are we there yet?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

THIRTIETH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (October 23^rd) 2022

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Joel 2: 23-32

Psalm 65

2 Timothy 4: 6-8, 16-18

Luke 18: 9-14

 

 

As we scamper through the readings it would be negligent not to mention and grasp the wonderful hope-filled prophesy of Joel, who almost swims against the tide of the prophets. He dares to whisper the hope of a God who will love again, affirm again, set right again the recalcitrant people God had called to be his own.

In a world that is churning out an awful lot of darkness that might resemble the wrath of a grumpy God, handing humankind over to its own rather misguided devices, it’s encouraging to hear Joel’s words of hope. In Dante’s portrayal of Hell the words “abandon hope all ye who enter here” are emblazoned above the entrance. Joel reminds us that ours is a gospel of hope, not just in the cruisy times that we have enjoyed for much of our lives but in the heart-pulling times that have also always been a part of the human story.

Am I the only person who sometimes feels like giving up? 

Or, as Maria McKee put it, “God help me, am I the only one who ever felt this way?” And the answer is “no,” I'm not the only one.

And “yes,” God helps. 

I want to park Joel’s words of hope for a while, though. Because in the Jesus story we have what appears at first sight to be a clear contrast given to us by Luke, as Jesus observes and reflects on a spiritually arrogant Pharisee and a broken, guilt-ridden but penitent tax collector. It is a contrast between a religious hypocrite, perhaps, and a penitent sinner. In our minds we might picture the sequel to this vignette. Jesus welcomes the penitent to the fellowship of faith, while the Pharisee saunters away, ever so pleased with himself.

Where are we in this story? We have to be careful. Unless we wrongly believe the scriptures to have been dictated from on high into a Word document, perfect in every syllable, then we have a problem here. The Pharisees get bad press in the four gospel stories, but they were written some time after the events they depict. History suggests that the Pharisees were not all bad. Not even mostly bad. By the time the gospels were written Jews and Christians were trapped in mutual distrust – we might think of the distrust clergy are held in by much of society today, a distrust that grows deeper with every chilling revelation that emanates from Royal Commissions and their equivalent around the world.

Don’t get me wrong. Awful atrocities have been perpetrated by those in positions of power in Christian communities. So too have works of grace and love. We must remember that, just as there are Christians who hold the hands of the dying and whisper words of comfort in every age, so too the Pharisees were on the whole compassionate, God-serving believers. If you want to look for the bad guys of Jesus’ decade you might want to look at the Sadducees. They were the ones riding Harley Davidsons and flying Bombadiers or Gulfstreams in the name of corrupt, life-sapping religion.

It is particularly important that we remember this, because our Christian history has, with tragic implications, tended to write a false equation when we have said simply “Jews were and are corrupt,” and “aren’t we Christians good?” We forget the Jewishness of Jesus at great peril. We forget our own histories of distorted faith at great peril. Yet to say that, too, is not to invite slippage into the error of those Christians who believe the State of Israel can do no wrong,. We do not stand with those who danced on the graves of justice, moving at least on paper their embassies to Jerusalem. Such figures flew in the face of decency by trampling down the delicate sensitivities of all who find holiness in that troubled spot on earth, and did so to please a self-righteous religious right.

No political state should be confused with the people of God. Not Israel, not the USA, not Syria, not Burkina Faso. God disregards the lines we draw on maps. God regards the Image of God, bestowed on humans in creation, and marred each time we perpetrate hatred and injustice. 

And, fierce Anglican though I am, God disregards the subtle differences in the way we worship or the ways we protect the structures of our faith-based institutions. God, loathe though I am to admit it, is neither Israeli nor Anglican. God looks for integrity, high or low, left or right.

It is tempting to read this Jesus-scene and to judge and condemn the Pharisee. I am reminded again and again, and will be until I die, of the ecclesiastical gatekeeper who in a previous parish told a newcomer that they had come to the wrong place. Was it the colour of her skin, her tattoos, her youth, that made him decide she was not welcome? Did that gate-keeper later pray “thank God we do not let those people in here”?

Yet this Jesus-scene throws a still fiercer issue at me: are there times I do precisely that? Do we by our traditions turn away the too young, the too uneducated, the too non-European from our fellowship?

