textual slaughter and wild dogs

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

ORDINARY SUNDAY 16 (18^th July) 2021

 

Readings:

A crowd without a Maremma?

2 Samuel 7:1-14a     

Psalm 89:20-36

Ephesians 2:11-22                                        

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

 

The author of the gospel-telling we know as mark was a natural story-teller. But one of his techniques to keep his listeners interested was to sandwich scenes between parts of another scene, to sandwich stories so that at least in his plan they served to illustrate each other.  The problem is that every now and again, like here, the lectionary compilers commit a kind of literary divorce, separating the parts from one another and from meaning. So I was tempted to ignore the passage this week and turn to the epistle. Except this Epistle reading is one of the most excruciating in the entire New Testament. I was once preaching at a girls’ school in Melbourne and was asked what readings I wanted. Without looking at the lectionary I told them to use whatever was the epistle for that day. I was after all not preaching biblically that day. To this day I have nor want no idea what the poor girl-prefect made of her reading.

So here we are with separated snippets of Mark, swimming against the tide of the author’s wishes.

The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things …

 

When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat.  When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the market-places, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.

 

So let us dwell with just one passing moment in this slaughtered gospel passage. In fact, one passing word. As you may have noted from my notes in the pew sheet, it is usually translated “had compassion on,” but that’s a terribly sanitized, anglicanised translation of the Greek. Years ago, when I was a priest in Whanganui, I indicated that the Greek was less sanitary: that it meant “moved to the bowels.” A furious woman informed my that such a word as “bowels” was not to be used in church. I wondered sadly how sanitised and judgemental we had become when we felt that we knew better than the gospel writers how to speak of the experiences of Jesus.

The life of Jesus reveals to us the heart of God – all that we need to know of God. When Jesus saw the aimlessness of his society he was, quite simply, moved to the bowels. As I have said in my notes, he felt as we might when we see a child run out in front of a bus. Worse, he felt as we might if we overdosed on prune juice: we are not talking about nice and polite disturbances, here.

But we are talking about the response of Jesus, the response of God, to a crowd, a community, a society, a race, a species that is lost, as sheep without a shepherd. Jesus’ listeners knew well that sheep without shepherds were in his rural world in mortal danger. Like a bus bearing down on a child, like a wolf stalking out its lunch.

When I lived in outback Queensland the farmers who were battling on with merino wool production (against all odds) were facing the relentless problem of wild dogs – some would say dingoes – stalking their flocks. In a parable in itself, many farmers turned to dogs like Maremmas; dogs that, well, doggedly defend the flock on 60,000 acre farms where farmers had no hope of covering all those bases where predators lurked.

The crowds Jesus saw were, we might say, like a flock without a Maremma, a Pyrenean Mountan dog, an Akbash or an Anatolian Shepherd, out there at the mercy of every hungry passer-by, four-legged or two.

We live in strange times. Every generation has. I might even suggest that every generation has had its wolves stalking it, stalking us, stalking all humans, stalking all sheep who are wandering vulnerable and astray. There’s always been predators lurking. And Jesus was moved to the bowels. He withdrew with his apostles but the crowd were relentless. That same crowd – us – eventually executed him: the wolves outwitted the Maremma, it seemed. Or for those in the know, we might suggest that the White Witch outwitted Aslan.

But Mark will tell a different story, and after 2000 years we are allowed spoilers. Just when the witnesses, the sheep of Jesus were at their most broken resurrection light broke in. A young man whispered to some frightened women, saying, if we may paraphrase, “go tell it on the mountain.” And they didn’t at first, because they were frightened. But then the frightened women whispered to the frightened men, and the frightened men whispered to other frightened men and women, and the message that Jesus goes before us and a round us and is always with us even through darkness into light and through death into life leaked out and had the final word.

And it seems that word still can leak out, even amidst dwindling churches and circulating viruses and rising tides and plastic-soup oceans and waterways. And despite all odds we are called to be the singers of the song and even through us and our worship and our lives some may touch the hem of the garment of Jesus and find that light. And next week we will find that a meal and a message of hope can transform the lives of those who reach out to receive it even when they seem simply to walk away. But that’s next week because the lectionary compilers have committed textual slaughter.

