surrender the shibboleths

SERMON PREACHED

at the CHURCH of St JOHN, WAIKOUAITI

Te POUHERE SUNDAY / OS 12 (23^rd June) 2019

READINGS:

Isaiah 42:10-20

Psalm 42

2 Corinthians 5:14-19

John 15: 9-17

For a few minutes we are going to place ourselves into the sandals of the ancient Hebrew people. We should do this more often: there are many ways in which their suffering prefigures and encapsulates every people’s life-experience. For now let’s just accept that they too are sufferers of the human condition, that condition under which we stumble in the 21^st Century, nearly three thousand years after them.

Frustrated perhaps, grief-stricken perhaps, the great poet-prophet Isaiah – actually the second of at least two Isaiahs – sought to bring comfort to his troubled people. He did so with a suitcase full of bewildering images, the best known of which is probably that of the suffering servant.

Isaiah himself was probably referring to the Hebrew people themselves as the suffering servant of God. Their task, as he understood it, was to reveal the one Creator God to God’s world. But centuries later it became the turn of the early Christians to make sense of the new realities they in turn were experiencing. They too were seeing the collapse of old certainties and safeties. They suffered the corrupt practices of the deteriorating, oppressive Roman Empire. They saw the certainties of the Hebrews’ faith in YHWH crumbling around them … Roman gods were sexier and easier to follow. They had encountered the rumours of the Resurrection of Jesus, and subsequently experienced the powerful sense of his unseen presence in their fellowship and worship. All this was confusing enough. Yet more even confusingly, some of them who had chosen to follow the new Resurrection faith were hated for their troubles, as they trusted in and followed their crucified Messiah.

So some of the Christians’ new teachers turned for inspiration to the powerful yet enigmatic images coined by Isaiah. They did not have access to the writings we call the New Testament. They had the Hebrew Scriptures, and they had new lenses, new life experiences through which to read them. They turned to the shadowy figure we know as The Suffering Servant. It is, as is so often in the case in our scriptures and tradition, a strange description of a Saviour, a Messiah, or indeed of God, though nearly 2000 years have perhaps hardened our hearts to the strangeness. They have done so at great peril to our witness.

That this Suffering Servant messiah sacrifices himself to bring hope, redemption to the world ceases to surprise us. We’ve heard it all before. Yet to most in the ancient world this was an obscenity. Gods might be a bit odd, even naughty at times, and might kilwas an obscenity. Gods might be a bit ofdd. ril to our witness.

a Messiah, or indeed of Gol each other from time to time, but on the whole they tried to keep from getting themselves killed, and certainly didn’t put themselves deliberately on the scaffold of human vulnerability. This servant does, and so had the Carpenter of Nazareth that the early Christians were now calling divine. Strange.

Isaiah’s strange message to the Hebrews had been that they were called to suffer, to be sacrificed, to be like a mother opening her life to the physical pain of child-birth and the emotional pain of child-rearing. This is no place for a god to belong, no way for salvation to be brought about. Isaiah was almost certainly pilloried for his claims: the Christians were.

The first Christians held tenaciously to their strange belief that Isaiah’s message had something to say about Jesus Christ and about the role of the Church, the body of Christ in the post-resurrection world. The earliest known reference to Christians depicts us as idiotic believers in a crucified donkey. Perhaps in the 21^st Century we need to learn how to look idiotic again?

Because we try not to; but when we try not to we forget that the great apostle Paul was adamant that he came like a fool to the people he met. We have cosied up for too long to the institutions of powerful societies, have come too easily to believe that the institutions themselves are the gospel, and that the madness of a suffering servant or a crucified God has nothing to do with us.

As we watch Western society crumbling around us we are frightened, like drowning sailors afraid to reach past the logs that we are clinging to, in order to grasp hands reached out to us, the hands of a suffering servant reaching out to us from the place where despair meets hope.

That place of encounter is the Good Friday Tomb of Jesus It is the place a god should not be, the place that we find it easier to make tame or dismiss altogether. We do so because it doesn’t really fit our view of the universe in a post-Enlightenment, rational world. In rural regions we are powerfully aware of the departure of shops and banks and post offices and police stations and churches. Where we still have them we cling to them tenaciously as if they were the good news of Jesus Christ. They are not, and neither will we be bearers of Good News as we cling to them.

