Our Father who does what?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 17 / TENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(28^th JULY) 2013

 

Readings:        Hosea 1.2-10

                        Psalm 85
                        Colossians 2.6-19
                        Luke 11.1-13

 Amongst the many characteristics of Luke’s writing is an extra emphasis on the centrality of prayer to the life of a follower of Jesus. Prayer itself is mystery, and I will never attempt to define it, only, however poorly, to practice it. I have no rational words to describe this, one of the most ludicrous yet essential of Christians’ (and others’) activities, yet for those of us who seek to follow in the footsteps of the Nazarene it is almost what writers call a sine qua non, a ‘without which then not at all.’ To make matters more complex I do not think there is a right or wrong, but rather a complex web of ways to pray, and as Luke records Jesus’ own teachings at this point – and does so with quite striking variations from Matthew’s record of the same or a similar moment, he certainly does not establish any one rule or pattern of prayer.

 

To pray is to participate in mystery (though that in itself is not welcome in some quarters of a rationalist society). Matthew records his version of this teaching on the practice prayer as being a part of the great Teachings or so-called Sermon on the Mount, and sees prayer as a matter for deep privacy. I too tend to see it that way, and, except for the rituals of public and liturgical prayer (of which more in a moment) tend to mumble my prayers in private, far from the eyes of those around me. Others see prayer as an act of witness – let’s be honest: I’m not very good at whatever that is, either! – and I suspect Myers-Briggs or similar might tell us a whole lot about those differences in taste. Nevertheless, whatever our personality, prayer seems to be a dimension that can take us beyond the smallness of ourselves and connect us to greater dimensions.

 

So what is prayer? It seems to me to be many things, but at the very least it is the beat of the butterfly wing of faith. Some of you may know the chaos theory that the beat of a butterfly’s wing may be the catalyst that starts the greatest storm. Chaos theory, dismantling the certainties of a mechanical, clockwork universe, warns us that – within logical guidelines – anything can happen. The butterfly’s wing does not cause a tornado: it may however influence the events in ways we can never ascertain. Can our prayers in the same way influence the heart of God? While prayers for, for example, Syria or for the boat people often seen to reverberate around an empty universe I see enough signs along the way to wonder if that is really so. As a dear parishioner of mine in a previous parish was fond of saying, the time-span of divinity is infinite, and who is to say which beating butterfly’s wing brought down the Berlin Wall, released Mandela from Gaol, or will one day beat swords into ploughshares?

In my days as a Pentecostal and later as an Anglican evangelical it was fashionable to look on the formalised prayers of liturgy as empty mouthings – vain repetitions was the preferred phrase. One might equally respond that the Lord-Lord really-really-just-Lord construction of much extempore prayer is an equally vain repetition, and I’m sure both forms can become no more than the banging of a tin drum. God, on the other hand is I suspect not so interested in form as in intention, and there is no Hogwarts style right formula to win the ear of the divine.

Nevertheless, what is prayer in applied terms? Is prayer, as I sometimes say self-mockingly, only possible when we have a book? Of course not! Is it possible only when it is extempore, without a book, with or without suckings of breath and repeated Lord, Lords? Well, no. Is prayer possible only in tongues? Is a quick ‘lord help me’ or ‘lord, remember Joe’ a prayer? Well, yes: all these are prayers. The great mighty acts of liturgy, the rousing ecstasies of Pentecostal praise, the inarticulate shedding of tears over the body of a dead or dying child, performance of the sign of the cross, or the wordless or maybe thought-accompanied lighting of a candle: these are all prayer, and there is no wrong or right, as long as the doer of the prayer or prayer-thought is directing their butterfly wing into the heart of God.

For me the great strength of liturgical rites – and they were a part of Christian practice from the moment of the conception of Jesus – is that they are collective, representative, bringing together the thoughts and “unthoughts” of the saints throughout space in time, particularly at times when I can find no words to overcome my shortsightedness or my own ocean of feelings. But they are not the be all and end all of prayer, and whatever we point in the ‘direction’ of God will do in times of need. What in fact this prayer of Jesus, in either Matthew’s or Luke’s rendition, does emphasize is the accessibility of God – just beyond our sight, just where we direct of heart in times of our need or the need of others. “Abba”, says Jesus (not uniquely, for the psalmist used a similar construction centuries before). Abba: intimate friend, parent, care giver, hear the prayers and longings of my heart, spoken and unspoken.

