in arid places

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT (March 6^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Deuteronomy 26: 1-11

Psalm 91: 1-2, 9-16

Romans 10: 8b-13

Luke 4: 1-13

 

 

 

In the vast screeds of pew news that you take home with you this week I mention that our small slice of that critically important Hebrew Scriptural book Deuteronomy is in fact the oldest slice of scripture that we or our Jewish sisters and brothers have. Originally recited as a creed, it places the encounter with God first in the initiative of God, and secondly in an act of deliverance.

The “wandering Aramean” is lost, is in a place of hostility, is in a broken and frightening world. He is in a world where a superpower attacks a nuclear power-station with missiles, where people who could be us flee in terror or fight with determination a foe all but infinitely greater than themselves. The wandering Aramean was not having a cosy, cuddly time with Jesus and some friends on a sunny afternoon, but was in a state of desperation. There, his descendants recall, begins the delivering, healing, redeeming work of God.

Let’s not fool ourselves. A few mattresses and tents burning on the steps of parliament were deeply disturbing, and serve to remind us that our comfortable little country is not Utopia. It never was, as those in leaky homes or none, and those dispossessed of culture and land for many generations could testify. We too have an ugly underbelly, as the mosque attack back in the pre-COVID days of 2019 should have indelibly reminded us. We are vulnerable both to nature – as Christchurch’s earthquakes, climate change, and the ever-present threat of the Alpine Fault should always remind us – and to human-sourced evil: Aramoana, Christchurch, or the endless list of youth suicides and domestic murders remind us.

Because nature and humanity alike can perpetrate tragedy, freedom is illusory. Those who have taunted our Prime Minister with threats of hanging would do well to recall, as they slink away from the site of their ill-advised camps, that Jacinda Ardern is not Vladimir Putin, and the very freedom they claim not to have is and always will be conditional freedom, conditional on circumstances, dangers and threats, human and natural.

The Hebrew people of our Deuteronomy creed knew that only too well. By and large they became a wandering people for large slices of their history, surrounded by or enslaved to more powerful tribes and nations. Since 1949 the State of Israel has been in different circumstances, and I for one suspect they have forgotten the God of justice and compassion as they respond to undoubted provocation with over-the-top military and economic muscle. But the State of Israel is not the people of God – and if God is the God of the oppressed then God’s energies now are firmly anchored in the suffering of the people of Ukraine (as well as Myanmar, Afghanistan, and the endless list of oppressed peoples).

The wandering Aramean cried out in his suffering as surely as the people of Ukraine are at this very moment. Scriptural history books foreshorten time (to use, if I recall correctly, a term borrowed from the visual arts). Who knows how long it took for the wandering Aramean, for those around him, and for those descended from his loins, to experience the deliverance of God? Let us pray that the suffering of the Ukrainians is over rapidly, that the world responds, that machinations of evil are smashed quickly.

But it may not be so. Perhaps, as president Zelesnkyy chillingly prophesies, Europe is facing its death throes. And when we get far enough beyond Ukraine to remember COVID, and far enough beyond COVID to remember climate change and plastic sludge tides, perhaps we are too. But somewhere, somehow, humans became the people of God, because a wandering Aramean cried out in desperation, and because God heard and responded to his cries, and the cries of his kinsfolk.

That is where what I like to call “cardiac belief” begins. Belief is not of the head, but from deep within our inner being – our heart, we would say, our bowels other cultures might say. If nothing else, as we watch the horrors of Eastern Europe, horrors that we naively felt we had left behind in 1989, we can learn to cry from our hearts.

For too long western Christians have played games of self-satisfaction with Scripture. If you look closely the devil does just that in his approach to scripture in today’s Temptation narrative. The Devil, Mephistopheles, Satan, whatever we might call this Opposer of Good and God, knows scripture well.  Satan is the sort who says to simple folk, only believe and you will be safe from COVID, safe from cancer, safe from death. Who says, pray and grow rich. Who obsesses with sexual behaviours – and I refer only to those that are not predatory – but ignores issues of justice. Satan is the sort who said to the fourth century Emperor Constantine “in this sign – of a cross – you will conquer” – and turned the instrument of salvation back into an instrument of conquest, oppression and death. But Jesus knows scripture better, and shuns the devil, shuns power, and becomes the Servant King.

