Maranatha and the butterly wing once more

SERMON PREACHED AT THE ORMOND CHAPEL
HOSPITAL HILL
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 17 (27^th July) 2014
       

Readings:       1 Kings 3:5-12
                       Psalm 119:129-136
                       Romans 8:26-39

                       Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

When Matthew wove together his collection of Jesus sayings, seeking to inspire his little community of perhaps forty or so people, nestling probably at Antioch in south-central Turkey, he did so with an eye to inspiring them to be the most effective witness possible to the Jesus-story. It is fair to say he incorporated (or perhaps accentuated, or even invented!) more Jesus sayings about judgement and end-times urgency than did his spiritual confrere Luke. It is probable that his little Antiochene community was under far more pressure to surrender its faith and its spiritual integrity than Luke’s.  He emphasises Hebrew Law far more than any other writer, perhaps as a corrective to a growing abuse of Paul’s teachings, teachings that already reflect a struggle with the questions of morality and law within Christian circles. These were volatile times. Antioch would go on, under first Peter’s, then Matthew’s, and then many others’ leadership, to become one of the great cradles of Christian thought. Paul, incidentally, never enjoyed a happy relationship with Antioch, though I like to believe the fable that Paul and Peter were martyred together, and like to believe that in the face of the imminent glory of God they got some differences sorted out.

So Matthew emphasized the importance of witness, witness to Christ in the maelstrom world of flux and antagonism around him and his Antiochean community. He used the teachings of Jesus to emphasize the need to cling on to Jesu-focussed integrity, so that this tiny little huddle of often frightened believers might indeed be the mustard seed of faith that transformed the wider city and region. I figure that Matthew, whoever he was (for he wasn’t necessarily the tax-collector of the story he narrates) might have been rather chuffed to see his town become one of the great Christian metropoli for nearly thirteen centuries, though he would have wept to see the bloodshed, not atypical of that region not far from where ISIS rebels are now persecuting, pillaging and slaughtering Shiite and Christian believers alike, would have wept to see the bloodshed that dominated the last four Crusade-pillaged centuries of his beloved hometown.

Mustard seed faith: it is a lovely image of how a small and faithful community can infiltrate the larger “meta-narrative” of the wider community. While I prefer to apply it primarily to the Jesus-story, there is no doubt that at this moment there are Jews and Muslims and Christians praying for peace and demonstrating peace-values, justice values together in the Middle East, swimming against the tides of ethnic hatred that dominate that region. There’s no doubt that a young woman like the feisty Malala Yousafzai, having survived an assassination attempt, is articulating a mustard seed faith in the power of girls’ education to transform the world. There is no doubt that those who continue to speak out against the power of the exploitative multi-nationals and self-interested governments on behalf for example of the people of Bhopal, or the sweat-shop workers of Bangladesh, or the refugees fleeing Sri Lanka do, like a prisoner striking damp matches in a darkened cave, sometimes succeed to change the world.

Like Matthew, Rachel Carson never lived to see her mustard seed of environmental concern at least begin to challenge international greed. Like Matthew, activist Steve Biko (whose icon adorns my cathedral office wall) never lived to see apartheid fall. In all these cases though the story is not and never will be over: bombs still fall on Gaza and Israel, corporate giants still rape the world’s resources, the ANC practices its own forms of exploitation now it controls South Africa, and the skies still pour their hard rain around the globe.

That is why I prefer to apply the image primarily to the Jesus-story of Resurrection and Second Coming: when women receive all the education we need them to have, injustice will still be perpetrated. When the executives of great multi-nationals finally discover compassion and justice new exploiters will rise to take their place. When Bangladesh or Sri Lanka become places of justice, new sweatshops will appear around the world, perhaps even in the nations that currently make up the crumbling empires of the global north. It was only when Europe finished stripping its forests bare to make capital, after all, that global south nations like Brazil or Burma emulated them in order to survive. From the Jesus-parable perspective only the fulfilment of the ancient prayer “maranatha, come Lord, come and wind up cosmic history,” will fulfil the mission of mustard seed faith.

