"Rise Against": punk rock, Jeremiah and 110 kilo wrestlers

SERMONETTE PREACHED AT St JOHN’S CATHEDRAL, NAPIER

EVENSONG (led by the children’s choir)
20^th MARCH 2014

 

Readings:

Jeremiah 9.12-24

John 7.1-13

Jeremiah was such a miserable dude that for some decades the word “jeremiah” was used to describe someone who was a party pooper, ruining every good get-together … you know, the person who when you are telling ghost stories around the camp fire comes along and says “there’s no such thing as ghosts and go to bed anyway or I’ll tell … et cetera.

As it happens there are occasions we need a Jeremiah. There are the times we’re all picking on someone and making their life hell, and it feels really good to be a part of a group even if someone else is suffering, but they probably deserve it anyway, and suddenly someone comes along and stands with the person (or racial or social group) being victimised and says "hey, cut it out because if you give this person a hard time you’ll have me to deal with" and you suddenly realise that this new person is in Year 13 and is the Hawke's Bay Wrestling Champ and maybe not someone to mess with

…Which is not to say Jeremiah weighed 100 kilos and was two metres tall ("six foot tall and made of muscles") and a national or regional champ at wrestling, but he was pretty persistent and it started to seem after a while that every time he said “hey guys cut it out or deep doo-doos are going to happen” and he got ignored that deep doo-doos did happen, and the bullies and others began, reluctantly to take notice. Except some, and they just plotted to murder him, but though it made him unhappy and he even wrote a book called Tears (or Lamentations) they never really shut him up, and he kept on pricking their conscience.

Any of you ever heard of an American punk rock band called “Rise Against”? They’re not quite choristers, but they’ve spent a lot of time, a bit like Jeremiah, telling society off when we get things wrong: when we bully or ignore people, or imprison people unfairly or declare war on people unnecessarily or hurt animals or destroy the planet. They’re not quite choristers and Gary might object if you adopted their vocal techniques but they have a powerful message – check out a song called “Make it Stop” sometime – it’s about people who bully people just because they’re different, and that’s exactly the sort of stuff that got up Jeremiah’s nose and Jesus’ nose for that matter.

Jeremiah got a whole lot of women together and made them wail. When I took Aboriginal funerals in Australia it was a bit like that. The women would wail and wail until the sound was unbearable and it seemed the whole world was crying and then they’d stop and you could breathe and then they’d start again. Jeremiah wanted the women of Israel to do that, and he wanted Israel (his country) to get over itself and some bullying people and to be kind instead … and three thousand years later we’re still hearing his message so maybe occasionally they and we just get, but most of the time we tend to forget and keep on boasting (and bullying is a kind of boasting, too).

Oh, and incidentally, that’s why Jesus’ brothers and sisters didn’t get him at first, either, and no one could understand what he was on about, because like Jeremiah he tried to stop people boasting and bragging and bullying and hating, too …

 

Be not afraid

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
 (NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
  SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (16th March) 2014
           
 Readings:   Genesis 12.1-4a
                    Psalm 121
                    Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
                    Matthew 17:1-9

Those who design the lectionary (by which in the mainline churches we set our readings, so that yours truly’s faves don’t dominate the narratives of faith) can take us on some interesting and sometimes unexpected journeys, not least during Lent. A week ago, as we entered Lent, we were standing as it were with Jesus in a narrative of temptation. we were recognizing perhaps that there are times we too have been tempted, but unlike the Jesus of the gospels we tend not to be perfect, tend not to resist, tend more to emulate Oscar Wilde and his infamous “I can resist anything except temptation” than Jesus and his dismissal of the Tempter.

Yet this week we are in a surreal environment, one of those moments in the text where the author (Matthew, but also Luke and Mark) appears to have chewed too many sacred mushrooms and engaged with the inner recesses of a chemically affected mind rather than focussing on the narration of a straightforward story line. All three gospel writers see this as an important incident, so what are they on about (rather than what are they on!)?

If Paul can hang fast and loose in his application of the Abraham story, and I think within some basic boundaries he pretty much does in order to contrast faith, certainty, hope and promise, then we can I think reach deep into the text to find sense-for-us in these biblical glimpses. Do we merely have in the Transfiguration scene a narrative about a mountain-top experience shared by four young Hebrew men, or are we being told something else here? Obviously you can guess my response! But let us not entirely explain away the inexplicable: first century readers were no less intelligent than twenty first century readers, and they too heard the strangeness of this scene.

