For the love of neurofibromatosis

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 30 (26th October) 2014

Readings:  Leviticus 19:-1-2, 15-18
                  Psalm 1
                  1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
                  Matthew 22:34-46


Hallowed be thy name! Even today, despite fifty years of contemporary language revisions, it is the seventeenth century version of the great prayer of Jesus that is best recognized (and which, incidentally, I still generally use with dementia and comatose patients). There have been rightly myriad attempts to translate the probable words of Jesus into a contemporary idiom; possibly J.B. Phillips’ 1950s idiom is as good as any: “may your name be honoured.” It misses, though, that the Name is honoured, ipso facto, by the very fact of its owner’s existence. It is holy, because it is of God. Paradoxically there is and can be no name for God, for God’s holiness is beyond names. I am, says God to Moses – I will be what I will be: the choice is mine, the freedom is mine, the holiness is mine. The supremacy of God is an unpopular concept in post-modernity: Hallowed be thy name, even though it is often merely an epithet, a swear word, an ejaculation: Oh my God Oh my God, OMG.

Holiness in relation to God is not optional. This is so even if holiness is much forgotten in the noise and clutter of post-modernity, in the age of the ephemeral, the snapchat selfie, the age of the pixel. Strangely one gift Christianity gives us is timelessness, the moment in which we do something useless: we slow down, we cease to be productive, we waste time-is-money opportunity in order to worship the unseen and unprofitable God of our ancestors. We have no place for clocks in church. Even if we merely approach God from the philosophical sense of “that than which no greater can be conceived” we are standing on holy ground, however unfashionable.

Within the Christian community our lives are invaded by God. There are myriad ways in which this is expressed in our scriptures, though Paul’s understanding that we are “in Christ” and that the Spirit of Christ “dwells in us” is fine shorthand. The Spirit of Christ, the holiness of God, invades us, though we far from deserve it. This doctrine has become darkly muddied by the so-called holiness codes of fundamentalism. In these codes the idea that the body is the dwelling place of the Spirit merges with obsessions with sex and sexuality, and with patriarchal self-interest  to produce an intolerable burden on the shoulders of those who do not fit highly selective and largely unfounded representations of what sexual behaviour is acceptable to God. I mentioned a moment ago that one of the finest translations of the great prayer of Jesus is that of J.B. Phillips, but there is a more profound reflection well known to many of us that came from the pen of Welsh gay theologian and spiritual writer Jim Cotter: “Father and Mother of us all, Loving God, in whom is heaven: The Hallowing of your name echo through the universe!”

The best outliving of holiness, the best demonstration we can achieve of a life lived in harmony with the Spirit of the Triune God who has invaded us, is by striving for integrity, authenticity. That is what Jesus was saying when he said “let your light so shine.” We cannot live lives of integrity in and by our own strength. Paul’s great (representative rather than personal) heartcry “who will rescue me from this body of death?” was immediately given the answer which while often translated “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord” means something more akin to “Thanks be to God who has done so through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Only the invasion of God can turn our lives to holiness, can slowly transform us into the person of today’s psalm, into persons whose integrity is so resplendent that it touches and transforms neighbours’ lives.

Years ago I spent some time with Desmond Tutu, and will never forget watching his encounter with a rather “burnt out case.” It was a tired, embittered and rather drunk clergyman who seemed to grow larger and more beautiful as Tutu conversed with him, as Tutu’s integrity rubbed off on him. That is holiness at work. Many of us saw the powerful image of Pope Francis kissing the disfigured faces of two different men; the first, Vinicio Riva, severely disfigured by the tumours of neurofibromatosis, the second who has remained anonymous, brutally disfigured in what appears to have been a massive cranial accident and reconstruction. In each case one can only imagine the arohanui that was transported in the moment: Riva said he felt only love in the eternal moment of the Pope’s embrace. This is the same great love that Jesus imparted to the lepers and the women and the mentally ill and the grieving outcast in society, the fringe-dwellers of his world.

