Circumcision of the rough edges

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
SECOND  SUNDAY OF LENT
(1^st March) 2015

       
Readings:        Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

                        Psalm 22:23-31
                        Romans 4:13-25
                        Mark 9:2-9

In recent breakings open of the word, I have suggested that we slip easily into the heresy of making the God of the Scriptures into a tame God. In the nineteenth century we made God a domestic nationalistic god, serving the interests of various colonial empires. We into a god of decency, who likes law and order and short hair and pressed clothes. The biblical witness, particular as embodied in the prophets, suggests that this is not the God of the scriptures (though there were, sadly, many moments when it was the god of Anglican practice). We often make God into an extension of our own wish list. A god who is no more than a self-help programme and not the biblically stern but redeeming God runs this risk. God will be found on the side of those who are down-trodden and oppressed, what Fanon called the “wretched of the earth.” But God is not a party political god, for sometimes the opportunism and selective amnesia of political parties will lead into positions at which God weeps. The wretched are not one cultural group.

Abraham begins the encounter with God flat on his face. Lent, if we take it reasonably seriously, is a time when we turn to spiritual prostration. It’s a reality check: is God my plaything, an extension of my own wishes and good feelings, or does God make demands of me, cut off my rough edges, and yet remind me that in places of even symbolic hardship rather than just amongst the sunshine and skittles, God is to be found? Abraham falls on his face before God. I don’t claim I do – nor even that I live up to my own demands of small privation during Lent or any other time (I usually fail abysmally) – but some sort of reality check on my complacent cosiness with God, with life, with everything does no harm. In Lent our liturgies try in some small symbolic way to echo that reality check: a little more speech about our unworthiness and propensity to do the wrong thing. For most of us it does no harm.

If at times the psalms can seem a little self-righteous and self-congratulatory, it is worth noting that the temple rites that they were destined to enhance or recall were the rites of a people who knew their vulnerability and their wrong-doing. When the psalmist exclaims “You are the theme of my praise in the full assembly” it is because the God worshipped by the Hebrew people in times of security and cataclysm, safety and near-holocaust is the only basis for meaning in his and his people’s life. God is the life-blood of existence.

But God is not a plaything, and while there is as yet no full-blown doctrine of judgement in the psalms the poets are realising that it is a dangerous matter to neglect God’s stern and critical gaze. The contrast with “those who sleep in the grave … those who go down into the dust” is designed to remind  poet and the poet’s audience that they stand under the critical gaze of a righteous God who loves but evaluates God’s people. For we who believe there is judgement, and Lent reminds us that it a searing judgement illuminating all the dark and hypocritical and exploitative and unloving wardrobes of our lives. In disbelief there is neither eternity nor judgment, though there may be the brief admonition or adulation by a generation or two of descendants. Thereafter there is no more than a nitrogen cycle; for some, as Paul would remind his audiences, that is an excuse to live hard and selfishly.

Not for all. There are many who believe in afterlife only as nitrogen cycle whose lives are an exemplary witness to goodness and justice. I think once more of a Fred Hollows or some of the great humanists like an Alice Walker or a Jeremy Bentham. Nor can we ignore the sad truth that there are many conspicuous professing Christians whose attitude is an insult to Jesus. Faith and integrity have never been simple to define. That conundrum I leave to God, albeit with a sneaking suspicion that the avowed but righteous non-believers in Christ may one day experience a pleasant surprise and that the avowed and ironically self-righteous hypocritical believers may one day experience a less pleasant one.

The saga of Sarah serves as a warning to those of us who profess belief yet who refuse to open ourselves up to the life-giving possibilities of God; it is not the openness of her life and womb to the impossible promise of God that echoes down through history but her jealousy as she refuses to believe in a God who transcends human expectations, overcomes rivalries, and offers reconciliation. She briefly finds laughter and fulfilment after God’s miraculous intervention, only to retreat into hatred, and drifts towards her death without further mention after her hating of Hagar. Ultimately the generosity of a foreign people and the fidelity of Abraham combine providentially and she is redeemed with a peace-filled resting place and the eternal blessing of God.