We stand on the shoulders of Matthew and his small community of mustard seed believers. Hopefully, despite overwhelming doubts, we still whisper our prayers for the coming of God’s reign of justice and love. I believe the fulfilment of that reign is thoroughly other-worldly, yet its DNA can and must be implanted in this world, too. With Paul we participate in the groans of God’s Spirit, groaning in prayer as we witness Gaza, Sudan, north-east Iraq and countless more theatres of suffering. Like Matthew or Paul or Rachel Carson or Steve Biko we may never see even the flawed and tainted answers to our prayers, let alone their final fulfilment, but we join in the murmur of beating butterfly wings, participating in the rhythm that will one day initiate God’s eternity. For me when the evidence of human hatred becomes too great I fall back on the ancient (fifth century) Jesus Prayer of Orthodox Spirituality: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us”: the exercise of that mercy would be, in the end, the coming of the Reign of God.

It’s all mystical stuff, and it must be, for it is otherworldly. It is though mere dross if we don’t also strive to change our lives to be the answers to our prayers, striving to live lives more fair, and just, and Christ-centred. It is our commission, not to mention our pearl of great price, as we obey Jesus’ command from the climactic end of Matthew’s story, “Go … baptize … teach.”

TLBWY

A Vibrant Soul: Rest in Peace.

Lynda Patterson 1974-2004

 

The National Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, the wider  church too, beyond our shores and beyond our denomination, was shocked last Sunday to hear that Dr Lynda Patterson, Dean of Christchurch, had died suddenly (of natural causes) the previous night.

Lynda has been for the last many months cast into the frontline of the conflict between Diocese and elements of the Canterbury community; she fought, with her bishop and close friend Bishop Victoria, for the right to rebuild the lost Cathedral in a manner meaningful to a new world and a new church. Lynda has been the stopping point for vitriol and abuse and threats since she stepped up as acting Dean in December 2011. She was appointed permanent Dean of Christchurch in November last year. She was not being melodramatic, a fortnight before that, when she told her fellow cathedral deans she believed the role might kill her. We knew it was true.

Originally from Northern Ireland, Lynda has been a prophet, a pastor and a priest, as well as a healer, a reconciler, and a theologian par excellence, something of a treasure in the NZ Church since David Coles ordained her in 2004.

The cathedral community and Diocese of Christchurch have lost a wonderful, vibrant human treasure: Bishop Victoria Matthews in particular has lost a close friend and confidant. The tight-knit community of deans has lost an inspirational friend and colleague. The loss is tempered only by the privilege of sharing in some small way in the too-brief journey of a wonderful and Christlike soul and servant of God.

Lynda Jayne Patterson: may she rest in peace and rise in glory.

 

MH17, Bentiu, Gaza and Boko Haram: resounding "no" of emptiness?

SERMON PREACHED AT

THE CATHEDRAL of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16 (20^th July) 2014
           

Readings:       Isaiah 44:6-8
                       Psalm 86:11-17
                       Romans 8:12-25

                       Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

If MH370 just a few months ago did not sufficiently remind us that human lives and infrastructure are unbelievably fragile, then the equally senseless loss of lives on MH17 has reinforced the message.  Yet we are terribly Eurocentric in our sensitivities: 307 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in the last eleven days, and that figure will already be out of date. According to Al Jazeera more than 2,000 Nigerians have died in insurgency uprisings in 2014, many at the hands of Boko Haram (and 200 kidnapped schoolgirls remain unaccounted for). Médecins Sans Frontières report that in one South Sudanese refugee camp, Bentiu, three children aged under five are dying, on average, each day.

The statistics are horrendous, and to avoid compassion fatigue most of us keep them at arm’s length until sudden tragedies occur. Human nature is such that a local story will tear at our hearts strings more than the frightening statistics that emerge from the lives of those who Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” Soft local news will sell papers and ratings far more than the ongoing narratives of the world’s tragedies, to which we allow ourselves to become inured.  It was probably ever thus.

The scriptures of our faith drive both to and from the heart of human tragedy and were written from the heart of suffering. Despite deep social pain the author of Isaiah 44 was able to voice words of hope and comfort: “Do not fear, or be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one” (Is. 44:8). Despite the tumult (and despair) around him the author dared to believe in the claims of the one God on his life and the life of his people. Despite, or perhaps because of the tumult (and despair) around him the author dared to proclaim the unique and demanding status and the absolute claims that God made upon his life and his people’s lives. Dare to believe, he demanded of his audience and of us.

