dancing beyond the capabilities of mind

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN

TRINITY SUNDAY (27^h May) 2018

READINGS:

Isaiah 6.1-8

Ps 29

Romans 8.12-17

John 3.1-17

When we speak of the Trinity we enter the language of love. Not the language of dissection, or of structural analysis, nor even of explanation, but of love. That said, even love language falls short, rings hollow, if it is nor grounded in experience. The difficulty for those who design the lectionary is that of choosing which language to use to showcase the love that is demanded of us by and for our creator, our redeeming, life-giving Triune God.

The readings give us hints as to how we might praise God by serving God, or even serve God by praising God. The Westminster Confession (more beloved of Presbyterians admittedly, than Anglicans) proclaims boldly that the “chief end” or “primary purpose” of human beings is to praise our God, to pour out the language of love. We might get put in a loony bin if that were our sole activity, but the powerful imagery remains: are there times when we pour our souls out in crazy praise to our invisible Creator?

There is a very real sense that we are invited to find our place in the stories that we read, inserting ourselves into the text. Not least we might in passing note the seraphim in Isaiah’s vision of calling. Their sole, or at worst primary role is to sing the praises of God. We might notice, too, Isaiah’s deep sense of fallibility, of not being good enough to serve God. Who is he to speak with the authority of God?

Who is anyone to do so, you or I included? Despite feel good pop-psychologies, it doesn’t do any harm to be reminded of our inadequacy. This is at least in part the reason why the Anglican version of Christianity incorporates so many checks and balances; our service of God must not become a monument to our own egos, wills and preferences, but is tested against the waters of wider traditions and opinions, a partnership between us and the wider Body of Christ.

The basic language of Trinitarian love is simple. For the Hebrews the Ruarch/Spirit was a sort of creative word, creative command of the Creator God, by which God’s actions became reality in the world. The Christians finessed this understanding. Their experience of God in the life and teachings – and the absolute identification of the two – in Jesus was so powerful, and so inexpressibly ratified in the Resurrection, that they began to speak of him, too, as Lord and God.

So far so good. Yet physically as we know from the ascension story, he had, after being physically present to them for a while, disappeared, dissipated perhaps, from the followers’ sight. Disappeared, yet he remained powerfully, tangibly present in their experience of worship, fellowship, and exploration of the scriptures. And the language of Trinitarian faith was slowly, and I would argue irreversibly born.

The believers’ response was love language.

Well … Paul’s language is not only the language of love, but sometimes the language of correction, for he was a prophet and a pastor. A people that claim to love and serve God but whose lives do not emanate Christlike love are skating on thin ice. Paul highlights a few failings of what we might call ersatz or faux Christ-followers.

One or two are of a sexual nature, though his emphasis is more on exploitation and predation. Most are references to behaviours that tear at and tear down the body of Christ: factionalism, back-stabbing, a catena of behaviours that he calls the works of the flesh (and that his contemporary James attributes to undisciplined tongues).

The temptation of course is always to point the finger at others: the responsibility is to note the three fingers pointing back at ourselves. Paul will always contrast flesh and spirit: the latter is the result of, the state of, the joy and love of immersion in the Triune God. Words to describe that God of Jesus Christ so far evade human description that in Paul’s time words had not even been invented to express the love God emanates, imparts, exudes. But where that love is, the Spirit of the Triune God is at work indeed.

So we are left with the (at this stage) rather obtuse Nicodemus, who John depicts stumbling his way through the gospel story, through three appearances. Nicodemus staggers awkwardly from incomprehension to adoration, to the moment when he eventually has no words but only ointment to pour on the body of the friend he first visited secretly by night.

While occasionally we might and do need Paul’s strong words of correction we could do worse than Nicodemus, whose love for Jesus overcomes intellectual confusion, and who eventually sacrifices so much to anoint the body. But Nicodemus was pouring out his love for Jesus between Good Friday and Easter, weighed down not only by his fifty kilo or so load of spices, but by grief and perhaps a sense of failure.

We live in a different time. Blessed says John are those who believe but have not seen.

We are called to something else: we are called to join the post-resurrection witnesses of Jesus, pouring out our hearts to the sometimes stern, never wussy or chummy Creator. We are called to experience not the dead Jesus, but the risen Jesus, made known to us by the eternal Spirit. Jesus, made known to us despite being beyond our sight or understanding. Jesus, made known to us in scripture and in fellowship and in the elements of bread and wine. Jesus made known to us in love and hope and justice, peace and reconciliation (“Peace to those who are far off, peace to those who are near”). Jesus, made known to us in the one another that we are called to love within the Body of Christ.

