advent musings

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1^st, 2024

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT

 

READINGS

 

Jeremiah 33:14-161

Psalm 25:1-9

Luke 21: 25-28

 

In the Seventeenth Century a Carmelite Friar, who took the name Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, regularly penned his thoughts on the life of faith. The came to be known as the “practice of the presence of God,” and in all their simplicity, they came to be one of the most widely printed – and read – books of all time.

Brother Lawrence’s outlook was deceptively simple. Simple, because the heart of this lifestyle was the simple desire to see and to serve God in all he did. Deceptive, because the Carmelite life is marked by daily silence for prayer, structured reading of psalms, and observation of two hours daily of prayerful silence. On top of this the Carmelites are committed to a life of study.

Brother Lawrence therefore, unlike Yours Truly, was no sort of Christian hippie. Yet for those of us who struggle along with lesser discipline or no discipline at all there are at least the rudiments of deeper relationship with God in his teachings. As George Herbert put it, independently of Brother Lawrence,

Teach me, my God and King,
in all things thee to see,
and what I do in anything
to do it as for thee.

As a professional, and seemingly incurable birdbrain, I have never achieved anything remotely resembling the disciplines of Brother Lawrence or even George Herbert, whose hymn I just quoted. But across the readings of this day there runs the theme of the immediacy of God – an immediately of time and space. God is just there – just here – around and within us, made present to all the degree we need by the one we call Spirit. 

God is present through all time, from pre-time to post-time, though we can never understand this, because we are laid low by timefulness. But perhaps more significant for this first Sunday of Advent, all time is, if I can put it this way, all time is present in the God who is timelessly present with us. And so our readings focus on divine immediacy, preparation to encounter God no longer, as Paul put it, through a glass darkly, but face to face. Face to face: that encounter that the Hebrews knew to be impossible to survive, but for which we are encouraged to practice for by preparation each day.

And while we may never be Brother Lawrences, we are at the very least encouraged to generate, or perhaps to permit, awareness of the presence of God, embodiment of love and compassionate judgement, in our every moment.

babels crumble

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 33

 

READINGS

 

Hebrews 10: 19-25

Psalm 16

Mark 13: 1-8

 

In the Hebrews readings of recent weeks we have been catching glimpses of the Christ who goes before us through the entire range of human experience. Not, of course, the specifics of driving a Mitsubishi or hang-gliding or, yes, running a marathon, nor of being female or wealthy, but the whole range of human emotional response to the world we live in.

I mention “wealthy” because, guiding our understanding of the life of Jesus is the profound insight we can gain from a few sentences in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, that this person who the earliest Christians knew, following the resurrection, to be divine, was also voluntarily emptied of what we might call the privileges of divinity. He emptied himself, as Paul put it, and became obedient to the forces of human existence, to the will, too of God, even to death on a cross. Gods do not generally enter the fully human experience of alienation from divinity, and even of death. I say this because in the Gospel reading just now we see the pre-resurrection, pre-crucifixion even, disciples getting that badly, humanly wrong. The comment made by the unnamed disciple was innocuous enough. The Temple was a massive building, ostentatious, opulent, a far cry from the early Jewish understanding of a God who was comfortable with just a tent.

Which is not to say God did not permit the building of the Temple. Sometimes humanity needs to learn harsh lessons. Sometimes our cathedrals fall down. Sometimes our temples are torn down. Sometimes even our planet heats up, falling foul of human greed, as it accelerates the harsh cycles of nature. Even then we must follow in the footsteps of the One who has experienced all, from conception to birth to annihilation and all in between.

Some of us remember the poem almost always thrown at us in public examinations for literature, Ozymandias. In that poem a megalomaniacal figure, a Trump on steroids, has built immeasurable monuments to his own self-importance. Allusion to Trump is not altogether accidental. Having stood at the foot of one of his opulent towers I cannot ever forget the crushing feeling of revulsion – at that stage I had never heard of Donald Trump – that a person could so ostentatiously proclaim his worth.