Am I the broken tax-collector or the Pharisee?

At best I suspect the answer is both. And surely our life-task is to ensure that all that is holier-than-thou, all that leads us to look down on others, is stripped from us, and that we become safe people who know our own need for divine grace, and simultaneously see the hand of God on the lives of all around us.

Perhaps it’s a long bow, but was that was what the prophet Joel was looking towards, too. To a time when his people would be a people of welcome and embrace, of justice and love, whose sign above the door written in actions not words, was “experience hope (and love, and welcome …) all ye who enter here.” Are we there yet?

steadfast love ... despite all

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

TWENTY SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (October 2^nd) 2022

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Lamentation 1: 1-6

Psalm 137

2 Timothy 1: 1-14

Luke 17: 5-10

 

As Luke approaches the end of Jesus’ resolute journey to Jerusalem and inevitable execution, he knits together a pot pourri of parables and other Jesus sayings whose connexion is not always clear to us 2000 years later. Between last week, when Anne was here, and this week, we skip some telling sentences that may just have some words of warning to our present world. Let’s dwell with them for a moment.

The missing sentences are about causing others to sin, and about forgiveness. Perhaps they're considered too hot to handle in the cosy world in which the lectionary was drawn up for 2022. But times have changed to such an extent that it is even harder to pretend that ours is a cruisy and cosy existence. For since February when President Putin put into action his demonic brain explosion we have found it even harder than before to live with our heads in the sand. That said, when we hear tell of Putin’s sending still more able bodied men to face and inflict terror and destruction in the east of Ukraine It may be worth remembering the Jesus saying that we were supposed to admit, a troubling saying that tells us that where we have caused sin, caused people to sin, judgement awaits around unexpected corners.

And in our cosy corner of the world it is easy to consider that this has no application to us. We are neither being sent nor sending others to a military frontline to inflict and experience devastation. But it is worth pausing for a moment. Not for the first, nor for the last time in our lifetimes we are hearing of the atrocities that we call war crimes. The perpetrators of such evil must not be allowed to escape judgement, human or of course we dare to believe, divine.

The Nuremberg trials taught us that simple compliance with evil is no excuse for upping the ante and carrying out evil orders. God alone knows how we would respond if we were inflamed by racial and nationalistic hatreds, but that's not the issue. The issue is that any who have perpetrated evil must face judgement, human or divine, human and divine. Wars since Nuremberg have taught us again and again the humans are capable of perpetrating atrocities beyond belief, and there can and must be no excuse for such sub-animal behaviour. But greater still is the judgement that rests on the shoulders of those whose ego and nationalistic pride sends others to carry out their dirty work. Racial hatred and jealousies are no excuse for perpetrating evil. But even since Nuremberg there has been reminder after reminder of the evil that can dwell in human souls. War crimes committed by Germans, Japanese, and perhaps we thought that was the end of the list, but since then by Rwandans, Serbians, and let us not forget British and American military, and now Russian soldiers and mercenaries, these reinforce the message that all human beings are capable of evil given the chance and the motivation. No claim that the devil made me do it, or my senior officers made me do it, or circumstances made it inevitable, will ever be an excuse in the eyes of divine or even credible human courts.

So much then for the Jesus sayings that were to be omitted this week. Perhaps it is some comfort that the primary perpetrators of evil, the likes of Pol Phot, Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić and now Vladimir Putin, face a judge more stern even than those of war tribunals, but the thought is for now small comfort to the widowed, the injured, or the dead of Ukraine.

Yet these are big pictures beyond our comprehension, and far away from us. The Jesus sayings in this section of Luke shift focus from judgement to forgiveness – the latter an inconceivably difficult concept in the face of such atrocity – and on to faith and duty. In the light of current international events these themes may after all be close to being too hot to handle. We are not qualified to speak of forgiveness and we may well be misconstrued if we speak of duty in a time of all too real military engagement (not we should add that there has never been in our lives a time without military engagement).