The danger for believers and unbelievers alike is the cauterisation of conscience. We who are believers run no less of a risk of deadening the nerve ends of what is right and appropriate than those who, like Sarah, who open themselves to God’s possibilities only reluctantly or not at all. Conscience and judgement are two great gifts of God, inextricably linked in the cycles of the universe. Again and again God promises good to those who listen and obey, who struggle on through dark times and emerge into inextinguishable light. Most of us find ways to deaden our conscience from time to time, most of us lose our way, but it is to be hoped that the cauterising of conscience is not the final word in our life narrative and that time and again we can turn back to the beckoning God who takes us through the darkness: “turn back o man, forswear thy foolish way” as we used to sing before awareness of the implications of language removed some of our hymns from worship for ever. That is at least in part what the Lenten journey is about.

There is one other major ingredient in this strange journey. For as we practice the presence and assume the habit of God and allow God to infiltrate our darkest places (never easy for us, much less for God) we can be, as the Orthodox call it, “divinised” or as the Protestants call it “sanctified,” can be made into, as we sang just now, “channels of God’s peace,” or can be as we shall sing in two weeks’ time,

Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before Thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.

Amen.

Britain’s myriad voices call?

SERMON PREACHED AT St MATTHEW’S, HASTINGS

100^th ANNIVERSARY OF THE CHURCH BUILDING

SUNDAY 8^th FEBRUARY

ORINARY SUNDAY 5, 2015
       

Readings:        1 Kings 8:22-23, 27-30

                        Psalm 84

1 Corinthians 3:10-17

                        Matthew 7:13-14, 24-25

 

 

Firstly, I make no apology for the fact that in the next several minutes we may work quite hard. I believe the vision that drove your forebears in faith to give life to this building is a vision worth reclaiming, worth renewing, worth spending a few moments hard work to repossess and reinvigorate. I do however apologize that you have a mere cathedral dean, not our bishop, leading this part of today’s journey!

On the 28^th June 1914 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was murdered, along with his wife Sophie, by a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip. Like all moments in history it has a degree of random to it – news of the assassination took two days to filter through to New Zealand newspapers – but it is a useful moment on which to pin the Death of Certainty. Paul Auster writes “… lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second,”[1] and as the archduke died they were. In that moment, we can say speaking symbolically, the certainty of being a European Christian, and therefore of owning “truth,” crumbled. Even as late as October 1915 a New Zealand academic was approving citing poetry that extolled the romanticism of Britannia’s call:

Britain’s myriad voices call,
Sons, be wedded, one and all
Into one Imperial whole,
One with Britain, heart and soul … [2]

The would-be academic was unable to cite an authentic New Zealand voice extolling the values of Mother Country or of war, though no doubt there were many in the school and university magazines of the time. Why would he? Britishness was the voice of authority and security, and Tennyson was, after all, a Lord.

As it happens the voice of certainty was beginning to tremble a little before 1915. Erstwhile Hawkes Bay (albeit Ormondville) resident poet Blanche Baughan was beginning to lament the harshness of the land, “Well I’m leaving the poor old place, and it cuts as keen as a knife; / The place that’s broken my heart – the place where I’ve lived my life,”[3] but she was beginning to find an authentic New Zealand voice, writing of “paddocks” not “fields”, and experimenting with snippets of te reo.[4] She sees herself however as “Standing, small and alone,” and as such was probably echoing the colonial pain that was still dominant when King and country summonsed the Empire’s men homeward following Britain’s declaration of war on August 5^th, 1914. As it happened, though Baughan went on to be a great and feisty New Zealand woman activist and mystic, she lost her poetic voice, at least in part because she could not find poetic idioms by which to express the cataclysms that rocked the world from 1914 onwards.

I had no tape-recorder set up in St Matthew’s, Hastings, in February 1915, but it is likely that a sermon of the time was full of patriotic fervour. Mr Brocklehurst, later Dean of the Cathedral, was vicar, and a little bit of detective work soon indicates that he was a man who would not only understand suffering and restoration, but a man who understood the priorities of the gospel. Brocklehurst is clearly a fine priest, for he was born in England and served in Australia before coming to Waiapu! More seriously he was a man who understood narratives of suffering and hope. Ill health dogged him long before he was so badly injured in the collapse of the Waiapu Cathedral, including during his time in Hastings. For his funeral in 1957 Brocklehurst stipulated that he not be the centre of attention, but that the focus should be on “eternal life.” I suggest that this perspective at the very least focussed his vision as he worked to the establishment (or re-establishment) of this building in 1915. 

