Here's to the alb-wearers of eternity

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FEAST OF ALL SAINTS (2^nd November) 2014
               

Readings:            Revelation 7:9-17

                               Psalm 34:1-10
                               1 John 3:1-3
                               Matthew 5:1-12

Elsewhere [see below] I have introduced you to a lady named Molly Haxby. She is only one of the remarkable servants of Christ who have passed through the labyrinth of my ministry: everyone who has engaged in some form of professional ministry in the service of Christ will have many similar tales to tell. The author of Hebrews writes of a “cloud of witnesses”: what it means I do not pretend to understand, but over the years I have come more and more to treasure the belief that as we gather in prayer we are not merely “us” but “us with unseen hosts.” Molly died years ago now, but whatever that means I like to think she is gathered somewhere with the faithful, beyond human sight, yet there in a manner far more profound than we can understand. Molly’s life was exemplary in its living for others: dwelling now in what we variously call death or eternity I believe that living for others continues, inexplicably, irrationally.

It is not only within the community of faith that we encounter the witnesses of Christ. Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner spoke often and controversially of “anonymous Christians,” and while the term can be understood as paternalistic or “Christian-colonialistic” it was never meant to be that way. It simply affirmed Rahner’s deep conviction that the God of Jesus Christ is bigger than our boundaries, faster than our vision, further than our deepest distance in the lives of those around us and the crevices of eternity. Following the terminology of the author of Hebrews biblical scholar Margaret Barker challenges the Christ-community to become what she calls “little Melchizedeks.” Melchizedek was the foreign, non-Jewish priest who becomes the first high priest of Judaism when in Gen 14:17-24 he blesses Abram in the name of God. Melchizedek is the outsider who exemplifies the work of Christ beyond the boundaries of our expectations. Melchizedek is the Fred Hollows or the Bill Gates or the Jon Bon Jovi whose time and fortune is made available to ameliorate the plight of countless of the wretched of the earth.

There were many years in which I dismissed anything that was not empirically quantifiable as nonsense. Gradually I shifted, particularly as I returned in my mid- to late- thirties to reclaim the centrality of the resurrection as the heart of my faith. For some years after that I saw the resurrection of Christ as the exceptional event in the laws of God’s on-going creation, the one moment in which God’s eternity breaks into God’s scientific universe. Yet in the twenty-plus years since then, and under a number of influences, my perspective shifted. I remain deeply aware of the seeming determination of God to limit divine action in the contexts of prayers for the Middle East or other large scale theatres of suffering. I no longer posit an answer to that divine recalcitrance, except to maintain my deep-held belief that we as God’s praying people must continue to pour out our prayers for such tragic contexts. At the same time I am persuaded by that memorable phrase of the archbishop of York, the more I pray the more coincidences happen. I treasure too the thought that our prayer might be the butterfly wing-beat of change.

I increasingly acknowledge these days the presence of the spiritual, unseen and un-understood world beyond my ken. While I don’t condone a sensationalism of that world such as that to which the charismatic movement sometimes tended, I can, after my experiences of Indigenous wisdom and spiritual sentience, no longer dismiss this. Who are we post-Enlightenment westerners to pretend paternalistically that we have a copyright on truth?

Parallel with that discovery, I have increasingly opened myself up to awareness of those unseen witnesses, the saints, who surround us with the love and the energies and the purposes of God. Does this mean my Molly dwells nearby, as if in a Dr Whoivan alternative time-zone, inexplicable, but present? I’m not sure. I certainly don’t think there is some sort of monkey colony on my shoulder, watching my every move, from toileting to praying. Perhaps the saints afford us the same privacy we afford one another! Yet, and particularly under the influence of so-called pre-Enlightenment cultures, and their awareness of spiritual realms beyond rational explanation, I no longer limit God’s universe to the merely rational. I am these days far more willing to be aware, for example, of the kind and benevolent presence of those who have prayed before us in this place; caring, smiling, perhaps even guiding as we struggle on through our myopic vision. Romantically I sometimes wonder if Kate Williams (who we hope soon to honour with a new window) and Edith Barry don’t in particular smile kindly on our struggled efforts to keep the flames of faith alive. All those, who have fought to live and proclaim the values of the Reign of God as set out in the Beatitudes of Jesus, those who lived faith but who have moved beyond our sight, may well have a special role in the on-going purposes of God. They will continue to do so this side of the New Heavens and Earth, that for which we pray in the Lord’s Prayer and that which is the driving hope of the Apocalypse of John from which we read before.