One of my favourite literary and biblical critics, Frank Kermode, says that is something about a passage strikes us as strange, then it probably is, and we should look more closely. This whole passage of Transfiguration strikes me as strange, but rather than dismiss it we need to dig deep in its entrails. And as I begin to find that I find a sudden, unexpected dimension that, if I have noticed at all before, I suspect I’ve never really reflected on. For, while the passage clearly depicts Jesus as an unparalleled god-figure who can chin-wag amicably with the great fathers of faith, and who seems to be a participant in a unique relationship with the Creator-God, his humanity takes on a powerful new flavour. While I don’t think Christianity is about Jesus as the example of how to live, neither do I think it is about ignoring the remarkable example (I sometimes use the arguably more emphatic ancient word “ensample”) of justice, compassion, love and God-attunedness that he embodies. And here Jesus responds not (or not only) to the awe and the mystery of chatting with the Greats, but to the needs of the terrified, bewildered disciples.

Many years ago I attended a Joan Baez concert in Melbourne. Baez opened the concert by asking how many people present had been dragged along by aging hippie parents who had told them they had to hear the iconic folk-singer. Many put their hands up. At the end of the concert she ushered one young girl up on to the stage, put her hand around her shoulders and led her off the stage to chat and to give her an autograph. Whoever that pre-teen kid was, and whatever her music taste today, I bet she will not have forgotten the moment in which a folk icon knelt in the dirt, as I called it last week, of her human experience, and led her back stage to chat.

Joan Baez may be to some the Madonna, but she is not Jesus. The two moments are only comparable, far from identical. Yet in their moment of probable abject terror Jesus reaches out to Peter, James and John and echoes those same words attributed to the angels when they frightened the shepherds in the fields of Christmas. “Be not afraid.” It is a recurring phrase in the gospels: Jesus to the frightened disciples in the storm-tossed boat. The angel to the shepherds. The angel-figure at the resurrection scene in Mark, telling the frightened women to overcome their fears as they see death transformed at the first Empty Tomb appearance. Be not afraid. It is perhaps the words we need most to represent and speak – by actions more than words – in a world facing the bewilderments of nuclear potential, global warming, rising sea levels, economic fragility, the death marches of the frogs and the bees and the polar ice caps. Be not afraid, not even for your children’s-children’s  (your mokopuna’s) future, for the God of Transfiguration is the God who is revealed in the Incarnate Jesus, who will be the one who, as the angel later puts it, “goes before you into Galilee,” the Galilees of our own lives and deaths. Indeed, in a world that barely even voice the words “died”, “death” and “dead” these days we are perhaps especially called to know and embody the knowledge that Jesus is the one who goes before us into death and resurrection.

Jesus remembers and turns to the frightened disciples. Though it was an anathema to the religious intellectuals of his day, this was not the only time the compassion of God breaks through human experience and expectation. To the “Greeks”, the religious intellectuals scorned by Paul, the idea of a compassionate God was ridiculous. To be God, a god had to be dispassionate, unmoved, remote, unconcerned with the trivia of human experience. Yet the Hebrews, as we noted last week, worshipped a God who, having expelled Adam and Eve from the garden for their own punitive protection, then kneels in the dirt to knot their clothes. The Hebrew Scriptures, especially the psalms and prophets, speak of a God moved to the core with emotions, and moved to the core by the plight of humans. The God of the Hebrews weeps and the people of Flight MH370 – and even where there in in human experience no longer any hope, even there breathes the hope of New Heavens and New Earth.

Jesus will come down from the mountain top and turn, as it says, resolutely to his own abandonment and death. He will ask us, empowered by his Spirit, his now unlimited being, to embody compassion and hope, even hate-transforming, even death-overshadowing hope to those he has called us to live amongst … and perhaps if we forget when our times of suffering come he will quietly engineer other bearers of Christ-light to cross our paths. Perhaps – it’s not actually guaranteed: the guarantee, the promise of which Paul half-speaks, is that even if we don’t experience hope the hope is still there, and is there because where we go the footsteps of Jesus are still warm.

No guarantees for us,  for we are called to suffer, but we can pray God that we might be bearers of Christ-hope to those around us. That is at least one part of the Lenten journey – stripping off the clutter and  recharging our ability to be as Christ to those around us. Let us continue the journey, down from Transfiguration and on into the heart of darkness in which Christlight finally bursts unambiguously.

