SERMON PREACHED AT CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS, NT
SUNDAY, JULY 31st 2011
(PENTECOST 7 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 18)
Readings: Genesis 32.22-31
Ps 17.1-7, 16
Romans 9.1-16
Matthew 14.13-21
I mentioned two weeks ago (and am not expecting you to remember!) that the word ‘calling’ in its theological and liturgical sense, in its preaching sense, is always a word laden with meaning. The same must now be said for its near-synonym, the theologically laden word ‘naming’. Throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptural records the verb ‘to name’ and the process of naming is riddled with divine intention and divine meaning. This has never changed, as we name our children, and perhaps in other contexts too: our churches, our schools, our businesses, even to a lesser extent our pets – are given labels that are saturated with our hopes and expectations, as well as with our own story and life-map.
Even today, if we name our child ‘Jjjayck’, spelling it ‘with three Js and a Y (the Y is silent)’, we make a statement. We make a statement about our individuality, about the child’s individuality, or perhaps about our post-modern nonchalance towards rules and social norms of any form, including those of education and grammar. (I should add that I personally resent the rugby league player Micheal Luck, whose name is deliberately or accidentally but nevertheless legally spelt the way Michael should not be spelt!). Naming is an act of control, however vacuous, exercised over the lives of those subject to us; some children will later opt to change their names, in adulthood, an act of gentle rebellion against something in the dreams and expectations of their parents.
When the narrator of the story of Jacob’s wrestling match creates his tale he plays games with us, his audience. We unfortunately hear the story, most of us, with not only our own life-time or partial life-time of familiarity with the tale and its ending but with perhaps three thousand years of telling and re-telling. That is one of the reasons that there is so much room for creative negotiation with the text, finding the meaning and nuance between the words: in much Jewish reading of scripture the meaning is found not in the words but in the blank, interactive spaces between the words and letters, or even within the shapes of the words and letters. There are boundaries to interpretation, but they are fluid, allowing for change and growth in the Spirit of God. So we are not told that Jacob is wrestling with an angel, only that he is wrestling with a stranger (and every stranger might, after all, be an angel, as the author of Hebrews intriguingly reminds us [Heb. 13.2]). There comes a moment, though, when Jacob unwittingly oversteps his boundaries, inquiring of the stranger a name, an identity, and, in this context, a hard-won familiarity. God, as Moses discovered, does not give out the divine name, does not surrender identity to we who are ultimately mere created beings. We are not God’s boss, no matter how much some forms of Christianity or perhaps even pseudo-Christianity give the impression of turning God into a form of entertainment.
It is this tradition that informed the now less than popular theological insight of the theologian who most profoundly and I believe wisely informed the thought of the twentieth century. It was the timeless insight of Karl Barth that we are not ever in a position to question, much less control the thoughts of the Creator. We may have moments in which it appears to us that we wrestle with God, but on the whole we are not Jacob, and it is unlikely we will prevail. The passage in Jacob’s life in any case is a metaphor of his entire life to this point: Jacob the underhand, Jacob the deceitful, becomes in encounter with God Jacob the chosen bearer of God’s purposes and plans. He is re-named, ‘re-identitied’ accordingly (a name change that may have come as something of a surprise to his ‘two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children’!). Karl Barth’s reclaiming, in the twentieth century, of the absolute authority of God may not, in the twenty-first century, be popular, but it is a fundamentally biblical insight, and fundamental to the integrity of our faith: all things, we might echo Paul in saying, ‘depend not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy’.
If this is the case, are we left with nothing to say or believe when a self-righteous and deluded gunman takes bombs into the heart of his city to create a distraction, and then takes an arsenal of automatic weapons into the heart of a young people’s holiday camp? There is in fact very little anyone can say in the face of injustice and cruelty, whether of humans or of fate (and is there a difference)? When a tsunami shakes the life out of Japanese cities, or tectonic plates turn a New Zealand city into blancmange, or when a lonely gunman turns Port Arthur into a graveyard, then words are utterly inadequate. When aboriginal communities not only in Australia but in the Americas and the Pacific have been decimated and sometimes even eradicated by expansionist histories and collisions with modernity, there are no words to suffice, beyond genuine expressions of sorrow. This is so whether they be the words of an atheist or the words of a Christian, the words of a Richard Dawkins or the words of a Rowan Williams.
Our beliefs and actions though cannot be separated, and it is only to be hoped that in the face of tragedy we will work, always alongside those of other beliefs and no belief, to proclaim light in darkness and Easter in Good Friday. We can believe, too, that our God is big enough to work divine love and compassion through the hands of an atheistic Fred Nile or Stephen Hawkins or Richard Dawkins, whenever they too act with Christlike compassion (for sometimes they will), and do so as easily as God can work through Jacob’s deceitful hands or Paul’s feisty hands or your flawed hands or my flawed hands.
Where then does this leave us? When Jesus saw the suffering of his people, he withdrew. For those who are activists this may seem a strange strategy. At the very least it demonstrates the prioritizing of prayer over action – though not the substitution of prayer for action. It can remind us that we are called to be primarily a people of prayer. Like the tenth leper, who I mentioned two weeks ago (and again don’t yet expect you to remember!!) we are called to be a people who turn back and, in all circumstances, give thanks, in all circumstances acknowledge the presence of God, breathe God’s hope-filled energies into a context before we blaze in with strategies and ideologies.
By being a Eucharistic people, a people of prayer and of connection to God in bread and wine and water we become bearers of a great if unseen, intangible hope in a world in which hopelessness and despair often seem to be final. No one claims this is easy – nor even that the Christ community will be thanked for its words. Nevertheless that is our task, as it was the task of the first disciples, speaking words of resurrection hope in a culture of corruption. The great Feast of Pentecost and the season that follows it should remind us that we do not do this in our own strength, but in the strength of the one who named Israel.
TLBWY
Saturday 30 July 2011
Hell is for Christians Only
SERMON PREACHED AT St. FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, JULY 24th 2011
(PENTECOST 6 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 17)
FIRST SERMON AT St. FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
OF THE REV’D DR MICHAEL GODFREY
Readings: Genesis 29.15-28
Ps 105.1-11
Romans 8.26-39
Matthew 13.44-58
TLBWY
SUNDAY, JULY 24th 2011
(PENTECOST 6 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 17)
FIRST SERMON AT St. FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
OF THE REV’D DR MICHAEL GODFREY
Readings: Genesis 29.15-28
Ps 105.1-11
Romans 8.26-39
Matthew 13.44-58
I may as well let you into the deep dark secrets of your new priest’s life right from our first encounter! It’s around 14 years now since Anne and I bumped into each other in a Canberra car park. I was living and working in Adelaide at the time, while Anne was studying for her Masters in theology in Brisbane. As a result of our encounter in Canberra we began a long-distance and potentially slow-growing relationship – I can tell you that the distance from Adelaide to Brisbane is 3020 kms (not so great a distance to Territorians, but nevertheless a reasonable test of the flames of passion!). In an exchange of letters Anne suggested she might consider marriage in seven years – it was, I emphasize, Anne rather than her then still-alive father, who made the suggestion. My response is possibly not quite repeatable in a liturgical setting, but was a reasonably emphatic indication that I was not Jacob! We married a little under two years later.
I tell you the story not just out of nostalgia. Apart from anything else it reminds us how vastly different the culture is in which we practice our faith to that in which Jacob carried out his own struggle to be obedient to God. Anne was not property, to be bought from her father by seven years of sweat (much less fourteen years). We live and read our texts of faith in a world that has changed since the events they narrate, and we need to be cognizant of those changes every time we seek to interpret them and apply them in our lives. This leaves us balancing precariously on an interpretive knife-edge, and surely serves as a warning that it is only in fear and trembling that we dare to imply that one interpretation, or even one moral code, applies to all people for all time. Reading of the scriptures of our faith is a delicate negotiation and a delicate surrender of ourselves to the Spirit of God.
The cultural sensitivity with which we are called to approach our faith is a minefield. We can read the history of missions in Australia – not just the Territory by any means – or Africa or the Pacific, to name just three regions, to know that many mistakes have been made. We need to know, too, that many wonderful deeds have been done throughout history by those who were bearers of the gospel. There is a tendency in a post-Christendom world to hold the missionaries to account only for their mistakes, not to praise and rejoice with them for their great works of faith. Nevertheless, the tale of Jacob and Leah, and of Jacob and Rachel, is a cautionary one. Much has changed: what in the tale remains the same?
