U-turn

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

THIRD SUNDAY of the EPIPHANY (January 22^nd) 2023

 

READINGS:

 

Isaiah 9: 1-14

Psalm 27: 1, 4-9

1 Corinthians 1: 10-18

Matthew 4:12-23

 

 

 

The great message of Christianity, often either highlighted or parodied in cartoons, is encapsulated in Jesus’ famous words “repent and be baptised.”

As is quite well known, repentance, if we break down the Greek word, is a radical reorientation, a reversal, as we put it in the Ash Wednesday liturgy, “turn away from sin.” But the problem, or a problem, With the Church is that whenever we say the word “sin” we are either saying or being heard to say the word “sex.”

There is little doubt that sex can be sinful. So can a lot of things. I maintain that sex becomes sinful only when it is exploitative, the predatory, reckless, or treacherous. Mine is a fairly liberal view, but I think that there are more important issues on which to take a conservative stance. I would include economic and other forms of justice, environmental, for want of a better word, “husbandry,” perhaps something like “neighbourliness,” or “community building,” even the failure to prioritise God and the worship of God, the connection with God, letting God slip to a neglected backburner, these are greater sources of sin then sex.

For that just happens to be the first of the Ten Commandments, A detail often forgotten as bible-bashers crying out for the re-introduction of the commandments in school syllabuses. It is at the heart of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. in the end it all comes down to the word I just used: reorientation.

For we are called to re-orient ourselves. It is a lifelong journey, and the biblical idea is that it is not possible to undertake successfully without the aid of God’s Christ-bearing Spirit. It is our calling, first as human beings made in the image of God, and secondly as human beings seeking to serve Jesus, and it is a lifelong calling. We tend, as Saint Paul knew only too well, to fall short of that calling, but we are given an escape clause. That clause, that command, is to honest self examination, self evaluation, and as Isaiah makes clear, reprioritization so that the directives of God are foremost in our consciousness. As part of that we are to lift our eyes above the earthbound, lift our eyes and our hearts as it were to the heavens, and there praise the God who we cannot see, but whose signature is all around us, and whose breath energises our lives. We are called in other words to lift our eyes from ourselves, to live for others, to pray for both ourselves and others, and above all as the song put it, to turn our eyes upon Jesus.

It is not, as I often find myself saying, rocket science.

hearing God?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

SECOND SUNDAY of the EPIPHANY (January 15^th) 2023

 

READINGS:

Isaiah 49: 1-7

Psalm 40: 1-11

1 Corinthians 1: 1-9

John 1: 29-42

 

If you are very discerning – and I’m sure you are – you will notice that there is much in the readings on this Sunday of the Three Year Cycle about calling, about being chosen, about chosenness. Isaiah, like the author of Psalm 139, has a deep sense of being called long before actually arriving on the scene. The early Christians used the passage from Isaiah – and that of Psalm 139 – to emphasize the self-awareness, what scholars like to call the Messianic awareness of Jesus, and I’m sure they’re correct. I prefer to avoid seeing Jesus as some superhuman God-Man wandering around knowing everything that is about to befall him. I feel such a burden would make him utterly unlike the humans whose lives he came to infiltrate, and utterly in need of truckloads of aspirin from the future to get through each angst-filled day as his end drew closer.  but I have no doubt that he had a growing sense of the hand and direction of God on his oh-so-human life.

Isaiah described a servant of God – perhaps himself or another prophetic figure, perhaps the Hebrew people themselves – in terms of being set aside and called by God. The Christians saw his words as deeply applicable to the life and work of Jesus, and in turn their own life and work in following Jesus. I think they were profoundly right. I also think it is profoundly dangerous at at least two levels.