So where do these reflections leave us? We are on the whole unlikely to face the cataclysms being faced in Eastern Europe. This is one of those times when not individual passages but the whole sweep of scripture must be the key to facing God’s future. As it happens our reading from Lamentations reminds us that desolation and despair can all too readily fall on those who consider themselves to be the chosen of God, and may even be considered to be a tool of God’s wrath. To say this is to speak en masse, to speak collectively. God is not punishing the individuals on whom Putin’s obscene missiles fall any more than God is punishing the Hector’s dolphins swimming in their last desperate circles off the coasts of our country. In the beginning of the book we call Romans Paul makes it clear that God can hand us over to the implications of our existence and like the Three Musketeers we can find ourselves all for one and one for all. All have sinned, and to a large extent all wallow in the outcomes of human sin.

So where is there good news for us? I guess I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't believe it was there. The writers of scripture offer us no “beam me up Scotty” escape routes from the results of human sin. The witness of scripture however whispers something else. It whispers of the healing, redeeming hand of God as revealed in Christ, as made known by the Spirit reaching out to us. It whispers to us that the despair and desolation beamed into our homes by news services every day is not the final word. It whispers to us the news that the steadfast love of the Lord, as the author of Lamentation put it later in his poem, never ceases.

desperation rulz ok?

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

And St Martin’s, Duntroon

TWENTY FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (September 18^th) 2022

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 8: 18 – 9: 1

Psalm 79: 1-9

1 Timothy 2: 1-7

Luke 16: 1-13

 

Well here’s a thing. Every three years this little slice of Jesus-teaching comes up in our lectionary. It is one slice that can generate a few furrowed brows. It is, as my gospel conversationalists admitted during the week, a slice that has many of us choosing the Old Testament or epistle reading to preach on instead. Actually I looked back through my records and found that this Sunday three years ago I was preaching at All Saints’ Gladstone, and I did in fact preach on this difficult Jesus story. I spoke about the prickliness of some of the bearers of Christ truth, I talked about Greta Thunberg and mentioned Joan of Arc, Rosa Park, Malala Yousufzai, Rachel Carson, reminding myself and the parishioners there that God and God in Christ chooses unexpected people and unexpected stories to bear divine gospel truth.

Then I put that sermon away, because I have pledged never to preach sermons from the past. The world has changed too much, I have changed, and you are not All Saints’, Gladstone. But the point remains, God turns up in unexpected places and forms, and perhaps Greta Thunberg and Rachel Carson in particular are even more our prophets for today than they were three years ago.

But I won’t go back there, to that sermon. As Christ followers in the late first quarter of the 21st century we are – or should be – painfully aware not only of the vulnerability of our planet, but of the history of the church. For at least 1700 years our flawed human institution has revealed at least a tendency to produce from this Jesus moment not an icon of living for the benefits of others, but of learning simply from the corruption of the corrupt steward. That is not the takeaway of this passage. It is a sad thing if we allow ourselves to be better known for corruption and even predation than for the love that we can sing so glibly about when we sing that song “they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Will they? Our track record isn’t all that good.

So what do we have here? I suspect we have a glimpse of Jesus’ divine sense of humour. I suspect strangely we glimpse a hint of the value of social capital. Perhaps Jesus knew the saying of his philosophical forebear, Plato, when the ancient Greek observed that necessity is the mother of invention. The steward of this Jesus story is crippled by the sheer desperation of his circumstances. But he is smart enough to realise that he can reach out and touch the lives of others to their benefit. Who knows what were the complex motivations of a Greta Thunberg, a Joan of Arc, Rosa Park, Malala Yousufzai, Rachel Carson? Is there such a thing as pure altruism? Is Greta Thunberg somewhere in her angsty adolescent and ADHD driven worldview motivated by something other than pure altruism, pure love for her planet and its species? Who knows? Who knows if even a Rachel Carson wasn’t driven by something other than pure determination to save the planet that in the 1960s was slipping into the horrors of a silent spring brought about by the DDT that Carson spoke out against?

In the last ten days we have seen a powerful example of social capital, as much of the world, and not just the English speaking world or British Commonwealth, has mourned the death of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth of course hardly needed to purchase any social capital but we have seen that she gained it anyway by the sheer integrity of the 70 years in which she did her job.

