March 7, 2004

George Armstrong

Before we get to communion, during this sermon, I'm going to take you for a ride! A ride of the imagination.

We're off through the narrow gate or door over there, up past where the bellringers do their stuff, up onto the roof of the church tower. Over we leap now! Follow me, a giant hop across to the Sky Tower. Up and up and up to the pinnacle of that Temple then up, up into the clear blue sky we spring, a kind of reverse Bungy Jump until our vision is unimpeded by the earth's curvature.

Are you with me? Don't be nervous now. This ride gets yet more strange.

Now look south, down towards Oamaru where that wonderful woman Janet Frame with the even more wonderful imagination rests - as do her ashes. Something is glinting down there. That mischievous woman Janet Frame has left behind a mirror. This is what is glinting in the sunlight as she signals in our direction from beyond this life.

We're flying south now. Don't hold tight. Relax. You couldn't be in more loving hands than those of Janet Frame. She's not like those of us who still fear the traumas and deaths ahead of us. She had her traumas long ago. Electric shock treatments without end as a severely depressed young girl. That wonderful woman and wonderful imagination saved by a whisker and by a literary prize even as she was being wheeled towards a lobotomy in the operating theatre.

The glinting mirror is poised over Puamahara, near Otaki maybe, or Waikanae; one of those towns that lately no doubt have become a no-go zone for those unspeakable ones, the endlessly denounced dole-bludgers.

We are drawn towards this mirror. Now we are gazing into it. It's not an ordinary mirror; more like Galadriel's still basin of water in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. What we see in the mirror is not exactly our reflection, but something nevertheless eerily connected with our innermost soul-selves.

We see a wealthy woman from New York, Mattina Brecon. She's the lead character in Janet Frame's novel The Carpathians. Mattina has rented a house in Kowhai Street Puamahara for a couple of months. This is her style of tourism. She wants to get close to the people. She is easily accepted by her neighbours. They readily invite her into their houses and onto their Marae. From the moment she sees the worried face of the British Queen on the banknotes that she exchanges at the quaintly named "dairy", she is entranced by these o-so-ordinary New Zealanders who become her friends.

Her new friends have some things strangely in common. Each of them in turn says that they do not really belong in Puamahara. They have come to Kowhai Street from some former place which they now speak of "with transparent love". And many of them speak of going away and finding a new life for themselves - in Auckland or somewhere equally inconsequential. They all seem to live for the past or the future, never delightedly in the present. All speak, each in their own hum-drum ordinary way, of a soul-deep bottomless disappointment and loss in their everyday existence.

Mattina becomes aware of their hopes and fears. She sees how fragile and vulnerable they are; just like herself back in New York with her once-promising but now - that promise long gone - her deeply disappointed writer husband Jake. Their own partnership however over many years has against all the odds settled to an extraordinarily sustaining togetherness.

It would outlast the apocalypses to come. For an apocalypse is on the way - and more than one.

One of Mattina's many utterly memorable utterly ordinary neighbours is Hercus Millow. Sergeant Major Hercus Millow, a widower and a returned soldier, has been a prisoner of war. He welcomes Mattina into his home and tells her of the communal imagination that had stocked the prisoner of war camp as with a farmyard of animals. They were mostly dogs, pet dogs whom the POW's could feed or take for walks, to whom they could talk and who could be relied upon to nuzzle their masters through the lonely night hours. One prisoner would say to another: "you should control that dog of yours. The place smells like a zoo in here". Another prisoner had fashioned a horse and two cows for himself and shared out the resulting dairy products amongst his fellow prisoners. "After all" he said, "I'm a farmer". To which another warned: "It's dangerous to let you imagination run away with you", after which the same wit immediately turned and said to the empty air "here boy, good dog" ... and so on. And as Hercus tells Mattina of these things, he becomes fully alive.

And this rich strange utterly ordinary and dear woman Mattina treasures all these and like dear things of Kowhai Street in Puamahara and keeps them safe in her capacious New York heart.