We all know, too, the phenomenon that one friend of mine refers to as “the diaspora of friendship.” In the vast and unfathomable matrix of God’s dealings with us and with humanity lives pass through ours, often enriching our lives and our faith-lives beyond comprehension or measure. I do not see God as a celestial multi-dimensional chess player, but I do sometimes wonder at the inexplicable gifts of both transient and lasting connection that pass through the chemistry of our being as we crawl from cradle to grave and onto birth and understanding beyond this sight. This is mystery, and mystery is the dwelling place of God.

What though of those strange writings of John of Patmos? I would not have written a book about them if I did not believe they had, not in some spooky sensationalist way but in some open secret way, something powerful to say to us as we journey the years God gives us, the hallowed years that are embraced on our paschal candle between alpha and omega. The strange imagery of the Book of Revelation is not some sacred mushroom munching gobbledegook, nor weird and occult (secret) conspiracy code, but the proclamation of an open secret: God wins, and wins despite the tears: God will (the tense is significant) wipe away the tears from broken humans. Above all at the heart of the Book of Revelation is the belief that God is in control, despite Da’esh, despite rising tides, despite a warming earth or advancing cancer, despite mortality in all its brutal forms.

While some branches of Christianity see this doctrine as an excuse to do nothing about the destructive anatomy of humankind and its greedy exploitation of the garden of God, I believe that when the control of God is held in tension with the doctrine of the saints it teaches us otherwise, teaches us answerability to the God of judgement. The blessed of the beatitudes are not the complacent and self-satisfied but the army of doers. The saints, robed in their white albs which ours are designed to remind us of, are those caught between the already and not yet, those who live as if Christ were to tap them on their shoulder and seek an account of their lives this minute. The saints know their unreadiness for that shoulder tap, yet live in eagerness for it: what have you done for the least of these my sisters and my brothers, the poor and broken people and species of God’s earth? The saints inspire us and perhaps, who knows, even guide our stumbling footsteps. The saints, like my Molly Haxby, are those who enthuse us despite their fallibility, from either side of the grave.

Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honour
and power and might
be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.’

TLBWY

 

 

[on the late Molly Haxby and Matt 5:1-12]:

I have long harboured a deep sense of the saints who gather with me, with us, as we pray and as we serve. The poor (or poor in spirit, in Luke’s version), the mourners, the meek, the list goes on. You and I have encountered them more often than we deserve, as they pass through our lives, slowly or fleetingly, in the vast celestial waltz we call existence.

Back in December 1993 I was living in Central NSW when a massive storm swept through the region. It terrified  many residents in my parish for an hour, lifting roofs and throwing ancient trees to the ground. As the winds settled and I headed off to visit vulnerable parishioners I found I had been beaten to it: one of my eldest parishioners, a nonagenarian saint named Molly Haxby, was already ahead of me, “visiting the old people to make sure they’re okay.” There are saints in many shapes and sizes. She walked everywhere—not just after storms—and spread Christ-love wherever she went.

We’ve probably all encountered saints: the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted-for-faith. In the great choreography of God they remind us that divine holiness pops up wherever God chooses, and our lives are the richer for the encounter.]