He did not just demand belief, but demonstration of belief. It will be no surprise to you by now that I will always maintain that the first demonstration of belief is corporate worship. We are not a political party of either wing, fighting for justice for the dying children of Sudan, or for the dying children of the late term abortion clinics, or for dying mother earth. We are the servants of the God who is revealed primarily in the stark contrast of a criminal’s death and an other-worldly and beyond-words resurrection. We are not a political party of left or right, though we may sometimes support them; our compass bearing is, while never forgetting the wretched of the earth and the plight of the poor, set on a point beyond comprehension, a point beyond understanding, and a point that breathes resurrection hope even when Ukrainian insurgents shoot a plane out of the sky, or infants and children die of dysentery at the rate of several a day in a Sudanese camp, or our loved ones are killed on the road.

We are commissioned by God-in-Christ to demonstrate hope-beyond-death by our response to the broken and the mourning and the wretched of God’s earth here and now. We are commissioned to compassion and justice, but we are commissioned too to proclaim a divine love that whispers that the death of a Sudanese child in a refugee camp or an HIV specialist en route to an Australian AIDS conference is not the final word in their life or ours or our planet’s.

We know, of course, that there are those who profess the same faith that we profess, whose message of hatred or disinterest all but drowns out any breath of compassion from the witness of the church. We are often embarrassed by the outpourings of bigotry dressed up as a Christian message from some wings of the church. Homophobia or xenophobia dressed up as moral purity, or (and I think no less damaging) proclamations of the non-existence of God dressed up as theological sophistication, are equally the workings of tares amongst wheat, and need the purging fires of God. I can only really address the tares amongst the wheat of my own life, and pray God that somewhere in God’s grace the wheat will slowly strangle tares, for as long as I live this side of the grave.

This side of the grave? We must not lose sight of the “not yet,” the rumour of resurrection that is the complete and future encounter with a healing and forgiving and resurrecting God. That encounter, in which God is seen (though the verb is inadequate) no longer through a darkened glass or a circumcised human intellect, that encounter is the only dimension of our faith that can ultimately  make any sense of the tragedies of missing or destroyed airliners, of economic and social and political injustice, of the death of the earth’s species, or even of the simple random injustice of metastasizing cancer cells . When Paul wrote of creation’s groaning for completion he was not writing of some future extinction point but the utter and eternal transformation of meaninglessness into meaning and of temporary existence into eternal existence; transformation of mortality, as he put it in his correspondence with the Corinthians, into immortality.

Creation’s fulfilment for which Paul yearns is not merely the fulfilment and redemption of all humans, and certainly not merely all Christians, while others burn eternally. It is unrighteousness and injustice, not, thank God, we who are unrighteous and unjust, that will be purged in the fires of which Matthew’s Jesus often spoke. Any proclamation that denudes the gospel of God’s “it is good” to existence, God’s “yes” to creation, God’s “yes” to those who we have loved and to those who have been loved but who have died in an airbus downing or a Sudanese camp or the Gaza, anything less than the promise of resurrection hope for them leaves us will nothing to say. Nothing to say, apart from, as Paul again puts it, mere dross (his word is stronger): anything less should be pruned from our proclamation.

To proclaim anything less than that leaves us with no more than human hatred gunning down an airbus, or killing Palestinian civilians or South Sudanese infants.  To proclaim anything less that all creation will one day rejoice, and that all life will one day “shine like the sun in the kingdom (Reign) of heaven,” and that all who have died will one day live, is to sell short the good news of Jesus Christ. In word and action we who bear Christ must not proclaim less than the fullness of Easter hope, or Flights MH307 and MH17, and Gaza and Bentiu and Boko Haram have the final word. Let it not be so in your life or mine.

