December 24, 2010

Clay Nelson

Christmas Eve & Day

Not all Christmas traditions are created equal. In the country of my birth a new tradition has arisen – regrettably. It is the annual “War on Christmas.” In America’s defence, war is kind of our thing. Most of my life we have been at war with someone. When there weren’t enough “someones” to war with we had wars on things: poverty, drugs, terror and now Christmas. This latest tradition became popular with the rise of Fox News who begins beating the drums of war sometime each September. Fox doesn’t believe it began the hostilities. Those who choose to greet others with “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” rather than “Merry Christmas” fired the first shot in their view. Fox would have us believe it is defending Christianity against liberals and atheists and implicitly, Muslims and Jews. If you don’t say “Merry Christmas” you are probably a terrorist. In truth Fox could care less what is on your Christmas card. Fox’s only stock in trade is dividing people. When people are polarized by fear of another’s race, creed, colour or Christmas greeting it is easier to keep power in the hands of the rich and powerful.

My fear is that this conflagration could expand beyond US borders thanks to cable television, which broadcasts Fox News around the world. Thanks to fear mongering, Christmas may spark World War III.

In the interest of peace on earth, goodwill to all, I have a suggestion. Let’s take the angels’ message seriously, “Don’t be afraid.” Let’s take away their talking point and wish everyone a merry Christmas. Let’s refuse to be an enemy combatant. Some might think this is a capitulation to evil. But I would argue that it is an act of defiance. The spirit of Christmas is universal and belongs to everyone. To wish your humanist, pagan, progressive, Jewish, and Muslim friends or anyone else for that matter, a merry Christmas is not only an act of generosity it is a reminder that Christmas doesn’t belong just to those who proclaim Jesus as their personal lord and saviour.

In fact, if Christmas belongs to anyone, it belongs to the Pagans. It wasn’t until the 4th Century that the church started celebrating the winter solstice with the birth of Jesus. Pagans have been celebrating it for 4000 years. It is the Pagans who gave us holly and mistletoe; Yule logs and Christmas trees. The Egyptians symbolized the return of the sun with the birth of a baby boy. Our candlelight services go back to the priestess bringing sacred fire out of the cave and passing the flame to her pagan congregation.

All this was too tempting to the church. They borrowed all of it and Christmas was born. But even then Christians didn’t universally celebrate it. The Puritans outlawed it in Massachusetts because of its pagan roots. There are Christian sects today that still refuse to celebrate it for the same reason.

For Pagans there is no embarrassment about keeping this season - keeping alive the wisdom that the light that shines on in the darkness, our darkness, cannot be extinguished. The pagan in us all – and all of us have some – will not be offended by a greeting of merry Christmas.

After the Pagans, Christmas probably belongs most to the Jews. Of course, wishing the Jews a merry Christmas presents a dilemma. Here is a story that has been the excuse for persecution and pogroms. For not accepting Jesus as THE Messiah, Jews have been subjected to great evil. For a Jew to sit out Christmas is not a surprise.

Still, the irony is, Jesus never of course, saw himself as anything but a Jew, one after reform, to be sure, but a Jew. The word “Christian” never crossed his lips. That anti-Semitism tries to hide this fact is another matter.

Jesus’ message was simple enough: the religion of his day had become lost in formalism. The letter became more important than the spirit. Forms that were to enhance human life were used to pound it down.

It is a hypocrisy found in every religion, often among those who claimed to found a new church in Jesus name. In our celebration of this Jewish prophet’s birth we do well to remember that. Strange as it may seem, there is room for a Jew in the stable. On that holy night, other than the magi, that is all there were at that stable. For that matter there is room for a Muslim as well, as the Qur’an venerates both Jesus and his mother. So the least we can do is thank them for our merry Christmas.

Humanists present more of a problem. Certainly in the last century they have stood firmly in the camp of “reason” against what they consider the superstitions of religion. The myths and stories around Christmas give them little reason to celebrate the season. Wishing them a merry Christmas, may get a “Bah! Humbug!” in response. But Christmas has something to offer them as well. 

Humanists have traditionally held that it is to the human, not to the divine, we must look for help. While early Christians squabbled about his nature, the “human” Jesus showed us what a human can do. He turned things upside down. His public life of only three years changed the world. While it may seem an impossible contradiction, Humanists can celebrate the birth of someone who showed us the full extent of our human powers. More than that, the ethic that Jesus taught, love for our fellow beings, is at its heart humanistic, as is his call to serve humankind.

What could be more appropriate for a humanist than to celebrate the most human of holidays? The themes of Christmas reflect the deepest yearnings of the human heart: hope and light, birth and joy and love and peace. There is a lot here for the humanist to celebrate. So we wish them merry Christmas.

Then there are the free thinking progressives who do not follow a “Jesus saves us” Christianity, but an ethical and spiritual Christianity, following the teachings of Jesus, the religion of Jesus, rather than the one about Jesus. They take in stride all the assurances that they are going to hell, and noting the fine people who are going to hell with them according to the orthodox, say, “Go to Heaven for the weather and hell for the company.” 

Progressives are found in many traditions including Anglican, but some of the first were Unitarians. One was Charles Dickens, whose story of human transformation, A Christmas Carol, helped give Christmas the popularity it has today. Another was John Pierpont who captured the joy of Christmas in his song Jingle Bells.

Sadly, some do not see them or their successors as part of the Christian tradition. Fox does not wish progressives a merry Christmas because progressives do not see the Christmas story as factual history, but as a myth that in the telling reaches deeply into our hearts. Progressives hear a tale of a child born in the commonest circumstance, revealing the holiness of every birth; declaring that even among the shunned, in a place of dung, divinity has a perch; that in the most wretched place we find that reality has a heart.

Progressives celebrate this subversive truth of Christmas. Thomas Merton, Catholic writer, monk and progressive thinker put it this way:

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, who are tortured and bombed and exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in the world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst ... It is in these that he hides himself, for whom there is no room.

Part of us chaffs at the idea that among those whom we shun and reject, is the holy. It is a hell of a note... No wonder so many are tempted to believe the story literally and miss the implication – the holy is among us.

For the progressive this truth is what makes Christmas merry. Here is the affirmation that the birth of God's love is possible in all times and places, even in our dread and doubt.

So as an act of peacemaking I wish you all a merry Christmas. For all of us are what make Christmas what it is, whether we believe the story literally, mythically, or not at all. We are all actors in the story and without any of us it would lose power to transform a world of darkness, pain, loss, and injustice. Without any of us the world would be less holy.

So my message of peace to Fox is from a child repeating the Lord’s prayer as he understood it: “forgive us our Christmases as we forgive those who Christmas against us.”

December 24, 2010

Clay Nelson

Christmas Eve, Carols Service

Christmas Eve is a time for candlelight.

It is a time when one desires little more

than family and soft music.

Who can say what passes through our hearts on Christmas Eve?

Strange thoughts.

Undefinable emotions.

Sudden tears.

Christmas Eve is a time to be quietly glad.

It is a time to wonder, to give thanks,

and of quiet awakening to beauty

that still lives on through the strife

of a war-torn world.

But Christmas Eve is also a time for memories and remembering.

For some, the memories are of loved family members

who have died, and the festive season

makes the pain of those losses ever more real.

For others, the memories are of happier times than we know now,

felt as the anguish of broken relationships,

the insecurity around employment,

the anxiety of illness or poor health,

or the emptiness of loss after flood, drought, earthquake or mine disaster.

All these feelings can be with us this night

as we gather in this sacred place surrounded by candles shining bright

in the dark of night.

Here we are safe to feel what we feel:

to acknowledge our sadness,

to share our concern,

to release our anger,

to face our emptiness,

and still to know that God by what ever name or experience,

is made present in the caring thoughts and deeds of others.

So let us be and share and remember and receive,

assured that we are not alone in our life experiences.

On the day after Boxing Day I received this gift via email. 

I attended a Christmas eve service for the first time in my life. It was yours at St Matthews.

When I arrived home I wrote this poem and I trust you will take something positive from it, as I did from you. It's the experience of one person among hundreds.

You may recognise the opening words as having been spoken by you during the carols...

Kind regards

Graeme

Christmas at St Matthews

Peace rolls on

Through strife and war

Struck numb by loneliness

He doesn’t know

His lover

Is just at his back

By the cathedral door

On his right

The older lady from Wellington

With her nervously excited,

Smiling

Adult

Auckland

Daughter

Through constant glances

Revealing concern

For her mother’s enjoyment,

Changing places with father

To be closer still

To his left

A young man

Thinking of his England

And tortured times in his teens

There to remember his mother

Taken by cancer,

A Grandfather, still alive,

So far away, and

A father he never pleased,

Now never sees

Behind him a Buddhist monk,

Courteously bowing his head

Here from Japan to

To witness a Christian service

Strange words

Flowing over his head

Beautiful words,

Beautifully read,

Tumbling from the pulpit

Invoking his thoughts

Of a relationship broken,

The loneliness born of loss,

The uncertainty coming

With a job soon to end...

Reflected on in calmness,

Just for now

Emotions carried

On the waterfall of

Rarely-heard

Sound

Pushed from great pipes

By the delicate touch

Of a joyful man,

(His animated body

shaking long blond hair),

Dwarfed beneath vaulting arches

Outside

Cooler breeze

Meeting clearer mind

Neck craning

Hoping, as if by looking,

The bells peeling

Midnight,

That it’s Christmas!

Will impart

Peacefulness

Love and hope,

To more than just

Those who hear,

Who have been,

On this one night,

Here.

Graeme on Christmas carols at St Matthews, Auckland, December 24, 2010

December 19, 2010

Clay Nelson

Advent 4     
Matthew 1:18-25


It was a few days before Christmas. A woman woke up one morning and told her husband, "I just dreamed that you gave me a pearl necklace for Christmas. What do you think this dream means?" "Oh," her husband replied, "you'll know the day after tomorrow."

The next morning, she turned to her husband again and said the same thing, "I just dreamed that you gave me a pearl necklace for Christmas. What do you think this dream means?" And her husband said, "You'll know tomorrow."

On the third morning, the woman woke up and smiled at her husband, "I just dreamed again that you gave me a pearl necklace for Christmas. What do you think this dream means?" And he smiled back, "You'll know tonight."

That evening, the man came home with a small package and presented it to his wife. She was delighted. She opened it gently. And when she did, she found-a book! It was entitled, "The Meaning of Dreams".

I think it is safe to say that our dreams fascinate us. It is one activity that transcends all human differences. We all dream, even those of us who don’t remember them. It transcends not just human differences, but species as well. I know my canine mate Zorro dreams, which makes me wonder if the fantail and tui dream as well? How about field mice and rabbits? How about insects? Does the weta have nightmares of being naked in church like I do?

While our dreams sometimes seem deranged, they apparently keep us mentally well. People deprived of dreaming for lengthy periods begin to exhibit mental illness. Their sense of reality becomes impaired.

Yet dreams themselves can often disturb our sense of reality. Have you ever awaken from a dream, and then realized that this is not real awakening, but that you are still within a dream. These dreams within a dream raise the question: do we live in reality, or in a dream of reality? Is the real hidden behind a dreamlike apparent reality? The Taoist philosopher of the Fourth Century BCE, Zhuangzi, once described such a dream:

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. [i]

Douglas Adams, author of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, put it more succinctly: “He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”

Such dreams are an invitation to consider the nature of reality. Such experiences encourage us to contemplate the deep structure of the universe and perhaps where to find the divine in it. As we do, Zhuangzi reminds us in another teaching that our lives are limited, but knowledge is limitless. [ii] There are things we cannot grasp or understand. Thus we live with mystery, with limited knowing. Every night, our dreams tease us with the limits of our knowing, inviting us to a place of mystery and humility. But on occasion they provide us with the gift of new creative insight or new wisdom. Niels Bohr, the founder of quantum mechanics, was given the critical insight of discrete quantum levels in a dream. He dreamed of horses in a horserace, having to stay in their tracks. [iii] Albert Einstein had a dream about travel at relativistic speeds, leading to his theory of relativity. His dream was about what the stars would look like, while sledding at high speeds. [iv]

Sometimes the gift of dreams is not just new insight but a call to action.

After World War I, in a time of increasing British oppression in India, Mahatma Gandhi was a relatively new participant in the efforts for independence. He and other leaders met to plan opposition to the Rowlatt Bill, which was the continuation of wartime martial law into peacetime. Violent protests had broken out, and Gandhi's appeals for non-violent action were ignored. During this meeting over several days, Gandhi had a dream, which he describes in his autobiography:

“Towards the small hours of the morning I woke up somewhat earlier than usual. I was still in the twilight condition between sleep and consciousness when suddenly the idea broke on me – it was as if in a dream. … we should call upon the country to observe a general hartal [a day of fasting]. … Let all the people of India, … suspend their business on that day and observe the day as one of fasting and prayer.” [v]

We know how that dream played out in reality. The country was shut down by this interfaith fast, essentially a strike, and the Rowlatt Bill was repealed. Moreover, this action launched Gandhi as a leader in the fight for independence for India. We also know such dreams inspire others to dream. Gandhi’s dream led Martin Luther King, Jr. to dream of equality for black Americans obtained through nonviolent resistance.

Anthony de Mello once noted that the shortest distance between our humanity and the truth is a story. Today’s Gospel is one such story. I have a fondness for the story of Joseph’s dream – and not just because it was the biblical underpinning of last year’s Christmas billboard. It hints at truths we sometimes only glimpse in our dreams. They are the kind of truths that have the capacity to transform us. Sometimes they transform the world as well.

Today’s story is not historical. Its deeper truths get lost when taken literally. The truth it speaks of is not the nature of Mary’s conception. It’s truth lies in the scandal revealed. Not Mary’s scandal – Joseph’s. Joseph is a dreamer, like his namesake, Jacob’s son, the one who provoked sibling envy with his coat of many colours and saved Egypt and his family from famine through his dreams. Not so coincidentally, later in Matthew, Mary’s Joseph will save his family from Herod with a dream to go to Egypt. 

Joseph is a dreamlike figure. He never has a spoken part in the story and disappears entirely from the Matthew and Luke after the birth narratives. He doesn’t show up at all in Mark and John. His story is a literary device that sets the stage for the scandalous life and death of the child to be born.

In my imagination Joseph has a voice. Mary has just told him she is with child by preposterous means. “I am a cuckold,” he laments. He considers his options. “It being a man’s world, I should publicly denounce her for her betrayal. Of course she and the baby will be stoned to death. Sad, but that’s the law. But if I do what is righteous I will be the laughingstock of the village. I’m already snickered at for taking a child bride. “Am I up to the task?’ they tease. No, a better option is to just break off the engagement without explanation. But of course the reason will be evident soon enough. Oh what to do, perhaps I should sleep on it.” 

The importance of the dream that follows is not so much its content but that it moves Joseph to violate the norms of his culture through a loving act. It teases him with knowledge beyond his own experience. It gives him insight into the mystery and nature of the divine. Because of it he chooses to defy societal standards and the purity laws of his faith and humble himself. He puts divine justice first and protects Mary and her unborn child. If he hadn’t, Matthew’s Gospel would have been quite short and we wouldn’t be here anticipating the child’s birth one more time. If he hadn’t stoning unmarried pregnant girls might still be considered righteous. If he hadn’t followed his dream we might not know that it takes courage to reflect divine love. It often causes a scandal. May we all have dreams of a scandalous Christmas and may they all come true.

[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuang_Zhou

[ii] Burton Watson, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, 1996. p. 46.

