fifty shades of self-obsession

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 30 (27^th October) 2013
 
Readings:      Jeremiah 14: 7-10, 19.22
                       Psalm 84: 1-7
                       2 Timothy 4: 6-8, 16-18
                       Luke 18: 9-14

As Jeremiah the prophet turns his scorching gaze on his community he becomes a figure who is unlikely to be popular in the era in which we live, the era of post-modernity or perhaps even post-post-modernity. Jeremiah excoriates his people in chapter after chapter of analysis – analysis and critique that weighed heavily on his shoulders and ensured that his life was spent devoid of party invitations or glitzy coverage in the glossy media equivalent of his day. He ends his life, so far as we can tell, in sorrow-filled exile, probably in Egypt, questioning with the psalmist how he or his people can ever sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, or indeed can ever sing again.

Jeremiah’s scrutiny is miles removed from the mantras of post-modern self-absorption.  Enter our bookshops or the internet today and the adult best-sellers are either voyeuristic sexual fantasies, Fifty Shades of whatever your favourite obsession might be, or meaningless tomes telling you that your truth is within you that all you need to do is dig deeper, strive harder, astrologize more confidently, adopt this training fad or that dietary fad or this parenting fad, and your life will be complete, your family perfect, your happiness secured. It’s no accident that life coaches are a growth industry, along with personal trainers, boot camp masters; we are inundated with an endless stream of “selfies” that take over photographic transmissions on the same social media sites that make us lonelier and lonelier.

Sites like Snapchat ensure that we can have our nine seconds of fame, with or without clothes on; sites like Ask.fm not only pollute our computers with destructive malware but ensure that for one fleeting moment we are in the driving seat of fame until things get nasty and teenagers are driven to suicide by outpourings of vitriol from which they wrongly fear they cannot run or hide. For those who don’t pick my allusion, no fewer than nine teenagers have committed suicide after being hounded by hate-posts and vitriol on the enormously popular social media website Ask.fm. There is a huge cost attached to believing you are the centre of the universe, but our society wants us to believe it every day.

Jeremiah would have none of it. His challenge to take a look at ourselves is not aimed at self-obsession, but at our tendency to forget our dependence on our covenant partner and creator, the God of the Hebrews. Jeremiah’s viewpoint was inseparable from that of Jesus or indeed any prophet: turn your eyes off self and see instead the hungry and the needy that surround you, see in them the face of God, and do something about their plight. We need to know in any era that these stern assessments apply to us as individuals and as a collective community (and I freely admit that I fall as short as any). To reject the poor, in Jeremiah’s books, was to reject God: we hear too few of our hellfire preachers emphasizing this dominant strand of prophesy, because it is much easier and safer and more comfortable to condemn sexual lifestyles than economic lifestyles. This is not altogether unrelated to our self-obsession: we are so overfed and over resourced in the west that we have become utterly self-indulgent, while the have-nots of the world’s refugee camps or our streets remain far removed from our thoughts. Fifty Shades of thoughtlessness, fifty shades of amnesia, fifty shades of myopia.

There was much truth in that chorus of the 1920s revival, “turn your eyes upon Jesus”:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.

There is much truth in it - along with some nasty ambivalences. We need to ensure that the Jesus we focus on is not recreated in our own cosy and narcissistic image. To some extent we cannot help doing that: liberals, conservatives and all in-between will inevitably read the Jesus story through our own filters of experience.

Each of the terribly human needs that bring us to surrender to the lordship of Christ will infiltrate our understanding of him – and there is no doubt that a psychologist can have a field day with our motivations for discipleship. But we must strive for honesty nevertheless: conservative readers of the biblical story must ask whether in fact Jesus – or any of the scriptural orators – really spend as much time obsessing with sexuality and sexual practice as many Christians seem to suggest.

Liberal readers of the biblical story must ask whether the resurrection narratives are really as tamely subject to post-Enlightenment, modern analysis as many of us suggest, or whether in fact it is our own scientific method that stands subject to the greater intensity of a Creator God’s immeasurable capability. All of us must again and again remember that there is, no matter what pop-psychological authors might tell us in their self-help books and websites, no way by which we can by ourselves claw our way into the fullness of life the triune Creator designed for us.