Brocklehurst of course did not preach on the day this building was dedicated:  the Bishop, Dr Sedgwick made a plea for the continuation of the faith of the Church of England, and there is little in his sermon at that service 100 years ago that suggests that he, any more than the colonial poets, was recognizing the extent to which the certainties of Empire were collapsing. Sedgwick was a child of the vicarage, a fin de siècle naval chaplain, an Earl’s chaplain and an erstwhile priest of Bloemfontein and Botswana, suggesting that he was not well-poised to recognised the collapse of theological and sociological certainty that was going on around the world as he addressed the people gathered in the new yet gothic edifice in which we now stand. Certainly, unlike his contemporary the mystic poet Blanche Baughan, Sedgwick is not showing any awareness that the old Euro-Israelite interpretations, the establishment of little outpost temples of brick, needed to give way to new traditions rooted in the whakapapa of new peoples and new lands, or in the Māori values of manāki, mana-a-ki, radical hospitality, radical “telling” of new story.

Sedgwick pronounced boldly a century ago that no new theology would be taught in this place: how surprised he might have been to read a subsequent curate of this parish, Numia Tomoana, who would one day write eloquently of tupuna wahine, strong ancestral women whose story melds creatively with the often forgotten story of the tupuna wahine of Hebrew and Christian narratives.[5] How surprised he might be to find not Matua Joseph Brocklehurst, but Wahine Helen Wilderspin keeping alive the fires of faith in and from the building he consecrated.

Perhaps Sedgwick knew that the newly built St Matthew’s was a radical metaphor. For here the ancient lines of gothic architecture were re-clad in the latest science of ferro-concrete which was slowly dominating creative architecture. The ancient Gothic dream was here recreated in state of the art modern reinforced cement, and the fact that it stands post-1931 Hawkes Bay and post-2011 Canterbury earthquakes and subsequent legislation suggests that something was strangely right here.

Yet something was confused too: the brick constructions that Sedgwick strangely lauded in his sermon this day a century ago, applauding the dismantling of flimsy if romantic wooden edifices, those structures have largely turned to dust or bureaucratic disarray in these shaky post-modern isles. They have mostly crumbled, just as the Temple of Solomon and its successor, beloved in Sedgwick’s sermons and beloved by masonic rites and beloved by British Israelites, were torn stone from stone and utterly destroyed, adding poignant meaning to Paul’s warning that the faithful believer, not the building, is the Temple. 

The new world that was struggling to be born as the certainties of the old Eurocentric universe collapsed was very different, and slowly it would learn to listen to the ancient voices, the tupuna wahine and tupuna matua of this and other ancient colonised lands, and to know that wisdom was not the sole prerogative of the Britannia whose rule over the waves was ephemeral at best. It would learn too to listen to the authentic voice of Paul of Tarsus, who saw that “fire will test what sort of work each has done” and who knew that personal faith integrity, not monolithic structures, would bear witness to the risen Christ.

Brocklehurst I sense began to listen out of his own suffering and heard those voices earlier than his erstwhile boss did, though in the end I sense even the one time Earl’s Chaplain Dr Sedgwick began to hear echoes of ancient and non-European voices. There are hints that Aotearoa sung its redemption songs even to this anglophile bishop: after retiring and returning “home” to England, Sedgwick subsequently made his way back to Aotearoa. He took part in the consecration of that remarkably complex bishop Lesser, and then stayed here to die and to be buried, receiving at last the radical hospitality of Ngati Whatua, buried in the soil of their lands at Purewa. On the other hand he would later be joined there by Sir Robert Muldoon, so maybe not so Māori friendly or progressive a neighbourhood! But in the mysteries of apostolic succession Sedgwick’s legacy was handed on to remarkable visionaries: Lesser, Reeves, Mills and others have filled his sacred shoes and continued to whisper a narrative greater than any of our flaws.

Ultimately the collapse of the old certainties that was in full force a hundred years today was the collapse amongst other things of a distorted Christian narrative. The gospel of a crucified God, of love in a cruciform shape, had given way to a series of nationalistic gospels in which the god of germanness or spanishness or frenchness or dutchness or englishness, of colonialness, reigned supreme. On this day a century ago, New Zealand was just learning that, three days previously, Private William Ham had become New Zealand’s first Great War casualty.  On this day one hundred years ago Able Seaman William Edward Knowles became New Zealand’s first naval casualty. The old certainties were dying with Ham and Knowles, and Sedgwick’s secure world was crumbling as he stood here a hundred years ago.

