Community as Counter-culture

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL CHURCH

OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 24 (14^th September) 2014
           

Readings:        Genesis 50:15-21
                        Psalm 103:8-13
                        Romans 14:1-12

                        Matthew 18:21-35

I was once told by a Catholic religious that the hardest dimension of the religious life was neither poverty nor chastity, but the brutal demands of obedience. By this he did not mean that the Fathers Abbot were constantly and unreasonably demanding that he shine their shoes, wash their dishes, or weed their gardens, like the traditional prefect demanding obedience from a fag, but that the demands of being answerable no longer just to himself but to the wisdom of a wider community as invested in a wise elder was utterly invasive and counter-intuitive. You may remember the banking advertisement – or was it insurance? Whatever! – of many years ago that solemnly proclaimed that the advertiser’s scheme existed for the benefit of “the most important person in the world: you.” My Catholic Religious friend was telling me that the life of religious community dismantled that near-universal assumption, that he was, I am, you are the most important person in the world, and flung him, me, you to the outer echelons of importance. It was however at the heart of the rule, and it had made the religious life a profound and demanding yet remarkably enriching option for 1500 years.

In the years since that conversation I have come to believe to the very depth my being that being community is the greatest evangelistic asset that the Community of Church possesses. It is close to being the pearl of great price of which Jesus speaks, though that phrase is in fact applied to the Good News of the reign of God. It is close to being that Good News precisely because it can serve as the best advertisement of that Good News that we can offer. See how Christians love each other, the first and secondary observers muttered in awe.

By community, though, I came to realise that we did not mean the glorious hippie communities, Christian or otherwise, of the 1960s and 1970s. The great and often drug-fuelled experiments in love-ins of that era degenerated into paroxysms of self-destruction, the most extreme example being, tragically, the decadent and evil commune of the Manson Family. That quasi-commune arose in the California desert in the late-1960s, and oversaw seven savage and counter-love, counter-peace murders including that of the eight month pregnant Sharon Tate, in 1969. Christian experiments in community living often descended into rancorous debacles of jealousy and metaphorical back-stabbing, and endless rounds of post-community legal wrangling over property. While the heart of the Manson Family’s degeneracy was an extraordinarily complex web of substance abuse and personality disorders, at the heart of many lesser breakdowns of the love-in experiment was simply a lack of the understanding Christianity holds dear, the understanding that we are sin-filled creatures, for who the perfection of eternity dwells not in the here and now but in the yet to come.

Nevertheless the ideal of community was a high and right one. In western society community is often only a chimera, a shadow that can be dreamed of but never grasped. T.S. Eliot amongst others saw it long before hippiedom, as he wrote of a wasteland of empty and meaningless lives, what he would memorably call the existence of “dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit.” Yet there is in our western society often desperate loneliness, and all the noise of electronic media and the internet has done nothing to heal the vast chasms that exist between isolated human beings. In this vast wasteland of loneliness the community of being-in-Christ has a powerful message of healing and redemption, of unity and togetherness. It cannot proclaim that message meaningfully however without self-discipline, and it was towards this that the demanding rules of religious orders were striving. The counterculture of Christian love is counterculture only when the blowtorch of discipline is applied, and the participants undergo the exacting work of transformation into the image of Christ.

At its best – and the great religious orders and the more modern communities such as Taizé and Iona can testify to this – Christian community can be a powerful rumour of the healing love of God. Faith communities – parishes, in our parlance – can be so, too. But at the heart, the dangerous and tricky heart of being a credible witness to the community of God, dwells the enormously risky, and sometimes exhausting demand of being a community not of the social norm of revenge, but of eternal, endless, and sometimes costly forgiveness. Only in forgiveness are cycles of revenge broken; only in forgiveness, which is not the same as cheap nonchalance (but more of that another time) is the rumour of God’s eternity made into tangible, death-transforming reality. It is to that hard task we are called as the community of Jesus.

 TLBWY

on finding hope in a crucified crim

 

SERMON PREACHED AT WOODFORD HOUSE GIRLS COLLEGE
HAVELOCK NORTH
A EUCHARIST OF REMEMBRANCE

 

Reading:              John 6:37-40

 

Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; ³⁸ for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. ³⁹ And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. ⁴⁰ This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’

When someone that we know as John wrote down a whole lot of Jesus sayings and wove them into the book we know as “John” or the “Fourth Gospel” he did so because he wanted his listeners (for such they were) to encounter the awe and the mystery and the hope and the joy that he had encountered in loving and serving one the Romans felt was no more than a crucified crim, but who he and his companions though had in some mysterious way overcome that most horrendous of deaths, not by not dying, but by dying and rising again.