But not just him; businesses outdoing each other by pushing their glass towers to the skies to proclaim the majesty of Mohamed Kajoor Alabbar’s Burj Khalifa in Dubai, or the finance company Permodalan Nasional Berhad’s Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur, or Shanghai Tower’s proclamation of it and its people’s self-importance. Those are secular buildings, some proclaiming greed, perhaps at best some proclaiming business success.

Sacred buildings too are vulnerable to the warp and weft of time, nature and politics. The cathedral of which I was briefly dean is facing condemnation, likely to be the second time that building has come down. Christchurch’s Roman Catholic and Anglican cathedrals, however magnificent, fell in a few seconds of natural terror. Darwin’s and Coventry’s were destroyed in war.

 I have no idea of the earthquake status of our stone building (St. Peter’s) but a decent wobble of the Alpine fault, or a careless flame at St Paul’s, could shatter the dreams of our forebears. They are not necessarily acts of God, as insurers used to like to call them, but they are reminders of the vulnerability of existence. And our mokopuna and mokopuna’s mokopuna may or may not survive the ravages of an overheating planet that we are bequeathing them.

And all of this was at least notionally in the mind of Jesus as he reminded his immediate followers of the vulnerability of human existence, and indeed of all existence. “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” The poem “Ozymandias” tickled the raw nerve of human arrogance; surveying the wreckage of the narcissistic Ozymandias’  shrine to self-importance with the caustic comment, “nothing beside remains. / Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Jesus warned that it would be ever thus. He warned too that human conflicts would go on, and that they would be misrepresented as harbingers of the end of time. The nature of energy and existence is such that one day all that we see and know will collapse around our ears, and the nature of humanity is such that some will make outrageous and misleading claims to be the servants of God during such apocalyptic times.

Have none of this, Jesus indicates but trust in the greatness and the compassion of the unseen God, revealed in him, Jesus, trust in his warming human footsteps through whatever military, ecological, economic, and even medical crises dwell ahead. And always just ahead of us the footsteps of the Christ who has been through it and conquered it all remain warm and secure as we tread our paths.

 

Robes? Not the Thing, please.

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3^rd, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 31 (and ALL SAINTS’, translated)

 

READINGS

 

Hebrews 9: 11-14

Psalm 146: 1-8

Mark 12: 38-44

 

 

If you are in the know you will be aware that today can be celebrated as All Saints’ Sunday. It is a wonderful feast of the church year, and a great counterbalance to the idiocies of Halloween, yet another piece of American commercialism that did not exist for most of us when we were young. Unless of course we watched that critical and iconic American documentary Scooby-Doo. But apart from that? Certainly, I was always unaware of Halloween – though I admit growing up in New Zealand I was at this time of the year building up excitement against that equally ridiculous observation of Guy Fawkes, mercifully banned in Australia, where as many of you know I’ve spent half my life.

Yet by dwelling on the readings that have continued through the past many weeks, readings from Mark and from Hebrews, I think there is a deep connection with the notion of the saints.

By “saints” I am never referring to that slightly bewildering practice of the Roman Catholic communion, one of very few that I don’t agree with, of a coven of elderly men sitting at a board table discussing whether posthumous miracles emanating from a saint’s sarcophagus or bodily remains, or some such, can be authenticated.

When I look back on the saints that have registered on my consciousness, about whom I've often spoken on All Saints Days over the year, saints like Molly and Leo and Ursula* that I’ve mentioned (though not here) I need no greater proof of holiness than that they have dared to struggle on, believing in our invisible God, often against all odds. That they have reached out their hands to receive communion believing that in some way it is for us the body and blood of Christ, against all odds. That they have dared to cling to the hope of resurrection and of justice, often against all odds. They have no shrines or weeping statues.