The Lord be with you.

pesky Jesus

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

ORDINARY SUNDAY 14 (4^th July) 2021

 

Readings:

2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10           

Psalm 48

2 Corinthians 12:2:10

Mark 6:1-13

 

You may be interested to know that Rev’d Anne kindly suggested, as she proofread my notes for our pew sheets, that I really didn’t need to preach a sermon, but could simply leave you with those notes. It has attractions, not doubt for both you and me. But perhaps I had better go a little way further towards earning my keep.

But I will briefly expand those notes. In them I have suggested that we really have two quite distinct but interrelated vignettes, pithy little scenes than can stand quite happily alone, from Mark. The first gives a glimpse of the blood family, the whanau of Jesus, just not getting him. It’s not really surprising. He was a tricky customer, was not the easiest sibling or son to have alongside. We get a glimpse in Luke’s gospel account of the quite precocious child-Jesus hanging out in the temple, after Mary, Joseph, and by then no doubt some of the sisters and and brothers of Jesus have headed home.  No matter how sparse Luke’s telling of that scene is, we might well guess that the long trek back to Nazareth after Mary and Joseph collected the wayward eldest son was not the most jolly of journeys.

The prophets in whose line Jesus firmly stood were not easy to get one with. Those who challenge our lazy, nonchalant lifestyles and habits never are. I’d go further – even the God whose values the prophets proclaimed with their lives and words and deaths is not the easiest of fellow travellers. The benefits probably outweigh the drawbacks but there are certainly times I remember with nostalgia the nonchalant atheism of my youth. It was all so easy then – no God to bother my selfish chasing after dreams, no God to be judged by.

So Mark gives us a glimpse of the difficulties of growing up with Jesus. Underlying the glimpse – and we learn later that eventually the family of Jesus did get what he was on about and join the growing Jesus movement, after that first easter – but underlying the glimpse we have of family life we also have a group of people who feel the good news of Jesus should be neat, packaged, contained in a tidy envelope.

Jesus and his gospel will have none of that, and he bursts out. He bursts out, too from the tidy envelopes in which we try to package him today. The middle class envelopes, the Europeanised envelopes – even the Christian envelopes. The actions and values and living presence of Jesus exceeds our cautious boundaries.

But in the second scene Mark warns us of another dimension of the Jesus story. He sends us out. Most of us haven’t been sent to exotic places or to high profile roles in our community. Most of us have been called just to stumble along a more or less normal life. Yet we are still called to be Christ-bearers, to declare by the quality of our tolerance and compassion and love that ours are lives infiltrated by the one who enables tolerance and compassion and love and justice. You and I won’t have our names written in the neon lights of sainthood but are called, each day, and always by the help of God, to bear the love and the hope and so much more that is the hallmark of Jesus’ life, the hallmark of the heart of God.

So may it be – that we don’t restrain the possibilities of God, package God, restrict God, but rather that we open ourselves in prayer and worship and fellowship to the God who can touch lives even through our lives. That way the Christ in us will out, like glimpses of light in the darkness, or a spring flower beneath a winter hedgerow, and resurrection may still be rumoured in our worlds.

The Lord be with you.

Corinthians and rabbits

 

SERMON PREACHED at St BARNABAS’, WARRINGTON

ORDINARY SUNDAY 11 (13^th June) 2021

 

Readings:

 

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13

Psalm 20

2 Corinthians 5: 6-17

Mark 4:26-34

 

As the beautiful simplicity of Jesus’ mustard seed parable reverberates in our ears, I want immediately to befuddle you by diving into the complexity of Paul’s strident, complex arguments with the Corinthian Christians. As Jesus delivers beautiful rural imagery, I want to delve into the murky depths of Corinth, pretty much the sin city of New Testament times.

Go figure!

For I believe the Corinthian texts are a powerful twenty-first century message. Running throughout Paul’s argument with the Christians of Corinth is his determination to counter an “eat drink and be merry” selfishness that had become the hallmark, not only of the city, but of the city’s Christians. Worse: the Corinthian Christians were determined to out eat, out drink, and out merry their non-Christian counterparts. Ironically they were determined to do so because they believed that there encounter with Jesus gave them permission to do so. Look at us: we know Jesus, we are saved (whatever that means), we can do anything. Okaaaay.