The Temptations begin and end in an arid place. We are in an arid place. There are global and local, social and ecclesiastical signs of our aridity. Ukraine is burning. Tides are rising. Papatuanuku is suffocating. Aotearoa’s complacency is being challenged. The Church is crumbling. We are in arid places.

Arid places, like the one where a wandering Aramean became a child of God. Arid places like the one in which Jesus turned his back on the values of complacent, self-satisfied society and breathed gospel instead.

Surrender to, dependence on, even love for God begins in the desert, in a tempest, in oppressive darkness. It is there that gospel light shines. Not an escape clause, a get out of gaol free clause, but the darkness-conquering light of the God of the Cross. Not “bad things won’t happen” – surely the ministry of Jesus in whose footsteps we are called to follow will remind us that – but “bad things are not the end.” It may seem risible, impossible, ridiculous, but it is the discovery the great saints of God have found at least since the time an Aramean wandered lonely and frightened and oppressed in an arid place in Egypt. So too can we discover and rediscover, as we ask God to breathe navigation into our lostness, light into our darkness.

 

The Lord be with you.

glory and derision

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (February 20^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Genesis 45: 3-11, 15

Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40

1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50

Luke 6: 27-38

 

 

At the risk of being somewhat autobiographical the major element of my journey in faith is that it has been the outcome of a very clear choice. A conversion, undertaken in my early adulthood. I was young, perhaps a little troubled by life, the universe and most things. My choice to believe was not in the league of a C. S. Lewis or a T. S. Eliot, two of my great icons of faith.

I make no secret that I prefer the latter, but I know only too well that I can hardly compare my small existence with either of theirs. Still, I decided, in the privacy of my own mind, that I would abandon my atheism, such as it was, and embrace belief in the strange way of Jesus Christ

I say “belief,” but faith is not the dry academic experience that this word sometimes indicates. It was a belief that seized my heart long before the slow tickings of my mind followed suit. “Cardiac,” rather than “cranial” belief. Both though have meandered along in fits and starts in the 42 years and 50 weeks and innumerable twists and turns since then.

For this faith traveller, then, the leap was from no-belief – or belief in no-thing beyond that which I could see – to belief, belief in that which I could not see. Pretty much anything else – almost everything else – was reasonably easy after that. Doctrinally speaking, that is. The actual task of being a follower of Jesus was less easy, and there have been many stumbles, some mildly spectacular, at least in the theatre of my own mind, ever since. But also there has been God’s Spirit.

Nevertheless minor details like the Trinity, Creation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the latter so central to Paul’s belief and proclamation, have been reasonably easy to go along with ever since. Other, what we might call lesser doctrines and miracles have been just that: lesser. The nature miracles, healings, exorcisms related in the texts of faith are not something I dwell on greatly. They are important parts of the story related by the biblical authors, but who knows what underlies them? They point to greater truths, and so be it. “Jesus is Lord,” as Paul emphasized, is the creed that matters, and all else is subservient to that.

But the word “lord,” I’ve come to learn over the years, is of immeasurable importance. That is why I refuse to have it replaced by less important descriptors, like “liberator,” in the collects and other prayers of our liturgy. Sure, our Lord liberates us, and many things beside, but he liberates out of his Lordship, and it is the claim that he is Lord that was the creed by which he lived and died and by which his followers were prepared to live and die.

Paul saw, though, that the resurrection of Jesus was, in the vernacular, the proof of the pudding. Lots of people were executed, especially under tyrannical regimes like that of the Romans. They still are. Almost certainly this day in Myanmar and Afghanistan and countless other sites of oppression activists will lose their lives for justice. Their lives I believe will be caught up into the Resurrection hope of Jesus. Some will be long-remembered. Most will be soon-forgotten. And if that is the whole of the story then we are, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, more to be pitied than all people.

More to be pitied because we have staked our lives on the pie in the sky, and the pie like Jimmy Webb’s infamous cake, left out in the rain, has crumbled into nothingness. It probably didn’t do us any harm, but as Paul acerbically notes elsewhere, we might just as well have lived by a less demanding creed: eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. But resurrection? I can’t prove it. It belongs in that category that Van Morrison called “inarticulate speech of the heart.” It is heart language, unscientific language, but language that can seize and transform our entire lives from the inside out. And however dark life has sometimes been, I wouldn’t be without it (though I don’t wish to be tested too much on that one: “do not bring us to the test,” as one translation of Jesus’ great prayer puts it).