 

 

For the love of neurofibromatosis

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 30 (26th October) 2014

Readings:  Leviticus 19:-1-2, 15-18
                  Psalm 1
                  1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
                  Matthew 22:34-46


Hallowed be thy name! Even today, despite fifty years of contemporary language revisions, it is the seventeenth century version of the great prayer of Jesus that is best recognized (and which, incidentally, I still generally use with dementia and comatose patients). There have been rightly myriad attempts to translate the probable words of Jesus into a contemporary idiom; possibly J.B. Phillips’ 1950s idiom is as good as any: “may your name be honoured.” It misses, though, that the Name is honoured, ipso facto, by the very fact of its owner’s existence. It is holy, because it is of God. Paradoxically there is and can be no name for God, for God’s holiness is beyond names. I am, says God to Moses – I will be what I will be: the choice is mine, the freedom is mine, the holiness is mine. The supremacy of God is an unpopular concept in post-modernity: Hallowed be thy name, even though it is often merely an epithet, a swear word, an ejaculation: Oh my God Oh my God, OMG.

Holiness in relation to God is not optional. This is so even if holiness is much forgotten in the noise and clutter of post-modernity, in the age of the ephemeral, the snapchat selfie, the age of the pixel. Strangely one gift Christianity gives us is timelessness, the moment in which we do something useless: we slow down, we cease to be productive, we waste time-is-money opportunity in order to worship the unseen and unprofitable God of our ancestors. We have no place for clocks in church. Even if we merely approach God from the philosophical sense of “that than which no greater can be conceived” we are standing on holy ground, however unfashionable.

Within the Christian community our lives are invaded by God. There are myriad ways in which this is expressed in our scriptures, though Paul’s understanding that we are “in Christ” and that the Spirit of Christ “dwells in us” is fine shorthand. The Spirit of Christ, the holiness of God, invades us, though we far from deserve it. This doctrine has become darkly muddied by the so-called holiness codes of fundamentalism. In these codes the idea that the body is the dwelling place of the Spirit merges with obsessions with sex and sexuality, and with patriarchal self-interest  to produce an intolerable burden on the shoulders of those who do not fit highly selective and largely unfounded representations of what sexual behaviour is acceptable to God. I mentioned a moment ago that one of the finest translations of the great prayer of Jesus is that of J.B. Phillips, but there is a more profound reflection well known to many of us that came from the pen of Welsh gay theologian and spiritual writer Jim Cotter: “Father and Mother of us all, Loving God, in whom is heaven: The Hallowing of your name echo through the universe!”

The best outliving of holiness, the best demonstration we can achieve of a life lived in harmony with the Spirit of the Triune God who has invaded us, is by striving for integrity, authenticity. That is what Jesus was saying when he said “let your light so shine.” We cannot live lives of integrity in and by our own strength. Paul’s great (representative rather than personal) heartcry “who will rescue me from this body of death?” was immediately given the answer which while often translated “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord” means something more akin to “Thanks be to God who has done so through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Only the invasion of God can turn our lives to holiness, can slowly transform us into the person of today’s psalm, into persons whose integrity is so resplendent that it touches and transforms neighbours’ lives.

Years ago I spent some time with Desmond Tutu, and will never forget watching his encounter with a rather “burnt out case.” It was a tired, embittered and rather drunk clergyman who seemed to grow larger and more beautiful as Tutu conversed with him, as Tutu’s integrity rubbed off on him. That is holiness at work. Many of us saw the powerful image of Pope Francis kissing the disfigured faces of two different men; the first, Vinicio Riva, severely disfigured by the tumours of neurofibromatosis, the second who has remained anonymous, brutally disfigured in what appears to have been a massive cranial accident and reconstruction. In each case one can only imagine the arohanui that was transported in the moment: Riva said he felt only love in the eternal moment of the Pope’s embrace. This is the same great love that Jesus imparted to the lepers and the women and the mentally ill and the grieving outcast in society, the fringe-dwellers of his world.

It is the same great love into which we are challenged to grow as we open ourselves to God in lives of prayer and worship. It is the love that Jim Cotter exemplified in his life and teachings, or that Maximillian Kolbe exemplified when he sacrificed his life to save Franciszek Gajowniczek in Auschwitz.  It is the love that Edith Stein also exemplified in Auschwitz, as a Jewish-Catholic woman who dared to speak out against Hitler and live exercising compassion for the victims of his pogrom.  It is the love exemplified by the mad and manic Simone Weill who likewise lived for others and died of tuberculosis while awaiting conversion to Judaism, her expression of support for Hitler’s victims. It is the same love and work of the Spirit that is sometimes demonstrated in the lives of those far outside the recognizable boundaries of faith: kiwi atheist Fred Hollows, who transformed thousands of lives through ophthalmology; semi-Catholic billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates; or somewhat agnostic philanthropist Oprah Winfrey.