Certainly I am not suggesting that Queen Elizabeth was corrupt. That was the specuiality of the steward of our Jesus story. I’m not sure that I want to allow the word corrupt to dwell in the same sentence as our former monarch’s name. I’ll let it rest there for illustration purposes only. But what we have seen in her life and death, and what we have seen in the lives and proclamations of those other prickly prophets that I mentioned in my All Saints’ Gladstone sermon three years ago, was the ability to bring benefit to the lives of others. It is, too, that that Jesus leads us in this strange and slightly comic parable. It is in the end an expansion of that other great parable that Luke alone records, the parable of the Good Samaritan. For in each of these stories a boundary is crossed, lives are touched, transformed even, and the love and resurrection hope that dwells in Jesus Christ is proclaimed.

Hopefully in a less corrupt way, and almost certainly in a less profound way than all the famous people I have mentioned, we too are called in our own small way to reach through the boundaries of silence and nonchalance and touch and warm the lives of those around us.

 

Thoughts Following the Death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

 

SERMON/REFLECTION GIVEN AT St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

TWENTY FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (September 21st) 2022

(Sunday following the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 4: 11-12, 22-28

Psalm 14

1 Timothy 1: 12-17

Luke 15: 1- 10

 

I am however ignoring the readings for this week

 

For all of us this is a week that will remain implanted in our memories. I operate usually with a hard and fast rule of not diverting attention from at least a sample of the lectionary readings on a Sunday. But flexibility too is a rule, and just occasionally current events overtake normality. Let me say too that I speak as a ridiculous combination of socialist and monarchist, which makes about as much sense as anything else that hall marks our strange dash from go to whoa.

“A life well lived.” “A lifelong promise kept.” “One of the most inspirational women this world will ever know.” These are the sorts of phrases that we have heard over and again, and justifiably so, these last 72 hours or so. Today we are conscious with citizens of all the countries that we call Common-wealth that a life has passed through ours, no matter how remotely, and that our lives have been the better for it.

For most of us in this place, whatever Queen Elizabeth represented, she alone has represented it. She has been the embodiment of dignity, devotion, and unwavering integrity, even through the darkest and shakiest days of her long reign.

As the Queen has become increasingly frail in the months since she farewelled the husband that she clearly loved we have known that this moment would inevitably come. If I may digress with a personal tale for a moment, some of you will know but I am the possessor of a 100 year old mother. I'm not sure that “possessor” is the technical term, but it will have to do. Throughout her life, since the dark days of World War Two, when the Princess Elizabeth, alongside her father, sought to inspire the confidence and hope of her people in Britain and to a less direct degree throughout the Commonwealth, my mother has looked to Elizabeth with admiration, even one might say “devotion.” The queen I should add was four years her junior, but there was no doubt that the older subject was inspired by the younger inspiration.

With some apprehension I checked on Friday morning to see if my mother, who I contact twice weekly by Zoom, was aware that her inspiration had died. “Well, of course,” said Mrs 100, “What do you expect? She was 96 you know.”

But that aside, and if we return at least loosely to the subject of gospel, if not our gospel or other readings for the day, one of the essential ingredients of the incarnation of God in Christ, God in Jesus the Christ, is the absolute correlation between the command, or what we call Word of God, and the outcome of that command, that Word. Be healed, says Jesus, and a person is healed. Be reconciled, and humanity is reconciled to its Creator.

In the events of the last few days, we have seen the closure of a life which has exemplified, I would dare to say almost to the maximum possible within those confines of being human but not divine, a life that has exemplified that same absolute integrity. If we dug beneath the surface of many of the words spoken these past three days or so they would point to Queen Elizabeth’s life as one spent to the greatest degree humanly possible in the embodiment of integrity.

I think one of the reasons we as a people are so deeply moved by the death of Queen Elizabeth is because, however much we knew it was coming, we were not ready for the closure of a life that so completely connected word and action, promise and implementation. We knew this end was coming, particularly since we saw a suddenly frail old woman, masked and in mourning clothes, lamenting the death of her eccentric but clearly beloved husband. In that moment not so very long ago we were reminded in a different way that royalty are deeply human.