Paul as it happens held to another central doctrine of faith. Perhaps it’s one I’ll go into in more depth anther time, but it’s another that I believe we jettison at great risk. The doctrine of judgement has been abused throughout two thousand years of Christian preaching, turned into a text of terror. It is a text of comfort. It is not “turn or burn,” but “turn and be loved.” It is a doctrine that invites us to turn from a world in which we see only, at best, through a glass darkly, to one in which we see God face to face, know the eternity of God’s embrace, the surety of divine love for us and for all who we love (and countless we do not!). It is a moment and an unseen eternity in which we are asked not about material or more tangible aspects of our being, but about our ability and practice of love. Do we show, have we shown the kind of love that Joseph (no saint, incidentally) shows as he forgives his brothers? Do we show, have we shown the kind of love that forgives those who wrong us, forgives even our enemies?

I don’t. But that’s not the end of the story of judgement, for Christianity has long taught the plea, the judgement that we are seen not as we stand alone, but as we stand in Christ. It is, incidentally no coincidence that my favourite hymn is “And now O Father, Mindful of the Love”: “only look on us as found in him,” wrote William Bright. He added incidentally, for those of us who often fret for loved ones, those poignant lives,

And then for those, our dearest and our best,

by this prevailing presence we appeal:

O fold them closer to thy mercy’s breast.”

I happen to believe that includes all people, but that is a conversation for another time. For now it is all we need to know that on that Day, whatever that means, the God, belief in whom has at sometime captured you and me, will murmur only, “my friend, have you loved?” Our answer, is that and must be that of William Bright, or more correctly that of the Jesus who beckons us come: “only look on us as found in him.”

And however strange that faith in Jesus may sometimes seem, I am glad that 42 years and 50 weeks ago I stumbled into the company of the poet who wrote

They shall praise thee and suffer in every generation

With glory and derision.

                                    T. S. Eliot, “A Song for Simeon.”

bolting horses of life

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (February 13^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Jeremiah 6:1-8 (9-13)                                    

Psalm 1

1 Corinthians 15: 12-20

Luke 5:17-26

 

About 15 years ago, when we were living in outback Queensland, my daughter and I used to go out riding our horses as a break from my work and her study. One afternoon, as we headed out across the thousand acre paddock where we kept our horses (catching them in so vast an area was another sermon in itself) my big thoroughbred and I had a small disagreement. Perhaps he was spooked by a snake or something, but he suddenly took off in a full thoroughbred gallop.

We had a few negotiations over his speed and direction, but like many negotiations there came a moment when I knew the case was lost. I was kind of winning the directional battle, and he was winning on the speed issue. I was left with one last futile card in the negotiations, that terribly lame plea that almost always falls on deaf ears when a horse is bolting. “Whoa” I cried, desperately. He ignored me, accelerated, changed direction again, and the next thing I knew the girth had slipped (I had not yet tightened it after saddling up) and I was flying through the air towards the one construction that was harder than the ground in that brutally stony outback paddock. We’ll leave me there.

But I want to suggest that the visceral, fear-filled cry that I so futilely offered that day was far closer to the meaning of the “woes” offered in Jesus’ vivid Beatitudes and Woes in his Sermon on the plain. As Christians we have tended to heart the English word “woe” as a fierce warning, to listen up or else. Too often Christian preaching has yet again found some threat of eternal punishment in the woe phrases pronounced by Jesus. Yet the word translated “woe,” used fifteen times in Luke’s account of Jesus, is far closer to my forlorn and hopeless “whoa” than any sense of eternal punishment. The words are a warning, with the plaintive character of a plea. “Whoa,” I cried out to my horse, “desist, or this will end badly.” Unfortunately he was smart enough to know it was only me that would end up hurt, and he had some serious eating to get on with.

Desist, or this will end badly. The words are directed very firmly at would-be followers. proclaimers of Jesus. He delivers a series of words of happiness, “blessings,” then offers the shadow side. We can engage in the hard work of prioritizing Jesus, engage in the hard work of sacrifice for Jesus, the hard work of identification with the poor the hungry, the weeping, the reviled, or we can wallow in our self-importance, our comfort, our luxuriating at the expwene of the survival of others. Luke warned us chapters earlier that the world of Jesus-following is an Alice in Wonderland, upside-down world: Mary warned us, rejoicing in a world in which the mighty are torn down and the lowly and broken exalted. “Which side are you on” asks the famous union song of the 1930s. Jesus asks the same 1900 years earlier. Blessing, or whoa?