As we have journeyed through Hebrews in recent weeks I have had to remind us all from time to time that the priesthood of Christ in which all Christians share is the biblical priesthood, and that it is only by an unfortunate fluke of translation that those of us who wear our collars back to front and even sometimes wear dresses on a Sunday have come to be called priests. Let us ignore that word at least in so much as it applies to clergy.

Yet in some ways the word saint has undergone the same corruption as the word priest. It is not often that I say this but with regards to this word it is the Protestant and Pentecostal denominations that have got the terminology right. To be made a saint is simply to be a person who has taken the commitment to open heart mind and soul to the risen Lord. To be a person who has dared, in some cases more daringly than others, to believe that Jesus is Lord. And we can of course argue for a lifetime as to what that means in its out-working, but it is fundamentally the same: to believe that Jesus has entered our lives, and is transforming our lives into his own likeness, despite our flaws and fallibilities, and often our active resistance.

So although I cringe when I hear it, Pentecostal pastors for example are theologically correct when they turn to the congregation and call them saints. I cringe a little because it can sound not so much Christ-righteous but collectively self-righteous, especially as the speaker will always be including him or herself in the description. The emphasis has to be on the holiness and the righteousness of the Christ who calls us not on any residue of goodness that happens to attach itself to the sieve of our lives. And when we forget that, when we parade our self righteousness then we become what Jesus in our passage today highlights as the behaviour of the scribes, “who likes to walk around in long robes and be greeted with respect” etc.

AHEM!

(Do I notice what I am wearing most Sundays? Well … yes. As an aside, when once faced with a barrage of criticism delivered to my then bishop about my terrible performance as a priest, I refuted myriad claims except the last one, that I did not look after my robes. I pleaded guilty. I have never quite got the hang of wearing a dress, much less looking after it, as some of you may have noticed!)

No, that is just an ancient and harmless tradition, in the same way that a judge or academic might wear robes in a formal ceremony, to add colour and gravitas. Event Protestant pastors have dress codes!

But if I come to believe that the robes are The Thing, or worse than I am The Thing, then I am revoking my sainthood, in the sense that Paul in the New Testament uses that word. I am becoming as a scribe or a pharisee, as a phylactery-wearing hypocrite seeking aggrandisement as I strut around thinking I’m important.

And, contrary to some Protestant paranoia, the same is true of using the title “Father,” which was something of the norm in circles that I moved in in Australia, and particularly so amongst some indigenous peoples. The title becomes a barrier to my Christ-bearing when I begin to abuse it, seeking power or glory, rather than just seeking by the grace of God to touch a life or two with a hint of divine love. You may of course know it that I haven’t dared to use that title in the New Zealand church, where it is less common. In any case the ordination of women made this a complex deal, and being married to a woman who is a priest has made it more complex still.

Jesus uses the metaphors of robes and phylacteries and titles to describe any way in which we as bearers of his name can mar the integrity of our witness. I once watched a priest clad in all black shouldering mere parishioners aside at a diocesan function (not in this diocese) to get to the goodies at the table before mere hoi polloi. It was a shocking display of phylactery-wearing, father-parading hypocrisy. Sadly some of the tales of abuse that have emanated from the church have far exceeded even that. Our response must always to ascertain whether we are seeking the place of honour at any metaphorical table, or indeed, real table. And if so: desist. 

So, while perhaps at times I lean a little towards what my brother-in-law refers to as a model of unholier-than-thou, I think the combined message about priesthood and sainthood is that the saints are those who are what the Orthodox call a window on Christ. We will have all met some in our lives, and indeed by virtue of our baptism and our growth into baptismal vows we are all amongst them, however flawed we are on our journey.

It’s just that when we begin to believe that this is based on our own merits or significance, then we begin to tarnish that very same sainthood.

So on this day when readings about priesthood, sainthood and hypocrisy all mash up, I suggest the simple message is that we take a long hard look at ourselves, check that that selfhood is not particularly glamorous in its own right, and then get on with the job of opening ourself up to the Spirit of the risen servant Christ.

