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Saturday 27 June 2015

Dollar towards a beer? Let the light in.


SERMON PREACHED AT THE ORMOND CHAPEL
HOSPITAL HILL, NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 13

(28th June) 2015

Readings:        
2 Samuel  1:1, 11-27
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43
           

There are some desperately broken hearts in the stories of our faith on this day. The bereaved heart of David cries out from the pages of faith-history, reverberates through time as he grieves beyond words the loss of his beloved friend Jonathan. We need not turn this into a celebration of gay love, as some have done, though nor need we decry the love of human beings for members of their own sex, sexually expressed or not.
 
This though is greater than the love of eros-passion, as the these days derogatory-sounding aside of “surpassing the love of women” is designed to tell us. This is the love of those who stand side by side, through thick and thin, who have as we like to say today, one another’s back. But as the hard words of the psalmist (always a part of a funeral if it is to be correctly taken) remind us “our days are like the grass: we flourish like a flower of the field. When the wind goes over it, it is gone.” So are the deepest human loves and friendships, including those of married love but not limited to them. Such loves are restored to us only in the promise “but your loving-kindness O Lord endures…” and in the belief that God’s resurrective love conquers even the brutal separation that death is.
 
Strangely the brief and timeless lament of David over the slain Jonathan has given us the cry “how are the mighty fallen,” yet in more recent parlance that has been turned not into a heart-cry at the fallibility of all human aspirations and achievements but into a tall poppy syndrome sneer at the fall of those who over-reach their allotted place. Such a reversal of the original meaning is a travesty: here David laments the highest degrees of love, for one day even they must, having flourished like a flower of the field, nevertheless succumb to the wind, sudden or gradual, of mortality. We know that.
 
Though disguised in the cut and thrust of first century church politics, Paul too is crying out at the plight of those whose lives are experiences of brokenness and neglect. He and the Jerusalem Christians, probably including Peter and James the brother of Jesus, agreed on very little. When though it came to the compassion to be shown to the poor and especially to those starving for their faith (for that is a theme previously addressed between the lines in 1 Thessalonians) there Paul and the Jerusalem pillars could agree: “It is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need.” Amen and amen, though we churches of the Global North or former West too often forget to remember the redressing of obscene disparity that may well dull the reverberations of our prayers.
 
But it is to the desperate hearts around Jesus that we must most often turn. What of the soldier whose child is dying? Childhood mortality was brutally common in the first century, but ever since soon after our ancestors climbed out of the primeval swamp we have desperately loved and wanted to pre-decease our children. This man dwells at the threshold of the grief that only those who have outlived their children know or understand. Yet greater even than his desperation is that of the hated and abused and unclean woman who scared-dares to touch the hem of the passing robe of Jesus.
 
These are cries of desperate hearts. Where is God when it hurts, when the heart-crush is so great we can no longer carry on? Suicide and substance abuse rates suggest that the rates of loneliness and despair are as high now as at any time in history. Prayers stay unanswered – and I won’t even attempt to gloss that statement with the kinder “appear to stay” unanswered. Prayers stay unanswered – and as our communities increasingly harden our hearts either to the naïve capitalist trickle-down theories of noblesse oblige or the social capital theories of communal responsibility more and more desperate human beings fall through cracks. Where is God when it hurts, and where is God when our neighbour hurts?
 
Where is God when a pan-handler approaches us, a beggar confronts us, a busker from the hard end of the economic equation plays for us? I am not naïve: we can’t solve the suffering of our world by handing out our loose change, but at a time when there are few safety nets and not even many ambulances at the bottom of the cliff I suspect we are cauterizing our compassion when we set ourselves a steely stare and walk past those who are or who purport to be needy. Aid agencies may well tell us that institutional change needs to be made to address the plight of the poor, but that doesn’t help the broken alcoholic sleeping under a bridge. Slowly our hearts are hardened and in any case we find more and more reasons to keep the dollar in the bottom of our purse or pocket.
 
In cauterising our hearts to the cry of the grieving or the hungry or any of those who Jesus calls “blessed” in the Beatitudes, we are generating a sclerosis of our own spirits. I am increasingly moved by the Jewish teaching of the sparks of light that we are commissioned to carry across our corners of the universe. It may not be profoundly sensible in terms of social theory, but the dollar you place in a beggar’s hand – or of course the sandwich or coffee you buy her – may just be the in-breaking of divine light into a hurting heart. It may and probably will not achieve lasting change to unjust social structures, or even to the beggar’s long-term future, and there will be some who have the gift to address those too (as our Marks of Mission remind us), but it will momentarily touch a life with warmth and Christ-light, and as a side-effect  chip away at the unfeelingness, the sclerosis of our own hearts and souls. The hippies are right: practice random acts of human kindness, for these sparks of compassion are sparks of the love to which we as bearers of Christ are challenged.
 