Ultimately our Genesis story is a tale of patience, fidelity and trust. It is the tale of Jacob’s trust both in God and in his own God-given dreams and longings. It is worthwhile to note that the cultural emphasis of Laban is not condemned. His pronouncement ‘This is not done in our country—giving the younger before the firstborn’ is not condemned, even when it is, to all intents and purposes, an act of betrayal. Jacob, the one-time cheat, is growing into a remarkable man. We might well learn about the need to respect the cultures and societies and sub-cultures and even perhaps ‘sub-societies’ into which we are called, and with which we are called to rub shoulders, before we speak words of condemnation that come too easily to our lips.
Though much of our language of the Spirit, what we call pneumatological language, is variously based on Luke’s and John’s gospel-accounts, it is important that we don’t allow ourselves to lose sight of Paul’s experience of the Spirit. The Spirit is to Paul the one who makes known and available to us the work of Christ, and who empowers us to proclaim the events of Christ to the world around us, who empowers us to participate in and benefit from the saving work of God in Christ, past and present. If we extrapolate from Paul’s new covenantal understanding of the Spirit back into the life of Jacob, then we might say that it is the Spirit who empowers Jacob to hold to his dreams against difficult if not impossible odds of pedantry and betrayal. In some churches the Spirit is transformed into a form of entertainment, turning human experience into silliness and triviality. To speak of the Spirit in such a way is to blaspheme: the task, as it were, of the Spirit, is to point to the Cross of Jesus Christ. It is this that Paul is referring to when he refers to the intercessions of the Spirit, helping us in our weakness. The Spirit may heal, the Spirit may intervene even miraculously in human lives where that intervention serves the purposes of the gospel, but the Spirit who ‘intercedes with sighs too deep for words’ is no entertaining plaything.
The Spirit will, however, strengthen us in our human weakness – strengthen us not in any superhuman, superpower form, but in the sense of holding us true to our abilities in the service of the gospel – holding us, as Jacob was held, true to the dreams of God. And where Jesus preaches so-called ‘kingdom-parables’ on the need to retain focus on the values of the reign of God, to retain focus on the priorities of the gospel, it is to the Spirit of God, or, in Trinitarian terms, the Spirit of Jesus that we turn in all our fallibility.
Fallibility will be, naturally, our hallmark. Over and again New Testament writers make it clear that perfection is beyond us – though another task, as it were, of the Spirit is to sandpaper away the rough edges of our fallibility, transforming us into the likeness of the one we serve. Fallibility and hypocrisy are of course vastly different animals. We begin and continue an authentic journey in the Spirit of Christ precisely when we acknowledge our weakness and our need for Christ, helping us to escape our volitions to sin and failure. We venture into hypocrisy when we begin to play games with God, transforming the Spirit into entertainment, or God into a plaything to serve our own self-aggrandizement and need for power or exaltation. At that moment we remove Jesus from the driver’s seat and find ourselves fingered by the warnings of hell fire and damnation, of gnashing teeth, and of the wonderful pithy insight I borrowed last week, from biblical commentator Marcus Barth, that ‘hell is for Christians only’.
For we who are Christ-bearers, then, there are severe yet welcoming warnings in the kingdom parables of Jesus: is he our focus and priority? Fortunately, when most of us in moments of honesty are forced to admit this may not be the case, there is the good news of grace, of the whispered ‘sorry’ that we offer to God, and the invasion of the praying Spirit who invades our life once more.
TLBWY
Friday 22 July 2011
Carried in the Loins of Jacob?
SERMON PREACHED AT CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
SUNDAY, JULY 17th 2011
(PENTECOST 5 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 16)
FIRST SERMON AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
OF THE REV’D DR MICHAEL GODFREY
Readings: Genesis 28.10-19a
Ps 139 1-11, 23-24
Romans 8.12-25
Matthew 13.24-43
There was in the university days of my first exposure to Christianity, and perhaps there still is, an evangelistic line that goes something like: ‘if you died tonight where would you spend eternity?’ Although it is loosely based on some of the Jesus sayings, such as the parable of the barn in Luke 12, it not only misses the point of that parable in particular, but more importantly misses the point that Jesus never, except in the face of religious hypocrisy and greed, threatened hell to or for his audience. Of the eleven times the New Testament records Jesus referring to hell – always a translation of γε΄εννα (gehenna), a reference to the city dump – all are in the context not of the failure to believe but of the double standards of those whose hypocrisy prohibits the tentative and vulnerable beliefs of others.
Such a form of evangelism contrasts darkly with the openness and compassion of Jesus, who, despite referring to himself occasionally (and only in John’s gospel-account) as judge, spends his life not threatening hell but proclaiming God’s inviting love. Indeed one wonderful commentator, Marcus Barth (son of the great twentieth century theologian Karl Barth) once proclaimed, provocatively, that ‘hell is for Christians only’. I will cite him often.
I have no adequate or even trite answer to misguided would-be evangelists who ask me where I would go if I died on any given day, but I suspect that by and large Jesus doesn’t bother with one either. I would rather approach the misguided question in terms of the compassionate and inviting love of the Creator God than with petulant threats of some form of eternal punishment, a doctrine that, although predominant in the history of Christianity, is by and large irrelevant to and absent in the biblical texts that should shape our faith. The language of judgment and of hell in the New Testament is directed at those who burden others around them with weights of fear and oppression, not at those who for whatever reason choose to believe something different to what you or I believe. Hell is for Christians only.
I refer to the New Testament, of course. In the Hebrew Scriptures language of afterlife at all is at best shadowy and unformed, and, as a late development, is often utterly absent. It’s fairly safe to say the Hebrews only developed a refined sense of judgement and of heaven and hell after their exposure to Persian religion, Zoroastrianism in particular, during the Babylonian exile five or six hundred years before Christ. But the language of blessing, central to our Genesis reading, was and remains critical not only to the Hebrew people but to us, their cousins-in-faith: we serve the same God. The Hebrew people were, in the actions of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, called into special relationship with the one creator God. They were in this relationship called to be a distinctive people – the Covenant (and certain operations experienced by their men-folk) was one way of expressing or signifying that relationship. It was not however, as so much Christian preaching implies, a relationship that was designed to leave non-Jews, non-Hebrews, burning in an eternal hell. And, despite occasional outbursts to the contrary, outbursts made always in times of persecution, nor was or is the New Covenant relationship with the Creator God, the new relationship made possible in Christ, supposed to leave those outside the Christ-community burning in some eternal hell, eternally weeping and gnashing teeth while a saved elite sip their celestial nectar and watch on in blesséd joy.
The people of God, old and new, are called to be blessing. This is the meaning of the words spoken to Jacob: all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. By this relationship to the Creator, the people of God, Old and New, are called to be a sign, and by being that sign are blessing to the communities around them. It is with this relationship to God in mind that Jesus calls us to be seed amongst wheat, or elsewhere calls us to be ‘in the world but not of the world’. It is this that is at the basis of Jesus’ response to the ten lepers (another passage I will often cite), healing ten but rejoicing in the thanks of the one who returns to say thank you. We are called, if you like, not to ‘save’ the world, despite what our Dean and Administrator said the other night (not to contradict him, either), but to stand in the world as a reminder that it is saved, as a reminder that Good Friday in all its injustice and sorrow is not the final word on human existence.
Paul, as he sets about the most dispassionate and reasoned of his letters, Romans, is acknowledging this as he writes of ‘creation longing for the revealing of the children of God’. Despite the tragic mishandling of this passage in some hands, this is not about some part of creation finding itself to be eternally separated from divine love, watching as the children of God are in some way whisked away to a blessed eternity while non-believers are left behind. Rather this is about the Good News that all creation, all people, even the nine lepers, are caught up into the unthwartable and eternal purposes of God. To this end we are called to be a people of praise, turning again and again, despite our inadequacy, to the God who invades our lives and makes us whole. We are called by our familiarity with the God we worship and love in Christ, the God who we can approach as ‘Abba’ (beloved parent), to proclaim glory. We are called by our practice of the presence of God, our liturgy especially, but our lives too, to proclaim God’s glory, the news that God’s is the final word to creation, and that that word is not the ‘no’ of mortality and injustice but the ‘yes’ of eternity.
It is this that is your task and mine, the task to which we are called together and in which we are all commissioned by our baptism.
