light in all darkness

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, WINTON

FIFTH SUNDAY of EASTER (May 15th) 2022

 READINGS:

Acts 11: 1-18

Psalm 148

Revelation 21: 1-6

John 13: 31-35

The more I encounter the gospels the more I am in awe of the remarkable authors, human like you and me, who so skilfully wove together the all but inexpressible Jesus story. I am as you would guess, not one for believing that these scriptures were dictated by an angel from on high, but believe they are the work of ordinary human beings, like you and me, stumbling on the journey that came to be known as the way of Jesus Christ. Ordinary human beings, but possessing, as the author of Psalm 45 puts it, with “the pen of a ready writer,” and enflamed by the inexpressible joy of the writer of Psalm 148. So write they did, with God-breathed skill.

The author of the fourth gospel was one such. His scenes are in some ways so carefully crafted that it does them violence to divide them into segments for lectionary-based liturgical reading. But few of us have the concentration or retention to absorb John’s nearly 19,000 words (in English) of Jesus-story. So we have to take slices. And in this slice – “pericope,” the scholars call these slices – we enter the narrative just after one of the most dramatic sentences of the New Testament. In Greek “ehn de nux,” it was dark. If we were directing a film we would use the technique known as fade, or even cut, to black. 

If we have been reading or listening to John we would know by this point that “light” is one of the author’s great themes in the first half of John’s gospel-story. By now we would have heard the word 19 times. Most powerfully, we hear it in the opening chapter, the Prologue:

Nothing was made without the Word, everything that was created received its life from him, and his life gave light to everyone. The light keeps shining in the dark, and the darkness has never put it out. God sent a man named John, who came to tell about the light and to lead all people to have faith. John wasn't that light. He came only to tell about the light. The true light that shines on everyone was coming into the world.

In Greek or in good English translations the word “light” appears seven times in those verses, out of a total nine times in John’s gospel-account. Yet when we pick up the story, we learn – or should have learned if we heard that previous verse – that it was dark. Not “night,” so much, but “dark.” We are tempted perhaps with Dylan Thomas to rage against the dying of the light, except that, while some fire in our bellies does no harm, John dared to tell us that the darkness cannot win, that Christlight is inextinguishable. No matter what happens.

Scholars often tell us that all that we need to hear in John’s gospel account is revealed in the Prologue, the first eighteen verses of Chapter One. And at John 1:5, we have our clue: “the light keeps shining in the dark, and the dark has not overcome it.” In 1 John this theme is accentuated even more, over and again.It was a universal experience of the first Christian writers: love and life and light win, even when it seems otherwise.

Now let me confess, I sometimes if not often find this hard to believe. As I watch news from Ukraine, or as I read of growing suicide statistics from the youth of our own country, or read of rising tides eating our foreshores or of the plastic sludge strangling our rivers and oceans, our awa and moana, of new viruses and a host of other threats, I wonder often if the darkness is overcoming the light, if not for us but for our descendants.

Some of that is undoubtedly because our news services are more effective, more potent than at any time in history. If we were alive at the time of the Black Death I suspect that may have been more powerfully terrifying even than the news that surrounds us today, certainly quarantined as we largely are in New Zealand. The Bubonic Plague – perhaps most chillingly portrayed in 14th century wood cuts – wiped out 33%, one in three, of the population of Europe. So far neither Putin nor Covid is as terrifying as that, and while anything could happen at any time in the history of humanity, let us hold to that, however apocalyptic things may seem right now. 

In any case things are far less apocalyptic for us so far than for fighters trapped in the Azovstal steelworks of Mariupol or those struggling for a meal on the streets of Sri Lanka or justice in Afghanistan. And even terror and death and the seeming absence of God do not overcome the light.

For says John, the darkness does not overcome the light. 

John (whoever, wherever he was) wasn’t writing in a comfortable armchair. Judas went out and it was dark, and the darkness did not, has not, will not overcome the light. Nor did the terrors by which early Christians were executed, like their Jewish siblings before and since them. “Now,” said Jesus, as darkness appeared to win, “is the moment, the hour, the eternity when the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him.” Not yesterday when all was light and rosy, the yesterday of our youth or the yesterday before Satan, as the scriptures put it, entered Judas. 

Let us remember that Jesus washed the feet of Judas even after he decided to betray his Master. He did so because love wins. Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. 

The glory of light shines and shimmers out, “like shook foil” as the poet Hopkins put it, and conquers all darkness. John recorded all this years later, because even after some decades of faith and persecution, the knowledge of the presence of the risen Christ, shining light into the deepest, impenetrable darkness and hope into deepest despair, was utterly and inescapably real.

May it be so for us and for all who we love and pray for.

Come on in ...

