Comes forth a prickly bugger

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
ADVENT SUNDAY
(November 29^th) 2015

 

Readings:

Jeremiah 33:14-16

Psalm 25
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

 

Five hundred and eighty seven years before Christ the safe world of believers’ cosy relationship with God was shattered. Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt were at each other’s throats. Power surges and vacuums inter-twined. Villages and cities were slaughtered, populations upended, migrations and genocidal obliterations reverberated across once-fertile lands, and rivers ran with blood. Josiah had attempted to reform Israel’s faith and the complacent and self-satisfied people wanted little to do with his God. The Egyptians slaughtered Josiah, the Babylonians slaughtered the Egyptians, the Egyptians re-slaughtered the Babylonians and so it went on. Somehow, through it all, a tiny Middle Eastern tribe of not always nice, more-or-less monotheistic former nomads found and lost, briefly observed and lost again a bunch of laws and rituals that made them distinctive, though they by and large indifferently ignored the demands of their inconvenient justice-seeking, hope-promising God.

Into all this stepped a prickly bugger named Jeremiah, who began to warn his complacent compatriots that their self-satisfied pride was soon to come to an end.  Like many before me I am tempted to add that my use of the word “bugger” in a sermon will have caused some more offence that the fact that the people of God had become self-satisfied and complacent, or that the Middle East then as now was descending into chaotic slaughter.

That aside perhaps, Jeremiah dared to challenge the self-satisfaction of his people, was put on trial for his troubles, was rescued from execution, but died in obscurity and crippling sorrow, depicted in the Book of Lamentations. His people did not listen, his nation was destroyed, his faith-narrative almost – but in the end only almost – obliterated from the earth. Amidst all this he had continued to serve the God he trusted, and even, as his people’s complacent lives were shattered, had dared to suggest that God would one day bring hope to them again: in those days, he said, Judah will be saved. He died without seeing it.

It was as if Jeremiah spoke of God acting as a magnet, drawing God’s people into a future. It was an impossible, unseeable future, and whether Jeremiah promised good or ill he was hated for it. The Hebrews’ God was unsexy, demanding and frankly embarrassing, and compromise with marauding Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians made far more sense that the awkward demands of this risible and inconvenient deity. God had been a kind of useful entity in the Hebrews’ brief nationalistic glory days, providing entertaining and uplifting rites and a little bit of Zionist fervour, but when the going gets tough the self-satisfied get pliable, get compromisable, get unidentifiable.

If we dare to sing “teach me your paths, O God” we may discover that we are called out of the respectable into the ridiculous, called out of comfort into chaos, called out of complacency into naked exposure: only then after learning at last with Jeremiah and Paul and the great prophets of God that we have to fling ourselves broken and hopeless into the twilight realm of God’s promises, only then may we find the living warmth and embrace of the God who is always there, beckoning, waiting, weeping.

Global warming, clashing civilisations, travel warnings, the rise of apparently vicious and puerile Presidential candidates in the world’s most powerful nation:  we might well wonder what beasts are slowly slouching towards the Bethlehem of our cosy western comfort zones. Yet as Egypt, Assyria and Babylon treated Palestine as a battle ground it is hardly likely that things were a bunch of fluffy ducks for the Hebrews. Individual lives and the life of a corporate civilisation were under threat in 587 b.c.e. no less than in almost any decade since on almost any tectonic plate of God’s earth. Jeremiah though dared to speak of a living, pulsing God and God’s future despite the ever-present threat of personal or cultural obliteration and no-future, un-future. Today we might be more aware of earth’s every atrocity and idiocy, as far right terrorists hold shoot outs in Colorado abortion clinics, global temperatures rise, and the great empires of the post-modern era carve up Syrian airspace as they attempt to eradicate their own Frankenstein’s monsters, but for human beings the threat is the same: obliteration. And in the face of the unchanging universal threat Jeremiah dared to speak of a God who promises, who weeps, who cares even for a sparrow that falls (though those words were from a later prophet who saw the signs and dared to believe). Jeremiah asks us to read the signs of the time with a bible in one hand and remote control in the other.