[iii] Jeremy Taylor, Where pigs fly and water runs uphill: using dreams to tap the wisdom of the unconscious, 1992, p. 30.

[iv] ibid, p. 31.

[v] Gandhi, An autobiography: the story of my experiments with truth, 1957, p. 459.

December 12, 2010

Richard Randerson

Advent 3

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. Thus read the opening words of the Bible in Genesis 1.1. But Professor Stephen Hawking’s latest research has led him to the conclusion that ‘the universe can and will create itself from nothing’ by ‘spontaneous creation’, and thus there is no need to find a place for God in the creation of the universe.

Professor Hawking raises an important question. Is it essential to our faith to find a place for God in the physical creation of the universe? If our image of God is of a pre-existent being endowed with all the human qualities of thought and action writ supernaturally large, then inevitably God must have done something to kick it all off. And if scientists talk about the Big Bang or evolution, then obviously God must have set everything up for the Big Bang to take place.

Never have I heard a public debate between religion and science where the theologians have questioned the image of God as a pre-existent supernatural being. The image may be nuanced as intelligent design or in some other way, but always the assumption that “God” had a hand in the physical creation of the universe is the position to be defended. Always the religion vs science debate is predicated and critiqued on that premise. And always it goes nowhere.

Now I want you to notice that I am using two words very carefully. I am talking about the physical creation of the universe – the planets, earth, sea and sky and all the physical aspects of life around us. And I am talking about our images of God: no human image, words or pictures can ever capture the fullness of God’s mystery. The traditional image of God is long-established but is nonetheless an image of God, not the inexpressible reality. There are other equally worthy images that don’t land is into the ongoing debate with science which comes when we adhere literally to the traditional image.

In my view, questions to do with the origins and development of the material world, its, are essentially scientific ones. I’m interested in the Big Bang, in evolution and whatever else scientists may discover about the physical origins and evolution of Planet Earth.

But faith is about something else. Faith offers wisdom as to how we understand the world in which we live, our relationships with God, with each other and with the earth. To read the Genesis account of creation as science is a category mistake, and one which sets up an unnecessary conflict between religion and science.

And yet there is no shortage of defenders of the position that God had a hand in the physical creation of the universe. Today in some quarters there is a renewed emphasis on Genesis as providing a scientific and historical account of Creation. This leads in turn to the relentless attacks by Richard Dawkins on religion. Dawkins ignores contemporary theology, but nonetheless has a legitimate target in the promoters of creationism as a scientific theory.

We need to think of Genesis in a different way. The world in which the biblical writers lived was one where it was natural to think of a heavenly realm inhabited by gods, or God, who created and controlled the earth and all forms of life. God was conceived anthropomorphically so that all the attributes of human thinking and action were ascribed on a much larger scale to God.

But is this the only image for the 21st century? There are other concepts of God, equally biblical, such as God as love, or God as spirit, that remain at the heart of religion. My own faith and experience of God has these features:

· A sense of being part of something bigger than myself, an otherness that transcends human experience but yet holds all humanity and all creation in an inseparable unity. Here is mystery, something in the face of which we stand in awe, and an antidote to any tendency to self-centred arrogance. Psalm 8 captures it in the words ‘O Lord, our governor, how wonderful is your name in all the earth; … who are we that you are mindful of us?’ This is not humanism.

· A sense that life and creation is a gift, unmerited goodness and grace, and that all life is to be treasured and sustained.

· I experience the divine mystery as love, and we are called as disciples to express that love through acts of compassion, in reconciliation, in working for justice and peace, and in caring for all people and the earth itself.

· The nature of the mystery, which we name as God, is expressed in the person of Jesus Christ, whom we name Son of God insofar as God’s nature is seen perfectly in him.

· A sense of connectedness to God and all life so that even in the darkest of times we are never alone. We are part of something bigger than ourselves, and this sense sustains us in distress, and guides us in every choice we make.

Now you will notice that I continue to use the word “God” as though God is a person, and here there is a paradox for me. My experience of God through prayer and worship, in all the encounters of daily life and in my contemplation of creation, is intensely personal, and yet the image of God as a person is not one I find helpful. In prayer and worship I use personal language about God, because my experience of God is personal, intimate and warm. God is not some cold intellectual or philosophical concept. God is mystery, yet a warm and loving mystery which embraces each one of us.

I imagine many of us would experience God in the way I have outlined – a mystery of love expressed fully in the person of Jesus Christ. But our creeds, our liturgies, our images of God are all at best inadequate human attempts to express the mystery. They are pointers to God, like road signs pointing to a city, but they cannot capture the fullness of God, any more than a road sign can be confused with the city to which it points.

The image of God as pre-existent being is traditional and widespread. Yet there are other images, such as the Celtic images of God as spirit, as love, as life, flowing through all life and creation, which do not require a place for God in the physical creation of the universe. One treads carefully where images of God are concerned. No image can be right or wrong. We must each find an image of God that works for us and best expresses our experience of God.

All civilizations have their stories of origin. Maori have the story of Rangi and Papa. We have the Genesis story. Neither should be seen as scientific accounts of how the world was made. But each story is rich in meaning as to the spiritual dimensions of life, and to how people relate to God, to each other and to the earth.

For myself I am happy to leave it to the scientists to explore how the universe began. Religion has a different task, and that is to help us experience the divine mystery that lies at the heart of life, and to experience and pass on the love of God which was seen so completely in the life, death and rising again of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is a complementary task to that of science. We should never allow science and religion to be at loggerheads. Our faith points us to a God whose life-giving spirit flows through all life, including science.

December 5, 2010

Linda Murphy

Advent 2
     Matthew 3:1-12

Repentance what does it really mean!

The imagery in our gospel today could have been written for the cinema. We have the wilderness in Judea, dry barren and rugged and the Jordan River this precious and symbolic water to the people of Palestine. John the Baptist is barely clad and living on adiet of locusts and honey, and there are crowds of people coming from Judea and Jerusalem including the Pharisees and Sadducees. John the Baptist is in the background shouting “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”, pure Cecil B. De Mille.

Over the last few weeks I have heard the words sin, repentance and forgiveness numerous times, especially at my ordination service and from my fellow ordinands. Today’s Gospel has John the Baptist, talking about repentance and the need for baptism to be prepared for the ‘kingdom of heaven’ which is at hand. But what does this word repentance really mean?

The original Greek word is metanoia which means to open and expand, to change one’s mind. It doesn’t mean feeling sorry for doing something wrong or bad. It means to ‘go beyond the mind’ or ‘go into the larger mind’. So what is John the Baptist talking about by going beyond our mind?

John and Jesus are asking people to approach life with a different mind-set, a more encompassing mind-set. In fact, the whole of Matthew’s Gospel is a story about transformation, turning around not just confessing our mistakes one week receiving forgiveness and returning next Sunday with the same or similar confession. It’s much more; it’s a realignment of how we live, how we engage with the world and with each other.

It was in the third and fourth century that Jerome when he was translating the Greek Scriptures into Latin that the word repentance was translated as to be sorry for our human shortcomings. This translation was based on a doctrine of original sin. However, Martin Luther wrote about this in the fifteenth century stating that metanoia clearly signifies a changing of the mind and heart not just a confession of wrong doing andasking for forgiveness. Sadly this error of interpretation has been with us for centuries, resulting in countless generations missing the point of this gospel and for many this error has caused immeasurable misery.

John is asking us to expand of our minds into the mind-set of Christ, to approach life differently here and now. Not just a turn around for eternal salvation, but a turn around of our lives and ourway of thinking. John was telling the people to turn their way of living around and be baptised in the Jordan not in the Temple at Jerusalem.

It would have been impossible to have a baptism in the temple by the time this gospel was written because the Romans had destroyed the temple some ten years previously. There was good reason for the gospel writer to be talking about turning around your mind-set. The Romans were as oppressive as during Jesus’ ministry if not more so, it was time for a new life perspective for the people of Palestine. John’s language challenges the priestly aristocracy; the Sadducees were high priests from Jerusalem and the Pharisees were the priests who made sure the Mosaic Law was being kept everywhere else. The Pharisees and Sadducees as the elite were working with the Romans, allowing excessive taxation, confiscation of ancestral property and chronic food shortages. This society was in need of a turn around and in needof a new way of being and living.

John’s appearance symbolically links him to Old Testament figures such as Samson, Samuel and especially Elijah. These prophetic men represented resistance to injustice and offered a revolutionary model of renewing society. John has crowds from Judea and Jerusalem, the people are not happy with the current status quo. John demands that his followers change their ways, they must live in ‘right relationship’ with God. John makes it clear that no one is exempt from this change required to be in the ‘kingdom of heaven’. This meant a radical conversion putting them and us back in a right relationship with God.

Advent is a time for renewal, new possibilities and hope, an invitation to participate with God in creating a new way of being. With all the media hype that comes with our commercialised Christmas season this seems a very difficult choice in fact something that we probably feel too busy to even contemplate. We have the Christmas cake to make, presents to buy, a tree to decorate and the all-important Christmas dinner to prepare. We don’t have time to think about changing our lives around.

But that is what this Advent tide is all about, being ready, being prepared, living in open expectation that we will be surprised by the gifts being offered by realigning and expanding our minds to a new way of living. One cannot expect to be cleansed by the water of baptism without first washing away the old way of living. We prepare the way of God when by our choices we open possibilities for God’s creative, transforming love.

John the Baptist's message is one of hell fire and brimstone, his message is uncomfortable, its not Christmas, not pretty lights and tinsel, it is challenging. John was preparing the people of first century Palestine for the coming of one so different to the age, a message offering love, hope, acceptance and compassion.

As many of you know Peter and I have had to move out of our apartment next door and put thirty-seven years of belongings into storage. We have experienced a radical turn around in the way we live. We are enjoying living in the countryside with just enough to get by on. We have no idea how we will celebrate our family Christmas dinner and we are not worrying about it.

Last week prior to my ordination I went on a silent retreat, I will admit I was not looking forward to the silence. To my amazement it was the best time I had had at Vaughan Park in three years. I really enjoyed the peace, I felt restored by the quiet, mediation and the gentle rhythm of retreat life. While it seems impossible to try and have quiet and peace in this time of parties and shopping it seems to me that this is what we should be doing. Listening and feeling that small voice within us all allowing each of us to be transformed into a humanity that challenges wrongs in our society, that cares for creation and each other.

We are being called during Advent and indeed through our whole lives to transform ourselves, to break out of our old habits and begin life again as new people. We will make mistakes and fall back into old ways, to respond continually to the invitation to repentance that is the expansion of our minds and hearts.

Amen.

November 28, 2010

Glynn Cardy

Advent 1     Isaiah 2:1-5     Matthew 24:36-44

This week the country has waited, praying, hoping for a miracle, yet expecting and fearing the worse for the 29 men within Greymouth’s Pike River Coal Mine. We are now told they are dead. 

‘Praying’ in this context means a variety of things. It’s a way of upholding the families, friends, rescue teams, police, and West Coast community. It was a way of hoping that Chile’s Los 33 Mine experience would be replicated and all would come out alive. It’s a way of saying that most of us are helpless to do anything, save send literal or telepathic messages of support to the families and people involved. 

Some believe that there is an omnipotent deity who hears our pleas and intervenes in human affairs to rescue those we care about. When the Los 33 miners surfaced this God was a hero. When the news came on Wednesday that the 29 were dead this God was nowhere to be found. 

Rather than the omnipotent deity I think God is the name we give for those sacred moments we have experienced and hope for. This God is known in the tears, in the aching hearts, in the kindness of others, and in the supportive actions of many.

I think of praying as opening one’s self to all that is sacred rather than petitioning a paternal being. In the context of Pike River to open oneself is to let the compassion in the community and the compassion in our own hearts flow through us and out to others. For in being together, in grieving together, in loving together we are strong. In this community of compassion a deity that is best known as Love can be felt. 

Advent is a time of waiting, praying, and hoping. Despite, says Isaiah, the circumstances of the present – no matter how tragic and terrible they might be – what we say or believe about the future bears heavily on the way we live.

Isaiah speaks metaphorically of a mountain where ‘heaven is joined to earth’; a place where what is human and what is sacred mix and mingle, where God’s tears and ours flow mingling down. And in that togetherness a vision is born. 

Matthew’s reading, loaded with code phrases [i], is also a meditation upon the future. He cautions against speculation, for none of us know what the future brings. And to not know is face our vulnerability. 

Yet in that mixing and mingling of the human and sacred hope is born – a hope that lifts our gaze from our present pain, the turmoil of our lives, and our fears for the future, and instead invites us to dream, to imagine, and to work towards a better world for all.

The Christian community has used these Advent readings for centuries to ready us for Christmas. Instead of buying presents, sending cards, and organising holidays Christians are asked to contemplate upon what we hope for in the future. 

Primarily Christmas is not about a baby, his mum, or his visitors. It’s not about God coming to save us, or about being generous to others. Rather it’s about Isaiah’s mythical ‘mountain’ being right here – in the Aucklands and in the Greymouths – where the sacred and the human mix and mingle, and where new hope might be born. That blending is called the incarnation and its here, as it’s always been here, in our tears and fears and hearts.

Daniel Rockhouse, one of the two Pike River miners who escaped, suffering the ill effects of carbon monoxide poisoning groggily made his way out of the mine. Yet he didn’t hesitate to stop, assist, and for a while drag his fellow miner, Russell Smith. For Daniel it wasn’t a deliberate heroic decision, weighing up the likelihood of survival if he dropped him. Rather it was simple case of ‘that’s what you do’. Underground you rely on one another, you take responsibility for one another, and when necessary you carry each other. It’s a code, and a vision, we could do well to emulate on the surface.

Visions start to build around our values. Here are some starters:

First:

“Love your neighbour as yourself”. This verse points to a notion of community where we are responsible for one another, seeing each other literally as brothers and sisters, caring for one another in a way so that poverty, war, and human rights violations would be unthinkable. When one suffered we all would suffer. We would not, of course, be close friends with everyone – families aren’t like that. But good families are loyal to each other, avoid hurting each other, and do what they can for each other. 

To ‘love your neighbour’ is also to open yourself to the change that your neighbour will inevitably bring into your life, welcomed or not.

This verse uses the term ‘self’ – of which there is a long philosophical history. You may be familiar with Descartes ‘I think therefore I am’, and others’ attempts since then. Personally I prefer ‘We are therefore I am’. It intertwines identity and community. In this definition we all belong.

Second:

Learning is not a means to an end; it is an end in itself. Learning does not have a quota to keep within. There’s no such thing as ‘too smart’. Learning is a value in itself – not to pursue a career, or money, or status – but simply to expand one’s horizons and see beauty and wonder where you’ve never noticed it before. Education should be about the absorption of knowledge, the ‘opening eyes, ears, minds and hearts’, and the development of reason, rather than a curtailed and streamlined skill package for a particular vocation or task. 

A friend the other night told me an amusing story. She had received a prize for Religious Education at her school many decades ago. Religious Education consisted in those days of the teacher dictating notes and the pupils writing them down. She won the prize for the neatness of her handwriting. It’s a sad reflection upon an education that doesn’t prize engagement, and a religion that is afraid of the thinking of young girls.

Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.”

Learning is one of society’s foundations and when we effectively bar groups from acquiring further knowledge we impoverish us all and impair our freedom.