* Name changed to save her family from embarrassment or coyness

God godforsaken

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 30

 

READINGS

Hebrews 7: 23-28

Psalm 34: 1-8

Mark 10: 46-52

 

I want us this week to set aside the well known passage in which Mark tells us of the blind man beside the road. I want to turn at last to the passages that we have been skirting around in our weekly readings from Hebrews. I do want to emphasise though in passing one important aspect to which we will return of the encounter between Jesus and blind Bartimaeus, and, to give credit where credit is due, to acknowledge that it was Mark, our Mark Wilson who brought to my attention the detail that Jesus asks this determined blind man what it is that he wants, rather than making the assumption that most of us probably make, that the man wants to have sight. Jesus does not impose himself on those he loves, cares for, and heal, and we might remember that it was only a week or two ago that Jesus watched sadly as the rich young man walked away. Jesus does not lasoo people and drag them kicking and screaming into his will.

We will in fact come back to that at the end, but let us glance first at the traditional high priest,  the model of high priest that forms the basis of the argument of the Sermon to the Hebrews, as the author seeks to remind her audience who Jesus is, and what our response to him should be.

The original high priest, Aaron, was appointed by his younger brother, Moses. It may sound like an act of humility on Moses’ part, but was in the text an act of timidity, a failure, which many of us can understand, to trust in God and God’s hand on his life. Nevertheless the high priesthood was established and soon, like that other Hebrew role of king, was corrupted. It seems that Aaron and his descendants faded somewhat from the scene as other forms of religious leadership and even civic leadership took over.

But from the very beginning the role of high priest was tainted and flawed, as we might say it was always going to be because the role of high priest was inhabited by human beings. 

You may not have noticed it but most of us are tainted and flawed.

The writer of Hebrews was writing for a Christian audience that was becoming complacent and nonchalant about its faith. She  set out to emphasise the unique nature of Jesus’ life and work, and to demonstrate that that defined him, amongst many roles, as uniquely a perfect, unflawed high priest precisely because he came from the heart of God, was eternal with God, was nothing but God except in so far, as Paul reminded us in Philippians, except in so far as he deliberately emptied himself of divinity to enter into the fullness of grottiness of human existence. I have touched on this before.

The significance of the emanation from God, the son of God, entering into existence is multi-fold. Jesus becomes, as the author emphasises, an unflawed high priest interceding for us deep within the heart of God. There are many ramifications of this that I simply can’t go into in so short a space of time.

However one which is somewhat under explored, though was thoroughly explored by my favourite theologian Jürgen Moltmann, is that the ascended Christ returns to the one he calls “Father,” returns to his previous state of oneness in Godhead, armed with the new experience of being embodied in all the flaws of being human. 

To put that a different way, he becomes aware of all those dimensions of temptation and sinfulness, except, as Matthew and Luke are keen to tell us in their stories of the temptation of Christ, except for the dimension of succumbing to temptation and acting from a heart of sin. Correct me if I’m wrong but none of us achieve that. It is for that reason, if I can put it this way, that he is able to return untainted into the heart of Godhead.

Time and timey-wimey travel beyond our comprehension here, but in simple terms, on a simple human timeline, something then is changed in the very heart of God. Apart from anything else as we find out on Good Friday, God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, God is exposed to the experience of separation from God: God godforsaken. We can never understand that, and let us not try. But it does matter and it is why I add here to trinitarian faith and I’m not a Jehovah’s witness, a Unitarian, a Muslim, even a devotee of the Grand Architect of the Universe, or other choices that focus on a God who remains outside our experience, an unmoved mover, far, far away.

As an aside, much though I love the song “From a Distance,” in which Mary Chapin Carpenter and other recording artists sing of a distant God watching us, trinitarian theology teaches that the distant God becomes human amongst us. Through the third person of the Trinity God enters into and transforms our being to a state in which we can enter into divine presence and divine eternity – but again let us not try to understand this rationally for it is far beyond human understanding.