Ultimately, though the Lord’s Prayer is a useful liturgical prayer, and all liturgical prayers have value as they lead us into the collective experience of praying, rather than individualistic efforts, perhaps its greatest benefit is as a template for all our prayers. The respect with which it approaches God is tempered by the knowledge that God, though not a “mate”, is accessible to us, and we do have access to the divine ear. The prayer dares to dream of a “not yet”, and invisible dimension of justice and equality which we cannot see reflected in our viewings of the world (on earth … as in heaven”). The prayer asks God to sustain in us a faith and hope that will transcend - - not protect, but transcend – all trials and sufferings that we might undergo (not least by keeping us embedded in a community of fellow-travellers-in-faith).  He prayer exposes us to the risky and countercultural business of forgiveness, by which our lives grow in the Christlike image to which we are urged as followers of Jesus.

Above all though the prayer takes us out of the smallness of our perspective and invites us into the eternal perspectives of God. That is not so bad a place to learn to be, however hard it may sometimes seem to be.

TLBWY

Kerouac, Bergson, God: the Doppler Effect of school

MEDITATION ON THE COMMENCEMENT OF A SECOND SEMESTER
KORMILDA COLLEGE, DARWIN
22nd JULY 2013

Opening Prayer

God our Creator
you gather us
from many different places and cultures
to live and learn and grow together.
Bless our school community
and all who teach, study, learn and serve
in this place.

Grow in us
your Spirit of wisdom and courage
that we may make the most of the joys and the challenges of this day,
and of every day to come.

Inspire us
through the example of Jesus,
to help one another shape
a world that is beautiful and strong,
and a tomorrow that overflows
with justice and kindness.
Amen.

Reflection

Some of you will know that I am an addict of driving. It’s hardly unique to me, but the road, not exactly endless but hopefully long, not necessarily winding but whatever terrain dictates, is my preferred metaphor for human existence. Of course it has been a metaphor for life since long before the time of Jesus, probably since the first amoeba climbed out of the swamp with their Satnav perched on their dashboard (distracting them, I should warn, from the real primary task of navigation, though that might be another matter), but I probably first engaged with it as I pretended to read the novels of Jack Kerouac during my teenage years.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life wrote Kerouac. Amen, I gasped breathily, using a word I refused ever to voice in school chapel services but which I found paradoxically appropriate when reading the so-called (and self-named) beat poets. Or perhaps it was Joni Mitchell, and particularly her “Coyote” and “Refuge of the Roads” (amongst other songs) that implanted endless highways and by-ways in my soul.

For me within the road of life the real world of driving was, alongside one or two other activities, the pinnacle of human experience. Which is why I have just driven down to Sydney and back … 60 hours of wheels turning with the occasional bout of sleep in the back seat and endless is my idea of heaven coffee (though for other than addicts like me the coffee is undrinkable from Mount Isa to Katherine: the only worse coffee I have experienced was in US diners).

This may not be your idea of heaven. (Perhaps it may also mean I can claim the gig on tax as research, as it now forms the basis of my reflection for the beginning of a new semester). Nevertheless, here we are, on the road, reflecting on our jobs in which our primary role is to nurture others, nurture our successors on the road that they, too will travel, and indeed are travelling already.

Funnily enough, if we were to read the set reading for the day as I did at this gig this time last year on my first day in the school we would find Abraham setting out on a road to a desert: the desert perhaps more than anywhere else is the place I encounter the breathings of the divine. The desert though is a place we cannot stay, and tomorrow our main game begins once more. Still, Abraham, the great mythical patriarch, may have something to say to us:

Genesis 12:1-9

The Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed on by stages towards the Negeb.

 Scientists among you will know far more than I do about the Doppler effect. Do not expect from this arts graduate a scientific analysis, but it provides a powerful metaphor. Usually applied with reference to sound or light waves I suggest it applies also to life-waves. I suggest too, since we are a school that teaches philosophy, that the much-forgotten Philosopher Henri Bergson might help us here, for although he doesn’t, as far as I know, speak of “time-waves” this kind of Doppler effect on the timeline of human lives is exactly what we are on about. You and I – all of us – are in the business of “life-waves” and “time-waves”, and in particular the life waves and time-waves of young humans. For better or for worse, as we look back on our lives, those in the educational sector (not just our teachers, but all school staff) are, after our parents and siblings, amongst the greatest single area of influence on the formation and direction that we have taken. Like the Doppler effect (yes: that is to say the “observed frequency equals velocity of waves plus velocity of the receiver relative to the  medium, all over the velocity of waves plus velocity of the source relative to the medium, all multiplied by the emitted frequency”, for those who care) the impact of our influence over young people’s lives is extended, swollen as it were in the passing through, disproportionate (here perhaps the Doppler metaphor breaks down) to the passing rate of time. There is a moment in time when we have the responsibility to nurture the potential in the lives of the children in our care, so that they can in turn midwife the very best future imaginable for times ahead that many of us will never see.