TLBWY
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
SUNDAY, JULY 17th 2011
(PENTECOST 5 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 16)
FIRST SERMON AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
OF THE REV’D DR MICHAEL GODFREY
Readings: Genesis 28.10-19a
Ps 139 1-11, 23-24
Romans 8.12-25
Matthew 13.24-43
There was in the university days of my first exposure to Christianity, and perhaps there still is, an evangelistic line that goes something like: ‘if you died tonight where would you spend eternity?’ Although it is loosely based on some of the Jesus sayings, such as the parable of the barn in Luke 12, it not only misses the point of that parable in particular, but more importantly misses the point that Jesus never, except in the face of religious hypocrisy and greed, threatened hell to or for his audience. Of the eleven times the New Testament records Jesus referring to hell – always a translation of γε΄εννα (gehenna), a reference to the city dump – all are in the context not of the failure to believe but of the double standards of those whose hypocrisy prohibits the tentative and vulnerable beliefs of others.
Such a form of evangelism contrasts darkly with the openness and compassion of Jesus, who, despite referring to himself occasionally (and only in John’s gospel-account) as judge, spends his life not threatening hell but proclaiming God’s inviting love. Indeed one wonderful commentator, Marcus Barth (son of the great twentieth century theologian Karl Barth) once proclaimed, provocatively, that ‘hell is for Christians only’. I will cite him often.
I have no adequate or even trite answer to misguided would-be evangelists who ask me where I would go if I died on any given day, but I suspect that by and large Jesus doesn’t bother with one either. I would rather approach the misguided question in terms of the compassionate and inviting love of the Creator God than with petulant threats of some form of eternal punishment, a doctrine that, although predominant in the history of Christianity, is by and large irrelevant to and absent in the biblical texts that should shape our faith. The language of judgment and of hell in the New Testament is directed at those who burden others around them with weights of fear and oppression, not at those who for whatever reason choose to believe something different to what you or I believe. Hell is for Christians only.
I refer to the New Testament, of course. In the Hebrew Scriptures language of afterlife at all is at best shadowy and unformed, and, as a late development, is often utterly absent. It’s fairly safe to say the Hebrews only developed a refined sense of judgement and of heaven and hell after their exposure to Persian religion, Zoroastrianism in particular, during the Babylonian exile five or six hundred years before Christ. But the language of blessing, central to our Genesis reading, was and remains critical not only to the Hebrew people but to us, their cousins-in-faith: we serve the same God. The Hebrew people were, in the actions of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, called into special relationship with the one creator God. They were in this relationship called to be a distinctive people – the Covenant (and certain operations experienced by their men-folk) was one way of expressing or signifying that relationship. It was not however, as so much Christian preaching implies, a relationship that was designed to leave non-Jews, non-Hebrews, burning in an eternal hell. And, despite occasional outbursts to the contrary, outbursts made always in times of persecution, nor was or is the New Covenant relationship with the Creator God, the new relationship made possible in Christ, supposed to leave those outside the Christ-community burning in some eternal hell, eternally weeping and gnashing teeth while a saved elite sip their celestial nectar and watch on in blesséd joy.
The people of God, old and new, are called to be blessing. This is the meaning of the words spoken to Jacob: all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. By this relationship to the Creator, the people of God, Old and New, are called to be a sign, and by being that sign are blessing to the communities around them. It is with this relationship to God in mind that Jesus calls us to be seed amongst wheat, or elsewhere calls us to be ‘in the world but not of the world’. It is this that is at the basis of Jesus’ response to the ten lepers (another passage I will often cite), healing ten but rejoicing in the thanks of the one who returns to say thank you. We are called, if you like, not to ‘save’ the world, despite what our Dean and Administrator said the other night (not to contradict him, either), but to stand in the world as a reminder that it is saved, as a reminder that Good Friday in all its injustice and sorrow is not the final word on human existence.
Paul, as he sets about the most dispassionate and reasoned of his letters, Romans, is acknowledging this as he writes of ‘creation longing for the revealing of the children of God’. Despite the tragic mishandling of this passage in some hands, this is not about some part of creation finding itself to be eternally separated from divine love, watching as the children of God are in some way whisked away to a blessed eternity while non-believers are left behind. Rather this is about the Good News that all creation, all people, even the nine lepers, are caught up into the unthwartable and eternal purposes of God. To this end we are called to be a people of praise, turning again and again, despite our inadequacy, to the God who invades our lives and makes us whole. We are called by our familiarity with the God we worship and love in Christ, the God who we can approach as ‘Abba’ (beloved parent), to proclaim glory. We are called by our practice of the presence of God, our liturgy especially, but our lives too, to proclaim God’s glory, the news that God’s is the final word to creation, and that that word is not the ‘no’ of mortality and injustice but the ‘yes’ of eternity.
It is this that is your task and mine, the task to which we are called together and in which we are all commissioned by our baptism.
TLBWY
Slaughtering Sons for Jesus?
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
SUNDAY, JUNE 26th 2011
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 13)
FINAL SERMON AT CHRIST CHURCH OF THE REV’D DR MICHAEL GODFREY
Readings: Genesis 22.1-14
Ps 13
Romans 6.12-23
Matthew 10.40-42
One of the great formative passages not only of Judaeo-Christian thought but also of the narratives of post Judaeo-Christian literature is the almost-sacrifice of Isaac. Writers of the late nineteenth century and twentieth century, most notably Sigmund Freud, but reaching back as far as the founder of existentialist philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard, have had a field day with the passage as a narrative of human frailty, anxiety, and psychological vulnerability. One could barely begin to imagine the emotional scarring that the event would have on the young child Isaac, aware enough to recognize the sudden threat to his life represented by his father’s obedience to the voice of God. Enough of us have seen our children and grandchildren give up the narratives of our faith just because it is less exciting than a morning in bed (perhaps I’d better rephrase that!) or a morning of sports or a morning mowing lawns: imagine the excuses we would provide them if our blind devotion to a Higher Power led us to draw a knife and threaten their lives!
It pays then not to read the great formative passages of Judaeo-Christian faith through the eyes of modern or post-modern sociology, psychology, or other humanities and sciences. Perhaps we can plead, in any case, the healing of memories as Isaac and his father make their way down the mountain after the ram is sacrificed. Perhaps, but probably not: I’m not altogether sure I want to play ball with a God who plays too fast with the synapses of my memory banks! On the whole I think we are better off understanding the story as a parable of priority: a brutal and impossible ‘as if’: we are called to live as if we had such trust in God that we would expect a happy ending to an impossible situation. Yet I am only too ready to admit I do not have even a shadow form of such faith: my knife would remain sheathed and I would stay home. God in any case does not ask us to make sacrifice – thank God! – nor to sacrifice others before we sacrifice ourselves (though perhaps one day my children will hearken back, in therapy, to the devastating decisions made by their parents, dragging them from the safety of an established network of friends to an unknown realm and an uncertain future. My oldest daughter does!).
In reality we often need to be reminded that the world of our scriptures is a world vastly different to our own. Even when we read Paul assuring us that ‘the wages of sin is death’ we need a little caution. Our scriptures do link sin, or fallenness, with death within their narratives, from the time of the mythical Eden onwards, but we might also recognize that the cost of cellular structure is decomposition, and that even an object as sinless as a kauri tree – our beloved Tane Mahuta, is mortal. We are, as my guru Bobby put it, ‘stone cold dead as we step outside the womb’, and it may well be that it is misleading in our preaching and evangelism to give the impression either that ‘sin’ is a list of naughty things that we have inevitably done, or that naughty things lead to death: the Christchurch earthquake is not wages for sin. We live in a post-Christian generation that rejected the tenets of our faith at least in part because the idea of a celestial God tallying up our misdoings was somewhat less than attractive as an eternal hope. No: a passage such as Paul’s letter to the Romans needs careful interpretation, though I for one believe Paul was striving towards timeless truths about the need for imperfect humanity to surrender to the reforming, transforming, transcending love of the Creator, the one we encounter through Christ, through the Spirit of Christ, in Bread and Wine and hymn and prayer, in scripture and fellowship-koinōnia and in (but perhaps only after the others), the divine poetry of nature.