As you will probably know by now, I have a deep sense that the crises we are facing in the 2020s, as church and as western civilization and indeed as human, are what we might as Christians call the judgement of God. The Greek word krisis – it’s obvious what English word we get from that! – is used for the depiction of Judgement Day, but it carries all the connotations of a time of critical decision. Scientists speak of our era in many terms of judgement, far beyond the eleventh hour, the Sixth Great Extinction being perhaps the most chilling. The time for “whoa” for planet earth and species humanity might well be over, though we hope and pray not. We live in a time, as Covid and a myriad distortions of reality remind us, when we may well be fling over the ears of creation’s, or Papatuanuku’s furious determination to buck our presence from her back. There are no cosy prophylactics for us from that, no cushions, even, to land on. Probably.

But ours is a faith that finds God even after the deepest whoa. There is for humanity – including us – no get of gaol free card. Humanity is currently facing what may even be its final crises of global warming, recurrent virus mutations, and all the unpredictable personal vicissitudes that stare us down. Jesus’ words to those gathered on the plain pull no punches, and Nature’s words to us in 2021 pull no punches either. She too can be a prophet of God. But we are privileged to hear that sometimes faint, sometimes deafening echo of the words that Paul offered his people, himself in a time of crisis: hang on to Christ-hope despite all odds, and your faith is not futile. The Corinthians had forgotten that. Too often I fear we – or maybe I speak only for me, are Corinthians.

But our task is, enabled by the Spirit of Christ, to hang on to that Resurrection hope. It is also to bear that Resurrection hope to those around us as we all pass through a judgement, a crisis time. And somewhere just beyond our clear hearing, there is as the New Testament writers saw so clearly, a voice reminding us that we will be welcomed home.

Even as we fly over the ears of our bolting horses of life.

When How Long Ends

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (February 6^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)                                          

Psalm 138

1 Corinthians 15: 1-11

Luke 5:1-11

 

One of the great, archetypal human cries is the cry “how long.” This can be the all too human cry when we face our own death and the death of those we love. The answer to that cry can never be more than a guess, filled with complexity, and to be honest pastoral training would tell us that the best answer is neither more nor less than a gentle touch, a squeeze of the hand, a hug, ort the sharing of a tear, whatever the recipient is comfortable with. The cry is somewhat universalised at the moment as even we, until now so quarantined in the south, watch the onward tread of the Omicron variant and wonder how long we have before the mayhem, mild or manic, spreads amongst us.

To some extent that is a different thing. To some extent. We’ve done our best as a nation, we hope, and we must leave the rest to nature, science, politics and above all (for us) God. And it’s of course to that dimension, the unseen, unprovable dimension, that we are forced by our readings (as it should be). The God-dimension. The same dimension that invades Isaiah’s life and challenges, leads him to speak a word of divine wrath to his people. “Through the wrath of the Lord the land is darkened” he will soon say to his complacent people. It’s not a way to win popularity stakes.

Yet in the present we have real parallels with Isaiah’s world. We have a form of American Christianity that has swept the world with obscene distortions of the gospel message – shortly in New Zealand with will have, if organizers have their way, a mission from Franklin Graham, that poor manipulator of his father Billy’s name, coming to spread his hate-filled version of Christianity here. False prophets like Franklin Graham and others who have so distorted the gospel message that former president Trump becomes to them a servant of God, these manipulators of faith represent precisely the corruption of religion that Isaiah dared to oppose. He did so in fear and trembling: who was he to speak out against the popular religious fervour (and self-satisfaction) of his time? But he was God’s chosen and dares to speak God’s disturbing priorities of peace and justice, to foretell God’s desecration of their land – to announce as it were their own version of Omicron sweeping through their lives and no immediate relief from a blight and a plight that could last for centuries if God so wished.

The harsh fact for those who believe that faith in God is some sort of insurance policy protecting us from ill is that the sun shines and the rain pours on just and unjust alike. Those whoso twist Christian forms that believers expected to be airlifted out of apocalyptic trial – whether they be pandemic or rising sea levels or troops massing on each side of the Ukrainian border, these are matters that were ever thus, and no divine airlift is promised to followers of any particular religious belief, Christian or otherwise. Famous passages about rapture, about graves opening and releasing their dead, about farmers buzzed up from their fields as others are infamously left behind, these are not about a get out of gaol for the elect. They are profound passages – like the entire book of Isaiah, or for that matter Revelation – that simply promise that God’s will will be done, that God’s “yes,” God’s final word of justice and compassion will eventually reverberate through the universes, and our death and the deaths of those we love will not have the final say.