But what is holiness?  There are those whose lives so epitomize the love of God, whether they acknowledge God or not, that an observer’s breath is taken away and their life values changed. Neither Christianity nor any religion has a monopoly on this great gift and discipline of living, as Kolbe’s biographer put it, as “a man [or woman] for others.” Living for others: for present others trapped in poverty and violence, for future others trapped on a warming planet, even for past others whose story needs must still be told and honoured, those who have gone before us whose story ensures we are not a rootless people. It comes of living for other species, too, and for fighting against the greed that strips meaning from earth and its inhabitants.

As Christians we must add that for us it comes from consciously opening ourselves up to the Christ who emptied himself so that we can do the same. Holiness is not the Oh my God Oh my God of the glitterati, but the hard grind of those who dare, like Pope Francis and Jim Cotter and Edith Stein and Simone Weill, to work at love and life for others. Holiness is saturation in the energies of God. Holiness is living out our baptismal vows.


TLBWY

No people my people

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16th 2011
(PENTECOST 18 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 29)


Readings: Exodus 33.12-23
                 Psalm 99
                 1 Thessalonians 1.1-10
                 Matthew 22.15-33

To understand our communion with God we need to know the back-story, in Māori the whakapapa, of our faith. We are in the spiritual loins of our forebears as they are called into ‘peoplehood’ by a compassionate God.  We are in the spiritual loins of our forebears as they are called to be God’s chosen people, led out of the sweat-yards of the Nile delta (where tragically our sisters and brothers in faith are once more in great danger: thank God for those of our Muslim cousins who have stood in solidarity with their suffering and vulnerable Christian neighbours).  The people of Israel had previously been little more than a no-people, a rootless and wandering Middle Eastern tribe, descendants of patriarchs touched and blessed by God, but a people without direction.  We are called by God never to forget that we, spiritually speaking, were once refugees: we were boat people even if our ocean was a desert. We were fleeing from oppression.

 

These are the people whose heart-cry God heard as they slaved for Pharaoh in Egypt. God heard them and had compassion not because they were a holy or nice or righteous people. God heard their heart-cries because they were a suffering people. The cries of suffering people have first-class access to the heart of the Creator. Our suffering, refugee ancestors were led by God from Egypt, perhaps in waves, or perhaps in one great and miraculous migration, escaping slavery, but soon turning on the hand that saved and fed them, soon whinging about the flavour of the manna. Rather than offering lives of thanksgiving to a saving God, they built a golden calf, generating an alternative deity: God, you may recall, was not amused. We must always recall the extent to which the story of the recalcitrant people of God has repeated itself – the degree to which for example the new people of God, the Christian community, soon forgot and still forgets its call to compassion and justice, and refuses to hear the voice of those who Frantz Fanon called ‘the wretched of the earth’.

It is worth pausing to reflect on our own golden calves. As a new religion Christianity displayed at its best considerable integrity until the fourth century, establishing itself as a religion of conspicuous love and justice, bravery and compassion. Later we tended to forget our vocation to the way of the cross, and at our worst began to proclaim the way of the sword instead. At our worst we have done that ever since – or at least until recent decades when we lost, thank God, our institutionalised supremacy (outside the US Empire).

 

We were not always at our worst, despite our frequent mistakes. Few would forget, once they heard the story, the bravery of the Northern Territory, Arnhem Land missionaries who stood in the way of the guns of those European Australians who would shoot indigenous people as a form of entertainment. These missionaries were not operating out of a theology of the sword, but a theology of the cross. Still: Our Anglican denominations, perhaps even our own faith community, certainly ourselves as individuals, have had moments when we have allowed shibboleths to usurp the place of God in our priority. We have, like Moses’ recalcitrant people, come very close to becoming the no-people, the no-person we were in the loins of our ancestors.