Must we, though, take on board some sort of religious dogma at all? The baggage of a God that calls Abraham to impose immeasurable damage on the psyche of his son in the service of faith, or that seems to hand out a death sentence as reward for a few naughty things we may or may not have done (after all, we didn’t eat any fruit in a far off garden) is surely a baggage we can jettison? Modern decades of western society have responded with an overwhelming ‘yes’, and while our patterns of substance abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse and the deepest damaging forms of self-abuse (including workaholism) suggest we are not after all better off, we certainly have rid ourselves of some burdens of oppression – as films such as The Magdalene Sisters, for those who remember it – told us with chilling effect.
Surely the teachings of Jesus are simple? In fact many have suggested, at least since the nineteenth century, that we need to rid ourselves of all the other doctrinal and liturgical baggage and simply get back to that; whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple will receive the reward of the righteous (even that passage has been brutally abused through history by those who saw themselves as wielding the powers of the disciples). A good bit of social service, the establishment of a soup kitchen or some social reform programme: isn’t that enough? Love your neighbour, don’t diddle your taxes, and don’t swear at old ladies … isn’t that the gospel? I don’t need to go to church to be a Christian, after all. Boy Scouts, Rotary, the National Party and the local surf-lifesaving club: aren’t they adequate expressions of goodness, lifestyle equivalents of ‘giving a cup of water’?
Indeed they are, if Christianity is no more than a set of rules. Similarly, what if Christianity is no more than a gaggle of feelings – the re-claiming over and again of peak moments in our lives so that we never come down from the heights, however terrifying, of Abraham’s Mountain, staying up there for ever with our new found ram, getting ourselves baptized and re-baptized literally or metaphorically each time God encounters us in some new life-experience? If that is the case then Christianity is no more than a drug, keeping us on a high, keeping us in a fuzzy and euphoric state of unreality. If Jesus is no more than the key to a good feeling, or a good teacher, then we should join the exodus and play golf Sunday by Sunday.
But, as I hope I hinted last Sunday, and as I hope I have been hinting over and again in our four year journey together, it is neither of these things. Despite my sometimes too-big words, faith is not big words and doctrine, not good feelings and mountain top experiences, nor even good deeds and good living. Faith is surrender to God, the triune God, made known to us in Christ, by the Spirit, the God of mountain top and valley, of birth and death: faith is surrender to receive God through Christ in word and sacrament – always both, and always invaded by God’s Spirit! – and only then to proffer cups of water or financial advice or solace or sermons: faith is the surrender to the God who takes us through the valleys and over the mountains, who never leaves us or forsakes us, and who will, in the end of our times, takes us into the immeasurable joy of divine eternity. Christian faith begins, continues and ends with the acknowledgement that Jesus alone is the Lord by whom humanity enters eternity, and by whom eternity enters humanity. However chilling the Abraham narrative is, it is a magnificent metaphor for faith: faith is surrender into the admission ‘yes Lord, my life and all I love is yours’. We will always fall short of Abraham’s surrender: for that reason we will mutter over and again the plea ‘Yes Lord, I believe: help thou my unbelief’, and stutter our ‘Lord I am not worthy to receive you’ before reaching out our hands to receive the miracle of God’s invasion of our lives. Faith is our yes to God, and God’s ultimate yes to us and all creation.
TLBWY
SUNDAY, JUNE 26th 2011
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 13)
FINAL SERMON AT CHRIST CHURCH OF THE REV’D DR MICHAEL GODFREY
Readings: Genesis 22.1-14
Ps 13
Romans 6.12-23
Matthew 10.40-42
One of the great formative passages not only of Judaeo-Christian thought but also of the narratives of post Judaeo-Christian literature is the almost-sacrifice of Isaac. Writers of the late nineteenth century and twentieth century, most notably Sigmund Freud, but reaching back as far as the founder of existentialist philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard, have had a field day with the passage as a narrative of human frailty, anxiety, and psychological vulnerability. One could barely begin to imagine the emotional scarring that the event would have on the young child Isaac, aware enough to recognize the sudden threat to his life represented by his father’s obedience to the voice of God. Enough of us have seen our children and grandchildren give up the narratives of our faith just because it is less exciting than a morning in bed (perhaps I’d better rephrase that!) or a morning of sports or a morning mowing lawns: imagine the excuses we would provide them if our blind devotion to a Higher Power led us to draw a knife and threaten their lives!
It pays then not to read the great formative passages of Judaeo-Christian faith through the eyes of modern or post-modern sociology, psychology, or other humanities and sciences. Perhaps we can plead, in any case, the healing of memories as Isaac and his father make their way down the mountain after the ram is sacrificed. Perhaps, but probably not: I’m not altogether sure I want to play ball with a God who plays too fast with the synapses of my memory banks! On the whole I think we are better off understanding the story as a parable of priority: a brutal and impossible ‘as if’: we are called to live as if we had such trust in God that we would expect a happy ending to an impossible situation. Yet I am only too ready to admit I do not have even a shadow form of such faith: my knife would remain sheathed and I would stay home. God in any case does not ask us to make sacrifice – thank God! – nor to sacrifice others before we sacrifice ourselves (though perhaps one day my children will hearken back, in therapy, to the devastating decisions made by their parents, dragging them from the safety of an established network of friends to an unknown realm and an uncertain future. My oldest daughter does!).
In reality we often need to be reminded that the world of our scriptures is a world vastly different to our own. Even when we read Paul assuring us that ‘the wages of sin is death’ we need a little caution. Our scriptures do link sin, or fallenness, with death within their narratives, from the time of the mythical Eden onwards, but we might also recognize that the cost of cellular structure is decomposition, and that even an object as sinless as a kauri tree – our beloved Tane Mahuta, is mortal. We are, as my guru Bobby put it, ‘stone cold dead as we step outside the womb’, and it may well be that it is misleading in our preaching and evangelism to give the impression either that ‘sin’ is a list of naughty things that we have inevitably done, or that naughty things lead to death: the Christchurch earthquake is not wages for sin. We live in a post-Christian generation that rejected the tenets of our faith at least in part because the idea of a celestial God tallying up our misdoings was somewhat less than attractive as an eternal hope. No: a passage such as Paul’s letter to the Romans needs careful interpretation, though I for one believe Paul was striving towards timeless truths about the need for imperfect humanity to surrender to the reforming, transforming, transcending love of the Creator, the one we encounter through Christ, through the Spirit of Christ, in Bread and Wine and hymn and prayer, in scripture and fellowship-koinōnia and in (but perhaps only after the others), the divine poetry of nature.
Must we, though, take on board some sort of religious dogma at all? The baggage of a God that calls Abraham to impose immeasurable damage on the psyche of his son in the service of faith, or that seems to hand out a death sentence as reward for a few naughty things we may or may not have done (after all, we didn’t eat any fruit in a far off garden) is surely a baggage we can jettison? Modern decades of western society have responded with an overwhelming ‘yes’, and while our patterns of substance abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse and the deepest damaging forms of self-abuse (including workaholism) suggest we are not after all better off, we certainly have rid ourselves of some burdens of oppression – as films such as The Magdalene Sisters, for those who remember it – told us with chilling effect.
Surely the teachings of Jesus are simple? In fact many have suggested, at least since the nineteenth century, that we need to rid ourselves of all the other doctrinal and liturgical baggage and simply get back to that; whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple will receive the reward of the righteous (even that passage has been brutally abused through history by those who saw themselves as wielding the powers of the disciples). A good bit of social service, the establishment of a soup kitchen or some social reform programme: isn’t that enough? Love your neighbour, don’t diddle your taxes, and don’t swear at old ladies … isn’t that the gospel? I don’t need to go to church to be a Christian, after all. Boy Scouts, Rotary, the National Party and the local surf-lifesaving club: aren’t they adequate expressions of goodness, lifestyle equivalents of ‘giving a cup of water’?
Indeed they are, if Christianity is no more than a set of rules. Similarly, what if Christianity is no more than a gaggle of feelings – the re-claiming over and again of peak moments in our lives so that we never come down from the heights, however terrifying, of Abraham’s Mountain, staying up there for ever with our new found ram, getting ourselves baptized and re-baptized literally or metaphorically each time God encounters us in some new life-experience? If that is the case then Christianity is no more than a drug, keeping us on a high, keeping us in a fuzzy and euphoric state of unreality. If Jesus is no more than the key to a good feeling, or a good teacher, then we should join the exodus and play golf Sunday by Sunday.
