Dancing in a fecund womb

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
FIRST SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS
(December 27^th) 2015

 

Readings:

1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26
Psalm 148
Colossians 3:12-17
Luke 2:41-52

 

Samuel’s story originates in the pain-filled piety of a young woman teased by a rival. In translation the name of the two wives of Elkanah, Samuel’s father, are “Fertile” and “Attractive.” Ms Attractive, Hannah, eventually experiences the delayed and perhaps miraculous conception after long enduring the taunts of her fertile co-wife. She is transformed from barrenness to the tender joy of birthing prophet Samuel. There is salvation here: the taunted if attractive woman Hannah had in her culture no reason to live but the bearing of children. God invades her life with blessing, and she bears the son by which she, in her culture, is redeemed.

Samuel grew up saturated in the dance of the faith that led his mother to cry out in pain for the only salvation she could know: a son. . The story of Samuel’s life is answer to Hannah’s faith that “the Lord raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.” Hannah dedicated him to the service of God. She gave back to God what God had given her. For us, as we emerge from the complex web of a virally capitalist Christmas there is a message about receiving much, even much that is unnecessary, and giving much out in response.

Giving back to God is not necessarily or even often a pathway to the cosy happiness that is the stuff of coffee or chocolate ads on the giggle box. It is a journey into the inexpressible joys – and occasional frustrating challenges – of living and breathing in the context of God’s eternities, the infinities of divine love. It is an invitation to participate in a story that is both personal and cosmic, anchored in time and yet endless and far beyond time, far beyond finitude, and far beyond our comprehension.

We, as the author of Colossians sternly charges us, are called to enact that story in our lives. Colossians  is a commission to love, to exemplary standards, even beyond-possible standards of love. It is that because that is what we have received in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. That is what we have celebrated liturgically these past few days: the coming of the eternity-transforming child into our world and our lives. As we were celebrating that we were celebrating the fact that our lives and the lives of those we love are not restricted to mere human experience but are caught up into the impossible eternities and eternal possibilities of God. The author of Colossians challenges us to be a people of exemplary love because that is what will attract others to the Way of the Cross, the inviting life and teachings and death and resurrection of Jesus.

Colossians challenges us to reach beyond vacuous promises of coffee and chocolate ads to a far deeper level of love that will reach through barren heartache and brokenness and then reach out to touch and transform the lives of others. Hannah, trapped in the bitterness of her rival’s taunts, cries in prayer to God. She receives the child Samuel as an answer to that prayer, but the cycle does not end there: she creates of Samuel a life so Godwardly focussed that he repeats the cycle. He having been saturated in the enormity of God’s love and justice turns and becomes himself a conduit of God’s love and justice.

And so the story is perpetuated. We may not see our biological children dancing in the aisles of faith – though some do – but we may still reach out so much, so warmly to the community around us that those we embrace with our welcome and our worship and our hospitality and our justice are touched and embraced by the eternities of divine love. Jesus and Samuel are saturated in love. Our task is to generate a Christ-family so saturated and saturating in love that we act as a conduit to the eternities of God.

How?

As the biblical authors knew well, the answers are not a kind of six-steps to conversion or join-the-dots to salvation or paint-by-numbers to gain eternity, nor are they the denial of needs for conversion or salvation or eternity. Nor are they bickering and backstabbing and complacent laisses-faire or indulgent narcissism and self-righteousness. Too easily we slip into senses of our own importance or greatness or even adequacy, when the witness of Samuel, of Jesus, of Paul and of others is that we are, except in the eyes of God and through the prism of Jesus, unimportant, small, and thoroughly unrighteous. Both Testaments are endlessly supplied with the texts and sayings of the prophets who addressed a self-satisfied people of God. Indeed, when you find Paul and his supporters encouraging his correspondents to “clothe themselves with love” it is almost always precisely because that is conspicuously what they are not doing. These are, as Phylis Tribble reminded us, texts of terror, and only after we embrace that stern critique can they become for us “comfortable words” of encouragement.

Quite simply, we are called to be a community of love. We become that by over and again exposing ourselves to the stern glare of a Creator-Redeemer God who reminds us that we are, in reality, the in-hospitable ones. We are the ones who turn away the desperate Mary, who laugh at the barren Hannah, and who crucify the love-dancing Jesus. We become a community of love, however imperfect and struggling, by over and again losing ourselves in the ecstasy of worship, seizure by the God of awe and majesty and might, an ecstasy of seizure like that of the psalm we recited; by losing narcissistic selfhood in the knowledge that we need Jesus; by losing self-assuredness in the knowledge that it is Jesus who touches and transforms our darkest fears and the sometimes even abhorrent inner recesses of our being, those darknesses that we barely admit to owning. We become a community of love by dancing ecstatically, like the psalmist, dancing with the Christ who picks us out of the gutters of indecency and not-good-enough-ness, then challenges us to invite others to our dance. That same Jesus holds us in warm, life-changing, self-transcending grace: he tells us to surrender the dark places, as well as the judgemental places, the critical places, the sclerotic, hardened places of our lives. He challenges us to become the embodiment of love that only he can make us.

As a cathedral people we are called to be transformed from Hannah the attractive but barren to Hannah the fecund, the fertile. Christ, you know it ain’t easy, sang John Lennon. This can become for us not a profanity, but a prayer, as we again ask Jesus to invade the barren and inhospitable chambers of our hearts and individually and collectively become a place of welcome to the seeking and embrace to the lonely. By the Spirit of Christ we can be enabled to open our hearts and our church to be a place where love is incubated in ridiculous, excessive, unrestricted generosity. That risky, mad generosity is the generosity of spirits invaded by the child who so puzzled Mary, the pondering mother. That mad, risky, generosity is the Way of the Cross to which we are called.