God is a God of grace, and, although his rescued chosen people are soon a stiff-necked people, God does not reject them. Over and again that is the story of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is the story even of our Christian Testament, the story of our Christian history, and the story of our own lives. God maintains a presence with the people of God, tainted as our history may be; Moses continues to be God’s chosen instrument as the wayward people are led to their undeserved destiny.

 

When Matthew depicts the Pharisees’ approach to Jesus ‘to trap him’ he makes clear that they have lost all respect. We who are believers have the hindsight advantage of knowing the identity of Jesus as Lord (either in terms of the textual narrative, or in our own lives, or both). There is little doubt though that Matthew is depicting the Pharisees as a people who have lost respect for all that is wise and holy, not just Jesus. The come to trap Jesus, not to engage in conversation with him. They come armed with obsequious phrases. They come to sneer: it is not a good way to gain insight or wisdom (though we as Christ-bearers have often adopted a similar attitude when we have encountered ancient cultures previously unknown to us, and sneered at their presumed unsophistication).

 

Matthew’s Pharisees encounter something greater than they can comprehend. The God of Jesus Christ is not a player of games, and despite hundreds of years of misinterpretation – misinterpretation that was caused by Christian interpreters losing the perspective of the cross and interpreting from the perspective of the sword  – Jesus does not here give the Emperor of Rome a ringing endorsement. The tone is far more one of ‘render as much as you like to Caesar, but God will always be God’. Wherever claims to divinity are made – whether in the form of a golden calf or the form of an emperor who proclaims himself divine – God’s voice of justice will eventually speak out, and false deities will crumble.

 

These days, as we of the community of Jesus are increasingly marginalized, the voice of God will be an ever more subtle revelation, an ever more counter-cultural revelation of divine will. Prime Ministers and Political parties may have little time for any consideration of matters of faith, justice, or God at all, yet even so sometimes God’s compassionate voice will speak. While it’s too early to crow, the events surrounding the rejection of off-shore bases for the so-called ‘processing’ of asylum seekers, despite valiant attempts by Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard to out-tough each other, suggest that even in contemporary Australia in all its disinterest in Christianity the voice of the compassionate God can still be heard. Whatever the national interest – the head of Caesar, the sacred cow – might be, the interests of God are always love and compassionate justice. Refugees, like the Hebrews in Egypt, will find a home. The onus will be on us to be the face of Christ in the home they have found.  In every possible way.

TLBWY

Maggots in heaven

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 23 (12^th October) 2014

(family Eucharist: blessing of the animals)
    

Readings:   Psalm 148

                      Matthew 11:25-30

This time two years ago I was at St Francis’ Church in Batchelor, the former Rum Jungle, in the Northern Territory, conducting a similar but very different blessing of the animals. Amongst the animals I blessed that day was a wild tree snake, which I had enough composure to know was a harmless species, thwarting the young indigenous kids’ attempt to scare this white-fella priest, but nevertheless causing at the very least a double-take as this more or less snake sassy kiwi checked out the guest’s appearance against mental maps of danger. Meanwhile, up the road, my colleague the then Dean of Darwin, never shy of a little media publicity, was attracting lots of photographs from the notoriously crocodile obsessed Northern Territory News  as he blessed the carefully gaffer-taped snout of a local crocodile (albeit one small enough to hold).
 

The stories of St Francis are stories of a Garden of Eden revisited. Depictions of the great saints who communed with nature as Adam and Even mythologically once did were designed to evoke memories of pre-lapsarian Innocence, the same scene Blake captures in his whimsical Song of Innocence, “The Lamb.”

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek and he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

                Little Lamb God bless thee.

Blake memorably contrasted the innocent lamb with the destructive tiger, but we’ll leave Blake there. The point is that in the Francis mythology we are taken to a place where his sheer prayerful holiness restores the values of Eden, where the lion and the lamb lie down together in Isaiah’s futurific vision, where there is no bloodletting and where, I guess, tigers graze on clover.