We will be ripped off. We will see our dollar for a sandwich turned into a dollar for a beer. We will find that the recipients of random acts of kindness are not always sycophantically grateful or obsequiously appreciative. Why should they be, or more to the point, why should we be expecting thanks? Jesus challenges his followers to act out their compassion and justice in secret. It’s not a bad rule, saving our heads from swelling and our hearts from making generosity all about us. It may however be a part of, as Leonard Cohen put it with Jewish wisdom, “the crack in everything that’s where the light gets in” for donor and recipient alike.
 
Jesus went on his way and two lives were restored, and many more touched, as they would later be by the Jerusalem Collection so feistily championed by his follower Paul. That touching of lives dwells at the heart of Jesus’ challenge to us to do likewise: never to be so hardened of heart that we cannot touch and strangely warm and encourage the lives of those we meet each day, however foolish our actions are in eyes of the wise and the prudent. Similarly we must never be so hardened of heart that we cannot open our lives to the love of a friend or a lover. In both cases our hearts must be so set beyond the limitations of human sight that we begin to see glimpses of the source of the light that gets in through moments and actions of love.

 
Amen.

Saturday 20 June 2015

Dylann Roof and a napping God?


SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY

(21st June) 2015


Readings:        

1 Sam 17:a, 4-11, 32-49
Psalm 9:9-20
2 Corinthians 6:1-13
Mark 4:35-41

There are a handful of bible stories I remember from my childhood – and it’s worth remembering that most children today won’t even know that many – then it is the story of David and Goliath. The glorious Veggie Tale rendition of this story from recent years is Dave and the Giant Pickle, well worth a squiz if you have a few spare moments of YouTube. The gist is of course the same: vulnerable person chosen by God fronts up to powerful figure chosen according to traditional human standards, and big fella loses the battle.

Whatever the origins of the story were deep in the bowels of the whakapapa of the Hebrew people, somehow the Hebrews came to define a victory scored against all odds against the powerful Philistines. The biblical story was for millennia a narrative that championed the origins of the Hebrews royal line, championed the triumph of the little fella over the powerful bully, and for the pious above all a narrative that champions the victory of God’s choices over human machinations.

But within the terms of reference of the story this is the pitting of the choices of God against somewhat blinkered human standards. We can see the narrative point: the will of God will overcome obstacles. Does that however resonate with our experience? Does that resonate with the story of the Charleston massacre in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church these last few days? Where is God’s victory over Goliath when a prayer meeting is gunned down by a man who had been invited to be a part of the prayers, who had for over an hour received the love and hospitality of the African Americans he hated so much that he would eventually kill them mercilessly? Where is God when people are gunned down primarily for the colour of their skin? If the psalmist tells us “The Lord is a stronghold in times of trouble” where was he as alleged gunman Dylann Roof donned his apartheid-era flags-adorned jacket and carried out his dream of a race-based multiple murder? Was God napping?

Or for that matter, if we take as a metaphor the story of Jesus in the boat, calming the storm, where was this nature-transcending Christ when the gun was raised in Mother Emmanuel church, or when a myriad other killings which will not have made the news were carried out around the world in any given week?

God was not, as some right-wing US politicians are actually and inevitably proclaiming, mourning the fact that Pastor Clementa Pinckney and his co-prayers were not better armed. Had they been armed (and the likelihood of an amateur shooter hitting a target who has a head start and evil intent is minimal) had they been armed the return of fire would have done no more than escalate hatred and killing still further across the streets and lanes of Charleston and South Carolina and the USA.

God is not an escalator of cycles of hatred and revenge. Nor is God, whose prophet Isaiah longed for that day when swords would become ploughshares, applauding the mindset of a nation that believes peace comes from a weapon, that makes weapons available to all and sundry, and continues to permit narratives of race-based hatred to dominate much print media and airwaves and pixels. The fact that police-sourced killing of blacks in the USA outstrips killing of whites by a factor of three,[1] the fact that this includes a hidden statistic of economic as well as racial injustice, though the two are intertwined of course, is not a source of joy to the God of the plough-share and the cross. The fact that race or gender or religion or sexuality-based hatred exists at all in any nation does not gladden the heart of God.

But while the psalmist cried out “Rise up, O Lord! Do not let mortals prevail” the answer to the heart-felt cry is seemingly as far off now as it was three millennia ago, and the presence of injustice, ecological and economic, racial and gender-based, is as utterly universal now as in every time in human history. Where is God in this?