But the bible we hold in our hands (and I hope we do), while it speaks of portents and portents of portents is not a time table. It does not speak of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, or Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. It is in itself a promise: “lo I am with you always, even to the ends of the ages.” It is the promise that humanity’s “no”, the decimation of God’s earth and species, the death of dodos and Hector’s dolphins and Baishan fir trees, this is not the final word. It is the promise that what Louis-Ferdinand Céline refers to as cancer cells creeping up our bowels or the sickening sound of sliding tyres and crunching metal is not the final word. It is the promise built on the experience of countless generations of imperfect human beings, the experience that humanity’s fragility is not the final word, that God’s “yes” is.

It is the final word that strangely dwells in humanity’s DNA. In our uncanny status as homo religiosis we long for meaning beyond life in a way that other animals do not, long with a longing that is often repressed, cauterized, trivialised, killed, sometimes with good reason. Yet in all this longing there is a hint of the truth of the imago dei, the image of God that is unique to the upright, laughing ape that we are. As homo religiosis cries out in a myriad ways “to you Lord I lift up my voice,” finding rites around life and love and death, we reveal our possession of this image of god, this signature of the God who is not just Alpha or just Omega but is Alpha and Omega; the signature of the Creator who beckons us from billions of years of yesterdays since we left the primeval swamp and on to an eternity of love in the presence of the God of Jesus Christ, in the presence of those we have loved and lost and will find again, in the many mansions of the eternal City.

In Advent we join the dance of those who have dared to believe.  It’s not a sexy journey. It’s not a journey of the elite or the sophisticated or the good enough, of the clever or the holier or cleaner or smarter than thou. It is the journey of those who know each day that we are not good enough, that we are a sin-doing people, that we are an arrogant and unholy people, that we are a people and I a person who desperately needs the healing, restoring love-touch of Jesus the Christ as we cry with the psalmist “pardon my guilt.” It is a journey in the end though that, if we dare to take it, will take us beyond the death throes of any and every being and any and every civilisation into the forever dance of God and those we love in God.

The peace of the beckoning Christ be always with you.

 

Prayer drunk yet?

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
ORDINARY SUNDAY 33
(November 15^th) 2015

 

Readings:

1 Samuel 1:4-20

(for the psalm): Samuel 2:1-10
Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

 

In my days as a Pentecostal worshipper I was often thrown into paroxysms of panic by the apocalyptic passages of the Bible. These are texts which in their first century setting were designed to assure the faithful not only that God knew the circumstances and trials that believers were undergoing, but also would bring surety and comfort in what were referred to by Jesus as “times of trial.” Mishandled, though, these texts brought to this believer and many of his confreres and consouers only terror. As newscasts brought evidence of war after war this new believer struggled to find comfort in the scriptures.

Images of highway pile-ups and planes crashing (long before 9/11), of graves opening and believers’ bodies rising to the heavens brought little comfort. There were wars and rumours of wars: Iraq, Lebanon, Salvador and, as it happens, Syria were just some of the conflicts thrust on my awareness, while Ronald Reagan escalated Star Wars and stared at Leonid Brezhnev down the barrels of his arsenal. They were heady times, though perhaps less heady than when Kennedy and Khrushchev stared each other down nearly two decades earlier, before my conscious time. Pentecostal doctrine, as I’ve mentioned before, was obsessed with the rise of a Polish Pope and an ethnically Jewish Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Though there were no more earthquakes in 1979 than any other given year, each one that did occur had millennialists scanning the clouds for the return of Jesus. Those with whom I was rubbing shoulders expected the Second Coming any day and planned accordingly.

It was as it happens ever thus. Wars and rumours of wars have ever been and ever will be, for as long as humans have breath. Earthquakes have ever been and ever will be for as long as there is an earth to quake. It can of course be acknowledged that improving media were generating heightened awareness of a global village by the late 1970s: images of the Iran/Iraq War were beamed to our living rooms daily from 1980 onwards. It is though also worth recalling, as I have mentioned before, that we were aware of one significant real change: since July 16, 1945 humanity had possessed the resources, for the first time ever, to obliterate itself and cast Mother Earth into nuclear winter. We still have that ability, and now always will.

The wars and rumours or wars, earthquakes and famines were ever thus and ever will be thus. But apocalyptic Christians have forever distorted biblical teachings, effectively fleeing to deserts to await the coming of Christ, as Montanus and his prophets supposedly did (but probably didn’t!) in Anatolia in the third century and as Jim Jones and David Koresh did in their toxic, lethal mixed-up confusions, and others will again.