But, as I hope I hinted last Sunday, and as I hope I have been hinting over and again in our four year journey together, it is neither of these things. Despite my sometimes too-big words, faith is not big words and doctrine, not good feelings and mountain top experiences, nor even good deeds and good living. Faith is surrender to God, the triune God, made known to us in Christ, by the Spirit, the God of mountain top and valley, of birth and death: faith is surrender to receive God through Christ in word and sacrament – always both, and always invaded by God’s Spirit! – and only then to proffer cups of water or financial advice or solace or sermons: faith is the surrender to the God who takes us through the valleys and over the mountains, who never leaves us or forsakes us, and who will, in the end of our times, takes us into the immeasurable joy of divine eternity. Christian faith begins, continues and ends with the acknowledgement that Jesus alone is the Lord by whom humanity enters eternity, and by whom eternity enters humanity. However chilling the Abraham narrative is, it is a magnificent metaphor for faith: faith is surrender into the admission ‘yes Lord, my life and all I love is yours’. We will always fall short of Abraham’s surrender: for that reason we will mutter over and again the plea ‘Yes Lord, I believe: help thou my unbelief’, and stutter our ‘Lord I am not worthy to receive you’ before reaching out our hands to receive the miracle of God’s invasion of our lives. Faith is our yes to God, and God’s ultimate yes to us and all creation.
TLBWY
Saturday 16 July 2011
Without Which Not
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
SUNDAY, JUNE 19th 2011
(TRINITY SUNDAY)
Readings: Genesis 1.1-2.4a
Ps 8
2 Corinthians 13.1-11
Matthew 28.16-23
I remember too clearly the abysmal attempts of those who produced sermons in the chapels of my youth, laboriously producing inadequate and misleading images of the Trinity to instruct their less than impressed young audiences. I remember only too clearly the ubiquitous blue or red carpets, imprinted with the fleur de lis, representing some imagined form of the trinity – or perhaps an obsession with the Ace of Clubs – prevalent in churches I suspect from Reykjavik to Invercargill. I remember learned dissertations on water, ice and steam – probably one of the more heretical representations of the Trinity – or visual demonstrations of the relationship between a projector light-bulb, the stream of light emanating from it, and the area enlightened by that light-stream as it terminated on a wall or paper or some other illuminated surface.
The illustrations were as creative as they were misguided: there is no illustration of the Trinity. The Trinity is divine, unique, and utterly, as the so-called Creed of Athanasius (which is neither a creed nor by Athanasius, though it is deeply profound, nevertheless) put it, utterly incomprehensible. Like the doctrines of Ascension and Pentecost that we have observed in past weeks (doctrines which pave the way in both the liturgical year and in the language of faith), the doctrine of the trinity is not a mathematical formula to be applied to problem solving, nor a complex puzzle to be solved, but a mystery before which to kneel in adoration. It is not for purposes of random routine that I cross myself at the name of the Triune God, but because an act of worship is the only appropriate response to a mystery that can never be unravelled, and whose extent is ultimately encountered only in the stark brutal simplicity of the Cross of Christ.
Language will fail – even art will fail – in attempts to describe the Trinity because language and indeed all human understanding is necessarily finite. When we master the language of the trinity we will have usurped the place of God – and, as people like to say, that’s not going to happen. The attempts of humankind to build a tower to the heavens to usurp the place of God, as told in Genesis after our creation story, are a timeless parable. To find the origins of the universe, to define the source of energy that began the magnificence of creation: these, even these, though impossible to the finite processes of your brains and mine, are child’s play alongside the incomprehensibility of a Creator God who is three in one.
Nevertheless the language of trinity began to invade the very first utterances of the Christian community. The linking in sentence structures, linking in prayer and in blessing of the words God, father, son and spirit, was an unavoidable outworking of the first Christians’ experience of encountering the Creator and redeemer of the universe in the person and story of of Jesus Christ, inexplicably made known and present to them in worship, in fellowship, and in the exploration of the Hebrew scriptures and later of the writings that came to be known as the New Testament Christian scriptures.
So let us not look for cerebral explanations or visual demonstrations of this most central of Christian doctrines, this doctrine that is a sine qua non of Christian belief. A sine qua non? A ‘without which not’: we may, as Anne reflected in her Ascension sermon, believe many things by jettisoning this doctrine, but we will not believe in Christianity or even in Christ. This belief is that which sets more than any others the boundaries of collective Christian belief. But it is not about cerebral, rational belief. It is about receiving and hanging tenaciously to the belief that God was in Christ, and that Christ is made known to us in our own lives even yesterday and today and tomorrow. Above all, perhaps, it is about knowing that God is love.
This may appear to be a sudden shift of thought. But while we may never comprehend the trinity, we can nevertheless experience God’s love, God’s essence (for God is love) in triune form. Out of God’s creativity God creates beauty and vastness and complexity – and creates humanity with which to share and enjoy it. We can sit as it were at the feet of the fact of creation and its source the Creator and marvel at the complexity of the labyrinthine connections of the universe, the vast intricate intersections of fluke and chance that have brought you and me into being, sustained our being, and will continue to sustain the being of all the vast web of intricacy that is yet to come. We can marvel at the complexity of the universe and the delicacy of the human eye that beholds some infinitely small aspect of it, we can marvel at the inexplicability of the human capacity for love – while acknowledging our too often revealed capacity for hatred – and gasp with the psalmist ‘what is a human being, that you, Creator God, care about us’. For as long as we have life and love life – and that is of course not a universal experience – we can whisper our halle, halle, halle to the Creator whose acts of sharing love breathe creation into being.
We might note also, though, that life is not always as it should be. Our lives, no matter how carefully we live them, will sometimes experience darkness, and many lives appear to experience inexplicable paroxysms of darkness. Sometimes, of course, these are self-inflicted, sometimes they are inflicted by others, sometimes the darknesses are afflicted by nature. No life is devoid of darkness, and in some lives – those for example caught in the hells of sexual abuse, substance abuse, or the economic and military greed that produces the world’s refugee camps and killing fields – in some lives the darkness seems unconquered. Yet there are enough testimonies in history to remind us that even in some of humanity’s deepest darknesses sparks of love have been fired, and Good Fridays – individually or even en masse – have turned into Easter hope. We can give thanks from the depths of our being for the experience of the Trinitarian God made known to us in the person of Jesus Christ, entering into human experience, and transforming even the heart-cry ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me’ into the hope of resurrection. We can note, too, with awe the surprising claim that within decades of his death his followers were worshipping the crucified criminal carpenter, naming him in the same breath as the Creator, and claiming not only that he had been raised from death, but that, even at the beginning of Creation, he had been present as the command, the Logos of God, creating a universe to share with us.
In the same breath – and that word breath is the same word as spirit – we can give thanks that the touching, transforming, healing love of the God-revealing man of Nazareth is not restricted to a short passage of three years in an obscure region two thousand years ago. From the first breathings of God that massaged order into chaos, that massaged being into the void of non-being, and that manufactured you and me and our loved ones into our infinitesimally yet God-breathed niches in cosmic history, from those first stirrings of divine breath to the present and on to an infinite future, there has been a way, a means, a method by which all that we need to know of God is available to us. God, the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the always-available even to us throughout space and time and eternity; incomprehensible God, God: mystery to be worshipped and adored, not understood.
TLBWY
SUNDAY, JUNE 19th 2011
(TRINITY SUNDAY)
Readings: Genesis 1.1-2.4a
Ps 8
2 Corinthians 13.1-11
Matthew 28.16-23
I remember too clearly the abysmal attempts of those who produced sermons in the chapels of my youth, laboriously producing inadequate and misleading images of the Trinity to instruct their less than impressed young audiences. I remember only too clearly the ubiquitous blue or red carpets, imprinted with the fleur de lis, representing some imagined form of the trinity – or perhaps an obsession with the Ace of Clubs – prevalent in churches I suspect from Reykjavik to Invercargill. I remember learned dissertations on water, ice and steam – probably one of the more heretical representations of the Trinity – or visual demonstrations of the relationship between a projector light-bulb, the stream of light emanating from it, and the area enlightened by that light-stream as it terminated on a wall or paper or some other illuminated surface.
