Sunday of the (dischordant) major key

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST,
WAIAPU (NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
SIXTH SUNDAY OF LENT: PALM/PASSION SAUNDAY
(13th April) 2014

Readings:      Isaiah 50:4-9a
                       Psalm 31:9-16
                       Psalm 116:11-end
                       Philippians 2:5-11
                       Matthew 21:1-11
                       Matthew 26:14 – 27:46

For many years now I have come to see the celebrations of Palm (and increasingly it has become Passion) Sunday as a celebration of our acknowledgement of our propensity for getting it wrong. It is not a theme I have often heard acknowledged, much less developed, but it seems to me a fundamental responsibility on our part to acknowledge that this most powerfully vivid moment of Jesus’ free ministry is the moment we look for redemption if not quite in the wrong place, then at best in a seriously wrong key.

This is if you like the Sunday of the Major Key … though the metaphor breaks down because surely, surely, Easter Day is when we break out into resurrection joy? Maybe: in fact there are some hymns in the Methodist and Lutheran traditions in particular that are deeply joyful yet in the minor key, so that commentators on hymnody begin to speak of the music of a deeper joy in the minor key. I’ll leave that to the experts, but, although our hymns later on this day are if not classics of hymnody nevertheless much loved in many circles, I think they are all in the major key. Sunday of the Major Key, and the Sunday we look for the glorious victory of God in the wrong place.

There is a wisdom that I first encountered in the John Marsden Tomorrow series of teenage narrative of invasion, a wisdom that says if you are seeking to hide from an enemy, as long as they don’t have dogs, climb. Climb a tree: up gives you the best chance, albeit far from perfect, of survival. Climb a tree: hunters we might be as humans, but our hard wiring has trained us that the best kai and the most dangerous enemies are at ground level. We look in the wrong places.

There are some warning signals in the biblical story. Back in the early passage, read outside the cathedral in our later liturgy, the Messiah enters the city riding a donkey. Matthew, anchoring his narrative firmly in the ancient prophesies of Zechariah, tells of Jesus entering the holy but tainted) city on a donkey. The emphasis is on the a-typical, meek nature of Jesus’s arrival, but we, the crowd, fail to read the signs, fail to note that the donkey is a symbol of peace and humility, and mentally put Jesus on a massive charger at the head of a conquering army. We fail to note the rag and taggle motley crew that accompany him, and act instead as if this were the great military overthrow by an army of the cruel oppressions of Rome.

There are none so blind as those who will not see; indeed, in Mark’s narrative particularly, Jesus has repeatedly shut people up as they name him Christ precisely because he knows they have got these signs wrong, failed to see that God will not appear in neon lights or glorious overthrow but in brutal naked vulnerability in death throes on a cross. It is then, so then, that the world whispers “truly this man was” – even if as yet the understanding is not given full significance by the glorious event of resurrection.

Christianity that places or leaves Jesus in a neon lit pantomime striding on the popular expectations of the people will never be the Christianity of the Cross of Christ. This is the Sunday we get it wrong – and we celebrate it precisely because we need to acknowledge our propensity for looking for answers in the godless, neon-lit and powerful places, on the ground, not on a tree.

We expect God, or at least something meaningful and salvific, to come in a blaze of glory. Much of our worship and sadly much of our mission and practice as Christ-bearers suggests we still too readily get this wrong. The God of the Cross is found not in the corridors of power but outside the city wall, at a dump, dying on an instrument of torture and execution. It is from there and from that great obscenity called death that finally Easter light breaks out. But we must wait a while for our pre-enactment of that glorious moment. We will soon turn from the donkey-riding Messiah because he fails our expectations. It is though our expectations, not God’s that are awry and need recalibration.

TLBWY

Bacteria, exclusion, and the embrace of God

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (6th April) 2014

Readings:       Ezekiel 37:1-14
                       Psalm 130
                       Romans 8:6-11
                       John 11:1-45

There are Sundays in which the readings are both a marathon and a feast of riches. Along with the infamous near-sacrifice of Isaac, the valley of dry bones has captured the hearts and imaginations of artists and other interpreters more than almost any other biblical passage, and for good reason. This story of the re-membering – and I used the word advisedly – of long dead and desiccated bones is vivid, timeless, and strangely playful, as God and prophet interact in interpretation of the visionary scene.

