partiers and whingers

SERMON PREACHED AT St ALBAN’S, KUROW

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 27^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

Joshua 5: 9-12

Psalm 32

2 Cor 5: 16-21

Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32

 

It’s not hard to find points of contact between our reading from Paul and our gospel reading. Luke, recounting the Jesus parable of two sons, takes us to imagery that is at the heart of Paul’s instructions to the stroppy Corinthians to involve themselves – ourselves – in lives marked by reconciliation. It would be lovely to say the Christian community received Paul’s great message and Christ-bearers got on with the task of loving one another thereafter. After a few decades of involvement in Christian circles I am sad to say this doesn’t always appear to be so, though there have been rare occasions when a figure like Desmond Tutu has emerged to model reconciliation on once warring factions.

There are other moments of reconciliation in our readings. The wandering Hebrews become reconciled to their renewed relationship with God – though it takes a few decades – and settle somewhat controversially into the land God promised them, where they renege on their promises once more. The psalmist becomes reconciled to the complexities of human existence and its frailties – God knows we know them at least in theory in our strange world of 2022, even in New Zealand – and seeks some sort of safe haven in God’s presence. But I want us to reflect on where we might stand in the striking Jesus Parable that has, at least since the writings of Kenneth Bailey in the 1970s, come to be known as the Parable of the Two Sons.

For I for one know my propensity to go astray, to sow wild oats – though I was singularly unsuccessful in my attempts to do so throughout my wilder days! – yet equally to sulk when others receive the preferment that I consider should be mine. I won’t name names but I can’t help thinking of one New Zealand politician having a little whinge this week past when he felt that disadvantaged minority groups in this country were being given preferment that he considered to be his white middle class entitlement. But I too can whinge like that, at least in my thoughts: how dare so and so have a better car, a better job, a better house than I do?

In such times, too, I tend to forget to look downhill. I fail to ask myself how dare I have three too-large meals a day, have a large house that could fit several families in many parts of the world, and head for bed at night without the fear of Putin’s obscene bombs heading for my family. Perhaps I too forget that my life expectancy – even as already realized – is greater than that of many who do not share my whakapapa, my educational opportunities, my literacy and my numeracy (pathetic though the latter is), because I have been far more greatly advantaged by dint of my living on the right side of the tracks.

Perhaps for once I will allow the better part of preaching valour to be brevity. I simply want to suggest that, though Jesus ends his story with a sulking older sun and a nonplussed but rejoicing younger one, it is you and me who are invited to complete the story. Do we become a people of joy, who join in celebration with the younger brother who has indeed thrown his life away, yet returned penitent? Do we receive and welcome him (will I, as and if Covid settles receive and welcome those with whom I’ve vehemently disagreed these past many months? When? Do I still resent those who stood on the opposite side of the Springbok Tour debate all those decades ago? How long is too long? How soon too soon?). And equally will I share a celestial beer with the older brother who has so vehemently drawn a line in the sand and said “never”?

I suspect the answer would be “no” to both – were I not to enlist the help of God. And it is to enlist that help we are called to pray each Lent.

lenten oasis

 

SERMON (/MEDITATION?) GIVEN AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT (March 20^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Isaiah 55:1-9

Psalm 63:1-8

1 Cor 10:1-13

Luke 13: 1-9             

 

As you may imagine, given the epidemiological, political, environmental and economic times we find ourselves in I find myself engaged in all but endless conversations about the future. Perhaps I should hold that thought over until advent, which is supposed to be the future-guessing season of the year, but I am inclined to think that Lent, too asks us to scan the horizon for the signs and directives of God. Lent after all is a time of self-reflection, and self-searching, and self-searching without the aid of God, the aid of the Christ-bearing Spirit of God, is likely to be a reasonably unproductive or certainly underproductive exercise.

