stumbling in valleys

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

22^nd ORDINARY SUNDAY (September 3^rd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Exodus 3: 1-15

Psalm 105: 1-7

Rom 12: 9-16

Matthew 16: 21-26

 

 

I have a couple of web pages that I run, and they provide me, kindly or otherwise, with performance charts. I like the charts not because I am particularly interested in the performance of my brain explosions, but because I love the aesthetic that the charts provide.

For a similar reason, when I was studying conflict resolution a few years back, I loved a book by an Australian academic, who described conflict resolution as being like crossing Australia from Sydney to Perth. That’s an endurance effort by any means chosen, but hills and valleys, plains and descents provide, when represented pictorially, a pleasing aesthetic.

Having crossed that big island east and west, south and north a few times over I would have to add that the reality is every bit as wonderful, no a million times more so, than the pictographs or charts I’m alluding to (especially once you move away from the coastal conurbations).

A quick coast to coast across te Waipounamu provides a similar image, incidentally, and we can do anything by playing with mapping scales! It can look like 3961 km, if we want it to. 

At any rate, although I am a mapoholic, I’m really wanting to engage with the Christ-following life of St Peter here, rather than with treks across the Nullabor or the Canterbury Plains.

And as Dr. Townsley made clear on our Gospel Conversations  this past week, here we glimpse Peter in a valley, perhaps a saddle between two hills. Caught maybe between Ben Lomond and Bowen Peak, or across the Bracken Saddle behind Arrowtown. Peter traverses from the wonderful if ambivalent moment of the declaration that Jesus is both Christ and, remarkably, Son of the Living God, to the dizzy heights of the Transfiguration which, inexplicably, we explore another time in the liturgical year. Spoiler: Peter will enter deep valleys yet, it must be said. And higher mountaintops. But he enters a valley here. 

Yet for now let’s just know that, while dramatic, Peter’s life is simply an echo of our own human journeys and our faith journey. I think for example of my own, because I don’t know many others, and I remember the peaks, the tumultuous scree slopes and valleys, ridgelines and plateaux, open plains and occasional potentially tedious flats – dare I mention here the Canterbury Plains in our country or the Hay Plains in Australia? Some of you will know one or the other or both. I remember times when my faith-walk has been electrifying, times when the universe has seemed terribly empty, times when I’ve stumbled terribly wrong tracks, and then inexplicably found myself in rich rain forest or breath-taking wide-open spaces – dare I mention the Nullabor again, yet also the McKenzie Country, Rakiura, the Tongariro Crossing  or the Milford? 

Peter was so human. To love, to stumble, to fall. To proclaim boldly and against all odds, as he did last week, “you are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and then only a week later in our time-scheme, to be chastised by Jesus: “Mate, you’ve got it wrong.” I don’t hear voices in my head, but I must confess there’s been times when I’ve felt the inexplicable energies of God redirecting me from the path I’ve chosen. “Mate, you’ve got it wrong.” I’m not going into details!

Even, tragically, the history of Christianity follows those inexplicable contours. When first, after the Resurrection, our ancestors in faith stumbled out across the Roman empire, preaching a subversive God of Justice, dismantling often at great cost the corruption of the Caesars and their minions, high on the ridgelines of success. Then, for more than a thousand years, becoming a part of the deep valleys of corruption and exploitation ourselves – though obviously, always, there were the great saints and small people who swam against the tide. 

And now, as we fall from the corridors of power, as we are pushed to the fringes of society, losing our false gods, our power-games and self interest, the Spirit may well be leading us or our descendants in faith to be once more the people that Peter was to become, humbled, yet enflamed at last by love and justice. 

As individuals and as a vast network of believing journeyers, that will be our path, but always in the hands of the God of Jesus Christ, for whom and in whom even our death is no more than a valley between hills of light.

Amen.

 

 

This is Peter. Be like Peter

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN, and THE GLENORCHY MISSION HALL

21^tst ORDINARY SUNDAY (August 27^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Exodus 1: 8 – 2: 10

Psalm 124

Rom 12: 1-8

Matthew 16: 13-20

 

Biblical theologians like to bandy around the theological term “Christological question” to describe this interaction between Jesus and Peter. Often in doing so they load the encounter with existential terror.