We cannot sing the new song that Isaiah commands us to sing, cannot sing anything meaningful in a world whose societies are crumbling, certainties dissolving, ice caps melting, skies overheating, if we cling to false gods. The God of the Suffering Servant, the God opposed to false securities, is tearing them down. Outsiders like Dennis Glover and Maurice Shadbolt saw the safety nets crumbling a long time ago, but they found no resurrected Jesus to speak into the vacuum that was forming. We must do so, for that is our task.

To do so we are called to surrender the false gods, the shibboleths. That always hurts, but the false securities are deafening all of us to the new song that Isaiah sang and the early Christians sang and Christians are still singing in genuine place of persecution (or places of genuine persecution). These are painful, uncertain times, but we are called to bear Christlight in them. Only then will we really sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, give glory to the Lord, proclaim God’s praise in places of raw vulnerability and pain, or experience the glory of the God who transforms death into life.

We are called to be a resurrection people. We are called to hope against all that is rational, for our loved ones,  for our loved institutions, for our loved but abused planet; our hope will become real when it is focussed on the heart of the gospel, on the death and resurrection of Jesus, and we surrender our attachments to the peripherals. These are difficult times, but the one who passes through suffering and death into resurrection and the mysteries of eternity is the one who wants to lead us on.

May God help us to surrender ourselves, all that we are and all that we shall become, in the service of the Servant who turns suffering into joy, and death into life.

AMEN

cyclonic spirituality

she sings like a cyclone

SERMON PREACHED

at the CATHEDRAL CHURCH of St PAUL, DUNEDIN

PENTECOST (9^th June) 2019

READINGS:

Acts 2: 1-21

Psalm 104: 24-35b

Romans 8: 14-17

John 14: 8: 1-27

As we engage in one of the three great feasts of the liturgical year, the Christian calendar, we are confronted with one of the great conundrums of Christian conversation. How do we speak of this “third Person of the Trinity,” this shadowy figure that one parishioner of mine years ago insisted on calling “Spook.” We’ve been mainly tongue-tied for 2000 years, so why bother? Next week I hope someone in this sermon-spot might apply the same question to the beyond words (or numbers) conversation about the Trinity. But for now: who is this Third Person?

Why bother? Aren’t there better ways to get bums on seats in our crumbling buildings? For that matter, aren’t we better off simply repeating the mantra “spiritual, not religious,” beloved in some circles? Some say so. I believe they’re wrong. I believe they dance on the graves of those prepared to live and die, sometimes prematurely, for these teachings.

So let us pause, for a few minutes, acknowledge that we dwell in a mystery. A few minutes, while inadequate, are necessary to open hardened, sclerotic hearts to mysteries greater than mere human being. Who is this Third Person of Pentecost?

One problem is that in the scriptures of our faith alone there are two main strands of conversation about this strange elusive Person of the Godhead. She (and we’ll touch on gender soon) is the one who inhabits the second verse of our scriptures: the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind (ruarch) from God swept over the face of the waters. Trinitarian theologians affirm that she inhabits even the first verse, albeit gently: in the beginning, when God created. God: triune, community God. She, Pentecostal Spirit, inhabits, too, the bewildering twenty-sixth verse of that first chapter of Genesis; Let us make humankind in our own image.  There God in the plural is at one level a mere grammatical construct, what scholars in their precision call “a plural of deliberation in the cohortative”!  Good with words, those academics are! But the words in the playful truths of interpretation are more than mere grammar. They open doors to admire the mysteries of a community of God, God who is Three-in-One and one-in-three, eternal paradox.

This glimpse of the Spirit is no plaything. Call me a wuss but as a poor air-traveller I was painfully aware of the winds of God as our airbus bobbed like a cork-in-a-maelstrom in the skies from around Palmerston until we touched own at our airport two nights ago. I remember only too well as a home-alone seven-year-old cowering from the winds and falling trees at my Kapiti family home, as the Wahine storm thrashed its fatal way through the lower North and upper South Islands. I remember a storm cell in northern New South Wales flinging heavy doors at head-height through my back garden, flinging cricket-sized hail stones through the windows of our rectory as my daughter and I sought protection in the centre of the house.

The wind of God is not a gentle zephyr, not a plaything, but potentially a life-shattering cyclone. Yet, if our hearts are not too hardened, she is also the force that draws winds from our own souls as we witness Aoraki Mt. Cook for the first time, or the MacKenzie country, or watch a desert moonrise or one of the startling dawns that Anne and I are privileged to watch from our Careys Bay home, splitting the horizon into reds and yellows and purples and blues above the Otago Harbourmouth.

