get out of gaol? yeah nah

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and  St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday (July 2^nd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 24: 34-38, 42-49, 58-67

Psalm: Song of Songs 2: 8-13

Rom 7: 15-25a

Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30

 

Confession time: Matthew is my least favourite of the four gospel-accounts. He seems to me to be the most ready to cite Jesus-sayings that cast us and almost everyone into pits of hell fire and destruction. The little chunk missed out in this passage is precisely one of those glimpses: woe to you because you didn’t repent.

I’m not one for cutting out pesky passages, and part of my love of being a lectionary-based church is that I have to grapple with them – and together with you, in step with you, do so every few years. I never look back, incidentally, on past sermons: I have changed, you have changed, the world has changed, though as it happens last time I was with you wasn’t a Matthew year anyway.

But what do we do with pesky passages? Cherry pick? I think not. Leaving that bit out, that bit about woe, is a little naughty … “it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon than for you.” Tyre and Sidon were destroyed by God, according to the legends, in reality with the help of horrendous military action on the part of, first and unsuccessfully Nebuchadnezzar, and subsequently, brutally, by Alexander the Great.

The frenetic global warming we are experiencing, exponential as it is, may one day be seen likewise to be the work – or punitive permission – of a Creator God disappointed with the way humanity has looked after this beautiful planet and ignored a century of increasing warning signs.  

Dig deep enough beneath the modern lands of Lebanon and you’ll find Tyre and Sidon. But they are almost a side bar to our Matthew passage. Here Jesus simply laments, and the Creator God he dares to call Abba, Father, also laments. We played the flute and you did not dance. We sang a dirge and you did not mourn.  

Humanity is not just shuffling deck chairs on a sinking planet, but partying while we can. Humanity’s response to the majesty of creation, has been not to dance but to fell virgin forests, to fill waterways with plastic petrochemical sludge – you know the general scene. It’s not pretty, and neither you nor I have a get out of gaol card.

All of which would be bad news. Indeed some of the charlatan churches exacerbate the bad news with a “beam me up Scotty theology”: don’t worry about planet earth, because God is going to whisk us out of here. I think not. The sun shines and the rain falls on just and unjust alike.

So is this all no more than fatalistic bad news? As Paul often says, a little more comprehensible than much of what he says, “by no means.”

For Jesus does not leave us stewing in the morass of human detruction. He invites us, as it were to enter the manaakitanga, the welcome, the hospitality of God. He generates within us a yearning akin to the erotic yearning that is the stuff of our psalm this day. He generates God-connection which gives us the motivation and the strength to rise above – not outside, but above, in the sense of finding the strength to believe and hope despite all darkness, even during all darkness. 

That’s the essence of “come to me, all you who are weary.”

So it’s not “beam me up Scotty,” though we will all be beamed out in some way at some time at the closure of our lives, but come with me, be with me, know me as we ride through this morass together.

And the added bonus that we have known deep in our hearts since the first Easter – though we  may often forget it – is that the one who bids us “come” has already trodden the track, and is in that way infinitely equipped to take us and all who we love through to that invisible other side that the author of Revelation calls a new heaven and a new earth, and which we can never understand.

 

 

Cup of Cold Water

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

and  St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday (July 2^nd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 22: 1-14

Psalm 13

Rom 6: 12-23

Matthew 10: 40-42

 

Every three years lectionary-based preachers are faced with a most chilling task. How do we read Genesis 22 when we are no longer a society a society that thinks traumatising children is a good idea? No longer do we endorse Hans Christian Andersen’s dark tales about naughty girls and their punishment, or children lost in a wood and threatened with cannibalism, or old women who spank their starving children and put them to bed.

Some think – I don’t as it happens – that we’ve swung the pendulum too far the other way. Certainly we don’t want idyllic tales in which no trial is ever faced and all existence is sweetness and light, or tales of entitlement that make every child think that like a despotic leader they can anything and everything they want. I want Ukraine and I want it now is not a great mantra, nor a great reality.

But what do we do with the sheer psychological abuse God and Abraham impose on the teenaged Isaac? I had quite a nice dad. I’d be a little troubled if he had taken me up a hill with a big knife in very dubious circumstances. Sadly many children, and even more step children, continue to be traumatised by parents, usually but not exclusively male parents, teachers, coaches, clergy, wielding if not a knife then the brutality of sexual predation.

Yet here is this tale of Isaac’s trauma right at the heart of Judaism, and, especially when morphed into a story about a God who sends his son to be killed, the centre of  Christianity.