Or, to put it in contemporaryish terms, me now for there may be no tomorrow. Aren’t we all just “looking for a little bit of hope these days,” as British rock band Bastille put it a couple of years back? Yet, like most of human history, their hope offered little more than a one-night stand, “I'll be your rabbit in the headlights / We'll never get to Heaven.” It was the same message that Jim Morrison roared out a generation earlier, “Hello, I love you won’t you tell me your name,” and the same desperate emptiness the Corinthian Christians were espousing: “I’m free, because freedom existence only in the moment.” T. S. Eliot put it another way, generations ago (but not as long ago as the Corinthians):

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”

 

Paul would have none of it, but Paul was never particularly popular in Corinth. He offered a Jesus-message of a new creation, but it was somewhat of a long way off. Be disciplined now, he said, because in a life and a world you cannot see you will have the glorious experience of bliss. It’s never been a message that sells well, and I admit there have been many times in my life that “eat drink and be merry for tomorrow you may die” seems far more attractive. Yet I suspect me now, or “I know what I want and I want it now,” while timeless mantras, are mantras related to greater despair, hopelessness, and the horrendous suicide rates that are a tragic underbelly to youth experience today.

It’s not easy. Paul suggests over and again that the experience he had and we can have of the risen Christ breaking into our lives, and reasserting that awe-experience from time to time, is what Paul called an “earnest” of the greatness, the unbelievableness that is to come. But pie in the sky is easily mocked. Paul was easily mocked. Yet we have glimpses, and those glimpses are, it is hoped, more powerful than “I'll be your rabbit in the headlights.” “Eye has not seen,” Paul had written earlier, also as it happens, but not coincidentally, to the Corinthians. “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived … God has prepared for those who love him.”

Jesus, the rural, wandering Messiah, had told of a mustard seed. Paul doesn’t often repeat Jesus sayings – he didn’t need to as they were well known in the new Christian circles in which Paul was moving.  But Jesus had spoken often in weird, wonderfully poetic parables, and he told one of mustard seed. It was simple enough. A tiny seed becomes a large and impenetrable bush, offering, in its shade, shelter and protection to many birds. Elsewhere we find Jesus suggesting that God rather likes birds, for not one sparrow falls without the Father knowing, and we can surmise, caring. But I digress.

The mustard seed parable operates on at least two levels. In the encounter with Jesus and the Kingdom of God that he enacts, proclaims, brings, we find the challenge of justice. Where there is no hope of justice there is no hope at all, even if, for some such as the black slaves of US history, that hope is beyond sight. There is also challenge: we are called to be bearers of that hope. We are called to bear, proclaim, usher in glimpses of that justice wherever we see its absence in the lives of people, species, our planet. If we don’t then our silence speaks volumes of hopelessness.

But we are called too to rumour mustard seeds of resurrection hope – hope that emptiness and despair, where rabbits in headlights are not the final word. But it’s not easy to fix our eyes on a more distant goal. The seed that we have, and are, and are challenged to cast to the winds is tiny and vulnerable. It’s not east to believe]e in the bush that may in the purposes of God emerge. Yet as individuals, and a parish, as a diocese, even as the western mainstream (traditional) church, that is what we are called to do – and called to believe that God can and will do the rest even when we cannot see it, may nor, probably will not live to see it. The seed will grow. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and while “assurance” is an optimistic word it is a word that we are challenged by: live as if. Live as if love. Live as if justice. Live as if judgement. Live as if love has the final word – even over death.

It is pie in the sky. Yet it is, as Paul and his Jesus alike proclaim, the pie we are called to live and in turn proclaim. It is the pie, the resurrection and justice pie we are called to be, with the help of God, as a first fruit of that further pie. We are called to be rumouring pie in a pie-less world. It is preferable, I think, to being your rabbit in the headlights. But our history reminds us that our pie is credible only if we rumour it with integrity and compassionate action in all we undertake.

May God help us so to do. Because it's a tough call. 

 

 The Lord be with you.

te pouhere - say what?

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, OAMARU NORTH

TE POUHERE SUNDAY (6^th June) 2021

 Readings:

 

There is a selection of readings appointed from which to choose for this day. I have not attempted to impose a current festival, however important, on to an ancient text except insofar as there is a reference to the unity for which Jesus prays in John 17.

 

In Anglican churches today, most of us will do an unusual thing even by our standards. For this is a Sunday on which we look at and give thanks for their constitution. I doubt it is a document we look at often – I use it during future-planning consultations when a parish is  navigating its route to new ministry –  so-called vacancy consultations, (we’ll have one here some time in the coming months!) but that is about all. Yet a consultation-scan need not be quite as dull as it sounds. Nor should it be, as it becomes in some place I have served,  a sort of exclusive Anglican self-congratulatory thing, aren’t we good? aren’t we good? That is simply a wrong-headed attitude.