But the first Christians? They found a new identity of the Spirit. John told of the moment in which Jesus breathed New Creation into the nostrils of the frightened, puzzled disciples after the Resurrection. We might call that moment the first hongi of faith, re-creating God’s hongi of the man built from clay in the second creation story of Genesis. Luke tells a different story. He tells of disciples cowering in fear in an upper room, cowering as I once was as those windows shattered around my daughter and me. But the disciples were suddenly empowered as the risen Lord appeared, fiercely tangible, and breathed New Life, New Creation into their troubled souls, transforming them from chickens to eagles, willing to soar (not to mention die) in their new found strength. Languages shattered at the Tower of Babel are unified once more, discord made into harmony, and the language of resurrection life remains a single language despite our petty divisions and hatreds within the body of Christ.

So who was this, who is this Spirit who transformed those frightened few? She is the ruarch of creation, terrifying in potential. But she is also the only means by which Christ and all that he made known of the heart of God is released from an upper room in Palestine and made present to you and me and all who have opened our hearts to Jesus. Her job-description, if I can put it that way, incorporates both the wind that blows through a thousand paddocks of James K. Baxter’s memorable phrase, capable of smashing creation and its lives. She is also the one who can empower us to participate in, be transformed by, be agents of all that Jesus was and is. All aroha-love, aroha-compassion, all prophetic justice-seeking speech and action (for in the Spirit speech and action are one) on behalf of the poor and the broken people and species of earth, all resurrection hope as we hold in our hands the hands of the dying or hold in our silences the grief and despair of the bereaved, all these are the gifts of the Spirit who makes the risen Jesus present and known throughout space and time.

There is so much more I could say in this love-song to the Third Person. She is the Spirit of wild-empowerment, who moves in many ancient religions. She is hinted at in the Māori mythology of Tāne, Tāne-mahuta, Tāne-nui-a-Rangi, who created First Person from the blood and breath of his own being. She is present in myriad versions of the Rainbow Dreaming of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island mythologies, and even in the brutal mythology of Gilgamesh. She is often female, and that need not stop her from making known to us the risen Christ.

She is no plaything. Yet she is the gift of the Risen Christ, making him known and present to us as we stumble in his Way. She is not to be trivialised as “Spook,” though centuries of our disinterested, confused language about her enhanced that caricature. She is not the entertainment of the charismatic movement, though in the corridors of our stuffy churches we perhaps needed that manifestation, for a season, of her healing power.

She is the “enemy of apathy” of John Bell and Graham Maule’s hymn, who mothers creation, hovers on the chaos of the world’s first day, opens to us the scriptures and reveals Jesus to us in them, and empowers us to be his hands and feet and body and blood in the world. She is God with us and in us, for as long as we permit her to be so, and sometimes, thank God, when we do not.

Let us continue to sing her praise in word and silence and music, and pray that we may through all our lives and beyond be transformed by her gentle but irresistible presence.

Lord, help me!

finding light

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY WINTON

THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER (5^th May) 2019

READINGS:

Acts 9:1-6

Psalm 30

Revelation 5:11-14

John 21:1-19

Let me begin again, as I often do even amongst near-strangers, by acknowledging that I have the privileged insight of life as a convert Christian. I’m not a particularly spectacular convert, nor was I a particularly spectacular pre-Conversion degenerate. I have however,  despite a few wobbles either side of coming to faith, more or less soldiered on with an unspectacular life, but one that shifted from one faith-view to another. Although I did as a teenager I humbly considered it my duty to eradicate religion in the world (single-handedly, I presume!), I did not perform citizens arrests and drag Christians off to Jerusalem. 

Nevertheless, unspectacular though my life may be, I have the privilege of living a life invaded by the Christ I once did not know. In many Anglican circles we are  a wee bit too embarrassed to speak of such experiences.

So I was not, am not St Paul by any means, so let’s talk about him instead of me.  While there are four different accounts of Paul’s conversion, there can be little doubt that his was a life that was invaded by a new light, by new purpose. His life was invaded by a divine presence that he almost immediately began to name in terms of lordship, divinity, to name the light as God and to surrender to him. There can be few more powerful experiences. Suddenly the sense of being exposed yet loved, of stumbling yet being lifted up (these metaphors that struggle to explain the joy of conversion are so inadequate), suddenly this experience was his.