We are called to be a trinitarian, resurrection people, dancing beyond the capabilities of the mind, dancing where the God who flings universes across the heavens meets us in a Palestinian peasant, meets us in suffering, leads us through death to life, and embraces us and those we love, eternally.

Alleluia, Amen.

dancing in the footsteps

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION (13^th April) 2018

READINGS:

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

Ps 1

1 John 5:9-13

John 17:6-19

The wonderfully poetic author John, perhaps the most lyrical of the New Testament authors, struggles valiantly to convey the experience of the first post-Easter followers of Jesus. Like falling in love it was beyond words. Like the pinnacles of human experience, it was beyond words.

What is there when we reach beyond words? Some biblical interpreters argue that the rot set in for Christianity the moment the first New Testament story teller, Mark, set the experiences to papyrus. I have had friends challenge me to conduct an entire liturgy with no words, only the silence and the gestures and the love that are the deepest entrails of God.

Yet after all, as John made clear, the One we call the Christ and Lord and Son is Word, is Wisdom and Word and words must be a big part of all we’ve got, to tell of him, to keep the Jesus-rumour alive.

So: words, I’m afraid. And while John the evangelist is using his words to tell a story, we might also see it as a love-story, a love poem perhaps. His demand of us as listeners to the story is that we participate in that love, in divine love. His prayer is that we participate in ways that only the Spirit, the “Comforter” whose empowerment we celebrate next week, makes possible. God is love, is John’s equation, and love is God, and where one is the other is. We can glimpse that divine love humanised only in the life of Jesus, John indicates, and the life of Jesus is made known to us only in the inadequacies of words. Those words, though, are enflamed by the Spirit, so we can feel their impact, timelessly. And – I think I am being true to John here – as we feel that impact and allow our lives to be saturated by it, so we become a people of love, and through us others may know the love that is Divine, death-conquering, life resurrecting eternal love.

As we move into the great liturgical stanza of Ascension, Pentecost and Trinity words fail. Explanations fall short. You are now entering, as Janet Frame put it in another context, the human heart. But this is the human heart enflamed by divine love. This is far beyond the mere rational, as love language often is. Sometimes we can find at least partially rational explanations for it, but the God who dances beyond the universes will not be limited to our small imaginations, and John knows it. “They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” These words are designed to have us dance in the footsteps of the Creating, Redeeming, Holy-making God. Those who reduce biblical witness to a “how to” manual miss the point. Love, in John’s view of the world, is the result of saturation in the presence of God.

There are measurements of our lovingness. Are we as a faith community hospitable to the stranger? I think this faith community is exemplary in this regard. Are we hospitable to God’s future, ushering in new ways of experiencing and expressing the experience of God? We may have to make changes in the months ahead. Are we hospitable to one another, seeing the presence and the signs, the artistry and the God-gifts in those we meet in and through our interactions in the church community? Do we look for the giftings in one another, affirm them, rejoice in them?

In Gethsemane Jesus prays not for uniformity, where we all clone each other, but unity, whereby we rejoice in our differences, allow ourselves to be edified by the gifts of those we rub shoulders with, allow ourselves some giving of our own gifts knowing they will be enhanced by God’s spirit, utilised by God’s people as we seek together to proclaim the Risen Christ. Our job, as Thomas Merton put it, is to love others without stopping to enquire whether they are worthy. John would argue we are enabled in this task only by the presence of the Spirit-Comforter, of whom more next week.

TLBWY

and five thousand believed?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN

FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (22^nd April) 2018

READINGS:

Acts 4.5-12

Psalm 23

1 John 3.16-24

John 10.11-18

The document we know as Acts reminds me of film makers whose first movie was great (or at least okay), but the second and subsequent additions were at best lamentable. I have not been, you may surmise, a fan of Acts. One scholar I have heard redeems the issue by suggesting that Acts was written before Luke’s gospel-account, and that therefore the sequence does improve after all. Perhaps that’s just academic chicanery!

But what do we do with slices of the scriptures we don’t like? Unlike the compilers of the New Zealand Prayer Book I believe we stand judge over the scriptures of our faith at great peril. The scriptures depict darkness and light, and if we deny there is darkness alongside the light in our lives then we deceive only ourselves.

