and even this raises the question of why the poor suffer disproportionately).

In response we are called to show, to shine Christlight by the quality of our compassion and care. We can sidestep the very Matthean gnashing and wailing by turning our shabby wedding garb into love and compassion for the most vulnerable of the earth, the “wretched of the earth.” In the chapters to come Matthew will, with Jesus, turn his gaze on myriad forms of religious hypocrisy.

He calls us to be a servant people, to live in readiness for divine judgement. He calls us to live in readiness and to make goodness and faithfulness to the God of the Cross, the vulnerable compassionate God, the hallmark of our lives. He calls us to be custodians and dispensers – as we will see in Matthew 24: 46 – of God’s goodness. It is by this rather than by empty gestures that we become the bearers of Good News.