But the Pouhere is a profound piece of faith-work. In its most recent incarnation, the 1992 constitution, the compilers were emphatic about addressing past wrongs, about setting to right colonial injustices, about generating a different future, one that breathed more of the Spirit of the compassionate Christ.

The constitutional revisers recognized, as the liturgical scholars have long emphasized, that facing, embracing a new future begins always by recognizing the wrongs of the past. There is much that has been wrong in the colonial past, not least the Anglican past, and liturgically we should begin by saying sorry. We might note in passing that when we make our confession at the beginning of the liturgy we are not specifically confessing the naughty things we’ve done, though they too many be caught up into our lament, but the whole sorry state of humanity. WE have sinned, and as the priestly people Jesus has made us, we confess, in the plural, the sins of the world we live in. Those sins include the sins that dwell deep in our past, but whose ramifications continue today: sins of exploitation, disrespect, disregard, to name just some that are hallmarks of colonial insensitivity. E te Ariki, kia aroha mai: Lord, we are sorry.

Traditionally in liturgy , when we have confessed our sins and the sins of our world, we hear the presiding priest speak the words that God would and does say to all who truly repent. “you are forgiven, be at peace” – and stand up, now, in the divine presence. Our task, then, us to burst out in praise, spoken or sung, glorifying the God who forgives.  We become the walking-, striding-for-God people, moving out into God’s world to declare divine love and forgiveness.

By pausing in our liturgical cycles to observe Te Pouhere Sunday we are reminding ourselves of our imperfections – and of the ways in which God can breathe new hope and life into us as individuals and as the Body of Christ. The word “pouhere” is used to refer to the constitution, but its origin is not in legalese. Its origin is the post to which different waka are tied as journeyers come together to korero and mahi, to speak and work as one. Before I came down south from Hawke’s Bay I belonged to a wonderful  hahi, Te Pou Herenga Waka O Te Whakapono, the anchor or hitching pole of the waka of faith. The name was a reminder of that one post, the faith in Jesus that anchors the different journeys of being human, and even the different journeys of being a Christ-bearer.

The Constitution of the our Church establishes three equal but differing strands, Tikanga Māori, Tikanga Pacifica and Tikanga Pākehā. These strands have different backstories, different whakapapa, yet each of these strands leads back to the same encounter with Christ. Sadly, the three strands experience vastly different resources. That flawed nature of our present state of being is something we must address – precisely one reason why we must be a sorry-saying people. “If a brother or a sister has wronged you,” says Jesus,  and goes on to address questions or restoration. Effectively tikanga Pākehā is reminded by tee Pouhere that we have done wrong, as our fiscally weaker sisters and brothers enjoyed smaller slices of the pie that God had given the Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.

It was a painful reminder, and it isn’t over yet. I was at a recent meeting at which Tikanga Māori Archbishop Don Tamihere laid down some blistering challenges to the assembled Tikanga Pākehā educators and leaders, challenges about equality and equity. Not for the first time I had to take a long hard look at my assumptions, and swallow discretely. The three Tikanga Pouhere or Constitution is one attempt to answer the prayer of Jesus for his Church: Father may they all be one, in resources, opportunities, and gifts, as we are one. We’re a long way from perfection, but perhaps we are beginning to navigate by the right truths, to build on the right foundation.

The confession that we use in liturgy is a lament. Laments are as ancient as the winds, and they need to be ancient, for exploitation and division are at the heart of the human condition. It is that human condition that we are challenged to say “aroha mai,” I am sorry, for, each time we engage in the Christian rites of Communion. I personally may not have used or abused my sisters and brothers directly, but I have participated in structures that have done so. Or perhaps I have personally, anyway?

Peace, Albert Einstein warned us, is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice. What he actually said was this: “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” The Global Peace index has found New Zealand, alongside Iceland, Portugal, Austria and Denmark, to be the most peaceful countries on earth. But we are not Nirvana yet, and must strive always for improvement.

The concepts undergirding the New Zealand Anglican Constitution, te Pouhere, are the longing for the three ethnic strands of The Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand and the South Pacific to work together in a just sharing of knowledge, insight, material resources and opportunities.