Now I have a sack here, full of cute and cuddly and less cute and cuddly things. We may well bless the animals, and shortly we will, but as we take toys from the very animalian pillowcase I would ask you – unless you or your child are an arachnophobe or an ophidiophobLittle Lamb who made thee e (ask me later!) – to accept the first thing you touch, cute and cuddly or hairy and scary. Because ultimately, while Francis might remind us of an edenic existence, some of our cute and cuddly friends would happily eat some of our other cute and cuddly friends, and even if the lamentable group ironically called Savage Garden once sung about wanting to run like the animals, careless and free, I doubt we are yet in Past Eden or Future Heaven, and existence continues to have its dark risks, as every news bulletin reminds us.

So let me end with a story. Over a decade ago a small plane crashed in the mountainous terrain north of Newcastle in New South Wales. The occupants survived the impact, though the pilot died some 36 hours later. His passenger and girlfriend was found on the third day, dehydrated and an estimated 20 minutes away from death. She survived, despite massive burns following the crash. Amazingly, doctors reported, one element in her survival was that maggots infesting her burned body ate away the dying, infected skin – doctors refer to it as “maggot debridement therapy.” It’s not a pretty thought, but one of nature’s ugliest beasties saved the life of that crash victim in New South Wales.

Today we will bless our furry, finned and feathered friends. I won’t bless snakes, crocodiles or even maggots. It is worth remembering though that God created the good, the bad and the ugly, in a complex and not always pretty balance, a balance that we humans often make worse. But what Francis saw was that God is the God who walks before us, even when the crocodiles, snakes and maggots infest our path, that God gives us the beautiful and the ugly, sister sun, brother moon, cousin maggot, and that all are just a hint of the complexity of perfection that lies behind us in Eden and ahead of us in the complex we call heaven. In all this God remains the constant” God’s footsteps go ahead of us, and in them we however tentatively place our own.

TLBWY

Rehearsing for a banquet

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 23 (12^th October) 2014
           

 

Readings:       Isaiah 25:1-9

                       Psalm 23

                       Philippians 4:1-9

                       Matthew 22:1-14

 

 

One of the great divides running through the witness of Christianity, almost as bitter if less militarized that the Shi’ite-Sunni divide in Islam, is the divide between the public-political faith practitioners and the personal-piety faith practitioners. This difference is often enshrined in denominational allegiances, and within denominations in the cleavage that sometimes exists between liberal and conservative, though the labels founder on individual realities. They provide a useful starting point, though: show me your personal salvation and I’ll show you my political-social activism, or vice versa.

And, while I haven’t yet asked a question, the answer were I to ask the obvious one, is both-and, of course. Personal piety without commitment to public justice is obscene. Political activism not anchored in personal piety is thistledown, planted on the wind, as Denis Glover and the Preacher of Ecclesiastes each might remind us. Not either/or, but both/and, though I should add that there is a form of personal piety that is so seamlessly and unquestioningly anchored in right-wing politics, particularly in the USA, that an observer might begin to wonder where the party politics ends and the faith begins. I make no secret of my belief that right-wing or capitalist dismissal of climate change is neither more nor less obscene than a left-leaning form of politics that separates cavalier sexuality from responsibility, and which reduces an unborn infant to the level of medical inconvenience.

So, while I find no scriptural reference (and however slippery interpretation always is,  scripture will and must always be the yardstick of debate) to “personal” salvation and a “personal” saviour, neither do I find a scriptural imprimatur of the nation state’s right to ignore the plight of the individual in a mantra of the greatest good for the greatest number. Last time I checked Jesus revealed the heart of neither a Communist nor a Fascist God but the heart of the vulnerable, hurting but hurt-transcending God of the Cross. “My Jesus, my Saviour” of the popular hymn is also Jesus, Saviour of the World of the ancient canticle.