The passage is timeless, and for that very reason it can and must speak loudly to us today. It is timeless as we see our own Anglican communion dragged into the media not only here in New Zealand as the Ma Whea Report on same-gender relations is released, but throughout the world as we bog ourselves down with vitriolic sexuality debates. These debates bear weight especially when they impact as life or death questions for minority-sexualised groups in Africa and elsewhere; in East Africa as I speak one liberal bishop, Christopher Ssenyonjo, former Anglican Bishop of West Buganda, risks several years’ imprisonment for speaking out for justice on behalf of gays, who across the continent may be beaten to death for their sexual behaviour. Ma whea indeed: where to from here, what future now?

As the millennial generations grow up, admittedly in a culture of hedonism that we may not altogether endorse, they grow up wondering how a big and to them obscure institution like the Church can become so bogged down on issues that are for them just so passé. Yet in our valley of the dry bones of disconnection, we might ask if our sexual mores have to be driven either by majority opinion or by hedonist narratives. These are questions we must juggle – and I don’t pretend to intend to answer them here, merely to highlight the sad fact that we are more and more marginalised, more and more bull-dozed by inaction into our own valley of desiccated bones.

The vision of Ezekiel is timeless as we look around our own cathedral and see, while not exactly dry bones, nevertheless tired bones. It is timeless as we watch traditional family groupings dissolve into myriad matchings and re-matchings, as children grow up with deep instability in the family lives that surround them, as either the incidences or, less likely, the reporting of domestic violence and abuse against women and children escalates  if not out of control at least far out of the desirable zero-occurrence that we would love to see in our society. The valley of dry bones is all around us, but I suspect if you feel anything like the way I feel, then our response is more akin to a possum in the headlights than to a prophet about to encounter the searing light of the Spirit of God.

Ultimately I suspect that as an institution we are like any organism, driven by the flight or fight instincts of self-preservation. We are like the possum in the headlights because we don’t know what to do with the unprecedented rate of change surrounding us. Changing sexual mores or perhaps sexual honesty, definitions of family, clashes of religious civilizations, climate change and rising sea levels, the resurgence of bacteria in our wards, threatened economic collapse, growing distrust of political and social and religious leadership: whether these matters are reality or not they are the perception thrust into our living room day after day as we sit transfixed by media transmitting their often jaundiced interpretations of the world. We are the dry bones.

Yet I suspect that it is at least to a large degree a case of that wonderful French saying plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. If for no other reason than this timelessness, then the powerful narratives of our scriptures would be worth exploring. A story of the revivification of dry bones, stemming from a vision experienced by a prickly Judean poet and prophet, Ezekiel, was born at a time when the known world was devastated by military overthrow, by rape, pillage and the annihilation of social infrastructure. Ezekiel dares to see the destruction of his known world as the work of God, but dares too to see the restoration of his people’s hope as a promise soon to be fulfilled. You need not be a biblical scholar to realize that Ezekiel may not have been flavour of the month as he told his people that their doom was their fault, and that any hope of restoration dwelt entirely in the hands of the God who had allowed their destruction. It is no coincidence that in our psalm, Psalm 130, the psalmist cries with a depth of pain not dissimilar to that of Ezekiel: the psalmist and Ezekiel alike are in the depths of a Good Friday hell, and it is in that hell that they learn to cry out with integrity: “Lord, hear my voice.”

When Paul addresses the Romans, although more succinct than Ezekiel, he too is daring to address a faith-community that is sinking into the demise of bitter division and lifelessness, although he waits to the very end of his epistle, at Rom 16.17, to make that concern clear. Throughout his few years of writing ministry divisiveness and party-spirit was one of the most destructive forces he addressed, over and again in the embryonic churches. Like all destructive forces he called it a work of the flesh – unlike Ezekiel he is seeing “flesh” not as a sign of re-vivification but as that which is opposed to God. The outcome though is the same as that addressed by Ezekiel: a community that is forgetting the life-giving, compassion-bringing, justice-establishing works of God’s Spirit, that is obsessed by its own divisions and party-politics, is a community that is dying, no matter how august or magnificent its outward appearances. Shortly after our passage Paul will refer to the Romans living in a spirit of cowardice, frightened to embrace the future as God’s future. I suggest, too that whatever happened in the actualities of the life of Lazarus, that the resuscitation he experienced at the hands of Jesus had parabolic as well as any literal meaning, and that the life of a believer restricted into the incarceration of a tomb of future-phobia is more than enough to bring Jesus and the heart of God to tears.