Ultimately Jesus – and not only Jesus but all who stand in the prophetic line (though he is so much more) – ultimately Jesus challenges us to ensure that we are not putting ourselves in the centre of the universe, in the driving seat of our own existence. To do so is to enter an abominable loneliness. No-one claims it is easy to “let go and let God” – and there is not even any agreement on what those often overused words might mean – but we might well notice that it is to what Bruce Springsteen called “the hungry and the hunted” that Jesus turns over and again as he attempts to portray appropriate, Spirit-filled discipleship. As followers of Jesus the onus is on us to recognize our points of weakness, to confess them, to surrender again and again to divine Lordship, and to stumble on in the path down which the beckonings of the Spirit lead us, paths that will always entail challenges of justice, compassion and love.

TLBWY

 

"Blah-blah-blah-godstuff-godstuff"?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: First Cathedral to See the Sun)

ORDINARY SUNDAY 29 (20^th October) 2013

(First Sermon as Twelfth Dean of Waiapu, Vicar of the Cathedral Parish of St John the Evangelist) 

Readings:        Genesis 32.22-31

                          Psalm 121
                          2 Timothy 3.14 – 4.5
                          Luke 18.1-9

 

Ah, the joys of a new ministry! I look down on a sea of faces whose kaupapa (story) is almost universally unknown to me. It is my belief, and although I have never “deaned” before I suspect this is as true for a dean as for any priest or proclaimer of the word – that the sermon or kauwhau must be born out of knowledge and experience of the life-journeys of those who hear it. That today is impossible, and will be for a long time yet. Bear with me then: I will try to engage – and though I make no guarantee that I can quite subscribe to choristers’ instructions for brevity (after all there is mahi [work] to be done here!) – I will do my best not to bore you out of all potential for belief!

And what a feast of riches! So often I fear we hear the scriptures of our faith read or expounded in church and hear no more than blah-blah-blah-godstuff-godstuff- blah-blah-blah. For those on the fringes or outside faith there seems so little to excite or entice, for those within the fluffy perimeters (not, incidentally “parameters”!) of faith little to encourage or inspire.  In other contexts there is some sort of inspiration but it is more to do with manipulation and artificial atmosphere and hype than the Spirit of the hard-working God of the founding fathers and mothers of our faith.

Blah-blah-blah-godstuff-godstuff- blah-blah-blah: it’s not what our forebears in faith heard when the author of 2 Timothy, for example, (who may or may not have been Paul) implored his listeners to anchor their faith in scripture. He meant, of course the Hebrew Scriptures, for the New Testament scriptures were not yet written or collected. The scriptures were as it was a “living word”, “inspired by God and … useful for teaching,  … reproof … correction, and …training…”. This was to him the equivalent of a Dan Carter physio workout – with all the emotional and physical pain and commitment and blood and sweat and toil, because this holding fast to Jesus was no walk in the park or bunch of fluffy ducks. And it is our task, somehow, to remember that costliness and energy of those who first (and sometimes still) risked their lives to hang on with this bizarre message of justice, righteousness and resurrection hope to which we at least try to adhere today. If nothing else we might recall the author’s plea to anchor any message of hope in scripture, in the narratives of faith, not in the whims and fashions of the fleeting social world that surrounded the Christians of his time and ours.

Indeed our lives of faith are called to be far closer to the wrestling with God that forms the storyline of the iconic renaming of Jacob-Israel. I fear sometimes that our god of the twenty-first century has become so plastic that she or he would quietly melt away were we to wrestle her, and we would be left merely wrestling and worshipping our own image, full of satisfaction when we win without realizing that we have also lost, and that we have merely recreated God, as no less than Nietzsche once tried, in our own image. Nietzsche taught us how to kill god, yet we have found nothing to replace God, and struggle I fear in the morass of our own self-importance now god is supposed to be dead. To say this, though, is not to claim that we did not make terrible mistakes in the alleged service of our God, too, as Nietzsche, for all his faults, prophetically warned us. We did, and we must not make them again.

How though do we avoid those mistakes of our forebears while hanging on to the pearl of great price for which they were prepared to live and die? Christianity is much on the nose in post-modernity, and when I see some of what passes for Christianity I tend to agree. God the nasty firebrand who stands on street corners proclaiming hatred for example of gays or Muslims or Jews or all of the above, god the exploiter, god the oppressor or the god who disregards a warming earth:  these are not the God of the early Christians or of the once very unpleasant Jacob who becomes Israel or above all of Jesus Christ. These are phantasms, sacred cows, and not the God of the Cross.