TLBWY

Another retrospective: Jacob was an slimy man

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(17^th July) 2005

 

Readings:      Genesis 28.10-19

                        Psalm 139.1-11, 23-24
                        Rom 8.1-25
                        Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43

A week ago  we heard the story of Esau, the hairy man, being cheated of his birthright by the wily younger brother Jacob. Esau, you may recall, was famished, and surrenders his right to inheritance for the immediate gratification of a plate of pottage. 

There are a number of ways we might water down that story, one that has always struck me as a study in the ways in which slimy cunning over common sense. There is a sense in which Esau deserved to lose that which was his by right – he was hardly likely to have been at death’s door if he was able to hold a conversation with his wily brother, and so it seems he was is a sense simply irresponsible in giving away that which should by rights have been his.

Perhaps indeed he was no more than a paradigm of the twenty first century – for surely more than any other at least in the last twenty ours is the era of instant gratification. “Hello, I love you won’t you tell me your name” wrote tragic icon Jim Morrison in the era of hippiedom. In his day the words were shocking and provocative, risqué and daring. Today they are passé. Almost any movie or tv programme works from the common assumption that if you find someone cute you sleep with tem and then find out later if you have anything remotely in common: “will you still love me tomorrow?” was Carole King’s more honest and timeless cry from the heart. Esau was interested in the tonight – Jacob, however slimy he was, was interested in tomorrow.

In that alone there is a message for us as the people of God. We are called not to live as a people with no tomorrow but as a people who believe that tomorrow is God’s tomorrow. W are called to live as a people who believe in the judgement of God. Many of the parables of Jesus are parables of judgement- and this is especially and disproportionately the case in the Matthew account of the Jesus story. Will you still love me tomorrow? The gospel, particularly in Paul’s hands, is clear that we cannot earn the love of God, yet there are strong hints that we should at the very least live and act as though we had to. Therein lies a paradox at the heart of Christianity: we cannot earn our ouvre to God, yet we should live as though we are desperate to please our God and our judge, for he sees us as if though the eyes of our neighbour.

Jacob though stands for something else. What Jacob does in tricking the not-very-bright Esau is far from a model of how we are to behave in the service of God. Yet God has revealed the divine name as not being a name, controlled and neatly tucked into a box by the speaker, but an action. “What is your name?” asks Moses, and God, who will not be backed into a corner replies with the indefinable sentence “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be.”

God demonstrated this in the lives of the Fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, long before Moses encounters the divine presence at the burning bush. Esau may be not very bright, and Jacob may be a slime-ball, but God turns their rivalry into one of the great tales of faith. For Jacob, over the next several weeks of our readings, grows into the great father of faith that he tricks Esau into letting him become.

God’s will is done, and is done despite our human foibles. This willing of God is in our story today ratified by a promise: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” As was the case with the promise given to Jacob’s grandparents, Abraham and Sarah, God is faithful to his word. God’s word is action. As we shall see in weeks to come, the people of God are born of this determination of God. This is the promise in which we too stand: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go…”

 

TLBWY

Three sermons from long ago: (3) an unnamed servant

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
and at St. Luke’s, Augathella
FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(17th June) 2005

 Readings:
      Genesis 24.1-67
      Psalm 45.10-17
      Matthew 11.15-30


Here we dwell on one of those most powerful Hebrew tales – a novella, a short novel telling of the getting of a wife for Isaac, son of the promise received by Abraham and Sarah and generation and four weeks ago. The psalm fits our text, for it is a celebration of the bride as a gift of God.

Previously we journeyed with Abraham and Sarah as they received from God promise of the impossible. Their lives were barren, and yet God whispered a word of hope into their barrenness. Sarah laughed, and it was not the laughter of joy, but a perhaps-bitter, perhaps-mocking, at least doubting laugh heard only by the angel.

The promises long stays latent, and Abraham and Sarah bark up the wrong tree for some time, but eventually Isaac is born. Then, in one of the darkest tales of the Hebrew Scriptures, Abraham is obedient to God even to the point of offering the son of the promise to God in sacrifice. God intervenes – and we are not expected to dwell on the psychological impacts of that event, but on the extreme fidelity of Abraham. A ram instead is sacrificed, and history has in its sacred story a tale of the unimaginable extent to which our love of God should reach.