Third, and last for now:

Live honourably. ‘Honour’ is an old classical word that embodies not only deeds but also courage. This is the courage to take the less popular path, to support the outcasts, and to receive praise from few and ridicule from many. This is the path where our immediate needs are sidelined in order to hear and respond to the concerns of others. This is the path where we close our ears to the clamour of the baying crowd, we show mercy, and we value what’s in another’s heart – even our enemy’s. A honourable life is not one motivated or marked by acclaim, recognition or wealth. Rather it is a life where one does what is right, come what may.

To love widely, to learn broadly, and to live honourably… these both contain and build my vision.

As we remember those grieving today I leave you with a prayer of Michael Leunig’s that encompasses life, death, and vision:

Let us live in such a way

That when we die

Our love will survive

And continue to grow. Amen. [ii]

[i] “The Lord is coming” is a code phrase for saying that we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future but it belongs to God. Of course ‘belongs to God’ is just another way of saying that we don’t know but still wish to be hopeful.

[ii] Leunig, M. The Prayer Tree.

November 14, 2010

Jim White

Pentecost 25     Isaiah 65:17-25     Luke 21:5-19

It is a pleasure to be with you this morning and to be amongst these beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God. Is it right to hope that some of it will be standing at the end of this sermon? I hope so.

I am here because when Glynn was first ill I made the offer to assist in some way and, in the mysterious workings of the St Matthew’s office, this was the time and occasion of my assistance. I don’t have any real idea if there is some significance of this time at St Matthew’s, maybe there is a complete lack of significance in this day and that is why it was picked. I don’t know.

Let me tell you what time it is where I live. As many of you know I am on the staff at St John’s College. We are at the end of our academic year. Students are about to leave to fieldwork placements or maybe leave leave – they have just a little waiting before ordination and their first appointment in holy orders.

This end of the year is perfectly matched by ending of our liturgical calendar which comes to an end next week. So, we are at this ending and on the edge of a new beginning kind of time.

Now, one of the joys of being at St John’s is the daily chapel services – every day prayer happens and I love the rhythm of the ride and I particularly enjoy the flow of the reading of scriptures. For the last week or so we have been trekking through the book of the prophet Daniel. Fantastic end of the year stuff because it is all so end of the world and crisis stuff. There is my all time favourite – Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – thrown into Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. Then there is Daniel thrown to lions. It is the decline of the Babylonian empire and things seem dangerously out of control. Will the faith and fortitude of these heroes be enough? The students are no doubt asking similar questions of themselves: will their faith and fortitude be enough for that which lies ahead of them. Daniel is great stuff. Epic. It might be about today?! Old empires in decline and are at war. As has been said, “Didn’t we prefer the US when it was just morally bankrupt?”

Anyway, the appointed scriptures are superbly fitting at the end of the academic year as the students, like birds, stand at the edge of the nest.

What will I do and what will I be? Will I plummet to the ground and die? Will my wings and that breath of God, which I can only just feel in my face, hold me up?

I think is where to locate the readings that you have just heard. They belong as part of the same time and space. I mean they both belong a time of ending and, at once, on the edge of a hoped for, not yet, beginning. I think they address the question of what we shall do and be.

Time doesn’t allow me to pause over the wonderful Isaiah passage. (Clay told me that you try and keep sermons under the hour here.)

I’ll focus on the Luke passage. But like the Isaiah passage we can locate Luke’s gospel as belonging to a time of tremendous tension of endings – of endings and unknown beginning. The temple that was not getting built fast enough in Isaiah’s time has been built and is now, at the time Luke is actually writing, the temple destroyed. Maybe that is why Luke remembered the words of Jesus, “not one stone will be left upon another.”? Who knows? This is time and space of destruction all around – things were not going according to any kind of happy plan; rumours of wars and dreadful portents abound. What is going to happen next? What shall we do? These press in with extra urgency.

Can you sense this space and time?

The question arises: What will happen? What will we do?

Now you will understand that I don’t like the advice that we are offered in the gospel. Oh, to be sure I like it that Jesus directs our attention away from the fear mongers, those who delight in the rumours of wars, – “do not go after them,” he says, and,” do not be terrified.”

(I like that, I have never felt very warm about those who stand on street corners and barrack us about the end of the world.)

[Have you noticed that folk who create apocalyptic visions most often imagine that it is just them wandering around at the end of the world and it is just up to them to start a new heaven and new earth. Their visions are so self-absorbed. “Don’t go after them.”]

What I don’t like about Jesus’ advice is the instruction: “Make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance.” I have something like an allergic reaction to these words. This is counter to so much of what I try and impress upon the students, which is to prepare them, over years we prepare them, to have some defense, some reason for the hope that lies within them.

[You know, I did think that I could just turn up this morning and see what happened. I did think I should resolve to prepare nothing and just see what words and wisdom came.]

This Gospel advice runs counter to so much of what I teach. 

‘You don’t just turn up.’

Except ... the message that really rests in this piece of the gospel is surely true: that we have to trust that God’s Holy Spirit will give us what we really need.

You know how it goes: we are justified; we are saved, by our faith.

St Matthew’s has always been thoroughly protestant church – by faith alone – you know this.

It is not by our own efforts, not by heaving on our own bootstraps that we haul ourselves out of the miry clay. It is by faith in God’s grace, by the gift of God … not our gifts, by the gift of God we are saved.

I wonder how much we believe this?

The strange thing is that the gospel actually ends on quite another note:

“By your endurance you will gain your souls.” (v19) Puzzling.

I can tell you, people don’t much believe in “endurance” these days.

The key reason Christian folk say they don’t like “endurance” is it is apparently advocating a gospel of works – by our doing comes our salvation – and this is message made of straw. We are meant to reject this, let it burn in the fires of hell.

The other reason people don’t like endurance is because it is about is about our effort over time. People do believe in themselves and their own effort, but prefer instant results and immediate gratification. It is not a pretty word ‘endurance.’

It is like perseverance, endurance.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith … (Hebrews 12)

People don’t like to hear that the life of faith is about perseverance and endurance.

Keeping at it, day after day; but that is how it is, I reckon … the life of faith is seldom one great and glorious sprint effort, over in a few seconds with the glory and prizes coming quickly.

Mostly the life of faith is getting up, saying some prayers and going into the day and there is no halo waiting with a fruit digestive at morning tea. It takes all day in the heat of the day, and day after day. Endurance.

“By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

So, you can see that today’s Gospel confronts us with one of the great paradoxes in Christian life. 

On the one hand it is not about our effort, it is about trusting God’s grace, it is about our faith and this amazing grace that saves wretches like me.

On the other hand, it is by our endurance that we will save our souls. Run with perseverance the race that is set before us ... be doers of the word.

It is about us living lives that are worthy of our calling, the Christian life is not just sitting in church of a Sunday and waiting for the gift of grace to land like the perfect little something in our laps.

What are we to do? How do we resolve this tension between two different answers? Which is it ‘grace’ or ‘works’?

I reminded of the story of child coming out of Sunday school with a gift all wrapped. It was something that the children had been working on for a weeks. There she was running towards her waiting parents, juggling spare clothing and a biscuit and the gift and, you know it, she trips and there is the unmistakable sound of breaking pottery. A sharp intake of breath from the parents, a long eternal silence, then wailing … utter grief.

The boldest parent goes forward and attempts to gather up all the pieces, “It doesn’t matter love.” “It doesn’t matter. It is the thought that counts.”

And the wisest parent gathers the child up and says, “Oh, it does matter honey, of course it really does matter. I am really sorry.” And sits and weeps with her daughter.” [i]

What we do, the outcome of our efforts and our endurance does matter; what we do does count and it matters just as much as the love, and faith and hope within us. Both faith and works matter, together, and we have unfortunately and falsely driven a wedge between them as if they can be separated. Each one gives meaning to the other. They are the internal and external reality of the same life.

So, for us today and everyday we need both: trust God and you will be saved, endure and you will save your souls.

Everyday when we stand on the edge of nest and wonder about what we are to do,

Every day when we wonder what is going to become of the world and there are wars and rumours of wars,

Every day that we question our own faith and fortitude we can only do one thing, or is it two? Trust and endure – they are the inside and outside of the same Christian life.

Everyday, we take a deep breath and … trust God and get on with the wrok of loving our neighbours as ourselves and, to be sure, in that we will have to endure.

[i] Not my story; from memory. I can’t find the reference for it. It comes from a sermon studied while I was at Yale.

November 7, 2010

Gaylene Preston

Remembrance Day

Your Excellency the Right Honourable Sir Anand Satyanand and Lady Susan Satyanand, the Minister of Defence, Wayne Mapp, Mayor Len Brown, Australian Consul General, Michael Crawford, Veterans, Ladies and Gentlemen; it is a real honour for me to be invited to this beautiful building to speak on this Remembrance Day set aside to remember the 11th of November 1918 – the end of the ‘War to end all Wars.

War Stories. I don’t know when I started collecting them. I was born in 1947 and I grew up in the shadow of another war. During the ‘Peace.’ Back then, to me as a small child, there were three times –

before the war,

after the war,

and a secret time, during the war

– it was a silence so loud to my little ears that it seemed more a place. “Oh that was during the war,” then the silence…”

I liked to draw – colour in – and I liked to do it on the floor. That was when I first heard stories around my mother’s skirts. Sitting under the kitchen table while the women talked above me, never about the battles or the bombs. Always about the relationships dislocated and forced apart, or worse, forced together again because of that time called ‘during the war.’

The men’s stories were very different. Not only in context, but in the telling. They were recounted loudly with a beer in one hand and a rollie in the other – amid eruptions of laughter. Army yarns for public consumption. Terrible tales with a punch line. Sometimes the voices would become serious and a small silence would fill the room, but not for long. The show must go on. 

Lest We Forget.

Everyone was trying to, I realise now. Desperately seeking that amnesia that blocks out painful thoughts of waste and futility, and honours mythology. Because we won. It must have been worth it. So my generation grew up in the bright white light of the peace time. The fifties. Security, conformity and everyone living the same happily ever after with the shadow largely unacknowledged, certainly as far as us kids were concerned.

I suppose it’s hard to own a war as a first hand event, when it didn’t happen here. When you live in a little piece of pink on the edge of the British Empire where hardly a shot was fired. No apocalypse here. No Blitz. No blood and carnage in the streets. Just romantic photos on the mantle piece of young soldiers who never came back, who never had funerals, and who stayed forever young encased in the black and white reality of an Egyptian photographer’s studio portrait.

And those who did come back often could only confront their terror in their nightmares. No demobbing, no therapy, no ‘lets talk it over.’ Sissy stuff. Just roll your sleeves up and work it off.

But down among the women the war was acknowledged as an on-going event. It was the reason why a neighbour never married, or couldn’t have babies, or another’s husband drank. Why a father rejected his son, why a husband couldn’t be loving.

So in a way, growing up in this blessed time of picnics, and equality for all, and social security from the cradle to the grave – all things my parents’ generation put in place for the peacetime. We were a protected generation. We were given education, opportunity and confidence to oppose war. And we did. In some numbers. It’s young people who get asked to fight them and enough of us across the Western World refused to fight in Vietnam and as young men and women managed to find a shared honourable mythology in NOT fighting. We put flowers down the barrels of the guns.

I didn’t want to know about the terrible shadow that we walked alongside, until I had a child of my own. Then I wanted to know. Hard to find out. The men didn’t want to talk about it and what they did want to talk about they didn’t want recorded! The women just maintained they weren’t there. “I wasn’t at the war, ask your Aunty’s sister in law, she was a nurse in Cairo.”

Oral histories are viewed with caution by some historians and are considered by some to be too personal and idiosyncratic to be taken seriously. This is because human memory is coloured by emotion to the point of being mysteriously irrational. But it is the pure vivid originality of oral histories that I love. Personal stories are often about moments. That’s how human memory works. We don’t remember days, we remember moments. This makes oral histories always surprising and sometimes even puzzling, particularly when exploring one event lived by several people. One person says this, another says that to the extent that the listener might wonder if the two tale tellers were even in the same place at the same time. But if there are enough stories told by enough people, a three-dimensional picture emerges and it all starts to add up to more than the sum of its’ parts. Complex, colourful and full. What I call a story net.

Lest we forget. Memory. Moments. Films are made of moments, so I started at home. I asked my father,

“What did you do in the War Dad?” 

“Nothing much. Just turned up.” 

“So what are those medals for?” 

“Turning up. They give em out with the rations.”

When he got a cancer diagnosis he finally agreed to be recorded on sound tape. And twenty years later I have made a film based on those ten little tapes. (HOME BY CHRISTMAS – the DVD is available in time for Christmas from selected outlets.)

But everything my father told me back then, made me realise that it was the women’s stories that for me provided the frame that brought home the larger picture. They lived through it, they held the social fabric, sewed it together when it was rent asunder and ‘soldiered on.’ And yet they weren’t really well represented in the official version – that big simplified story of World War Two that gets dusted off for public occasions. My intuition lead to my working with Judith Fyfe and the NZ Oral History Centre at the Turnbull Library from 1992 to make a collection of women’s memories of World War Two – there’s about 80 or so three hour tapes held there in the National Library all meticulously annotated for future researchers to splash about in.

These accounts contributed to another film of mine, WAR STORIES Our Mothers Never Told Us. So I’ve been most fortunate to have been able to spend a certain amount of my adult life investigating that secret place called ‘during the war’ for myself and it has led to my thinking about how the personal and the public record is dislocated. While we have celebrated warriors, we have created a fault line. A big geological gash exists through our communal memory. We have rendered ourselves amnesiac.

For example, I want to share a story told to me in the film I made by Rita Graham. It is of a man, Campbell Paterson who worked with her husband Alan at a Queen Street bank. When the younger Alan was called up to serve in 1942 he refused to fight on the grounds of his Christian Pacifist principles and was therefore to be imprisoned for the duration of the war. It was the custom at the Queen Street branch to give men who had been called up to serve a send-off and a gold watch. Campbell Patterson requested that Alan be given the same respect as those who were leaving to fight. The bank manager was furious. Outraged. No send-off or gold watch for Alan Graham. He left the bank and went to serve his sentence under a cloud. But Campbell didn’t forget Alan or Alan’s family. Every week he collected ten shillings mostly in threepences and sixpences from staff at the Queen St branch and put it in a bank account for Rita and Alan’s young family until Alan returned when the war ended. It is this story of fortitude, tolerance, and persistence that to me is an inspirational memorial of human compassion during war and I am sure there have been many instances of this kind of human compassion. The Campbell Patterson factor. We can celebrate it Lest We Forget.

I’ve also been privileged to spend quality time watching hours and hours of archival footage from all over the world shot during World War Two. Again it is moments that are most vivid. One image is of ecstatic faces; people dancing in Cuba Street when the war was declared over. Complete strangers are doing the hokey-tokey into a bar, their joy expressed with complete abandon, secure in the certainty of a better future. This footage exists in beautifully exposed and archived 35mm film shot by the NZ National Film Unit for the Weekly Revue.

There is another vivid image sequence shot at the same time but in a different place. It was recorded in colour but not released to the public in its original form until very recently because at the time it was considered too disturbing for people to see. It is a long slow pan across the completely devastated city of Hiroshima just days after the atomic bomb was dropped. Miles of horrific shadows where buildings once stood, deathly quiet. A city inhabited by ghosts.

In my head I carry that film that I have never made. It is of these two sequences inter-cut on a never ending loop. Lest We Forget.

Yes, lets remember together all the hard to understand and difficult to carry human experience of war because this defiant and communal forgetfulness has created a shared memory gap where dangerous mythologies have thrived. Simplistic ideas of ‘honour,’ and ‘glory,’ and ‘heroes,’ and ‘demons,’ and ‘winning,’ and ‘losing,’ and ‘goodies,’ and ‘baddies,’ and ‘enemies,’ and ‘allies,’ and ‘Victory,’ have become irrefutable. Our forgetfulness is overwhelming.