Of course in a scientific rational world in which we love we know that dead friends don’t come bopping back a few days later. We are human: we wish with all our heart that they could or world, but the silent space they leave behind remains silent, the empty chairs and empty tables remain empty, and the ache of a human heart goes on. In our world we readily mock silly people who talk to their imaginary friend and hope things will get better.

Actually they did when John was writing, too. They didn’t really think that loved ones came back and sat at the table where we last saw them, even then. They weren’t dumb. Yet something had changed for them, and it was something so powerful that they were prepared to die for it. They felt that in the experience of worshipping and loving and serving the now unseen crucified, dead Jesus – and sceptics then would refer to them too as silly people who had an imaginary friend – in loving and serving and worshipping this person (that few if any of them had actually ever seen) they found supremely powerful hope. They found hope for themselves. They found hope for their friends – friends who they had shared life and love with but who now were dead – and they found and felt hope for their world.

They remembered Jesus talking about something called resurrection, and they felt his presence so powerfully in their worship and in getting together to pray and eat and sing that they began to understand what he had meant. They came to believe passionately that sadness and loss and even death were not the end, though they remain a passage through which they and we and those they loved and those we love must pass. They came to believe, against all the cynicism around them that even death was just a parenthesis, a break in transmission, a kind of brutal loss but yet one which would not end the experiences of love and fellowship.  People then talked about silly Christians and their Imaginary Friend, but slowly the compassion and the love and the hope the Christian community demonstrated began to attract others, too.

Sometimes in our rational world it’s hard to believe all that stuff. And yet every now and again I experience something so uncannily irrational, so utterly powerful in its rumouring of a life beyond the merely here and now, that I cling as those first Christians did to this weird thing called Christian belief. Through three and a half decades now it’s seen me through some pretty interesting times, and given me powerful experiences of love and hope and joy along the way. So I guess I get what those first Christians were on about as they remembered their loved ones, hoped for them in Christ, and dedicated their lives to believing in Jesus.

Called to be Canaries?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 23 (7th September) 2014
           
Readings:

Ezekiel 33:7-10
Psalm 119:33-40
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20

Several years ago I was privileged to interview Sydney rabbi Raymond Apple.[1] I asked him during the course of the conversation as to whether he sought a more evangelistic emphasis in Judaism. Rabbi Apple laughed and exclaimed words to the effect of “God forbid – I would not wish on anyone the burden of being a Jew.” In a more sombre tone, the famous New York rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, struggled in the early 2000s with the burden of Judaism, writing

 

the Jew plays the role for the world that the canary used to play for the coal miners. You've read about how the miners would take canaries with them into the mines because the canaries were extremely sensitive to dangerous gases. They responded to danger before the humans did. So if the miners saw the canaries get sick and pass out, they knew that the air was bad and they would escape as fast as they could.

That's what we Jews do for the world. We are the world's early warning system. Where there is evil, where there is hatred, it affects us first. To be a Jew, whether we like it or not, is to be a magnet for hatred, for envy, for resentment no matter how unjustified, no matter how irrational. If there is hatred anywhere in the world, it will find us. If there is evil somewhere in the world, we will become its target. People overflowing with hatred for whatever reason, including self-hatred, make us the objects of their hatred.[2]

Kuscher was writing after 9/11, when, paradoxically, anti-Semitic attitudes were on the rise around the world. He sees his Jewish siblings as the canaries in the mines of human existence, living as a sign to the world of the possibilities of God, “not because it will make our lives easier, but because it will make our lives more meaningful, because it will bless the world as Abraham blessed the world, showing people what it looks like to live by God's word.”

 

As a sad aside I probably have to add that my clear sympathy for this Jewish religious perspective bears no resemblance whatsoever to my deep grief at the obscene military bullying of Palestinians by the State of Israel. I see the latter as spiritually (although to say this is chronically to oversimplify) unrelated to the holy People of God, who strive by Torah-observance to witness to the possibilities of God as signs of God’s covenant.