Still weeping, one suspects. But the writings of both Testaments do again and again provide at least two pronged answer. One prong is our human response as we practice the values of God. Allow a simple story. In 1996 a young black woman Keshia Thomas attended a clash of rallies in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  As the KKK and human rights and other protestors faced off against each other her actions almost certainly saved the life of her KKK opponent. As the tension mounted the counter protestors attacked a Klan sympathizer who had become isolated. He fled the blows, but fell, and was set upon by an angry crowd. Keshia Thomas threw herself over him to protect him, later saying simply that “someone had to break the cycle of mob mentality.[2]

In breaking cycles of hatred, motivated in part by her own faith beliefs and in part by her back-story of suffering, Keshia Thomas saved a life, and her actions transformed many lives in the crowd that witnessed them. That crowd – on both sides of the hate divide – had lost its coordinates of humanity, compassion, and no doubt for some, faith, just as those who gun down blacks and those who seek cycles of revenge have lost coordinates. God is present when figures like Keshia Thomas risk their own lives to save the life of an enemy.

There is a second prong to God’s presence. Actions like Thomas’s can be inspired by what I call a pre-memory of God transformation of swords to ploughshares. Actions like that of Keshia Thomas pre-enact the future coming of God for which the psalmist cries with heartfelt longing: “For the needy shall not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor perish for ever.” Such actions will be enacted again if the death of nine prayer-partners in Charleston spark not cycles of revenge but words of forgiveness.

These words are already being spoken, as the daughter of victim Ethel Lance told Dylann Roof yesterday that she forgives him for the white terrorism action that killed of her mother. These are words of the in-breaking of God’s Reign; these are pre-memories of the eternity of justice that the resurrection foreshadows. These are pre-figurements of the eternally calmed storm of which the temporary storm-calming in Mark’s gospel story is pre-figurement. These are the hints of the coming Reign of God for which we pray each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, and which hints not at the impossibility of a human reign of justice and peace but the in-breaking of the divine and eternal reign in which peace and justice are never again shattered and lost. These are even what we “pre-enact” as we share the peace together and then break bread together, no matter how scarred we or our neighbours might be. These are we pray for and hope in and pre-act upon, and where we do not we must fall again on God’s forgivenness: e te Karaiti, kia aroha mai.

Amen.




[1] Source: Channel 4 FactCheck. See http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-killed-police/19423. Retrieved 20 June 2015.
[2] “Alone in the Mob.” The Day. Jul 11, 1996. Retrieved 20 June 2015.

Friday 12 June 2015

John-Michael Tebelak and the craziness of God


SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 11

(14th June) 2015

Readings:        
 
  • 1 Samuel 15:34 – 16:13
  • Psalm 20
  • 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17
  • Mark 4:26-34


 
In the solemn delivery of liturgical reading, especially in an acoustic chamber as echoing as ours, we constantly lose the playfulness, humour, and divine madness that permeates so many of the texts of our faith. (Perhaps this is all the more so now I have opted for the longer and more demanding continuous cycle of readings instead of the ostensibly “related” readings we were using). No matter how good our readers – and you are good! – we are, especially as Anglicans, trained to deliver the text with theatrical gravitas. When we read or chant the psalms we do so with all the joie de vivre of the announcement of a death, the terrible heaviness of a police officer’s knock on the door at night. Do we dare to notice, for example, the craziness of God that gives the second portion of our Samuel reading a glorious and Godly inanity? Do we notice the wry humour with which the psalmist notes the trust some will place in tools of war, while he prefers to trust a God greater even than death? It’s not thigh-slapping, belly-wobbling humour, but it is humour nevertheless and it runs through many of our biblical texts.

We are, after all, Anglican, and we all the more so, for we are cathedral. In the lead up to Pentecost I mentioned the mad in-breaking of the Spirit that was the Charismatic movement of the 1960s and ’70s and perhaps even ’80s. It had its limitations, made its mistakes, danced ultimately on wrong paths, but I suggest that somewhere in the tiggeresque bounce of its ministrations there was an important truth.

That aside, in 1971 a young graduate student named John-Michael Tebelak went for a walk. He should have been finishing his dissertation, but, wearing overalls and a tee-shirt, meandered into the Cathedral of St Paul in Pittsburgh. He had been writing his thesis on ancient Greek and Roman mythology (people did that in those days!) but had become enraptured by the joy he found in the Christian gospels. He sought that joy in St Paul’s Cathedral, and felt that the Easter vigil above all should radiate irrepressible happiness. For his troubles he was frisked by police and left only with the sense that Christians had poured cement on to the tomb that was already sealed by a rock.