Yes, there are occasional glitches in the text that we must approach with caution, but even a would-be cynic like me should not dare to chuck out or at best avoid whole texts because they don’t suit our comprehension of events. I find Luke’s emphasis on exponential growth in the Christian community to be both disheartening and dubious; though the early Christian faith undoubtedly did spread rapidly I doubt there were many if any occasions on which thousands of people were converted at a single Petrine sermon.

Luke’s story is psychologically and even architecturally improbable. Yet I can’t jettison Luke because I don’t like his second volume. I must wrestle with the text: what is going on as he depicts the phenomenal growth of Christianity across the Empire? This passage I think gives us a clue.

Moments before our scene today, five thousand individuals have converted to Christianity after hearing one of Peter’s sermons. Disheartened? Moi? Beyond the rather situation-specific crusades of Billy Graham few of us called to preach have or will ever see such impact from our words. Are we then failures, and are our churches failures (I’m not letting you off the hook) because we don’t see such growth?

I think Luke is being more subtle than that. In this Acts passage we do not see a mass conversion, though the message Peter delivers, the central, universe-altering miracle of the resurrection, is central to both speeches, the one we heard and the one before it. Peter’s second audience, though, is cynical. Peter and John have cast gauntlets at the feet of corrupt, decaying religious and civic leadership. To one audience, hungry for meaning in life, they have spoken of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Easter message. The spiritually hungry populace has absorbed their authenticity, opened their hearts and been transformed by the proclamation.

But the second preachment falls on hearts of stone. Corrupted by power and self-interest the audience seek only to plot and destroy the Jesus movement and its message. Truth is suppressed, as it always will be by evil leaders. Democracy, The Washington Post warns us, dies in darkness. So too does hope and meaning to existence. Luke, sometimes more subtle than I give him credit for, makes it clear that very fact that the cynics do not succeed is authentication of the gospel. As John puts it elsewhere, darkness does not overcome.

The word of resurrection hope, with all its ramifications of reconciling love and justice, will not be suppressed. It will not be suppressed by my petty cynicism about the Book of Acts. It will not be suppressed who by those whose desire to make God manageable leads them to preach a meaningless, resurrectionless faux-gospel. It will not even be suppressed by the evil of leaders who call truth “fake news” and attempt to silence truth-speakers. In the end, as Paul puts it elsewhere, every knee shall bow before the truth of Jesus.

But what do we make of Peter’s proclamation “no other name”? For much of the history of Christianity this has been turned into a loveless, bleak message of “turn or burn.” Believers whose loved ones fail to embrace their faith are ... (if we believe in an afterlife at all, and we should, for reasons I will explore another time) ... are left with the horror of contemplating something called “eternity” divorced from those to whom they have given love and life. Is the good news of Jesus Christ good news if its reach is incomplete?

I think not. I do not believe that is the implication of Peter’s “no other name.” I do believe that the event of Jesus Christ is unique. I do believe that alone in all of history the life of Jesus of Nazareth is God’s redeeming intervention into human darkness. I do not believe that its impact depends solely on our response, nor that the response of those who do not get the Jesus thing, or who find meaning on other paths, is the gateway to some sort of eternal condemnation. Some of you may have seen the video of the Pope assuring a young boy that his recently deceased atheist father has a very special place in the heaven of God.

So what for us? Certainly, I must accept that thousands will not embrace the faith I try to proclaim each time I preach. We may all have to accept that the institutional church that we love and rightly struggle to keep afloat, may sooner or later collapse into the morass of meaninglessness, even corruption, that it sometimes seems to represent. That may or may not be the judgement of God, and all we can seek to be is authentic in our lives, individually and collectively. Not perfect – or I for one would long have been condemned. But as we seek to follow and proclaim the Good Shepherd we are warmed by the integrity of his voice: my sheep – probably the Dorpas or Barbados that I write of elsewhere[1] – recognize, connect with my voice, says Jesus. Even where our institution fails to have integrity, and it often does, we must search our own lives and strive to find integrity there. Sometimes we will fail, and there again and again we will meet the beckoning Good Shepherd. But we must strive, and strive together, to be the authentic bearers of good news that Luke depicts Peter and John as being.