This does not mean that those who claim, as we do, to be followers of Christ, are privileged, but neither does it mean that we are left abandoned in an empty universe. Again and again figures like the psalmist or indeed Paul the Apostle urge us to maintain our link with our creating, redeeming, hope-bringing God. We are urged to pray – I don’t think it matters how – and to offer, as we will say later in the liturgy “our thanks and praise.” The great disciplines of liturgy can help us with that, which is in part why we continue this stylized habit of eucharist, this holy communion with God, with ancestors and saints, with one another, Sunday by Sunday and other times besides. Give thanks, says St. Paul, in all circumstances, however gritted our teeth, however dark the horizon seems. Cling to God – and when that no longer works, permit God to cling to you, to me, in all the confusion and doubt -as well as occasional joy and laughter – that surrounds us.

Above all, says Paul, be a clinging-to-resurrection people. Because of that, and because of the divine judgement enwrapped in that, we must strive to be a justice-people and a compassion-people and a love people too. We will not ever make sense of this mystery. We can’t. But it can make sense of us. The hope of the God who brings light out of darkness and life out of death can cling to us, no matter what we are feeling, and even as often as we let God down. Cling to it, says Paul, for without the hope of resurrection we are more to be pitied than all people. Pitied because, having the light, we obliterate the light. One day, one immeasurable day when light shines for all creation and all humanity, at the end of the How Long,  we will be aware that to darken the light with our small minds and knowledges and doubts was futile. So Paul reminds us, firmly to cling to resurrection hope, and to let it cling to us.

To cling to that, and to let ourselves be encouraged by those who have been inspired in dark times and in light, in trouble and in joy, to bear witness through our attitudes and actions and words, to the one who is resurrection hope.

dancing with power

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, N^th OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

THIRD SUNDAY of the EPIPHANY (January 23^rdp) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

Psalm 19

1 Corinthians 12: 12-31

Luke 4:14-21

 

 

The story of Nehemiah is one we turn to too rarely. Like most biblical texts, it is a dangerous text to read. Read correctly it will challenge us to look at ourselves, individually but perhaps more as an institution, and ask where we have grown complacent or even corrupt. 

Unusually, but not uniquely amongst the prophetic figures of God’s history, Nehemiah was not a fringe-dweller, but a central figure in the corridors of power. Foreign power. He was also a person of integrity, prepared to centre his life on his God, prepared to challenge corruption.

Unlike John the Baptist, who we visited last week, and perhaps even Jesus himself, Nehemiah had political influence. He may remind us more of Joseph, or of Moses, for he had the ears of the powerful. Most of our religious leaders today are, because religion and faith is marginalized, forced to speak from outside the corridors of power. But other powerful prophets speak. I think perhaps of Tory British Conservative MP David Davis, who last week echoed 1940s Tory MP Leopold Amery, calling to his Prime Minister “In the Name of God, go.” Have there been moments in New Zealand history when similar calls for credibility and justice have been made? I can think of some. Perhaps even in this diocese there have been dangerous calls, right or wrong.

Nehemiah – the patron of dangerous calls. Cup-bearer to the king, and faithful servant of God, he dares to ask to be allowed to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. For a moment let Jerusalem and the People Israel be what they have not always been, symbols of the compassionate love and justice of God. Let us for a moment see the walls of the city as a metaphor, as walls of justice, walls of protection for the vulnerable, walls of compassion for those most at risk. They are perhaps walls of protection for abused women and children. They are perhaps walls that open up to protect the wretched of the earth, protect and empower them. Men and women like Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish refugee granted asylum in New Zealand, Nehemiah's walls give them saftey, then hope, safety and a platform from which in turn they might speak justice.