 

I mention Bergson. He is a largely forgotten philosopher today because he is not rational, sensible, scientific or empirical. He believed and taught that time is what we perceive it to be. Forget the ticking of the clock. The ticking of the clock says that we will have considerably less than 220, 898, 482 seconds – that would be a full, every moment of seven years – to influence our young charges’ lives. We have a gobsmack less time than that: the figure is, if we have one subject’s exposure to a child for say 30 weeks of each of seven years,  an opportunity of a mere 693,000 seconds. In that time, assuming their full concentration and ours, we needs must inculcate in them enthusiasm for the subject that we love, tools to explore and utilize that subject, and a few other life skills besides. It was the theologian Paul who said “all have sinned and full short of the glory of God” – at the very least, if we don’t take on board the Judaeo-Christian doctrines of God and sin, we must acknowledge “all fall short of the potential of 693,000 seconds.”

Bergson, though, said that time is not the ticking of a clock. So does the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of time, incidentally, because it argues that all time is pregnant with the Doppler effect of sacred potential. But let’s leave that for a moment: perhaps we might all instead remember a teacher who changed the potential of our own lives. I remember a class teacher when I was a ten year old who destroyed any potential I ever had in mathematics when he demolished my confidence by bawling me out in front of a class for a close but wrong answer to a maths problem. I was proud of my answer, to be so close, but rather than fine tune my performance he destroyed in a moment my embryonic love of his subject, and I have floundered at anything resembling maths ever since. But I remember too with thanksgiving my fourth form (year eight) English teacher who inculcated in my sprouting soul a love of the written word, a love that has stood me in good stead long after he died, on and out to this day forty years after he introduced me to a love of sentences and clauses, paragraphs and phrases, rhyming patterns and rhythms. The Doppler effect of these two men (they happened to be men) was immeasurable, and yours will be too. No matter your role in the educational community (for I remember kitchen staff, boarding house staff, grounds and medical staff with similar Doffler proportions) their impact was immeasurable (like sacred time).

Some of you will believe in the God I believe in, the God of Jesus Christ, others will not. But I suggest to us all that, if we are truly going to nurture in our charges the values and beliefs we address in our school mission, in the lives of our students, we dare not do it on our own. We are, if we are to be part of the Doppler effect of education, enmeshed in a bounden duty to enlist the support and teamwork of those around us, to dwell in the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts movement of a school community. Perhaps we might learn even to whisper in our hearts our recognition of the need for a power far greater than we can imagine or comprehend, far greater than rationalism, far greater than mere human ability, the power that Judaeo-Christian and many other philosophers call Spirit, and the power that Christians believe is ultimately revealed in the remarkable Doppler effect of a humble, justice-proclaiming man who lived in Nazareth two millennia ago.

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life” wrote Jack Kerouac. The road ahead of the children in our care is life, too. Let us hope and even pray that the Doppler Effect we have on these lives may lead them into strong, wholesome futures that in turn lead them into a future filled with the realization of their own and humanity’s potential. For so great a task it is no shame to ask the help of a power greater than our selves or our small imaginings!

And of course, this chaplain wouldn’t be who he is if he did not leave with one final song to shape your thoughts on the Doffler effect of your vocation: do not expect the profoundest of complex lyrics, but perhaps more than most this song takes you into the depths of human potential: take time to listen and then go with God into the demands of this day and the remainder of this year.

PLAY: Les Miserables: “Little People”

Lyrics available at http://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/lesmiserables/littlepeople.htm

 

Boat people go home, said Jesus (or Bonhoeffer) never

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF St FRANCIS
BATCHELOR (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16 / NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(21^st JULY) 2013

Readings:        Amos 8.1-12

                        Psalm 52
                        Colossians
                        Luke 10.38-42

The writers of the gospels tended to provide near the beginning of their narratives a prism that establishes a perspective through which we as followers of Jesus are to see both world and gospel. John, for example, establish a prism of reception versus rejection of the one who is Logos, or Word of God, and we are challenged constantly to assess whether we are receiving of rejecting that which is the command of God in and upon our lives. For Luke the prism – and this is of course to over-simplify Luke’s creativity – the prism is that Magnificat that once formed the basis of Anglican Evening Prayer for countless generations:

He hath shewed might in his arm:
he hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
and hath exalted the humble.
He hath filled the hungry with good things;
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Within the structure of Luke’s gospel telling there are then a series of what I would call “sub-prisms) at which point the scientific metaphor probably breaks down!) dominating the various sections of the story. Each of those though is consistent with the Magnificat: the human world of power structures is being torn down, the mighty cast down, the rich sent empty away.