To some extent it is a once-only experience, like realizing we are in love and loved in return. Yet it is not to be considered the be all and end all. For some, for many in western culture, even today, there is no such experience but rather an on-going awareness of the Christ who walks alongside. The Lukan story of the Emmaus Road, rather than his story of the Damascus Road, attempts to convey that. But as it happens our liturgies, if we take them seriously, present the experience back to us again and again. “Merciful God, we have sinned against you …” “God have (God has) mercy on you.” And our response should be to stand and song in praise … “Glory to God.” We are transformed, redeemed, all those words that attempt to express the experience of the risen Christ who invades our lives, daily, weekly, for ever, even beyond our grave.

Conversion is re-programming. In films like The Matrix it is near instantaneous, but for most of us it is a lifetime process or more. Slowly, inexorably, we should but too often don’t allow ourselves to be transformed into the likeness of Christ. The not altogether wonderful impression the Christian community has given the world around it suggests we have flawed, inhibited, even thwarted the process, yet we are called over and over again to open ourselves to what many biblical writers refer in terms of light, the radiating scrutiny of God. We are called to be as it were reconstituted by God. Our eucharistic liturgies reenact the transition from sinner to redeemed missioner, Christbearer, but it is up to us to reposition that re-enactment so it becomes true for us, so that our lives are invaded again and again by the joy and the transformative love of the risen Christ. “Re-clothe us,” says the hymnist, “in our rightful mind.”

The conversion the biblical writers tell of is no superficial moment, but a lifelong process of cleansing and reconstituting, It is also, as the author of Revelation makes clear in that apocalyptic vision, a lifelong and often difficult process of trusting against all odds. Luther’s hymn, “a safe strong-hold is our God,” (look it up if you don’t know it!) and the much-derided “To Be a Pilgrim” with its hobgoblins and foul fiends, strive to express the presence of the risen Christ with us in times of duress. The former in particular was written in apocalyptic times not unlike our own, yet the authors can speak of the need to cling to the risen, transforming, doubt-conquering Christ in such times of trial.

These are the same times of trial from which we implore deliverance each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer: Lord, save us. These are the same words, the same implication of the words that a convert cries out: “Lord, help me!” They are the same words we heard in the  psalm. They are not an excuse by which to do nothing about the world around us in all its trials, perhaps even death-throes, but a heartfelt request that we can be invaded by the risen, death conquering, hope breathing Easter Christ who transforms us and helps us transform the world, the communities in which we live, the globe on which we dwell.

Lord, help us. The on-going conversion process is one of trusting God not only in the complacent times – the decades, for example that followed World War Two – but in times of great uncertainty, of Trumpianism, of racial and religious hatreds, of economic and ecological collapse. Christ is with us, and these are times to be increasingly aware, however strange, surreal, unreal that affirmation seems to be. Let us together rejoice and be renewed in and by the risen Easter Christ who will lead us beyond the hobgoblins and foul fiends of every apocalyptic age, even the last when it comes.

wrong place, wrong god

wrong place, wrong god

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S NORTH OAMARU

and St ALBAN’S KUROW

SIXTH SUNDAY OF LENT (14^th April) 2019

READINGS:

Isaiah 50: 4-9a

Psalm 31: 9-16

Philippians 2: 5-11

Luke 19: 28-40

I apologise, firstly that I have not followed the expected routine, and my usual practice, of reading the entire passion on this day. As a visitor I feel a little awkward changing the plans your vicar had made, especially as they match my own normal practice, but in the interests of road safety and the quick bestowal of a few minimalist thoughts from a stranger not immersed in your daily life I felt it would be better to dwell momentarily on one of the central enigmas of our western church year.

I say western, incidentally because, as it was pointed out at a liturgy I attended at your cathedral recently, the Orthodox churches spend less time pretending that we don’t expect the resurrection during our Lenten observances. They permit themselves enough joy to continue pouring out the hallelujahs and rejoicing in resurrection hope throughout the season. I suspect we can, just a little, too. But today I might just put the brakes on anyway, and be thoroughly “western” as we journey through what in my childhood was one of the great feasts of the year, the feast of Palm Sunday, or as I prefer to call it these days, the observance of Getting It Wrong.