 

Nevertheless, just as the mortal prophet Ezekiel was commanded to prophesy to the wicked, urging them to turn from sin and selfishness and from, as we say in our liturgies, “all that leads to destruction,” so the people of God are called to exist in the community as a sign, however fallible, of the possibilities of redemptive, healing, uplifting relationship to God. If I am an evangelical I am, like Rabbi Apple, a poor one, for I sense that our role too is in a sense a burden, a task not of converting others to our ways, but of shining as beacons of gentile hope in a world that sometimes for good reason is little enough interested in the God of Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

 

Such an attitude of course is hardly likely to fill our churches with converts, and I certainly long for people to come to know the God-in-Christ I love and strive fallibly to serve, but I have no formulaic expectation that those I meet in daily life and ministry must pray the sinners’ prayer and come to adopt my faith. You will often hear me say, echoing if distorting Paul and Jesus alike, that we are called to be the tenth leper, remembering to say thanks to God for all we as created beings experience, remembering to implore God when the going gets tough (as it does each day) for humanity and the biosphere, who are which are respectively too busy or too voiceless to pray.

 

I mention in passing Torah-observance. Because we read through the lens of Paul’s struggles we give Torah, the Law celebrated by the psalm today, bad press, as though it were some kind of evil burden from which Jesus releases us. The Christ of Matthew’s gospel – possibly narrated in this way by Matthew in order to apply a corrective to some believers who were yet again abusing Paul’s “law free gospel” – is committed to fulfilling and even exceeding the laws of Torah. Is this then some terrible curse or wowserism and myopia we must bear?

 

Certainly in the expectations of Torah and Christ-following alike there are exacting demands, demands that we should live in a way that exceeds the morality of the culture around us. In Roman times culture was harsh and greedy: the Christians set about exemplifying love and generosity. It became their most powerful evangelistic weapon: see how these Christians love. We might well look at the dominant paradigms of our culture: where there is fear let us be a people, by grace, of hope; where there is meanness and greed let us by grace be a people of generosity; where there is a spirit of hedonism let us be a people, by grace, of disciplined fidelity and even unpopular chastity.  Where hatred and vengeance dominate the narratives of a society, can we be a people of love and cycle-breaking reconciliation? Only by grace, but we can.

 

We are called to be in this community as a sign, a rumour of the countercultural standards that God can, as we ask, as we seek, inject into the arteries of our existence. “How then can we live?” We can live imploring the God who awaits to hear us as we gather in God’s name, we can live imploring God to make us into the sign of Christ-values, Jesus-values, even Torah-values that Matthew’s Jesus calls “being loosed on earth,” which Rabbi Kushner called being society’s canaries, and which we might call advertising the eternal reign of justice, righteousness, peace and love that Jesus open to us.

TLBWY

 

 

[1] Or I think I did. I worked in the religion department of ABC Radio, and I may have internalised an interview by my much more skilful colleague Rachel Kohn. It was all long ago and far away!

[2] See http://www.ikehillah.org/rabbiharoldkushner/article.nhtml?uid=10002

collective euphoria in the service of God?

SERMON PREACHED AT St. FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, AUGUST 28th 2011
(PENTECOST 11 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 22)

Readings: Exodus 3.1-15
                 Ps 105.1-6, 23-26
                 Romans 12.9-21
                 Matthew 16.21-28

The welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas speaks in his poetry of God as a ‘fast God’, always moving ahead of us and leaving warm footprints as we arrive. It is a powerful image of the God of Judaeo-Christian thought, the one on whose face we can never look and live, but of whom, in the understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures, the servant Moses was once privileged to see, as it were, the back disappearing from sight. In Christian doctrine we have an alternative privilege, of course: we have the eye-witness reports of those who saw and dwelt with the face of Jesus, who they came to know as the ‘all that is needed to be known’ of God. But he, too, has passed beyond our sight, is just around the corner, leaving warm footprints as we arrive. For all who have lived in the two thousand years since the ascension there is just – just! – the experience of the presence of Christ made known to us by the Spirit, the unseen Christ who dwells in our midst in word, sacrament and the fellowship of Christian living.

There is much silliness spoken in the name of God. There is much carry-on that pertains to be God-sent but is in reality no more than collective euphoria – in itself not harmful, but certainly not the gospel of a suffering, justice-living Messiah. God, if I am going to be consistent with my own thoughts, is not limited to my small ideas of where a God should dwell, and may even turn up in the ecstatic experiences of Pentecostalism, but the litmus test of an experience and its godliness is the degree to which it points to the God whose disappearing face is revealed throughout the scriptures. I once inherited a group of well-meaning women who had been powerfully liberated by the experience of crawling around and barking, dog-like, for Jesus. While I’m sure the experience was one of bonding, and probably most memorable, I am even more sure that it had nothing to do with the God of the Cross.