What though does it matter that God in Christ through the Spirit has entered into our existence and even our individual lives? It matters very little at all unless we are willing to open ourselves up to the constant and ongoing invitation to Jesus to dwell in us, to renew us, to – to use a fancy theological term “sanctify,” or as the orthodox would say, “divinize” us through the process referred to in Anne’s recent book Restoring the Story  as “theosis.” Wesley explains it as “transformed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place.” There is though an onus on us to hand over again and again our lives to the transforming, redeeming love of Jesus.

That however leaves me with one other matter that I must touch on. And here I part company with many of my evangelical friends. For I emphasise in my life and my teaching that we are not “the saved” in some exclusive way, who will see our friends and loved ones, to borrow the title of a ghastly series of so-called Christian films of the 1970s, “left behind,” as God sets out to dispatch to hellfire those who have not made a confession of faith.

Not so. Like the Jewish people of old we are called to be a remnant who pray on behalf of and for those who do not share our faith. Those who are too busy, too sceptical, too rationalist, too unreached to share the love of Jesus that we are blessed with. Scriptures themselves refer to, in the promise to Abraham, the blessing that we have received as children of Abraham,  extending to the children and children’s children even to the 25th generation. That is metaphorical language and we don’t need to count up and down our family tree to see where our loved ones dwell. That is rich metaphorical language that says those who we love and pray for, that phrase I use at the end of each liturgy, are caught up by our prayers into the glorious hope and eternal love of God. This incidentally is a doctrine called christocentric universalism, and a doctrine to which I dearly hold, and which I believe dwells at the heart even of the teachings of Saint Paul.

Enough for now. Except to reiterate that those we love and pray for are absolutely caught up in the eternities of divine love. And except to emphasise that our responsibility is to remain faithful in prayer, in worship ending finding every way we can to enact and if necessary speak with words the good news of Jesus Christ and his resurrection.

corporate box, thanks

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 29

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 5: 1-16

Psalm 99: 1-5

Mark 10: 35-45

 

 

For those of us who are not in church week by week hearing the continuous progress of the gospel story we just need to recognise the context in the story of this little exchange between the glory-seeking disciples and Jesus. The two were not exceptional in their bad behaviour: rather it was indicative of the bad behaviour of most of us in some ways or another, and certainly most of the twelve who gathered around Jesus. But this little exchange happens just after they have heard Jesus speaking of his own impending doom. They effectively ignore him  – at the very least failing pastoral care or even friendship 101  –  and instead seek their own eternal glory and recognition. 

There is a chilling report that appears from time to time that explores a series of young people's response to a question something like “if you could take a drug that was guaranteed to curtail your life at 35 but equally guaranteed you international fame and glory before then would you take it?” Perhaps in fact it’s apocryphal but the story goes that a disturbing proportion of those interviewed affirmed that they would take this mythical drug.

Glorification. We are particularly living in an era of so-called influencers those who earn phenomenal amounts of money, disturbing amounts of fame and glory by setting themselves up often with few if any credentials or life experience as inspirational figures for those who are dare I say it easily influenced. I admit that there have always been influencers. As a teenager I looked to figures like middle distance runner John Walker along with Dick Quax and Rod Dixon, To the poetic singer-songwriters who seemed to see to the heart of civilization’s angst, to poets and prophets who offered some sort of navigational beacons for my future. But they were different. Most of these attained their high profile by dint of sheer hard work and self sacrifice, at least at first. 

The disciples as depicted in this scene were drunk on their own self importance. Jesus speaks of his own pending doom, and they speak of luxury suites in the heavenly Hilton. It is not a good look. I add as an aside that I find it somewhat humbling that these flawed human beings went on to permit their mistakes to be broadcast to the world, and, although they didn’t know it, not only across the Roman Empire but through space and time. Had I been as publicly wrong as they appear to be in these narratives I think I would have arranged a court order, an embargo on any further discussion of my fallibility. In the years after the first Easter these flawed human beings saw that it was precisely their failures that enabled the light of Christ to shine most brightly.