We are at risk of becoming, if not already being, the dry bones. We are at risk of being Lazarus. We are at risk of being the Roman Christians of Paul or the Judean Hebrews of Ezekiel, frightened by a future that we dare not name as God’s future because we do not understand it. As a cathedral parish with dwindling numbers, as a diocese with dwindling resources, as a national and international church increasingly marginalised, we are haemorrhaging by our majoring in the minors, by party-spirit, by obsession with maintaining the letter of the past (that foreign country where things are done differently). It is not the time to discuss in depth questions of marriage reform and sexuality, despite Ma Whea, nor the politics of episcopal election, despite our diocesan vacancy, nor the cries of those who would see Jesus but who are turned away where we exercise a ministry of exclusion rather than embrace in our moral pronouncements (but also in our liturgy and music and teaching and preaching).

It is time though to note that, following the crie de cœur of Psalm 130 the canon introduces a new tone, the confession of sin and cry for forgiveness of Psalm 131. We cannot do a great deal about the international or national or even diocesan big picture issues of sexuality and justice, but we can as one tiny corner of the church of God ascertain what we are doing to be a welcoming, embracing, accessible, meaningful signpost to the Easter hope that we are called to be, and we can ask the Spirit of God to pour out on our tired and sometimes apprehensive if not frightened flesh and cause our dry bones to rise in a future that may be different but is nevertheless God’s future.

TLBWY

PS: I have been asked to include a bibliography of my sources. The primary sources for this week's reflection were Katheryn Pfister Darr, "Ezekiel", in the New Interpreter's Bible, Volume 6 (2001) and J. Clinton McCann's "Psalms", also New Interpreter's Bible, Volume 4 (1996). I'm not sure either scholar would own my findings and uses of their thoughts, though!

"Rise Against": punk rock, Jeremiah and 110 kilo wrestlers

SERMONETTE PREACHED AT St JOHN’S CATHEDRAL, NAPIER

EVENSONG (led by the children’s choir)
20^th MARCH 2014

 

Readings:

Jeremiah 9.12-24

John 7.1-13

Jeremiah was such a miserable dude that for some decades the word “jeremiah” was used to describe someone who was a party pooper, ruining every good get-together … you know, the person who when you are telling ghost stories around the camp fire comes along and says “there’s no such thing as ghosts and go to bed anyway or I’ll tell … et cetera.

As it happens there are occasions we need a Jeremiah. There are the times we’re all picking on someone and making their life hell, and it feels really good to be a part of a group even if someone else is suffering, but they probably deserve it anyway, and suddenly someone comes along and stands with the person (or racial or social group) being victimised and says "hey, cut it out because if you give this person a hard time you’ll have me to deal with" and you suddenly realise that this new person is in Year 13 and is the Hawke's Bay Wrestling Champ and maybe not someone to mess with

…Which is not to say Jeremiah weighed 100 kilos and was two metres tall ("six foot tall and made of muscles") and a national or regional champ at wrestling, but he was pretty persistent and it started to seem after a while that every time he said “hey guys cut it out or deep doo-doos are going to happen” and he got ignored that deep doo-doos did happen, and the bullies and others began, reluctantly to take notice. Except some, and they just plotted to murder him, but though it made him unhappy and he even wrote a book called Tears (or Lamentations) they never really shut him up, and he kept on pricking their conscience.

Any of you ever heard of an American punk rock band called “Rise Against”? They’re not quite choristers, but they’ve spent a lot of time, a bit like Jeremiah, telling society off when we get things wrong: when we bully or ignore people, or imprison people unfairly or declare war on people unnecessarily or hurt animals or destroy the planet. They’re not quite choristers and Gary might object if you adopted their vocal techniques but they have a powerful message – check out a song called “Make it Stop” sometime – it’s about people who bully people just because they’re different, and that’s exactly the sort of stuff that got up Jeremiah’s nose and Jesus’ nose for that matter.