What we don’t do is chuck it out. There are dangers in deciding which bits of scripture suit our tastes and fashions which do not. Scripture guides and judges us, and though in reality we will always to some extent apply our judgement to scripture, we are called as a People of the Book to do so in the expectation that we, not our forbears in faith or our God, are the ones needing a little bit or a lot of pruning and redemption.

So let’s not read Abraham and God as evil tormenters, but let’s read them. And let’s read them wearing the right lens. Rabbi Sacks writes,

What God was doing when he asked Abraham to offer up his son was not requesting a child sacrifice but something quite different. He wanted Abraham to renounce ownership of his son. He wanted to establish as a non-negotiable principle of Jewish law that children are not the property of their parents.

Children were no more than property in the ancient times of Abraham. Children were sacrificed, too, to appease angry or ravenous gods. Children were sacrificed in much the same way as they were sacrificed by institutions, state and church, that turned their backs on rumours of abuse. Children were sacrificed on the altar of power abuse.

Let’s not read Abraham’s binding of Isaac as history. To do so is potentially demonic. The church has done demonic too often. But in this powerful parable, fable, call it what we will we find the ancient world’s record of abuse is challenged and broken by God. 

The point of the story is that, in a world where children were given up to abuse and even sacrifice, Abraham is prepared to trust God’s loving intervention. And of course we know that there are far too many cases of broken lives where neither God nor human has intervened, but that is precisely our role: God empowers us to speak up and to intervene in the face of all forms of evil.

And, believe it our not, that us where our cup of cold water comes in. Remember our cup of cold water? Jesus said Wheresoever we give a cup of cold water, wheresoever we speak out, wheresoever we intervene – and otherwise act – in the interests of the vulnerable, so we do the work of God. So we are called to do – for the disadvantaged, the lonely (not always poor, sometimes poor in the spirit) the vulnerable.

So may God help us to do.

listening is loving

 SERMON PREACHED 

AT 

St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

Te Pouhere Sunday (June 11^th) 2023

 

 

READING:

 

John 15: 9-17

 

We have no idea how the author of the Fourth Gospel – we call him John but don’t know who he was – gained his insight into the deepest and most interior thoughts of Jesus. Whatever he wrote down it had to be consistent with what people knew of Jesus … for those of you who remember him for example, over a similar timespan it would be no use for me to write of Rob Muldoon as a gentle and accommodating man. Narrative needs to match truth.

John’s story of Jesus a handful of key themes at the heart of the story – and the greatest of those themes, as St Paul might say, is love. 

I want to emphasize what some of you may have heard me say on the Gospel Conversations, love is love. Though of course what love is is also a bit complex at times. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we trip up. Jesus didn’t, though thank God he knew, knows that we do, sometimes, and loves us still.

Love was and is at the centre of everything for Jesus. And for John 

On this  Sunday of the year, a Sunday to recall the highly distinctive nature of our New Zealand Anglican Church, to remember the beauty, often forgotten, of our role as a three tikanga church, we have the gift of this call to love from the heart of Jesus.

To what? To love? But then ...what is love? 

And don’t expect the definitive answer from me. We’re all just stumbling in the dark. But there are some yesses – and the noes are obvious.

Disunity is not love, but unity – Father, may be one as we are one – unity is. 

Unity of course is not uniformity. As I read through the history of our in New Zealand I notice that it was not until the mid-1970s that the dominant cultures began to get the message, or some sort of inkling of the message … that unity is not about Māori Anglicans looking like Pākehā Anglicans in attitude, behaviour, worship, theology, amongst other fields. 

Slowly, since then, we’ve been learning to hear the Māori voices in all those fields and more.  That’s why, incidentally, I’m committed to the use of te reo in liturgy, but that for now is another story.

Neighbourliness, too, is closer to love than “disputefulness,” if that’s a word. 

Who is my neighbour? At the very least it may be someone who needs my time, my shirt, my r u ok, my roof … someone who needs my love not just as lip service but as practical commitment. The Samaritan, we might recall, gives all that and more to the man who fell amongst thieves, a man who should have been his sworn enemy. 

Am I good at it? No.

Love may just be about learning to share the sacred space of hongi – of course bearing full awareness of the risks of virus, but grasping what the inbreathing of one’another’s space can mean in our whanau of faith. 

Okay … I haved never been good at it, but life is a learning that love is about more than hugs or even hongi, but about walking in shoes – and then giving them to someone whose feet are more sore than mine. Love is what we might call inter-involvement. What is my sister’s or my brother’s most poignant need? Te pouhere, the interwovenness of our cultures in faith, demands of us that we hear that question.