Although we don’t hear this part of the story in our Readers Digest liturgical version, Sarah now has died. Before she dies she laughs a very different laugh. It is the Easter laugh of the mad fool for Christ – the laugh of the one who has seen that God defeats the odds. It is an infectious laugh, and its echoes are not silenced by her peace-filled death. Like the dance of Jesus, from our gospel-glimpse at  Matthew 11.15-30, it is a moment we are invited to continue in our present. Her burial becomes an amusing tail of bartering for a grave, and if we read it we would find echoes of its financial opportunism in Genesis 24.1-67; note the noserings and bracelets that speak volumes to Rebecca's brother Laban!

For the narrative now has moved on to a new generation. Abraham is still alive, but the central player is now to be Isaac, for whom Abraham commissions an unnamed but remarkable servant to find a son. The promise realized in Isaac needs a future, and Isaac must marry if the generations are to continue even to “many nations.”

Isaac must have a wife. The servant who finds Rebecca is a parable in himself. He remains a nameless hero in the narrative of God. Often when I enter a church I wonder at the nameless heroes of faith who have believed and lived and rumoured the dreams of God and who are now forgotten in all but the memory of God: this is one such hero of faith.

Abraham is a great man of faith, but so too is this servant. He carries out his master’s bidding and more. He is unswerving in his belief that his task is the work of God, that God alone can make the journey succeed. It is no accident that the beginning and the end of the servant’s search is marked by prayer. His story begins “He knelt down and prayed …”, and concludes “Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his steadfast love and his faithfulness toward my master. As for me, the Lord has led me on the way to the house of my master’s kin.” This is the work of God and there can be no mistake about that.

The servant’s speech to Laban, the brother, and Bethuel, the father of Rebecca, also begins and ends with a focus on God. There can be no doubt who is the major, unseen player in this narrative. There is a hint that Laban has been greatly impressed less by the theology of the servant than by the expensive jewels bestowed on Rebecca and her household, but either way the brother is no fool, and the will of God is done.

Significantly the story ends with new words of blessing, spoken to Rebecca. They echo the words spoken a generation earlier to Abraham and the now dead Sarah, into whose family and line Rebecca now enters. They are the words of divine blessing spoken to the generations of those who have stood faithful in the tradition of Abraham, those who have seized the promises of God and clung to them in times if darkness and of light.

We could say so much more about this dense narrative. For now we are left with a demonstration of the promise of God in action. It is an inspirational promise – it lay more than almost anything at the heart of Paul’s faith, and his realization that in all the struggles of faith and life we are called to cling on to the promises of a God who proclaims “Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the ages.”

In the twenty first century, as the tide of orthodox Christian faith appears to ebb lower and lower and we find ourselves in the unfamiliar territory of a post-Christian society, we are challenged to recall that the promises of God to the ancients were not of instant gratification, nor easy to swallow. Our job is to keep on clinging to the God of Easter promise, and to place God at the beginning and the end of our daily journeyings. God is not a visible character in the journey of the servant, yet the servant clings to his task and to the promise received by his master Abraham. God is the unseen enabler of the story, and we are called to place ourselves into God’s hands, as individuals and as a corporate community of faith. To that task we are commissioned once again, believing against all odds, as Paul puts it, hoping against hope.


TLBWY

Three sermons from long ago: (2) Sarah's bitter laughter

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
and at St. Luke’s, Augathella
THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(12th June) 2005

Readings:
 Genesis 18.1-15
 Psalm 116.1-2, 11-18
 Romans 5.1-115
 Matthew 9.35-10.8

A week ago we were confronted and hopefully challenged by the cry of dereliction not of Christ on the Cross, but of Sarah in her barrenness. Where there was no human way to go on, where her meaning for existence was removed from her, she and Abraham cry out and hear a word of promise from God.

We need to know, though, something that the Hebrew scriptures are not. They are not a story of instant gratification: they are not, that is to say, an advertisement for a sugar fix or a coffee fix. Nowhere in the scriptures, Hebrew or for that matter Christian, is the promise that all shall be made right now. The biblical literature a story of promise.