Jeremiah got a whole lot of women together and made them wail. When I took Aboriginal funerals in Australia it was a bit like that. The women would wail and wail until the sound was unbearable and it seemed the whole world was crying and then they’d stop and you could breathe and then they’d start again. Jeremiah wanted the women of Israel to do that, and he wanted Israel (his country) to get over itself and some bullying people and to be kind instead … and three thousand years later we’re still hearing his message so maybe occasionally they and we just get, but most of the time we tend to forget and keep on boasting (and bullying is a kind of boasting, too).

Oh, and incidentally, that’s why Jesus’ brothers and sisters didn’t get him at first, either, and no one could understand what he was on about, because like Jeremiah he tried to stop people boasting and bragging and bullying and hating, too …

 

Be not afraid

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
 (NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
  SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (16th March) 2014
           
 Readings:   Genesis 12.1-4a
                    Psalm 121
                    Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
                    Matthew 17:1-9

Those who design the lectionary (by which in the mainline churches we set our readings, so that yours truly’s faves don’t dominate the narratives of faith) can take us on some interesting and sometimes unexpected journeys, not least during Lent. A week ago, as we entered Lent, we were standing as it were with Jesus in a narrative of temptation. we were recognizing perhaps that there are times we too have been tempted, but unlike the Jesus of the gospels we tend not to be perfect, tend not to resist, tend more to emulate Oscar Wilde and his infamous “I can resist anything except temptation” than Jesus and his dismissal of the Tempter.

Yet this week we are in a surreal environment, one of those moments in the text where the author (Matthew, but also Luke and Mark) appears to have chewed too many sacred mushrooms and engaged with the inner recesses of a chemically affected mind rather than focussing on the narration of a straightforward story line. All three gospel writers see this as an important incident, so what are they on about (rather than what are they on!)?

If Paul can hang fast and loose in his application of the Abraham story, and I think within some basic boundaries he pretty much does in order to contrast faith, certainty, hope and promise, then we can I think reach deep into the text to find sense-for-us in these biblical glimpses. Do we merely have in the Transfiguration scene a narrative about a mountain-top experience shared by four young Hebrew men, or are we being told something else here? Obviously you can guess my response! But let us not entirely explain away the inexplicable: first century readers were no less intelligent than twenty first century readers, and they too heard the strangeness of this scene.

One of my favourite literary and biblical critics, Frank Kermode, says that is something about a passage strikes us as strange, then it probably is, and we should look more closely. This whole passage of Transfiguration strikes me as strange, but rather than dismiss it we need to dig deep in its entrails. And as I begin to find that I find a sudden, unexpected dimension that, if I have noticed at all before, I suspect I’ve never really reflected on. For, while the passage clearly depicts Jesus as an unparalleled god-figure who can chin-wag amicably with the great fathers of faith, and who seems to be a participant in a unique relationship with the Creator-God, his humanity takes on a powerful new flavour. While I don’t think Christianity is about Jesus as the example of how to live, neither do I think it is about ignoring the remarkable example (I sometimes use the arguably more emphatic ancient word “ensample”) of justice, compassion, love and God-attunedness that he embodies. And here Jesus responds not (or not only) to the awe and the mystery of chatting with the Greats, but to the needs of the terrified, bewildered disciples.

Many years ago I attended a Joan Baez concert in Melbourne. Baez opened the concert by asking how many people present had been dragged along by aging hippie parents who had told them they had to hear the iconic folk-singer. Many put their hands up. At the end of the concert she ushered one young girl up on to the stage, put her hand around her shoulders and led her off the stage to chat and to give her an autograph. Whoever that pre-teen kid was, and whatever her music taste today, I bet she will not have forgotten the moment in which a folk icon knelt in the dirt, as I called it last week, of her human experience, and led her back stage to chat.