Jesus was not suggesting that we retreat into silliness so that Roman armies need to rescue us from our isolated waiting spots. He was suggesting that we are aware of the world around us, but more important even than reading the bible with a newspaper in our hands (as Karl Barth allegedly recommended), is reading the bible with a transforming knowledge that it tells of a God who will journey with us into the darkest recesses of human experience.

This was no new doctrine, but a Hebrew doctrine in which the incarnate Jesus was deeply immersed. Hannah, one of the great Hebrew women of faith, was so immensely absorbed in the experience of God-with-her that, cast out as she was about to be on the scrapheap of womankind, she exhibited deep, deep faith in God’s presence and ability to hear and to answer prayer. Few of us will achieve such piety, stemming from a life of immersion in faith. She pours out her heart to God, first in silent petition, and subsequently in praise. In either context her piety was so intense that she might be accused of drunkenness.

As it happens our liturgies of faith take the same journey, from repentance to cleansing to pleading petition to the drunken ecstasy of thanksgiving, though I suspect few would look suspiciously at our rites and wonder if we were drunk! Nevertheless the journey is there in our worship, and as we practice rites with a lifetime of open hearts we may yet experience the uncanny transformation into Christlikeness that the Protestants call sanctification and Orthodox traditions call divinization: transformation into the person we are called by God to be, “Changed from glory into glory, ’Till in Heav’n we take our place” (as Charles Wesley put it).

But as the great interpretations of Hebrew traditions by Christ-followers affirm, especially in the book we call Hebrews, we are aided on that transforming journey by the Christ of Nazareth. He is known to us in his Spirit who invades us, dwells with us, purges us, but always travels with us, whether we name and practice this experience or not. Jesus has done the hard yards, even to the moment of crying out “there is … there can be no God,” yet even as he cried out remaining, as G.K Chesterton observed, God.

It was this that the language of apocalyptic was seeking to express: there will be bombings in Paris and earthquakes in California or Chile or Aotearoa, there will be god-awful suffering in Syria and Christmas and Manus Islands and at the razor wire barricades of Europe and Nauru, in the cells of our bodies and the road- and life-journeys of those we love, and in the slow and sometimes frightening gasps of the earth we are destroying. We need not go out into the desert to encounter the God who comes, but into our struggled and sometimes seemingly empty words of prayer, pouring out our hearts as Hannah did, not always seeing or experiencing answers, yet practising the presence of God, the God who comes, who comes even to us.

Sometimes (though of course being Anglican we might wait until no one is looking!) we might even learn to dance our ecstasy, or even dance or maybe cry our pain, or perhaps just allow our thoughts to dance or weep: to dance or weep in the sometimes frenetic, sometimes still presence of the God who dances and weeps too. Sometimes, as we learn to do that, we may even become so infectious in faith and hope and love, especially love, that others will see Christ too, and dance (wherever they may be, as Sydney Carter put it).

 

The peace of the dancing Christ be always with you.

Which Jesus?

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

ORDINARY SUNDAY 32

(November 8^th) 2015

 

 

Readings:

 

Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17

Psalm 127

Hebrews 9:24-28

Mark 12:38-44

 

Today we enter into that question Jesus put to his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Who is this that gazes across the Temple of Jerusalem and observes what are in economic terms the last gasps of a dying woman? Who is this who does nothing to alleviate her suffering but goes on to predict the not yet apparent destruction of corrupt religion, religion for which she gave her last economic breath? Who is this man Jesus? Why take notice of him at all, much less turn him into our Invisible Friend, or speak of him on Remembrance Day?

There are many ways to address this christological question, as many as there are bottoms on the clouds of eternity. Circumstances change, eras change: the breathing, thinking space of every observer of Jesus differs according to their life story. There are though some broad-picture categories that have been major keys to interpreting Jesus. Is he a role model to follow? The rather unpleasant, toxic nineteenth century atheist James Thompson offered a caustic (and sexist) critique of the presentation of Jesus as mere role model:

This poor sexless Jew, with a noble feminine heart, and a magnificent though uncultivated and crazy brain, did no work to earn his bread; evaded all social and political responsibilities, took no wife and contemned his own family; lived a vagabond, fed and housed by charity … and died with the lamentable cry of womanish desperation, perhaps the most significant confession in history of a life of supreme self-illusion laid bare to itself at the point of death. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

The extent to which Thompson got things wrong is common but excruciating, not least the significance of that powerful cry of dereliction from the Cross, but we might leave that for a moment. I suggest that there are moments in the legends surrounding Krishna or Gautama Buddha that I find more uplifting than some of the moments in the life of Jesus.