---

[1] From my notes on the readings: “The Good Shepherd was no purveyor of candy floss. The Palestinian shepherd fought brutal heat, brutal cold, and brutal predators to preserve his flock. His sheep weren’t pussy cats, either. this Shepherd was more a rampaging Jonah Lomu than the sweet- lamby-cuddler of Romantic religious art. For those in the know, the Good Shepherd was more of a Maremma sheepdog than our toga-wearing friend in the St Peter’s [Queenstown] west window, and the sheep were more Dorper or even Barbados than docile Perendale or Romney.”

mad crazy invisible love

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (8^th April) 2018

READINGS:

Acts 4:32-35

Psalm 133

1 John 1.2 – 2.2

John 20.19-31

When the early Christians began to spread out into the Roman community they were noticed primarily for two criteria: ridiculous beliefs and powerful love. The near exponential growth of the Christian sect in the decades that followed was a result of these strange bedfellows. Over two millennia the cutting edge of these ingredients has been brutally blunted.

Can we reclaim them? The author of the several documents we name “John” pleads with us to do so. So does Paul. And every iota of the teaching and life of Jesus embodied love.

Embodied, too the ridiculous nature of Christian doctrine: the God man, the celestial human, a God who in ancient thought could never suffer becomes the suffering, executed God on a Cross. Paul called it offensive and foolish. Paul spent his life and death preaching it anyway: Jesus, Christ, God, human, crucified, risen.

For the writer we call John love was the essence. In the passage from Luke’s Acts we get a glimpse of love so powerful that followers of Christ had ceased to own goods individually, pooling resources as an expectant, communal body, eagerly awaiting the return of their Lord.

John was less interested in questions of property: he was adamant that every aspect of a Christ-follower’s life should radiate self-sacrificial love. God is love. Where love is, there is God. Where love is not, there God is not. The equation was simple. The psalmist had seen it centuries before: “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!” Because there, the poem suggests, dwells the fullness of God’s blessing.

We can for now leave the questions of ridiculous beliefs. Suffice it to say that the ridicule was not directed as it is in some quarters today at Christians’ belief in an “invisible friend.” The ancients took seriously the proximity of humanity to nature, the latter centuries later defined as “red in tooth and claw.”

The ancients had little need to explain away the complexities of spirit and a spiritual world, or even the existence of an external Creator or Creative Force. Humans did not consider themselves so superior that they could giggle at the gods or God, for spiritual handiwork was evident at every twist and turn. As our intellects destroy our earth we might pause and wonder if we shouldn’t listen to the ancients and their readiness to believe.

Nor was the ridiculousness of early Christian faith the sort of embarrassing spectacle that comes out of militant modern forms of Christianity. The first, exponentially effective, transformative Christians were not the sort that see God as a belligerent punitive being, one who militantly hates minorities, militantly hates non-whites, militantly hates those who adopt beliefs or lifestyles different to those claimed to be lived by the haters. I allude of course to the sick parodies of Christianity that confuse God with any one nation, but most obviously the United States. I allude to forms of Christianity that turn blind eyes to the obvious darkness and predation embodied in the person of an elected leader.

The God of the Cross does not choose predatory opportunists to be a chosen leader. But God may well allow blind humans to live, for a season, with the results of foolish choices. The world is doing that, I fear.

But I partially digress. The ridiculous ways in which God chose to reveal the sacred, the divine redeeming love that is God’s nature were chosen precisely because we must never intellectualize our way to God. God’s love reaches to the darkest darknesses, and there gives birth to light in which there is no darkness at all. Ridiculous, but I’ve not come across a better explanation. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

In response, we are called to be a people of love. Generous love. Forgiving love. Redeeming love. Love that overlooks otherness and overlooks foibles and overlooks human fallibility. Love that does not demand that all are perfect – or I would have been cactus long ago, but so might you. Love that embraces the other, celebrates the foible, acknowledges the fallible. Love that says “come as you are.” Love that says “come” to the lonely and the broken, but also accepts that some of the loneliest and most broken do not at first sight appear to be so, and says “come” even so. Love that says “come” to the refugee and the abused and the dependent even when those states of existence are dressed up in Pierre Cardin and Louis Vuitton. But love, too, which says “come” to those arrive without access to a shower or fine words or polished intellects. Love that just says “come … stay, worship our mad maniacal communal God of love, ridiculously revealed on an ancient cross and rumoured in transformed lives of a resurrection-believing people.”