The illustrations were as creative as they were misguided: there is no illustration of the Trinity. The Trinity is divine, unique, and utterly, as the so-called Creed of Athanasius (which is neither a creed nor by Athanasius, though it is deeply profound, nevertheless) put it, utterly incomprehensible. Like the doctrines of Ascension and Pentecost that we have observed in past weeks (doctrines which pave the way in both the liturgical year and in the language of faith), the doctrine of the trinity is not a mathematical formula to be applied to problem solving, nor a complex puzzle to be solved, but a mystery before which to kneel in adoration. It is not for purposes of random routine that I cross myself at the name of the Triune God, but because an act of worship is the only appropriate response to a mystery that can never be unravelled, and whose extent is ultimately encountered only in the stark brutal simplicity of the Cross of Christ.
Language will fail – even art will fail – in attempts to describe the Trinity because language and indeed all human understanding is necessarily finite. When we master the language of the trinity we will have usurped the place of God – and, as people like to say, that’s not going to happen. The attempts of humankind to build a tower to the heavens to usurp the place of God, as told in Genesis after our creation story, are a timeless parable. To find the origins of the universe, to define the source of energy that began the magnificence of creation: these, even these, though impossible to the finite processes of your brains and mine, are child’s play alongside the incomprehensibility of a Creator God who is three in one.
Nevertheless the language of trinity began to invade the very first utterances of the Christian community. The linking in sentence structures, linking in prayer and in blessing of the words God, father, son and spirit, was an unavoidable outworking of the first Christians’ experience of encountering the Creator and redeemer of the universe in the person and story of of Jesus Christ, inexplicably made known and present to them in worship, in fellowship, and in the exploration of the Hebrew scriptures and later of the writings that came to be known as the New Testament Christian scriptures.
So let us not look for cerebral explanations or visual demonstrations of this most central of Christian doctrines, this doctrine that is a sine qua non of Christian belief. A sine qua non? A ‘without which not’: we may, as Anne reflected in her Ascension sermon, believe many things by jettisoning this doctrine, but we will not believe in Christianity or even in Christ. This belief is that which sets more than any others the boundaries of collective Christian belief. But it is not about cerebral, rational belief. It is about receiving and hanging tenaciously to the belief that God was in Christ, and that Christ is made known to us in our own lives even yesterday and today and tomorrow. Above all, perhaps, it is about knowing that God is love.
This may appear to be a sudden shift of thought. But while we may never comprehend the trinity, we can nevertheless experience God’s love, God’s essence (for God is love) in triune form. Out of God’s creativity God creates beauty and vastness and complexity – and creates humanity with which to share and enjoy it. We can sit as it were at the feet of the fact of creation and its source the Creator and marvel at the complexity of the labyrinthine connections of the universe, the vast intricate intersections of fluke and chance that have brought you and me into being, sustained our being, and will continue to sustain the being of all the vast web of intricacy that is yet to come. We can marvel at the complexity of the universe and the delicacy of the human eye that beholds some infinitely small aspect of it, we can marvel at the inexplicability of the human capacity for love – while acknowledging our too often revealed capacity for hatred – and gasp with the psalmist ‘what is a human being, that you, Creator God, care about us’. For as long as we have life and love life – and that is of course not a universal experience – we can whisper our halle, halle, halle to the Creator whose acts of sharing love breathe creation into being.
We might note also, though, that life is not always as it should be. Our lives, no matter how carefully we live them, will sometimes experience darkness, and many lives appear to experience inexplicable paroxysms of darkness. Sometimes, of course, these are self-inflicted, sometimes they are inflicted by others, sometimes the darknesses are afflicted by nature. No life is devoid of darkness, and in some lives – those for example caught in the hells of sexual abuse, substance abuse, or the economic and military greed that produces the world’s refugee camps and killing fields – in some lives the darkness seems unconquered. Yet there are enough testimonies in history to remind us that even in some of humanity’s deepest darknesses sparks of love have been fired, and Good Fridays – individually or even en masse – have turned into Easter hope. We can give thanks from the depths of our being for the experience of the Trinitarian God made known to us in the person of Jesus Christ, entering into human experience, and transforming even the heart-cry ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me’ into the hope of resurrection. We can note, too, with awe the surprising claim that within decades of his death his followers were worshipping the crucified criminal carpenter, naming him in the same breath as the Creator, and claiming not only that he had been raised from death, but that, even at the beginning of Creation, he had been present as the command, the Logos of God, creating a universe to share with us.
In the same breath – and that word breath is the same word as spirit – we can give thanks that the touching, transforming, healing love of the God-revealing man of Nazareth is not restricted to a short passage of three years in an obscure region two thousand years ago. From the first breathings of God that massaged order into chaos, that massaged being into the void of non-being, and that manufactured you and me and our loved ones into our infinitesimally yet God-breathed niches in cosmic history, from those first stirrings of divine breath to the present and on to an infinite future, there has been a way, a means, a method by which all that we need to know of God is available to us. God, the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the always-available even to us throughout space and time and eternity; incomprehensible God, God: mystery to be worshipped and adored, not understood.
TLBWY
Friday 15 July 2011
God's Hongi
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
SUNDAY, JUNE 12th 2011
(DAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: Numbers 11.16-30
(For the psalm: James K. Baxter, "Song to the Holy Spirit")
1 Corinthians 12.3-13
John 20.19-23
In the wind-down – or is it perhaps the final crescendo? – of John’s gospel-telling the Risen Christ carries out a number of actions and conversations that are of no small significance to the mission and self-understanding of the people of God. In these verses, chapters 20 and 21, we are given example after example of the ways we might embrace the Good News of resurrection and act upon it in our own world, how it might alter our beliefs and actions in the world in which we as John’s audience are called to exist and do mission. These scenes and verses are effectively the flick pass from the half-back of faith, and it is up to us to decide how to use the ball we are fed.
In simple actions Jesus, and John his faithful recorder and interpreter, tell us much. The greeting of peace that Jesus shared – suddenly and miraculously entering the room where the disciples were huddled in fear and uncertainty – is no casual greeting. It is, of course, the greeting we in turn share in the liturgies of our faith when we exchange the peace, and, as I have said in the context of that rite it is not mere greeting but an enactment of the birth of God’s eternity. It is liturgically, as I have said before, not ‘hello, how’s the mokopuna [grandchildren]?’, but ‘may God’s eternity be foreknown now and experienced eternally in your life’. It is scripturally not a casual ‘hi, guys, I’m back’ from Jesus, but: ‘may eternity begin now, in your life, drawing you into the future that is inescapably imprinted with the “yes” of God the Creator’. It is of course an echo of that first creative hongi* of God bestowed on Adam in the Garden. God the Father’s hongi of Adam was the birthing, the out-breathing of creation, the bestowing of wairua or life-force. God the Son’s hongi of the frightened disciples is bestowal, out-breathing of the energies of eternity, the new creation, drawing us forward into its dynamic for-ever-ness.
The breath of God is never stale, never static. Adam without wairua [spirit/breath] is no more than meaningless sinew, bone and corpuscle. The disciples without the new-yet-eternal wairua-experience are mere frightened automatons, broken and defeated. The peace Jesus bestows is that which Paul elsewhere calls ‘peace … beyond comprehension.’ Perhaps you have, as I have, experienced something life it from time to time: I have spoken before of the overwhelming peace I once experienced on a beach on the Awhitu Peninsular, or the overwhelming peace I have sometimes experienced from time to time in the Australian outback. There have been, too, moments of overpowering peace in liturgy, not least when I have sometimes been transported Godwards here at Christ Church by the mana of Richard Gillard’s Lord’s Prayer setting, or for example the powerful peace I once experienced at a Taizé service conducted by Brother Ghislain in Alice Springs (or again at Ghislain’s leadership of liturgy on a beach in Perth), or as I heard a cantor’s voice rise up into the dome of St. Paul’s in London a decade ago.
Those moments, though, while they are a gift of God, are no more than dross if they do not lead us to practice not only the peace that is the absence of strife, but the peace that is the presence of justice and of hope. Peace of the kind breathed by Christ in the disciples’ locked room is never merely experiential and static, but compelling, leading us to action that proclaims God’s Reign in the world in which we are called to minister, in which you and I alike are called to be priests and prophets.
Priests and prophets? The Old Testament mantle of those roles, indeed the entire priestly and prophetic role of the ancient people of God, called to be a sign to the nations around them and us, descends on the disciples and their successors in the locked room, as Jesus breathes on them. They could of course remain in the locked room, but that is not a gospel action: the gospel is an imperative, catapulting us outwards to proclaim resurrection hope and gospel justice. As Jesus gives his hongi to the disciples he offers peace, he offers nurture, and he offers the energies of God, for the Wairua Tapu [Holy Spirit] is never static or self-centred.