 As Luke tells the story of Jesus he provides again and again a litmus test of the authenticity of Christian witness: does our witness point to the upside-down topsy-turvy God who tears down the mighty from their thrones, as we hear in the Magnificat of Mary? Does our witness proclaim justice for the most broken and oppressed – human and other species – of the earth, or proclaim only our warm and fuzzy comfort? Is our witness anchored deep in prayer, wrestling with God in prayer, seeking and imploring that we may be the answers to prayer, seeking also that God’s answers to prayer may sometimes rise above the smallness of our expectations and become miracle?

I did not choose the readings for this day, but I believe they issue a manifesto, a challenge to us all as we begin a new chapter in your journey and mine. May God leave footsteps for us to tread in, still warm footsteps, and may we walk together as we proclaim in word and action the somewhat difficult, challenging, demanding and therefore unpopular God of Jesus Christ, the God of the Cross.

TLBWY

Is there no balm in Gilead? (So long, and thanks for all the fish)

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD

FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)

ORDINARY SUNDAY 25 (22^nd SEPTEMBER) 2013

final sermon at the Parish of the Good Shepherd, Fred’s Pass and Batchelor

Readings:        Jeremiah 8.18 – 9.1

                        Psalm 79.1-9

                        1 Timothy 2.1-10

                        Luke 16.1-13

 

If a first-comer were to pick up the books of the New Testament and read them from the opening pronouncement “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ” of Matthew to the closing “amen” of Revelation, even though these are not in any sort of chronological sequence, the reader would be hard pressed to miss gleaning something of a sense of urgency. Mark’s gospel-account is particularly urgent, as the author tells the Jesus-story in the shadow of what he considered to be the imminent return of Jesus. Can we or even should we still do this two millennia later?

For that matter, can we maintain any such sense of urgency even in the small time-frame of our own lives? Scholars used to say that there was a diminishment of apocalyptic urgency in the writing of Paul, occurring over a period of less than a decade. That is a less popular view these days, and I think it is more likely that his expectation of the triumphant apocalyptic return of Jesus came and went in waves of circumstance, and was gradually overtaken by his expectation of meeting Jesus (again) in his own forthcoming death, but the case remains:  his writings are full of apocalyptic urgency. But can we – should we – maintain that urgency?

For centuries that apocalyptic dimension of Christianity was suppressed. I do not mean it was suppressed in a Da Vinci Code sort of manner, but simply that it was put in the too hard basket of Christian teaching. There were moments of apocalyptic fervour: the lead-up to the end of the first millennium was one such moment, and the events of the Reformation led to another, but on the whole apocalyptic ferment was left neatly filed under “I” for ignore or “E” for excruciatingly embarrassing. In particular it was embarrassing to perpetrators of state religion – unfortunately deep in the DNA of Anglican Christianity – and even in my 1960s exposure to Christianity any notion of a second coming was seen as quaint and embarrassing. It’s no coincidence that it’s only since the detonation of the bomb obscenely named “Trinity” in the Jornada del Muerto desert on July 16^th, 1945, that any notion of apocalyptic has escaped the clutches of the idiot fringes of Christianity and returned to the mainstream (which, despite appearances to the contrary, does not indicate that the millennialist idiot fringes were or are not idiotic after all, for their focus remains deeply askew). Apocalptic has drifted very slowly into Anglican thought, so we have been deeply embarrassed when Jesus appears to teach that we should have so great a sense of urgency that we should behave like a rotten and corrupt farm manager. Jesus clearly was not terribly Anglican.

Yet this strand of New Testament thought is deeply important. If we lose it, then we run the risk of becoming precisely the sort of visionless Christianity that has often dominated our history. We run the risk, and this is deep in the essence of Anglicanism, of believing that civic leadership is the ultimate expression of divine will: as our formative Book of Common Prayer tended to express it, God appoints kings first, then magistrates, then bishops, then mere clergy, and last of all you, hoi poloi, whose task it is to do exactly what you are told, and ensure no boat is ever rocked. It is a miracle that Anglicanism has ever produced figures the likes of Trevor Huddleston, or his protégé Desmond Tutu, or the current ecclesiastical leadership who tend to be more prepared to critique corrupt or self-seeking governments. For a doctrine of apocalyptic, at the very least, reminds us that God is, as the Veggie Tales so aptly put it, bigger than the boogie man, bigger than corrupt or myopic governments, as well as being bigger than the calamities that may devastate our individual existences.