This is not apparent as we turn on our media. The single biggest issues in our political thought are not issues for the poorest of the poor, who are the world’s outcast and refugees, except insofar as politicians seek to out-tough each other in their attempts to keep them from our shores. Luke tells us over and again that it is the poor and powerless in our midst who are the image of God: “whatsoever you do for the least of these my brothers and sisters”, records, strangely enough Matthew, rather than Luke. But it is Matthew that sees that the compassion of the Law, of Torah, rather than being jettisoned, must be exceeded by the Jesus-community. Even Kevin Rudd once wrote, citing Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that “We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the reviled - in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.” Politician however, of all persuasions, appear to have short memories.

Amos had no time for short memories: “Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. Shall not the land tremble on this account …?”. Christian preaching in some quarters has often majored in the minors, so that renowned and perhaps infamous US influenced preachers in particular rail against changes to marriage laws, claiming that cyclones and earthquakes and wild fires are a sign of God’s wrath against a country’s liberal views on sexuality. Yet the prophets of the Hebrews rail not against sexual mores – though these too must always be scrutinized in our own lives – but against flamboyant injustice, against oppression of the poor and alienation of the outsider.  One wonders whether Amos would have more to say about Australia’s attitude to refugees or its broad though not yet official tolerance of a wide range of marital states.

So much that passes as Christianity, though, is no more than militant self-preservation. At its worst, even the promise of “eternal reward” or “eternal life” is no more than a trite sidestep of the fear of non-existence, and a holier than thou attack on those who do not share our faith. When the fear of change – and this is not to pretend that all change is ipso facto good, but neither to claim it is ipso facto bad – when the fear of change leads us to rant against the oppressed and the insecure then it is highly questionable whether we are bearing Christlight to the community around us. I do happen to believe in the eternal existence of the human person – but not, I hope, as a tragic act of preservation against my own non-existence, but rather a logical outcome of the promise of God revealed in the event of Jesus Christ, so that even the power of death is “torn down” from its throne.

Martha is a tricky customer. It could be argued that she is an example of servanthood, the very thing we as a diaconal people of God are called to: “brother, sister let me serve you”, as Richard Gillard wrote. Yet there is something wrong here: her service has become distraction: “Martha, Martha”, Luke records Jesus as saying. They are words of gentle reproach, for Martha has, in her servant role, lost her focus on the Christ-element. “Kevin, Kevin”, he might say, or for that matter “Tony, Tony”: in their search for political supremacy they are distracted to the extent that they have dropped the ball of Christlike compassion. It is the Christlikeness, not the political or culinary expediency, that is the issue.

For us, then, as Christ-bearers, we are challenged to asses our performance and our motivation. Do we, in the light of this passage (which follows hard on the heels of the Lukan telling of the tale of the good Samaritan) , demonstrate Christlike attitudes and values in attitudes, like Mary, in actions like the good Samaritan (let us recall that Mary as a woman and the fictional Samaritan as an ethnic outsider were both theoretical non-people in Jesus’ world), or are we like Martha and the priest and the scribe so embedded in our own holiness that we forget the values of the Magnificat, that it is the poor and voiceless who are the icons and even nerve-endings of God in our midst? I know I fall short of Mary’s higher call to dwell on Christ: I fear many of us do. I know I fall short in the challenging call to radical hospitality, extending Christlight to the most needy in and beyond our community. I fear many of us do. May we pray that we are and indeed our two main political leaders are transformed towards radical Magnificat standards of justice and love? I fear anything less leaves us as Amos’ “you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land.”

 TLBWY

Tweeting for God

For 82 million years, since New Zealand floated off the edge of Gondwanaland, its parrots have evolved in directions far removed from their more vibrant and psychedelic Australian cousins. The prime native New Zealand parrots, kea, kākā and kakapo (and varieties), are positively funereal compared to, say, a crimson rosella or a king parrot. Yet ask a kaka to sing, and, while not quite either Kiri Te Kanawa or even Joan Sutherland, neither is its hymn the Mephistophelian snarl of a sulphur crested or red tailed black cockatoo or a galah. To be honest, given its skills at mimicry, a kākā would soon out-Kiri Kiri.  