Yet the final words of this scene are enigmatic: what are these words of forgiveness doing here? They were often taken in the mediaeval church to be as if words spoken to the priests – the presbyter-priests or ordained priests – about their power to absolve or withhold absolution in sacramental and pastoral ministry. They became obscenely a message of power imbalance, always a distortion of the gospel of the powerlessness of the Cross. It unfortunately was a destructive distortion – except insofar as we are all priests, participating in the ἱεράτευμα (priesthood) of Christ, with the power to forgive and absolve, or to withhold forgiveness and absolution. We cannot proclaim the eternal Reign and justice of God if we practice unforgiveness – the kingdom parable of the unforgiving servant makes that abundantly and unambiguously clear. We can harbour resentments, or we can get on with bearing Christ and proclaiming him and his cycles of forgiveness and reconciliation. We are called to be proclaiming and enacting those cycles to a world that prefers unforgiveness and revenge, or at best disinterest and amnesia. Presbyter-priests should by their liturgical actions remind us all that the power of hope is in our hands: it is up to us to decide whether we’ll stay in a locked room, frightened and trapped in myopia, or whether we’ll allow ourselves to break out as agents of God’s Pentecostal Reign.
TLBWY
*The hongi is the traditional touching of noses in Maori greeting, by which the two participants effectively breathe one another's life force.
SUNDAY, JUNE 12th 2011
(DAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: Numbers 11.16-30
(For the psalm: James K. Baxter, "Song to the Holy Spirit")
1 Corinthians 12.3-13
John 20.19-23
In the wind-down – or is it perhaps the final crescendo? – of John’s gospel-telling the Risen Christ carries out a number of actions and conversations that are of no small significance to the mission and self-understanding of the people of God. In these verses, chapters 20 and 21, we are given example after example of the ways we might embrace the Good News of resurrection and act upon it in our own world, how it might alter our beliefs and actions in the world in which we as John’s audience are called to exist and do mission. These scenes and verses are effectively the flick pass from the half-back of faith, and it is up to us to decide how to use the ball we are fed.
In simple actions Jesus, and John his faithful recorder and interpreter, tell us much. The greeting of peace that Jesus shared – suddenly and miraculously entering the room where the disciples were huddled in fear and uncertainty – is no casual greeting. It is, of course, the greeting we in turn share in the liturgies of our faith when we exchange the peace, and, as I have said in the context of that rite it is not mere greeting but an enactment of the birth of God’s eternity. It is liturgically, as I have said before, not ‘hello, how’s the mokopuna [grandchildren]?’, but ‘may God’s eternity be foreknown now and experienced eternally in your life’. It is scripturally not a casual ‘hi, guys, I’m back’ from Jesus, but: ‘may eternity begin now, in your life, drawing you into the future that is inescapably imprinted with the “yes” of God the Creator’. It is of course an echo of that first creative hongi* of God bestowed on Adam in the Garden. God the Father’s hongi of Adam was the birthing, the out-breathing of creation, the bestowing of wairua or life-force. God the Son’s hongi of the frightened disciples is bestowal, out-breathing of the energies of eternity, the new creation, drawing us forward into its dynamic for-ever-ness.
The breath of God is never stale, never static. Adam without wairua [spirit/breath] is no more than meaningless sinew, bone and corpuscle. The disciples without the new-yet-eternal wairua-experience are mere frightened automatons, broken and defeated. The peace Jesus bestows is that which Paul elsewhere calls ‘peace … beyond comprehension.’ Perhaps you have, as I have, experienced something life it from time to time: I have spoken before of the overwhelming peace I once experienced on a beach on the Awhitu Peninsular, or the overwhelming peace I have sometimes experienced from time to time in the Australian outback. There have been, too, moments of overpowering peace in liturgy, not least when I have sometimes been transported Godwards here at Christ Church by the mana of Richard Gillard’s Lord’s Prayer setting, or for example the powerful peace I once experienced at a Taizé service conducted by Brother Ghislain in Alice Springs (or again at Ghislain’s leadership of liturgy on a beach in Perth), or as I heard a cantor’s voice rise up into the dome of St. Paul’s in London a decade ago.
Those moments, though, while they are a gift of God, are no more than dross if they do not lead us to practice not only the peace that is the absence of strife, but the peace that is the presence of justice and of hope. Peace of the kind breathed by Christ in the disciples’ locked room is never merely experiential and static, but compelling, leading us to action that proclaims God’s Reign in the world in which we are called to minister, in which you and I alike are called to be priests and prophets.
Priests and prophets? The Old Testament mantle of those roles, indeed the entire priestly and prophetic role of the ancient people of God, called to be a sign to the nations around them and us, descends on the disciples and their successors in the locked room, as Jesus breathes on them. They could of course remain in the locked room, but that is not a gospel action: the gospel is an imperative, catapulting us outwards to proclaim resurrection hope and gospel justice. As Jesus gives his hongi to the disciples he offers peace, he offers nurture, and he offers the energies of God, for the Wairua Tapu [Holy Spirit] is never static or self-centred.
Yet the final words of this scene are enigmatic: what are these words of forgiveness doing here? They were often taken in the mediaeval church to be as if words spoken to the priests – the presbyter-priests or ordained priests – about their power to absolve or withhold absolution in sacramental and pastoral ministry. They became obscenely a message of power imbalance, always a distortion of the gospel of the powerlessness of the Cross. It unfortunately was a destructive distortion – except insofar as we are all priests, participating in the ἱεράτευμα (priesthood) of Christ, with the power to forgive and absolve, or to withhold forgiveness and absolution. We cannot proclaim the eternal Reign and justice of God if we practice unforgiveness – the kingdom parable of the unforgiving servant makes that abundantly and unambiguously clear. We can harbour resentments, or we can get on with bearing Christ and proclaiming him and his cycles of forgiveness and reconciliation. We are called to be proclaiming and enacting those cycles to a world that prefers unforgiveness and revenge, or at best disinterest and amnesia. Presbyter-priests should by their liturgical actions remind us all that the power of hope is in our hands: it is up to us to decide whether we’ll stay in a locked room, frightened and trapped in myopia, or whether we’ll allow ourselves to break out as agents of God’s Pentecostal Reign.
TLBWY
*The hongi is the traditional touching of noses in Maori greeting, by which the two participants effectively breathe one another's life force.
Monday 11 July 2011
Hanging Sandals
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
SUNDAY, JUNE 5th 2011
(SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER, SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION)
Readings:
Acts 1.6-14
Ps 68. 1-10, 32-55
1 Peter 4.12-14, 5.6-11
John 17.1-11
As Anne mentioned in her Ascension Day sermon last week there is both embarrassment and humour in traditional (more or less) Christian circles with regards to the doctrine of the ascension of Jesus Christ. There have been many jests about the appropriate symbol for this season being a pair of sandals hanging from a cotton wool cloud – perhaps had the past week not been so debilitatingly frenetic I might have replaced our butterflies with sandals collected from op shops around the town! But – and in her reference to the levitating sandals Anne was making a serious point – there is a real sense in which the doctrine of ascension is one of those stumbling blocks that many Christian theologians would rather jettison in order to make our faith more so-called ‘accessible’, more so-called ‘relevant’, to the purported person in the street.
The doctrine of the ascension of Jesus Christ, like the doctrine of the resurrection, and even, dare I say it, like the doctrine of the virgin birth, are fundamental corollaries of the doctrine of the incarnation, and that doctrine is a fundamental corollary of the doctrine of the trinity. Remove them and we may have a comprehensible faith, but we do not have Christianity. We may approach Islam, we may approach Judaism – we may approach many other variants of monotheism, but we do not have Christianity.
So what is this moment we observed last Thursday, which informs our transitional thoughts today, as we strive towards the celebration of the coming of God’s Pentecostal Spirit? What we do not have, and do not have in any of the Christological doctrines I have just referred to, is a description of the mechanics of how God achieved divine aims. In exactly the same way the doctrine of creation is misunderstood if it is reduced to a mere mechanical six or seven day process, so the great Christological moments are rendered impotent and banal if we see them as merely mechanical descriptions of process. This of course is easy for me, the rigorous non-scientist, to say. If I may draw comparison from the other great love of my life that parallels my faith, I have no understanding whatsoever of the workings of a motor vehicle. Few things give me more pleasure than flinging a car – preferably manual so the driving pleasures are not depleted! – through the variants of its potential, hour after hour if possible (always, I hasten to add, within the boundaries of legal and sensible responsibility). I love driving, and take pride in it. I have absolutely no idea of the mechanics of the process, either with regards to the internal combustion engine or other centrifugal and centripetal forces that allow the vehicle to handle as it does.