Joan Baez may be to some the Madonna, but she is not Jesus. The two moments are only comparable, far from identical. Yet in their moment of probable abject terror Jesus reaches out to Peter, James and John and echoes those same words attributed to the angels when they frightened the shepherds in the fields of Christmas. “Be not afraid.” It is a recurring phrase in the gospels: Jesus to the frightened disciples in the storm-tossed boat. The angel to the shepherds. The angel-figure at the resurrection scene in Mark, telling the frightened women to overcome their fears as they see death transformed at the first Empty Tomb appearance. Be not afraid. It is perhaps the words we need most to represent and speak – by actions more than words – in a world facing the bewilderments of nuclear potential, global warming, rising sea levels, economic fragility, the death marches of the frogs and the bees and the polar ice caps. Be not afraid, not even for your children’s-children’s  (your mokopuna’s) future, for the God of Transfiguration is the God who is revealed in the Incarnate Jesus, who will be the one who, as the angel later puts it, “goes before you into Galilee,” the Galilees of our own lives and deaths. Indeed, in a world that barely even voice the words “died”, “death” and “dead” these days we are perhaps especially called to know and embody the knowledge that Jesus is the one who goes before us into death and resurrection.

Jesus remembers and turns to the frightened disciples. Though it was an anathema to the religious intellectuals of his day, this was not the only time the compassion of God breaks through human experience and expectation. To the “Greeks”, the religious intellectuals scorned by Paul, the idea of a compassionate God was ridiculous. To be God, a god had to be dispassionate, unmoved, remote, unconcerned with the trivia of human experience. Yet the Hebrews, as we noted last week, worshipped a God who, having expelled Adam and Eve from the garden for their own punitive protection, then kneels in the dirt to knot their clothes. The Hebrew Scriptures, especially the psalms and prophets, speak of a God moved to the core with emotions, and moved to the core by the plight of humans. The God of the Hebrews weeps and the people of Flight MH370 – and even where there in in human experience no longer any hope, even there breathes the hope of New Heavens and New Earth.

Jesus will come down from the mountain top and turn, as it says, resolutely to his own abandonment and death. He will ask us, empowered by his Spirit, his now unlimited being, to embody compassion and hope, even hate-transforming, even death-overshadowing hope to those he has called us to live amongst … and perhaps if we forget when our times of suffering come he will quietly engineer other bearers of Christ-light to cross our paths. Perhaps – it’s not actually guaranteed: the guarantee, the promise of which Paul half-speaks, is that even if we don’t experience hope the hope is still there, and is there because where we go the footsteps of Jesus are still warm.

No guarantees for us,  for we are called to suffer, but we can pray God that we might be bearers of Christ-hope to those around us. That is at least one part of the Lenten journey – stripping off the clutter and  recharging our ability to be as Christ to those around us. Let us continue the journey, down from Transfiguration and on into the heart of darkness in which Christlight finally bursts unambiguously.

TLBWY

You stole my apples I believe?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
 FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT (9th March) 2014

Readings:       Genesis 2.15-17, 3.1-7
                Psalm 32
                Romans 5.12-19
                Matthew 4.1-11

We are probably all aware of the metaphor of the frog in warming water, slowly boiling to death as it fails to notice the temperature transitions going on around it. Scientific analysis demonstrates that the story is not rationally true (and rational truth is a whole different story!), but it is a useful metaphor by which to illustrate human beings’ failure to respond to calamity slowly growing around them. In our society we might point not the slow creep of the mercury upwards in the world’s climactically changing thermometers, but also to the slow inuring of humanity to dark attitudes of racist, sexist, culturist, and other forms of oppression and alienation
.
Examples of the collective cauterizing of conscience in human history are innumerable, but the rise of Hitler in the inter war period of last century remains one of the most chilling and instructive examples. Most frightening of all is the realization that the rise of Hitler is not something that merely happened (relatively) long ago and far away, but something that can happen in any society at any time, as disenfranchisement and hatred of “the other” in a community grows, as outsiders are blamed for wrongs real or imagined, as we dismiss others as not like us and as responsible for any sufferings, real or imagined, we might experience. The rise of Hitler was enabled by a host of economic and political and military planets falling into alignment, but it is ever thus: as people flee the hatreds of the Middle East and Africa to Europe and Australia – and in New Zealand we are complacently quarantined from the world’s suffering so far – the general population finds more and more reason to generate hatred and ostracism of the hurting.