TLBWY

You stole my apples I believe?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
 FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT (9th March) 2014

Readings:       Genesis 2.15-17, 3.1-7
                Psalm 32
                Romans 5.12-19
                Matthew 4.1-11

We are probably all aware of the metaphor of the frog in warming water, slowly boiling to death as it fails to notice the temperature transitions going on around it. Scientific analysis demonstrates that the story is not rationally true (and rational truth is a whole different story!), but it is a useful metaphor by which to illustrate human beings’ failure to respond to calamity slowly growing around them. In our society we might point not the slow creep of the mercury upwards in the world’s climactically changing thermometers, but also to the slow inuring of humanity to dark attitudes of racist, sexist, culturist, and other forms of oppression and alienation
.
Examples of the collective cauterizing of conscience in human history are innumerable, but the rise of Hitler in the inter war period of last century remains one of the most chilling and instructive examples. Most frightening of all is the realization that the rise of Hitler is not something that merely happened (relatively) long ago and far away, but something that can happen in any society at any time, as disenfranchisement and hatred of “the other” in a community grows, as outsiders are blamed for wrongs real or imagined, as we dismiss others as not like us and as responsible for any sufferings, real or imagined, we might experience. The rise of Hitler was enabled by a host of economic and political and military planets falling into alignment, but it is ever thus: as people flee the hatreds of the Middle East and Africa to Europe and Australia – and in New Zealand we are complacently quarantined from the world’s suffering so far – the general population finds more and more reason to generate hatred and ostracism of the hurting.

Which may seem far removed from Eve and Adam and a snake in the garden, or from Paul’s spontaneous, passionate dictations about sin, or Matthew’s and Luke’s stylized stories about a tempted Saviour. But is it? The stories of Genesis were of course never supposed to be post-Enlightenment, factual narratives about the actual facticity of events. They are profound analyses of the human state. In a moment after the closure of the Genesis story as we read it this morning we will find Adam and Eve blaming anyone else but themselves for all that has happened. The woman made me do it says the newly ashamed Adam. The snake made me do it, says Eve. The refugees have taken my jobs, the multinationals are destroying the earth, this racial or socio-economically defined group is responsible for whatever discomfort I may be feeling. The reasonably unambiguous demand of Jesus that we treat others as we would have them treat us is squashed out of existence. Anne once was lectured on a bus as to how we should bring “back them biblical teachings: do unto others as they done unto you.” Adam, Eve, and most humanity enter into the unbreakable cycles of blame and repayment that dwell at the heart of a broken, “fallen” world.

We could read on in the Adam and Eve narrative and find that God punishes all three players in the story; is punishment not just one more cycle of revenge? Not so: in a few verses we would find God effectively kneeling in the dirt, making clothes for the now knowingly naked primordial couple. It will not be the last time in the biblical story that we find God immersing fingers in the dirt of human existence, as we shall be powerfully reminded in Holy Week, as our Lenten journey reaches its nadir and we descend into the tomb of human darkness.

Adam and Even should know better than to engage in a blame game. In the glorious negro-spiritual telling of the story the lies are succinct:

You stole my apples I believe
Dese bones are gonna rise again
Oh no Massa Lord I 'spect was Eve
Dese bones are gonna rise again

On the whole it is better to ’fess up than to run labyrinths of lies. God in any case spends little time negotiating:

Well out of this garden you must get
Dese bones are gonna rise again
When you're livin' by your sweat
Dese bones are gonna rise again

But as we read on through the story of the people of God – our story, eking out an existence east of Eden – we find that God has left in us, as it were sewn into the fabric of our clothing as we left Eden, the gift that eluded the primordial pair. Over and again we find characters in the Hebrew scriptures niggled at by the small voice that, by the time of the New Testament, has come to be known as “conscience.”

From the much needed pricking of King David’s conscience as he is confronted by the enormity of his sin against Bathsheba - or, more technically, against God, for the apples are always God's apples)through the hints of an inner voice in the teachings of Jesus – “the light that is in you” of which we read later in Matthew’s gospel-account, there is a sense that, while we are expelled from Eden, we are not expelled from the knowledge of good and evil. Nor are we expelled from responsibility to respond to that knowledge: “They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them ...” wrote Paul. He is describing the human condition shortly in the same letter in which he addresses the questions we read just now of sin and redemption.  

Conscience becomes a major theme of Paul, always with the reminder that we can deaden its voice, that we can choose deathwards life rather than lifewards life. He reminds us always, too, that “lifewards life” is available only as we turn and turn again to the Christ who alone lifts us from death to life. We can deaden conscience, as Adam and Eve did from the start, but to do so is to kill the humanity in us, to turn those we hurt or ignore into mere objects, to end up where we began this sermon, in the frog ponds of growing social hate or disinterest, looking only after ourselves, forgetting the message of the martyr Bonhoeffer, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” We too easily forget to love and treat others as we would wish to be loved and treated. We are challenged to live as a people contrasting with the frogs in the warming water for whom “treat others as we’ve been treated” or even “treat others before we get treated” is the dominant paradigm. We are challenged and helped by God’s Spirit to live as a people who speak and act for compassion and justice wherever there is need. We are challenged to be a contrast society of Jesus.

TLBWY