Let me explain. There was a scholar a few decades back who theorized that for Luke, as he told the story of Jesus, the whole of history narrowed itself down to an hourglass neck, like a fulcrum on which all history balances, but more emphatically the tiny narrow waist, the centre of time, before which dwelt God’s old dealings with humanity and creation, after which God’s new ways of dealing with humanity and all creation, and in which all cosmic history is given meaning. He (Conzelmann) is probably a bit passe now, but I think he might be right.

The hour glass waist moment in time was the death and resurrection of Jesus. In that moment of surrender all of God’s dealing with humanity and creation is given meaning. Death is conquered, life is as it were “re-blessed,” hope springs eternal. Don’t let us worry about the mechanics, because like the mechanics of a black hole but far more so, they are far, far beyond our comprehension. In the moment of death and resurrection of Jesus all cosmic history is given meaning.

And we celebrate Palm Sunday, but Palm Sunday is before Good Friday and Easter, before meaning is revealed, before creation is redeemed. We celebrate a triumphant entry of a king into God’s holy city. But – though it’s the right bloke, it’s the wrong time and wrong methodology. God in Christ has not yet entered humanity’s and creation’s deepest hellholes. God has not redeemed us, and we’re still awaiting a political, military revolution. We’re looking for a terribly human, politico-historical solution to hellishness and sadness and darkness and death, and that is not God’s solution.

We will not join the Orthodox today. Let’s leave it … though we know that in a week’s time we will be surprised by joy, but let’s leave it with us looking in the wrong place for hope. Jesus will stride on through the wrong place, and head to the right place, the deepest hells of abandonment and death, Syria, post-cyclone Mozambique, or the mosques of our Christchurch neighbours. We will fall away. Yet he will beckon us back even so, and at last and forever the hallelujahs will burst forth. 

Welcome to the journey of Holy Week.

hoping against appearances

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH

of St PAUL THE APOSTLE

DUNEDIN

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (7^th April) 2019

READINGS:

Isaiah 43: 16-21

Psalm 126

Philippians 3:4b-14

John 12:1-8

These are strange times in which to have the role of interpreting, breaking open and making meaning of ancient words of scripture. Thirty-plus years ago when I set out on this journey it was, perhaps, all a little theoretical.

We were aware, yes, that since July 16, 1945 humanity had, for the first time, the ability to destroy itself and its planet, but on the whole things looked fairly hunky dory. The Berlin Wall would soon crumble, though perhaps we weren’t expecting it yet. We had more or less survived a Reagan presidency and its obsession with Star Wars. There were concerns about apocalyptic issues, and Tiananmen Square was a brutal obscenity on our consciousness, but apocalyptic’s complex messages and convoluted assurances seemed on the whole rather abstract.

So if in 1989 I was preaching from these poignant words of Isaiah I suspect the message was reasonably theoretical. Isaiah’s original audience had been through brutal exile, and he whispered surprisingly unpopular words of comfort and promised return to prosperity and peace. Like collective Stockholm Syndrome subjects the Israelites weren’t particularly interested. Israel and its old fashioned god was so 150 years ago, why wouldn’t Isaiah just shut up and go away?

And that was about it, really. All a bit abstract. “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.” I mean why would you? Babylonian exile was a bit of a doddle, collective amnesia a fine state to enjoy. Pass another piña colada, please, and slip Milli Vanilli or the B-52s on the stereo.  

Yet since then, if I can borrow TS Eliot’s phrase again, so many certainties have crumbled. As a person called to preach I have to self-assess: am I merely slipping into the potential apocalyptic idiocies of old age? Am I merely succumbing to the over-abundance of information of the ether-highway in an age of Trumpianism and a growing white supremacist profile? Timothy McVeigh aside, was white supremacy even a Thing in 1989. His act of evil was still six years into the future then anyway. To speak of the God of Israel and of the Cross was so comfortable then.

There were tiny hints of darkness even then as we strode into a brave new world, hints that all was not well in the Garden of Eden. Rachel Carson of course had issued her prophetic howl years earlier, but there were one or two other more recent troublesome signs. The Middle East would not go away, Terry Waite was a captive, and yes, Tiananmen Square. But they weren’t even a glitch in the matrix – just temporary if tragic parentheses in the human and cosmic progress we were experiencing. God was in God’s heaven and all was well, and it was comfortable enough to believe. Just like it was fairly cruisy in exile in the sixth century before the Common Era, too. If we were inclined to believe in God and stuff, it was neither too costly nor too totally weird.