To reflect in this way, and I might add so inadequately, on the life and death of Queen Elizabeth is not in any way to suggest that she was perfect. Were she to sit with us I’m sure she would be the first to assure us that she had many flaws. There was much criticism levelled at her at the time of the death of that noble-tragic figure, that human figure, the Princess of Wales. The Firm seemed for a while to be irreparably damaged, yet a phoenix rose from the ashes, and in the years since we have seen a new model of inspiration arise despite the flaws and the humanness of the principle actors.

Her Majesty would demur if she were to hear much of the praise that has been directed her way these past three days (though she may have approved the warm thoughts of Paddington Bear). I want to say now, in the context of liturgy, only that it seems to me she has thrown herself wilfully, constantly on the mercies of God, the strengthening, uplifting mercies of God, as she has sought to be a person living for others. She had some private life but woefully little, and she knew that would be the case from the moment at such a tender age when she promised to live in the service of her people.

In living out that promise she has modelled the central ingredients of faith, ensuring that she served God and her people not in her own strength but in the strength that God gave her. She sought to change with the changing world, if sometimes reluctantly, while retaining the essentials of her role. She threw herself again and again on the strength and the mercy of the God she knew was primarily her Master. She drew attention away from herself to the needs of her people, seeking always that help of God. Our lives are, thank God, the richer for it.

As it happens, I believe at least one part of her legacy is that our lives will be richer not only because she has in some strange way passed through them, but because she has formed and nurtured, sometimes in cauldrons of struggle, an heir in King Charles III who will continue to serve, to lead, and to inspire all who care to look his way.

So for now we simply give thanks for an inspirational life that is closed, a life of immeasurable integrity, that has passed through our lives, and for which our lives are all the richer. For now we can be deeply grateful for all the inspiration that Queen Elizabeth has been.

“May ‘flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’” said King Charles to his late mother in his first King’s Speech yesterday. To which I would add those beautiful words from the last rites, “May your portion this day be in peace, and your dwelling in the heavenly Jerusalem. Amen.”

on the road again

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

TWENTY SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August 28^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 18: 1-11

Psalm 139: 1-6, 13-18

Philemon 1-21

Luke 14: 25-33

 

 

As you may be aware, Luke constructed a large section of his Jesus story around a loose travelogue. It begins towards the end of Luke 9, at verse 51, and more or less ends with that pivotal scene when he weeps over the city that, as a Jew, he loves beyond words.

That aspect of Luke’s story is not unlike many of the heroic sagas and moral tales of Luke’s time, and Luke would have been thoroughly aware of that. Naturally he believed that his is a tale not of entertainment but of life and death – in we might say an eternal context. Jesus will weep over the city he loves, enter it, be crucified there, and then the story will not end.

Although there’s also a sense in which the story bifurcates, splits in two. The Acts narrative goes on to tell of the work of the spirit in taking Jesus and his gospel to the ends of the earth and perhaps of time. We could say there is a hidden parallel narrative – and that takes us into the story of the risen, ascended Christ, together with the expectation that he will in some way return again to wind up human and cosmic history, and declare all things finished and all things made new.

In that eternal framework, for want of a better phrase, Luke tells us that the upside down vision that Mary had, and of which she sang at the time of the Annunciation, is finally fulfilled. Mary told us that the poor will be exalted and the mighty torn down, and, to borrow the words of a much later woman, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. But I’m getting ahead of Luke’s story.

More of that another time, perhaps. But in the midst of Luke’s travelogue this week we have Jesus using powerful, provocative, almost offensive words to overthrow at least symbolically the very basis of almost every society. Love me. Hate all else.

Jesus is not giving us here, a basis for fratricide or matricide or any other cide or form of family murder. He is using hyperbole, dramatic exaggeration, forcefully to drive home his point.

Eleventh century saint, Anselm of Canterbury, devised an argument for the existence of God. That argument needn’t detain us here, Though it has kept philosophers entertained for centuries, as they either approve or disprove of it. But Anselm gave us the wonderful phrase “That than which no greater can be conceived.” Or, as I used to say to primary school religion classes, “the biggest thing in your life.” Fishing? Rugby? Money, sex, power, love, horses, sunsets? Your mother, your father? the list goes on endlessly and meaninglessly, as Jesus hints provocatively.

For in a vastly different context Jesus is using a similar tool to that of Anselm. What is the biggest most precious thing in our lives? Parents, children, loved ones? They should be pretty big factors in our lives. Shrink them, says Jesus. It's a big ask.