It is the same great love into which we are challenged to grow as we open ourselves to God in lives of prayer and worship. It is the love that Jim Cotter exemplified in his life and teachings, or that Maximillian Kolbe exemplified when he sacrificed his life to save Franciszek Gajowniczek in Auschwitz.  It is the love that Edith Stein also exemplified in Auschwitz, as a Jewish-Catholic woman who dared to speak out against Hitler and live exercising compassion for the victims of his pogrom.  It is the love exemplified by the mad and manic Simone Weill who likewise lived for others and died of tuberculosis while awaiting conversion to Judaism, her expression of support for Hitler’s victims. It is the same love and work of the Spirit that is sometimes demonstrated in the lives of those far outside the recognizable boundaries of faith: kiwi atheist Fred Hollows, who transformed thousands of lives through ophthalmology; semi-Catholic billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates; or somewhat agnostic philanthropist Oprah Winfrey.

But what is holiness?  There are those whose lives so epitomize the love of God, whether they acknowledge God or not, that an observer’s breath is taken away and their life values changed. Neither Christianity nor any religion has a monopoly on this great gift and discipline of living, as Kolbe’s biographer put it, as “a man [or woman] for others.” Living for others: for present others trapped in poverty and violence, for future others trapped on a warming planet, even for past others whose story needs must still be told and honoured, those who have gone before us whose story ensures we are not a rootless people. It comes of living for other species, too, and for fighting against the greed that strips meaning from earth and its inhabitants.

As Christians we must add that for us it comes from consciously opening ourselves up to the Christ who emptied himself so that we can do the same. Holiness is not the Oh my God Oh my God of the glitterati, but the hard grind of those who dare, like Pope Francis and Jim Cotter and Edith Stein and Simone Weill, to work at love and life for others. Holiness is saturation in the energies of God. Holiness is living out our baptismal vows.


TLBWY

No people my people

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16th 2011
(PENTECOST 18 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 29)


Readings: Exodus 33.12-23
                 Psalm 99
                 1 Thessalonians 1.1-10
                 Matthew 22.15-33

To understand our communion with God we need to know the back-story, in Māori the whakapapa, of our faith. We are in the spiritual loins of our forebears as they are called into ‘peoplehood’ by a compassionate God.  We are in the spiritual loins of our forebears as they are called to be God’s chosen people, led out of the sweat-yards of the Nile delta (where tragically our sisters and brothers in faith are once more in great danger: thank God for those of our Muslim cousins who have stood in solidarity with their suffering and vulnerable Christian neighbours).  The people of Israel had previously been little more than a no-people, a rootless and wandering Middle Eastern tribe, descendants of patriarchs touched and blessed by God, but a people without direction.  We are called by God never to forget that we, spiritually speaking, were once refugees: we were boat people even if our ocean was a desert. We were fleeing from oppression.

 

These are the people whose heart-cry God heard as they slaved for Pharaoh in Egypt. God heard them and had compassion not because they were a holy or nice or righteous people. God heard their heart-cries because they were a suffering people. The cries of suffering people have first-class access to the heart of the Creator. Our suffering, refugee ancestors were led by God from Egypt, perhaps in waves, or perhaps in one great and miraculous migration, escaping slavery, but soon turning on the hand that saved and fed them, soon whinging about the flavour of the manna. Rather than offering lives of thanksgiving to a saving God, they built a golden calf, generating an alternative deity: God, you may recall, was not amused. We must always recall the extent to which the story of the recalcitrant people of God has repeated itself – the degree to which for example the new people of God, the Christian community, soon forgot and still forgets its call to compassion and justice, and refuses to hear the voice of those who Frantz Fanon called ‘the wretched of the earth’.

It is worth pausing to reflect on our own golden calves. As a new religion Christianity displayed at its best considerable integrity until the fourth century, establishing itself as a religion of conspicuous love and justice, bravery and compassion. Later we tended to forget our vocation to the way of the cross, and at our worst began to proclaim the way of the sword instead. At our worst we have done that ever since – or at least until recent decades when we lost, thank God, our institutionalised supremacy (outside the US Empire).