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

THIRD SUNDAY of EASTER (May 1^st) 2022

 

a sign in a narthex (church entrance)
that did not win the heart of the gatekeepers of a church

 

READINGS:

 

 

Acts 9: 36-43

Psalm 23

Revelation 7: 9-17

John 10: 22-30

 

 

In the Jewish Calendar the Festival of Dedication, Festival of Lights, or Hanukkah, is one of the great festivals of faith. In the Book of Maccabees we are told various stories of the rededication of the First Temple, and by amalgamation of a couple of them we find the events that were the reason for the festival that Jesus was attending in Jerusalem. The Jewish people looked back with joy on the reestablishment of their Temple after its desecration by the oppressing Seleucid forces. We might imagine and hope that one day the people of Ukraine will rejoice in events celebrating the overthrow of Russian invaders, celebrating the restoration of sites pulverised and bestialised by marauders. 

Jesus the observant Jew joined his people as they celebrated the eight day feast of a light - nine lights - that miraculously burned for eight days despite their oil running out. The feast as it happens is one still celebrated even by many non-observant Jews, a kind of national party time of great joy.

We’re possibly looking a bit too far here if we notice that this festival that Jesus attended was a festival of lights, and that John is adamant that Jesus himself is the inextinguishable light who comes into the world. Nothing would be too much to believe of John’s creative handling of the Jesus story so we should not discount the possibility. But something else is going on here, something important.

In the scene we have the Jews – unfortunate shorthand in many ways in John’s gospel but we’ll stick with it – the opponents of Jesus come with yet another cynical trap, rather more subtle than some. Obsequiously they ask Jesus to tell them who is – they are of course not in the least interested in who he is, but are determined to demonstrate that he is a fraud precisely because he does not fit their ideas of who he should be or of how God should reveal the self, the being of God. The enemies of Jesus have decided which box God belongs in, and nothing will shake them.

Surely we don’t do this? Yet I have been in a church in which a person was nearly turned away because of their race – fortunately she was too feisty to retreat. I have watched countless times as church spokespeople pronounce in subtle ways or blatant who is worthy to attend: abandon hope all ye whose sexuality differs to mine, whose literacy differs to mine, whose clothing differs to mine.  

Even the great atheist poet R. A. K. Mason was more willing to find Jesus in a tramp’s clothes, “his body doubled under the pack that sprawls untidily on his back,” more willing to welcome Jesus than are than such gate-keepers of Christianity have too often been.

The opponents of Jesus were to some extent more subtle than this. As Bishop Kelvin put it in our Gospel Conversations, “what theories and proposition shall we fit God into?” As one who can be a bit academicky I know only too well how dangerous that heresy can be. If you do not hold to my propositions of who and where God or God’s people should be and how they should behave, then may you be anathematized – cast out – to darkness and the gnashing of teeth! Pronouncements from an Anglican diocese across the Tasman that effectively anathematize children working to understand their sexuality, a precarious enough journey without pompous church pronouncements – are one such example of pharisaic sin.

For Jesus the proof of the pudding of love, of faith, of integrity, is action. John we might recall describes Jesus as “word” in the first place, with the implication that Jesus is the creative word of God, in which word and action are utterly superimposed, united. Let there be light and there is light. In the beginning was God who is word, and light and life and love and you and I came into being.

Is this rational? No. It will never be rational. The opponents of Jesus come looking for a logical, tidy, packageable Jesus-Messiah and they don’t get it. They mustn’t get it.  If Jesus is to be saviour and God and vulnerable and crucified, he will not be one size fits all, nor one size fits me. He will wriggle out of my restrictions, hang out with the people I don’t want him to hang out with. Hang out with them and redeem them. How annoying is that? Even when they don't wear designer labels. 

And so be it. Because at my best I might recognize that he hangs out with me and with you too, and sometimes me and you are not the easiest people to love, redeem, offer inextinguishable light to, either.

So I guess it wasn’t an accident that John tells us of a moment when Jesus turns up at a feast of inextinguishable light, was it?

 

TLBWY

Oh dear ... see what happens
when you welcome strangers to a church? 

 

 

kumbaya, love, and skittles?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, OAMARU Nth

THIRD SUNDAY of EASTER (May1st ) 2022

 

READINGS:

 Acts 9: 1-20

Psalm 30

Revelation 5: 11-14

John 21: 1-19

 

There’s an awful lot of reconciliation going on in this Johannine account of a resurrection appearance of Jesus. As Dr Gerry Morris pointed out on our online Gospel Conversation, John provides a whole lot of flags to suggest that reconciliation is a really important part of following the newly risen Christ. The Peter who warmed his hands by a charcoal (Gk: anthrax) fire as he was deserting the one he pledged to follow endlessly, now encounters the Risen Lord beside another charcoal fire at a beach barbecue breakfast. Jesus, the one who was deserted, provides kai [meal/food] for Peter the deserter. This is an unimaginable act of table-fellowship, of manaakitanga [hospitality], above all, of grace. To add to the grace-imagery we might note that Jesus has, seemingly with some rather over the top miraculous intervention, provided an overkill of grace – 153 fish, presumably not anchovies, and it seems some sort of supply of bread to wrap it in. That is a fair-sized breakfast feast.

