bloody impossible doctrines of love!

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

TRINITY SUNDAY (June 12^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5: 1-5

John 16:12-15

Let’s start, unusually enough for me as one dwelling at the extreme edges of chaos, but let’s start from something like the beginning. If there is something that drives me bananas then it is the countless stream of Christians – mainly clergy I’m afraid – who reach the point where they decide that because they cannot understand or explain the Trinity then it is all nonsense, a barrier to church growth, and let's get rid of it.

As John Franklin said in our Gospel Conversations  this past week, to explain the road code to a three year old is a hopeless task, indeed a pointless task. As it happens I know, admire and obey the road code, at least most of the time, and that is enough without knowing the intricate reasons for its design. There are as it happens reasons why most countries in the world drive on the right and we of the once British Empire drive on the left, but that really doesn’t concern me, and so I leave it alone. As the much-covered Iris DeMent song goes, “Let the Mystery Be.” Perhaps the comparison’s not quite the right one for me and there will be others for you. I'm more or less happy to accept the workings of a  continuous variable transmission – though I confess it would not be my choice (give me a good old clutch pedal and gear stick any day) – but while the words make some sense to me the scientific constructions are way beyond me. The same will be said of photosynthesis or a myriad other things that make up my life or yours each day.

I’m lucky I guess, that I have no difficulty with the theology of Trinity. But nor do I want to explain this wonderful language of love, because like all language of love it collapses in a puff of inadequate logic. The readings we have today, and countless others we could have, are merely scratching towards the immeasurable mysteries of a Triune God.

So it is the language of love. It is the language of being loved by God and of loving God, of being known by God (as the great Psalm 139 puts it), and of knowing God at least in some miniscule way, and of wanting to know more of God. 

This is the God who inexplicably decides to create or generate or whatever a universe – or an infinity of universes perhaps – and does so. That same God breathes divine image into at least one species on at least one spinning orb in that infinite universe amngst infinite universes, allows us the freedom to run our own lives. Sometimes as we see in Ukraine  we do so with disastrous consequences through our own fault or at the mercy of the fault of others or of nature.

 But where those consequences are disastrous, and indeed always because life as we know it is finite, God enters into our experience in a moment of time – or perhaps I can say entered into our experience in a moment of history – to give us, if we accept it, a way to gain access to the eternities that we have lost in our finiteness, never had because finite, but which dwell just beyond our sight. God enters into our finite existence, into our too-human floundering, not remaining out there beyond the universes, but entering your existence and mine, entering the depths of being human and being mortal, and there births eternity. 

Despite us and for us, even though as yet we cannot get it intellectually.

But this beyond-comprehension God not only does not remain out beyond the edges of the universes, but does not enter into human experience just once 2000 years ago and leave us forlorn. This God enters into the very deepest depths of human experience, into the bitternesses of human despair, angst,  loneliness, boredom or what the French call ennui, enters into every human experience throughout space and time, even in little old North Otago. And when God enters into that experience at any time in space, there human beings who are open to God’s presence can be touched and transformed.

And through all that God is the wonderful Community of Being, and for that matter Community of Becoming, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – breathing love and hope that otherwise would not be available to us, breathing resurrection hope when otherwise there would just be a clanging echo chamber that a far-off-God or perhaps no-God left behind a millisecond after some immeasurably gigantic and inexplicable explosion billions of years ago.

Trinity? The language of love from and for the God who is and always is Creator and Creating, Redeemer and Redeeming, Life-giving and Renewing, Making and Flinging universes across infinities, and yet caring for a sparrow that falls and those dying in Severodonetsk, and even for you and for me.

Amen.

Come Holy Spirit

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S NORTH OAMARU

PENTECOST (June 5^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Acts 2: 1-21    

Psalm 104

Romans 8: 14-17

John 14: 8-17

If we were to ask a Muslim convert to Christianity to express the fundamental difference in his or her new relationship to the creator God, they would almost certainly point to the doctrine, and more importantly the experience of the Holy Spirit. This of course is inseparably connected to the doctrine of the Trinity, but we will explore the intricacies of that complex next week. For now let’s focus on the language of the Spirit, which is language of the heart rather than the mind, but is far from trivial for all that.