Nevertheless, I emphasize the ability of God to turn up in unexpected places. Often for me that turning up is in nature, sometimes of course it is in Christian liturgy (I remember for example an experience of Taizé worship in Alice Springs, and the same again on Cottesloe beach at Perth), sometimes it is in gatherings of the religionless or of those of religions (not just denominations) that are not mine. I hosted on a few occasions in New Zealand non-religious (or not specifically religious) memorial services for those affected by HIV-AIDS, and could not but be aware of the presence of a compassionate, caring and justice seeking God as hurting and loving people gathered together in common purpose.  The God of the burning bush will not be restricted, but will turn up wherever it seems meet to God so to do.

Having turned up in the unexpected places, God will not readily be restricted. The process of ‘naming’ is one that imposes identity and control on the recipient of the name. God will not allow Moses the privilege of knowing or granting the divine name, not because God is a God who rejoices in some sort of occult mystery, but because God will not be limited by the myopia of human vision, will not dwell in human boxes. While Christianity may belong to God, God does not belong to Christianity: God will not be a part of charlatan religion, Christian or otherwise, and by the same token God will not be barred from the lives of those whose faith, of whatever flavour, is deeply immersed in justice, love and compassion, for these are the givings of God.

For us as a committed people of God, though, there is a responsibility to ‘remember’ God as we gather together in worship, focussed on God’s presence. We glibly use the word ‘remember’ in our liturgies, and it has been the cause of some bitter arguments between Christians, particularly in the context of the eucharistic liturgy – arguments in particular about the presence or absence of God in the elements of bread and wine. The arguments are specious, based on misconceptions and misunderstandings of the Hebraisms that informed the words of Jesus in the upper room. The celebration of a God whose acts and words are ‘membered together once more’, made present again in our sacred repetition of those acts, such celebration is a powerful force for transformative good in our collective and individual lives, a powerful tool by which our lives may be transformed into Christlikeness which is godliness.  Lives transformed that way begin to rumour the hope of heaven, and that is our calling.

So we must find ways in which to rumour and even exemplify the just and compassionate heart of God. When our societies proclaim lust for exclusion and revenge – and we do – then we must above all proclaim a gospel of inclusion and cycle-breaking justice – both of which dwell at the heart of our radical but unpopular experience of grace. Peter looks for a Jesus who will dwell in the attractive and popular places, but Jesus calls him Satan, the opposer of God. On issues of environment, sexuality, medical and social ethics, economic justice, race relations – in all these melting pots of our involvement in the world we are challenged not to look for a place of comfort but a place that maximises our ability to proclaim a God for the hurting and the lonely and the unsure, a God who will sometimes emerge from unexpectedly burning bushes, a God who will unexpectedly welcome strangers that we would rather send away. Discerning God’s purpose in such a way, incidentally, will never follow party politics, though democracy and its parties have a place.

Six days after this encounter with Jesus Peter attempts to place Jesus in a cosy box on a mountaintop: God though will not rest comfortably in the cosiness of our expectations. Our yardsticks of Christ-bearing are not always unambivalent. Faced with a rapidly changing society we will often find it easier to hide than to face the ambiguities of God in a burning bush. We will often want to name God so we can keep him under our control, keep him neat and tidy and in the image that we have always found comforting, even keep him as a him. Sometimes though the fast God is far ahead of us, and as the Spirit moves ahead of us in society we can only play catch-up. Hard and ambivalent though it is, as the world struggles to give birth to its own future, we are called to find the compassionate and just action – to reach out and touch the broken and the spat upon that society relegates to its fringes. Who are they? That’s a question into which God leads us daily.

TLBWY

be still and know that I am sitting here with you

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
16th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(31st August) 2008

 

Readings:       Exodus 3.1-15
                       Ps 105.1-6, 23-26, 45c
                       Rom. 12.9-21
                       Mt 16.21-28

It has been well said – by whom who knows? – that you can measure how civilised a country is by the way it treats its dead. To put it another way, a culture that has ceased to respect its dead is, by and large, losing the ability to respect its living. Just as statistics have shown a correlation between cruelty to animals and cruelty to human beings, so I suggest there is a correlation between our recognition of the dead, and our respect for the processes of grief, and our ability to live as if made in the image of a loving and caring God. Perhaps I feel another doctoral thesis coming on!