Reconciliation. I speak as one who has generally not harboured grudges, but there’s not an awful lot that is meritorious in that. I have a memory like a sieve for many matters and tend to forget whatever I might have nursed as a grievance. But amnesia is not merit, and I now I have tucked away one or two serious grudges over the years – the host who turfed me out of his house one day, forcing me to drive, tired, nearly a thousand kilometres through the night to get my family home. The colleague who won my trust, gleaned some of my most private feelings, and then turned out to be the leader of a pack baying for my metaphorical blood and literal dismissal. The very fact I have recounted these unrelated tales is proof enough that yours truly is far from gaining any merit on the reconciliation journey.

And partly that’s okay. Peter after all denied Jesus three times – I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Jesus asks him to declare his love three times before commissioning him to a somewhat grisly mission, commissions him, as John notes, to living and dying as a Jesus-follower. Divine forgiveness, Jesus had long since told his followers, reaches to seventy times seven – which means “infinity times infinity,” not 490, incidentally – and there are broad hints that such grace is attainable only by the invasion of the one we call Spirit. The one whose "task" is making Jesus present to and within us, making all that we need to know of God present to us and for us. Peter goes on to get it reasonably right from here on, though we get glimpses of his relationship with Prickly Paul that suggest all was not always kumbaya, love, and skittles.

And it’s not for us, either. Firstly, no one is suggesting some sort of cheap grace here. Jesus doesn’t wave an airy hand to Peter and say “Yeah, look, no worries mate.” The awkward exchange forces Peter to reassess himself, and I suspect he was uncharacteristically introspective as he chomped on his fishy barbecue in the hours that followed. No one expects a Ukrainian mother to wave a disinterested hand to a Russian who has bombed or raped her family. No one expects a victim of domestic violence to cheerfully pronounce that her – or his – story doesn’t matter. It does.

We are challenged to hope and heal. As it happens I am a believer in universal salvation – I don’t believe anyone can resist in the end the painful but persuasive redeeming love of God. Though now we see love and sin alike only through darkened glass, but there must come a time – if there is a God – when the scales fall from our eyes and we see how great our need of God is, and how inadequate we are in grasping that love without the love-help of the Risen Lord. 

And then at last we might stutter with Peter, “you know I love you – and how badly I blew it.” I don’t believe in an eternal hell – or hell at all. But I believe in purgatory – that long searching look by which we are exposed to Christlight and persuaded to surrender our darkness. Even a Putin – though neither I nor the gospel deny that’s a tough call.

But I partly digress. And in any case I want to end not with Jesus, as Esther Clarke-Prebble put it on the Gospel Conversation, doing the housework, or as I prefer because I’m a bloke, barbecuing on the beach.

I want to end with that inspirational vision of another John, as he speaks of the Risen Christ, portrayed as a Lamb who conquered all suffering, the Risen Christ reading from what we might call the Book of Eternal Life: “praise, honour, glory and strength forever and ever to the one who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.”

As we learn to chant those words in the depths of our hearts (and it’s a life time of learning) however great our wobbles and however dark our inner recesses, it seems at least to this flawed pilgrim that we can join Peter in his reconciliation with the one he deserted. Aided by God’s Spirit  join Peter and stumble along, as Jesus beckons “follow me,” stumble and dance along filled with Resurrection Joy.

tyrants and saviours

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

PALM SUNDAY (April 10^th) 2022

 

READINGS: 

Isaiah 50: 4-9a 

Psalm 31: 10-18

Philippians 2: 10-18

Luke 19: 28-40

 

Picture yourself, not as the Beatles might wish, in a boat on a river,  but tucked up in a single bed, waking up, slowly becoming aware that your house was shaking, that the windows were rattling, that rain was lashing them. Picture the discovery that when I – for yeah it was me – dared to emerge from beneath the pillows, that visibility was little more than a couple of metres and the sound was all but deafening. Actually it was yards, not metres, because metrics were yet to be introduced in New Zealand but never mind that. The shady form of the tall matai tree, just visible through the driving rain, was thrashing wildly. A few moments later, as I watched, there was, just audible above the sound of howling wind and torrential rain, a sharp crack, and half the tree split away. Terrified (if I recall correctly, but probably) I scurried through the house, but there was no one there. I was home alone, and to an eight year old boy it seemed the world was ending. I scurried back beneath the pillows and the blankets and desperately hoped I would be safe.