World War One would give way to World War Two, and the ability of men and women to be the very opposite of civilised, would dominate. The old certainties passed away. Sedgwick’s world of bricks and mortar, of muscular Christianity, God and emperor, of pulled up socks and cleanliness that was next to godliness, these had no answer to the horrors of the 1914-18 war, or the subsequent horrors of Hitler’s and Stalin’s pogroms. They have no answers either to the very post-colonial questions of a young Jordanian pilot immolated by Daesh terrorists, or to the knowledge that we live on a warming planet with rising sea-levels, dwindling resources, and an ever-growing chasm between the richest and the poorest of humanity.

But the scriptures that have been read and broken open in this place since that day 100 years ago do have answers. We throw out the crucified, died and was buried form, and the rose again on the third day form of God, at great peril, for that is what the churches of Europe had done, and their usurper nationalistic gods died with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. We throw out the scriptures of our faith at great peril, for they speak of the radical, compassionate manāki of God, the one who stretches out arms in Christ, who welcomes the broken and the dispossessed, the hungry and the hunted, the hung-out, strung out ones and worse. The scriptures speak of a God who enters into a crucified death for Jordanian pilots and Hawkes Bay cancer sufferers, for starving refugees and road accident and drowning victims, and strangely for perpetrators and victims of injustice alike, for all of us are capable of giving and receiving toxic evil. 

But it is not the British Voice of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Days of Empire that calls us on, as we sing several times today, on into a Promised Future, when we shall with Jordanian pilots and Japanese journalists tread the verge of Jordan. It is a different voice. More like the faint echo of Aotearoa that brought Bishop Sedgwick back to an unforeseen place he never expected to call home, more like the whispers of ancestral voices that have inspired ancient peoples since we clambered out of the primeval swamp, more like the feisty wairua that turned the slowly stilled poetic voice of a Blanche Baughan into radical activism, the voice that will beckon us and our mokopuna is the mysterious voice that whispered despite the Cross and despite the Tomb, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:29) and who then added “haere.”(John 21:19). Haere, haere indeed, says the Spirit who beckoned our forebears and who beckons us and those who follow us.

“Blessed are the dead for they die in the Lord henceforth.” Blessed are our ancestors in faith who midwifed this place, and blessed may our mokopuna in faith be too, for they will midwife a very different place. And blessed may we be, if we hold fast to the Taonga of faith in the God of the Cross.

 

Amen.

 

 

 

---

[1] Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger, 279.

[2] From “Poetry and Patriotism”, Victoria University College Review, October 1915, p. 17. The author is designated only as “C”. The poem so quoted and approved is Tennyson’s “The Making of Man.”

[3] From B.E. Baughan, “The Old Place”, in An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry, 4.

[4] See B.E. Baughan, “A Bush Section.” Ibid., 4-6.

[5] See Numia Tomoana, “Te Karanga o te Atua”, in E. Fairbrother and J. te Paa (eds), Our Place, Our Voice, 33-51.

Nostradamus and wibbly wobbly words

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FOURTH SUNDAY OF EPIPHANY
(1st FEBRUARY) 2015
       
 Readings:   Deuteronomy 18:15-20
                    Psalm 111
                    1 Corinthians 8:1-13
                    Mark 1:21-28

More years ago than I dare to remember I was talking about prophets in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Someone raised the question as to whether prophets spoke today, and began to answer his own question, suggesting that Nostradamus was the last prophet.

I’d never even heard of Nostradamus. I went to the university library, but it had not heard of him, either. Eventually I found some of his writings. They were profound sayings open to endless interpretations (like clouds in the sky):

The young lion will overcome the older one,
On the field of combat in a single battle;
He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,
Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.

They remain popular, cosy, unthreatening. Realistically this typical example was so meaningless it could be applied to countless scenes, though it has generally been applied to the joust between Henry of France and the younger Comte de Montgomery. Things ended badly for Henry: he died as a result of injuries to the eye.

Nostradamus was a soothsayer, not a prophet in the Judaeo-Christian sense. As time passed, I refined my response to the question: do prophets spoke today? They do, but they speak a searing word of justice into the midst of injustice, reconciliation amidst revenge, compassion amidst greed. The future is God’s and God’s alone. So I think of Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, James K. Baxter, Desmond Tutu, Malala Yousafzai: many of you will have heard me on these and other names before. Some stand within the faith traditions of Jesus, others do not: the Spirit of God is not limited to institutions.