Birders speak of “LBJs”, little brown jobs. The pardalote is a classic, though not particularly drab: it skitters through bushland leaving a trail of scattered song, tantalising the eye but rewarding the ear. To be fair Australia has an enormous range of birds, and many are exquisite songsters (the most beautiful, ironically, is perhaps the butcher bird). Aotearoa has a comparatively limited range of natives, but few fail to thrill the ear. Arguably the most mellifluous of all is, in fact an import, the song thrush, but let’s not let reality get in the way of a good story.

For there is a parable here. The beautiful trillings of an otherwise drab LBJ stir the heart, and, if the heart is godwardly attuned it may be stirred to join the bird, singing in praise of the Creator. The psychedelic flash of a flock of rainbow bee-eaters also stirs the soul, but, while its song is not that of a galah, it’s more Barry Manilow than Andrea Boccelli, and it is the colour, not the song, that moves us.

For me, more than any, it is a tiny New Zealand native called a riroriro that provokes the heart to praise. Only about 10 cms long, this tiny drab bird sings the descant of the forest, and its piping ventriloqual voice can float through a valley like the song of an angel. Perhaps I should stop any trans-Tasman rivalry, for there is an Australian warbler with a very similar song that is a relative of the riro riro, but, while not rare, it is far less ubiquitous and its song is less iconic in Australian culture.

This riro riro, then, is my (flawed) parable. Small, drab, all but invisible, its song rises to the heavens. Surely for those of us who will never paint the forests bright with the psychedelic colours of our being there is a message here: sing the song God gave us and we too can raise the spirits of a frost-encrusted valley. Frost, of course, is not exactly a problem in Darwin, but perhaps we can relate from experience somewhere sometime to the oppression of mist and frozen toes? You and I have a song to sing, the notes of life that God has given us. We may not, will not live in neon splendour, but in our small songs we may somewhere, somehow thrill the soul of those who pass us by.

Storming ICU for Jesus?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 10 / THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 
(9th JUNE) 2013

Readings: 1 Kings 17. 8-24
                 Psalm 146
                 Galatians 1.11-24
                 Luke 7.11-17

“The hope of the resurrection” say Baptist scholar Alan Culpepper, “is not grounded in the fact that the widow’s son came back to life but in the fact that the one who had the compassion to bring back the widow’s son has himself triumphed over death”

[You may as well know from the start of what may be a happy relationship that my favourite biblical word is the Greek verb splagnidzomai (you cannot use it in Scrabble). I love in part because I was once told, when I explained that it translated as "moved to the bowels", that such language was not permitted in church. I fear the good people of Christ Church, Wanganui must be a little more prudish than God or the apostles! I love it more though because it drives right to the heart of the differentness, if I may torture a word (I often do) of the God of the Cross. This is not the unmoved mover, but the God whose very bowels move at the plight of creation. We will find more of the significance of the moving bowels of God shortly.]

It is probably apocryphal, a sort of rural myth, but the story goes that some thirty years ago a group of Pentecostal Christians, emboldened by this passage or one of the similar resuscitation passages in the New Testament, stormed the critical care ward of Alice Springs hospital, demanding that the bewildered staff let them raise one of their friends from his or her life-supported death bed, because God had commanded them to do so. Unfortunately the security and nursing staff of the hospital were less persuaded of the significance or even existence of God in this critical moment, and the bewildered Christians were forcibly removed from the premises.

It is easy to be cynical about such a moment, and to mock the Christians for their misguided mission. Certainly they cost the wider Christian community a fair bit of credibility that day, but on the other hand there is a sense I can only admire their courage and their determination to overcome reality in the name of their beliefs. They were misguided, yet there was something impressive about their foolhardiness, and I can only hope that if the incident ever in fact occurred they were able to find Godward lessons in it, rather than find their faith stretched beyond breaking point at the thwarting of their expectation. I hope, too that the nursing and security staff weren’t turned away from the possibilities of the gospel of Jesus Christ by this gauche moment of Christian witness, albeit witness gone wrong.

But I do think they got it wrong, if the event ever took place. I admit I am something of a sceptic about almost all healings and even more so about alleged resuscitations,  though I do allow some room for the surprising and unstoppable actions of God. On the whole, though, I suspect God is not at our beck and call for spectacular sideshows, even in the name of “witness”, and that in any case even raising the dead would have little evangelistic impact on those who do not want to believe.