But “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Since then it is as if the former western world, the Global North, has been driven into exile. Slowly the accumulated symptoms of ecological, economic and cultural collapse have gained exponentially in accumulated weight. Eden is burning, and few of us have the ability to navigate the resultant blanket of smog. Is there hope for our mokopuna, not to mention countless of our neighbouring species, on a planet whose death appears far more imminent than we could have dreamed in our wildest nightmares thirty years ago? “It was so easy then,” sang Carly Simon, but it’s the older lyric of John Lennon that seems more apropos today: “Christ you know it ain’t easy,” and if Lennon meant it as a curse, I mean it as a stuttered prayer.  Yet the gospels suggest Christ does know how hard it can be, because Christ is the face of the unseen God who walked the harshest road of all.

Yet this is when faith’s traction bites the road. This is exactly when we stand on the shoulders of the Isaiahs who tried to speak of God over two hundred years of catastrophic upheaval. [For those being confirmed today this is indeed a time in which the faith in which you are confirmed and in which we are challenged to stand with you becomes most pertinent. The assurance of things hoped for against all odds]. It is in these circumstances that the call to hold to the promises of an unseen god become most difficult to hold to and yet – and yet that is the challenge to which we are called, to which we make claim in our worship. This is when we are called to live out that choristers’ prayer, that “what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives.” 

Those who heard the words of the original Isaiahs may never have seen the outcome and fulfilment of their daring promises, their words spoken of hope against all odds. We may not either: the cataclysms of mother earth and of decaying civilizations may outlast our brief existences. The time scale of scripture, and even more so the timescale of divinity, is beyond our comprehension. Nevertheless, as the apostle Paul bravely affirmed against all odds, we are called to “strain … forward to what lies ahead.” What lies ahead, the doctrines of Christianity tell us, are the futures of God: “O let me see thy footprints and in them plant my own.” It is not easy to believe this stuff – not as easy as it was thirty years ago, straining forward to what lies ahead, though probably easier than it will be thirty years hence. It is not easy, but like the grieving, sensual, aching Mary we are called to pour out our love in costly, priceless hope. It is to against-all-odds hope that we are called, and it is in against-all-odds hope that our risen Christ will lead us, stumbling, on, murmuring the psalmist’s prayer:

May those who sow in tears
    reap with shouts of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
    bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
    carrying their sheaves.

grace and yearning

SERMON PREACHED AT St MICHAEL’S, ANDERSON’S BAY

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT (31^st March) 2019

READINGS:

1 Samuel 1: 20-28

Psalm 127: 1-4

Colossians 3:12-17

John 19: 25-27

Mothering Sunday has never been a part of my own tradition. This is not because I don’t think mothers are a good idea. Most of us have had one, after all! Rather it is but because I am not sure what it is doing in the middle of Lent. Professor Google is always a useful friend, and reports that the origins of this strange incursion into the middle of the Lenten journey was an English invention, based on the premise that the peasants' daughters were likely, by mid-adolescence, to have been forced away from home in the search for an income, and that on this mid-point of Lent they might be allowed home, in an act of grace by their employers, to visit their mothers.

Tradition has it that the daughters gathered flowers on their journey back to their home, usually just a few miles away. At this juncture we can recognize some marriage between the British break in lent and a later American celebration, Mother’s Day (the apostrophe belongs before the s, in recognition that most of us have only one mother).  Mother’s Day was originally invented by a Methodist woman named Anna Jarvis. She would soon regret the commercial event that grew like a cuckoo chick in the nest of her mourning for a much-loved and inspirational mother. Asher expression of love and admiration for her mother was seized on my Hallmark Cards and other profiteering ventures she sought to rescind the day she had invented, but the capitalist genie was out of the bottle, and the expression of love by a grieving daughter.

There are two ingredients we should hold over from these two stories; the first is grace, the permission granted to the young women to return to their village for one Sunday. The second is yearning, the yearning grief that Anna Jarvis was seeking to redress in honouring her mother. Grace and yearning.

For the young women of the sixteenth century the return to the home village was a break in privations. They returned for this one day to mother (if she was still alive), and to the mother church in the which the young woman’s faith had been nurtured as a child.

So our readings hang very loose to the great themes of Lent and of God’s willing redemption of humankind. Yet there are hints; we find the dying Jesus recognising a mother’s incalculable grief as she observes her son’s agony. No parent wishes to outlive their beloved children, and I know as I speak these words that some of you will have borne that anguish. There are no words. Jesus, in his own agony, recognises, connects with, redeems the emotional suffering of his mother: “woman, here is your son.” Of course an adopted son will not wholly replace the real son, yet Jesus reveals the compassion, the “suffering with” which is what compassion means, the compassionate being of God. 