I have never heard voices in the night. Perhaps I am a particularly bad Christian, but the only exception to that observation is the drunken voices of passers-by when I have lived near students or a pub or both. I am even suspicious – and this will offend many in the church – who speak in terms of hearing the voice of God, the voice of Jesus. The directive urges of God, yes, though I think the verb “heard” has to be used far more in the sense of “felt” or “assessed” or “discerned” than that terribly aural sense of “hearing.” I’m even somewhat wary of hymns such as “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say,” unless we emphasize that hearing is not auditory. The psych wings of our western world hospitals are too full of those who hear God’s voice, and the pews of our churches – or perhaps the absent presences on our pews – are too full of those who lament that they, like me, have never heard this celestial voice. I do confess that when asked how I ended up as a priest, I sometimes answer that I wasn’t any good for anything else. Psychologists and other therapists would rush me to a couch and series of sessions of self-belief, but they’d be misguided. God’s nudge for me to offer for and subsequently remain in ordained ministry was no different to God’s call for me not to be a linesman or an accountant or a nuclear physicist. There are other roles in life I think I could have undertaken, and there are roles I definitely should not and could not have taken, but the nudges of God led me to this point.

In many ways we’ve lost the sense of vocation. Not the sacramental vocation particularly but vocation itself. The nudges of personality and circumstances and other factors that, for example, careers guidance personnel seek to offer to school leavers are every bit as much a part of vocational guidance and the strange happenstances that led me to this equally strange career. The vocation to be a truckie, which I envy, a policeperson, which I considered, a broadcaster which I have dabbled in … your vocations including the vocations of those who chose what we might call non-stipendiary parenthood: all these can be the nudgings of God. Nursing, teaching, retail, manufacturing, whatever. And, hopefully, in following those nudgings we find a deep sense of fulfilment, and find ways, if we happen to continue to believe in God, to continue to serve the gospel God entrusts to us.

And what is that? I suggest that it is neither more nor less than to continue to open ourselves up to the possibilities of the life God gives us, to thank God for those possibilities, and to do our flawed, or as I always say, “stumbling” utmost to see in us and whatever our vocation might be some glimpse of the eternities, the eternal values of love and justice and compassion and all those things Paul calls “fruits of the Spirit.”  God likes us to rumour those values in the world, so that others’ lives may be touched by the warmth of God’s love.

It's that simple, really. And if we ask God nicely, God sends that mysterious energy who we call Spirit to aid us on our Christ-filled way.

 

 

in the middle of the fire

 

REFLECTION AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU 
and St Martin’s, Duntroon
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT

(December 18^th) 2022
 
 
 READINGS:
 
Differing readings in the two centres, so I am taking, loosely, as a text Daniel 3:25:

“But I see four men unbound, walking in the middle of the fire, and they are not hurt, and the fourth has the appearance of a god” 

(or T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland,” line 360, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”

 

I could spend a lifetime meditating on Advent and Christmas readings. So many to choose from. Were we strictly observing Advent 4 today we would be dwelling on the obedience, at great self-risk, of Joseph as he learns that his fiancée Mary is carrying a child that is not his.

Never mind that this child is the implantation of God in Mary’s womb, let us give Joseph his humanness: this child is not his, and Mary is his fiancée. By choosing to remain in relationship with her he is protecting her life; by choosing to obey God he is risking his dignity, his pride, his mana, his all.

It is risk itself that I find myself dwelling on at this time of the year. So many risks in the Incarnation of Christ. I don’t, to be honest, know what “Son” means in the context of God, but I do know that God’s very selfhood, God’s very essence is being placed into the terribly vulnerable state that is human existence. And yes, we have been trained to read the story of the conception, gestation and birth of Jesus as a safe and secure plan that was always going to work out, and after Christmas the reading of the slaughter of the innocents will strengthen that impression.

But what of the “yes, but” moments? Mary, aided by her fiancé, permits the entire plan of God to nestle in her womb, to nestle, to be born in what in another context Harry Chapin coyly calls “the usual way.” She lives, thouigh Joseph doesn’t, to eventually see him brutally executed. For we cannot divorce the birth and death of Jesus, and the roller coaster that is Mary’s life is one of terrifying ferocity. It is small wonder she ponders things in her heart along the journey. Of course we know the Easter story, and thank God we do. But she didn’t.