So lets remember all the mainly young men who have for far too many centuries died in far too many bloody wars – Lest We Forget;

And lets remember all the women and children whose lives are cast asunder during times of dreadful upheaval and loss, and the families never born because of war – Lest We Forget;

And lets remember those who refuse to fight and live every day branded as cowards in communities grief stricken and in pain – Lest We Forget;

And lets remember the Veterans of all wars, the Service men and women who have returned to their homes and put bitterness and hurt aside and built a society based on equality, tolerance and compassion.

Lest We Forget.

E nga mana, e nga reo, e nga karangatanga o te motu. Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa.

November 7, 2010

Clay Nelson

Remembrance Day


I’m sure you’ve noticed how tricky remembering is. How much of what we remember has any fact in reality? How much is wishful remembering or polishing up of the tarnished? How much is an alternative reality so we can live with ourselves?

If you have siblings, have you ever compared notes about some piece of family history and wondered if you grew up in the same household or even solar system? And then there is the most important part of remembering: forgetting. Treasuring certain memories often requires serious editing. Whole episodes must often be forgotten if we are to maintain our belief that something or someone is worth cherishing.

It is the nature of remembering that makes me ambivalent about Remembrance Day services. I twist and turn every year over whether or not it is a good thing that we hold such a service. I am uneasy about the church being in league with the state for what is essentially a civic service. I’m always nervous when the state and religion are on the same side. In this case we undeniably are. In about an hour the Governor-General, Members of Parliament, the Consular Corps, active and retired military figures and other civic leaders will be sitting where you are. We will be remembering those who have laid down their lives for their country. How we remember that sacrifice is what I worry about. Will our collective memories glorify past wars that we might justify the tragedy and cost of future ones? Does it serve the purpose of instilling patriotism in the next generation so they will be ready to die for Queen and country or does it serve to make us give up the notion that any war is just or worthwhile? 

Ultimately I think remembering is worth the risk.

One month before his death Howard Zinn, an American historian, finished his last book, The Bomb. In it he wrestles with his memories as a B-17 bombardier during World War II, especially his last mission in 1945 on a raid to take out German garrisons in the French town of Royan. For the first time the Eighth Air Force used napalm, which burst into liquid fire on the ground, killing hundreds of civilians. He wrote, “I remember distinctly seeing the bombs explode in the town, flaring like matches struck in the fog. I was completely unaware of the human chaos below.” Twenty years later he returned to Royan to study the effects of the raid and concluded there had been no military necessity for the bombing; everyone knew the war was almost over (it ended three weeks later) and this attack did nothing to affect the outcome. His grief over having been a cog in a deadly machine no doubt confirmed his belief in small acts of rebellion, by which he meant, “acting on what we feel and think, here, now, for human flesh and sense, against the abstractions of duty and obedience."

This kind of remembering gives perspective that strengthens our resolve to act for peace. That is my hope for today’s service. Remembering can also lead us to envisioning a different kind of world. Songwriter Loudon Wainwright III succeeds in doing this. He lived outside Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. I would conclude with how he remembers it.

A Pretty Good Day So Far

I slept through the night

I got through to the dawn.

I flipped a switch and the light went on

I got outta bed

I put some clothes on

It was a pretty good day so far.

I turned the tap

there was cold there was hot.

I put on my coat,

to go to the shop.

I stepped outside

and I didn't get shot.

It was a pretty good day so far.

I didn't hear any sirens or explosions,

no mortars coming in from those heavy guns

no UN tanks

I didn't see one.

It was a pretty good day so far.

No snipers in windows taking a peek

No people panicked running scared through the streets

I didn't see any bodies

without arms, legs, or feet.

It was a pretty good day so far.

There was plasma, bandages and electricity,

Food, wood, and water,

and the air was smoke free.

No camera crews from I-TV.

It was all such a strange sight to behold.

Nobody was frightened, wounded, hungry or cold.

And the children seemed normal,

they didn't look old.

It was a pretty good day so far.

I walked through a park

you would not believe it.

There in the park there were a few trees left,

and on some branches

there were a few leaves.

I slept through the night

I got through to the dawn.

I flipped a switch and the light went on

I wrote down my dream,

I made it this song,

It was a pretty good day so far.

May we all remember a pretty good day in the past that we may have many more in the future.

October 31, 2010

Clay Nelson

All Saints’ Sunday     Luke 6:20-31


The challenge of preaching on All Saints Sunday is that there are so many sermons that could be preached. What does it mean to be a saint? What’s it take to be one? Why do we celebrate All Saints and Protestant denominations celebrate Reformation Day? Why is the Gospel for All Saints Day the Beatitudes from either Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount or Luke’s Sermon on the Plain? I wonder: Did Jesus ever angst over what sermon to preach? Of course, to some degree it doesn’t matter. Whatever sermon I preach each of you will hear the one you need to hear or tune out completely using the time constructively to make out your grocery list.

While I decide what to preach on let me share some background. There is a reason All Saints Day and Reformation Sunday are held in opposition. All Saints Day was one major church feast that never fully caught on. It was intended to be up there in importance with Christmas, Easter and Pentecost, but people weren’t showing up for church. This was bad for business. Selling the relics of the saints, promoting pilgrimages to holy sites of the saints and asking for saintly intercession were important sources of income to the church in the Middle Ages. All Saints Day was important to marketing them. To encourage attendance free indulgences were granted to those who came to Mass on All Saints. Indulgences are literally a “Get out of Jail” free card; only in this case it was to get out of Purgatory. The indulgence granted would assure that a loved one’s time awaiting to get into heaven was either shortened or eliminated. Free indulgences proved to be very popular, for normally one had to pay the church for them in this era. But on All Saints Day people only had to show up to make the afterlife a little less punishing for Uncle Bill or Aunt Sadie. Some would attend Mass several times on the day depending on how many relatives they thought might need a little help getting through the Pearly Gates.

By the early 16th century All Saints Day had become a symbol of a corrupt and immoral church to the reformers. Dissatisfaction with the Church could be found at all levels of society. The papacy lost much of its spiritual influence over its people because of the increasing tendency toward secularization. Popes and bishops acting more like kings and princes than spiritual guides fuelled people’s disdain. And as so many people were now crowding into cities, more and more people from all walks of life noticed the lavish homes and palaces of the Church. The poor resented the wealth of the papacy and the very rich were jealous of that wealth. At the same time, the popes bought and sold high offices, along with selling indulgences. All of this led to the increasing wealth of the Church – and this created new paths for abuses of every sort. Something was dreadfully wrong.

On All Hallows’ Eve, October 31, 1517 the dam broke when tradition says Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. As the town was crowded with pilgrims for All Saints Day word spread quickly and what was later known as the Reformation was ignited.

While much of the debate that followed would be about whether salvation was achieved through grace or good works and whether the church or scripture had more authority, I believe Martin Luther’s 86th Thesis captured the heart of the church’s need for reformation. In it he asks this very important question: "Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of Crassus (the richest man in ancient Rome), build the basilica of St. Peter with the money of poor believers (buying indulgences) rather than with his own money?"

It is this question that leads to what I’ve decided finally to preach on. 

I’m not sure when the Beatitudes that highlight the blessedness of the poor were decided on as the best Gospel for All Saints Day. If it was before the Reformation it was an ironic choice. If afterwards, it was a choice born of repentance. I choose to think it was the latter.

Luke’s Sermon on the Plain captures best the sense of repentance. Unlike in Matthew’s more spiritual Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is not talking about the blessings and curses that will come some day, but the way the world is now and is calling for a new ethic; a new way of living in it now. And unlike on the mount, Jesus is only addressing his disciples. He is not blessing his own folk and cursing those who are not yet following in his Way. Amongst his followers in the Lukan community the rich and poor are both represented as are those who hunger and those who are well fed, those who mourn and those who laugh, those who are reviled and those who are pillars of society. Jesus could’ve been warning the pre-Reformation church. He could be warning the church today.

As we listen to Jesus we must remove any notes of judgment from his remarks. His only inflection is love and concern. When he speaks of the poor being blessed he is not saying abject poverty is a good thing. He isn’t saying the life of the poor isn’t unspeakably harsh. When he speaks to the rich he is not saying being rich is bad in itself. He is cautioning them that being rich has some dangers. He is saying the poor have an important advantage.

We might ask how is that? If we have never been in a place where we didn’t have a roof over our head or know where our next meal is coming from we are blind to certain realities. The poor don’t have to be told that life is fragile and full of injustice. They know existentially how vulnerable we all are to the vicissitudes of life. The poor do not have to be told what it is like to be a victim. The rich have no frame of reference for being solely dependent on the God we know as love or on the kindness of others. They live in a world of illusion that lets them think they are in control of their lives and that the transitory things they can and do have will give meaning to their lives. They are comfortable in their self-sufficiency and accept it all with a sense of entitlement.

Before you say to yourself, “No worries. I’m not rich,” let me suggest you may be richer than you think. There is a website called the Global Rich List where you can calculate how wealthy you are compared to everyone else on the planet. I put in my stipend as a priest and learned that there are only 307,011,494 people richer than I am. While that won’t get me onto the Forbes Fortune 500 wealthiest list, it does mean over five billion 700 thousand others suffer less woe than I do. What woe is that?

Not seeing the world like the poor makes it more difficult to find the compassion, love and forgiveness, which I would describe as the God within us and between us. The richer we are the less likely we will experience our oneness with creation and the divine. Without that experience there is only emptiness; emptiness we are tempted to fill with more possessions and wealth. 

Ultimately the rich find it more difficult to live out the new ethic that prevails in God’s realm. If that were not true, why does it feel like a loss and not a gain to do to others, as we would have them do to us? Why is it something we are more apt to do reluctantly than eagerly and joyfully? Consider these questions to be your indulgences for coming to church on All Saints Sunday. Your answers to them may lead to this life being a little less punishing for yourselves and the poor.

October 24, 2010

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 22     Luke 18:9-14

I want you to slip into your imagination for a minute to see an awkward, skinny, five year old, blonde-haired boy with a missing front tooth. In a faded old 16mm home movie he looks like he is in perpetual motion – a mechanical toy that never winds down. Now dress him in a coonskin hat and a fringed buckskin jacket provided him by an overly indulgent grandfather. He is carrying a long toy musket he proudly calls Ol’ Betsey. Now imagine the impossible. His name is Clay. I know. Hard to believe and I’ve seen the film. 

When I was five the most popular movie for the younger set was Davy Crockett. So many of my friends also wanted to be the “King of the Wild Frontier,” wrastlin’ bars and shootin’ Injuns and rememberin’ the Alamo, no one wanted to play the Indians in neighbourhood games. Since I had the right outfit I, of course, was excused from taking a turn as an Indian.

Part of what makes a good story good is being able to identify with the characters. It must be part of being human. Even toddlers want to wear their Spiderman pajamas to bed and dress up as one of Disney’s many princesses to go to childcare. It is also true that we usually identify with the heroic and beautiful rather than the villain, unless it is Halloween.

This human characteristic apparently has always been true, for Jesus uses it to set a trap for us in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The Pharisee appears to be the good guy. He follows the law faithfully, keeps himself pure, and is grateful to God. The tax collector is definitely the villain of the piece. The tax collector is a corrupt collaborator for the oppressive occupiers and would be considered to have all the moral standing of a pimp in today’s society. Now Jesus’ listeners are beginning to catch on to his trick of turning their expectations upside down, so they know that instead of identifying with the obvious hero they are expected to identify with the unthinkable, the tax collector. Or maybe they have something in common with Kiwis. As soon as they hear the Pharisee thank God that he is not a rogue or an adulterer or a tax collector, they want to cut his tall poppy attitude down to size. As soon as do they fall into the trap. Even Luke falls for it.

Those more scholarly than I believe Jesus ended his story with the line: “This man went down to his home justified rather than the other.” There is no judgment in Jesus’ words. It is Luke who adds, “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Judgment and punishment ooze satisfyingly from Luke’s response. Since exaltation is the more desirable outcome, the tax collector is the good guy we all want to be and no one wants to play the Pharisee. We take to our role with relish, thanking God that we are not like the faithful Pharisee. As soon as we hear our prayer we know Jesus has stuck it to us. We aren’t any different than Fritz Hollings, who was the Senator from South Carolina for nearly forty years. He once took a lie detector test to see what it was like. He failed as soon as he said, “In my humble opinion.”

For 2000 years Jesus has been setting this trap and for 2000 years we have been falling for it. We are so used to falling for it we think it is the right thing to do. We commonly use the word Pharisee as a pejorative. Of course we don’t always use the word, sometimes we replace it with Tea Baggers or Fundies or Happy Clappies. From the other side of the political and theological spectrum we might call them tree huggers, lefties or heretics.

The irony is that the Pharisees and Jesus had more in common than we assume. Some have even tried to make the case that Jesus was a Pharisee. I remain an agnostic as to whether or not he was, as we know remarkably little about them and one of the three sources we have about them is the New Testament. There is no question that by the time Luke’s Gospel was written in 70 CE Christians Jews and the Pharisaic Jews had had a falling out, because the Christians put Jesus not only over Caesar but the Torah as well. Pharisaic Jews considered it an anathema to consider Jesus, not the Torah, as the fullest revelation of God. It was natural for early Christian writers to make them the foil to Jesus’ message. The sad unintended consequence of this literary device has been 2000 years of anti-Semitism.

What we think we know about the Pharisees is that they arose as a Jewish religious force around 150 BCE in response to the Hellenization of Jewish life under Roman rule. They were committed to protecting Jewish identity by studying the Torah and carefully observing customary requirements in certain areas of life, such as tithing, purity laws, the Sabbath, marriage and divorce, and temple ritual. They saw themselves as a Jewish renewal movement. Underlying their passion and missionary zeal for faithful living was the vision of Israel as a covenant community whose future blessing or punishment was contingent on observance of the Torah. After they faded from history, their spiritual heirs are today’s rabbis. [i]

The reason some argue Jesus was a Pharisee is that they shared similar goals including a passion for the renewal of Israel as a community that expressed and promoted the rule of God in human affairs. Others argue he wasn’t a Pharisee because they differed in how to achieve it. We just don’t know. There were no Christian Jews to be in conflict with in Jesus’ day. Since Jesus didn’t believe his personhood should replace the Torah there may not have been any disagreement over religious beliefs.

Anyway, Jesus wasn’t concerned with religion. He wasn’t trying to reform what existed or create a new one. He knew religion couldn’t save us. While he wouldn’t have even thought of the possibility of Christianity, if he could’ve he would’ve known Christianity couldn’t save us either. The story he told about the Pharisee and the tax collector wasn’t about right doctrine or proper prayer. He was pointing out, first and foremost, that God loves us no matter what. There is nothing we can do to be more loved. There is nothing we can do to be less loved. There is nothing we can do to be more valuable than we already are. The parable is not about whom God will exalt more but how to experience the fullness of God’s acceptance of us as we are.

That should be good news, but if we are honest, I think it mostly annoys us. Judging the deficiencies of others is so much more satisfying than thinking divine love includes them just as much as it does us. We know “they” are jerks. Why doesn’t God? And furthermore, if we are loved as we are, why go to the trouble of trying to be more worthy of love? Jesus keeps trying to explain to us that when we experience his love knowing we have not earned it, we are freed to reflect it. Love precedes our response, not the other way around. When we still don’t get it, the love Jesus embodied, refuses to judge us. We just continue to be loved with the hope that the next time we hear the parable we won’t fall into the trap.