Here is revealed the truth that Timothy Rees would express in one of his finest hymns, “when human hearts are breaking under sorrow's iron rod, then they find that selfsame aching deep within the heart of God.” The heart of God aches … and there the lights of resurrection hope begin to form, if not yet to flicker.

But Jesus has always revealed the ability of the divine heart – which it is, as it were, his “job” to reveal – to ache, to yearn. He has stood over his beloved city Jerusalem and cried out “How I would gather you together as a mother hen gathers her chickens, but you would not.” He has been moved again and again to the depths of his being by the plight of the poor and the outcast. He could not but feel his mother’s anguish, even though his own: “woman” (a word or greater endearment than it sounds to us) “behold your son.”

Jesus has always yearned. This should be no surprise. The Creator God who Jesus calls “Abba” has also always yearned. The story of the Hebrew people and their God has been one long tale of unbalanced yearning. Again and again the prophets tell of God, yearning that the Hebrews will return to right relationship with their Creator. Over and again God weeps for the chosen people. God weeps for all humanity, for whom the chosen people are called to be a sign. And while the human yearning for God is dulled from the moment of our expulsion from Eden, it remains: we seek as a race to find meaning, seek hope, seek authentication of our existence in so many ways. Generally though we are loathe to turn to the God who beckons us, and seek meaning or sometimes just anaesthesia elsewhere, instead.

The founder of the American commercial Mother’s Day never wanted it to be commercial. She wanted it to express her yearning for an inspirational mother who was no longer with her. This deepest, most visceral human emotion was at the heart of the day that became obliterated by commerce. In a strange coincidence the origins of the English quasi-liturgical event of Mothering Sunday expressed that other great truth, of grace. Unmerited access to hope, to love, to God, to God’s resurrection promise for us and for those we love. And so, despite my bigotry, in tis strange mishmash festival there is a twofold message of God. The God who yearns for us, and who creates in us the ability to yearn for God, and for all who we love, also provides this unmerited hope: God is here, God waits for us again and again to open ourselves up to divine love. God embraces those who we have loved and see no longer. God invites us to relationship, and God invites us to be a sign to others in this world that such hope, such relationship with the Source of All Meaning, the Creator, is possible.

The author of Colossians sets out a blueprint as to how we might be a sign to ourselves and to those around us of the possibilities inherent in relationship with Jesus. Enabled, empowered by the Spirit we can be a sign, that the yearning and the grace can collide, leading us into the heart of God:

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.  And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

stumbling in a place of judgement

SERMON PREACHED AT St ANDREW’S, OBAN

(RAKIURA / STEWART ISLAND)

THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT (24^th March) 2019

READINGS:

Exodus 3:1-15

Psalm 63:1-8

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Luke 13:-1-9

Coming to you as a stranger – which I know is frequently the option here – makes it difficult to break open the word with authenticity amongst you. The art of proclamation, preaching, is a transaction between parties immersed and conjoined in the Spirit of God. Biblical authors, collators, society and its changes, your story, my story, all engage. The points in common are common enough, but the disconnections can be brutal. Forgive me if in my foreignness (relatively so, of course: I haven’t arrived from Mars, though some have often thought so when I’ve preached!) our lines in the stave do not harmonize. At the very least may our souls sing from the same source and the same destiny, sing in the same embrace of God.

I say this particularly because the readings all take us to stern places today, journeying as we are through Lent. But I say it too because here in our nation we have been taken to stern places, places from which we can only stutter in deep lament. We will never forget, though we may repress, the moment when we heard of the shootings in Christchurch ten days ago. For most of us the pain will pass, because it’s reasonably abstract. Less abstract perhaps than shootings in the USA, cyclones in southern Africa and Arnhemland and Arizona, but abstract nevertheless. For us personally new days have dawned without palpable grief. But they have dawned with a niggling sense that something has changed. Watersheds do that. Our 9/11 has changed us, just as the world’s 9/11 changed us.