Then midnight Apocalypse falls upon Kowhai Street in Puamahara. Mattina awakes to screams and cries from her neighbours. Terrified at what she might find, she bundles herself and her courage eventually into her dressing gown and goes out under the streetlights. There has been no great explosion. No terrible flames shoot out of houses. Yet her neighbours, inexplicably, are all, children included, at their gates, crying and screaming, their clothing in shreds. As she speaks to them their faces are blank and uncomprehending. Their own alarmed cries are gradually forming themselves into something like new words and sentences which Mattina in her turn cannot comrehend. She feels gentle drops on her head and hands. Rain? Not ordinary rain. It is dry or damp particles of various size and texture, principal amongst them tiny letters of all the alphabets of the world. Raining plentifully down upon the whole street.

The panic gradually subsides. The people fall quiet and returned through their front doors from behind which there issue for some hours sounds sometimes amounting to cries of alarm and anger. Then … nothing.

Morning brings the certainty that this has been no dream. The usual voices of children on their way to school can not be heard as Mattina awakes. Traffic seemed to be avoiding Kowhai Street. But later in the morning a long line of sombre vans winds to a halt along the street. From her hiding place behind a hell of herbaceous shrubbery Mattina watches stretcher bearers carry out her neighbours, stow them with matter of fact competence, and drive purposefully away.

Mattina seems the only survivor. As for the rest of Puamahara, life goes on all as if nothing particularly peculiar had happened. But the Puamahara terror and its strangely peaceful aftermath, as it arises from within Janet Frame's mirror, possesses no less a stature and significance than a New York Trade Towers' bombing as yet far off in real history.

Blasphemous though it is to turn from this mirror of Janet Frame after so brief a visit, we must gently wing our way back now Northward to Sky Tower, to St Matthew's tower, to the old familiar things of the Sunday Morning Service and this unusually unhinged Sermon. Can I land you back here without so much as a gentle bump? Are you OK? Enjoying the ride? Good; even though it was but a brief shadow of the giant reality of Janet Frame's story telling.

We have just heard in the Gospel for today how Jesus wept over Jerusalem: "How often" he cries, "How often I would have gathered you under my wings but you would not". The people of Jerusalem, the central sacred powerhouse of all Israel, were chickens in a chicken house. And to guard this Chicken House, the Roman Imperial Caesars continued the rule of the local Herodian tyrants. Today's Gospel Herod, "that fox", a kind of ancient version of the early American Fox Sadaam in Iraq, looked after Caesar's Galilean Chicken House. That fox Herod Antipas, was a son of Herod the Great who had died the year Jesus was born. He was a fortunate survivor was our Antipas. His Great Dad had already executed his own two eldest sons fearing that they might steal his kingdom. Yet another royal dysfunctional family or stewing Parliamentary Cabinet you might say.

Just a few miles up the road from where Jesus very likely grew up, there was a fine new Roman style town called Sephoris which Herod the Fox rebuilt as his first capital. Herod the Less had to rebuild this city on the charred ruins of the city burned to the ground by the Roman legions after the rebellions which followed the power vacuum at the death of his father Herod the Great in 4 B.C.E. Those Sephoris citizens who were not numbered amongst the 2000 crucified leading rebels, were all sold into slavery. The rebuilding was financed from the taxing of the already heavily endebted peasantry. Apocalypse indeed.

The main tactics of the Roman globalisers were two fold. They taxed their subjects mercilessly. Non payers were treated as traitors. Offenders against the Romans were regularly crucified, sometimes in great numbers at the one time. These devastating tactics were calmly calculated and methodically implemented to strike terror deep and permanent into the heart of the regular population.

Into the midst of this inhuman apocalyptic fringe of bloody world history came Jesus the compassionate. He quickly saw through to the heart of the issue. His heart warmed to the people in all their frailty and strength. He offered them his support and his spirit. Even to those who opposed him, whether Jew or Roman or Greek, to them all he offered his gifts of wisdom and life. In him the divine wings stretched far and wide and high over that fraught situation.

Those wings stretch over us still this morning as we come forward to share this quaint banquet of Jesus the Messiah, the mother hen. These are mighty angels wings which soar far above and beyond us and this mighty building, far beyond Oamaru and Puamahara and out to the uttermost parts of the Galaxies and even to Janet Frame's crazy Gravity Star. This is a banquet for remembering Jesus our host, a banquet when past present and future are woven into the single great canopy that now reveals itself as the bright wings of eternity.

Rev Dr George Armstrong