Of course the parallel breaks down. Many of you, and many others even more so, totally understand the principles of mechanics and physics that make automotive transport possible. No one, not one person, has a copyright on the recesses of divine method. The ancient adage ‘no man looks on my face and lives’ still to this extent applies: we cannot claim, like some modern variant of the arrogant builders of the Tower of Babel, to usurp the mind of God. The workings of the Trinity are God’s business, and must remain so. They are a mystery before which we can kneel in adoration, but they are not a celestial carburettor to be dismantled or a piston shaft to be re-bored.
What then are we left with when we kneel at the throne of this mysterious God and this bewildering moment on God’s relations with us? Not, we are suggesting, merely sandals hanging from the clouds. Nor are we left with a departed God, deus absconditus. Jesus in John’s gospel-telling has been at pains to make clear to us that we are not, no matter what befalls the Christ, going to be left bereft in a Godless universe. We can of course choose to disregard the promise of Jesus, ‘lo I am with you always’, just as we can choose to drive our vehicle with the handbrake on. It is not, however, given the circumstances with which we and our forebears have been presented, the most sensible choice.
There is a theological college chapel in Melbourne – not my alma mater (though that of my future bishop!) – that has, emblazoned across the front of what they would call the communion table, the words ‘he is not here, he is risen’. They are of course words from the resurrection scene, and not directly related to the ascension. Except that John makes little separation between the two events, and even Luke would allow that they are a part of the one magnificent supernatural, divine purpose: the conquest of darkness and mortality by the incarnation of God in Christ. The theological college in question was attempting in its chapel architecture to make a doctrinal point: doctrines of the presence of Christ in the elements of communion were abhorrent to the evangelical founders of that college and to their Reformer forebears. They were however powerfully wrong: he is there – and here – precisely because he is risen and ascended.
This celebration of Ascensiontide, and the event it points to, is the liberation and the release of the Christ event – Jesus Christ and all that he has achieved – so that it is effective throughout all time and space, and no longer limited to a huddle of bewildered rag and tag itinerants from first century Palestine. He is here, yet he is risen. He is here in fellowship, in scripture, in elements of bread, wine, and (as we shall shortly observe) water. He is here. He is not visible – in part because, as the poet R.S. Thomas put it, he is always moving just beyond our sight, leading us into his future. He is not visible, too, because we are too limited in our comprehension to grasp the dimension into which he has entered. It is though the dimension of eternity to which you and I, too are invited, and of which we receive foretaste in word, sacrament and fellowship.
Next week we will celebrate Pentecost. In that celebration we acknowledge and rejoice in the coming of the one who makes all this possible, the liberating Pentecostal Spirit, third person of the Trinity. For now we simply acknowledge that it is in the departure from our sight – or from our forebears’ sight – that our experience of God is made possible, even here and now, in the mysterious purposes of God.
TLBWY
SUNDAY, JUNE 5th 2011
(SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER, SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION)
Readings:
Acts 1.6-14
Ps 68. 1-10, 32-55
1 Peter 4.12-14, 5.6-11
John 17.1-11
As Anne mentioned in her Ascension Day sermon last week there is both embarrassment and humour in traditional (more or less) Christian circles with regards to the doctrine of the ascension of Jesus Christ. There have been many jests about the appropriate symbol for this season being a pair of sandals hanging from a cotton wool cloud – perhaps had the past week not been so debilitatingly frenetic I might have replaced our butterflies with sandals collected from op shops around the town! But – and in her reference to the levitating sandals Anne was making a serious point – there is a real sense in which the doctrine of ascension is one of those stumbling blocks that many Christian theologians would rather jettison in order to make our faith more so-called ‘accessible’, more so-called ‘relevant’, to the purported person in the street.
The doctrine of the ascension of Jesus Christ, like the doctrine of the resurrection, and even, dare I say it, like the doctrine of the virgin birth, are fundamental corollaries of the doctrine of the incarnation, and that doctrine is a fundamental corollary of the doctrine of the trinity. Remove them and we may have a comprehensible faith, but we do not have Christianity. We may approach Islam, we may approach Judaism – we may approach many other variants of monotheism, but we do not have Christianity.
So what is this moment we observed last Thursday, which informs our transitional thoughts today, as we strive towards the celebration of the coming of God’s Pentecostal Spirit? What we do not have, and do not have in any of the Christological doctrines I have just referred to, is a description of the mechanics of how God achieved divine aims. In exactly the same way the doctrine of creation is misunderstood if it is reduced to a mere mechanical six or seven day process, so the great Christological moments are rendered impotent and banal if we see them as merely mechanical descriptions of process. This of course is easy for me, the rigorous non-scientist, to say. If I may draw comparison from the other great love of my life that parallels my faith, I have no understanding whatsoever of the workings of a motor vehicle. Few things give me more pleasure than flinging a car – preferably manual so the driving pleasures are not depleted! – through the variants of its potential, hour after hour if possible (always, I hasten to add, within the boundaries of legal and sensible responsibility). I love driving, and take pride in it. I have absolutely no idea of the mechanics of the process, either with regards to the internal combustion engine or other centrifugal and centripetal forces that allow the vehicle to handle as it does.
Of course the parallel breaks down. Many of you, and many others even more so, totally understand the principles of mechanics and physics that make automotive transport possible. No one, not one person, has a copyright on the recesses of divine method. The ancient adage ‘no man looks on my face and lives’ still to this extent applies: we cannot claim, like some modern variant of the arrogant builders of the Tower of Babel, to usurp the mind of God. The workings of the Trinity are God’s business, and must remain so. They are a mystery before which we can kneel in adoration, but they are not a celestial carburettor to be dismantled or a piston shaft to be re-bored.
What then are we left with when we kneel at the throne of this mysterious God and this bewildering moment on God’s relations with us? Not, we are suggesting, merely sandals hanging from the clouds. Nor are we left with a departed God, deus absconditus. Jesus in John’s gospel-telling has been at pains to make clear to us that we are not, no matter what befalls the Christ, going to be left bereft in a Godless universe. We can of course choose to disregard the promise of Jesus, ‘lo I am with you always’, just as we can choose to drive our vehicle with the handbrake on. It is not, however, given the circumstances with which we and our forebears have been presented, the most sensible choice.
There is a theological college chapel in Melbourne – not my alma mater (though that of my future bishop!) – that has, emblazoned across the front of what they would call the communion table, the words ‘he is not here, he is risen’. They are of course words from the resurrection scene, and not directly related to the ascension. Except that John makes little separation between the two events, and even Luke would allow that they are a part of the one magnificent supernatural, divine purpose: the conquest of darkness and mortality by the incarnation of God in Christ. The theological college in question was attempting in its chapel architecture to make a doctrinal point: doctrines of the presence of Christ in the elements of communion were abhorrent to the evangelical founders of that college and to their Reformer forebears. They were however powerfully wrong: he is there – and here – precisely because he is risen and ascended.
This celebration of Ascensiontide, and the event it points to, is the liberation and the release of the Christ event – Jesus Christ and all that he has achieved – so that it is effective throughout all time and space, and no longer limited to a huddle of bewildered rag and tag itinerants from first century Palestine. He is here, yet he is risen. He is here in fellowship, in scripture, in elements of bread, wine, and (as we shall shortly observe) water. He is here. He is not visible – in part because, as the poet R.S. Thomas put it, he is always moving just beyond our sight, leading us into his future. He is not visible, too, because we are too limited in our comprehension to grasp the dimension into which he has entered. It is though the dimension of eternity to which you and I, too are invited, and of which we receive foretaste in word, sacrament and fellowship.
Next week we will celebrate Pentecost. In that celebration we acknowledge and rejoice in the coming of the one who makes all this possible, the liberating Pentecostal Spirit, third person of the Trinity. For now we simply acknowledge that it is in the departure from our sight – or from our forebears’ sight – that our experience of God is made possible, even here and now, in the mysterious purposes of God.
TLBWY
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