Te pouhere asks us to ask ourselves: do we hear the question? Do we walk with our sisters and brothers in the whanautanga of faith?

And in all this, as the Jesus of John’s Gospel story reminds us, we need that gift of Holy Spirit to make present to us the giftings of God. Come Holy Spirit, come.

strangers on a road

 

SERMON PREACHED at St ANDREW’S, CROMWELL

and at St. COLUMBA’S, WANAKA           

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 23^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

Psalm 116: 1-4, 12-19

1 Peter 1:17-23

Luke 24:13-35

 

 

Some stories from the scriptures are so well known that were it not for protocols I would be tempted to say that you know the story, let’s move right along. I suspect I’m not allowed to do that, protocols forbid. Still: a) I am under strict instructions from your vicar to keep it short, and b) short is exactly what I want to do. So here’s a compromise. 

So basically let us believe for a moment that we’re hearing this story for the first time. First we could ask how the story sounds to Luke’s first, intended audience in the first century, then how it sounds to us,  his accidental audience, hearing it for the first time today.

I don’t know you well enough to encourage an interactive sermon on this occasion, but it would be lovely to hear your feedback sometime about these first impressions regained, as it were, from a too familiar story.

For me the clue is often taken from a wonderful literary scholar whose approach to works of literature was simply to say “if something strikes you as strange then it is probably designed to have you take a second look.” So, because we can’t really be interactive, I will just give you a couple of my responses based on that methodology.

Firstly, there’s nothing particularly surprising about a couple of travellers walking along a road. Twelve kilometres was not a particularly arduous walk in the first century, roughly the distance from my house to the CBD in Dunedin, a walk I take from time to time. Walking and talking are not particularly unusual or mutually exclusive activities, even for allegedly multi-task challenged males. Actually I happen to believe one of the walkers was female, but that’s another story.  Admittedly as an introvert I don’t encourage strangers to start talking to me as I walk, but it is one of those things that happens. I am reminded of the fellow passenger on a bus across outback Australia who once asked me, “is that an interesting book you’re reading?” I can think of few more depressing opening lines.

I do think there is a little embellishment, probably from the author Luke himself, when the travellers ask the stranger, with some surprise, whether he has not heard of the things going on in Jerusalem recently. I believe it’s a literary tool that Luke uses to add dramatic emphasis to the story, which you may remember, he was writing at least ostensibly for someone called Theophilus. Luke just wants to add some dramatic emphasis to his story.

The response of the stranger however is a little unusual, and it is unsurprising that later the travellers will speak of their hearts being on fire as he unpacked the story that they themselves had told. I kind of like it too when gaps in my knowledge I fleshed out by a vivid co-conversationalist.

Then, it is true, things become a little surreal. There is nothing particularly surprising about asking the traveller to stay for a meal. It is a little more surprising that he disappears in a puff of unreality leaving the travellers, Cleopas and possibly Mrs Cleopas, somewhat bewildered. Apart from anything else I think Luke is telling us that it is okay if somethings don’t fit into our minds.

More important is that the travellers’ eyes and ears have been suddenly opened in the breaking of bread and wine. Overwhelmed by the sense of the risen Christ and his presence in this simple rite, they rushed the twelve kilometres back to their friends to join in a fellowship of resurrection joy, and to acknowledge that the women who were after all the first witnesses to the impossible event, were right after all.

And that is pretty much where I would like to leave story except that, were I hearing this for the first time and deciding to make a movie or a stage play out of it, I would probably have those women roll their eyes meaningfully at the formerly sceptical followers of Jesus, who had refused to accept their testimony that divine love will conquer even the deepest darknesses if we only get it, if only we let it, and seek the power of God to help us be grasped by this new reality.

we just ain't that smart

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 6^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Acts 2:14a, 22-32

Psalm 16

1 Peter 1:3-9

John 20:19-31

 

 

So what is this resurrection thing? One certain answer is that I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Actually nor was anyone. Matthew suggests a couple of soldiers were hanging around, but they were asleep. I even suggest it was lucky for them that they were. This moment in cosmic history was too big for human vision. Or human understanding.

Perhaps since I’m doing a lot of work on the thought of Bishop Allen Johnston at the moment I may be permitted to quote him?

There are many divergencies between the gospel narratives of the Resurrection but there is one point on which they are without doubt: the strongly attested fact that the grave of Jesus was empty. It is absurd to suggest that this in itself proves the Resurrection. It does, however, emphasize the identity between the risen Lord, who is the object of faith, and Jesus of Nazareth. Had it not been for this identification, what justification would there have been for the writing of the gospels?