Still:  never can we neglect the resurrection. Stripped of that, then all that Mary faces, like so many women of hers and every age, is a story of a broken heart. So we will glance forward to the resurrection. But she could not, back in Bethlehem.

Later, when the first Christians turned to their scriptures, the Hebrew Scriptures, to make sense of all that had taken place in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, they turned amongst many scriptures to the story of Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. They turned to a fourth figure walking in the flames with those who Nebuchadnezzar was trying to execute. They saw in that story a metaphor to unlock the meaning of Christmas. God entering the risk of human existence, God with us, Emmanuel in the flames of human existence, the womb of human existence. The fourth always with us watching not from a distance, not far off, but actually one of us.

The song by Joan Osborne, “One of Us,” so big a hit in the 1990s, is frustratingly ambivalent: does it capture or entirely miss the story that dwells at the heart of Christian faith? If you know the song, I’ll leave the question with you. If you don’t, ignore it. But in the womb God becomes one of us. Eternally.

T. S. Eliot famously captured the image another way – allegedly reflecting on the legends surrounding Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions. The party of explorers constantly had a sense of an extra presence with them as they faced the very extremities of human vulnerability. “Who is the third who walks always beside you” the poet asks an unseen, unnamed companion. The poet is there, the companion is there, but a shadowy figure, too is there, a presence bringing what may be divine hope into every human existence. An extra, almost seen presence. Who is the third in the poet’s conversation? Who is the fourth in the furnace? Whose are the footprints in the sand? The metaphors, of various merit, capture the Incarnation. Diana Spencer used the image of a third party in a marriage in a rightly dark and menacing way, but the figure of the Book of Daniel and of “The Wasteland,” while dark, is not menacing.

From the moment of conception in the uterus of Mary, God is one of us. God in Christ – not a distant God staring from afar – but God within the very vulnerabilities and risks and successes and failure of being human, is one of us. God, passing through the birth canal. God in a manger. God at the mercy of humans. God breathing resurrection into every death. God in the furnace of life and death. God dependent on Mary saying “Yes,” on Joseph saying “Yes,” and, strangely, on each of us saying “Yes,” as we ask God to be, as Wesley puts it, “born in us today.” Today and every today of our lives.

“There is always another one walking beside you,” says Eliot. Amen, say the scriptures.

 

 

 

divine size 14 boot

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU 
and St Alban’s, Kurow
THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT
(December 11^th) 2022
 
 
 READINGS:
 
Isaiah 35: 1-10
For psalm: Luke 1: 47-55
James 5: 7-10
Matthew 11: 2-11

 

As I interacted with my gospel conversation co-conversationalists the other day it occurred to me that one of the foremost and most neglected themes to emerge from this week’s gospel reading is the invitation established by John the Baptist to interrogate Jesus.

Often in my career I have tended to hang loose to the gospel readings, dipping more completely into the other readings and seeking application for our own times in those encounters with the God we serve. Occasionally I’ve been organised enough to weave through the readings, letting them cast light on each other – interrogate each other as I have just put it. That in fact is how the lectionary is designed, but whether we use what is called the “continuous readings,” something of a misnomer in any case, or the so-called “related readings,” the links are often tortured at best. Nevertheless our readings do in a sense interrogate each other. Isaiah’s ecstatic vision of joy asks our God – who as Christians we believe is definitively revealed in Jesus Christ as found in the gospels – asks our God where we might find joy in a tormented world, whether then in the first century – or today in our twenty-first.

“Here is your God … he will come” says Isaiah, foreshadowing that powerful word Immanuel, God with us. But where? Where is Isaiah’s God in the midst of the semi-apocalyptic doom and gloom of our era? Isaiah’s vision is of a God with a big stick who will bash up the Putins and Taliban and torturers and exploiters of his time. 