Those who wish to build such walls of safety for the vulnerable are few and far between, and often unpopular. In this they are forced to the very fringes of society and must speak only from there, no matter whenre their voice originates. Technically Boochani was a fringe-dweller, powerless. First he was a Kurd in Iran, hatesd by Iranian and Syrian and Turkish authorities alike, neglected by Britain, the UsA and other European powers. Then, fleeing persecusion, he was incarcerated in Australia’s inhumane and illegal immigration detention programme.  He was held on Manus Island until his smuggled manuscript and smaller works generated enough awareness for the world to hear him, and for prizes to accrue. Then, despite the Australian Government’s bloody-mindedness, he was able to receive asylum from the New Zealand Government. (While New Zealand’s record on justice is imperfect, moments like the Tampa crisis and Boochani’s restoration at least serve to remind us that being an unimportant people on the edge of the world has its advantages, and we are far less imperfect than our neighbours).

I digress far from Nehemiah, from Paul’s writings to the Corinthians, from Jesus preaching in Galilee. Or do I? In each of these there is a call that dwells at the heart of Christ. We are called to set aside pretentions of power, and adopt the voice of vulnerability, the way of the Cross. The great Christ-bearing figures of the last hundred years, figures like Maximillian Kolbe, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu: these have perhaps gained access to corridors of power, but the teeth of their convictions were cut in powerlessness, now power. They wielded no weapons. Nehemiah as a cup-bearer may have had considerable influence, but even he lived at constant risk and earned the trust of Artaxerxes only at great peril. Power itself – like money – is not evil. The all-too-frequent abuse of both is the root of evil, and far too easy to adopt.

Christianity has too often adopted the language and rhetoric of power. Clergy of the past – and many in the too recent past (but hopefully none in the present?) saw themselves as powerful. Christian leaders who became too comfortable in corridors or venues or on the stages of power too quickly believed in themselves as the subject of the gospel. Their riches or finery of cloth or mortar was their imposter sign of importance. If last week I hinted at one such self-proclaimed bishop and his Harley Davidsons, who as it happens is at present learning a touch of powerlessness in prison, I am only too aware that in our history our prelates were addressed as “lord,” and built fine houses in Woodhaugh, and clergy lived in fine parsonages far beyond the reach of most of their community, and sexual abusers and other predators used power and influence for evil.

All these become signs not of gospel – good news – but of the corruption of Christianity. They became bad news. Our grand infrastructures become not an invitation to encounter Christ but reinforcement of inequality and injustice. We must turn the metaphor of Nehemiah’s wall on its head: he rebuilt a wall to protect God’s people from marauders. Too often we became the marauders ourselves, abusing the vulnerable, or at best muttering “let them eat cake” to those most in need.

Consequently, God is tearing down our walls. Western Civilization’s walls, the Church’s walls: these are different to Nehemiah’s wall. Reading the scriptures is not always straightforward. The story of the Corinthians could if we had time reinforce this: the holier-than-thou crowd were fighting hard to keep the vulnerable and voiceless away from the best seats in the house of encounter with God. But that is a story for another time – I may even set up a Lenten study on Corinthians here should there be any interest! As it happens St Mary’s is less likely to absorb the sin of prestige than some of our other faith-communities: we aren’t that glamorous. And less I seem unfair, St Alban’s too despite the idiosyncratic magnificence of its buildings has never quite had the opportunity to rest on its laurels and meditate on its self-importance (unlike some faith communities I have known!).

Enough. The readings this week really leave me reflecting simply on the call to us all to live, as the Roman Catholic Church once put it, simply, so that others may simply live. It’s a bit upside-down but all Nehemiah wanted was a place of safety for some of the most vulnerable in the vast Persian Empire. It was a tough call, but in prayer he made it, and God responded.

overkill, overflow

 SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

SECOND SUNDAY of the EPIPHANY (January 16th) 2022

READINGS:

Isaiah 62: 1-5

Psalm 36:5-10

1 Corinthians 12: 1-11

John 2: 1-11

Although in my priestly career I have never had the mixed blessing of oversight of one of those churches that brides choose for their photogenic attraction, I have nevertheless taken quite a lot of weddings in my day. Some were memorable for all the wrong reasons – the disinterest particularly of the groom and party being a recurrent theme – and some (especially that some years ago of my niece) because they were full of love and joy and the fullness of life’s possibilities, or the amazing moment when a determined paraplegic bride shocked all present by walking, unassisted, some of the steps up the aisle to be married to her loved one. 

I could keep you for far too long by telling the tales, but a recurrent element amongst most of these events was my turning to the Fourth Gospel and John’s telling of a miracle at Cana, in Galilee. And about once every three years it comes up in a context where we gather with various shades of enthusiasm because we actually want to encounter and to worship the risen Lord of wine and water. 