He goes on to speak of instruments of death, the cross. He puts following him into the context of love that is greater than life, greater than the love of life itself. It’s a very very intentional decision, the decision to follow Jesus.

When I left Darwin some years ago, I drove, not for the first time, across that great red continent. As I pulled out of our driveway onto the main highway south, my GPS announced “For 1375 kilometres go straight on.” At the end of 1375 kilometres the electronic voice announced “At the roundabout take the second exit.” After taking that exit in Alice Springs she announced, “For 1234 kilometres continue straight on.”

It had a feeling of resolution even in an age of air conditioned comfort, as I let out the clutch and headed south. Yet that is minuscule compared to the risky journey that Jesus of Nazareth calls us to. On the other hand, he does give us an eternity of help along the way.

on celestial nosh-ups

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

TWENTY SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August 28^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 2: 4-13

Psalm 81:10-16

Hebrews 13: 1-8, 15-16

Luke 14: 1, 7-14

 

It’s a strange thing about preaching, week after week, as I have the immeasurable privilege of doing, that too often we find ourselves accentuating the negative.

I think of the many sermons I have delivered or heard that emphasise the too little, the degree to which for example we fall short – that phrase from Paul’s letters to the Galatians – fall short of the glory, the expectations, the holiness of God.  And we do. But since that is a given – after all that is the meaning of “all” – let’s park it somewhere else.

Because every now and again if not in the underfelt to every scene of his teachings, we find Jesus simply saying, admittedly in first century terminology, “get over it.”

I mean, he means it in the nicest possible way. You may recall there is a saying that has become popular in recent years, when people are feeling sorry for themselves, “Go to Bunnings (or, least this be seen as free advertising, to Mitre 10), buy some timber, build a bridge, and get over it.”

But what if we find in the parable today not words of condemnation because we are arrogant and claim the best seats for ourselves, but, addressed to us, the instruction to move up higher, because we have wallowed for too long in the belief that we are miserable, unworthy, privileged and a shopping list of other adjectives that remind us that we are all together just what we probably know we are, not quite good enough to hang out with the likes of God.

In other words, what if we find that it is you and me, despite all our failings, to whom Jesus addresses those words, “Come, my friend, sit with me.” I suspect most of us would look over our shoulder to see who he’s really talking to. But there is no one there. The gentle beckoning of our host is to us. “Come, my friend, sit with me.”

Or, if I may return for a moment to my shopping expedition, what if we find that we have no need to go to the local hardware, because it is in fact Jesus who says, “Come on my friend, I’ve been to Bunnings or Mitre 10 – wherever – and bought some timber, built a bridge, and I’ve even carried you over it.”

Like the tenth leper who remembers to pop back and say “ta” to Jesus when he was cleansed with nine of his mates, it is probably a nice thing if we remember to say “ta” to God. But that’s what we’re doing. That’s Eucharist. A sophisticated way of saying, “Ta, God.” For lots. And what a privilege it is. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or fancy, or anything more than a genuine feeling of gratitude for giving us access to the creator of all that is, has been, will be, even though sometimes the journey has its wobbles. Sometimes bad ones. But: hope. 

Because Luke carefully situates this story between a scene in which a man with oedema is healed and a story in which the undeserving on the highways and byways are brought in from the streets to share a fancy nosh up in a flash house. Yes we might from time to time be reminded that we consuming more than our share of the earth’s resources, and be encouraged to do a little better, but that’s not the end of the story. 

In the first century world oedema or dropsy automatically symbolised greed. As it happens we see something similar in our own century with the sad prevalence of body shaming in various forms. But let’s not dwell on the negative. The first century had no better science then to believe that oedema was a sign of indulgence. Yet even then, Jesus, limiting himself to the worldview of his incarnation, simply reached out and transformed the man’s life. He had a habit of doing that, for the deserving and the undeserving alike. God is like that. The sun shines on the just and the unjust alike.

And in the parable that follows our passage we will find that a whole lot of not necessarily glamorous people are invited to the heavenly hoopla. It is kind of comforting, really.