[i] John Meier, A Marginal Jew, III, 330

October 17, 2010

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 21     Luke 18:1-8

I have to confess I don’t like the parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge very much. I never have. That may explain why I don’t think I’ve ever preached on it before in my 30 years in various pulpits. I would much rather go with Jeremiah. He tells us God has given up on getting the people to follow the Law: A smart decision in my view. Instead he is going to give us a new covenant that is written on our hearts. Not only does that sound more convenient than carrying stone tablets around, transforming our hearts clearly sounds like good news to me. Certainly better news than finding something edifying about the stroppy widow and corrupt judge…

I don’t think I’m alone in my lack of enthusiasm for this story. Matthew, Mark and John don’t choose to share it. Even Luke struggles to explain the strange story about a woman who is denied justice and pesters day and night the judge who can, but resists granting her relief. He finally does, not to dispense justice. Not out of compassion for her plight. He relents only to get her off his back. 

A parable is supposed to give us an alternative view of reality. It is intended to interact with the listener without being explained. If resolved for us too quickly we stop thinking about it. For that reason Jesus never explained his parables. But this time, Luke puts an explanation in Jesus’ mouth that I’m not sure improves it.

Luke’s Jesus tells us that God is the judge, only nicer. Not exactly a shocking revelation is it? He then goes on to say that the widow is an example to us of faithfulness in her perseverance and that the nicer God won’t be any worse than the judge if we pray without ceasing. Inspiring isn’t it?

I guess I really only have three problems with Luke’s interpretation: How he views God. That he equates faith with perseverance. And lastly, how he understands prayer.

My problems with Luke’s portrayal of God, begins with the image of God as a judge. A judge dispenses justice and the world I see is a far cry from just. Any of us could give a long litany of the injustices that surround us near and far. My list would include asking where is the justice in a group of financiers on Wall Street causing a worldwide recession that has harmed millions if not billions of people, while they are made even richer by being bailed out instead of jailed? And of course we don’t have to look as far as America. We only have to look to South Canterbury to see the rescue of investors at the expense of those in need.

If God is a judge and this is justice then at best “He” is inept. I say “He,” because Luke’s God is male and a supreme being in the sky. I envision him having an answerphone for us to leave our prayers on. I wonder if this God even listens to his messages or does he just hit the “delete all” button?

On to my second objection: I have a real struggle with the idea that faithfulness and perseverance are the same. Perseverance is not always a virtue to be admired. Yes, we can admire the perseverance of the engineers in Chile who drilled down to the trapped miners. Over two months of dogged perseverance freed them. The miners showed perseverance as well, patiently waiting in interminable darkness for rescue. So did their family and loved ones persevere, holding faith that there would be a happy ending.

But when is perseverance simply stubbornness? A refusal to move on in our lives when circumstances we can’t control alter our expectations? Is perseverance a virtue when what we seek is self-serving at the expense of others or just plain evil? When does perseverance become an obsession that consumes us and all else that is good in our lives?

And lastly, when perseverance is our only choice does that constitute faithfulness? We feel compassion for those who live in poverty, those who struggle for enough food and clean water; those who live with life-threatening and incurable disease. We certainly admire their courage, but is that the same is faithfulness?

Then there is the issue of prayer. Luke seems to say if we nag God long enough we will get what we want. Is prayer really all about us? Sounds like that old Janis Joplin song:

Oh lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.

My friends all drive porsches, I must make amends.

Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends.

So oh lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.

I would suggest prayer is a way of life. It is being open to the love of God within, between and beyond us. It is intentionally choosing transformation, not of the world to meet our expectations but of our selves to be true to who were made to be.

As I reflected on this parable this week, I thought, if this is what Jesus’ parable is about, I am ready to avoid it for the rest of my ministry. But then I thought more about the nature of parables. Their purpose is to turn our expectations and understandings topsy-turvy. That’s when it occurred to me that Luke may have gotten more than faithfulness and prayer wrong, he may have misunderstood who was who in the story.

The parable suddenly makes sense if God is not the judge but the widow and we are not the widow but the judge. We are the ones with the power to make things different, but don’t. We are much too busy asking what is in it for us. The history of human behaviour suggests that we pay God little mind nor respect God’s people. God as the widow is the one who comes to us in humility to nag, cajole, and even hound us, but not to coerce us to do justice, love tenderly and walk humbly alongside her. This God as widow does not accept the status quo as the way it always has to be.

When perseverance is applied to the “Widow” God, it becomes a virtue. She keeps battering away at our defences hoping to break them down. The Widow God persists in pursuing us for as long as it takes that we may one day see that dispensing justice is in our self-interest. Any other way is self-destructive. For instance, the present economic meltdown is accelerating the gap between rich and poor. To let this continue will eventually destroy even the rich. Let’s do something about it.

The Widow God demonstrates her love for us even in our obstinacy. She is the example the poet Samuel Crossman describes in the hymn A Song of Love Unknown: “Love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be.”

We won’t always recognize her in her widow weeds. Sometimes she comes in the benign guise of a sermon or a religious book or even a parable. But more often she comes through a difficulty, a failure, sickness or maybe even a widow seeking help.

We will know we have glimpsed her when our prayers are no longer addressed to her. We will be on our way when our prayers are no longer demands of her, but listening for her demands of us. Then we will know that making our world more just is our work. It is then that we will know Jeremiah’s words have come to pass: A new covenant of love, compassion and forgiveness has been written on our hearts.

October 10, 2010

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 20     Luke 17:11-19

Ever had a bee buzzing in your big toe? I know, it sounds ridiculous. But once I did know someone who did. He didn’t find it odd, only annoying. In most ways he seemed quite normal, but that bee kept him in a mental hospital diagnosed with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia literally means broken heart or mind. I think of it as broken boundaries. He didn’t know where the boundaries of his self began and ended and where the world began and ended. In his illness it did not seem contradictory that he might have a bee in his toe. 

It has been thirty years since I worked with him during my clinical training, but he came to mind as I thought about the ten lepers Jesus encounters in Luke’s gospel. The story raises for me how confusing and complex the boundaries in our lives are. When should they be honoured? When should they be crossed? When do they bless us and when do they curse us? Could it be that where boundaries are concerned, we all suffer from schizophrenia, at least a little bit?

As Jesus crosses the border between Galilee and Samaria, his disciples may be remembering the Samaritan town that refused him entry. After all no Samaritan has reason to trust their Jewish cousins who judge, reject and scorn them. Making his way to Jerusalem, unperturbed by past rejection he approaches another Samaritan village. Before he gets there, however, he encounters ten lepers, a little band united by their suffering and exclusion from the community. Both he and they respect the religiously imposed boundaries between the ritually clean and unclean. They don’t come close, and he doesn’t touch them. But he penetrates the boundary with just a word, a command, sending them on their way. They leave full of anticipation of what will happen on the road – for it was a word of healing! When it occurs, nine of them, who are presumably Jews, rush to the priests, as the Law requires and Jesus commands, to be confirmed as ritually clean. They are restored to the community. They are not heard from again.

But one of the ten comes back to say thank you and to praise God. Ironically, he's an outsider, a Samaritan, a "them" who is seized by a gratitude that turns him around to make his way back to the one who healed him. That the healer is a Jew is no concern to him. But I wonder if there is more to the story. The nine who did not return did nothing wrong. They did what they had been told. They knew that the Law would open the boundary between them and their people to be received back. I’m sure they were just as grateful as the tenth leper. Why not? They could resume their lives again and have some control over them. They no longer had to beg and depend on the kindness of strangers. They were no longer outcasts. They were no longer “them.” I wonder if they ever thought of or tried to keep in touch with their former mate to whom they were once bonded in suffering? His was a different fate. The priests would never certify him as ritually clean. There is no cure for being a Samaritan. With no community to return to he had nowhere else to turn but to God. In his case the boundary that excludes him frees him to be made whole, or as Jesus says, “Your faith has made you well.”

I don’t find this story to be about proper manners and sending “thank you” notes. I don’t think it is even about the tenth leper. What intrigues me about this moment is where it takes place. It is in an in-between place – the border between Samaria and Judea. It is outside the boundaries of both. It is neither one nor the other. Perhaps its only inhabitant is that whom we call God. Having been on that road I can tell you it is desolate enough to wonder why even God would be there. It also makes me wonder what the divine is doing outside the boundaries of where we would put such power? It’s a little unsettling. We prefer God in a box than roaming about God knows where.

We know that boundaries are good things or so we think along with Robert Frost’s antagonist in his poem Mending Wall. “Good fences make good neighbors” he remarks repeatedly with the thoughtless confidence of carelessly gathered wisdom. 

The therapeutic community would agree, encouraging us to maintain a healthy sense of self. Keep mending the wall that defines you they tell us. And I can’t argue with that advice. Spiritual directors and Shakespeare remind us that “This above all: to thine own self be true.” Their understanding that all journeys begin with knowing who we are and are not is essential to health, be it mental, physical or spiritual. Almost all the professions these days are reminded to respect boundaries in the workplace. Workshops are often required to maintain that wall always on the edge of collapse. Respecting the boundaries of others is essential to healthy, safe relationships. And again I laud the wisdom. We all know stories of damaged lives caused by those who violated boundaries in the workplace.

One cannot argue that boundaries, walls, borders; lines in the sand, have their purpose. They give us confidence in whom we are and protect us from real or imagined fear. They preserve us from chaos and provide order. We come to think of them as sacrosanct, for we frequently see the consequences when they are violated or breached. 

We saw it this week when Paul Henry allowed what can only be described as his crude racism to embarrass a large portion of an entire nation in suggesting our New Zealand born Govenour-General, Sir Anand, of Fijian Indian descent doesn’t represent what a New Zealander should look or sound like. Such racial attitudes may have once been considered an acceptable wall in our culture to define us, but no longer. Mr. Henry apparently did not get the memo that it had been torn down to build a wall that includes a much more diverse and colourful citizenry. As a nation we resented memory of that former wall we would like to forget being brought back to mind by his hateful question. And we squirmed all the more when our Prime Minister did not immediately and firmly stand up to the implication behind the question. That is perhaps a good thing. It is good to remember that boundaries change. And they change for good reason. But to do that we must remember from whence we came.

Boundaries clearly have their uses but again I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s Mending Wall:

“Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.”

I do confess that at first I felt some uncomfortable empathy for Mr. Henry as someone who has also been assaulted in the media for violating a boundary. In my case it was with a billboard. But upon quick reflection I realized a fundamental difference. He was trying to rebuild a wall constructed of stone-hard hate that had fallen into disrepair. Our billboard sought to breach a wall of rigid doctrine and dogma that impedes the church from fulfilling her mission in the 21st century. 

These episodes, perhaps, give us a guideline as to when a boundary is no longer or was never helpful and needs to be breached. When boundaries no longer allow us to be true to ourselves, it is time to move beyond them. When a boundary has been imposed upon us against our will it may be time to challenge it. We begin to learn this as two-year olds when we first used the word “no.” We further develop this important skill when we took our first tentative steps at rebellion as teenagers. At these times in our lives those boundaries are often imposed out of love to protect and discipline us, but at some point we must be allowed to define our own boundaries. Ideally, we reach a point when our boundaries are formed by mutual respect and care, and a confidence in our oneness with divine love.

As an example, where Lynette and I live, we have a fence on one property line and none on the other. The neighbour on the fenced side never returns our greetings or speaks to us. Our only interaction is their throwing their green waste over the fence into our garden. Lynette takes perverse pleasure in returning it to them promptly. Where her garden is concerned she does not find it easy to turn the other cheek. The neighbours on the side without a fence are neighbourly in all ways. Baked goods are exchanged. Drinks are shared. Mutual support is given. We serve as surrogate grandparents for their small children – a mutually beneficial arrangement. Clearly in this case, it is not a good fence that makes a good neighbour, but love, kindness and respect.

Tearing down walls, broaching boundaries is not a comfortable undertaking. It leaves us uncertain and uneasy in an in-between reality. The landmarks we rely on to guide us are often absent. It is a place we have to go to in faith with no guarantees. We go because we will never be more than who and what we are if we do not move beyond the boundaries that wall us in. Whatever our reluctance, once we realize that that which we call God resides outside the boundaries we have set or have had imposed upon us, we are free to move on. We go thankfully that we might be healed. But in the meantime, I suspect that that annoying bee is still buzzing in our toe.

October 3, 2010

Geno Sisneros

St Francis' Day     A Sermon delivered to the Auckland Community Church

Tonight we are using the liturgy A Celebration of Life to remember and celebrate the life of St Francis of Assisi. In our prayer, we gave thanks for the lives of the Saints and prayed that our lives too may be “moulded in the love of Jesus Christ”. Earlier today this space was also used to honour St Francis' great affection for animals. A few hours ago this church was filled wall-to-wall with animals of every kind lining up to receive their blessing. We do this in remembrance of him. St Francis proclaimed the goodness of God and ministered even to the animals. 

Saint Francis believed in the 'relatedness' of all things – in the familial sense of the word 'related'. Sometimes when I hear theologian's use words like “relatedness” or “connectedness” I wonder if they are using them, in a metaphorical sense or in the St Francis sense. 

In his Cantacle of the Sun, St Francis calls the Sun his “brother” who also bears the likeness of the “Most High”. The Moon, water and Mother Earth are all his sister's and the wind and air are his brothers. The force of bodily death he also calls “our Sister”. The four elements, the celestial bodies, and the forces of life and death are all siblings in creation – for St Francis, creation is all about relation.

These elements, bodies, and forces all do as they have been divinely ordained to do. They are all part of the divine dance that makes up our reality. Creation itself for St Francis is in the likeness of the “Most High”.

A natural world theologian – St Francis believed in the goodness of creation but that creation suffered and was in need of redemption. Because being and suffering were wound together so tightly, he felt compelled to take as his bride – Poverty. This was his ministry, to live in solidarity with the poor. Why he chose the metaphor of marriage to describe his own relationship to that destructive force of poverty is a wonderful topic for reflection and meditation. 

During my own reflection this weekend I came to the conclusion that it had everything to do with the transforming power at work between two bonded entities. Relationships do not allow us to remain static in our being. The interaction between two bonded beings is transformative and after the encounter, neither is the same – both have been transformed.

I thought of St Francis again this weekend when I heard the big news that scientists have discovered the most promising candidate in our search for earth-like planets. The fact that an earth-like planet, possibly capable of sustaining life, was found so early in the search has given scientists cause to think that maybe earth-like planets are in abundance in our Milky-Way galaxy. 

The planet known as Gliese 581g is a mere 20 light years from Earth. It is believed the planet is comparable in size to earth. It orbits around a red dwarf star with which it is tidally-locked. That is, one side of the planet is constantly faced towards its sun and the other side is always in complete darkness. This is similar to the relationship our Earth has with our moon. The far-side of the moon is never visible from Earth. We are tidally-locked in a cosmic dance.

It is on that border between Gliese 581g's light and darkness that scientists believe is the most likely place to find life if life or the potential for it exists there. The temperature, not too hot and not too cold may be just right at this border.

At this stage, it is a lot of scientific conjecture based purely upon our observations of the relationship between this planet and its sun. Scientists can't actually see this system up close to gain telemetry; however, it is believed that the planet is in just the right proximation from its sun as to be in the “habitable zone”. 