In so many ways that hope is far from fulfilled. It has never been and is not yet terribly equal: compare the number of Tikanga Pākehā stipendiary clergy with the Tikanga Māori numbers. Assess the value of Tikanga Pākehā’s properties—especially buildings—and compare that with Tikanga Māori. And that's before we even consider the assets and opportunities of Tikanga Pacifica – or take into account disparities in personal income, life expectancy, and myriad other indicators.

Te Pouhere Sunday in the modern tradition of contemporary New Zealand Anglicanism is a means to acknowledge, lament the flaws that divide people of faith across barriers of race. In practical terms Te Pouhere, the constitution that we remember and give thanks for today, ensures that Anglicans come together in a handful of contexts to hear one another – marae style we might say – and alter our paths and responses when our sisters and brothers point to injustice and unChristlikeness. It is perhaps honoured more in the breach than the observance, but it is at least a step towards reconciliation and cooperation.

The Lord be with you.

architect of love

 

SERMON PREACHED at St NICHOLAS’, WAVERLEY (OTAGO)

TRINITY SUNDAY (30^th May) 2021

 

Readings

Isaiah 6:1-8

Psalm 29

Romans 8:12-17

John 3: 1-17

 

 

It’s an old tale, possibly true, that clergy who were able  to do so loved to flick pass preachments on Trinity Sunday to their curates, placing the Doctrine of the Trinity in the too-hard basket for their own repertoire. To my embarrassment, when I looked back on my preaching in early years I found that I had often done something similar. In my case, as I am something that some of you will know as an extreme “P” on Myers Briggs co-ordinates, it was nothing to do with organising a systematic, annual flick-pass. I was never organised enough to arrange such a thing, never organised enough to realise that such and such a date on the rosters was Trinity Sunday. It wasn’t until Anne and I were working together in a New South Wales parish and I managed – accidentally – to be 1500 kilometres away visiting my children, that she pointed out that I had left the mysteries of the Holy Trinity to her. I was gutted: I am deeply committed to this central Christian doctrine, to the extent that I believe that it is, together with the Resurrection, the doctrine by which we stand or fall as an identifiable faith.

Which does not mean I think it’s a matter of turn or burn. I don’t think God is greatly in the business of burning anyone. But that is – to some extent – a different story. To some extent.

Still: it is a large jump from the mostly simple God-language of the New Testament to the complex and often dull recitation of the Nicene Creed. On the other hand, I don’t think the Holy Spirit of Pentecost went on holiday after the closure of the New Testament. That work of revealing the heart of God was not something from which she takes a Sabbatical. It is a large jump because the context was changing, and the experiential simplicity of the first Christians was needing greater explanation and explication if it were to survive in a complex and often cynical, crumbling Roman Empire. Or in the twenty-first century. And anyway, does recitation of the Creed have to be dull? Might it not be a song of joy, spoken or even sung? As an erstwhile atheist I have never found the words “I believe” to be dull. After 44 years of stumbling but rewarding faith they remain words that astound me. I believe. I believe.  We believe.

Still, I have too often worked with clergy and other church leaders whose approach is that the creed is to dismiss it as long, boring, and to declare that the Trinity has nothing to do with the gospel. Where do I go to howl in fury? Or is it to weep in sorrow?

Many years ago, when Anne as an undergraduate, she was friendly with a young Muslim student. They knew each other well – I suspect he had the hots for her – and one day he declared that he could accept Christianity if Christians would do away with the awkward teachings about the divinity of Jesus and the triunity of God. He had a point: what we had left could easily translate into a Muslim world view – or a Jehovah’s witness worldview, a Jewish worldview, a Muslim worldview or dare I say it a Masonic worldview (so much a part of our Anglican and other non-Roman Catholic backstories, as Bishop Nevill would remind us). But we would not have Christianity. Again: this is not to say God is in the business of burning those with other worldviews: “there are others, not of this flock,” says Jesus, and some early Christians dared to remind us that it is God’s will that all, not just some, who are to be embraced in the eternities of God.

Have you noticed – as I’m sure you have – that Nicodemus came to Jesus by night? Darkness is always significant in John’s telling of the Jesus story. But darkness is not the end of the Nicodemus story. Slowly as he sees the fullness of Jesus, the light shines in his darkness. Those words should be familiar, too. It is Nicodemus whose love for Jesus has him carrying 50 kilos of spices to anoint the dead man’s body. Nicodemus learns to love Jesus.