What do we do then with a collection of tenuously linked readings like those we have? The God of Isaiah’s prophesy will wipe away tears from the eyes of God’s people, but this is a very collective, nationalistic God and it is the collective nationalistic guilt and the collective, nationalistic tears that are being addressed. The God of Philippians’ prickly author seems interested in the focus of the individual believer’s eyes, a sort of “Turn your eyes upon Jesus” message, but elsewhere Paul indicates that he does not have an individualistic but what is called a “dyadic” view of the encounter between a believer and God, in which whole communities or at least households may together, not individually, turn to receive the grace-touch of the Saviour. Jesus seems to be threatening the dismissal of a wayward chap to eternal hellfire, but the context, as I have suggested elsewhere, is a tragi-comic tale about behaviour that even the most reprehensible first century reprobate would not countenance, suggesting therefore that this is more than just a tale about naughty individuals who do not surrender to an altar-call of personalised salvation.

So I suggest always, despite the non-existential, non-personal flavour of the world in which the scriptures groaned to birth, despite the suggestion that salvation in the biblical stories is not ever some sort of individualistic ticket to eternity, that we nevertheless take each of these references and realize that, while we can’t change the world, we can nevertheless change ourselves (with the help of God), and while we can’t persuade the world of the veracity of the claims our faith makes for Jesus or for God, we can nevertheless allow our lives to be continually changed so that at least the rumour of God and God’s values are kept alive. In that way, as global security blankets fray and disintegrate as they have for every civilization, nevertheless the life-transforming love of the God we encounter in worship and fellowship can shine through our attitudes of compassion and justice and love despite the noisiness and fallibility of our normal human self-serving volitions. I suggest that we don’t threaten to throw other people into hellfire, in other words, but deal with that within ourselves which rejects the love-touch of God, the healing invitation of God, that we amputate that within our lives which drowns out the justice-song of God, that we amputate that within us which is anti-Christ and turned to darkness rather than divine and eternal light. It is after all, as Jesus says elsewhere, better to enter eternity maimed that to spend eternity, whatever that might mean, wailing and gnashing our teeth.

As we do that, and always only ever with the help of God, we may just become better guests in the eternal banquet hall of God.

 

TLBWY

Da'esh, Mendelsohn, and the Sparrows

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL CHURCH
OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 27 (5th October) 2014
           
Readings:   Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
                   Psalm 19
                   Philippians 3:4b-14
                   Matthew 21:33-36

If there are many times I breathe thanks for my membership of a liturgical church whose worship is governed by cycles of prayers and readings and ancient rites practiced and prayed for two millennia (or four or more) of believers, there are others in which I have to say that the wisdom of the Church momentarily lapses. Apart from clock-watching paranoia, which is close to obscenity in the context of worshipping the God of Cross and Universe, there can be no reason to bowdlerise the greatest of the texts of faith, to spit as it were on the sacred texts of commandment that have shaped Jewish and Christian faith for three millennia at least.

 

How dare we remove from the great commandments of fidelity to the Creator God the explanation that idolatry is, as Paul sees in his introduction to the Letter to the Romans, a dehumanising distraction from the main game of relationship to the Creator of the universes? How dare we eviscerate the command­ment to Sabbath rest by throwing it aside, when hidden in its wisdom is a reminder that we are not to be slaves to a capitalist obsession with commerce, with profit, at the expense of the care of God’s garden, creation, and indeed of ourselves? We bowdlerise our texts at great peril to our own integrity and the integrity of our witness. For homework, were we not given to limiting God to a seventy-five minute gap in our lives, we should probably read and ponder the verses we have omitted from the Ten Commandments, for as the rabbis remind us, it is often in the gaps between the words, not least when cavalierly generate those gaps, that truth is found.

 

When we talk about commandments and the falling short of them that the word “sin” describes, we are often caught in a no-person’s land between Jesus the Word and Paul the Interpreter of Jesus. Such a claim is sometimes used to drive a wedge between Jesus and Paul: I drive no such wedge, for Paul and his spiritual integrity must be retained as one of God’s greatest gifts to the church. But whereas for Paul sin is an inescapable human state, ensuring that we snarl and snap and betray and pollute and maim and kill directly or indirectly, for Jesus sin is closer to the naughty things we do each day: Go and sin no more. But, etymologically the naughty things we do inexorably lead to nought, and the difference is, as it were, the same.