In fact Gliese 581g's presence was only detected by our most powerful telescopes due to the “wobble” of its star. That means that the planet's gravity pulls on its star causing a wobbling effect. This is the scientific method employed to find exo-planets. We look for wobbling stars, calculate how large the planet pulling on it is and than calculate their approximate distance from each other to see if the planet is a good candidate to host life.

The relationship between a star and its orbiting planets is one of transformation. Depending on their proximity to each other, among other characteristics, they are either involved in a dance that makes life a possibility, or in a dance that makes life impossible.

The reason I thought of St Francis when I heard this news is I believe he would have understood this interaction between entities as transformative power like his ministry to the poor. Francis knew that in order for his ministry to be life-giving, he had to open himself up to transformation. He became like a wobbling star being pulled toward the poor who were craving for the fullness of life.

I'm sure too that St Francis would not be surprised to hear that science has proven him correct, that indeed all creation emerged from a single and continuing act of interaction between matter and energy. Everything in creation is indeed related. Creation then, is an ongoing interaction and transformation. That sounds a lot to me like ministry.

The image of St Francis giving away all he had and living his life in solidarity with the poor, makes me think that if he is the standard in sainthood, then I will very probably most certainly never qualify for sainthood. But is that the message of St Francis' example to us? If we are all charged with ministry, and I believe we are, is the goal of our ministry that our lives become so completely self-sacrificing that we too must marry Poverty?

I don't think for St Francis, that detaching from material things and withdrawing to live a life of self-giving was a sacrifice for him. In fact, I believe this was an inseparable part of his identity, this is who he was. It was as inseparable for him as our Queer identities are to us. 

And there are all kinds of ministries and there are all kinds of poor. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus names more than a few, pre-scripting each kind with the adjective “blessed”. Blessed are the poor for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Saint Francis inspires me to be pulled toward the kind of poor that I am ordained to work among – the poor in human rights, the poor in mental health, the poor in voice. Like a wobbling red dwarf star that feels pulled to entities craving the fullness of life, so goes my ministry. That feels more like an inseparable part of my identity rather than self-sacrifice. 

Sainthood then to me is like elevating people to a level of holiness because they have green eyes or because they're tall or because they have freckles, all parts inherent in their identity which they had nothing to do with. The point of sainthood then to me is to teach us to look inside our own identities to think about our own ministries to think about who or what we are being pulled toward. Feast Days then are an opportunity for us to explore and think about our place in the greater work of the Church and to remind us that our own ministries are about fulfilling our identities, being who we were meant to be.

Ministry as demonstrated by St Francis is that power in each of us, to be part of a greater transformation. St Francis challenges each of us to recognise that we too are wobbly stars and if we haven't already done so, maybe the Feast of St Francis gives us the opportunity to think about letting our planets pull us closer. Amen.

September 26, 2010

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 18     Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15     Luke 16:19-31

In this day of email I don’t find much of importance in my letterbox very often, but this week I received two pieces of mail out of the ordinary. The first was my voting papers to cast my vote for a mayor and councillors for Auckland “The Super City.” The second was my ballot to vote in the US midterm elections in California. 

I have to say I find both documents discouraging. They bring out my less than attractive cynical side. I’m one of those people who believe my vote is a civic sacrament, a sacramental right, if you will. I have voted in every election for which I was eligible since I was 18. My healthy American skepticism about “the System” has not deterred me in the past. Nor has my frustration with my fellow citizens who choose not to vote, even though they are often the deciding factor of who gets elected. For instance, the 72% of the electorate who did not vote in Alaska last week have effectively chosen a radical right candidate to be their next senator. Of course if they choose not to inform themselves I share author Gore Vidal’s hope, who observed that “Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.” Sadly the recent successes of the Tea Party in America suggest otherwise.

I can sympathize with those who choose not to vote out of principle because they believe that if voting ever changed anything, it would be abolished. Often it seems that way. But how different would the world be today if more Americans had voted in 2000. If they had I don’t believe the results would have been close enough for the Supreme Court to appoint George Bush as president. 

The problem is that not all politicians want to get out the vote. For those who represent the wealthy and powerful, it is in their self-interest to not encourage certain segments of the population to vote. As Dan Quayle once observed in a moment of total transparency, “Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It's the other way around. They never vote for us.” So, from their frame of reference it is best that the poor not vote at all. If they can make it too cumbersome or confusing to vote they know many won’t.

Another strategy is to convince us that there really isn’t much difference between the candidates by hiding their true agenda. They know if we perceive little difference many will not bother to vote. If we believe the outcome doesn’t matter, they win. When we don’t vote, whether we are in the US or New Zealand and are poor, unemployed, ill, uneducated, highly educated, a woman, gay, a person of colour or compassionate we lose. Vote suppression is the only way the smallest segment of the population – the wealthy – can win elections.

I see vote suppression at work in our own election.

American humourist, Will Rogers, at a time when most politicians were men, once observed, “Anything important is never left to the vote of the people. We only get to vote on some man; we never get to vote on what he is to do.” I certainly feel that way about the concept of the Super City itself. While I believe what we had was inadequate for our growing region, we had no opportunity to vote on what the Royal Commission suggested for a structure or what Rodney Hyde, the powerful advocate for the richest in our community, decided it would be. We just get to vote on who is going to run it. Frustration with the government’s less than transparent process feeds cynicism that this is all about making the rich richer and the poor poorer and that cynicism feeds vote suppression. And if that doesn’t do it the ballot we have been sent should do it nicely. The last local authority election turnout was good by US standards – 44%, but that was down 2% from the previous one. Who knows what this ballot will do to it.

There are 542 candidates for 170 vacancies on the new council, local boards, the licensing trusts and local health boards. There are 23 candidates for mayor alone. 

With a few high profile exceptions, there is precious little information out there about who these people are and what their positions are on the issues. If I had lived in New Zealand all my life I might’ve met or gone to school with at least some of them. That not being the case I mostly have to depend on the booklet that came with the ballot. It has a brief paragraph about each offered by the candidate. Its chief purpose seems to be to say as little as possible about what they stand for with the exception that many want to lower my rates. At what cost they don’t say. Knowing party affiliation would be helpful in making an informed choice, but most claim to be an “independent.” Independent against “what” or for “what” is the question.

So in the midst of my despair about what the future of Auckland might be and my growing cynicism about how we are getting there, Jeremiah speaks to me today. He is not his usual ‘doom and gloom’ self. Yet, he has every reason to be so. His city is under siege and he is in prison. Things are bleak and getting bleaker, yet he does the inexplicable. He buys land to plant a vineyard outside the city. Yes, he probably got a good price considering the circumstances, but he still probably paid too much. He makes this poor commercial decision to invest in an image of hope of life after destruction and captivity. He does it because even after the enemy has done its worst, he is certain that God is still working in the rubble of Israel’s former life. That certainty moves him to act even when it makes no economic sense.

So while I am discouraged and would prefer to ignore my ballot I will do as Jeremiah and struggle to fill it out. It is an investment in hope for what could be, even when it seems futile. But hope doesn’t tell me who to vote for, so I’m grateful for Luke’s parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.

Many, if not most, scholars question if this is one of Jesus’ parables because the last four verses speak of someone returning from the dead. I agree that those words belong to the primitive church. But I also agree with Dominic Crossan who hears Jesus in the beginning of it. He argues that like Jesus it makes no moral judgment about how good or bad the rich man and Lazarus are, the story just reverses a common expectation. The rich have earned God’s blessing just as the poor have earned God’s curse. Jesus is says, “Not so fast.” In God’s realm our expectations are not going to be met. Furthermore those mistaken expectations divide us from one another. They create an unbridgeable chasm between us and the shovel we use to dig it is fear.

The rich man ignores Lazarus out of fear. Lazarus’ poverty, sickness, age, vulnerability, and just plain difference are what he fears. Since he can’t run away far enough or fast enough, he digs a chasm or a gated community or goes to a different church or joins clubs Lazarus can’t afford. Jesus doesn’t say but he might send a check to the Mission to give the hungry a food parcel but he wouldn’t think of worshipping with Lazarus or living next door to him. 

Forty years ago I went to university in Santa Barbara. In those days rich and poor lived together. That is no longer true. The rich have built a chasm around it. Their servants and gardeners live at least 50 miles away because they can’t afford to live there. Even my university had to build faculty housing because their professors couldn’t afford a home there. Today it is a wonderful “make believe” place to live if you are rich, but if you are poor it is just a place to work. What the rich don’t know is that they are on the wrong side of the chasm. They have isolated themselves from 99% of the human family and it hasn’t made them any less vulnerable to the ravages of life. To see the image of God we have to be one with the whole human family. Anything less leaves us ultimately miserable. It is a misery that does violence to the souls of those who live this way just as the true cost of their wealth does violence to the “have-nots” and to our society as a whole. Jesus simply reminds us we are not made to live this way and don’t have to.

With the rich man in mind I will seek to vote for candidates whose primary concern is not about making me “richer” by lowering my rates at the expense of the most vulnerable. Instead, I hope to find enough candidates to support who are concerned about filling in the chasms that already exist in our community. I do not want to use my vote to dig new and deeper ones. Life is difficult enough without being isolated further. My candidates may not win, but in them I will invest my hope in a city that could be super. May Jeremiah and the rich man encourage enough of us to do the same.

September 19, 2010

John Bluck

Patronal Feast

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

On the feast of St Matthew's, John Bluck, author, educator, and retired bishop of Waiapu, takes a look at disreputable Matthew and how we carry on his work.

September 12, 2010

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 6     Luke 15:1-32

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Today might be called lost and found Sunday. We have three stories Jesus tells in response to the Pharisees disdain for his eating with sinners. We have a lost coin, a lost sheep and a lost son. In each case they were found with great rejoicing. We have heard about them many times before. So many times we may assume that they have nothing left to say to us. In their familiarity we may have lost sight of how radical they are. My challenge in preparing for this morning was to find them surprising again as Jesus intended all of his parables to be.

I began by thinking about what was lost and how they differed. The prodigal son did not have to be sought. He returned of his own accord. The lost sheep made it easy for the shepherd by bleating his location. The lost coin said nothing cloaked in darkness.

It occurred to me that as someone impeded by a Y-chromosome, finding anything is a challenge. Like the prodigal’s father I prefer to wait for the lost to find me. Failing that I might have a chance of finding something if it calls out to me like a lost lamb. As that rarely happens, I call on Lynette to find what is often right before my eyes. If I have heard, “If it was a snake it would’ve bit you,” once I’ve heard it a thousand times.

Perhaps because I am in awe of a woman’s capacity to find what often eludes me, I found myself drawn to the story of the lost coin and what the woman who lost and then found it might have to say to me. 

Let’s listen in as she reflects on her loss. 

As I went about finishing my evening chores, I heard it fall from the chain I keep it on with the nine others that crown my forehead. It clinked and then rolled, immediately swallowed up in the darkness of the evening. I had to reign in my panic. Those ten coins are mine. As a woman in a man’s world there is very little that is mine. They are a statement of my worth. They say I have value. If one is lost I am diminished. I am less whole. I feel like I have fallen like the coin. I remember some unpleasant, difficult stories of women who have also fallen. Fallen women (Why is it no one talks of fallen men?) are at the bottom of the heap, forgotten, outrage unanswered and unheard, silenced, lost in the darkness; abandoned and vulnerable, condemned to passivity. Which of us women, I ask, have not experienced or feared the fate of the lost coin? How many of us still lie lost in the dark with it.

As my panic begins to subside, I am subdued by the memory of other losses in my life. My life has been full of loss from the moment of my birth. There have been lost opportunities, lost loved ones, lost health, a lost sense of zest for life and with it a deep inward joy and sense of purpose. At times I have even lost a sense of self.

I shake myself from a reverie that leads only to a darker place than my coin has found. I must find that coin. I must begin the search without delay, carefully following the trail, the pain perhaps; the light of the inner voice perhaps, and be confident that I will find it. There is no alternative if I am to be complete again.

Outwardly and inwardly, inwardly and outwardly I search my house diligently and as I do, my life situation and circumstances as well. I listen attentively for clues to the whereabouts of what has been lost. Inwardly and outwardly I know tender places can be signposts to places that throw light intellectually and psychologically on what we have lost if I find the courage to go there. I know that we women do not divorce specific life circumstances from inward psychological and bodily experience. It is a dualism we do not accept. We do not divide the Spirit. Through what surrounds us and the deep and directing wisdom of our intuition we see reality. What we see tells us much has been lost and needs to be named if it is to be found.

What has been lost is justice, the sharing of goods and gifts. What has been lost is the possibility of living peacefully together. What has been lost is the wisdom of the opposite poles and their harmonious coordination in dark and light, female as well as male, above as well as below, heaven and earth. What has been lost is the harmony with the regularities of nature, astonishment at the miracle of the diversity of races and species, of the equal worth and distinctiveness of us women and men.

What has been lost is the harmony of emotional and rational knowledge, of intuition and reason, flesh and spirit. What has been lost is the grateful acceptance of boundaries and finitude. What has been lost is the certainty of our oneness with all creation. What has been lost is living out the universal love that embodies and surrounds us. What has been lost the Song of Songs tells us is our beloved.

So much has been lost. The situation seems hopeless. How am I to find any pathways here? How will I ever be equal to the challenge of this crying lost-ness.

I then remembered from past experience that how I responded to the loss made all the difference. My response gave me direction. When I went freely and autonomously and courageously in search of restoring my wholeness, recovering my value, I discovered that strength flowed into me. It was a liberating strength like lighting a lamp. It allowed me to look carefully ahead to examine each step to find the inner goal. I was able to go forth consciously and pragmatically to achieve that goal, like many women before me.

Like the woman with the haemorrhage that never stopped who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment, in full awareness that this is forbidden. She demanded health, and her loss was restored to her. She knew life’s rhythm and cycles could not be silenced by human law or prejudice.

And the Syrophoenician woman who used all her persistence and skill in argument until Jesus finally heard her, restoring her loss. She knew life is shaped by clear-minded determination and passion.

And the widow who pestered the judge to claim what she had lost until she received it. She knew a fulfilled life requires justice.

And then the woman who had always been loyal and remained so even when she knew for sure that everything was lost – He was dead and buried for ever. This woman who remained prostrate in her grief and loss until she heard his greeting, “Mary!” Her cry, “Rabboni!” confirmed her certainty that life is dying, life is transformation and that nothing is lost – nothing.

As I listen to her ruminations while sweeping, moving furniture; peering into the crevices of her life, I know she will find the coin. And so she does. Picking up the shiny disk she sees her face reflected back to her and she rejoices--not alone, but with her friends and neighbours. Her joy is contagious. It overflows, inspires and multiplies moving others to find hope and courage to not give into their sense of loss. They see the coin and recognize what seemed lost was there all the time. They look at her and see God. Surprised to discover that God is more than a loving father welcoming back his prodigal or Jesus the shepherd actively looking for the lamb but also a woman who does not let loss defeat or define her, only direct her forward. The divine feminine knows each of us are precious and will not stop encouraging us to search until we have found the coin of God’s realm she knows awaits only our discovery. With it in hand, we, too, will know wholeness and be certain of our worth.

September 5, 2010

Ann Mellor

Pentecost 15     
Luke 14:25-32


Video available on YouTube, Facebook

The reading this morning in Luke talks about commitment as disciples of Christ, to bring about social justice as we work towards the Kingdom of God on earth. The call to leave everything behind and find a new way is central to this reading, as it symbolizes the dismantling of the walls of patriarchy and dominance intrinsic to the Roman rule during the time of Jesus, and calls us to continue that struggle today.