It is no accident that the Hebrew lawmakers spoke out against soothsayers: those who offer false narratives are very different to the great men and women of justice who speak with God’s voice of justice and compassion. Jesus warned: “On judgement day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name’” (Mt 7:22). In Matthew’s account those who practice charlatanism in the name of faith get short shrift indeed. There are many examples, and we will all be aware of damage done in and to the name of Christ.

Jules Gomes, Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral, observes, “As you read the prophets you will discover that biblical faith is not compliance but defiance; it is not passivity but protest. ‘It is protest against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be,’ says Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks.”[1] Prophesy, biblically, is not soothsaying, but searing analysis of the present in the light of God and God’s future judgement.

Paul gets prophesy. He gets that if the Christ community is to speak with an authentic voice in the corrupt communities that surround it then its members must look to the integrity of their own lives. Paul was vehemently opposing inauthenticity, every form of hypocrisy and abuse, in the Corinthian Christian community.

We need to get away from the habit of simply translating his words through 2000 years to the present, need to dig deeper and find out why he was speaking to each situation. If he makes a pronouncement about meat offered to idols then it is not our task blithely to pronounce that no meat that we eat has been used in such a way, and then eat nonchalantly, but to ask deeper questions of our food. Does genetic modification of crops threaten the well-being of future generations, thus becoming an idol to current gods of commerce? Are we breathing new life and meaning into Rachel Carson’s prophetic 1960s stance against pesticides in Silent Spring now applicable to genetic engineering? Are we consuming more than we need? Are we keeping the poor, present and future, trapped in hunger? Prophesy is “protest against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be,” says Rabbi Sachs.

When Paul speaks of being “puffed up” he is playing with words. He is using the Greek word for “enthusiasm.” It is where we become puffed up, filled with the wind of our own self-importance rather than the wind of God’s Spirit, that we become the foci of Paul’s wrath. If we are arrogant, full of our own cultural or aesthetic self-importance, using our privilege to oppress others, then we become the proud and the arrogant who are the recipients of Paul’s prophetic fury. When the Corinthians ate meat they did so in elitist riot, keeping the underclass believers in their place. The poor could not afford meat except the second hand meat previously offered to idols, and so were kept from the Eucharistic feast. What are we doing to keep others from the Eucharistic feast? The issue of meat is an issue of justice: what are we doing to ensure that our place of worship and encounter with Christ is open to the strugglers and the illiterate and the unsophisticated and the tone-deaf and the underclasses? Where do we stand under Paul’s prophetic glare?

The psalm perhaps tells us. The doctrine of the “fear of God” is unpopular. We remake God as a plaything in the image of our own preferences. To do so is dangerous. Today we commission Sam as an intern, the beginnings of a new journey, but by our baptism we are in any case all commissioned. If we carry out our commission of faith haphazardly or nonchalantly or arrogantly then we play nothing more than the Nostradamus game, sending neat but empty syllables into the ether of time and space.

Mark tells us of the early public observations of Jesus: “they were amazed, for he taught as one having authority.” We might today say “mana”: that wonderful word from the depths of Polynesian languages, including Māori, that speaks not of some pretentious badge or title but of deep, deep authenticity. It is to that that the readings command us today. May we too address with integrity the unclean spirits, the social and economic and ecological and psychological and spiritual oppressions that permeate every nook and cranny of the world into which God commands us to go, proclaim, baptize.

Amen.




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[1] Gomes, “Prophets of Justice vs. Profits of Injustice.”  www.liverpoolcathedral.org.uk/642/ajax.aspx/download/209

Sulking Jonah, prickly Paul ... paradigms of faith?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
THIRD SUNDAY OF EPIPHANY

       

Readings:        Jonah 3:1-5, 10

                        Psalm 62:5-12
                        1 Corinthians 7:29-31
                        Mark 1:14-20

If you are familiar with the lectionary cycles will be aware that this day is the celebration of the Conversion of St Paul. I would love to claim that my failure to observe that great feast, bring together two of my favourite topics, conversion and St Paul, was because I was surrendering so great a liturgical and homiletic opportunity to a greater cause. Sadly it is not so – I simply failed to notice the feast on my calendar, so we journey on through the Sundays of or after (depending on what school you went to) Epiphany. My apologies to St Paul!

As it happens it’s not a bad set of readings with which to be faced when poised on the cusp of beginning an antipodean year. Yes, we all know that the church year begins at Advent, but realistically in the antipodes nothing begins before the end of January, so realistically we are beginning once more to dip our toes in the waters of faith-action. And we are confronted with a diversity of readings that reminds us how difficult, how challenging and yet rewarding it can be to be a People of the Book.