 

If we do not have a clear understanding of sin – an “hamartiology” – then we have nothing meaningful to say about or to ourselves or the world around us. We may have a grand vision of the goodness or the beauty or the majesty of God, as is often reflected in our sacred music, but if it is not related to our own understanding that we, no matter how hard we try, cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps into the presence of God’s eternity, then we are just engaging in aesthetic drivel. Theology and its poor cousin preaching in the nineteenth century became more and more obsessed with the rarefied and majestic nature of God, but had less and less to say as Christianity entered the twentieth century and died in the paroxysms of two great and bloody wars. Only as it found a voice in the dark shadow of Auschwitz and our acquiescence to evil did teaching and preaching begin to find a voice again. Even today we must recognize that Da’esh, (ISIS) or climate change, or e coli in waterways, or the sexual abuse of the powerless and a myriad other evils are at least as much about me and you and our participation in an unjust, fallen world as they are about corrupted Islam in the Levant or dairy farmers up the road.

 

Speculation about a majestic and aesthetically rewarding God will lead not to the transformation of human sin at the cross but to self-satisfaction and complacency. It is precisely that issue that the commandments which we bowdlerised were seeking to redress. When the God of Suffering, God of the Cross becomes the muscular patriarch of the Sistine Chapel or even the oratorical God of Mendelsohn or Haydn and is left there then we have nothing to say to the young mother who has just been diagnosed with cancer, to the family of yet another Da’esh (IS) barbarity, or to the over-mortgaged farmer facing foreclosure and the dark options of suicide.

 

The extent to which Christianity has been abandoned in recent decades serves to remind us of the degree to which both we and our host society have lost sight of the core message of a Saviour who touches the most marginalised in society and beckons them to come, to know, to follow. The risk of being a cathedral parish more than any other is that we begin to seek security in our own imagined importance rather than the absolute importance in our lives of the crucified, redeeming Christ to turns even a beheaded loved one into the Hope of Easter. Ironically the pixies and fairies faith of the New Age has all but usurped our place in society, but in our marginalization there may be a stern message of God.

 

It is when we begin to re-grasp the concept that we are, individually and collectively, less important than the sparrows that fall or the lilies in all their splendour, and yet hold that truth in tension with the truth that the Christ of the Cross can and will die to enter even our unimportance, it is then that we begin to be an authentic witness to Christ-light in our community. Do I do it? No. For we all collectively major in the minors, get obsessed with the trivial, and fall back into the web of human sin.

 

But God does it, and our task is to turn and turn again to the God who does. We are tiny, insignificant microbes in the complexity of the universe: ironically it is that which the architects of the great cathedrals were trying to tell us, and which is echoed in miniature in the design of Kingwell Malcolm for our cathedral. We are tiny.  The great revivalist hymns and songs can teach us much: despite the incompre­hensible and ever-growing majesty and mystery of the Creator, flinging universes across nothingness, that same Creator cares for a sparrow and for you and for me and for Da’esh’s latest victim Alan Henning and for Ebola victims whether they are in New York or Sierra Leone.

 

It is fashionable to sneer at the great songs and hymns of the revivalist era and holiness movements such as the charismatic renewal and its aftermath, but it does no harm to recall over and again that the God who flings stars is the God who calls us again and again to the compassion and reconciliation and forgiveness of the cross:

Just as I am, though tossed about
With many a conflict, many a doubt;
Fightings within, and fears without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come!

For all the limitations of the some expression of atonement doctrine we should not sneer at the un-ambivalent reminder of “there’s room at the cross for you”, even if we need to remember that the return to the compassion of cross is not once for ever but always over and again and for me and for each of us.

 

That is why Jesus told a parable about the arrogance of self-reliance and self-satisfaction: in his over-the-top tale of a landowner and his evil tenants we receive a burlesque parody of our ability to force ourselves into what we think is the driving seat of the universe, bruising and beheading those who get into our way, and never allowing the surrender of self to Christ that is the real beginning of the gospel. The moment we think this analysis of the parable is about someone else is the moment we should realize that still and again there is room at the cross for us to set right our relationship with the Owner of the Vineyard.

TLBWY