Is that our God? Such a God seems remarkably absent in our world, or at a more micro level, in the terrifying worlds of victims of war, famine or abuse. I will tend to explore answers, if such can be proposed to that question more in the context of Good Friday when we find God on a Cross crying out in resurrection solidarity with all who have cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is an eternal question. But let us for now acknowledge that the affirmation of either Isaiah or Jesus that there is hope, that God will come, that God will be with us, that God is with us, these can seem a pretty tenuous claim after 2000 years or more. Perhaps as philosophers like Nietzsche or Sartre and the fiercely evangelical New Atheists have claimed, God is simply dead or absconded.

Hopefully it is needless for me to add that this dark view is not mine. If it were I might well be mowing my lawns right now. But I’m not, long though they are after two weeks’ absence.

Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist – under threat of death – is understandably impatient too. It is sobering to note that he does not really see an answer to his question before he dies a brutal death. Interrogating Jesus, even believing in Jesus, is not necessarily innocuolation against dark times.

Where then is hope in the crazy Jesus-story? Jesus’ own answer is simply “go, see,” and we may well be human enough not to find that entirely convincing.

We have to be realistic. There is so much in our Christian story which is hardly Christ-convincement. We have seen exploitation, self-aggrandisement, grim stories of abuse perpetrated by those who claim the name of Christ, and suffering even to the extent of John the Baptist experienced by those who follow Christ. Where, then, is good news breaking through the white noise of calamity?

We might note  that Jesus warned that there would always be tares – thistles we might say – amongst the fine wheat of faith. That amongst those claiming the name of Jesus there would be wolves in sheep’s clothing, predators amongst the pure of heart. He also warns of times of great trial for his followers – John the Baptist at the very least foreshadows the trials that those who are obedient to God may face. I make no secret of my own belief that ours is a time of sifting, sorting the thistles from the wheat grass, or whatever metaphor we might choose. The brutal exposure of our institutional church by royal commissions, by collapsing kudos and resources, by marginalisation in society’s consciousness: these are amongst the trials predicted by Jesus, and they have always been a part of the Christian story. Jesus speaks of them when he prays that we may not be led into times of trial.

Yet we find ourselves at least to some degree in a time of trial. And there will be greater trials yet as our false gods are torn from us. Parishes collapse, church buildings crumble, close, or both, and numbers dwindle to nothingness. Those in what Jesus tellingly calls “soft robes” and ostentatious palaces are receiving the firm Size 14 boot of God’s winnowing Spirit. Our children and grandchildren, most of us, care little for our esoteric beliefs about an invisible friend.

Yet we can even without, no: especially without ostentatious palaces and soft robes – he says while admittedly wearing the beautiful robes of liturgy – be the sign for which John the Baptist was looking, for which John the Baptist asked Jesus. Are we able, in whatever small way, able to touch lives, to shine light, if only faintly, to penetrate a whole lot of grey dark?

It’s been kind of nice for me this past fortnight to return to old haunts across the ditch, and, returning, not to know but at least to wonder if God has maybe just once or twice or more, pray God, used this stumbling Christ-follower to touch a life or two, to murmur the rumour that love, hope, justice, joy, peace can still exist in some small but God-breathed way even in our century.

And, as John the Baptist interrogates Jesus, perhaps we can too, and can offer our lives as we do in the liturgy, to in some small way be a living sacrifice, be a vehicle through which God may touch and encourage those we walk amongst. Our task, in the words of the famous prayer of Richard of Chichester, is simply to know him more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly, day by day, by continued exposure to the experiences of those around us, by immersion in the stories of scripture, and in the rhythms of liturgy. May God help us so to do.

fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

KO TE KARAITI TE KINGI - CHRIST THE KING  

(November 20^th) 2022

Near Eucla, January 1998

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 23: 1-6

For psalm: Luke 1: 68-79

Colossians 1: 11-20

Luke 23: 33-43

 

 

There is a strange sense in the lectionary that introduces periods of incremental change in the themes of the readings that we journey through. It is as if we were meant to prepare ourselves gently for the larger changes around the corner.

