faith in the storms

This belonged with last week's readings ... this week's later. Life got in the way. But for my stuttered thoughts on Charlottesville see my alternative blog

This was delivered in 2011 - had I pictured the storms of Charlottesville and the rise of hate  six years hence I might have emphasized the stilling of the storm a little more: Because I was not prescient I will inject this link a long six years later: "hate will not win" but  silence is not the answer

SERMON PREACHED AT St. FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, AUGUST 7th 2011
(PENTECOST 8 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 19)



 

 
Readings:

Genesis 37.1-4, 12-28
Ps 105.1-6, 16-22
Romans 10.4-15
Matthew 14.22-36

If ever there were events in the stories of the life of Jesus – and in a sense that is what the gospels are not, but more of that perhaps another time – that captures a visual imagination it is the nature miracles, the stilling of storms and walking on water.  Popular images in stained glass and other art, it became popular in and since the nineteenth century to dismiss or disparage (either way to ‘diss’!) these events as elaborate and naïve fabrications.

I don’t particularly want to weigh into the argument. It is important as we read the first century scriptures to remember that the world of the original audiences was not so different to our own, and that then as now language of stilling storms or walking on water would have been heard as metaphorical, or literal, or fabricated. Those who first told the stories were aware of this, and told them still: the risk of conveying the gospel on the back of utter fabrication was too great to undertake.

We can therefore be assured either that the events occurred as described or that there was an understanding between speaker and audience that these stories conveyed truth about a divine yet human figure who could, as one utterly conjoined with the creator of the universe, command creation to obey his will. If this is the case we can also be assured that the early Christians knew the risen Christ as one who, present to them by the Spirit, could calm the tragic storms of their individual and corporate lives.

This did not, then or now, indicate that, as the saying goes, bad things don’t happen to good people. The story of Joseph in any case should warn us that while God may journey ahead of us and with us in times of trial, we are not by any means protected from the vicissitudes of life. Bad things happen to people, full stop! The challenge though is for us as a people of God to be so immersed in the rhythms of a life directed towards God, so immersed in the rhythms of a life that is lived on the premise that it belongs to God, that we can know ourselves to be treading in the footsteps that God has already trodden, treading in the footsteps that God has created for us.

The challenge then, to borrow the words of one great saint, is to ‘practice the presence of God’. The fate of the pre-Easter Peter, characteristically relying on his own bravado to attempt the miraculous task to which Jesus calls him, is highly symbolic in application for our own lives. I emphasize again, it does not matter whether we take a literal approach to the events described, or whether we see them as a metaphor, there is no doubt that the earliest Christians believed, against all odds, that faith in and obedience to Christ was utterly trial-transforming.

They knew from tough experience that a life lived to Christ, lived in such a way that it becomes a constant confession of Christ and witness to Christ, becomes a life that transcends trials of any magnitude, even trials of persecution and death. It was this that was the main evangelistic tool of the first Christians – martyrs by death or simply by lifestyle, they demonstrated a resilience and an authenticity far greater than that of the world around them, and gradually their numbers grew against all odds.

For us in twenty-first century western Christianity cultures there is, thank God, little chance of martyrdom for our faith. I for one am not necessarily sure that I would be so brave in Christ that I could be a Stephen, stoned for his faith, or a Peter, who once he stopped attempting to bravado his way into God’s plan, once he surrendered to the leading of God’s Christ-presenting Spirit, became one of the greatest witnesses of all our history.

But a life lived to Christ is simply a life lived in the shadow of the Cross, the shadow of God’s call to prioritize Christlike, self-sacrificing justice and compassion and love in whatever context God calls us to dwell in. It is to that we are called across the waters – no matter how strong the winds (including the winds of change that blow around us and which may be our gentle form of persecution) – and it is in Christ, not in ourselves, that we are called to put our trust.

 TLBWY

on light inextinguishable

KAUWHAU at TE POU HERENGA WAKA O TE WHAKAPONO

(South Napier)

TE WHAKAAHUAKĒTANGA o te TAMA AROHA

(Feast of the Transfiguration)

(August 6^th) 2017

READINGS

Daniel 7.9-10, 13-14

Psalm 97

2 Peter 1.16-19

Luke 9: 28b-36

This week on a friend posted a link on Facebook that caught my eye. The link focussed on the German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who attempted to topple Hitler. Bonhoeffer maintained that when the church stops talking about Jesus, it has nothing to say. 