 If we were writing what I suppose now is called an “X” rather than a “tweet,” we would load the text with strings of OMG emojis. If we were drawing a cartoon we might have a thought-bubble doing the same thing.

­But to see it that way is to overload this moment. This not about saying the right words.

Let’s remember that the words and actions of Jesus and Peter are being recounted by Matthew.  He has his own criteria as he tells the Jesus story.

Peter here becomes the first disciple to use the term “Christ,” though Matthew has used it several times in his story. He adds an equally solemn term, its reference more Roman than Jewish: “son of the living God.” Dictators of the ancient world enjoyed that sort of language.

Peter is laying it on. Given the brash figure he was he was probably rejoicing in his own sudden insight, but the phrase could equally be obsequious, fawning around like an Obadiah Slope or dare I say it a Rudy Giuliani, prostrating himself at his master’s feet. Either way he’s got it badly wrong. John’s Gospel-account recalls Jesus saying, again to Peter, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

So, yup. Peter’s words are right. Dramatically right. But they approach what in my broadcasting days we used to call “process language.” The right words are there, but they remain devoid of meaning. So Jesus says – as he often does in Mark’s gospel-account, “Shh, don’t tell anyone.” Biblical theologians call that “the messianic secret,” by the way. 

Ironically the unnamed but desperate woman a couple of scenes earlier got it right. No hollow syllables from her, as she cried out for her daughter to be saved. She shouldn’t even have been talking to this foreign healer Jesus. But desperation yelled within her soul. No nice formulae, just desperation.

Ironically Peter did gets there, on another occasion: “Lord Help me” he cried out as he was sinking in the lake. But by now he’s forgotten that desperation. We can be almost certain that the woman whose daughter Jesus healed did not forget. And she was an outsider, one against whom the church would too often lock its doors.

Nor in the end did Peter forget. Not in the end. He did become in some strange way the rock on whom Jesus founded the church. But first he had to see and own his own weakness. He had to realise that he could deny his leader, desert his leader, and even after the resurrection remain sceptical until the integrity of the women’s strange tale of an empty tomb and weird appearances of their beloved Lord began to convince him. No trickery, then, just the sheer authenticity of those women and their witness.

Peter in the end is not a failure.

More … we can even assume that the stories of his earlier failings were narrated with his encouragement. Peter, the Peter we find after the first Easter, allows his story to be told. Peter changes, after his saturation with the Divine Spirit, the One who came making Jesus present to the disciples in the weeks after Easter. That Divine Spirit, who comes to us still, humbled and restored Peter. Then and only then he was prepared to live and die for the one he here too glibly calls “Christ” and “Son” of God.

That Peter was prepared to let the story of his failure be told so that the focus would not be on him but on the Risen Lord. That Peter became the rock that is the meaning of his name.

Matthew’s story is in the end a bit like that meme several years back: “This is Peter … Be like Peter.”

But Matthew’s story has a rider. “Be like Peter, but like the unnamed Syrophoenician woman, wait until you really know the desperation that opens the human heart to the Creator of love and light. Be like that Peter.”

zero-sum?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN, and THE GLENORCHY MISSION HALL

20^th ORDINARY SUNDAY (August 13^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 45: 1-15

Psalm 133

Rom 11: 1-2a, 29-32

Matthew 15: 10-20, 21-28

 

One of the more criminal misapplications of the gospel-events made by Christians over centuries is what is called supercessionism, or replacement theology. In short, such a theology basically affirms that the Hebrew People, the original People of God, blew their chance; God confiscated the baton of salvation, and handed it over to the Christians. More specifically, it is incorrectly alleged, the Jews executed the one we know as Son of God, and as such they are to be rejected, even despised.

Such a theology, so-called, is deeply evil.  It reached its nadir in the Holocaust, the Shoah or “catastrophic destruction,” as most Jewish people would prefer it to be called. It is a dreadful misreading of the scriptures, and one that we slip into all too easily when we see the finger of scripture, as it were, pointing at others, and not at us.