As it happens, if you will excuse a digression for a moment, there's a couple of places in the geography of Australia where you drive through unofficial time zones that create a segue from one time zone to another. If you drive from Adelaide West to Perth you don't make the full 2½ hour time change at the border but drive through an unofficial region about 80 or 100 kilometres long around the minute settlement of Eucla, where your time is changed by three quarters of an hour. In reality it makes considerable business sense, as is even more apparent in the New South Wales town of Broken Hill which on the basis of population gravity locates itself in South Australian time. These are important subtleties when you pick up a phone or e-mail your nearest business contact who may legally share your time zone, but who in reality isn't out of bed yet. Of course if you're driving the reasonably significant distances across our big flat red western neighbour it doesn't matter quite so much.

So yeah, we are in a sort of transition zone here. We have leapt from Jesus journeying towards Jerusalem to not only his arrival there, but, omitting a few details about meals, arrests and torment, have leapt to his crucifixion. We saw the full process, of course, months ago in Holy Week, but now we are approaching the death of Jesus wearing a different pair of glasses. Surrounded by political upheaval in the world we are looking for leadership that is greater than, sounder than, more just and compassionate than, the dictatorships of a Putin or a Muhammed bin Salmin, or the chaotic narcissistic machinations of a leader-in-waiting of that powerful nation between Mexico and Canada.

So how is this shift in the church calendar, originally invented by Pope Pius XI, supposed to rumour good news? To answer that question we need to know that Pius in 1925 was doing all he could to counter the emerging tyranny of an Adolf Hitler, a Benito Mussolini, a Joseph Stalin, or, though he was still a year from infamy, a Francisco Franco. Pius XI was a brave and visionary man, who openly accused the Nazi government of sowing “fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church,” the same accusation we might make of Vladimir Putin, despite his snuggly relationship with leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. They must themselves stand alongside Putin before the stern judgement of God on the day of reckoning.

We know of course that they have always been tyrants, that the more things change the more they stay the same. It is often hard to proclaim a God of hope when tyrants prevail. Yet that is an eternal problem and in our Jewish and Christian heritage it reaches back at least to the beginnings of scripture. As it happens the story of Cain and Abel was a reasonably late Hebrew scripture, but it makes clear that there always will be as there always has been tyrants soaked in blood. Against all common sense we are called to believe that nevertheless God’s final word is one of light, not darkness, is “Yes” not “No.”

The kingship that we acknowledge and celebrate on this day is revealed as a polar opposite to the kingship that the tyrants of history have sought to establish. God is not a king of missiles, but as revealed in Christ is the King of Love. The hymn writer Henry Williams Baker put it beautifully when he interpreted Psalm 23: “the king of love my shepherd is.” The kingship revealed in Jesus Christ is compassion, love, justice, and it is of these graces that we are called to be bearers.

If we were to hold the entire church year together in our thoughts we would recognise the recurring theme that we can only be ambassadors of this king of love by opening again and again our hearts, minds, spirits to his redeeming, sustaining, edifying and transforming love. It is to that surrender to this king of love that we called day by day, Sunday by Sunday, and it is for that reason that it is such a fine and soaring note on which to end the church year.


My sermons will be conspicuuous by their absence for the next couple of weeks, as I swan around in the southern reaches of that vast flat western isle, acquainting myself with a few grandchildren / mokopuna born since Covid, and reaquainting myself with a few born before. Oh and a few daughters, too. And their partners. Bring it on!

light at dark tunnels' end

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

THIRTY-THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (November 13^th) 2022

 

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Isaiah 65:17-25

For psalm: Isaiah 12

2 Thessalonians 3: 6-13

Luke 21: 5-19

 

 

 

If you’ve been even loosely noticing the way in which Luke has constructed his version of the Jesus-story you will be well aware by now that much of the story revolves around a very intentional journey towards Jerusalem. While our Muslim friends have an equivalent in, for example the Hajj and its destination in Mecca, both as Christian people and as kiwis we have little of equivalence. Neither in term of national identity nor in the relationship between faith and place our religion do we have equivalent. Perhaps as we grow in our recognition of cross-cultural stories the centrality of Waitangi will develop a similar resonance – and for some the even more demanding pilgrimage to Anzac Cove, Anzac Koyu, has similar dimensions. But on the whole, yeah, nah. And for those of us of faith the location of God within in us has gazumped any particularly deep sense of a spirit of place, though we do I think mourn in our Anglican tradition if our places of worship are desecrated or deconsecrated.