When I was a priest in Whanganui fifteen or so years ago it was by and large the tradition in the town for drivers to pull over to the side of the road as a funeral cortege made its way to the deceased’s place of rest. In small country towns perhaps that tradition still stands, I’m not sure. Perhaps there is another correlation here: the greater the capital, financial basis of a community the more likely it is to rush on headless, without respect for feelings, without respect for grief. I doubt if many pull over to the side of the road even in Whanganui, now.

Similarly, it was once a mark of decency to show respect to the place of the Holy in other traditions. I may think Christians are wacky, but I tend not to mow my lawns on Good Friday. I may not believe in the gods of a Hindu shrine, but I would refrain from attacking it with graffiti. I may not subscribe to traditional Māori beliefs, but I would treat Cape Reinga as a holy place – I hasten to add I am here being hypothetical, as in fact I have long deeply loved the tradition of the departure of the spirits from that sacred spot, seeing that departure in a Godward light.

In a western society it has come to be seen as all but ridiculous to speak of the sacred. The sacred contributes nothing to the gross national product, nothing to the pockets of shareholders, and nothing to the coffers of Inland Revenue. Prayer and productivity are mutually exclusive: I would have to say that even as a faith community we are being swallowed up in meaninglessness if we begin to swallow that paradigm: to be asked to measure the outcomes, for example, of a sermon or a children’s activity or a time or prayer-filled spiritual reflection is to be spoken to in a language that is not the language of resurrection. Time spent simply being still with another being is of immeasurable worth, but it is immeasurable worth because it is a form of worth that no measurement in our world can assess. Be still and know that I am God – be still and know that I am sitting here with you, dwelling in God’s time, being.

In the multicultural world we all now live in, one part of the respect and love and evil-breaking behaviour we can show is by respecting the attitudes and traditions of those around us – except of course when those traditions are themselves destructive and evil. We need common sense. If children are abandoned or neglected while parents get smashed on P it is hardly a tradition to respect and affirm. If parents however teach their children the value of an ancient tradition that affirms faith and hope and justice then we will treat it with respect – while holding with joy to our own story of the Christ.

By doing that – by showing love and respect for that in other traditions, faiths and cultures that is edifying and credible, we can help break cycles of hatred with cycles of love. To do so is not to compromise our faith but to act with the type of decency we see in Jesus when he responds with gentle humour to the Samaritan or the Syrophoenician woman, or as Paul does in Luke’s account in Acts of his encounter with the religious men and women of Athens. It is to engage, to respect, and to honour the Spirit of Christ who is always ahead of us on the journey, preparing the way long before our small lives take their stuttering steps.

And through it all we hang on to our belief in the Christ of the Cross. The one who makes something so profound even out of the life of Peter the blunderer can take our lives too, and use them in the service of the kingdom. And so once more we offer ourselves in that sacred service that is so meaningless in the eyes of a material world, but can be made meaningful in the eyes of God.

TLBWY

abuse of institution or the way of the cross?

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
THIRTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(28th August) 2005

 

Readings:
  Exodus 3.1-15
  Psalm 105:12-6, 23-26, 45c
  Rom 12.9-21
  Matthew 16.21-28


At a pivotal moment in his ministry Jesus shifts the focus of his teaching so that it now rests on the meaning and purpose of his own life.

For Peter has just identified Jesus as “the Christ.” In Matthew’s gospel-version this leads to an extend response from Jesus – “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Luke and Mark don’t give us this conversation, out of fear that it can be misinterpreted as permission to use and abuse power.

The history of Christianity at its worst has justified their caution, for their can be no doubt hat amongst the good that we have, at our best, achieved, there has been much that has been far from good, to our shame, that we must acknowledge and confess.

But Matthew is less cautious in his telling of the story. He wants us to see the complexity of the issue. Peter’s eyes have not seen as yet the extent to which the Lordship is prepared to reach, and he is only seeing the Messiahhood of Jesus in terms of Peter’s own bravado and potential for glory. It is pathetically possible for us to fall into the same trap. There have been many times in which and many individuals by whom the gospel has been abused. There have been times we have sought to make ourselves look good, accidentally or deliberately, by our belonging to and use and abuse of the name of Jesus and his Church.