TLBWY

 

Welcoming the illogical Christ

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT
(December 20^th) 2015

 

Readings:

Micah 5:2-5a

Psalm 80:1-7
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-55
 

Every narrator since before Homer created his or her tale to take their audience to a particular perspective or experience. Whether the writer’s task be “mere” entertainment or a much deeper level of instruction, they seek to take us into a new perspective on what Douglas Adams called “life, the universe, and everything.” The gospel authors were no exception. They took thirty or forty years’ worth of remarkable, credible oral story telling about the man Jesus, dared to name him Lord, and dared to tell of his conquest of all darkness and suffering and even death despite his much publicised execution by Roman overlords. They dared to tell of a powerlessness that conquers even the most brutal and manipulative powers. They dared to turn reason upside-down.

Luke’s telling of the Jesus-story was based on his two or three decades of life-transforming encounter with the risen Christ. That Christ had been made known to him by the persuasive presence of the Spirit in evangelism and worship and fellowship and scriptural exploration. At the heart of that experience was the belief that against all appearances God the Creator had turned existence upside-down in Jesus. No longer was the brutal Caesar Lord, but the crucified outsider criminal was Lord. No longer were the proud and together and slick and polished the mighty, but the broken and the hesitant and the Not Very Clever. No longer were the dwellers in crystal palaces powerful, but the dwellers in culverts and bus shelters. No longer were the clever creative aesthetes the conduits of divine goodness, but the bumbling stumblers were.

In this reversal Luke interpreted the whole of Jewish history as a history of expectation, a history of the hope that despite suffering and despair, despite Daesh and a myriad myriad shootings and road traumas and human catastrophes social and personal, despite all appearances, God’s “yes,” God’s promise first whispered to Abraham, would one day be fulfilled, and indeed was fulfilled in Jesus of the manger.

We know next to nothing about Luke, but he was not thick. He knew that Caesar still packed a mighty punch, that poverty was unromantic, that death either by natural causes or at the hands of a brutal state was fiercely unattractive for both the dying and for those who love them. But Luke’s years of worship and fellowship, practising the presence of God by building on his first life-changing encounter with Jesus, his years of breaking open the Hebrew scriptures and finding his Saviour writ large there, these had persuaded him over and again that it was not the silliness of belief in the resurrected Christ but the silliness of the failure to see beyond suffering and death that represented truncation of the human heart and soul. And so he either put into Mary’s mouth, or more likely recorded a poetic vision that had originated with Mary the mother of Jesus, the mystical Mother of God, the words through which the Christ-life must be lived: “my soul doth magnify the Lord … despite everything logical.”

This means though that as Christians we are not called to see the rational and coherent and strategic and sequential, but to see the vast and incomprehensible upside-down blessing of God, the inextinguishable blaze of Christ-light in which human experience of sensibleness and coherence and strategically planned-for and sequentially ordered existence is made inconsequential. He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their hearts. We are called not to see things as they are to us, but as they are to the eternal perspective of God. This is impossible, but aided by the Spirit of the Resurrection we can withstand God-given glances of the eternities.

Centuries ago the great saint John Chrysostom wrote to Christians who were experiencing persecution and death in a brutal reprisal initiated by the Emperor Theodosius. Theodosius had begun by stripping away the privileges of the city Antioch in which those Christians lived, removing therefore the comfortable protections they had relied on. History is slowly repeating itself.

For social chit chat today is increasingly toxic in its assessment of Christianity and its practitioners. Groundswells of murmuring and economic realities coalesce to indicate that one day even western or global north Christians will not enjoy the cosy infrastructural privilege that has been our Linus blanket for centuries. As this happens we might learn from Chrysostom’s sage warning: the honour of a city, Chrysostom warned, is not the favour of the emperor, or the large and beautiful buildings, but the piety of those who worship the God of Jesus Christ.

The beauty and security, the Linus blanket of a church or a cathedral or a diocesan infrastructure will crumble, but it is the prayers of the people, the journeying of the people in the way in which and to which we are baptised: these are the church and the cathedral and the diocese and the collected authenticity of the City of God.

To that we must witness by our mad-crazy actions. Are we a people who welcome and embrace the odd and dysfunctional or the just plain different? I speak not only of our big picture response to the world’s growing migration of refugees, but the far more difficult small picture response of our attitude to a noisy child or an unshowered street person or a person with prison tats in the pew next to us. Do we embrace or do we exclude? I know my first reaction, and I suspect I am not alone in needing to confess my reliance on comfort zones that do not represent the topsy-turvy Magnificat values of Jesus the Christ. Do we embrace and include those who are not from our socio-economic, chronological, ethnic or cultural milieu, or do we subtly (not least by our expectations of high literacy) exclude the lowly and the other, as we sing or read our Magnificat?

Advent is a time of preparation. Sometimes the temptation is even to make preparation distant and abstract, if aesthetically pleasing. Remembering the sage words of R.A.K. Mason’s “On the Swag” at least as much as those of Jesus the already-come and still-coming Christ, or indeed of Mary his mother, we need to ask once more whether our hearts are really prepared to encounter Jesus, to “bring him in, ” to “let the wine be spiced  in the old cove’s night-cap.” Can we pause to meet him in the upside-down, topsy-turvy world he simultaneously inhabits and promises, or are we prisoners of our own paradigms of comfort and propriety, orderliness and niceness?

 

May God help us to be ready for the coming, upside-down Christ of the Magnificat.  

 

The peace of the coming Christ be always with you.

 

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[1] See R.A.K. Mason, “On the Swag”.