Strangely Jesus was not immediately recognisable, but the gospel is emphatic that the person a handful of women, and later a handful of men, met on the first day of the new creation was absolutely the Carpenter of Nazareth, absolutely tangible (though he asks Mary not cling to him), absolutely an event in human and cosmic history.

I think their point is that we just won’t ever get it, intellectually. Human beings on the scale of things aren’t that smart. Our absolutely desevration of the garden God has given us to live in is a reminder of that. Our greed, our disinterest, and a myriad other faults serve to remind us that we just aren’t that smart. Certainly when lined up against the smarts of the author of a rather big universe. Or universes.

So in the end the gospel writers – and they are all we have because the soldiers were snoozing – give us the language of the heart. Language of the heart that those first rather clutzy and very frightened witnesses were prepared to go on and die for. Language of the heart that transformed and transforms human lives. The followers of Jesus went on to tell a new story. I quote Johnston again:

They affirmed that death had been conquered; that by a tremendous manifestation of his power God had raised Jesus out of the home of departed spirits. They did not imagine that Jesus, like a ghost, had returned to spend some further period on earth. They affirmed that death hath no more dominion over him, that the universe had become a new place, that the new world order was already here, because Jesus had risen from the dead.

And I’m not going to explain that. On good days, though, I let myself be seized by it. And I’m hoping you do. Perhaps most often I am seized by it, in the days when I am in pastoral rather than educational ministry (but should we split the two?) when I stand at a graveside and whisper, stutter, proclaim those same worlds of hope we just heard read, from Peter’s epistle, stuttering to those who gather and to the unseen departed the words of faith,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.

I don’t what it all means. I know that it gives a hope that is far more than pie in the sky, because it is a hope by which shattered lives are healed, strength to carry on dispensed, energy to proclaim often risky justice, reconciliation, love birthed.

I hope in the past two years I’ve been able to share hints of that energy. I’ve not been your vicar, but hopefully I’ve been a fellow-traveller and hopefully I’ve been able to be a bearer of light. There’s no magic wand for tomorrow: there never was. The world is changing, the church is changing, but the hope that transformed our handful of frightened followers of Jesus is not changing. The strength for the future is God’s, not mine, not even yours. I can’t lead you into the tomorrow of this faith community but I firmly believe there is one. And I believe whatever happens to this place, this organization, even to us, that future is bright with the light of the risen Christ, who in all the uncertainty neither leaves nor forsakes us.

come, all

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

PALM SUNDAY (April 2^nd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

          

Isaiah 50: 4-9a

Psalm 31: 9-16

Philippians 2: 5-11

Matthew 27: 11-54

 

I have always claimed that I never refer to or repeat my old sermons, and I hold to that claim. There is though no doubt that on Palm Sunday, if I preach at all (and if we had the full liturgy I would not) that I come perilously close to it.

For 36 years, as a friend reminded me this week, I have at this liturgical celebration focused on my belief that this is the Sunday we celebrate getting it wrong. Or, more precisely, we celebrate our encounter with Jesus despite getting it wrong.

Perhaps I should explain. But I do want to address a misconception first. An awful lot of Christians get excited because they discover that a handful of passages, like the so-called “servant song” that was read from Isaiah just now, appear to predict the future Christ as narrated in the Christian gospels. I feel we need to be more honest. The gospel writers turned to passages like these and framed their Jesus stories in the terms of the constructs they found there.

Certainly Jesus was a servant like no other. Self-sacrificial, suffering, loving. Whatever Isaiah’s vision was about, it's wonderfully matched the first Christians’ experience of Jesus. But Isaiah had neither crystal ball not even divine insight, at least in so far as such insight provides unambivalent interpretation. Jews and Christians will and should interpret Isaiah’s poem very differently.

Paul, utilising a poem that he in turn may have either written or stolen - acceptable in days before intellectual property acts - sees this in terms greater still. This is the one who strode across, as it were universes, yet he so empties himself of all that he can be that this week we see him executed on a cross. He empties himself, as Wesley put it, of all but love. And we are the beneficiaries of that love, for it draws us mysteriously, inexplicably into the heart of God.

So why for 36 years have I taught that this is the Sunday we get it wrong? We stand with the crowd, and the crowd alas are terribly wrong. We stand with the crowd today and we will stand in the crowd on Friday. Samuel Crossman, in the seventeenth century, got it so terribly right. “Then crucify was all our breath, and for his death we thirst and cry.” It is thus because we look for a saviour in the glamour of human kingship: a Trump, a Putin, a Jacinda, a Kennedy. The radical shifts of politics left and right across the globe and across institutions in recent years suggest we live in an era desperate for salvation.