The language of the Trinity is language of love, too. Over years and decades the early Christians reflected and reflected more on the hold of love that Jesus had for them. More than that, they reflected too on the deep experience of his loving presence that they had continued to have since the strange events of resurrection and ascension. Paul spent about a decade and a half reflecting theologically and spiritually, trying to understand the Hebrew Scriptures in the light of his own powerful original and then on-going experience of the Risen Christ. Slowly the language and what we might wrongly call the mechanics of the Trinity began to form in his and other Christians’ minds. And always their reflections were driven not by some need to make equations of the head but by their deeper need to express the equations of the heart. The language of the Trinity is the language of love. The unseeable, unreachable Creator God, drawn near. The integrity of the human Jesus, in flesh and in subsequent Spirit, was so powerful that Jesus could be no less than God, no less than all we need to know of God. The presence of that long-ago human being not long ago but very, very now – very, very now despite his invisibility. That presence in sacraments, present in fellowship, present even in the words of Scripture. That presence, that both the gospel writer Luke and John Wesley would call “strangely warming,” was life-transforming and death transforming. and slowly the revelation of Triunity formed in the Christian mind, formed as a marriage of head and heart.

In the end does it matter? I believe it does. Again, it matters not as a ticket to ride to some eternal bliss, denied to those who don’t have it, some ticket to a train that carries only the righteous and the holy. Far from it.

The Trinity matters because God is revealed in the tender, patient Jesus who engages with Nicodemus until Nicodemus finally finds that light that shines in darkness. Jesus who heals a centurion’s dying daughter, who heals a man’s blindness, a crippled woman, a demoniac, a hungry crowd. Jesus who touches and transforms, showing justice and compassion consistent with his teachings. Jesus who, as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea and a handful of weeping women eventually discover, heals even the obscenities of death and bereavement.

The Creator is inseparably entwined with the man Jesus, made known in space and time by the Spirit … not a far-flung architect of the universe or master craftsman who remains at the outer edge of time, but a compassionate loving God who enters yo
ur life and death and my life and death and the life and death of those we love and care for and turns all into the glorious hope of the new heavens and the new earth, the hope of resurrection.

There is though one final catch. For we are called so to immerse ourselves in the community of the Trinity, in the love of and from Creator, Redeemer, Giver of life, that we too bring resurrection hope and justice and compassion to those around us, that we too become ambassadors of justice and compassion, a people of light that transcends all darkness, that we too become a Good News People in a world that is somewhat short of anything but un-good news.

 

The Lord be with you.

no rose garden

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, OAMARU NORTH

and St Alban’s, Kurow

PENTECOST SUNDAY (23^rd may) 2021

 

Readings

Acts 2:1-21                                        

Psalm 104:25-35, 36b

Romans 8:22-27

John 15: 26-27, 16:4b-15

 

There is a whole infinity of ways to describe this formative moment in early Christian history, this strange, beyond words moment – or perhaps period of moments – in which the church was suddenly empowered, liberated and commissioned to reach out through space and time. A glance at the readings shows Luke, John and Paul all giving different nuances, almost irreconcilably different narratives of the first Christian Pentecost.  As with the stories of the first Easter the writers are attempting to narrate that which is beyond narration. As with the stories of the first Easter the writers have to resonate with the experience of those who witnessed and experienced the events of which they tell.

Those who days or hours or some other period of time before had been broken and terrified were suddenly overwhelmed and empowered to continue the work of Jesus. More than that, they were empowered to experience an all but tangible sense of the presence of Jesus with them in the words they shared, the rites they performed, the scriptures they read. The invisible but overpowering presence of Jesus would be a part of the Christbearers’ story from that moment to the present, though we have manipulated and distorted it from one extreme to another from era to era.

In 1970 Lynn Anderson warmed (or anaesthetised!) the cockles of the heart of the western pop music world with a syrupy little song called “(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden.” It was a song largely typical of its time, pleasant enough, far from profound. Anderson re-released it last decade, and while her voice hadn’t changed the world probably had. Or hadn’t. But now I’ve promised you an ear worm! But there was and is still no rose garden. Anderson and God have much in common: neither promised a rose garden. 

Why? At times the Holy Spirit of Pentecost was turned into a vague and mostly forgotten theological abstraction. At other times she became a warm and fuzzy, and sometimes dangerously misleading spiritual high. Both were rose gardens. Complacency. Idiocy. Opposite extents of a pendulum swing.