For that is what we are. It is as it happens what our Muslim cousins in faith call us, but it is what we are. We as liturgical Christians are all the more a people of the book, for we carefully ensure that our worship as well as our teaching is anchored in the written word. We are a people of the book. We jettison in particular the book that is our scriptures at great peril, for they are of the very essence of who we are, shaping, feeding, forming us. But what does a diverse collection of readings like these that we face today say to us? How do we read this book, these books (for the bible is many very different books) that we are dared and challenged and called to read?

The book we call Jonah, after its main character, is amongst other things, a glorious satire. Perhaps I am a particularly poor Christ-follower, but I see something of myself in the blundering prophet Jonah – not I hasten to add, that I have ever managed to convince an entire city to repent, not even had an entire city’s attention. Jonah gets so many things wrong: Apart from anything else he forgets to tell the people of the great city, an ancient equivalent of Tokyo or New York, that the message he brings is a message from God. He blunders along, annoying people, getting swallowed up and vomited out by fish, getting things right and more often getting them wrong, and suddenly despite his blunderings an entire metropolis gets a message from God. When they repent Jonah gets a fit of the sulks: like too many of us he was voyeuristically awaiting the moment when the judges kicked Nineveh out of the shared house, kicked Nineveh out of the chef’s kitchen, kicked Nineveh out of the prize-money. But the judge doesn’t, and Nineveh gets and responds to the message, and Jonah gets the sulks when his fun is spoiled. It would be as if I had spent my ministry striving for the inclusion of young people in the Church, but were to get the sulks because my new bishop is far younger than I am – or having fought for the ordination of women or gays were to sulk because women or gays are at last gaining rightful roles of leadership in the church. Jonah is a satire that makes us laugh at ourselves: do we want young people in “our” cathedral church? They may do things differently!

The psalms, by and large, are the love poetry of faith – even if one contains the chilling heartcry about the execution of an enemy’s children. The psalm on this occasion is a celebration of God’s faithfulness, of God as the source of meaning and succour to the psalmist’s life. There are perhaps times we can relate to this and times we cannot, yet this is precisely the strength of these 150 or so liturgical poems, running the gamut of human emotions and human relationships to the possibilities of God. They run even to the possibilities of no-God, and to the hatred of enemies, and if we think we are too pious to reach the former or the latter heart-cry then it may just be that we know ourselves too little, are deluded about our humanness.

How do you solve a problem like Maria, sings the mother superior. How do you solve a problem like Paul? For too long Christians have delved into the writings of Paul and found there either eternal if selective rules for all times, all peoples, all situations: “wives submit …”, or decided that he is so irrelevant that we never need break open his words again. How brutal a distortion either of those extremes is! Yet always we must ask who Paul was writing to, what situation he was addressing, what was the culture and circumstances surrounding those to whom he wrote his belly-fired, passionate letters of instruction. The Corinthian Christians were playing games with religion, using the Jesus-message as a tool of self-satisfaction and of the oppression of others. Christians have often returned to this abuse. How dare they?  Paul challenges them and us to live each day as if the eternal judge were about to tap us on the shoulder. Of course we fall short of such a demand: he tells us that elsewhere. As he warns his correspondents not to dwell in prolonged mourning he is not writing a twenty-first letter of psychological advise: mourning takes as long as mourning takers, even to the closure of our lives. But he is asking us to know that it is the risen, bigger than death Christ who is beckoning, coaxing us through the darkness into renewed light, first temporary, then eternal.

Or, indeed, as Mark tells us, the Christ who beckons us to stumble on in his still warm footprints. The call of the disciples is the call of fallible, broken, rather Jonah like human beings like me or you or Paul – so perhaps we have ended up with the conversion of Paul after all! The call of the disciples or the call of Paul or the call of you or the call of me is the call to stumble on, embracing the future as God’s future, despite all its unknowns. It is not a bad reminder as we stumble into the realities of 2015.

The Lord be with you.

 

 

God of an aching Paris?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
BAPTISM OF CHRIST (11^th  JANUARY) 2015


　　　　　　　
Readings: Genesis 1:1-5
    　　 　Psalm 29
                 Acts 19:1-7                 Mark 1:4-11

When the authors of Genesis and its two great creation stories set about telling their tales they did so not as a scientific explanation but as a theological explanation. In two different ways they wanted to speak of a God who breathed all that is known into existence, yet who still cares for and suffers with creation in its own on-going dramas. More than that, they wanted to speak of the paradox of a God who creates from without yet remains within, remains involved in creation in its personal and cosmic struggles. The second author even depicts God walking and working in and within the garden of the created universe, listening, punishing, caring, and remaining, ever-always.