 

We were not always at our worst, despite our frequent mistakes. Few would forget, once they heard the story, the bravery of the Northern Territory, Arnhem Land missionaries who stood in the way of the guns of those European Australians who would shoot indigenous people as a form of entertainment. These missionaries were not operating out of a theology of the sword, but a theology of the cross. Still: Our Anglican denominations, perhaps even our own faith community, certainly ourselves as individuals, have had moments when we have allowed shibboleths to usurp the place of God in our priority. We have, like Moses’ recalcitrant people, come very close to becoming the no-people, the no-person we were in the loins of our ancestors.

God is a God of grace, and, although his rescued chosen people are soon a stiff-necked people, God does not reject them. Over and again that is the story of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is the story even of our Christian Testament, the story of our Christian history, and the story of our own lives. God maintains a presence with the people of God, tainted as our history may be; Moses continues to be God’s chosen instrument as the wayward people are led to their undeserved destiny.

 

When Matthew depicts the Pharisees’ approach to Jesus ‘to trap him’ he makes clear that they have lost all respect. We who are believers have the hindsight advantage of knowing the identity of Jesus as Lord (either in terms of the textual narrative, or in our own lives, or both). There is little doubt though that Matthew is depicting the Pharisees as a people who have lost respect for all that is wise and holy, not just Jesus. The come to trap Jesus, not to engage in conversation with him. They come armed with obsequious phrases. They come to sneer: it is not a good way to gain insight or wisdom (though we as Christ-bearers have often adopted a similar attitude when we have encountered ancient cultures previously unknown to us, and sneered at their presumed unsophistication).

 

Matthew’s Pharisees encounter something greater than they can comprehend. The God of Jesus Christ is not a player of games, and despite hundreds of years of misinterpretation – misinterpretation that was caused by Christian interpreters losing the perspective of the cross and interpreting from the perspective of the sword  – Jesus does not here give the Emperor of Rome a ringing endorsement. The tone is far more one of ‘render as much as you like to Caesar, but God will always be God’. Wherever claims to divinity are made – whether in the form of a golden calf or the form of an emperor who proclaims himself divine – God’s voice of justice will eventually speak out, and false deities will crumble.

 

These days, as we of the community of Jesus are increasingly marginalized, the voice of God will be an ever more subtle revelation, an ever more counter-cultural revelation of divine will. Prime Ministers and Political parties may have little time for any consideration of matters of faith, justice, or God at all, yet even so sometimes God’s compassionate voice will speak. While it’s too early to crow, the events surrounding the rejection of off-shore bases for the so-called ‘processing’ of asylum seekers, despite valiant attempts by Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard to out-tough each other, suggest that even in contemporary Australia in all its disinterest in Christianity the voice of the compassionate God can still be heard. Whatever the national interest – the head of Caesar, the sacred cow – might be, the interests of God are always love and compassionate justice. Refugees, like the Hebrews in Egypt, will find a home. The onus will be on us to be the face of Christ in the home they have found.  In every possible way.

TLBWY

Maggots in heaven

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 23 (12^th October) 2014

(family Eucharist: blessing of the animals)
    

Readings:   Psalm 148

                      Matthew 11:25-30

This time two years ago I was at St Francis’ Church in Batchelor, the former Rum Jungle, in the Northern Territory, conducting a similar but very different blessing of the animals. Amongst the animals I blessed that day was a wild tree snake, which I had enough composure to know was a harmless species, thwarting the young indigenous kids’ attempt to scare this white-fella priest, but nevertheless causing at the very least a double-take as this more or less snake sassy kiwi checked out the guest’s appearance against mental maps of danger. Meanwhile, up the road, my colleague the then Dean of Darwin, never shy of a little media publicity, was attracting lots of photographs from the notoriously crocodile obsessed Northern Territory News  as he blessed the carefully gaffer-taped snout of a local crocodile (albeit one small enough to hold).
 

The stories of St Francis are stories of a Garden of Eden revisited. Depictions of the great saints who communed with nature as Adam and Even mythologically once did were designed to evoke memories of pre-lapsarian Innocence, the same scene Blake captures in his whimsical Song of Innocence, “The Lamb.”

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek and he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

                Little Lamb God bless thee.

Blake memorably contrasted the innocent lamb with the destructive tiger, but we’ll leave Blake there. The point is that in the Francis mythology we are taken to a place where his sheer prayerful holiness restores the values of Eden, where the lion and the lamb lie down together in Isaiah’s futurific vision, where there is no bloodletting and where, I guess, tigers graze on clover.