Over the next few days he wrote Godspell. He wrote Godspell in all its manic zaniness, and many Christian leaders dismissed the musical as demonic and anti-Christian, metaphorically frisking its lyrics as it was asked to leave the cathedrals and churches of the English-speaking liturgical world. I am less sure that the musical is demonic or anti-Christian, more sure that it is profoundly insightful and Christ-bearing. In the clowns’ mad manic dance there is a search for truth. It is a search that circumnavigates again and again and inescapably around the sayings of Jesus, but also by implication around the very being of Jesus.  (Tebelak was granted his Masters for the lyrics by his school, Carnegie-Mellon University. Coincidentally, amongst its alumni Carnegie-Mellon numbers two of the astronauts killed in the Challenger space shuttle disaster, but also John Forbes Nash, the subject of A Beautiful Mind, and Andy Warhol, whose mind was also arguably beautiful).

Amongst the manic, surreal joy of Godspell is the telling of the Parable of the Sower, that same parable that we haven’t read today. We aren’t reading the Parable of the Sower because it isn’t read in Year B, through which we are now travelling, but the mini-parables we have read this morning are Jesus’ own enlargements on the theme. There was seed that fell amongst weeds, that rose up, and was choked by the worries and concerns of the world, seed that died whilst carefully ensuring that anyone who wore overalls and a tee-shirt, tattoos or a nose stud was firmly frisked by police as they were sent out of the near-empty building.

In Godspell’s telling of the Parable of the Sower the young female narrator grows in confidence as the words break out of her. Under the watchful encouragement of the Jesus-character she journeys from stage-fright to eloquence, and from eloquence to holy madness, as the story crescendos and the final seed yields fruit, thirty and sixty and an improbable hundredfold. But before that she tells of the seed that fell amongst weeds, seed which rose up, and was choked by the worries and concerns of the world. She tells of the seed that, like Samuel, looked on appearance and height of stature, on mission statements and economic viability plans, on demographic assessments and ecological impacts, on canon laws and corporate memories of previous attempts, seed that waxed eloquent on the importance of horses and chariots but forgot the possibilities of God. And that seed choked.

In the minor seed-parables with which we are re-engaging Mark’s gospel-telling we find seed quietly germinating in the dark, or seed that is tiny bursting out in luxurious, manic, tangled mustard seed growth in which the birds of the air can find shade even if they have nose rings and tattoos. We find that the seed manically scattered by a dancing clown, (for in Godspell if not in the gospel itself that is the profound image), in the fruits of frenzied adoration of and devotion to God the ingredients of gospel, ingredients of resurrection hope and compassionate justice and uncontainable cruciform love are irrepressibly spread, and spread, and spread.

As we make our pledges of giving this understated Stewardship Sunday we should be looking far deeper into ourselves: as we reflect this day on our giving to the life of the church, and as we later hear the call to give generously to an appeal to empower women attempting to study at St John’s University in Tanzania, we should respond, madly, manically, to those calls. Alongside those responses we should look deeper still within ourselves, beyond even the linings of our pockets; we should assess anew the viability of the soils of our spirit, question whether we are able to be a place of mad, maniacal God-filled dance, of ridiculous giving of time and energy and love, a place where the light breaks in (as Leonard Cohen put it) or whether the weeds are already or for too long reaching out with choking tendrils. If John-Michael Tebelak were to walk into our midst would he find a dance or a dirge, dancing clowns or frisking police? The choice is ours if we wish to be a place of fertile faith for the generations who at this stage are voting firmly with their absence.

When John-Michael Tebelak (who tragically died of a heart-attack at the age of 32) left St Paul’s, Pittsburgh, he wrote Godspell. He incorporated into his clowns’ telling of the parable of the Sower a well-known and once popular hymn, though it may well be one we have not sung here in recent years. The clowns form a circle and dance, in the way we don’t dance, singing and dancing to these words:

We thank you, our provider,
for all things bright and good,
the seed-time and the harvest,
our life, our health, our food.
Accept the gifts we offer
for all your love imparts,
and, what thou most desirest:
our humble, thankful hearts.

All good gifts around us
are sent from heaven above;
we thank you, Lord, we thank you, Lord
for all your love.

Perhaps we too might one day find our inner clown and dance the mad, manic, mystic dance of thankful faith, the dance John-Michael Tebelak had to leave a cathedral to find. David whose ruddy face and clear eyes ultimately foreshadowed his status as God’s chosen, David the great king, was also the one that as Leonard Cohen again reminded us, danced before the Lord, earning the scorn of Milcah and the admiration of God. Perhaps we can be fertile soil, and  find that dance within these hallowed walls, and take it with us, with no frisking police to stop us, take it with us out into the streets and lanes into which God is calling us.

TLBWY