It’s such a vivid story. Most of us have been to a wedding or two, most of us have known a bit of grog to flow. At the risk of one more wedding tale I recall almost my first wedding, when the groom and his support crew turned up half cut already. It is possibly the only time in my career I have given anyone a bollocking. They had fifteen minutes until the bride arrived, and I assured them that if they couldn’t convince me in that time that they were sober enough to sign a legal document then the wedding was off. The transformation was impressive.

The story John tells is rich at so many levels.  A Middle Eastern wedding was no abstemious affair, and the shame of a host running out of wine was no trivial matter. Possibly that is a point John wants us to notice: Mary the Mother of Jesus is deeply concerned because deep shame has come upon the household of someone she seemingly knows well enough to be invited to co-celebrate a mountaintop event. Admittedly vast networks of guests would be invited to such an event, but belonging to such a network was no trivial element: kinship, even friendship are deep entanglements in a traditional society. Mary was troubled. Jesus’ response to his mother is less harsh than it seems when we encounter it, but it was nevertheless quite formal, dispassionate. Like storms on a lake, this was within his grasp. What do they say in sports circles? Trust your plan.  Hye had a plan, God has a plan, nervousness in the face of potential chaos was not a part of that plan. We might hold to that as we count down to the arrival of the Omicron Variant, as we await with bated breath the chaos that may soon be upon us. 

It’s worth noting. too, the vast overkill of the event. This may be a whole-of-village party, but there has been no shortage of the good things of God’s earth flowing already. The guests were, as the New Jerusalem gloriously puts it, well wined. Let’s not think about contemporary concerns about drink driving or other deleterious outcomes of a too generous uptake of alcohol. This is about celebration, overkill of joy, and these guests have already celebrated and overkilled, but the overflow of joy in the lives of those who are visited by Christlight is not going to be restricted: flow, overflow, and overflow some more with the good things of God.

I often tell the story of the priest who was my vicar when first I moved to Australia in the early ’80s. At baptisms Fr Alan would fill the font with water, fill it some more, overflow it, overflow it some more: this, he would say, is the overflowing of God’s goodness and grace. I’ll admit that that wild, manic, God-filled priest never over-poured the wine – so much waste would be wrong – but his complex life never ceased to overflow with divine goodness and joy.

The guests are well-wined, and, John tells us, Jesus ensures they are wined immeasurably more. The steward looks for rational explanations to this over-pouring abundance, but the limitations of rationality will not ever serve the gospel. The resurrection will flow out of the restrictions of a tomb. John wants us to know this over and again: love will conquer both hate and nonchalance, light will overcome greyness and darkness, God will break through the limitations of our science. 

Sometimes even this side of the grave we get glances of this. The glories of a sunset, the magnificent terror of waves driven by a far-off cyclone (as they are off that Other Island’s east coast as we speak), the tenderness of a loved one’s touch: these are the overkill of divine goodness that can from time to time invade our lives.  On this day of a dried up wedding feast the overflow of the goodness of God’s joy will permit no limitation, and the goodness of 180 gallons of the finest wine flows and flows and flows.

Need I say more? This experience will not grip us every day. Yet as we open ourselves, sometimes through great struggle, as we surrender to God’s invasion, the overflow of grace can pour into and through and even out of us. May God flow thus in our lives as chaos builds around us, as uncertainties pulse, even when the storm clouds build. The wine of God’s love, against all odds, will not dry up.

 

entering authenticity

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and at St ALBAN’S, KUROW

BAPTISM OF OUR LORD (January 9^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Isaiah 43: 1-7

Psalm 29

Acts 8:14-17

Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22

 

When Luke told the Jesus story he set about anchoring the events of Jesus’ life within the framework of known history. Or so we were often told. He is writing, he said, to Theophilus, though we may well question if there ever was a Theophilus. Luke may have been deliberately obfuscating, playing a Dr Who-esque game with lines of time and space in order to demonstrate truths far greater than mere timelines and geographical particularities.

Like many great writers in the story of literature Luke sets up expectations, then dismantles and, we might even say, “remantles” them. For those of you who are lovers of literature or film or visual arts there will be some resonances here:  some of the greatest creators of human artistic depth have done that. Such creators – and let’s not forget that’s a title that echoes the heart of God – do so not to be clever, but to expand our horizons, expand our understanding of the world around us. For Luke this is not an academic exercise but an inspired means to take us, his audience (though we are not the audience he intended) deep into the heart of God’s truth, light, hope.