The two banquet stories tell us that the undeserving, the not good enough, you and I have an invitation to sit at the banquet of Christ. It seems to me pretty good news, good enough to encourage me along the journey. Beyound comprehension, sure, but a lot of things are (build a bridge).

Our task is just to let it be, to say over and again, yes Lord, I believe. Or even yes Lord I kind of believe, or even yes Lord I wish I could believe but I don’t really get it and it’s nice to think some people do. There’ll be a lot of people surprised to find themselves enjoying what scholars call the eschatological banquet, but what I prefer to call the heavenly nosh up. If we imagine that by meeting a whole heap of prerequisites we have earned our place in God’s love, then we have a bit of re-thinking to do.

Even that’s not a fatal flaw. God is patient. In the meantime though it’s great if we can simply open ourselves up to the mad zaniness of a God who creates the heavens and the earth and you and me and loves us recklessly even to the extent of incarnation and crucifixion and inviting the outsiders to the party. If we can recall the mad zaniness of the one who invites the broken and undeserving, even us, to encounter mad irrepressible joy of relationship with God then giving thanks and joining the party is a pretty good response.

 

becoming fully alive (with help)

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

TWENTY FIRST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August 21^st) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 1: 4-10

Psalm 71:1-6

Hebrews 12: 18-29

Luke 13: 10-17

 

It was a fascinating adventure in the Gospel Conversation this past week, as I navigated a path between an emphasis on the demonic world of Satan and his minions and the personal and sociological dimensions of the encounter between Jesus and a horrendously crippled woman.

Let us not forget that for eighteen years this woman – unnamed as so many women are in the patriarchal world of the first century – has seen very little but the ground in front of her. The sheer physical pain, and emotional and psychological humiliation of her life is beyond words. Jesus, moved as he is so often in his ministry – moved to compassion, moved to the very viscera of his being, initiates a healing that is physical, spiritual, psychological, and even in a sense sociological.

Would that we could do likewise. I think of figures like the incomparable Fred Hollows – atheist yes dare I say it bearer of Christ – who likewise transformed lives, releasing them from physical, psychological, and spiritual demons. There are demons in society far removed from the stereotypical realm of beasties under the bed emphasised by so many in Christian circles. To say this is not to deny the existence of that which is beyond our post-Enlightenment and sometimes arrogant worldview, but nor is it to focus on the sensational and inexplicable that is dramatically over emphasised by some.

The woman of this story is never given a name. She is one of the massive majority of humankind, the majority of which are women, who slipped through history unmentioned or unnamed. Yet we glimpse both her suffering and her redemption, I say again, physical, spiritual, all-dimensional, as we hear this Jesus story. Jesus initiates heaven for this woman.

Jesus is a little less visible in our world than he was for the three brief years of his public ministry in first century Palestine. We, however inadequate, are called to be his voice and hands and feet. Dare we even ask how we might touch lives in our community? I might add that whenever I say this in a sermon I am almost inevitably spun into an encounter with someone in need.

I often fail, fleeing from their need. I remember with shame to this day the time I tiptoed past a person sleeping in the cold on the doorstep of my church. I tiptoed past him in the dark, frightened perhaps by his form in the shadows, but I later relented. I made a cup of tea and would have given it to him, but he was gone. I had let him down, and I had let God down. The demons of the world at least for a time maintained the upper hand in his existence. As it happens there is a happy end to the story of his life so far but I can in no way claim credit for helping him on the path to restoration. For me the lesson remains that I walked by on the other side.

Jesus in our vignette today, this glimpse of his ministry, becomes the Good Samaritan that I for one so often have not become.

In the end it is too rare that I or perhaps we serve successfully as the voice or hands or feet of Jesus Christ. Yet we can but ask that sometimes – just sometimes – we may touch a life with Christlove. We will never be a Fred Hollows, that atheist Christ-bearer, or a Desmond Tutu, that Christian Christ-bearer, but we can but ask that our lives may touch and transform the life of another human being this day, this week, this lifetime. I suspect you and I won't change the world, and God knows it needs changing, but we may be for some person the touch of the love of God, if we ask God to let us so be.

 “The glory of God is a human being fully alive” said Irenaeus in the second century. May we touch lives so that those lives may become signs of the glory of God. And may we likewise be touched.

Amen.