Charles Wesley, amongst countless others, saw that the reading of scripture must far more accurately be pointed at ourselves. “Died he for me,” he wrote in the hymn we will soon be singing, “who caused his pain  ̶  for me, who him to death pursued? Amazing love!”

We are not called to beat ourselves up, but we are called to recognize that we, as humans, will too often execute love, however bizarre that seems. We are called to recognize that love, compassion, justice: these are entwined.

I’m not sure where the phrase “zero-sum” came from. Google tells me it originated in game theory in the 1940s. It is a phrase much loved in conflict resolution, and seeks to convey the attitude that in conflict, and indeed in any collision of ideas, the outcome is all or nothing. 

Australia’s Matildas and Sweden’s women experienced the brutal world of zero-sum last week. But football is a game.

The clash of faiths is not. To approach our siblings the Jewish people with a zero-sum mentality has been a deep stain in Christianity’s history.

Sadly it has been an attitude we have repeated in other realms, too, keeping people out or forcing them to change, rather than drawing them into the magnetic love of Christ.

I think Jesus is telling us more. Whatever happened in the witty exchange between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, any attitude of zero-sum or win-lose is dismantled. The Jews traditionally hated the Syrophoenician gentiles, but hate is not the path of God.

Not quite uniquely, it is Jesus who is corrected. But let’s not be too literal about this. Jesus here exemplifies an attitude that in reality he was dismantling. He – and at this point we meet him as a character in a morality tale – represents an attitude of exclusion, uses zero-sum language to exemplify harsh boundaries and the hoisting up of drawbridges.

The desperation of the woman – the desperation of any parent about to lose their child – outweighs imagined scruples, and Jesus turns his own apparent response around to open a path of love and reconciliation. The woman – who remains like so many women in the scriptures, nameless – the woman’s daughter is healed.

The greater healing is up to us. Matthew wants us to see that we must exercise the compassion that Jesus, after the feisty exchange, exemplifies. The unnamed woman, like Jacob centuries earlier, has wrestled with God and prevailed. More to the point, the desperate woman has wrestled with injustice, even bigotry, that has come to be embedded in religious systems.

Our job is to ascertain where we embody zero sum, win-lose bigotry: where I am in, you must stay out. It works in a soccer game, where teams strive for ultimate glory. It does not work in a world crying out for compassion.

So I can only ask “who do I shut out of the encounter with Love that is embodied in our faith, our worship, our fellowship?” I will not dare to answer for you. But I do find God has a habit of whispering to me.

 

beyond the tempest

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

19^th ORDINARY SUNDAY (August 13^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 37: 1-4, 12-28

Psalm 105: 1-6, 16-22

Rom 10: 5-15

Matthew 14: 22-33

 

Back in the convoluted days of my adolescence, I was given a book to read. I must add so I don’t appear to be completely a drama queen, that my coming of age was not particularly more or less complex than the journey of any youth of probably any era, but certainly of the 1970s. Nevertheless I was given the book Forgive Me, Natasha, (also known as The Persecutor) and I read it, and there is no doubt that it played some part in my quiet and personal journey form adolescent atheism to Christian faith some months – or was it years? – later. The book was also almost certainly the reason I called my second daughter Natasha, still more years later but approaching forty years ago.

Sadly much of Forgive Me, Natasha has been discredited by researchers in the years since. The author, Sergei Kourdakov, was not all that he claimed to be, and much of the narrative has been exposed as demonstrably false. Even at the time I wondered at some of his claims. Yet two aspects of his fabrication transcend even the fabrications.

One is the power of forgiveness – though myriad investigations into the behaviour of predators in church and similar bodies have warned us that there are, despite powerful value in forgiveness, many grey areas: forgiveness is not the airy waving of amnesia when someone demands that they receive it, and survivors of predation and abuse must not be coerced into believing they have to nonchalantly forgive their perpetrators.