Our readings – from long ago yet from today, too – take us to the heart of God of judgement. While often in the church we have trivialised this stern, what I in my writings call (after C. S. Lewis) “Aslam is not a tame lion” aspect of God, we do so at peril. Christchurch was not in a simple obscene sense God’s judgement, any more than Good Friday was the bitter and bloody act of a vitriolic God. But Christchurch was the outcome of our silent self-satisfaction and our acquiescence with evil, the joint evils of xenophobia and complacency. A brutal reminder that we are as tolerant a society as we are a clean green society, and that the veneer is very thin.

Good Friday, towards which we are journeying through Lent, was likewise a brutal reminder, the brutal reminder, that humanity will always crucify love and justice and compassion (and if we doubt that, we might recall news statements today that there are serious death threats directed at our prime minister right now).

That the Christchurch killings took place is an event from which we are brought to crisis, to judgement (the words are the same), and are a call to ameliorative, restorative action. Christchurch was our moment to cry out in a dry and weary land where there is no water (metaphorically speaking), our striking down in the wilderness, and our cutting down in the orchard.

We the Church are not in a position to wave big sticks. In the Church (in all its forms) we have often done so, or finger-pointed at the community around us. Our permission to do that, if it ever existed, has long been exposed as a fraud. Our sorry histories of exploitation and abuse are something we are called deeply to repent. While that is partially a story for a different time it is not entirely so.

We cannot wave a big stick at society, but we can demonstrate the integrity of the gospel we are called to proclaim. We can be speaking and acting out of conspicuous love, justice and compassion, and doing so in the face of the growing narratives of hatred towards our Muslim brothers and sisters.

Speaking up for the persecuted includes not only our Muslim whanau but all our persecuted minority brothers and sisters. We might, as we speak in Lent about conspicuous justice, love and compassion, and about the judgement of God, note that bikies have been more visible in their actions of love and support for our friends than many Christian groups. We might at this time lament those pseudo-Christian leaders (and I will name Brian Tamaki) who have used this time to worsen the pain of our Muslim friends.

We surrender a theology of God’s judgement, running through our readings today, at great peril. But other themes run through these scriptures, and we ignore them, too, at peril. As Paul writes about the history of the people of God, and of the failings of our predecessors in faith (and there is nothing new under the sun), and about God’s judgement, he writes as always with a deep sense of the God who draws near to and enters the human predicament in Christ.

We surrender the doctrine of Incarnation, too, at great peril. I am not here critiquing our Muslim, Jewish and other neighbours, for whom this doctrine is incomprehensible, perhaps silly or even offensive. I critique those who espouse faith in Christ while dismantling the meaning of his existence. For us God is not merely out there at the edge of the universe or universes, but has drawn near to and indeed entered human experience in the Incarnation and in Pentecost’s coming of the Spirit. 

For Paul, God in Christ enters into our own stumbling and failure, as well as our doubts and uncertainties. God in Christ enters and transforms our failures into the Easter hope. We speak, in a time of ecological and sociological and economic crisis (judgement) not with empty platitudes but with individual and collective experience of lives transformed by God. This is the God who in Christ by the Spirit enters us and converts us and our world from darkness to light, from despair to hope. We must speak by our actions and attitudes, and only then perhaps by words, but we speak (or should) nevertheless. We remain silent, frozen in the headlights, at great peril. We ignore the central traditional resurrection faith of our forebears at great peril for without it we have nothing to say.

The readings take^` us to a place of judgement, crisis. They take us to a God who in Christ draws near and even within us.

They do not leave us in the shadow of Good Friday. In the apocalyptic language often favoured by biblical characters, yes, the axe is at the foot of the vine or the tree. Yet that, we know, is not the final word. We must not forget, or again do so at great peril, a third great theme of our scriptures, that of grace and its spiritual bed-fellow, resurrection-hope. 

Am I good enough to bear witness to the love and compassion of God? I don’t have to be an extraordinary sinner (though I do quite badly well) to know that the answer is no. I stumble, I fall. As the old confession wisely used to put it, I do the things I ought not to do and leave undone the things I ought to have done. I suspect we are all stumblers on the Way of the Cross: the reminder in the Stations of the Cross that some will observe on Good Friday, that Jesus stumbles, enters our stumbling on the journey to death and resurrection. That is a powerful sign of hope. For in the end, while we cannot, must not be complacent in the face of darknesses, we are nevertheless privileged to know the transforming energies of the eternal one who walks with us, leads us in God's warm footprints to eternal hope and life. We know the God who refuses any name beyond “I am,” but who beckons us always to the hope beyond our understanding and the eternities beyond our sight.

Amen.