Now I have a sack here, full of cute and cuddly and less cute and cuddly things. We may well bless the animals, and shortly we will, but as we take toys from the very animalian pillowcase I would ask you – unless you or your child are an arachnophobe or an ophidiophobLittle Lamb who made thee e (ask me later!) – to accept the first thing you touch, cute and cuddly or hairy and scary. Because ultimately, while Francis might remind us of an edenic existence, some of our cute and cuddly friends would happily eat some of our other cute and cuddly friends, and even if the lamentable group ironically called Savage Garden once sung about wanting to run like the animals, careless and free, I doubt we are yet in Past Eden or Future Heaven, and existence continues to have its dark risks, as every news bulletin reminds us.

So let me end with a story. Over a decade ago a small plane crashed in the mountainous terrain north of Newcastle in New South Wales. The occupants survived the impact, though the pilot died some 36 hours later. His passenger and girlfriend was found on the third day, dehydrated and an estimated 20 minutes away from death. She survived, despite massive burns following the crash. Amazingly, doctors reported, one element in her survival was that maggots infesting her burned body ate away the dying, infected skin – doctors refer to it as “maggot debridement therapy.” It’s not a pretty thought, but one of nature’s ugliest beasties saved the life of that crash victim in New South Wales.

Today we will bless our furry, finned and feathered friends. I won’t bless snakes, crocodiles or even maggots. It is worth remembering though that God created the good, the bad and the ugly, in a complex and not always pretty balance, a balance that we humans often make worse. But what Francis saw was that God is the God who walks before us, even when the crocodiles, snakes and maggots infest our path, that God gives us the beautiful and the ugly, sister sun, brother moon, cousin maggot, and that all are just a hint of the complexity of perfection that lies behind us in Eden and ahead of us in the complex we call heaven. In all this God remains the constant” God’s footsteps go ahead of us, and in them we however tentatively place our own.

TLBWY

Rehearsing for a banquet

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 23 (12^th October) 2014
           

 

Readings:       Isaiah 25:1-9

                       Psalm 23

                       Philippians 4:1-9

                       Matthew 22:1-14

 

 

One of the great divides running through the witness of Christianity, almost as bitter if less militarized that the Shi’ite-Sunni divide in Islam, is the divide between the public-political faith practitioners and the personal-piety faith practitioners. This difference is often enshrined in denominational allegiances, and within denominations in the cleavage that sometimes exists between liberal and conservative, though the labels founder on individual realities. They provide a useful starting point, though: show me your personal salvation and I’ll show you my political-social activism, or vice versa.

And, while I haven’t yet asked a question, the answer were I to ask the obvious one, is both-and, of course. Personal piety without commitment to public justice is obscene. Political activism not anchored in personal piety is thistledown, planted on the wind, as Denis Glover and the Preacher of Ecclesiastes each might remind us. Not either/or, but both/and, though I should add that there is a form of personal piety that is so seamlessly and unquestioningly anchored in right-wing politics, particularly in the USA, that an observer might begin to wonder where the party politics ends and the faith begins. I make no secret of my belief that right-wing or capitalist dismissal of climate change is neither more nor less obscene than a left-leaning form of politics that separates cavalier sexuality from responsibility, and which reduces an unborn infant to the level of medical inconvenience.

So, while I find no scriptural reference (and however slippery interpretation always is,  scripture will and must always be the yardstick of debate) to “personal” salvation and a “personal” saviour, neither do I find a scriptural imprimatur of the nation state’s right to ignore the plight of the individual in a mantra of the greatest good for the greatest number. Last time I checked Jesus revealed the heart of neither a Communist nor a Fascist God but the heart of the vulnerable, hurting but hurt-transcending God of the Cross. “My Jesus, my Saviour” of the popular hymn is also Jesus, Saviour of the World of the ancient canticle.