Which may seem far removed from Eve and Adam and a snake in the garden, or from Paul’s spontaneous, passionate dictations about sin, or Matthew’s and Luke’s stylized stories about a tempted Saviour. But is it? The stories of Genesis were of course never supposed to be post-Enlightenment, factual narratives about the actual facticity of events. They are profound analyses of the human state. In a moment after the closure of the Genesis story as we read it this morning we will find Adam and Eve blaming anyone else but themselves for all that has happened. The woman made me do it says the newly ashamed Adam. The snake made me do it, says Eve. The refugees have taken my jobs, the multinationals are destroying the earth, this racial or socio-economically defined group is responsible for whatever discomfort I may be feeling. The reasonably unambiguous demand of Jesus that we treat others as we would have them treat us is squashed out of existence. Anne once was lectured on a bus as to how we should bring “back them biblical teachings: do unto others as they done unto you.” Adam, Eve, and most humanity enter into the unbreakable cycles of blame and repayment that dwell at the heart of a broken, “fallen” world.

We could read on in the Adam and Eve narrative and find that God punishes all three players in the story; is punishment not just one more cycle of revenge? Not so: in a few verses we would find God effectively kneeling in the dirt, making clothes for the now knowingly naked primordial couple. It will not be the last time in the biblical story that we find God immersing fingers in the dirt of human existence, as we shall be powerfully reminded in Holy Week, as our Lenten journey reaches its nadir and we descend into the tomb of human darkness.

Adam and Even should know better than to engage in a blame game. In the glorious negro-spiritual telling of the story the lies are succinct:

You stole my apples I believe
Dese bones are gonna rise again
Oh no Massa Lord I 'spect was Eve
Dese bones are gonna rise again

On the whole it is better to ’fess up than to run labyrinths of lies. God in any case spends little time negotiating:

Well out of this garden you must get
Dese bones are gonna rise again
When you're livin' by your sweat
Dese bones are gonna rise again

But as we read on through the story of the people of God – our story, eking out an existence east of Eden – we find that God has left in us, as it were sewn into the fabric of our clothing as we left Eden, the gift that eluded the primordial pair. Over and again we find characters in the Hebrew scriptures niggled at by the small voice that, by the time of the New Testament, has come to be known as “conscience.”

From the much needed pricking of King David’s conscience as he is confronted by the enormity of his sin against Bathsheba - or, more technically, against God, for the apples are always God's apples)through the hints of an inner voice in the teachings of Jesus – “the light that is in you” of which we read later in Matthew’s gospel-account, there is a sense that, while we are expelled from Eden, we are not expelled from the knowledge of good and evil. Nor are we expelled from responsibility to respond to that knowledge: “They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them ...” wrote Paul. He is describing the human condition shortly in the same letter in which he addresses the questions we read just now of sin and redemption.  

Conscience becomes a major theme of Paul, always with the reminder that we can deaden its voice, that we can choose deathwards life rather than lifewards life. He reminds us always, too, that “lifewards life” is available only as we turn and turn again to the Christ who alone lifts us from death to life. We can deaden conscience, as Adam and Eve did from the start, but to do so is to kill the humanity in us, to turn those we hurt or ignore into mere objects, to end up where we began this sermon, in the frog ponds of growing social hate or disinterest, looking only after ourselves, forgetting the message of the martyr Bonhoeffer, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” We too easily forget to love and treat others as we would wish to be loved and treated. We are challenged to live as a people contrasting with the frogs in the warming water for whom “treat others as we’ve been treated” or even “treat others before we get treated” is the dominant paradigm. We are challenged and helped by God’s Spirit to live as a people who speak and act for compassion and justice wherever there is need. We are challenged to be a contrast society of Jesus.

TLBWY

Lisbon 1755, Napier 1931, Beatles, Jazz and God

SERMON PREACHED AT THE JAZZ EUCHARIST
St JOHN’S CATHEDRAL, NAPIER
ART DECO WEEK 2014

(the sermon is not based on the readings of the day!)

On Saturday, 1st November 1755, the Feast of All Saints, a massive earthquake struck the region around Lisbon, Portugal. Centred 200 kilometres off shore, the 8.5 magnitude quake generated a massive tsunami and fire that took up to 100,000 lives. It remains one of humanity’s greatest catastrophes.

It also rang the death knoll of what we call “Christendom”, the era spanning some 12 centuries, when church and state cozied together in the bed of Europe. That was an era during which the simple justice- and faith-based message and life of a rural Jewish carpenter was turned into a system of oppression and control. Sadly it was also the era Christianity reached out through the colonial world.