But the other aspect of the book was almost a parenthesis in the conversion story that it told. Sergei tells of his defection from the USSR, jumping overboard from a Soviet warship into bitterly cold west coast Canadian waters. Perhaps he did, though his claims of surviving in those waters, even with a deep and new found faith has always struck me as stretching credulity too far. His suggestion that a computer programme, when faith was factored into his narrative, revised an assessment that the survival was untenable, stretched my imagination even further. What, in the 1970s or the 2020s, does Artificial Intelligence know of the quantifiability of faith?

Yet even with those questions in my mind I do have a deep sense of the strength – perhaps not 11 kilometres over six to nine hours’ worth of strength but never mind  – that faith can provide in dark times.

Perhaps we can all recall dark times in our lives that faith has steered us through. Perhaps we might recall the story of Terry Waite’s 1,763 days in captivity: less dramatic than the story told by Sergei Kourdakov, unembellished, and utterly credible.

Any dark chapters in my own life have been far less important but the emergence into light after a tunnel has never failed to remind me of the story of Peter reaching out on the waves in desperation: save me Jesus.

For some of course the light does not shine until after the final human closure: surely there are countless crying out to God in the Kupiansk district of the Kharkiv region in Ukraine at this very time, those for whom the lights will go out. We must hold stretched belief in that further aspect of light beyond our sight, for ourselves, for those we love, for those we pray for but see no apparent answer.

Surely this week in Hawaii’s Lahaina some who cried out to God saw light only after the tragic closure of their lives. There are no words except to know that the very same Christians who first rumoured resurrection-hope were themselves able to hold to light even after the dying of their light, and so the Easter rumour spread through space and time.

It spread, of course, because those first and countless subsequent witnesses were so inspired by love and anger, as the Iona hymn puts it, that the light in their lives transcended mortality.

Perhaps that was what Peter glimpsed as he reached out for Jesus’ hand on the lake. I have no idea what happened that day, but I do believe that Matthew’s telling of the story was utterly consistent with the Christian experiences of divine hope that transcended even death.

I am not altogether convinced by Sergei Kourdakov’s narrative now. I’ve seen and heard too many false testimonies to believe that all are as it were gospel truth.

But I remain convinced of a God who continues uncannily to reach out across stormy waters and transform, darkness into light – as Joseph’s story reminds us – and even death into life as Paul and Matthew alike were so convinced. I think that’s what Peter’s desperate clutching reach for Jesus can remind us, and perhaps, for all its faults that’s what Sergei Kourdakov’s embellished tale told me.

Yes, for all its faults. The God revealed in Jesus still reaches out over stormy waters.

speechless

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

FEAST OF THE TRANSFIGURATION (August 6^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Exodus 24: 12-18

Psalm 97

2 Peter 1: 16-21

Luke 9: 28-36

 

 

I want to talk about poetry.

Of course I speak as one who wandered around a university campus in undergraduate days, knowing only too well that as a literature student and a male I was hopelessly outnumbered by women. That of course may have been an incentive for undertaking humanities, but that is another story. I was nevertheless surrounded by men, including one of my flatmates, who rolled their eyes at the thought of poetry.

When I went on to theological college several years later it was men who struggled with the abstract moments in the biblical record. They had, it seems, three choices. They could analyse every surreal moment in the biblical text as if absolutely historically provable, concrete, rational. They could walk away from faith altogether because of its movements into the emotions and the imagination.

Or, and of course I’m biased, they could wrestle with the text on its own terms.

Perhaps it was ever thus, but as Christianity reached out with its gospel through space and time these dilemmas never diminished. Despite that, the leaders and thinkers of the church clung to and continued to celebrate the moments that reach beyond the merely rational. So readers of the Bible, too, held on to and (thank God) celebrated the poetic moments. Moments like the transfiguration, or the high end holy moments of Jewish mythology, and above all for Christians the moments of Resurrection, Pentecost, Parousia (future coming), and Judgement, despite the fact that they are way beyond our understanding.

Yesterday I read in the paper that astronomers have found a remarkable item in a distant constellation. It resembles a giant cosmic question mark. Scientists are of course not particularly interested in this celestial coincidence as if it were some sort of profound message from the cosmos: it is a quirk of form with no hidden text. Extraterrestrials billions of miles away don’t necessarily use European punctuation.