But for Luke’s audience and indeed for Jesus the importance of Jerusalem was immeasurable. Jesus has reached the holy city a couple of passages back, we have seen him weep over the city; in Matthew’s gospel account particularly we will hear Jesus make warning about the “desolating sacrilege” first referred to in Daniel and much loved by the crystal-ball gazing scripture-twisters who fill the stages and hog the microphones of sensationalist churches. For us it is important to remember that when Jesus spoke the Second Jewish Temple was still intact, a wonder and a central element of both faith and national identity. By the time Luke recorded his words pretty much all that remained was destruction, the rubble of past glory and past hope. The safest of safe spaces, the happiest of happy-spaces was gone. I can think of few equivalents.

Yet, Luke notes, Jesus speaks words of hope in the midst of immeasurable darkness. Again there are few comparisons in our story. For indigenous peoples, including Māori, I think there is a realization that what social historians tend to call “contact” was, however inevitable, a watershed, a cataclysm that wrought irreversible change to the world of their ancestors, their tupuna. For the newer nations such as New Zealand in all its bi- and multi-cultural history there is so far no such moment. There have though been wars of horror and natural calamities, and of course for all of us there have been personal calamities, after which life could never be the same again. And in the midst of these Luke reminds us that Jesus spoke – and still speaks we might add – a contradictory word of hope. Stand tall, he says. Like the prophets before him he dares to speak of a different narrative: be not afraid. I am with you, says God, even to the ends of ages.

Not easy, of course, to believe. And part of Jesus’ command to stand tall is the command to continue to be active. We are not called to despair, for example, in the dance of global warming and possible global extinction (including our own extinction) but to be active in attempts to midwife a better future. Christians who snidely await the destruction of the earth in the expectation that they will be slickly whisked away to a better place are not standing in the footsteps of Jesus. We are called to be active and hope-filled to the last, and to be aided in that by the presence of God with us. And sometimes we will stumble. And the invisible Spirit will prod and nudge, if we let her, and the journey to our own New Jerusalem will go on. God meets us in our anxiety, and leads us on.

It's not magic. We need to do our part. To cling to the hopes that are made known to us in scripture. Indeed, as our bishop reminds us over and again, to pray, to read the bible, to be – using my own words – as Christ to those around us. We are called – with the help of God – to exercise intentional, spirit-filled love, justice and compassion. And we almost certainly will not see the real impact of our moments and our days, my well see, perhaps should see the closure of the temples of our faith and happy spaces of our lives, but that, says Jesus, that recorded Luke, is not the end of God’s great story.

Harp free zone

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

THIRTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (November 6^th) 2022

 

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Haggai 1:15b – 2:9

Psalm 98

2 Thessalonians 2: 1-5, 13-17

Luke 20: 27-38

 

On a couple of occasions I have had cause to mention that the bad press given to the Pharisees in the New Testament is not altogether fair. On the whole, I have suggested, the Pharisees were more akin to contemporary clergy in the mainstream churches, and for that matter synagogues, even mosques: they were people who believed in their God, and did their best to exercise compassion and love and to proclaim justice and hope in a world that seemed to lack an awful lot of those ingredients. A world that seemed to lack an awful lot of those ingredients but was by and large not going to look for them in the corridors of organized religion. Later, as the embryonic Christian community began to fall out with its Jewish neighbours, things turned a little toxic and the Pharisees began to get bad press. Bad press in some ways, I have suggested, that was similar to the ways in which professional religious representatives have been given bad press, on the basis of some very bad eggs amongst their colleagues who have rightly been exposed by investigations and commissions. We hope of course, or I hope we hope that clergy will learn from mistakes of the past, and that whatever emerges from the collapse of our institution will indeed proclaim love, justice, compassion, and resurrection hope.