By Tuesday 3rd February 1931 that was history. When my predecessor Dean Brocklehurst gathered a few parishioners together for a small regular service that morning their practice was far from the mainstream practice it had been in Portugal on All Saints’ Day 1755. For some, especially men who had seen the horrors of the Great War, God was already dead. For others God was dying his last gasps. The first sexual revolution, that of the Flappers, of D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield and the devotees of Madame Blavatsky, was already giving him the Last Rites. The second sexual revolution of the Beatles era would soon bury him.

The faith of those gathered with Dean Brocklehurst was probably fairly conservative. Teachings of his day were of a rather strict and formal, distant god. This stern god had survived Lisbon and was an instrument of instruction ensuring that natives and children were well-behaved. The intelligentsia though rid themselves of God, for god as guarantor of personal survival had died in Lisbon with 100,000 souls. Over the next 150 years God as a national assurance of military victory also died, dead in the mud of the trenches as both sides sought his help.

Dean Brocklehurst and those injured or killed around him were dwelling in what would soon be clearly seen as a rearguard action. Their faith is now often mocked as a fairy tale belief in an Imaginary Friend. Today faith is seen as crackpot, silly, marginal – though the aftermath of 9/11 suggested for a short time that there are still some who, as martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggested, will turn to God when sore afraid.

Nevertheless, out of the rubble of the first cathedral here a new cathedral grew, and out of the rubble of Napier a new Napier grew, and out of the rubble of the gung-ho developers of the 1970s and ’80s a new celebration of things Art Deco grew, and we are here together annually, remembering (literally meaning that we are pulling together and making present again the members, the elements, of those earlier times). We watch, too, as the rubble of Christchurch is slowly transformed into a new infrastructure, a new place of laughter and tears and birth and death.  We watch the phoenix rising. For I would rather define this renewed trust in life, this renewed hope as “resuscitation” or “rising phoenix” than use the word “resurrection.”  I reserve that word for a unique event 2,000 years ago and its impact on my death and yours.

Gradually, ever so slowly, as is God’s wont, something else is growing out of the ashes of Lisbon 250 years ago and out of Europe’s great wars, and even worse, out of the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Hiroshima and Nagasaki: slowly theologians and teachers have begun to realize that the all-conquering god who died in the rubble of Europe on All Saints’ Day 1755, and the tribal god who died in the trenches and killing fields of 20th century wars (and whose epitaph was so brilliantly written by the war poets) – and the god who dies today amidst cries of "Allahu Akbar" in new killing fields of Syria and Sudan: that god in any form is an imposter.

Slowly since Lisbon our prayers have begun to speak of and to a different God: not a banner waving or neon lit god but a suffering God who was crucified, and who died as if in the rubble of Lisbon and the European cities like Dresden and the concentration camps and the scorched earth of nuclear holocaust, and who died with Edith Mary Barry and Kate Williams in or soon after the destruction of this cathedral’s predecessor, and who struggled in the soul of poor Doctor Waterworth who spent the rest of his life wondering if he had done the right thing in administering a fatal dose of morphine to Mrs. Barry, because ethics is never easy. A God who struggles to be born in your soul and mine as we too face whatever torment and inevitable death lies ahead of us; only then God breathes the unique moment of resurrection into us and makes real at last the greatest joy of all.

In other words, slowly, ever so slowly, since 1755, theologians (not all) rediscovered the God who cried out on the Cross, the God who cried “my God my God, why have you forsaken me”, and the God who breathes resurrection-life even greater than resuscitation into Edith Mary Barry and Kate Williams and your loved ones and mine, the God who says that death is not the end, that No is not the answer, that Yes is the final word in the universe, the God who waits patiently for our love in response.

That God – not even the phoenix god of finding fun again, but the God still there when all fun ceases – that is the God whose hope we must seek always to proclaim in our words and in our prayers in and from this Cathedral of St John, if this place is truly to be a place of resurrection, life, and hope!


TLBWY

Flipping the finger for Jesus?