As I reflect on the way we are called, I think of the monks of Nadi El Natroun. Last year I cruised into Alexandria, Egypt and was determined to find the monks of the Egyptian desert, descendents of the early Desert Fathers, who left the comforts of city life for a contemplative existence, their only shelter the desert rocks and caves. Perhaps they were escaping burgeoning taxes imposed by the great Roman cities, or sought to live out the life called by Luke in the gospel reading today. I was fascinated to find the caves have morphed into 4 great monasteries surrounded by huge adobe walls rising out of the arid landscape, walls built as protection from the warring Berbers. The Coptic Christian monks of today seem unchanged by time. They are marked by the cross with a tattoo on the inner wrist and make their living by embroidering and weaving fabric used for their robes. The 10th century churches still stand within the walls, now surrounded by the cells and cactus gardens that expanded to become monasteries. This ancient worn habitat is home to Father Joakim who greeted us insisting we stay for a meal. Inclusive hospitality a sign of Christ is present here, in stark contrast to the menacing walls and isolation of the monastery. We ate beans with olive oil and preserved lemons added and soaked up with flat bread. Over this austere lunch we were welcomed as brothers and sisters in Christ.

I reflected that this symbolic life of giving up everything to follow Christ, was part of the fabric of my own journey, albeit less apparent, living in secular society today. The cost of discipleship is indeed high. We are all called to give up our own life just like Father Joakim. Our growing in a relationship with Jesus, searching for a new direction in life, a new way of living, calls us to a commitment no less than the disciples in Luke’s gospel, or the monks of Wadi El Natroun… we struggle with the distractions of our everyday life, and the monks have isolation to combat. The Coptic Christian monks carry on the traditions of the Desert Fathers of the first centuries, but we too share those traditions with prayer, blessings, shared meals, poignant God moments and inclusive hospitality that is part of our life today as a Christian community. 

Just as the disciples follow Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem we also journey, nourishing our spirituality, refining our theology and our images of God, through the process of dying and being born again in our own personal transformation, as we move ever forward to a Kingdom of God on earth. The reading today is about journeying, about dying and rising again to new life, the way that Jesus taught. Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me – and if you don’t then you are not my disciple. They were following the way of Jesus which was his path to death and resurrection. The message is clear… to save your life you have to loose it, as we too journey to follow the path of many deaths and resurrections in our own life. Journeying towards a new kingdom is a dream for earth as a place of peace and justice for the disciples – like all the great prophets that went before, and for us as Christians today. The gospel of Luke structures Jesus journey ever facing towards Jerusalem, so that those who join him are ever moving forward, just as we today are ever moving toward the Kingdom of God on earth. Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem (9:51), a new kind of public ministry which involved journeys and which Luke continues with Paul’s journeys In Acts.

The instructions for the journey to Jerusalem are in the main part of Luke’s gospel, including today’s reading. Luke focuses on how the disciples should behave – to mistrust money and material things which are likely to stifle their spiritual life, as it had with the Pharisees. They are instructed to be good neighbours no matter what religion or race, which is modeled in the Good Samaritan story, and to be committed to a prayer life.

The requirement to leave the family in Luke 14 in order to join the journey, is representative of leaving all structures of the time, especially the patriarchal domination of the Roman rulers and the Synagogue leaders. The revolutionary Jesus by including everyone disregarded the social constructs of his time, pitching the patriarchal family against the community of equal discipleship. The Jesus movement does not respect patriarchal family bonds, but rather disrupts the peace of those structures by setting each against the other. It is not our extended family that is our focus, but rather a larger family open for anyone to join, where we are equally accessible to God. This radical new way of being is referred to often in the gospels where the great or the first must be slaves and servants of all, by working together for those who are slaves and servants (the marginalized) in our community. Today we work in solidarity for those who are marginalized through sexism and prejudice… now more than ever when our church will not support the ordination of gay clergy, and where women clergy are marginalized in some diocese.

You will notice that the disciples must leave behind their wife, children and families to follow Jesus. This reading (Luke 14:26) has been used to justify that only men can join the new radical discipleship of Christ, as there is no mention of husband. It paints a picture of a group of men in a charismatic movement, who having left home, follow Christ to spread the good news. Although Luke is silent about women in the group, the feminist theologian Fiorenza quotes Mark 10:29 where they are told they must leave their brothers sisters, mother, father – no mention of husband or wife. She argues that the women disciples followed Jesus in Galilee, ministered to him and came up with him to Jerusalem (Mark 15), having left everything and followed Jesus on the way to its end at the cross as eye witnesses of Jesus death and resurrection. Fiorenza states “The evangelists Mark and John highlight the alternative character of the Christian community and therefore accord women apostolic and ministerial leadership.” 

‘Carrying the Cross’ in Luke 14 can also be seen as symbolic of the Roman domination. The disciples understood kingdoms with all the political barriers and constraints which Herod and Caesar imposed. The cross was a sort of social terrorism reminding people that any time the rulers could take away your life. Were the disciples carrying the cross as a form of revolt diminishing the power of the cross in the process? Or was the cross a symbol of new life and personal transformation written by Luke after the resurrection, calling for lack of self interest and competing loyalties? Either way it is both personal and political, railing against the powers of domination, and stresses the high cost of following Jesus. There is no doubt that the primary allegiance is to Jesus, one that might well bring strife amongst the family and incur the wrath of the social and religious elite.

The theme continues in Paul's letters. “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me”, as we walk in the newness of life gifted to us in Baptism. As Marcus Borg claims, it is a way of awareness of self and the world, as we are born again like Saul on the road to Damascus, or slowly over time develop a relationship with Christ where our identity is centred in Christ. We become intentional about our awareness of God and our Christian faith here in this place. The requirement is to give up the old life, an ongoing struggle in our journey to remove the crutches that keep us from a closeness with God, and also means a solid commitment to struggle for social justice. The call to give up your family and carry your cross in Luke’s gospel is symbolic of this struggle and indeed a high price of discipleship. The fruit is love.

August 29, 2010

Geno Sisneros

Pentecost 14     Luke 14:1, 7-14

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Either Jesus is the worst dinner guest in the world or ... well actually there is no ‘or’; Jesus is the worst dinner guest in the world. Fancy inviting someone into your home for a meal, like the host did in today's Gospel reading and they repay your hospitality by criticising your other guests and then telling you what crappy company you keep. The word 'humility' doesn't exactly pop into your head does it?

Nevertheless, this story continues to inspire countless sermons about “charity” and “humility” and mostly because preachers have seen Jesus' condemnation of the guests scrambling for the best seats, and his criticism of the well-to-do guest list as a call to offer “authentic” hospitality. 

Perhaps we can even overlook Jesus' apparent lack of gratitude in the face of hospitality in light of the greater good that he is championing. After all, we know Jesus at times can be blunt and capricious anyway. Some see evidence of Jesus being “set up” by the Pharisees in this story as somehow contributing to his somewhat challenging behaviour. 

The unfortunate thing about our lectionary is that it cuts out the healing story in between the time Jesus is on his way to the Pharisee's house for a meal and the time he starts his rant about the seating arrangements. The lectionary clearly wants our focus today to be on the themes of charity and humility and not so much on healing, but in doing so we may miss an opportunity to engage the text in a deeper way.

The missing meat of the story is that a man ill with dropsy is standing in front of Jesus as he makes his way to the Pharisee's house on the Sabbath. After challenging the lawyers and the Pharisees about whether it is lawful to heal the man on the Sabbath, they remain silent. So Jesus heals the man anyway and carries on to the dinner. After all, in his challenge to them, Jesus isn't asking their permission to heal but he uses the opportunity to once more highlight their oppressive and hypocritical commitment to the law in the face of human need.

The historical Jesus scholar, Dominic Crossan, sees in the Gospels a connection of what he calls “the dyad of magic and meal, healing and eating, compassion and commensality, spiritual and material egalitarianism.” To understand how this dyad works, we need to know a little something about social rank and oppression in Jesus' first century culture, or as George W. Bush calls them, “the good ol' days.”

In those days you might not have wanted to be someone Jesus would invite to a party because it meant that you were not just a Nobody, it also meant that you were defective in some way, a stain on Israel's holiness. The common trait that Jesus' four-fold guest-list of “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” shared is that they all represented shamefulness in a culture that coveted and prized honour through social rank. 

This social structure could be seen in all parts of the culture but featured prominently at elite social events like banquets. When you were invited to such a meal, your feet would first be washed by a servant before you took the place at the table that you believed represented your social ranking. Then your head might also be anointed with perfume. The mark of a good host was the skill of making sure that guests were at the correct positions at the table at all times. If someone more important than you showed up, or you were presumptuous enough to think your social standing was higher than it actually was, you would be shamed by having to move to a lower place at the table. There was also a difference in the quality of the food and wine at the lower places. The meal was followed by entertainment and/or philosophical discussion. 

For the most part, these events functioned as boundary markers that allowed the 'honourable somebodies' in while keeping the 'shameful nobodies' out. When someone invited you for a meal, there was the expectation that you would repay their “hospitality” by inviting them to your home to increase their social standing. But Jesus challenges these elites to reverse this social order and invite those shameful nobodies who can neither reciprocate nor further their social standing to the table. Actually, taking the risk that Jesus was telling them to take would in fact harm their social status.

There is a children's book called, Miss Spider's Tea Party by the “bug poet” David Kirk. It is about a lonely spider who one day is gazing up at the sky and becomes aware of all the other insect life around her. She decides to try and make some friends by having a tea party.

All who she invites decline her invitation because they are afraid of being eaten by her. The ants come to the table but then leave immediately because though they aren't afraid of miss spider they are too good for her table. Apparently in the insect social structure ants are the 'honourable somebodies' superior to the 'spider nobodies' so the ants turn up their noses and leave Miss Spider in tears.

After all hope for her tea party is lost, Miss Spider happens on to the lowliest of insects, another nobody, a small drenched moth. His little wings are too wet from the rain to fly and he's probably hungry and missing his family too. Miss Spider takes him in and dries him off. Once he's dry and she's given him something to eat, she tosses him gently into the air and away he goes. 

The Good News of Miss Spider's hospitality soon makes its way through the insect world spreading like wildfire. Before she knows it, sitting around her table are insects and bugs of every kind. All Miss Spider's guests are delighted to see that “she ate just flowers and drank just tea”.

In spite of the rest of the insect world responding to Miss Spider's invitation, the self-important ants still do not come to the table. The ants are so certain of their belief that they hold a place of honour in the world that it causes them to miss out on a greater honour still yet. The honour of becoming a nobody. 

The Pharisees, I mean the ants, are passing up the opportunity to take part in a miracle. That is the sacred dance that happens between magic and meal. It is in that transforming act that we can find our own otherness, our Miss Spider-ness. After all, is that not what being human is about, the dance between what is seen and unseen, “the dyad of magic and meal, healing and eating, compassion and commensality, spiritual and material egalitarianism”?

The Gospel stories of healings and meals are indeed connected. These stories are always pointing to right now, the time when the world could be as it should be. Jesus imbues us to open our table and be transformed by what we encounter there. This hospitality has no strings attached and it is not about charity, it is about becoming Nobody for the sake of the kingdom. 

In a few moments you will be invited to share in a meal, the Eucharistic supper. I pray that in that meal, you may know the place of honour that Christ has prepared for you as he bids you welcome to the Kingdom of Nobodies.

August 22, 2010

Carolin Telford

Pentecost 13     
Isaiah 58:9-14     
Luke 13:10-17

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

A few years ago, I decided to install a shower in the bathroom of our house in London. Having a bath can be fantastically restorative, but sometimes there is nothing like that feeling of standing under a full flow of water, then emerging clean, invigorated, ready to face the day-or night, as the case may be. I chose one of those overhead kinds of showers, so I could stand directly under it rather than have the water squirting out at me on an angle. The shower was duly installed, and wonderful it was. For a while. After a couple of months, far from the water coming straight down at me, it was shooting out all over the place.

Looking carefully at the showerhead (with the water turned off, needless to say), I noticed little encrustations around quite a few of the holes the water was supposed to flow through. The notoriously hard water of London was slowly, inexorably, blocking up the showerhead.

I got a hole punch and stuck it through each of the little holes, clearing each one and removing the deposits of calcium carbonate which had built up. It was a bit laborious, and I could have done without having to bother, but the attention was well worth it. Result: full flow of water restored, and all was well. For a while, anyway. Slowly, insidiously, the holes started to block up again. So I got out the hole punch once more. This is called regular home maintenance, and we are all no doubt only too familiar with it in some form.

In our liturgy this morning there is much to affirm us in our desire to live lives of faith, to encourage us to take stock of ourselves and to inspire us to renew our resolve to live in response to the claims God makes upon us. There are many words we will sing and say which resonate with the intent of those words from Isaiah. They speak of the mercy and blessing of God and the eventual harvest springing from that blessing as it flows out to become a blessing for others. If we commit ourselves to justice, seek to establish equality, work to 'build peace together', then God will 'satisfy our needs in parched places, make our bones strong, and we shall be like watered gardens.' In that lovely phrase, we ‘shall be called the repairer of the breach.’ We, like the original audience for these words, are to attend to the Spirit of God moving in our world, act in obedience to God's ordinances, and respond to the needs of our neighbour. God's justice is for all, not just for some.

This is familiar ground for our community here at St Matthews. We will shortly affirm that we are endeavouring to be people who 'let love be their compass, compassion their means, and justice their destination.' And thus, by implication, we acknowledge our regret for any previous ‘losses’ of bearing and failures of compassion, and affirm our intention to move away from whatever might stop us being people who do not have justice as their destination. I say 'by implication' because, in my reading, we won't actually be saying any words that directly convey that intent.

If you are an aficionado of Sacra Musica, you might recognise these words from the General Confession, taken from the service of Evensong in the Book of Common Prayer:

“Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against thy holy laws, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us...” The confession is followed by the priest pronouncing absolution, or remission, of sins.

The fact that we are not going to say them, or words which would take us on the twists and turns of the same journey, may in fact be one of the reasons we find ourselves here this morning. For surely if we are to 'find ourselves' we should articulate who we are and how we are seeking to live: is this not more productively a matter of affirming good ‘practice’ than castigating ourselves for bad?

The argument of those who criticised Jesus for healing the woman on the Sabbath was that Jesus wasn't being observant. In this instance, he was failing to attend to those prophetic words of Isaiah reiterating the call to keep the Sabbath holy. The woman was not at the point of death. She was an unworthy reason to break the Sabbath – her healing could wait awhile. She has already waited 18 years, after all. In fact the woman seems to have internalised that pretty thoroughly, and felt herself to be indeed unworthy. But Jesus healed her. To him, she was worthy of attention, of healing and restoration to full life. He healed her of her affliction, and also of her sense of unworthiness. Those words she spoke, 'Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed' are still spoken by some Christians as part of their liturgical preparation just before receiving Holy Communion.

Last year I conducted an on-line, anonymous survey for senior students at the school where I work, and asked them to write about their spirituality, particularly relating their sense of spirituality or religious conviction to their experience of living here, in the city of Auckland. Around 15% of the students chose to respond, a pretty good number, considering how many claims are made upon their time, and also the length (and depth) of the questionnaire. Around 45% of those who responded said that they were atheist or followed no formal religion. Another 45% or so described themselves in some way as Christian. I tried to avoid theologically weighted terminology in formulating the questions, but I did ask about prayer. Surprisingly, all but 3% chose to respond to the question “What does prayer mean to you?”