As we return to Genesis this week we find that, although we have skipped a few chapters of narrative, the promise remains unfulfilled. Abraham and Sarah have left their country, in accordance with the command of God, but they remain childless. Worse, they have become accustomed to their barrenness, and it has become a place of comfort. Indeed, if you know the story, you will know that Abraham and Sarah have fundamentally if humanly failed to maintain their belief in the promise.

They have elected for the easy and un-divine option; Abraham has had a child by Sarah’s slave girl, Hagar. They have stayed within the limitations of human insight, rather than raising their eyes to the heavens. It should not ever be forgotten that the Jewish scriptures reveal a God who is compassionate and promise-making also in his dealings with the slave girl Hagar. Her son “Ishmael”, the nomadic peoples of the east, is given a wild life, but it too is one breathed into being by God. That fact alone should be the basis for constructive conversation between Christian, Jew and Muslim, cousins as we are in faith.

Now we find further development in the saga. Abraham is the key character in the first half of our passage, and he is a person in a hurry. He runs from the tent to meet the stranger who is also strangers, he hastens back to Sarah, and demands that she likewise hastens in the preparation of the bread. He runs to choose a beast from the herd, orders his slaves hastily to prepare it, and only then slows down to stand with the strangers who are his guests.

The story slows down in the second half, as the camera shifts to focus on the “three men” who visit. One of these three – Christianity has always found significance in the fact that the narrative mentions both three and one – recounts the promise made my God in last week’s story, the promise of offspring. But the repetition of the promise is met only with the laughter of Sarah. It  is the laughter of disbelief, and of the human failure to hold to the divine promise of impossibility. Their hopelessness is normality, and the call of faith nonsensical. Theirs is a very twenty first century existence. Yet it is into their world that the stranger(s) speak again the promise of God.

The answer of God is, in playful Hebrew fashion, a question: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” It is a question we should wrestle with ourselves, as we witness the complexities of our existence.  Is anything too hard for the Lord: Is Iraq a question that the world has sought to answer with its armies, or Zimbabwe, a question we have sought to answer with feather-sized reprimands? Is illness, ours or the illness and suffering of our loved ones “too hard for the Lord?” Is drought? Is death, the last enemy that we do all possible in our society to avoid and to deny and to hide? Is this “last enemy” “too hard for the Lord?”

If our answer or Abraham’s is “yes”, then the Lord is simply not Lord, for there is a greater something beyond the grasp and capabilities of the one we have called “God”. Funnily enough and sadly enough, even within the Christian community, I find much speech and action that turns death and suffering into a demon seemingly greater than God.

The author of Genesis does not want us to answer yes to God’s rhetorical question. We are expected to let God be God, answering “No: there is not and cannot e anything greater than our god.” There may be “yeses” to our vision – we may have good reason to believe that our barrenness or even our death is the final and therefore tragic word, but we are asked by faith to see through the eyes of God.

Sarah laughs. It is the laugh of science at the possibility of a Creator God, or at the possibility of resurrection, at the possibility of life beyond death, or at the possibility of the New Heaven and New Earth envisioned by the seer of the Book of Revelation. It is the laugh of a society that will mock the God we love and seek to serve, dancing on sacred sites or beliefs, or maybe just too busy in the service of gods called money or security to pause before the God we believe in. Sarah is not mocked for her laughter and neither should we ever dare to mock or knock those who do not share our strange faith.

Sarah’s laughter does not have the final word. God’s promise is not dependent on her response, or on Abraham’s response. God has spoken and it will be done – in Italian it is called a “fiat”. God’s word is action, and, though Sarah laughs and has taken a poor option in the past and laughs in the present, the will of God, the promise of God, will be done.

Only the promise of God is a “definite”, not human longing. Long as they might to break through human barrenness, even using alternative tools to do so, the wok of God will be the only way in which their human predicament can be solved. It is sometimes the case that the “Yes” of God is a long time or an alternative way in coming, but we are called, as Paul clearly sees to be a people believing in the promise of God. The ultimate promise of God is that darkness and death are not the final word, but resurrection and light. It is that promise that we are called to bear in our lives

TLBWY

Three sermons from long ago: (1) Go out, risk living

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
and at St. Luke’s, Augathella
SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(5th June) 2005

Readings:
            Genesis 12.1-19
            Psalm 33.1-12
            Romans 4.13-25
            Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26

Walter Brueggemann describes Genesis 12.1 as “perhaps the most important structural break in the Old Testament, and certainly in Genesis.” Another, and perhaps the greatest modern Old Testament scholar, places the break just three verses before our passage: Claus Westermann breaks his magnificent three volume commentary on Genesis at 11.27, after the resounding cry: “Sarah was barren; she had no child.” This is the beginning of the human encounter with God.