More important than failed spectacles in hospital wards is what Luke is telling us about the ministry of Jesus himself. Last week we saw a healing by what is called fiat, a command issued that is immediately fulfilled, obeyed even by the forces of nature and the spiritual world. This week it is rarked up (if I may use what I believe is a kiwi verb) to a new level, as a mere healing is trumped by a resuscitation. This of course is not a resuscitation of the CPR type – yet nor is it resurrection, as we shall see. Like the raised Lazarus, this resuscitated man will one day face death again. Perhaps like some who I know he will face his own death with greater calm than might otherwise have been the case, or perhaps like Kerry Packer he will come back from over the brink happily sneering "there's nothing there, folks." The fact is we know nothing about him: his name, his mother’s name, his emotional responses to life and death: all are lost to us because all are unimportant to us. This is not a story about a nameless young man and his mother, but a story of the revelation of the heart of God.

For the heart of God - or indeed the gut or the bowels of God - here enter into that most visceral form of human grief, the grief of a parent who has out-lived her or his child. I write “her” or “his”, but in this narrative it has to be a "her", because the grief of a mother is not only the grief of lost love, but the grief of total doom. A woman had no hope in widowhood beyond the support of her son and his family: with her son dead she too is effectively dead, and all hope has left her world. Luke is taking himself into dangerous realms – realms far more risky than those entered by the Alice Springs alleged ward-stormers – because he was writing in a world in which the hallmark of a decent god was feelinglessness, unmoveability, immutability. Yet he is writing of a God who feels, who feels even into the deepest entrails of divine being. This is so wrong if the idea of the early Christians was to appeal to, to be relevant to, the populace in which they lived out their faith.

Not insignificantly this is also the moment that Luke, in his Jesus-story,  refers to Jesus as “Lord” (v. 13): previously characters in the gospel have called him “Lord”, but Luke himself has held the title back. It is a significant moment: God-in-Christ becomes “Lord” for us and to us when he enters into our deepest moments of vulnerability and hopelessness, and there breathes resurrection light. As the bowels of God move with our suffering, so resurrection-light breaks into the most ghastly bowel-moving, visceral experiences of being human.

He does not allow us to stay there. He enters our pain, but there he commissions us to be his hands and feet, entering into the pain of those around us. The hallmark of the earliest Christians, and their strongest evangelistic weapon (as it were), was the quality of their love for the vulnerable, and especially, as it happens, for those most vulnerable of all, first century widows. Communities were gobsmacked: see how they love, they said of the Christians. Would they say it of you or of me? I suspect most of us fall short. I do.

This was not entirely a new thing. The Old Testament people of God drew strength from stories such as that of Elijah and Elisha, the first from 1 Kings that was our Hebrew Scripture reading this morning the second Elisha story from 2 Kings. There are many differences, but as Luke deliberately echoes the 1 and 2 Kings stories we are expected at the very lest to make two connections outlined in the dissimilarities, his deviations from the Hebrew texts. In the first place we might simply say that, if it is good enough for our cousins-in-faith to take hope and strength from the stories of Elijah and Elisha, then it is surely good enough for us. They even risked ritual uncleanliness by touching the dead - can there be greater compassion that theirs? Jesus in fact doesn't touch the body - though we know from other stories that he is not afraid of uncleanliness.  No: Luke though wants us to take another step. This is an event like that of Elisha and Elijah, but oh so much more, for here the man is healed not by actions and rites of prostrations on the body,  but by the simple command, the fiat of the God whose word or command and action are one and the same – and we are commissioned to know that this God is revealed in Jesus the Christ.

Where does this leave us? Not in the end, I think, storming the critical care units of our hospital, but knowing and acting out in our lives the realization that even death is transformed by the healing, hurting, healing light of Christ – your death and my death and the death of those we love. I firmly believe that if we denude our faith of this critical and inexplicable dimension then we are wasting divine time and human. “The hope of the resurrection” say Baptist scholar Alan Culpepper, “is not grounded in the fact that the widow’s son came back to life but in the fact that the one who had the compassion to bring back the widow’s son has himself triumphed over death” (Culpepper: "Luke". NIB IX, 159). We are called to live not denying death but celebrating the conquest of all deaths, all tragedies, by the glorious resurrection of the one who commanded the widow’s son to rise.