So Luke takes us in a series of Jesus moments in which more than one gauntlet is cast at our feet. It’s worth remembering that as our gospel scenes unfold Luke has Jesus on a resolute journey that is a journey towards death. But because we have heard the stories before we have just a hunch that death is not going to be the end of this story, and in times of considerable gloom across the pages of humanity’s journey it’s not such a bad thing to have a spoiler or two here. We are, Paul reminds us, more to be pitied than all people if we have no resurrection in our faith. We’re in Lent but here is a hint of light just beyond the next Full Moon. Which is just as well, because I suspect the same pharmaceutical manufacturers who have done rather well out of Covid antidotes may well be doing well out of antidepressants, too, in this era.

But in our Lenten journey we have come down from the mountain, and we suddenly encounter some of the darker attitude of humanity. About this time, we might read, Jesus learned that Putin had given orders for civilians to be killed in the service of his lust for power and a Russian Empire. And Jesus turns with some passion on those who think – as some Christian fundamentalists do – that the innocent victims deserve their fate. The bystanders ask Jesus if the possibly a thousand or more Ukrainians killed in a theatre bombing deserved their fate. The obscenity of those first questions put to Jesus today is immeasurable, and the answer of Jesus is not without its stark warning: those attitudes lead to death, spiritual if not actual. So incidentally do the attitudes that declare that all Ukrainians are Nazis – a bitter irony if ever there was one as President Zelensky is in fact Jewish – but human intelligence is an early victim of propaganda.

I don’t entirely digress. There is much ugliness in our news sources each day – it was ever thus, because bad news sells, but there is somewhat of an overdose at present. Or perhaps that’s just me? We should all make the wonderful website Daily encourager or Channel One’s Good Sorts compulsory viewing. Maybe that’s why we should not be afraid this Lent to glimpse ahead to the hope that is Easter. Besides, liturgical theologians tell us that Sundays in Lent are not actually in Lent at all, but that’s another story.

Still, Luke doesn’t leave us despairing in any case. The Gardener in our fig tree Jesus-story remonstrates with the Master … hang on, bro … perhaps if I till and manure the fig tree? Please give it a chance? We might recall in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion that the Creator kneels in the dirt of the garden to make the miscreant couple clothes to warm them and cover their new-found nakedness. God the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the gardener kneels with us, postpones for us, even breaks objectionable Sabbath interpretations for us so that we can see the glimpse of resurrection light in the midst of the darkness of human turmoil. In the verse just after our official passage, as those of you who have seen the Gospel Conversations will know, and which I included just now, we are reminded that gospel is like a weed, like mustard seed, hard to eradicate despite the shrubs and darkness and heaviness all around us. While at present there is much gloom, the fact is that here in North Oamaru, or deep in the horrors of Ukraine’s Kyiv or Mariupol some are clinging tenaciously to hope, and in Russians streets brave citizens are marching against the obscenity of Putin’s narcissistic war.

There is much that could be said. There is much darkness, as I said, epidemiological, political, environmental and economic, even darkness I suspect for the future of our parish, even our diocese, in the struggle-streets we dwell in. But Luke allows us the spoiler: darkness is not the final word. Although Jesus trudges towards Jerusalem to die we are allowed a reminder that the mustard seed will break through all odds and invite the birds to nestle in its soothing comfort.

Or as the Psalmist and Isaiah put it years before Jesus’ ministry (though in whose footsteps he firmly placed himself), those who thirst will find God, even in the most parched of metaphorical lands.

transcending molasses

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (March 13^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 15:1-2, 17-18

Psalm 27

Philippians 3:17 – 4:1

Luke 9: 28-36

 

 

Having heard Paul wax eloquent about those whose fixation is their belly it is a little hard to refocus on the strange mysteries of Transfiguration that we encounter in today’s gospel reading. Given that Paul’s attack on the “belly-centred” is an attack on any who are obsessed with their own rights and privileges I have to admit that I too easily could earn his wrath. But what has that to do with a Mount of Transfiguration or a timeless promise to a patriarch. The psalmist cries out for God’s mercy and protection. I get that – but can I ever really get that when I watch the merciless world of Ukraine unfolding, neither the first nor the last cataclysm we all have witnessed in our mainly privileged lives, but know I have no adequate words?

Is there, in the uneasy relation between the scenarios of our Lenten readings, some  revelation of the height and breadth and depth of the majesty of God and gospel, God in the mysteries and in the whole range of human experience, good, bad, cataclysmic?