I would not want to suggest that Jeremiah lost sight of God: far from it! The abject heaviness of heart that characterises his world view is a direct result of his critical analysis of the corruption of the leadership of his day. I make no secret of my belief that our own civic leadership deserve the same scorn, as they use asylum seekers as cannon fodder in games of political one-upmanship, though I would add that our church leaders, too, have been utterly self-seeking as they spent decades hiding corrupt and exploitative predators within our own ranks, desperately attempting to avoid shame and fiscal horror of exposure to the powerful scrutiny of the law. For that matter we would do well to remember, as the Fitzgerald Enquiry reminded us a decade or two ago, that the law itself is not above corruption: and so the cycles of human sinfulness continue.

So is there indeed no balm in Gilead? There certainly is not if we either deaden the voice of conscience, that gift of God that inconveniently reverberates around the human soul until we cauterize it, or if we remove any sense of the judgement of God from our life-equation altogether.  We can take these options in a myriad ways, pushing God’s “still small voice” out into realms of irrelevancy, deadening divine scrutiny, making excuses: we can’t afford to be exposed to legal scrutiny in case we are bankrupted by legal proceedings, and how could we carry out our task then? So said the gospel never. I suggest that if we believe that – and I fear we have – then we have set up, like Jeremiah’s people, false gods, and worshipped them. Or, indeed, as Jesus put it: we have served Mammon, not God.

The winds of change are blowing through the church in all its forms. Our infrastructures are being stretched and broken, for I fear we have believed they, not the Spirit of God, would save us. God knows I do it too: anyone who claims perfection is a liar, and anyone who claims it is easy to face a shifting, uncertain future is not really much more honest. Is there no balm in Gilead?

Jeremiah was a miserable old soul, so much so that for a while the name Jeremiah was common parlance for a party pooper. He was far more John the Baptist than party-going, story-telling Jesus, though the prophetic tradition of justice-seeking embraces both of course. In the end though Jeremiah was kept on focus through his dark night of the soul by his constant awareness of the presence of God, a presence far greater than the corruption that surrounded him, far greater than doubt and despair. Such awareness is both a gift of God and, paradoxically, the result of discipline and hard work. I don’t set myself up as an example, but pray God that my life and yours can be a learning curve in that direction.

The author of 1 Timothy’s injunction to “lift up holy hands” is no more than an invitation to pray – the so-called orans position of prayer adopted in charismatic-pentecostal worship was probably the original and most appropriate pose, though I make no secret of my belief we lose bent knees at great peril.  The author’s invitation is neither more nor less than a demand that we work hard at the experience of closeness to God. We need though a reality check: are we worshipping because it brings us warm-fuzzy feelings as individuals?

Our paths have briefly crossed but the challenges put to us by Jesus’ story of a corrupt steward are applicable in all our individual journeys and in our corporate journey as members of faith communities in the service of God: Are we talking about mission and evangelism and justice and other ministries of the Church because we want to prop up shaky institutions? Jeremiah, would have no time for either, and Jesus stands firmly in Jeremiah’s footsteps, even if he has a better sense of humour. Or are we engaging with God because we love God, because our lives are touched and transformed by God, because we want others to know and share this side of the grave the warmth and the magnificence of the One we will encounter in our own personal death or in the final apocalypse of human history, whichever, whatever form that may take? May the answer be the love of God, for you and for me, as we tread the tracks God has beaten for us.

TLBWY*
 

*Please note there will now be a break in sermons until October 20th, after I am installed as Dean of Waiapu in New Zealand

Creative entropy and the shuffling sinner

SERMON PREACHED AT 

THE CHURCH OF ST FRANCIS, BATCHELOR

(NORTHERN TERRITORY)

ORDINARY SUNDAY 24 (15^th September) 2013

Readings:        Jeremiah 4.11-12, 22-28

                        Psalm 14

                        1 Timothy 1.1-2, 12-19a

                        Luke 15.1-10

While getting a hold of meaningful statistics in any field can be like catching shadows, the suggestions are that Christianity is adhered to by about one third of the world’s population – and whilst there may be varying degrees and shades of belief, as belief is strictly a matter between believer and believed I think we can accept that as a basic starting point for reflection. There are then slightly fewer than 2.2 billion Christians around the world, even though some might not acknowledge one another as Christians and there will be some in that number who would be a little reticent to give themselves that title. While in the western world there is some decline in adherence to Christianity, this is not true of the entire world: one of the most “Christian” of nations – though I abhor that combination of words it will have to do for now – is Mexico, where 95% of the population claim Christianity as their faith. At the moment US adherence is around 78% and falling: in Australia the figure is (2006) 61%, though only about 8.8% actually attend church on any given Sunday. Not quite a tithe of the population, not quite the tenth leper on whom the sun shines and who remembers tpo give thanks, to make eucharist, but close enough.