But there appears to be little in the way of mitigating circumstances when it comes to the behaviour of the Sadducees. They ceased to be a problem by the time the New Testament was written. They were so deeply in bed with the corrupt Roman Empire that, following the destruction of the Second Temple, they simply melted away into their well-feathered if somewhat lonely nests. They were, incidentally, providers of the detestable work force of tax-collectors, exploiting the underlings amongst their own people, making their own wallets fat by means of any method available, and making all the more remarkable the fact that Jesus on at least two occasions invites one of them to join his rag-taggle scrum of followers – one named Zacchaeus, another named Matthew.

Their main failing as proclaimers of God was not so much their denial of resurrection – but their exploitation of the vulnerable. There are theologians today – I think of the redoubtable Lloyd Geering and the, in my opinion, less credible Jack Spong, who specialize in disproving, to their view, any personal hope-after-death narratives. I think they are wrong, and may be in for a pleasant surprise in whatever eternity turns out to be, but I do not think they are evil in the way predatory and/or parasitic clergy have been throughout history. Those who feather their nests with fleets of Harley Davidsons and hangars-full of Bombadiers, those who avoid taxes by claiming miniscule wages while living in palatial homes, those who destroy children by preying on them: those are with the Sadducees amongst the lowest levels of humanity. But again: let us not forget that Jesus’ love reached even to the tax-collectors Matthew and Zacchaeus, and awaited only their surrender.

That too is not to say that denial of resurrection hope is poor taste. I often find it hard to believe my six impossible things of faith, things like resurrection and eternal existence, before breakfast. But there are times we are called to suspend our disbelief. I happen to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, and in the hope of the New Heavens and Earth and Humanity and of you and me and those we love and lose, impossible though it sems to me. But even on dark days I would be sub-human to declare, for example, at the funeral of a still-born child that the only hope of reunion was some sort of rebirth in the nitrogen cycles of a dying planet. Not so. And Jesus did not mean that, either, when he said there would neither be marrying or giving in marriage n the hereafter that he called eternal life.

The Sadducees also represented the worst of religiosity in another way. Dipping often ill-gotten wealth, they ensured, like powerful slave-owners, that those under their spell had no hope of escape. Like drug lords, paedophiles, televangelists, domestic abusers and other models of corruption, even like some oppressive mainstream clergy of days I hope gone by, they kept their minions in place, kept their dependents dependent, kept the light of dawn from breaking. The Sadducees’ story of the woman owned by seven brothers is the story of a society in which women were property, alongside shares in Twitter and the spare house in the Caribbean. Yet ever the tragedy of her purported life was, arguably, marginally better than that of the women, then and now, left to die when society has no further use for them.

But let’s finally come to Jesus, as every sermon should. For it is into this world of darkness – which was ever thus – that Jesus came. Jesus came, and Jesus spoke, and there was in Jesus, as I’ve said before, no credibility gap between his word and his action. Jesus speaks of a God whose love and hope reaches beyond the darkest darkness – beyond Good Friday when hope dies – and into the brightest of benevolent light. He speaks of a love that transcends even the most mind- and body- and soul- blowing experiences of human love, some of which are, we know, pretty good.  When he speaks of “those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage” he is speaking not of a negative, not of some chaste and dull state sitting on a cloud playing a harp, but of all we can imagine that is life-enriching. That and immeasurably much more.

As I’ve mentioned (often) elsewhere, the author of the Book of Revelation speaks of that which is to come not as static tedium but of electrifying engagement and action: the very best of all we’ve known and so much more. Jesus speaks of the God “who will shake all the nations” – who is doing a pretty good job of that right now – and yet even, after the last fading shake of human and cosmic history, will be God of the living beyond our sight. Beyond our sight, that is, for now, until we too join the saints who see no longer through a darkened glass, until we join our forebears and say at last, “aha, so that’s how it is.”

And the Sadducees may be in for a surprise. For good or ill will be their choice. Though whether there can be ill in the patient and eternal heart of God is a question for another time.