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

(NAPIER, AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
(16^th February) 2014

 Readings:     Deuteronomy 30.15-20

                       Psalm 119.1-8
                       1 Corinthians 3.1-9
                       Matthew 5.21-37

I suggested last week that we cannot and must not drive a theological wedge between Jesus and Paul, between Paul and the gospel writers, and between the gospel writers and Jesus. To do so is wantonly to compartmentalize the story of the people of God, to compartmentalize as it were God’s spiritual guidance, and while if we are to be honest we can’t avoid doing that to some extent, it is best if we avoid doing it unnecessarily.  Paul, with some rancour, challenges the people of Corinth (with good reason) to be what he calls a “spiritual people” because they were playing games with the guidance of God: we run the risk of doing the same when we unnecessarily distort the scriptures of our faith into micro-canons that suit our particular taste. I say again: we probably all do it (some of us were wincing this week at the readings from 1 Timothy and from Leviticus that seem somewhat alien and patronising to our post-modern ears). We all do it: Somehow we must seek the grace of God that we may be gracious and discerning in our reading of the sacred texts of faith, wise perhaps as serpents, gentle perhaps as doves.

To read Paul we have again and again the insight, stated baldly in Galatians but undergirding his whole world view, that humanity has fallen short of its divinely instigated potential. Later this would give rise to complex doctrines of the Fall: for now we might just recall that when we turn on the news we are simply not the humanity we ought to be. When we turn on a little bit of self-analysis we will probably discover that we are not the human individuals we ought to be. Ask those who are closest to us whether we have fallen short of human perfection, let alone the glory of God!

I’m neither a fan of bumper stickers, nor of clichés. On the other hand they can point to truths. Driving along a motorway and finding someone cutting into my lane unnecessarily I am I’m afraid I am likely to react in a slightly less generous way than Jesus would – though on the whole I refrain from flipping the finger. Walk past a beautiful woman on the street and I am afraid – don’t tell Anne – I am likely to find myself condemned by the standards of these stern words of Jesus (though not, perhaps, by Thomas Aquinas, who allowed us heterosexual blokes seven seconds of observation before appraisal becomes sin). So far I have not plucked out my eyes, but were I to be what some Christians rather dangerously call a “bible believing Christian”, a fundamentalist, then there is no doubt I should be plucking out mine eyes and chopping off mine limbs incessantly. Funnily enough I find an awful lot of fundamentalists with all limbs and eyes intact. I’m neither a fan of bumper stickers, nor of clichés, but what would Jesus do? Because, sadly, I know it would contrast markedly with my self-serving efforts.

Should we bash ourselves up for our inadequacies? Probably not. Matthew is in all likelihood reacting against those who were abusing Paul’s theology of grace,  those who like the Corinthians wanted to use their faith in Jesus to out-hypocrite the hypocrites (and we’ve seen too much of that in churches). Matthew more than any other writer lays down the “more even than the Law” demands of following Jesus. Luke records words of Jesus that suggest the Torah of the Jews will never pass away, but does not go into the gruesome details of lust and murder and legal shenanigans (the last a prohibition often ignored by some of the most casuistic of Christians) that Matthew records. Matthew lays it on the line with heavy hand precisely because he believes that bearers of Christ must strive, however inadequately, for the impossible. Matthew, every bit as well as Paul, knows that we all sin and fall short of the glory of God, but as the behavioural pendulum swung wildly Matthew realised that Christians needed to strive – always with the help of God – to strive for the perfection that Jesus had exemplified in his life and teachings.

Will we get there? Sorry folks: no. Not this side of the grave. But the grace and healing that comes from metanoia, from turning and turning again to the forgiveness of God is much easier to receive if we make the effort, no matter how some Christians distort that message into some sort of "earn you way to salvation" message. Will we fall short? Yes. Matthew knew that. Few people attain sainthood in the traditional sense, and the ones that do are precisely those who best know their need for the help of God. We are challenged though – daily – to strive. Choose this day whom you will serve: choose life, that you and your descendants may live. Choose life lived for others, love directed to others (even lane swappers!). Choose to hold fast to what we might call not the “land of God” as Deuteronomy puts it but the state of God-attunedness to which Jesus invites us day after day after day. Hold fast, as the psalmist urges us, eyes fixed on the demands of God. Hold fast … as God holds fast.

TLBWY