Jesus begins to tell Peter that his Messiahhood and the way of the Cross to which Peter is being commissioned are not a way to elitism or favouritism in the way of society – or even of God – but a way to the loneliness of crucifixion. Peter will have none of it – and Jesus will have none of Peter having none of it! Roman Catholic theologian von Balthasar saw the trap clearly:

What in the Gospel is in need of special absolution is the abuse of institution: twisting it for purposes of worldly power out of fear of the Cross … puffing oneself up by appealing to the special grace of office … masking fear of and flight from suffering as love of the Lord [Peter’s particular sin at this point] … making oneself at home in transfigured heights

 Peter here is commissioned to but is failing to understand that the way of Jesus is a way of self-denial and sacrifice, of powerlessness not power.

Paul, we often need to remember, is writing before Matthew – though after Jesus taught and commissioned the first Christ-bearers. Paul, without Peter’s advantage of eye-witness journeying with Jesus, has wrestled with the significance of the Cross and its loneliness. As he writes to Rome, he writes to the seat of world power – as he knew it. He writes to Christians who are surrounded by the growing emperor cult of Caesar, the absolute opposite of the self-sacrifice of Jesus. Paul writes to a community tempted to forget its call to self denial just as Peter had been tempted to forget the nature of his call.

The Romans’ error is an understandable error. All the advertising messages of Paul’s day, all the subconscious messaging of their Roman community, were pronouncing that might and power are the way of the gods and the chosen god-bearers. In the same way, all-but-all of our subliminal messages tell us that power and sex are the way to liberation, and it is too easy to ignore the call of Paul to be a radical alternative society, or to reinvent Jesus in the plastic iconography of our own society.

Paul here, and equally notably in the great hymn to love of 1 Cor 13, calls his audience to what we might call the way of “unplastic love.” Writing to a society in which military might and conquest are the ways of the gods, he speaks only of sharing in love and tears and resources and hospitality. Writing to a society in which dog eats dog – as revealed most powerfully in the throwing of criminals to the lions or the public entertainment of crucifying nuisances – Paul speaks of bringing comfort to the frightened and the hurting. Writing to a society in which arguments were sorted by conquest and revenge, Paul writes instead of cycle-breaking acts of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Our task as a people of God, even on the small stages of our lives, is to hear and respond to these calls to a radical alternative structure. Where the ads tell us that this car or coffee or razor will bring us eternal happiness we are called to look for a deeper set of values. Where the politicians tell us that punishment and revenge are the ways to a safer-happier-wealthier future we are called to ask whether there might not be ways in which endless cycles of hatred can be broken by forgiveness and reconciliation. Where the media tells us that “the most important thing in your life is “you” we are called to see life the opposite way.

Do not be overcome by evil but over come evil by good. Such is the challenge of living for Jesus today and tomorrow and each of the todays that God lends us.

TLBWY

Am I not pretty enough?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL CHURCH
of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 20 (17th August) 2014
             

Readings:         Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
                         Psalm 67
                         Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
                         Matthew 15:10-20, 44-52

Under the influence of the (unfairly depicted) Pharisees the crowd asks a question that demonstrates that they have come to see themselves as a clean redeemed, pure people. The very notion of “purity” post-Hitler should send shivers down our spine. Yet Hitler’s belief in a pure master race is not unique to him. Anti-Jewish pogroms by Hitler and Stalin, ethnic cleansing or genocide as perpetrated by the English in Scotland and Tasmania, of various shades of Muslim by the Ottoman Empire, of Bengalese by Pakistanis, of Croats and others from Serbia, of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda: the history of human purity-hatreds is a dark stain on the our story. It is recreated in J.K. Rowling’s depiction of Voldemort and his loyal wizards, committed to the eradication of mud-bloods, striving for ethnic purity.

Exclusivist purity is an attitude all too easily recreated in religion. It mars the history of Judaism, Christianity and even Islam. Religious purity obsessions taint the witness of all of us who are descendants in faith of Abraham, despite Isaiah’s joyful pronouncement that God “will welcome foreigners” (Is 56:6). As many Muslim leaders are currently pointing out, the evils of ethnic cleansing being perpetrated by ISIL/ISIS in the power vacuums of Iraq and Syria have no basis in the sacred texts of Qur’an. Similarly, even the often militant texts of the Hebrew Scriptures are adamant that military action is the domain of the Creator God, not of humans.