What do we do then with a collection of tenuously linked readings like those we have? The God of Isaiah’s prophesy will wipe away tears from the eyes of God’s people, but this is a very collective, nationalistic God and it is the collective nationalistic guilt and the collective, nationalistic tears that are being addressed. The God of Philippians’ prickly author seems interested in the focus of the individual believer’s eyes, a sort of “Turn your eyes upon Jesus” message, but elsewhere Paul indicates that he does not have an individualistic but what is called a “dyadic” view of the encounter between a believer and God, in which whole communities or at least households may together, not individually, turn to receive the grace-touch of the Saviour. Jesus seems to be threatening the dismissal of a wayward chap to eternal hellfire, but the context, as I have suggested elsewhere, is a tragi-comic tale about behaviour that even the most reprehensible first century reprobate would not countenance, suggesting therefore that this is more than just a tale about naughty individuals who do not surrender to an altar-call of personalised salvation.

So I suggest always, despite the non-existential, non-personal flavour of the world in which the scriptures groaned to birth, despite the suggestion that salvation in the biblical stories is not ever some sort of individualistic ticket to eternity, that we nevertheless take each of these references and realize that, while we can’t change the world, we can nevertheless change ourselves (with the help of God), and while we can’t persuade the world of the veracity of the claims our faith makes for Jesus or for God, we can nevertheless allow our lives to be continually changed so that at least the rumour of God and God’s values are kept alive. In that way, as global security blankets fray and disintegrate as they have for every civilization, nevertheless the life-transforming love of the God we encounter in worship and fellowship can shine through our attitudes of compassion and justice and love despite the noisiness and fallibility of our normal human self-serving volitions. I suggest that we don’t threaten to throw other people into hellfire, in other words, but deal with that within ourselves which rejects the love-touch of God, the healing invitation of God, that we amputate that within our lives which drowns out the justice-song of God, that we amputate that within us which is anti-Christ and turned to darkness rather than divine and eternal light. It is after all, as Jesus says elsewhere, better to enter eternity maimed that to spend eternity, whatever that might mean, wailing and gnashing our teeth.

As we do that, and always only ever with the help of God, we may just become better guests in the eternal banquet hall of God.

 

TLBWY

Da'esh, Mendelsohn, and the Sparrows

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL CHURCH
OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 27 (5th October) 2014
           
Readings:   Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
                   Psalm 19
                   Philippians 3:4b-14
                   Matthew 21:33-36

If there are many times I breathe thanks for my membership of a liturgical church whose worship is governed by cycles of prayers and readings and ancient rites practiced and prayed for two millennia (or four or more) of believers, there are others in which I have to say that the wisdom of the Church momentarily lapses. Apart from clock-watching paranoia, which is close to obscenity in the context of worshipping the God of Cross and Universe, there can be no reason to bowdlerise the greatest of the texts of faith, to spit as it were on the sacred texts of commandment that have shaped Jewish and Christian faith for three millennia at least.

 

How dare we remove from the great commandments of fidelity to the Creator God the explanation that idolatry is, as Paul sees in his introduction to the Letter to the Romans, a dehumanising distraction from the main game of relationship to the Creator of the universes? How dare we eviscerate the command­ment to Sabbath rest by throwing it aside, when hidden in its wisdom is a reminder that we are not to be slaves to a capitalist obsession with commerce, with profit, at the expense of the care of God’s garden, creation, and indeed of ourselves? We bowdlerise our texts at great peril to our own integrity and the integrity of our witness. For homework, were we not given to limiting God to a seventy-five minute gap in our lives, we should probably read and ponder the verses we have omitted from the Ten Commandments, for as the rabbis remind us, it is often in the gaps between the words, not least when cavalierly generate those gaps, that truth is found.

 

When we talk about commandments and the falling short of them that the word “sin” describes, we are often caught in a no-person’s land between Jesus the Word and Paul the Interpreter of Jesus. Such a claim is sometimes used to drive a wedge between Jesus and Paul: I drive no such wedge, for Paul and his spiritual integrity must be retained as one of God’s greatest gifts to the church. But whereas for Paul sin is an inescapable human state, ensuring that we snarl and snap and betray and pollute and maim and kill directly or indirectly, for Jesus sin is closer to the naughty things we do each day: Go and sin no more. But, etymologically the naughty things we do inexorably lead to nought, and the difference is, as it were, the same.