Mark in his gospel writing constantly emphasises that we cannot get the meaning of Jesus teachings and his life until we have seen the earth shattering significance of his death and resurrection. The disciples can be excused to some extent for not understanding that in advance.

The discourse in the passages we have in reading over these last few weeks raises again and again the question what must we as readers set aside to walk in the footsteps of these flawed but redeemed human beings? We might pause – but I’m not that kind of a speaker – to reflect for a moment on what sacrifices we have made, and perhaps more significantly, what sacrifices are we not prepared to make in the service of the gospel. You may remember my confession a week or two ago of my own determination to cling to my large library, most of which is utterly superfluous to my needs, glaring at God and declaring that those treasures will only be taken from me if they were torn from my cold dead hands. 

Actually I don't think I was quite such a drama queen when I mentioned the subject a couple of weeks ago but my case rests. Speaking strictly for me for me we all may find things in our story that we had determined not to surrender to God or to anyone less than God. Indeed I think that was the point that Dr. Townsley was making when I cited her last week, that death itself, the great leveller, is good news, for it is the point at which we all will inarguably surrender to the love and the care and the mercy of God.

Between now and then, whenever then might be,  God remains immeasurably patient with us. I sometimes picture not a stern angry God glaring at me from the celestial heights, but a benign chuckle from behind a bush somewhere, as God wonders how obtuse I am and how long it will take me to get the message that I can’t take it with me when I go. Thank God, God is patient.

The gospel passage that I read ends with the reference to Christ’s life and death as a ransom for many. The language is disturbing. The tendency to read the near-sacrifice of Isaac into any mention of ransom language has debilitated the church down through the years. You'll have to read Anne’s book Restoring the Story to discover why that is both profound and deeply disturbing and unhelpful language. I had in my last parish amongst a gaggle of clergy one who stormed out if ever the word ransom entered the church. He assured me that I was doing my best to destroy his faith in a loving cuddly God each time I used it. The God of our scriptures is loving, but not cuddly. The scriptural writers use this powerful image, this disturbing image of blood sacrifice and ransom to explore the heights and breaths and depths of the journey that our Christ would take to enter into the darkness of our lives and give birth to the hope of Easter and its resurrection. Paradoxically, incidentally, said colleague didn’t believe in the resurrection either.

God chips away at our complacency until we have nothing left. It can do no harm for us to help God in this process by doing just a little bit of a self-audit to assess what are the obsessions and possessions that hold us back in the journey towards what the Bible calls abundant life. Perhaps this coming week we can take glances deep inside our souls to see what next we need to fine tune as we offer ourselves as a living sacrifice in the service of God's love.

Jesus gets ouchie

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 28

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 4: 12-16

Psalm 106: 1-5

Mark 10: 17-31

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 28

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 4: 12-16

Psalm 106: 1-5

Mark 10: 17-31

 

It’s a little hard to ignore the fact that that gospel reading makes for uncomfortable reading for us all. The demands of the gospel are not to be trivialised, and there is a tendency for us all, and I include myself as I shall explain, to seize on the almost-closing words of this scene, rendered here as “for mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible,” to seize on them at the expense of dwelling on the all but terrifying demands of the paragraphs on either side. The man, Jesus’ interlocutor, goes away sad. That’s one bookend to the passage. “Many who are first will be lost, and the last will be first.” That’s another bookend to the passage.

And at the risk of making me squirm as much as maybe I make us all squirm, are not these chilling words particularly daunting when we recognise that we live in a town where houses that are empty or filled for only small fractions of the year are owned by people with other houses elsewhere – no matter how hard they may have worked to own multiple houses, the case still rests. It rests more weightily still when we recognise, as we will increasingly, that there are homeless people on our church and office steps, sleeping rough. It is, while I am no social work expert, too easy to say that they have other choices. The choices I hear from them, and from specialists in the field, is that either through employment or through mental health issues, these are people for whom there is an imperfect safety net even in egalitarian New Zealand.