But it reminds us that the human imagination likes to play. As the great author of Ecclesiastes didn’t say, there’s a time for play and a time for work, there’s a time for meh and a time for awe, a time for science and a time for poetry.

Poets and playwrights and novelists spend lifetimes taking moments that we all recognize as beyond words and trying to find words for them. Peak human experience like a sunset or a surging wave or sexual or emotional, or grief: these do not adequately translate into words, despite the event being utterly, utterly real. Somewhere in the universe there’s an exploding ball of matter that we can only describe as looking like a fiery question mark. Somewhere in your life and mine there have been experiences beyond words. 

Somewhere in the lives of those attuned to the limitless possibilities of a God, and those who dared to journey with the beyond-words magnificence of the life and death and something else of Jesus of Nazareth, there were and are experiences that utterly out-pass the power of human telling, as fourteenth century mystic Bianco da Siena put it in a hymn we sometimes sing, “Come Down O Love Divine.”

Today we just touch one of those moments, and I have no idea what its about, but I know that peak moments of human experience are beyond words, and I suspect the moments in which we experience the utter mystery and magnificence of God are all the more so.

light in darkness

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday 17 (July 30^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 29: 15-28

Psalm 128

Rom 8: 26-31, 38-39

Matthew 13: 31-43, 44-52

 

 

I’ve kind of ignored Paul for the last four weeks, but I want to spend a few moments of your time (and God’s) giving the somewhat prickly saint a little bit of oxygen. 

My comments on him in the pew sheet notes this month [not online, sorry!] have been a little underplayed, but that is not out of any disrespect. Paul is an intensely deep thinker, as well as a stern but compassionate pastor. His writings deserve and stand up to the deepest levels of analysis. 

One of the most precious books on my shelves is a commentary on Romans several centimetres thick and, I am told, weighing just under two kilos. Unfortunately at the moment it is languishing in Green Island.

Why, you might ask, should Paul matter? Some see him as the great destroyer of the accessibility of Jesus. 

I think not.

Paul is the great interpreter of the Jesus-event. Jesus taught primarily in simple, broad and generally rural brushstrokes, word-pictures that offer vast interpretive possibilities of the God-culture by which he calls us to live. We’ve been seeing that the past several weeks.

But the Jesus-event, as scholars have described it for decades now, is not just his teachings. Rapidly the followers of Jesus came to see that his teachings, his entire life, death and resurrection, were inseparable. They saw that the events surrounding what we would now call his incarnation were utterly consistent with his teachings, were the embodiment of his teachings, in a way that one else, Paul included, could claim. Jesus, enfleshed in humanity, could not see that.

And he didn't write anything after the resurrection (or any other time, it seems). 

In writing to the Romans Paul was digging deep into that Jesus-embodiment. Unlike his other letters, Romans was written to an “audience” many of whom, most of whom did not know Paul personally. The letter is not corrective surgery like some of his letters, or what scholars call exhortative, like a coach yelling encouragement from the sideline, like Philippians. It is more or less a compendium of his understanding of all that Jesus was – and is. 

So Romans in particular is not readily adapted to two minute slices on a Sunday morning, and warrants two kilogram commentaries. Maybe we’ll dig deeper some time down the track, over good coffee. But that must wait. I, like Paul, need to win your trust.

Amongst other things, and especially in the few verses we just read from Paul, he is taking the whole of the Jesus-event and telling us to be encouraged, that we are not alone, that we can make it through the trials that human beings experience, whether in the 60s of the first century, or the equally calamitous 20s of the twenty first century. He wrote – or spoke – from his own deep experience.

For Jesus, Paul is constantly emphasizing, is all that we need to know or can know of the God who holds us in resurrection light. 

The event of Jesus’ resurrection, Paul is adamant in his letters to the Corinthians, cast light over every human life. And, he further emphasizes, that resurrection-event is implanted in our lives by the Spirit of Pentecost, who is all that we can long to know of Jesus, embedded in our lives, closer than our breathing.