At this point, were we reading through Genesis, we would find that we come to an end of the story of God’s creation and providence through nature. However we under­stand Genesis, we have so far been reading of God’s dealing with all creation, including all humanity. Tales of the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the species of the earth, tales of the creation and the fall of humankind, and of the results of that fall, have filled the first 11 chapters of Genesis.

Now the story changes. We move into what we call salvation history rather than creation history. In all but nine of the preceding previous 53 verses the focus has simply been begetting, generation after generation of begats to tell the story of the expansion of humanity. The sole interruption is the strategic and tragic tale of the Tower of Babel, the story of humankind’s attempts to build its own path to the heavens. But now, as the story teller’s camera zooms in, the story of begetting has reached a dead end: Sarah was barren. Only the intervention of God can save the story.

So God’s intervention is needed, for humankind can go no further. Sarah is barren. The history of humankind has encountered desperation and hopelessness. Sarah is barren. This, the biblical author wants us to realize, is the place where the encounter with God begins. It is only when we encounter barrenness and hopelessness and the realization that in ourselves we can be or do nothing that the encounter with God begins. It is no accident that barrenness as rhe place of salvation is a recurring theme in the Hebrew Scriptures: Rebekah (Gen. 25.21), Rachel (29.31) and Hannah (1 Sam. 1.2), as well as Israel itself (Is. 54.1) must all encounter their own barrenness before they become the person or nation God calls them to be.

It is into this context that God speaks. Not for the first time the book of Genesis makes very clear the message that lies at the heart of Christianity’s Christmas readings: when God speaks it is done. God’s speech God’s word, is action. In the beginning “God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.” God’s word is action.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. God’s word is action, and in Genesis 12 God speaks a word of hope into Sarah and Abraham’s world of hopelessness.

This is what Paul means when in our Romans passage he cites Genesis, saying that the God of Abraham “calls into existence things that are not.” At a literal level, God “calls into existence” the child that was not available to Abraham and Sarah through the processes of nature – through begetting when begetting was merely the process of history and of biology without desperate need for God. But God speaks into Abraham and Sarah’s lives, and therefore into the lives of the people Israel, and therefore into the life of all humanity, speaking a word of salvation. Where we are broken and surrender the purposes of God, there we can hear and receive God’s word of healing.

We live in a world of change. Like Abraham and Sarah we are confronted with much barrenness. We see the barrenness of western civilization, with a comparative obsession with the execution of God. We see our culture and so much of what we grew to believe in unravelling before our eyes. Some of what we see is no more than a media distortion – it is arguable whether chemical dependence or violent crime today are worse than they were, say, in the time of Ned Kelly. But we are seeing increased pressures on the rural economy, as well as changing climates, economic and meteorological. We live at a time of renewed biological threat – bird flu, for example – and of the apparent clash of civilizations, of the West and of Islam. We live in the shadow always of nuclear warfare. Are we as a world reaching a time of brokenness?

We may encounter moments of brokenness on a micro scale. Times of pain in our own lives, times when we realize we cannot make it on our own, relying on our own strength or even the strength of those we love. Are we as a world reaching a time of brokenness?

The call to Abraham is a call to move into God’s future. In the midst of brokenness and barrenness Abraham and Sarah are commanded not to stay petrified or fossilized, but to go out from their comfort zone. There is an all too human temptation to stay in the state or the place we know, even if it is a place of hopelessness. God challenges us, as he challenged Abraham. Like frogs in slowly heating water humanity has a tendency to stay put, never to move and take the challenging escape that God offers.

Abraham’s story offers an alternative. We are invited to discover it by treading out towards alternative places, places as yet unknown but places that are foot-printed by God. God gives us a future. That future is ours to grasp

TLBWY