But when I preach I preach not to make you squirm but to make me squirm. I may not have multiple properties, although as I live in two places at the moment I may squirm a little on that basis alone. But I have over the years spent an inordinate amount of  money for example on books which in rare moments of excruciating honesty I should probably admit I do not need, and if I can extrapolate from Jesus’ teachings on adultery and looking on sexually desirable human beings (for more than three seconds of course) as being a form of adultery, then by extrapolation I know that, when I dribble over the sight of a Maserati, Bentley, or Aston Martin, I know that I too if I had the chance would be driving one, and that I too am therefore trapped in the cycles of consumerism.

“Point not at others lest you notice the fingers pointing at yourself,” as Jesus didn’t quite say, though he says many equally telling things: many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

The challenge for us is to act rightly. For us who are all, regardless of our actual assets, comparatively blessed with riches (it is always worth remembering that we are in the top few percent of the world’s wealth owners), the challenge is to discern how best we can act philanthropically, how we can act generously, how we can act, preferably crazily, to benefit the lives of others in the dark holes, nationally and internationally, of poverty and injustice.

The author of Hebrews is, I grudgingly admit, right: the word of God (and she was referring to the Hebrew scriptures) is sharper than any two edged sword. As Christ bearers we have come to know Jesus, hopefully with a deep and intimate knowledge, as the Word of God, the embodiment of acting out all God’s demands and commands. The author of Hebrews is right because by the merciful power of God’s Spirit Jesus does draw alongside and even within us to guide us on a more excellent way. It is impossible – or I hope it is – to hear the words of Jesus to this eager would be Jesus-follower, and to the disciples standing by, without being challenged to take a long and hard look at ourselves and the standards of generosity and compassion that we set and follow ourselves.

As we look at our media each day and seeing telling signs of a civilization that is crumbling  (and I do not mean that lightly), we might well remember that it is God who builds up and tears down, and who may be handing over (to quote a phrase from Romans) at the very least the wealthy peoples of the world to the ramifications of our own somewhat indulgent lifestyles.

I am always told that a sermon should contain good news. Saint Hilda’s Chaplain Dr. Gillian Townsley somewhat rocked the socks off my recent gospel conversation when she emphasised that the good news in this passage is that we all die. 

Once we had a chance to pick ourselves up from her statement, for at the very least it was a somewhat unusual interpretive angle to place on this passage, she reminded us that death is the great leveller, and that we are, again at the very least through a veil of tears, invited to enter, to use now my words not hers, the loving judgement of God. 

Nearly all of us have got possessions badly wrong, but we can offer to our God of the best of what we have been able to do and implore and know the forgiveness of God where we have corporately and individually failed. 

It is small wonder that the earliest Christians wrote of judgement often in tandem with writing of tears. Yet in saying that, I have a deep sense that while there will be tears of sorrow in whatever the resurrection means, there will be tears of laughter too.

 

 

 

  

 

annual-ish mea culpa

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 27

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 1:1-4

Psalm 26

Mark 10:2-16

 

Because we are a liturgical, lectionary following (more or less) faith community I am faced with the ritual encounter with Jesus’ teachings on divorce almost annually. Because on the whole I’ve moved around far too much, and no I’m not running from something, just as Lord Byron would have called it, a restless soul, because I’ve moved around a lot I’ve tended not to have to preach on this passage and its parallels in the same place too often. Last year I escaped it because I was not yet with you, next year I’m going to be lying on a Hawaiian beach sipping pina coladas or something. Today I have no wriggle room. It is my annual mea culpa.

Because of course to those of you who are not visitors it will be well known that I stand here not only as a divorced person, but as a remarried person, with as it happens children on either side of the equation. Enough about me, Except to say that honesty is I think the best policy, and the severity of Jesus’ teaching is not to be trivialised.