As it happens I would say the same of Jesus as a teacher. There are of course wonderful moments. For those of us who know the story the question “who is my neighbour” is powerfully answered in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and the image of the shepherd leaving 99 sheep to find the hundredth, while perhaps not good agricultural policy in the modern world, was in first century Palestine a deeply illuminating image of God’s determined compassion. But there are moments in the teachings of, say, Confucius or Karl Marx that I find every bit as illuminating as the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Many interpretations find in Jesus the social and religious revolutionary, the Che Guevara of first century Palestine. Certainly Judas wanted him to be that, and much liberation theology has emphasized that many of Jesus’ teachings, not least this story of the widow’s mite (when it is given its proper ending about the destruction of the Temple) do point to revolutionary ideals. But there was no revolution, and while some remarkable followers of Jesus (Oscar Romero and Desmond Tutu come to mind) have contributed to powerful reform, most revolutions have merely replaced one form of tyranny with another, and The Emperor Louis is merely replaced by The President Robespierre, or apartheid’s oppression replaced with Zuma’s corruption, and the peasants still starve.

As the early Christians gathered and told stories they were most deeply moved by another aspect of the life and teachings and death of Jesus. They were most deeply moved by their overwhelming sense of the resurrection of Jesus and their overwhelming sense of the presence of Jesus as they gathered. The suggestion that they were just silly and misguided naïfs is unconvincing: some were prepared to die in defence of their right to proclaim the revolutionary resurrection of Jesus, and many then and now did so.

There was a “been there done that” dimension to the Jesus they encountered in their faith journey. No matter what they underwent, they were strengthened by the experience of the Risen Lord journeying with them, journeying even into death and resurrection with them. It is this that the author of Hebrews is emphasizing as she depicts the journey of High Priest Christ through the brutality of human suffering and death and on to what she calls “heaven itself.”

Her congregation had grown bored, nonchalant, laissez faire about the Jesus thing. The Hebrews preacher was prepared to put one more bomb under the unidentified Hebrews’ collective backside, and the fact that we read her sermon still, 2000 years later, suggests that at least some got the message.

But does her message of a “been there, done that High Priest” have anything to say today? Today, as Israeli forces shoot dead a 72-year-old Palestinian woman; today as refugees continue to struggle and die in one of humanity’s greatest ever mass-migrations, the most significant since the two Great Wars we also acknowledge this day; today as we hear of the fightback of bacteria in hospital wards; today when "Innocent until Proven Muslim" is becoming an increasingly vitriolic attitude and we are threatening to lose our ability to feel compassion; today when in the face of ecological crisis we must wonder what world we are bequeathing our mokopuna?  

But also, as we observe the Remembrance that we must not forget, does her message of a “been there, done that High Priest” have anything to say, as we recall when troops and civilians died in their millions, 38 million dead or injured in World War One, 60 million dead and countless injured in World War Two? Did the meaning of Jesus die as war broke out? Does the meaning of Jesus die each time calamity breaks out, globally or personally?

Jesus does once and for all die to meaning if all we have is nice teacher Jesus, good example Jesus, or social revolutionary Jesus. But this is not who the early Christians discovered as they gathered in secret to worship, nor who the chaplains conveyed as they hunkered down in the trenches and hospitals and killing fields of not just two World Wars but of almost every war for two millennia.

In the lead up to World War One the churches had recreated Jesus in their own image: nationalistic Jesus, nice Jesus, Jesus slavishly obedient to public demand. But that Jesus died without resurrection in the wars, and slowly we are learning to rediscover the life- and death-transforming Jesus, the been there done that Jesus who beckons to the suffering and dying of all armies, all civilians, all conscientious objectors, all who face incurable disease and even those who face the incurable diseases we have inflicted on mother Earth. Because what the author of Hebrews had discovered was “been there, done that” Jesus, the Jesus of the agonised Cross, the Jesus who took the experience of God from trenches to mountain top, the Jesus who offered resurrection wherever people reached out to receive him.

Shortly we will reach out to receive that Jesus in communion. The earliest Christians did so too; they did so because they knew the Great High Priest who journeys into every human hell hole to bring peace, the Great High Priest who inexplicably invites us through the curtain of death to the far country, “whose ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace.” They did so because Jesus transforms death into eternal life.  

Shortly we will reach out to receive that Jesus in communion.

 

The Lord be with you