Let’s glance for example at Abraham, this father of nations. How hard it is to believe a promise! Sad though it is to say we now live in a society (perhaps we always did?) when truth is fiction and fiction is truth. Some years ago I had cause to preach on this reversal of decency: having been dismissed from a position from the church on the basis of untruth and injustice I struggled for some time to find the footsteps of God or gospel in the church – though I did in wider society. Where do we find truth when it is not only presupposed that political truths and promises are, as one Australian Prime Minister infamously expressed it, core and non-core, but when in either category truth is disposable? When truth is fake news and idiocies are truth and tinfoil hats rule?

It is not only political punters, the likes of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, for whom truth is fiction and fiction is truth. In a time of darkness I found that some church leaders too are cavalier with honesty. It is, then, remarkably hard to understand how Abraham, millennia before, could cling to, could live and die by a promise made by an unseen God. Yet whatever else we may believe about the Jewish and Christian scriptures, countless myriads have found in them unshakeable truth. I was left, having swum in the molasses of lies spun by church-people, wondering with Pontius Pilate: what is truth?

I wouldn’t be here today, sharing a glimpse, a snippet of testimony, if the molasses hadn’t become more viscous, more swimmable, the lies exposed at least in part. More important: I glimpsed transfiguration. I saw truths in the support of family and trusted friends, many outside the church, a remnant within. In the deepest depths of that torrid time I took time out to drive a couple of thousand kilometres across rural Australia. It could equally have been New Zealand, albeit over shorter distances. But there in the vastness I glimpsed the hints of transfigurement, of faith breaking through darkness, of mountain tops above dense clouds. I glimpsed the promises, the majesty, the unchangeability of God.

I’m not Abraham. Perhaps in any case, in these slightly apocalyptic times (there have been many before and may be many again) I am standing near the end of family lineages, with all humanity teetering on the edge of dark unknowns. But the confusions of Covid, or the horrors of a Russian sociopath doing his best to restructure the globe, these have not so far shaken the faith I rediscovered in the weeks and months after I thought my vocation in the church was gone. They might if I were in Ukraine, but even so.

In the majesty of Ranginui and his heavens, the volatility of Papatuanuku, in both the ancient forms of the big red western isles and our hugely diverse younger lands,  I found glimpses of what Abraham saw in the vastness of his skies. I saw promise. I will never leave you nor forsake you. The Australian rural heavens or the vaulted skies above McKenzie Country or the Maniototo, these speak equally loud of the constancy of God. I saw the signature and the promise of a Creator who is bigger than petty liars or global sociopaths. My own career, even my existence came to matter less, and the majestic love of God came to matter more. The sky is big.

Of course, like the disciples who got it all badly wrong on the Mount of Transfiguration, I had to come down from the mountain. I got many things wrong. I always have and always will. The disciples began to in-fight and whinge, and God knows I’ve been far from exemplary since my little, rather unimportant-to-anyone-but-me time of trial five years ago. I continue to get things wrong – that’s why I use the verb “blunder” when I speak of my work as ministry educator or archdeacon or even as your interim priest.

But I don’t blunder alone, and the footsteps of Jesus, as you have already heard me say often, are still warm. They are still warm even when in my confusions I seem not to find them.

The three disciples experienced a pinnacle experience, a foretaste of resurrection, before they came down and joined Jesus on his dogged way to Jerusalem. After such experience they were bemused, for he was speaking often of execution. He wasn’t making sense. He often doesn’t.

My deep trough ended. I was reinstated to the position that I had lost, though I never returned to it. There have been many little troughs and peaks since, and despite my prayers there will be troughs as well as peaks ahead, too. But if I can claim one thing in common with Abraham, I encountered the promise that God is bigger than the stars, bigger than time. And if I can claim one connection with the transfiguration-watching disciples I can in Christ descend mountains and ascend valleys and either way my really rather unimportant life is as precious to God as the life of every sparrow that falls, every disciple who blunders yet stutters gospel through millennia, every ancient Hebrew patriarch who dares to believe despite all human logic.

And yours is too.

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.