So what this becomes is an exercise in which academic people call “hermeneutics”; loosely, the science of interpretation. As we can probably all remember from our secondary school days every text is open to a plethora, even an infinity of realistic interpretations. Jesus teachings on divorce and remarriage are in their biblical versions pretty much unambivalent, and yet most Christian bodies across the world, with the slightly slippery exception of the Roman Catholic Church, have chosen to ignore them. What is going on? And for that matter are they to be put in the same category as Paul’s teachings on hair length and hats, or are they, because they are apparently the words of Jesus, to be given extra weight, red ink perhaps, and in that case do we then have what scholars call a “canon within the canon,” biblical texts that are more important than others, to be taken more seriously than others?

These are big questions and we can probably save them for when you join in a theological studies programme, which of course I hope you all will at some stage in the next decade or two or three. But I put it out there because I believe the biblical texts are not something to be trivialised. A colleague who, sadly, died recently, once shocked me by his declaration that he was not going to have his life ruled by an old book. I cannot be so dismissive. The 66 books that make up the form of the Bible preferred by Protestants, or the 72 or sometimes 73 books in the Bible as accepted by the Roman Catholic Church, (which I prefer unashamedly), came to be collected together through sweat and tears and even blood, as Christ-followers sought to determine which books most accurately convey the will and the purpose of God, as revealed in Christ. It’s a long story. But it is not just an old book, but a collection of books that point to the heart of God.

So what do I do as a divorced and remarried person when it tells me that I am an adulterer, and indeed that by remarrying I have made Anne adulterous too? Put that way it sounds pretty brutal, and it is.

My response is to acknowledge who I am and where I’ve been. Strangely in my pastoral career I have often found this sad story to be encouraging for those for whom I have cared and to whom I have listened. While I am obviously not recommending that every clergy person should have a divorce, I have found on the whole that people have responded with relief that a person with their collar back to front is a person with glitches and scar tissue. But that is no excuse. My starting point must be that I acknowledge that I made bad mistakes in my life.

My continuation point is more important. The story of Jesus is the story of divinity meeting us in the dark struggles of being human. I came not to condemn, says Jesus, and we see that he meant it in his warm compassionate and welcoming attitude to so many of the struggling people that he met in his public ministry.

I am in any case relieved when it comes to the question of being adulterous that Jesus makes it quite clear that ogling, a human tendency that a great deal of our advertising industry is based on, and to which certainly many males and perhaps even some females have not been completely impervious, is basis enough on which we should all – well all of us who admit to this weakness – be plucking out our eyes.

In the end I think the question comes down to that struggle for integrity or authenticity. When, infamously, televangelists announced that they have had an affair but it’s all right because the devil made them do it, I suspect they are falling short of that very flexible question of integrity. I hope and pray that I and others who have sought to serve Christ despite the flaws in our lives do not fall into that obscenity. I hope that those of us who have gone through the painful journey of marital breakup and perhaps the joy-filled journey of discovering new love will have always been seeking damage control for children, decency in relationship with estranged partners, and a sort of never-ending acknowledgement, but not ongoing brutal self-castigation, that this has been an error, a glitch, a sin, in our journey as we seek to follow Christ.

We live in a remarkable age. I often feel the boundaries have been erased too radically. I remember with wry amusement our youngest son coming home from secondary school one day and announcing that it was terribly embarrassing that his biological parents were still married to each other, as he was, he said, the only one in his year group who had to suffer such shame. I remember both sons, and I usually avoid telling family tales, shrugging their shoulders and asking what was for dinner when told that a family member was gay. I remember, years after my divorce, talking with my daughters about the life-mistakes that I had made, which had been briefly publicised following my wrongful dismissal nearly a decade ago: There was neither surprise nor condemnation from these strong young women who had the most right to judge and find me guilty.

It is always possible for us to indulge in cauterising, numbing our conscience. Macbeth speaks of it when he speaks of being so far in blood that sin will prick on sin. But ultimately it is up to us to be honest about our lives and to seek in both the highs and the lows of our journey to find ways by which we may proclaim and glorify our risen Lord.