The Holy Spirit that Luke, Paul and John wrestle in their writings was neither. She was the overpowering presence who had appeared throughout the history of the people, shocking and changing God’s people and God’s universe from the moment the universe exploded into existence – or thereabouts. She had danced over chaos in the milliseconds of creation, had danced in the hearts of God’s people, had enflamed and enraged the prophets as she cried out for justice and compassion towards the oppressed (Palestinian and Israeli).

Now she was empowering a new, parallel people of God with the immeasurable challenge and immeasurable gift of the timeless, dangerous, life-giving presence of the physically risen but now visually departed Christ. She was liberating irrepressible, death conquering, justice proclaiming Jesus throughout space and time, so even we can experience him, far away and long after. But she wasn’t and isn’t promising us a rose garden – nor a bed of petals. She is promising the dangerous, unsettling, yet resurrection bringing presence of Jesus.

If much Christian preaching seemed by and large to forget her from about 150 a.d. to the late second half of last century, that more recent era didn’t do her many favours either. As she swept through mainline churches, liberating us from our formulaic stuffiness, she was manipulated and transposed to become a plaything, entertainment, a rose garden. We domesticated the dangerous wind of God.

As Trinitarian theologians emphasize she had and has what we could describe as one main job description, at least insofar as she relates to God’s people this side of the grave. She makes the presence of Jesus and all he did and is available to his people. Many over the last twenty years have heard me tell the story of the parish I inherited where a group of parishioners believed the Spirit had set them free to crawl around barking for Jesus. I suggest that, no matter how much fun they had, how liberating the experience was, it was not the work of the Spirit of the Christ of the Cross. The work of the Spirit is to make Jesus and all he stands for present to us. Barking was not the forte of the Christ of the gospels.

Yet we are experiencing a powerful era of the Spirit. If, yes, the charismatic renewal of the ’60s and ’70s blew our cobwebs away, the Spirit of God is now blowing our false western gods away, our Baals and our demons of complacency and deception. We are being forced to chose now whom we will serve: a god of entertainment and good times, a rose garden god, or the justice proclaiming God of the Cross. The dubious god who gave us massive privilege and prestige in society, buildings and bank accounts, or the God who declared that the Christ can have no place to rest, will have no flash palace until, as another pneumatological hymn puts it, “his work on earth is done.”

Pentecost is the great feast of the church, inseparably linked to Easter. We are renewed, re-immersed in the challenging Christ the Cross. We are this day thrown back on the mercy and empowerment of the Risen Lord, who forgives, restores, and sends us out into the world to be love and justice for the unloved and the broken.

The Lord be with you.

Remain

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, OAMARU NORTH

FIFTH SUNDAY IN EASTER (2^nd April) 2021

 

Readings

Acts 8:26-40                                

Psalm 22: 25-31

1 John 4:7-21            

John 15: 1-8

 

It was a delight this week to engage in the on-line Gospel Conversations[1] that we are now running – an aid we hope to sermon preparation – and to find my fellow conversationalists there zoning in on two key themes from the seventh and final “I am” saying of Jesus. Perhaps we can mention in passing that seven was a number that often symbolised perfection in Hebrew discourse. Was John carefully suggesting, in his rendition of these sayings, that in them led the path to perfection in Christ? Or to put it a different way, was John saying that by adhering to the immersion, the saturation, the absorption in Christ that Jesus demands, lies the way to completion of our sanctification, our being made Christlike, our being made holy and acceptable to God? I suspect so, but let’s set that aside for a few moments.

Let us set aside, too. for a few moments the letter of John, written perhaps a few but not many years after his Jesus story, the Fourth Gospel. Though as we set it aside we may want to confirm what I suspect we all gleaned, that “love” is an over-arching theme on John’s mind. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

Though funnily enough – and by I suspect John’s careful design – that very verse from John’s later letter takes us to the heart of the Gospel-story John has written. There at the heart of the epistle reading is that other great verb that is at the heart of the “I am the Vine” teaching of Jesus. That verb, which we translate generally either as “abide” or “remain,” is a strong, an emphatic verb. “Remain” is a useful translation insofar as it picks up and echoes the Greek verb “mene,” and the related noun “menō.” The noun refers to a continuous, unfailing presence rather than a fleeting encounter. The verb contains far more of a sense of deliberate intentionality than the English “remain” does. So perhaps “the archaic “abide” is a better English word. To abide is no accident. Jesus is not suggesting we hang around him loosely, like an annoying sandfly, but that we utterly and intentionally attach ourselves to him, like a limpet. Or perhaps like a branch.