When Mark sets out to tell the story of the one who he had come to know as the very heart of God – perhaps as one influenced by Hebrew thought he might dare to say the very entrails of God – when he tells the story of Jesus he begins with the strange and unavoidable historical observation that Jesus was baptised in the Jordan by his cousin John, baptised in a baptism for the remission of sin. It’s a tricky tale, because Christians came to know Jesus as sinless, and a nice deity should not be grovelling around in a river full of human sin. In fact the whole narrative of baptism shared by all four gospel writers raises that terrible question: what is a nice God like you doing in a grotty place like this? It is, ironically, the same question the authors of Genesis were addressing, but times had changed, and Jesus had happened.

Eastern orthodox depictions of the baptism of Jesus often show debris in the river beneath his feet. It is the detritus of human sin, left behind him. Some modern icons have used the modern detritus of a dying planet: batteries, tyres, broken glass, condoms and syringes. It is the same issue: what is a nice God doing in a place like this – and for that matter, what is a nasty notion like a condom doing in a sermon like this?

But if God is a rarefied and nice God then God is not in Paris when bullying and powerfully non-Islamic thugs shoot a Muslim policeman and assorted champions of free-speech. If God is a rarefied and nice God then God is not on our beaches and our roads when our loved ones die in far too great a number. If God is a rarefied and nice God then God has nothing to say in tragedy, and the death of a loved one echoes through the universe with a resounding "no", a resounding "my God my God why have you forsaken me", which is a highly theologised way of saying my God my God why do you not exist, why is the universe an empty and meaningless place?

When champions of freedom are shot in a Paris office no one should dance in the streets yelling platitudes about resurrection and eternity and justice. That was never the way that the gospel writers and Genesis writers were proclaiming. But slowly, by the authenticity of their lives and the integrity of their witness their story did begin to seep out into the Babylonian and later the Roman Empire: thuggery is not the end.

God (though even that word may be damaged seemingly beyond repair) still opens those divine entrails to the pain of the universe, still feels that pain, and is still drawing that universe to an as yet incomprehensible and invisible end in which death and injustice are not the final word. The Genesis writer was trying to tell us that the Source of all existence has not deserted existence, and still draws that first day existence through its pain to a final and future glorious Seventh Day. The authors of the gospels were trying to tell us, against all odds, that the cry of death on a cross or in an upstairs Paris office is not the final word, but another tragic parenthesis on the way to what the hymnist calls "that yet more glorious day." The Baptism of Christ, like the entrance of God into Existence, is neither more nor less than the very Source of existence hitching creation in all its ambiguity onto a trailer that ultimately leads to eternal life and light, in all its incomprehensibility.

The Lord be with you (TLBWY)


 

　

singing a love song

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FIRST SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS (28^th December) 2014

       
Readings:        Isaiah 61.10 – 62.3

                        Psalm 148

                        Galatians 4.4-7

                        Luke 2.22-40

 

In the endless world of the interweb, from Facebook to Twitter to the myriad other chatfests in which humanity indulges, there is an endless continuance of pixel-wastage on the meaning and the events and the actuality or fabrication of the Incarnation, the Bethlehem story presumably familiar to most of us.

There are as ever those who wish to defend every last detail of the biblical narrative as absolute and irrefutable fact. There are as ever those who wish to mock every last detail as some sort of sewerage polluting the minds of the gullible with vacuous and exploitative nonsense. There are myriad positions in-between, and, if we take the whole of humanity into account a myriad of perspective even beyond these bookends: myriads who to varying degrees know little or nothing about the Christian stories of the coming of the Christ child.

Every attempt to extract some sort of quantifiable truth from the scriptures of faith will end in tears. The reading of scripture in a post-enlightenment age, when empirical data is prized beyond all else, is hazardous. We are here no more engaged in a quantifiable process than we are when we kiss a loved one, savour a culinary delight, or bathe ourselves in the magnificence of a balmy sunset. The readings of our faith are generally either the love-poetry of faith or the encouragement and direction-giving of faith. Just as a road sign advising of a sharp turn ahead gives a broad stylised image of a sharp turn, so the scriptures of faith have broad and often stylised insights into the relationship between believers and the paths we are led to tread.