Who is she? What does she do – what is her job description as I often put it? And why am I calling her “she”? We will come to that last question in two ways, one of which I still put on hold for a little while.
But first let me sing you, or at least read you, a song. Perhaps you know it?

She sits like a bird, brooding on the waters,

hovering on the chaos of the world’s first day;

she sighs and she sings, mothering creation,

waiting to give birth to all the Word will say.

 

She wings over earth, resting where she wishes,

lighting close at hand or soaring through the skies;

she nests in the womb, welcoming each wonder,

nourishing potential hidden to our eyes.

 

She dances in fire, startling her spectators,

waking tongues of ecstasy where dumbness reigned;

She weans and inspires all whose hearts are open,

nor can she be captured, silenced or restrained.

 

For she is the Spirit, one with God in essence,

gifted by the Saviour in eternal love;

she is the key opening the scriptures,

enemy of apathy and heavenly dove.

John L. Bell and Graham Maule

The task of the Holy Spirit is to release the work of Jesus Christ through space and time. More than that, her task is to release the resurrected presence of Jesus Christ through space and time. Jesus Christ was, and through the Holy Spirit is, the enemy of injustice, including the injustice of apathy, but including too the injustices of loneliness, despair, emptiness: all those dark works of death, and even the injustice of death itself.

“Silence in the face of evil,” famously said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German martyr, “is evil itself. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

And let me say I stand as much as most of us do in the comfort zone churches, deeply challenged if not roundly condemned by the German martyr’s words.

But let's pause from that thought. So much idiocy has been proclaimed about the work of the Holy Spirit. In the early days of the charismatic movement she was indeed a powerful wind of change blowing through the fusty corridors of mainline Christianity. But she generally limits herself to our readiness to cooperate in her redeeming, sanctifying, holy-making work. “She weans and inspires all whose hearts are open,” says John Bell in his now famous hymn. But we can close our hearts not just by hardness, by fusty corridors, but by a fixation on that which is entertaining and exhilarating. Comfortable Christianity, with its expectation of the sensational, soon turned the experience of the Holy Spirit into a form of entertainment. “More power, Lord,” yelled the late John Wimber from a floodlit stage as he performed some act or other of entertainment dressed up as Christian ministry. 

So how do we tell where and when the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, for the terms are interchangeable, the Holy Spirit is at work?

The answer is to look back into the deep places of our texts, our sacred texts. Her task – and perhaps now I should explain that in Hebrew and Greek alike “spirit” is a feminine noun – her task is to make known the presence and the work of Christ throughout time and space. Does Jesus entertain? He reveals from time to time  perhaps a wry sense of humour but the luxury of idiocy not so much, or in reality, not at all. No. He drives forward in works of justice, drives forward in, as I have said here before, such a way that there is no dissonance between word and action, drives forward to counter loneliness, hypocrisy, hopelessness, untruth, and dullness, to name just some works of  the demonic. He drives forward both to proclaim and be present as the opposite of these darknesses in human experience, in our lives. The work of the Spirit is to fill our lives with fellowship, integrity, hope, truth, and holy exhilaration, the opposite of dark demons.

Today is the feast of Pentecost. We are called simply to immerse ourselves in the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, so that we can experience and spread justice and resurrection hope, the fullness of the resurrected presence of Christ, in our lives in our world, no matter what is going on around us. 

But we are not mere passive recipients of this gift of God. Our task is through discipline, prayer, worship, and fellowship to be co-creators of the holiness that God seeks to midwife in your life and mine and the world's. The strange truth of the Spirit, Truth that is so fundamentally trintarian, is that she works, if we let her, from within us: God in us.

Come Holy Spirit, renew us in the likeness of Jesus.

 

truth in the spaces between

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, GORE

SEVENTH SUNDAY of EASTER (May 29^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Acts 16: 16-34

Psalm 97

Revelation 22: 12-21

John 17: 20-26

 

The author of the Fourth Gospel is a creative writer of enormous talent. At the time he wrote, division into chapters and verses was over a millennium away, so he knew nothing of flags like “chapter 17” or the fact that he wrote 21 chapters. Nevertheless he used flags, alerting his audience to significant dimensions of the Jesus-story he was narrating. Flags like key words, locations, themes. And we need to ask questions of the text. Who was Jesus addressing in John 17? It’s no longer the disciples, but the Father. “Father, the hour has come” (John 17:1).