TLBWY

God as Boss

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
PRDINARY SUNDAY 9 / SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST  
(2^nd JUNE) 2013

 
 Readings:        1 Kings 18:20-39
                         Psalm 96
                         Galatians 1.1-12
                         Luke 7.1-10

Over the last couple of hundred of years, if not for ever, the absolute will of God has been a not altogether popular doctrine. I suggest possibly for ever, since we find Abraham having a few difficulties with God in Genesis 18, as he attempts to negotiate on behalf of the city of Sodom, but possibly that’s stretching my bow too far. Perhaps we should limit ourselves to the modern era, since the time when the earth was rolled up into a ball and our home became no more than an infinitely small bit-player in an infinitely big universe.

There is a paradox, there, for at one level, as the sun stopped circling the earth and the boundaries of creation spread further and further away from down-town Rome (or Jerusalem, depending on your slice of history), humans took less and less cognizance of the Psalmist’s “what is  a person, that you should be mindful of her.” Humanity, floating around an unimportant star in an insignificant galaxy in a spreading universe, placed itself at the centre, and flung the Creator out beyond the abyss, taking absolute will with him – or her. Humanity decided God was unimportant and decided to call the changes on the universe.

In other words, for at least three hundred years we have not been fussed with the idea “your will be done / on earth as it is done in heaven.” We’ve become less and less fussed with the idea of heaven, too, but that is in part a different story. We have gradually re-written the psalm to become “what is God, that we should be mindful of him, her it … ?”

Ahab had similar problems. His people had some allegiance to their God, but the gods of Baal were sexier, and they were kind of keen to have them, too. The God of Judaism and Christianity tends to be, as the scriptures put it, a jealous God, and wasn’t too fussed about sharing human hearts with bronze cows and orgiastic fertility gods. It’s probably not just since the modern era to be honest, but we too have done a fairly good job of flirting with orgiastic gods, trivializing the Creator (rather than seeing that, in an expanding universe, the creativity of God and the compassion of the God who cares for a falling sparrow is greater and greater to behold).

As the current Royal Commission will demonstrate, there have been far too many in our midst who have failed to believe in a God who might judge us by our actions, far too many who have forgotten to remember the stern words of Jesus about children and millstones. Far too many who have replaced God by putting themselves at the helm of the universe. This of course is to over-simplify, for readings of history tell us it was ever thus, but this is no excuse. We have fallen at the feet of Baal.

We have tended to forget about a God who created at the beginning of time and a God who judges either at the end of time or throughout time, depending on our comprehension of time (and mine is highly un-linear).  The Royal Commission that will shine its torch through our corridors – the corridors of the church in all its forms, will do us good. We can only weep and say sorry for the victims of abuse that have not necessarily been my victims or your victims but are all our victims. And when we hear of abuse it becomes nigh-on impossible to speak of the will of God, for to suggest it was the will of God that a child should suffer so at the hands of those who claim to be Christ-bearers is sick beyond words.  Where was the God who wills the centurion’s servant to be well?

For those who suffer, either at the hands of humans or at the hands of nature, I suspect we have no words, only the actions that pray God may speak louder than words about a healing, resurrecting God. I can only pray that those who suffered may judge us all kindly, for one day, in my theology, it is the victims who will on behalf of God judge the perpetrators. It is a solemn thought, and one I have long held, tempered only my equal and opposite belief that one day all, even the most evil of humans, might learn to surrender to the love and healing of the wounded Christ.

These, then, are just musings, not as it were an unpacking of our scriptures. But they are not unrelated. Ahab finds those who want to keep God as a convenience but their own hedonistic lifestyle – the attractions of Baal – and is not altogether kind to them. They have removed the question of a stern and judging God from the equation of their lives, and the implications of that choice are unattractive. We need to learn from them: God and the conscience he gives us may be slowly silenced in our lives but the risk of doing that is high. We can shut God up, killing those divine whispers in our ears, but we do so at great peril of our humanity. Jesus, like God, commands creation to obey his will, but we are not God.

How then does this leave us as we seek to stumble in the way of the Cross in 2013? It leaves us – or it should – refusing to play games with the gospel. We are called to be servant followers of Jesus, as he was and is a servant revealing of the heart of God, the servant king. We are called to find ways to express our love for God and for one another and for our neighbour in actions of service. God may be the one who heals by a simple word, but we need to know we are not God. Few of us have too many difficulties with this, until it comes to being servants of one another, or, more accurately, of Christ in one another. We prefer to control with our cheque books or our words, trying subdue God to our will, trying to reduce God the creator to the level of a good time Baalite god.

Instead we need to recall that it is God, not we, not you or I who is the boss, who commands the servant’s demons to release him, and raise him from the death bed. We are less glamorous, I suspect, and can only look for opportunities to serve one another – to serve and never abuse or exploit – as we seek to be the body of the Christ.