Theophilus, therefore, may never have existed despite having been addressed at Luke 1:3 (he will be again in Acts 1:1). We may be Theophilus – you and me – and we are being asked to see something beyond words here in Luke’s story. We are being asked to see Truth. John uses a similar technique, referencing what we might call the Truthness of Jesus, the Truthness of Good News, over and again. Theophilus is told that the Jesus story contains – we might say “is” – Truth. It is truth deeper than mere facts and figures of history.

So Luke, having created word-pictures around the birth and early life of Jesus – later we will return to his preparation for public ministry as he wrestles with Satans in the wilderness – introduces us to a listless, directionless people. They are a people filled with expectation, but expectation of what?

They live in a corrupt and already crumbling Roman Empire. They live in a time when soothsayers and idiot fringe charlatans are eagerly leading them this way and that. John the Baptist is no charlatan, but for many people he is just one more entertaining distraction from a decadent, disintegrating society. So they flock to the desert, and rather than stroke their egos he rebukes them.

Yet they encounter in him not some latest fad, not an empty-headed, self-aggrandizing false prophet feathering his own ego with meaningless titles and his pocket with their hard-earned cash. They do not find a self-proclaimed “bishop” climbing down from a fleet of expensive cars and motorbikes long enough to seduce more dollars from their pockets. They do not find a rock star peddling his own importance and destructive lies, (believing, as one prophet critiqued it, that his nose has led him straight to God[1]). They do not find an over-inflated, over-paid tennis player believing that he or she has the right to spread disease in the name of personal freedoms (and a pay cheque).

They find John the Baptist in the desert, and while some choose to follow him he makes it quite clear that there is a different path to follow: “one more powerful than I is coming.” later of course the same people will murder both the prophet and the messiah. But for now we have a humble, God-saturated man pointing to another humble God-saturatec man, directing lost, directionless human hearts to the demanding way of Jesus: “he will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

For Luke the message is both timeless and urgent. For too many of Christianity’s centuries we have turned the prophets of God into rather dull figures propping up self-indulgent societies. Every now and again, though, times of complacency become times of urgency. We live in one such – Covid is only one particularly noisy ingredient of a crumbling security. Charlatans, predators, will inevitably arise in such times, but so too do genuine servants of God.  In recent days of course we have seen one such servant, Desmond Tutu, pass from human sight. Not all are as spectacular as Tutu. But we live again in apocalyptic times, and Luke, John and above all Jesus dare us to look in right places for the footprints of God. We are dared to look not to those who write their own names in neon lights, but to those who proclaim justice, hope and love.

As the story goes on (as our year goes on), we will find that Luke challenges us to look to Jesus amongst the lines of prophets not just as a pointer, but as the heart of God, as all that we need to know of God. The words of the Spirit will reverberate through the year, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” These reverberating words of course mean far more than a surface level reading will disclose. Interestingly, as sermon-blogger Mike Marsh puts it, they are spoken to Jesus before he has …

… done a darn thing. He hasn’t preached or taught. He hasn’t healed anyone. He hasn’t walked on water, turned water into wine, or fed 5000 with a few fish and loaves of bread. He hasn’t raised anyone from the dead. He hasn’t died on the cross, been resurrected, or ascended to heaven. He hasn’t performed or proved himself worthy or deserving. He doesn’t even say, “Thank you. I’ll work hard to be a good son. I’ll prove myself to be worthy of what you have said.” He simply receives the gift. He lets the words wash over and drench him.[2]

 

We’ll leave that thought there. Except insofar as it reminds us that Luke is challenging us to enter a journey that is not about us or our ego, but a journey of surrender, a journey of trust in times of difficulty, uncertainty, bewilderment, even exhaustion. The voice from heaven authenticates the person and the task of Jesus. The voice invites us to enter, too, into that authentic existence, that place of faith against all doubt, hope against all despair, light against all darkness. You are, says the voice of God, my beloved child: enter and re-enter the journey of Jesus.

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[1] Lou Reed, “Strawman.”

[2] Michael K. Marsh, Interrupting the Silence, January 13^th, 2019. Online at https://tinyurl.com/4yu724zd.