We do not need to be scholars to be inspired by the fourth gospel. Actually, the author of this work would be horrified if he thought that we thought that we were inspired by him. He hints that in his final sentence (John 21:25).  

So I should put this in a different way. We do not need to be scholars to be inspired by the Jesus we encounter in the pages we know as the Fourth Gospel, or “John.” We should never, incidentally, call it the “Gospel of John” or “John’s gospel,” not only because we don’t know who wrote it, but because whoever wrote it will always emphasize that it is the Gospel of Jesus. But I, too, often forget that.

Onwards, then.

The author of John provides tools to know the mind of Jesus more closely. He does so, so that as we break open the word, we explore the teachings of the one who John calls “Word.” Word with a capital W.

Well, in English we give this a capital W. The author didn’t:  the scriptures were written all-caps. But it is similarly helpful to note some of the little flags the author does fly along the way. In the beginning was the Word, the command of God, the action of God, embodied in the man Jesus. Even in the beginning, not just in the first century or now.

So when we dig into the scriptures we encounter and explore Jesus. The Good News of Jesus. And if we look at John 17 we find that Jesus is no longer talking to his disciples, or to us. We are seeing how he talks to God – we are seeing how he prays.  And, just to confuse matters further, while the Jehovah’s Witnesses are right to tell us (as they do) that the word “trinity” does not appear in the bible, they are wrong, because the biblical writers are bravely striving beyond the limitations of the language available to them. Striving to find words for what we later came to call Trinity. As we see Jesus pray, we are seeing the internal communications of the trinitarian godhead – in conversation, discourse, on our behalf. And it remains beyond our comprehension.

So what are we left with in our small passage in John? The longing of the Godhead, creator, redeemer, giver of life, is for our unity. This is very different – and those of you who viewed the Gospel Conversations  will have seen this – very different to uniformity. The armies of North Korea march in uniformity. The armies of God live with disagreement, finding both truth and life in the spaces between letters of our language, the silences between words of our disagreements.

Now, don’t go thinking I am good at practising what I preach. If a cause I am fighting for goes down in synod I sulk in a corner until about three minutes later when I forget what I was sulking for. Amnesia is a wondrous healer.

On the other hand it’s not the deep reconciliation that the Spirit of Christ demands of us and coaxes and coaches us to. The Christ who reaches out to his betrayers and deserters after the crucifixion was exercising the deep love that dwells at the heart of God. Such love, far removed from my airy amnesia, is available to us only through the deep workings of the Spirit.

In our passage Jesus prays for unity for those who follow after him – for us.  He flagged this back at John 11:42. It is a prayer uttered deep within the heart of the triune God, Father, Son, Spirit. It is a prayer not for the militaristic and ferociously rehearsed unity of North Korean or Russian soldiers. It is a prayer that we can be a cardiac people, a people who learn to exercise the costly cardiac love, visceral love that drives reconciliation with enemies, reconciliation far beyond the limits of our imagination.

The only aspect it has in common with goose-stepping militarism is that it is borne of deep discipline, deep surrender to the transforming work of God. The prayer of Jesus ends with the plea that the divine Spirit embodied in Jesus may be embodied in his church, his on-going and Spirit-filled body.

But we must be prepared to be the answer to that prayer, and that takes hard work of the sort that most of us fall short of (or do I speak only for me?). But we are not alone – the coming of the Paraclete is always a part of this prayer of Jesus: Holy Spirit, come to us.

But come to us not in showy exhibitionism of some sad parodies of gospel, but in the hard and prickly work of transformation.

Only then will we be the people that are known by our love, the demand that Jesus highlights at John 13:35. Only then will we see gospel transform lives around us. And we will be that only by the deep and hard work of allowing the Spirit of Pentecost to touch and transform the deepest recesses of our lives. But perhaps that’s next week’s story.

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.