 TLBWY

 

Quarks, Kissing, and the Trinitarian God

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF ST FRANCIS
BATCHELOR (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
TRINITY SUNDAY (26^th MAY) 2013

 Readings:        Proverbs 8.1-4, 22-31
                        Psalm 8
                        Romans 5.1-5
                        John 16.12-15

I was for a few years a priest in the NSW diocese of Bathurst. Still in many ways a wet-behind-the-ears young priest, I was proud to be under the nurture of three or four senior priests, including the bishop of that diocese.  A few years after leaving, though, I was sadly and deeply stunned when one of the finest of those priests, with whom I was having a nostalgic drink or two, announced with solemnity that if Christianity was to survive in the 21^st Century it was going to have to ditch what he called “the nonsense of the Trinity”. He argued – though I was too jaw-dropped to contribute anything but spluttered gasps to the conversation – that this was no more than a fourth century pseudo-doctrine designed to appease a secular emperor and his political support base. I wanted to beg to demur, but my jaw was under the bar stool, and I’ve never been good at arguing anyway.

Yet someplace deep within my spirit (within my wairua) I heard my own voice mumbling “over my dead body”. It was very deep within – I never spoke the words, but they remain with me still. The Christian faith, in my books, stands or falls by the doctrine of the Trinity. Anne had a Muslim friend who used to chide her “if you Christians rid yourselves of the doctrines of the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and the Trinity, you’d have a great religion.” We would indeed: we’d have either Judaism or Islam. I have great respect for our Muslim and Jewish cousins, but I would passionately argue that Islam and Judaism and Christianity are not one and the same. We may well share a God, but that, believe it or not, is another matter. And it is enough of a different matter to believe that my Bathurst mentor was deeply, deeply misguided. Perhaps that’s when we learn to fly, when our mentors let us down?

Can I explain the Trinity? No. And not “no” in the way I cannot explain quantum physics, either. I cannot explain quantum physics, but there are some who can. I have a friend whose life has been spent measuring the weight of quarks.  I have no idea what he is even talking about, but he is engaging in an activity that is at least in theory humanly possible. I do not believe we can or should ever place the doctrine of the Trinity in the same folder as potentially possible human knowledge.

I too have sat through sermons attempting to describe this mystery of God in terms of ice, steam and water, fleur de lyse, or three leafed clovers, in terms of love, lover and beloved, and a thousand more. They are bound to fail. My favourite will always be Rublev’s Icon of the Trinity: three humanesque figures gathered around the chalice and paten of the eucharist. But such an icon will always fail until we understand that eastern orthodox iconography is never meant to be a representation but a deliberately flawed visual metaphor, a darkened window through which the light of faith can illuminate, teach, but never close a book of factual information.

To speak of the Trinity is to stand on holy ground.  The language I will inadequately use, if I dare to use any, will always ever only be the language of poetry, and will be the language of experience, perhaps even of ecstasy, not the language of description, much less analysis. We should not be afraid of that. The obsession of western society with enlightenment rationality may have its place when building literal bridges, skyscrapers, or balancing balance sheets (all of which are practices at which I am woefully inadequate) but not when we engage in the language of love. And, similarly, the language of love can never be reduced to physics, as those who have read a scientific description of the human art of kissing may recall. “Osculation” sounds so prosaic in any poem!

It is no accident that the words “poem” and “poet” are intrinsically related to ancient languages’ attempts to render the idea of “creator”, related to making, creating and composing. “God, the poet” is not a common idea in western Christianity, yet it is I believe one of our profoundest truths: “in the beginning was the word”, the fourth evangelist tells us. In the beginning was the poet, and we became the poem. Our puny post-enlightenment attempts to reduce the mysteries of God to language that we can understand are bound to fail. But to speak, especially in praise, in the language of poetry, in imagery and metaphor of the mysteries of God is to open ourselves up to God’s healing and redeeming energies: “consubstantial, co-eternal, while unending ages run.”

All in the end I will suggest, and the reason I will stand distinct from my Muslim and Jewish cousins in faith, is that, as the earliest Christians tried to formulate a language of the Trinitarian God, they were driving to the heart of the mysteries of Good Friday and Easter. In the event of the Cross of the Son every moment of pain in all creation is drawn into the heart of God, and every cry of dereliction, every “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me” is pierced with Easter light. And every moment in time, not just a Friday afternoon in Palestine two thousand years ago, is imbued with resurrection hope and resurrection light. Neither more nor less than that is the doctrine of the Trinity as best as I can stutter it.

 TLBWY