But I doubt if many of us see ourselves implicated in the raids of Kristallnacht in 1938, of the Rwandan rivers flowing with blood in the 1990s, of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the same decade, or the current ethnic atrocities of the Central African Republic, Sudan, Syria or the Sinjar Mountains in Iraq. Yet we must see the finger of Jesus, criticising the Pharisees, at pointing at our own potential for sin, or the whole scene remains far removed and abstract.

When, where, how do we see and hate otherness in those who God calls across our path? It is my suspicion that much of the debate about homosexual law-reform in many Christian circles is about otherness, about using a preconceived or misconceived or conveniently and selectively conceived idea of God’s holiness codes to maintain some kind of ideological purity in church pews. It is equally my suspicion that a tendency in some circles to ensure that Anglican liturgy remains pure and unsullied by modernity, by data-projection or by accessible, participatory music is driven not only by an unstated theology of salvation by good taste, but by a latent desire to ensure that those with whom we share our pews don’t look ethnically or chronologically or socio-economically too different to ourselves. I am often amused, incidentally, by the claim that there is only one degree of separation in kiwi culture, a claim that perpetrates a myth that we are all pakeha, middle-class, and “decile ten educated” † and which leaves us cosy within the holiness codes of that myth.

Jesus points the finger at any phariseeism that begins to infiltrate our lifestyle. In Anglican circles we are particularly prone to forgetting our need for God, forgetting that God is an utterly unmerited invader of our lives, forgetting that God is the absolute holiness within which the grot and squalor of what Samuel Wesley called “the mean altar of my heart” has no place. We lose touch too easily with the desperation of the foreign, outsider woman who cries out “have mercy on me, my daughter is tormented.”

Jesus is trying to teach establish a faith, a Godward journey of embrace, as Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf has called it, rather than one of exclusion. We probably often find ourselves smiling our agreement with Jesus, tacitly ticking off on our fingers the ways in which we are not like the Pharisees. There is no such reading of the gospel. In the moment we do that we become like the Pharisee who watches the powerful but corrupt tax collector with disdain. When we smile indulgently at our ideological purity, and shut the door on those who vote or act or worship in ways other than our own we have become Pharisees, and there is, as the old prayer used to put it, “no health in us.” Does someone wipe their nose with their hand, sniff noisily, or expectorate, as Churchill put it, on the pavement? “Am I not pretty enough” sang country singer Kasey Chambers, pretty enough to be in your pure world? The very fact I quote a quote a country singer may give some Anglicans a shudder: am I not pretty enough to participate in the sophistication of Anglican Christian life?

I recall well my first months at my rather Brideshead Revisited theological college, when I deliberately drank beer at college functions, while some of my colleagues sipped their sherry and their gin, and all moved away from me on the bench. Colleagues at the nearby alternative college moved away because we drank alcohol at all! I recall well my seclusion as I drew on my pool of resources for preaching and teaching in the college chapel, quoting this contemporary author or singer while my erudite colleagues quoted the Greek and Latin Fathers in original languages. I remember well my confusion as the more profound liturgical participants glared at any error a naïve newcomer might make when it came to the appropriate moment for genuflection at the Mass, all metaphorically moving away on the bench.

And I am alluding too to reverse-Phariseeism, the unholier-than-thou Phariseeism of that moment in Arlo Guthrie’s classic anti-war tirade, “Alice’s Restaurant” when a hardened crim asks Guthrie

      “What were you arrested for, kid?”
      And I said, “Littering.”
      And they all moved away from me on the bench there,
      with the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things,
      till I said, “And creating a nuisance.”
      And they all came back, shook my hand,
      and we had a great time on the bench.

In what ways do we generate Phariseeism, ensuring that our world is not infiltrated by those who don’t think or speak or act like us? We cannot rest cosily behind any sort of holiness or purity codes or liturgical or academic or political or musical excellence. We are to be merciful, as God is merciful to us, inviting as God is inviting to us, hospitable as God is hospitable to us. We are to be the porous people of God, and that may well mean we have often to be uncomfortable in our journey of knowing Jesus and making him known, of being Jesus to a community that is in so many ways crying out for the crumbs of love and inclusion beneath the table of faith.

TLBWY



† A socio-economic grading of NZ Schools