An hour or so later, after my mum returned – she had been taking my dad to the railway station ten kilometres away – we set out to get me to school. We lived up a long dirt drive, and our progress was soon stopped by a fallen tree. As we got out of the car to see if we could clear our path another fierce crack sounded from behind us, and a large macrocarpa fell behind the car, trapping us. Clinging to swaying trees we made our way back up a path, up a steep hill, and back to the house. We were barely holding our own against the wind, barely able to open the door of the house. The wind screamed as the door was forced shut, and the house continued to shake for several hours.

The power was out, but as the morning wore on, the transistor radio brought reports of a ferry struggling at the entrance to Wellington Harbour. The day of course was April 10th, 1968, the ferry was the Wahine, and it was 54 years ago today. I got a day off school. Fifty-one people didn’t make it home that night, and two died subsequently from the trauma. A fifty fourth person died at home, killed by a sheet of flying corrugated iron.

Obviously, I tell the story because today is the anniversary of that day. Obviously too I tell it because it was a dramatic, almost apocalyptic moment in a child’s life. I was terrified. And perhaps that is the tenuous yet very real link with the events of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. There was no terror then, except perhaps in the heart of Jesus, who almost certainly knew, though not I think in a crystal ball-gazing kind of way, that things were turning to custard.

As  Dr Gillian Townsley reminded us in this week’s Gospel Conversations, Luke is careful to tell his version of the story in such a way that the central paradox remains: Jesus is in control of the very events that are conspiring to destroy him. Whether by pre-arrangement or by some sort of supernatural knowledge he knows the availability of a donkey. Deliberately it seems he emulates the triumphant entrance to their hometown of great warriors. But his donkey is not a majestic horse, the prisoners that he will take in his procession are invisible to the human eye – for few of us, especially those of us of European descent, will ever see or understand whatever it is that makes up the spiritual world. The crown he will soon wear is not a laurel wreath but a brutal crown of thorns.

From the beginning of Luke’s story the author has told us that things will be upside down: the mighty torn down, the humble uplifted. The religious leadership of Russian Orthodoxy might do well to remember that, as they champion their obscene hero’s attempt to ride to Kyiv and Odesa and Mariupol. Whatever the outcome of these bitter bloody weeks the contrast with the entry to Jerusalem could not be more stark, and to say otherwise is to defecate on the gospel.

Ironically the crowd who gathered around Jesus on this day were expecting a Putin, a Glorious Leader. Dear Leader in various shades, but a Putin or Kim Jong-un nevertheless. The lies of a leader who claims that he is liberating his nation from the threat of a neighbour that he deceitfully  labels “Nazified,” these are the cries of the demonic. For evil will take human form. In the form of powerful military leaders it often has, the more powerful the more corrupt. Putin’s march of shame joins that of his predecessor Stalin. It joins, ironically, that of Hitler, of Pinochet and Pol Pot, of Napoleon, of Nero, of a thousand other tyrants through time.

Today you and I are in the crowd expecting a triumphant hero who will impose justice and peace. Yet justice and peace grow only from love. The Second Person of the Trinity emptied himself, remember, of all but love. Jesus knows we will be amongst those who, disappointed, cry for his blood in just a few days’ time. Because we do that. Perhaps not dramatically, bawling “crucify him,” but subtly we will all, as Paul puts it, “fall short of the glory” of the one who empties himself and become one of us. We will all fall short of the standards of the one who, in Wesley wonderful words, empties himself of all but love. Gender aside, few of us will be with the powerless women as they wait, weep.

For only the powerless women, with no standing in society, wait at the cross, and later come back to embalm the body. Only the powerless. Luke doesn’t give us a glimpse of an empty tomb, but when a stranger breaks bread on the road to Emmaus the resurrection rumour begins to burst out, and the powerless begin to rumour hope in human darkness. Later we would distort that powerlessness into power, though I suggest in the twenty first century that obscene reversal is being torn from us, and soon we will be left only with whispers of love. But for now that’s another story.

As Mark’s telling of the gospel story makes clear over and over again, that story can only break out after God’s self-emptying love in Jesus has descended into the deepest hells of human existence, the Mariupols and Auschwitzes, the sinking ferries and advancing cancers. My temporary terror 54 years ago today was trivial, though disturbing enough at the time. But this week we are challenged to get just a glimpse of the journey from the adulation of the crowd to what Isaiah calls the pulling of the beard; a glimpse of the loneliness, the taunting, the physical and above all spiritual agony of the coming days of Jesus.

Because – and herein I offer a sneak preview – it is in the deepest and deeper than the deepest of darknesses that resurrection light will burst.

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.