So in this Romans passage today he speaks of the Spirit who dwells within us through thick and thin, holding us in the mystery of resurrection light and hope that is beyond human comprehension, yet strangely, in small glimpses, not beyond the comprehension of our spirits. 

Those unsustainable but irreplaceable moments in which we sense the presence of the eternal.  whether that presence be glimpsed in the depths of the night sky, the tonalities of fine music (regardless of our taste!), the love of a friend, the strange hints of eternity in liturgy presented well. 

These moments, Paul tells the Romans and us, sustain us through the direst personal or cosmic crises. As it happens, we too can by the grace of God be vehicles, channels of these moments to those around us.

Paul should know! He was sustained through dark times. So, he emphasizes, are we.

 

no crabgrass here, thanks

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday 16 (July 23^rd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 28: 10-19a

Psalm 139: 1-12, 23-24

Rom 8: 18-25

Matthew 13: 23-30

 

For any of you who are viewers of my Gospel Conversation YouTube programme  you will already be aware from my panellist Ellen Clark-King that Matthew the author has constructed his gospel-telling very carefully. Although chapters and verses weren’t invented as aids to reading the bible until many centuries later, nevertheless Matthew has placed at the heart of his narrative a large chunk of Jesus-teachings about what we would now call the reign, or as one of Ellen creatively put it, the culture of God. Matthew is telling his people, and as it happens that includes us (bet he never saw that coming!) that this culture-teaching is at the very centre of all things Jesus.

Over centuries, at least since Aquinas in the thirteenth century, we’ve tended to think more in terms of the death of Jesus as the central theme of gospel, occasionally with a glimpse of resurrection-reference thrown in as a softener, but Matthew is emphatic that God’s culture – a gender inclusive phrase that is preferable to “kingdom” in this context – is the heart of the gospel.

Our task then is to allow our lives to be invaded by Jesus, by Jesus-seed if you like, and in that way to allow ourselves to be overrun by his divine culture. And so … because God’s culture is not monochrome but a kaleidoscope of colour and command and responsibility and longing – we have parable after parable to extend our horizon and confound our expectation. Which, if we let them, they still can after 2000 years.

This parable of the weeds bends over backwards to emphasize that our responsibility is not to mastermind but to allow God’s growth to work within us. Tares and wheat in Jesus’ world looked very similar. But you will find countless contemporary examples here and now, too. Many of you as gardeners will know the problem well: couch or twitch, kikuyu, crabgrass, to name just some of countless examples. For us the task is one of surrender to the life-energies of the seed sown within us; but with a catch. We are called to surrender not to the weeds hidden with the grass of our own life of the life of our community, but to surrender to the energies of the Spirit who will lead us to discern those differences.

This is not to suggest we sit back and do nothing. It is to emphasize that we must offer our lives over and again in exposure to God’s Spirit. It’s not altogether helpful to know what kikuyu or couch (twitch) or crabgrass look like without then doing something about it. It’s not altogether helpful to know what loneliness or poverty look like without doing something about them. Doing something, that is, within our range of capability. God doesn’t ask me to climb ladders, or ask you, if it’s not your think to make public speeches or play for the All Blacks. God tailors, as we see in that stunning metaphor of God clothing Adam and Even as our protypes are sent out of the Garden.

How do I encounter Jesus in this context, how do I represent the culture of God in that context? Where I see in my own life or in the life of the community around me something that is counter-God, how do I speak God-stuff, God-culture, how do I enact God-culture in that realm? Like every good discipline faith takes practice, as Brother Lawrence, the Carmelite, put it in the seventeenth century. Meet together, read together, pray together, all these are training exercises. Pray and think alone, too, in creation, in a garden, a park … sit in a church … read … pray … however that looks for you. Do so alone and together, for these are practices, or can be, of the presence of God.

The call of the Parables of Divine Culture is not to condemn people to the pits of a fiery hell, but to discern and dismiss that within our own lives which needs to be eradicated, and, like ridding ourselves of crabgrass or even wildling pines, to chip away at the bigger questions in society as we can.

To these tasks we are called as we seek God’s help to discern and eradicate the tares, crabgrass, kikuyu and worse in our life and the life of our world.