But as one of my co-conversationalists reminded us last week, (and if you are reading this online you will find the link below), there is an awful lot about pruning, too, in this Jesus saying. Sadly, as with so many scriptural passages, the Christian community has often turned this Jesus saying into an antagonistic weapon to be fired at perceived enemies of faith. Really it is a word to turn on ourselves, a word by which we, not anyone else, is scrutinized. So many gay friends for example of mine have heard in this verse nothing but accusation, the bitter distortion that says someone would, because of their sexuality, be dismissed to an eternal hell.  Those who peddle that distortion have missed the heart of the teaching themselves. They need to turn the pruning saw of God’s Spirit on the decaying branches of their own faith.

Though let us admit in context that Jesus is describing the pruning of branches from the vine, and the burning of those branches. It sounds an awful lot like the suggestion that there are those beyond the pale of faith, those whose celestial fate is somewhat fiery. There are occasional biblical verses – fewer than some imply – in which this is a core ingredient, that for there to be “the saved” there must be the “unsaved” (neither is a term I use). Yet my homework tells me that the scriptures that focus on this beyond-time fate are written in the face of persecution of the faithful. There they belong. Belief that white oppressors would receive their come-uppance in the future was a source of hope and strength to oppressed slaves in the Deep South of the United States. African-American Spirituals remind us that God hears the cries of the George Floyds, not of the Derek Chauvins. “Nobody knows the trouble I've seen / Nobody knows but Jesus,”[2]  indeed. We are reminded of that even if, the day after the Chauvin’s conviction, 16 year old Ma’Khia Bryant died in an altercation with police. More than 60 people, predominately black or Latino, have died at the hands of US police since Chauvin’s trial began.[3]

There is much to be pruned from us collectively, and much to be pruned from us individually. I’ll leave it to those who live and work with me to speak of all that stands as impediment to my integrity and lovability as a bearer of Christ. But I use the word “lovability” advisedly. For in the passage from John’s epistle we find words based on love appear no fewer than 29 times – getting on for 9% of the words used passage in English alone.[4] Johns’ writings of Jesus are overwhelmingly centred on love. Love is the fruit, though that word is Paul’s, not John’s, that stems from abiding on the Vine. Love is the fruit that is the hall mark of the community that abides in Christ. Love, said the early watchers of Christianity, was the hallmark of the Christian community, “See how Christians love each other” was the response that Tertullian imagined that pagans would have to the Christian community. Whether or not it was true is another matter. Today, sadly, I more often her the phrase used with bitter sarcasm.

Nevertheless love is the sap that flows through the vine to which Jesus commands us to intentionally attach ourselves. To attach ourselves and by discipline – by intentionality – remain attached. When John Lennon infamously wrote “Christ you know it ain’t easy” he probably wasn’t intending it as a prayer. Yet it can be our prayer. We are called to love, and when, we as humans and our neighbours as humans are not totally loveable, that is not an easy calling to uphold. Yet John’s gospel-telling provides the formula. I am the vine, says Jesus. Abide in me. If we work hard at allowing the Spirit, who is called the Comforter or paraclete in John’s gospel-account, to prune, to nip away the unproductive and fruitless aspects of our life and of our communal life, then we become bearers of fruit.

May it be our prayer that as we move into God’s future that we surrender ourselves to the vinedresser so that we can become closer to the sanctified, perfected Christ-bearers, become the fruit that points to, attracts to a living, loving Christ of hope. Can we, by disciplined faith-lives, become bearers of the Christ who transcends all the hopelessness that we see around us? Can we as we abide in him radiate a living, loving Christ of light who transcends all the darkness that we see around us and around our world? May that be our prayer.

 

The Lord be with you.

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=0oYKG-ALX0g&feature=emb_logo

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVKKRzemX_w

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/64-people-died-police-since-chauvin-trial-began-2021-4?op=1&r=US&IR=T – but these statistics from April 19^th are already long-dated.

[4] Marginally lower in the Greek, if you’re interested, albeit by a margin not statistically significant: 8.9% in English (NRSEC Version), 8.8% in Greek!