So, as the great Isaiah reassures his people that the hard times are, at least for the fore-knowable future, over, he caresses them with songs of love. This is not accidentally the language of bridegroom and bride, garlands and jewellery, for this is the language of that which cannot be expressed in words. Some of you will be aware of the expressions of pain that are coming from Christians and others exiled in terror from northern Iraq and Syria in recent weeks. Some of you may have seen the tears of the Bishop of Mosul as he related the sad tale of his proud people, a people who have celebrated the great feasts of their Christian faith in their lands for 1500 years. They have done so despite the invasions of the Tatars, of Mongols under Genghis and later Hulagu Khan, of the Ottomans and the British and the Russians and the Americans. They have done so alongside Jews and Muslims, yet for the first time in 1500 years they have under Da’esh (so-called and mis-nomered “ISIL”) been forced from the churches and their prayers.

The language of Isaiah is the language that refugees such as these might pour out if they were to be told that their lands had been rendered safe and they could return without threat or danger. This language of Isaiah is the language of ecstasy, as the refugees in the Australian razor wired refugee hell-holes might use if they were told that Australian and New Zealand governments had decided to welcome them with open arms, of if they were told their homelands of Afghanistan or Sri Lanka or Syria or Sudan were safe to return to at last. This is the language of ecstasy.

So too is the language that the psalmist generates. It is the language of love pouring forth from poets or a poet who has encountered the power of the presence of God in both the festivals of faith and the ordinariness of everyday life, and who has experienced the highs and the lows of the human journey and interpreted them as being all within the embrace of his or her God. A few poems before our psalm today the psalmist cries out with one of the most heartfelt and all-but unreadable sentences of the entire scriptures of our faith, yet here he or she is crying out in paroxysms of ecstasy, voicing the praises of all creation as we might if we were returned from exile or if a lost child were returned to us safely or if our diagnosis of terminal cancer had turned out to be an administrative error and we were now given the all-clear.

Our psalm is the language of the un-languageable, not the language of the concise and the measurable that so many from both the camps of faith and the camps of anti-faith are seeking. This is the hope and happiness of faith restored: “my whole being shall exult.” This is the unutterable yet uttered squawk of adoration: “praise him, all of me, praise him all of you” (and the allusion to John Legend’s “All of me” is not accidental, for that too is a love song).

Even the prickly Paul breaks into the language of praise as he delivers his situational diatribes of instruction. As he writes through gritted teeth to the not very astute Galatian Christians he breaks for a moment into an outburst of praise to the God he loves and is even more loved by: “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” Again and again even Paul’s most volatile letters – and some are – are interrupted by the outpourings of faith-ecstasy, his first century version of “You’re my end and my beginning / Even when I lose I'm winning /  Cause I give you all of me / And you give me all of you …”. This does not warrant scientific analysis, for this is the language of love.

 

So too is the language that Matthew and in this case Luke attach to the birth of the one they knew as Saviour, Messiah, God made flesh. Whatever happened in and around the birth and childhood of Jesus their stories were stories of love, not science. Can history in any case ever be quantifiable and unprejudiced? There are other stories too, delightful, playful stories that did not make it into the canon of our scriptures, though they too can inspire and edify our faith. The fact is that these stories resonated with the power-experience that the first and subsequent followers of Jesus underwent, and indeed as we let ourselves be embraced by the all-powerful love of the Creator as revealed in Christ and Christ’s Spirit they can equally resonate with us, equally enthral and empower our lives and our footsteps. Simeon cries out  in the language of fulfilment: “Master, now you let your servant depart in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation.” This is the language of a life’s dream satisfied, realised, completed. Many of us will never experience such completion, though I suggest that the language of grace says to each of us that our lives, no matter how broken or incomplete, are made complete in the fulfilment of Christ. That fulfilment dwells at the heart of the news we call Good News.

 

So the invitation from these passages is to us all to open up once more our hearts to the warmth and playfulness of Christ, the justice seeking, life up-building Christ of manger, cross, empty tomb and eternal life packed away in the incomprehensible love-poetry of our faith.

 

TLBWY.

My Christmas Sermon!

It is my tradition to let others speak for me when we come to the highest and holiest days of the calendar - sorry if you expected my thoughts but how could I add to these!

My Christmas Sermon

Sorry too that I can't provide the text - purchase the book if you can!