And always we will be let down.

Until after Good Friday. And it is to the depths of that day and its implications that we are invited to travel in our readings and in our liturgy this week, even if it is in shadow form. In that way we can find the God who dies for Ukrainians, yet also for Russians trapped up in someone else’s war, who dies for transgender persons, but also for women fearing that some transgender persons may just be exploitative and predatory persons dressed in another guise, who dies even for what are now called CIS White Males like me who are only too aware that some of the accusations directed at us ring only too truly.

So in this week of the passion we are invited to know that there are no limits, nor party politics, neither male nor female Greek nor Jew, slave nor free capable of blocking out the irrepressible love of God.

jesus wept

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St. Alban’s, Kurow

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 26^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

          

Ezekiel 37: 12-14

Psalm 95

Romans 8: 8-11

John 11: 1-45

 

It’s too easy after 2000 years of conditioning to forget that gods of the ancient world were not supposed to weep. It wasn’t that they were without emotion. They could be angry, jealous, biff a few thunderbolts around. But crying? That was beneath their pay scale. This was particularly so of any god who claimed to be Boss God.

It was just not the done thing. Real gods could not show anything that could be interpreted as weakness. This passage in John 11 breaks a whole heap of protocols. We have the God carrier, the God Man, the Lord himself weeping. But we have at least one other protocol broken too. As with the Samaritan woman, we find a strong woman daring to break expectations. It was incidentally one of the great innovations of feminist theology to recognise and affirm that sin for women, or perhaps for womankind, was not so much stroppiness but submission, token acquiescence to a dominant male narrative. 

I would leave that for another time, except insofar as in the past few weeks we have seen or referred to the incredible strength of the Samaritan woman who argues with Jesus, the Syrophoenician woman who argues with Jesus, the brave women who will carry the gospel message out into the world, despite their fear and marginalisation, on the first Easter morning, and now brave Martha who is willing, as we know from Luke’s gospel-account, to be recognised as a disciple, and is here willing to confront Jesus with her rage.

Martha an Mary alike overstep the boundaries of submission. They expresses their grief and her rage to a man in whose presence they would be expected by society to remain silent. He in turn is not afraid, to absorb like a lightning rod their grief.

Mary and Martha had no hope with their brother gone, so her desperation can come as no surprise. She already had the idea that Jesus had some kind of mastery over life and death greater than any human she could conceive of. Why now, she howled, were she and her sister to be left with nothing?

It is also one of the most poignant verses in the Bible. John is telling us something here that is critically important. Jesus wept. Decent gods even in the first century didn’t weep. They were not particularly interested in absorbing human pain. But something is getting turned upside down here.

Martha and Mary are trapped in that visceral grief which really knows no measurement. We humans have the capacity to feel deeply our losses – partner, parent, above all perhaps our children or our grandchildren – there are no words sufficient. This grief is what Jesus encounters in the bereaved sisters. Traditional gods of the first century remained unmoved by such a scene, our silly human problem not theirs. Jesus wept. But his tears are not the final word.

Jesus calls Lazarus out of death. I don’t know what that means. The gospel writer is at pains to demonstrate that the situation was pretty unusual, that human decomposition was reversed. Of course Mary, Martha and indeed Lazarus are one day going to have to experience this scene again in all its dimensions. One day we will too, and there are dimensions of it that we will have already experienced in our lives.

But there is a still greater extent of divine love which is yet to be revealed in John’s telling of the gospel. Soon God in Jesus, Godself, will enter that same experience of brokenness, desertion, even Godforsakenness, and death. We will too, though thanks be to God we are unlikely to feel the utter desertion, the utter Godforsakenness of the death of the crucified Messiah.

Technically the experience Lazarus undergoes is a remarkable resuscitation, not resurrection. He will undergo the dying journey, the death journey again. This experience that John relates, whether we see it as a metaphor or, as I am happy naively to prefer, as a literal if unique event, This scene reveals only a foretaste of the absolute and unparalleled depths to which God in Christ will journey in order to bring resurrection light and life to human experience. Those themes of light and life have been reverberating through John’s gospel telling from the very beginning, those famous first eighteen verses. Shortly in the events of Holy Week and Easter we will read not just the deadness of Lazarus and the brokenness of Mary and Martha but the absolute hell depths of every curtailed life and every crippling grief. And though it is beyond words, it is there that a greater light and life will break out, and the weeping women will experience not only the reversal of Lazarus’ life and death but the beyond words restoration and resurrection of all life.

It is to that life and life we are invited each day.