It is  the Feast of the Transfiguration. In the Orthodox church this is the great feast of the year, for this is the feast on which the light of God shines through the flesh of Jesus and we are enabled to see the face of God in the face of Jesus, something the Hebrews could never do. The divine light shines in and through the flesh of the Incarnation, arreuria!  

The centrality of Jesus is not-negotiable. We take a risk when we speak of Jesus. We will recreate Jesus to some extent, remake him in the image that we want him to have. That’s only natural, and we’re allowed to be human. But we must always ensure that our presentation of Jesus is not contradicted by the scriptures. 

That’s one reason why the mystical language of the Orthodox is so valuable. The scriptures are the first place where we encounter him, divine light pouring from him. We must not remake Jesus in our own image. The experience of the scriptural authors was that his light, divine light will always be shining with us on our journey, even our journey through death. Divine light, light of lights, for us and with us!

If I claim to speak on behalf of the Church, the Body of Christ, but do not refer to Jesus, then I am mocking Christianity. Jesus is  God’s self-revelation, and I blot the Jesus story out at  the expense of white-washing faith itself, making faith meaningless. If I speak about social justice, but do not claim the authority and compassion of Jesus the Just, or if I speak of justice for the earth, for what I will happily call Papatūānuku and her children, but do not cite the compassion of Jesus who has loved creation from its beginning,  then I am no more than a political party and I am only pretending to be at prayer or ‘at faith.’

I don’t always get this right, don’t always practice what I preach. But when we begin to look and sound more like a political party or a service club than the Body of Christ, then we are seriously losing our way, blackening the divine light. And we are, across the Church.

But what of the Transfigured Christ?

The language of Transfiguration is strange: Jesus becomes too powerfully vivid for our eyes to cope, converses with ancestors in faith, and hears, with his companions, the voice of God. This is no normal event. Should we dump it, then?

But why should our language about the Messiah of God be merely normal? When we describe the pinnacle experiences of our lives we break our of the ordinary. We struggle to find words. If I speak of my wedding day (or night!) or the day a group of our completed the Milford Track in atrocious conditions or the day I climbed Table Mountain or my feelings at a Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen concert or when watching a sunset, then I have no words.

Whatever happened in the lives of Peter, John, and James, it was not able to be communicated in common or garden words. In fact they failed to get a grasp of the events at all until much later, and were prepared to admit that (or we wouldn’t have the story). But we should not avoid building it into our story of Jesus. The disciples glanced something beyond words. But later, after the even greater resurrection event, they began to get it. When they saw this moment of light in the light of the even greater light of the resurrection, they began to understand. Make sense of that! Some experience that they could not explain or even convey clearly, filled them with awe, and they told the tale. Still though they had no words, and nor did Luke, or Peter, who told the tale years later. The biblical writers could not always or indeed often convey the awe and strangeness of God. Nor can we. But they and we could live it.

In this scientific world we must never be afraid of that which is mystery. Language of the weird and wonderful, which we often only turn to in books and movies, should be a part of our language of faith, must be a part of our language of faith, unless we’re going to be mere drivellers. We drag God down to merely human drivel at peril. We reduce faith to a political or sociological programme at peril. We trim the unknowable, the eternal, the mystical, the divine out of our language and our discourse at peril. When we do that we become mere bessa blocks, mere concrete blocks instead of the beautiful ornate whakairo, carvings that reveal mystery, that the Creator designed us to be.

The Transfiguration challenges us to lift our eyes above the gutter. The great biblical stories challenge us to move from prose to poetry, from talk to waiata, and then to turn with renewed wairua to the issues that we face from day to day. As we are renewed we know that we are not addressing life merely in our own limited strength. We can face issues of injustice, suffering, despair, loneliness, innumerable things that weigh us down and cripple our family, friends, our wider society. Some of us are called to address these big issues – from homelessness to income disparity to the big questions of global warming and international affairs. Some of us are simply called to share aroha and tūmanako (hope) with those we meet on the smaller stages of life. Either way it’s okay. But we are called to do so with our hearts warmed by the ever present, risen, ascended and in all ways transfigured Christ, who is always with us. Then, when it all gets too much we are called to step back, renew our lives in prayer, fellowship and worship, be refilled with the transfiguring Wairua (Spirit) of Christ who so enflamed the earliest Christians, and who himself went up the maunga to pray and be renewed (with remarkable effect on those he shared the experience with). 

And in all this the centrality of Jesus is not negotiable. The one who is known to us in the bread and the wine, known to us in the warmth of fellowship, known to us in the power of karakia (prayer) and himene (hymns), who will take us on into the impossible eternities of God, glimpsed in the words and visions of the Mount of Transfiguration.

TLBWY