There is much beating of breasts amongst church leadership about the falling statistics of faith adherence and church attendance. While obviously I would love people to experience the joy I experience in the encounter with and worship of God, I am more at peace than many about the alleged falling numbers. Obviously the present models of church, with heavy infrastructure and stipended clergy, may be under threat, but there are many who suspect that very threat may be a movement of God’s Spirit. In a column I wrote for Market-Place many years ago I wrote of the “creative entropy” of the church: as a church that exists primarily for the maintenance of its infrastructure gradually implodes, by the gifting of God’s Spirit newer and wiser models of ministry and of mission will arise from the ashes. To me the infrastructure matters little: what matters is that we continue to be a Eucharistic and a missiological community of hope.

This was certainly the case with the church-equivalent of Jeremiah’s time: in a time of arid complacency the people of God turned away into Jeremiah’s version of a valley of dry bones, “and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.” I have no doubt that we are experiencing such a time now, though at what stage we are in the journey into the city of ruins I cannot tell: two world wars, a cold war, the so-called “clash of civilizations” between an increasingly decadent west and the more militant and fundamentalist wings of Islam, not to mention global financial crises and ecological brinkmanship all speak to me of dire warnings from the God who has sent many dire warning before. The beefing up of skittish news stories about Miley Cyrus tewking at a time when for example Syria is plunging deeper and deeper into a human crisis, as we saw a few weeks ago, assures me that our media are by and large slaves of entertainment, not information, and that our populace remain duped not by religion but by the controllers of popular media, most noticeably Mr Murdoch. But that is not to paint Rupert Murdoch as the antichrist: all that is antichristian is antichrist, and Murdoch’s self-serving media is only one pawn in a gigantic and demonic game.

Not to know the warmth and love and security of Jesus is, so far as I can see, punishment, not crime. Too much Christian preaching gives the impression that God is adding up our balance sheets, checking the naughty things we have done, and preparing the flames of hell for those who fall short of the equation. Of course I agree with Paul and all orthodox Christianity that we can never balance that ledger, that we universally fall short of the equations of God. My difference with much Christian teaching – though by no means all – is that I believe that to remain embedded in the shortfall is punishment in itself. To journey through life divorced from resurrection hope, and indeed to travel through death devoid of resurrection hope is a terrible burden. To dwell trapped in the valley of dry bones, the unreal city of Baudelaire and TS Eliot, to live a life of hollow-chested half-existence is punishment indeed. To be enslaved to drugs or sex or power or stock markets or all the pantheon of small g gods that stand as ersatz substitutes to the God of Jesus Christ is to live a half-life, or even not to live at all. God’s wrath, I believe – and I think I have Paul’s opening chapters to the Romans on my side – is revealed in the human determination to live without God. This determination to the negative is something those bearing the epithet Christian may often choose to do, too. I think of Christians trapped in lives of fear, fear of the future, fear of change, fear of all that does not resemble their cosy security: theirs is a shadow form of the way of the Cross, and it can become mine, too, if I do not embrace the wideness and the depth and the generosity of the God of Jesus Christ and the Spirit in whom he is known.

I am privileged. I have, for a start, known life without faith, and can safely say that every day I am aware than my own existence would be far more squalid were it not for my encounter with the risen Lord 35 years ago. I make no apology for that. While I am no angel I know I am enabled by God to blunder along in something vaguely resembling the Way of the Cross. I know that compared to my sisters and brothers in lands where Christianity is, statistically, growing, I am a mere shuffler in faith, but pray God I will continue at the very least to keep on shuffling. I am no greater sharer of faith – there are no conversion notches on my belt! – but am not convinced that, in the traditional sense, is what I am called to be (or maybe that is just my excuse to shuffle, not run the race!). I am called to be a signpost towards God, rumouring resurrection  hope even when it is considerably unsexy in a post-enlightenment world. To that end, I will shuffle on, perhaps showing some modicum of the passion of the widow as she finds her coin: rejoice with me, though I suspect that metaphor breaks down and I am the coin, not the widow, the sheep not the shepherd. God gives us a future: individually and corporately, and it utterly transcends the limited vision of our perspective. We must shuffle on, remembering, like the tenth leper, to turn back and give thanks from time to time.

TLBWY