 

If we do not have a clear understanding of sin – an “hamartiology” – then we have nothing meaningful to say about or to ourselves or the world around us. We may have a grand vision of the goodness or the beauty or the majesty of God, as is often reflected in our sacred music, but if it is not related to our own understanding that we, no matter how hard we try, cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps into the presence of God’s eternity, then we are just engaging in aesthetic drivel. Theology and its poor cousin preaching in the nineteenth century became more and more obsessed with the rarefied and majestic nature of God, but had less and less to say as Christianity entered the twentieth century and died in the paroxysms of two great and bloody wars. Only as it found a voice in the dark shadow of Auschwitz and our acquiescence to evil did teaching and preaching begin to find a voice again. Even today we must recognize that Da’esh, (ISIS) or climate change, or e coli in waterways, or the sexual abuse of the powerless and a myriad other evils are at least as much about me and you and our participation in an unjust, fallen world as they are about corrupted Islam in the Levant or dairy farmers up the road.

 

Speculation about a majestic and aesthetically rewarding God will lead not to the transformation of human sin at the cross but to self-satisfaction and complacency. It is precisely that issue that the commandments which we bowdlerised were seeking to redress. When the God of Suffering, God of the Cross becomes the muscular patriarch of the Sistine Chapel or even the oratorical God of Mendelsohn or Haydn and is left there then we have nothing to say to the young mother who has just been diagnosed with cancer, to the family of yet another Da’esh (IS) barbarity, or to the over-mortgaged farmer facing foreclosure and the dark options of suicide.

 

The extent to which Christianity has been abandoned in recent decades serves to remind us of the degree to which both we and our host society have lost sight of the core message of a Saviour who touches the most marginalised in society and beckons them to come, to know, to follow. The risk of being a cathedral parish more than any other is that we begin to seek security in our own imagined importance rather than the absolute importance in our lives of the crucified, redeeming Christ to turns even a beheaded loved one into the Hope of Easter. Ironically the pixies and fairies faith of the New Age has all but usurped our place in society, but in our marginalization there may be a stern message of God.

 

It is when we begin to re-grasp the concept that we are, individually and collectively, less important than the sparrows that fall or the lilies in all their splendour, and yet hold that truth in tension with the truth that the Christ of the Cross can and will die to enter even our unimportance, it is then that we begin to be an authentic witness to Christ-light in our community. Do I do it? No. For we all collectively major in the minors, get obsessed with the trivial, and fall back into the web of human sin.

 

But God does it, and our task is to turn and turn again to the God who does. We are tiny, insignificant microbes in the complexity of the universe: ironically it is that which the architects of the great cathedrals were trying to tell us, and which is echoed in miniature in the design of Kingwell Malcolm for our cathedral. We are tiny.  The great revivalist hymns and songs can teach us much: despite the incompre­hensible and ever-growing majesty and mystery of the Creator, flinging universes across nothingness, that same Creator cares for a sparrow and for you and for me and for Da’esh’s latest victim Alan Henning and for Ebola victims whether they are in New York or Sierra Leone.

 

It is fashionable to sneer at the great songs and hymns of the revivalist era and holiness movements such as the charismatic renewal and its aftermath, but it does no harm to recall over and again that the God who flings stars is the God who calls us again and again to the compassion and reconciliation and forgiveness of the cross:

Just as I am, though tossed about
With many a conflict, many a doubt;
Fightings within, and fears without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come!

For all the limitations of the some expression of atonement doctrine we should not sneer at the un-ambivalent reminder of “there’s room at the cross for you”, even if we need to remember that the return to the compassion of cross is not once for ever but always over and again and for me and for each of us.

 

That is why Jesus told a parable about the arrogance of self-reliance and self-satisfaction: in his over-the-top tale of a landowner and his evil tenants we receive a burlesque parody of our ability to force ourselves into what we think is the driving seat of the universe, bruising and beheading those who get into our way, and never allowing the surrender of self to Christ that is the real beginning of the gospel. The moment we think this analysis of the parable is about someone else is the moment we should realize that still and again there is room at the cross for us to set right our relationship with the Owner of the Vineyard.

TLBWY

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.