I found it extraordinary that only one respondent mentioned forgiveness. No-one else said anything about wanting, or needing, to say they were sorry for things they had done, or hadn't done, to God, or to anyone else. For 99% of the girls who took the time to complete this fairly demanding survey, forgiveness just wasn't on the radar. The one student who used the word 'forgiveness' wrote the following: “To me, prayer means giving thanks, repenting, and talking to God. Everyone says different things in their prayers, but personally, when I pray I thank God for all the good things that he has brought to my life, big or small. If I have sinned, I repent, but even when I am not aware of sinning I still ask forgiveness as it is very important for me to have peace with God and not feel like I am being selfish. Sometimes it is hard. You should pray about everything bothering you. Sometimes people feel guilty, including me.”

Recognising and acknowledging a need for forgiveness appears to run counter to the spirit of our times. I think that girl was on to something in what she said about guilt. That kind of generalised sense of failure, feeling guilty all the time: who needs it? I once heard guilt described as 'that most unproductive emotion'. Guilt can spur us to take remedial action, but it can also paralyse us with despair. Christianity has a history of somewhat overplaying its hand when it comes to guilt. We don't want to be made to feel guilty, so we don't call to mind our failings. Sometimes it is hard, as she says. And so consequently, it could be argued, we deny ourselves the opportunity to receive (or acknowledge the receipt of) God's forgiveness. In the words of 1 John 1:8-9 “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

It seems to me that this is to open ourselves to a process of healing, not one of neurotic self-denigration. While not wishing to advocate a return to the Book of Common Prayer, I have followed too much the devices and desires of my own heart. I feel it is entirely reasonable to say that there is no health in me which is earned or deserved. I am radically dependant, and I desire and recognise my need to be reminded of my radical dependence on the continuing gift of the mercy and grace of God. That is not to overstate things, it is merely to recognise and identify the real state of things. Like the unblocking and freeing up of the flow of water through the shower-head, this is not a once and for all event, but something requiring regular and repeated attention.

We will of course be asking for forgiveness in saying the Lord’s Prayer together today. And even if there is some kind of specific ‘confession’ included in a liturgy, there is not usually enough time allowed to do anything more than make a kind of mental note that this is an important aspect of our spiritual life which we need to return to in a more quiet context. But at least we do have the collective reminder. We recall once more that if we allow the love of God to wash into and drench the parts of us that are parched and dry, miraculous things can happen.

Of course, here in New Zealand, our water is soft, and our showerheads don’t tend to block up with hard deposits. (Maybe this is because we live in Godzone!) Would that the same could be said of our hearts.

August 15, 2010

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 12     
Luke 12:49-56


Jesus is apparently having one of those days. Sounding more than annoyed, he asks, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Perhaps he is a little fed up with the cluelessness of those who have been following him on his way to Jerusalem and God knows what. He certainly doesn’t sound like the same guy Isaiah foretold would be the Prince of Peace, but even the Messiah is entitled to lose his patience once in a while. Still that doesn’t make his talk of a divine scorched earth policy and fracturing families any easier to preach. Come on Jesus. Give me a break!

Over thirty years ago I had to preach my very first sermon in seminary on Matthew’s version of this same passage. Matthew is even clearer that Jesus is not in a good mood, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Mt 10:34) I remember nothing of what I said, only what I felt – terrified. Being quite shy (I know. That’s hard to believe now), the very idea of public speaking turned my knees to jelly. Speaking without any understanding of how the Jesus I thought I knew could say something so unexpected left me flummoxed. Where is the good news in what sounds like hellfire and brimstone?

What I didn’t have then but do now, is the research the Jesus Seminar’s New Testament scholars published 11 years after I was ordained. They tried to determine what words that are said to be Jesus’ own, he actually said. They voted on every word. They could vote with a red ball that meant “That’s Jesus;” a pink ball that said, “It sure sounds like him;” a gray ball that said, “Well, he didn’t say it, but maybe he would’ve agreed with it” and a black ball that said, “There’s been some mistake.” Most of today’s Gospel falls into the “Well, maybe” category. Only the bit about being anxious to baptize falls into the “definitely not Jesus” category. It turns out that after Easter the primitive church put these words into Jesus’ mouth, but why?

It seems becoming a Christian didn’t guarantee a life of peace and harmony after all. Apparently it wasn’t a good career move after all to join what the established religious and political authorities considered a subversive sect. Mum and Dad were not necessarily overjoyed when their pride and joy came out as having been baptized as someone deemed not socially acceptable. Not everyone welcomed them with open arms. A message of giving up your life to gain it turned out to be a harder sell than anticipated. So both Matthew and Luke felt it important to have Jesus speak to that reality when discussing discipleship. It is kind of like the disclaimer a pharmaceutical company inserts in small print at the bottom of an ad about how great their latest wonder drug is, telling you what all the unpleasant side effects are.

Well, if Jesus didn’t say it, can’t we just ignore this message and move on to something he did say – preferably something more positive, Christian and loving? We could, but while Christianity 2000 years later is now part of the DNA of the establishment, it still isn’t a source of peace and harmony. Perhaps it would serve us well to take some time to consider the warning.

Today we seem to have come to the conclusion that unity is a good thing and division is bad. United we stand, divided we fall seems to be intuitively obvious to us. When I was growing up church billboards said things like, “The family that prays together stays together.” My family thought that was a joke. When we got to church Dad went off to supervise the Sunday school, Mum went off to count the collection, my sister went off to sing in the choir and I went off to robe as an acolyte. We never saw each other. Yet the goal of unity was considered positive and still is. We see it as the source of peace and contentment. 

If unity is good, then division is necessarily bad. Clearly it is a threat to happiness and well-being. Certainly the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks so. He is going to great lengths to try to unify a fractured Anglican Communion with a new covenant that give archbishops unprecedented power to impose unity on all of us for our own good. Most bishops in New Zealand seem averse to being divisive. For instance, they have expanded a moratorium on ordaining gays and lesbians as bishops, to mean not ordaining them as priests and deacons either. Their justification for this is apparently based on the traditional view that the office of bishop is supposed to be a symbol of unity and ordaining gays and lesbians would be divisive, thus unchristian.

Yet Luke’s Jesus has a different view. He is not just warning us that following him has divisive consequences. He is arguing that whatever the cost, being divisive is our job. I know. That sounds contradictory to my usual message from this pulpit that our spiritual journey is about discovering our oneness with God and one another. Being divisive doesn’t sound like a road that will get us there. And sometimes it isn’t.

Speaking ill of others and spreading rumours is hardly a godly occupation. Those politicians who exacerbate our fears of those who are different from our selves in colour, culture, faith, sexual orientation, gender and class to gain more power certainly are not following the spirit of Jesus’ call to divisiveness. Addiction in its many forms and family violence, while divisive, are not what Jesus had in mind either.

But when a call for unity becomes self-serving, it needs to be challenged. When unity exists for the sake of a false peace that supports an unjust status quo, division must be our choice. 

Ten years ago a self-help book calling for more innovative thinking in the business world was published. I’m not much for self help books, so I never read it, but I loved the title, If It Ain’t Broke, Break It. I think this was the essence of Jesus’ diatribe. God’s peace requires rocking the boat. Today, it challenges the church to reclaim its subversive roots. It challenges each of us to ask ourselves at what price do we seek personal peace, comfort and tranquility? Who is paying the price for it? Who is suffering? Who is in pain so that our carefully constructed world isn’t rocked? Are we still willing to follow him when our mission is to break with social convention?

To quote Theresa Berger, a theology professor at Duke Divinity School, “If our world were nothing but a place of created goodness and profound beauty, a space of flourishing for all, just and life-giving for all in God’s creation, then Jesus’ challenge would be deeply troubling. If, on the other hand, our world is deeply marred and scarred, death-dealing for many life forms, with systems of meaning that are exploitative and not sustainable, then redemption can come only when those systems are shattered and consumed by fire. Life cannot (re-) emerge without confrontation. This is the basis of the conflict Jesus envisions. He comes not to disturb a nice world but to shatter the disturbing and death-dealing systems of meaning that stifle life.” [i]

I think many of us can buy into that, no matter how uncomfortable the idea of doing it makes us. Even harder is grasping how to go about breaking what is not broken. Professor Berger offers us a modern day example. She points to Lisa Fithian, a grassroots, yet global, peace activist. She has been arrested 30 times for intentionally creating crises. She intentionally annoys the powers that be – transnational corporations, the media, security forces, consumers – so that they may cease doing business as usual, examine the inequities they perpetuate, and change policies. She explains her rationale this way, “When people ask me, ‘What do you do?,’ I say I create crisis, because crisis is the edge where change is possible. I bring crisis because business as usual means injustice and death” [ii]

It has long been my position that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. All kinds of new possibilities, often unforeseen, can be realized through them. Could Jesus mean this when he speaks of bringing fire to earth? Is crisis the edge of the sword he brings instead of peace? Is it possible that he does not seek conflict for conflict’s sake, but rather wholeness through fragmentation? How might we cause crisis in our families, in our church, in our community, in our nation, in the world to bring about a world made whole by God’s justice, love and peace?

Sorry, no one said Jesus’ way was an easy one.

[i] Berger, Teresa, “Disturbing the Peace.” The Christian Century, August 10, 2004, p.18.

[ii] Ibid.

August 8, 2010

Bishop Ross Bay

Pentecost 11     
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16     Luke 12:32-40


Video available on YouTube, Facebook

I was talking with one of our church school boards recently about the nature of the particular character of the school. Part of the discussion centred around the question of what it means to call ourselves Anglican Christians. People around the room talked about what they understood Christian to mean, and the kind of attributes and ideals that might attach themselves to Christian people.

Things like tolerance, forgiveness, love and humility were to the fore. I was relieved when someone mentioned that it was to do with being a follower of Jesus Christ. But I found myself thinking that one of the things about being Christian that is important to me, is the vision of things being different, transformed into a new kind of reality.

So the writer to the Hebrew says “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”. That is a statement about believing in a different future, a better future, God’s future for the planet and its peoples. A lot of what we read in Hebrews has a kind of dualism attached to it. There is a dualism of above and below: the real heavenly world, and the transient earthly world which offers reflections of what is above. There is also a dualism of the present age, and the age which is yet to come. These spatial and linear dualisms reflect a combination of platonic philosophy combined with a primitive Christian eschatology, that is a belief in the saving intervention of God at the end of time.

The idea of the two worlds is particularly evident in the writer’s contrasting of the earthly and heavenly temple, and the discussion of the role of Christ as the great High Priest. There is a lot in that which has the sound of the philosopher Philo about it. He was a Greek Jewish philosopher, and his work influenced many early Christians who found in his writings fresh insights into what it meant to hold to a future hope.

Dualism is treated somewhat cautiously in theological circles today. Too strong a dualism can remove from us a sense of real responsibility for ourselves and our actions. The idea of a perfect heaven that represents some kind of destination, in contrast to the imperfect earth which is a place to escape from can cause us to place little value on this planet and our actions as creatures who inhabit it. A disconnect between physical and spiritual reality can lead people to imagine that the body has no value other than as a container for the soul, and at its worst extremes has led people to regard the body as inherently evil. As if most of us don’t have enough problems with self-image already.

So we are inclined to take a more integrated view of such things. We may speak of heaven and earth, of the spiritual and the physical, but in doing so we understand them to be part of one reality. Heaven is not a place to head to, but is the presence of God in our midst now. The spiritual is mediated through the physical, and cannot be separated from it. The sacraments of the Church bear testimony to that.

And yet faith tells me there is more. I have assurance of things yet hoped for; I have conviction of things not yet seen. But I do not believe they belong to another world or an alternative reality. And neither in the end do I think that the writer to the Hebrews believed that either. For in this great chapter about faith, the annals of great figures of faith from the past are recounted. And all of them are people who not only believed there was more, but who also worked to make it so. Abraham and Sarah made their journey into the unknown. Moses gave up a life as part of Egyptian royalty to identify with his own people. Rahab helped the Hebrew spies escape safely. And so on, and so on. Today we might remember Mary McKillop in our own annals of figures of faith. August 8th is the date in the church’s calendar now set aside for her, the founder of the Josephites in Australia. One of her sayings was “never see a need without doing something about it”.

Believing and working. Faith calls forth this synergy from us. The ideas are present in what we heard from Luke’s gospel today. The parables are of someone returning home to servants after a marriage feast, and of a thief breaking into a house. The images speak of preparedness and alertness. They suggest more than sitting and waiting for someone else to act. Rather they give the idea of people who are constantly seeking what can be done, and are ready to act when the opportunities arise. 

I hope that each of us may carry within us the dream of something being different. It might be in our own personal life. It might relate to our family or community, Maybe it’s about the church. Perhaps we are able even to dream nationally or globally. Whatever the dream of transformation and change might be, can we allow it to become an assurance of something hoped for, and the conviction of something we cannot see? Faith allows that to be so.

But in doing so we should always understand that we are part of the work of transformation. We are part of making change. God does not place such dreams within us for no purpose. And if faith offers the assurance and conviction that such dreams can become reality, then faith also offers us the motivation and the power to bring that reality to life. Believing and working, the synergy of faith.

Towards the end of what we heard from Hebrews, we read “All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them”. Alongside all of the hopeful encouragement offered by those figures from the past, it is a sobering reality check. Believing and working for the dreams of faith is hard. We do not always achieve what we dream of. Sometimes things continue to lie ahead of us. Our glimpses of them are real enough, but we do not see the substance of them.

William Wilberforce is well known for his part in the movement to abolish slavery. It was some 20 years before the Slave Trade Bill was passed and slaves would no longer be carried on British ships. William Pitt who had worked with Wilberforce to achieve this had died the year before. It would be another 26 years before a law was passed to abolish slavery more generally in the British Empire, and Wilberforce died 3 days after.

How many were the women through generations who died in the hope of gaining equality with men through the tight to a parliamentary vote, before Kate Sheppard’s generation made it a reality? It would be another 40 years before the first female Member of Parliament was elected. Kate Sheppard lived just in time to see that reality.

Believing and working, glimpses and substance. This is the stuff of faith, the vision of things which will yet be different, transformed .

Dream, believe. Work, keep hope. Together with God, we can play our part in fashioning this world more into the image of all that God intends for it through the liberating love of Jesus Christ.

August 1, 2010

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 10     Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23     Luke 12:13-21

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

I need to begin with a confession. Last week I bought an iPad. I did this even though I knew that this Sunday I would have to preach on a Gospel that is often used to condemn greed and consumerism. I couldn’t help it. I’m addicted. I’m an Apple-holic. It is tougher to give up than smoking and there are no Apple Anonymous support groups. I took the first bite of the Apple as a young priest when I purchased an Apple 2e, freshly minted from Steve Job’s garage. Apple said it would be the only computer I would ever need. It was a marvel in its day, but the high didn’t last. Six months later they came out with the Mac. I had to have one. I was hooked. And so my descent has continued through the years with each new faster, more powerful version. A few years back I almost succeeded in kicking the need to have the latest greatest computer when they came out with the iPod, then the iPhone, and now the iPad. It is now hopeless. I no longer have the will to even resist. 

And why would I? With the touch of a button my iPad not only keeps me organized and connected, it entertains and informs. I can read the Bible or play Scrabble with someone on the other side of the planet. I can take a walk at night and have it point out the heavenly bodies in my location in real time while I listen to my latest audio book or Handel’s Messiah. I can read the local paper in Kalamazoo or check the weather in Timbuktu. On it my grandkids can race cars or Lynette can sketch out her next painting or Michael could write a composition for the organ and then play it. It can even serve as my teleprompter this morning as I give this sermon. And later this week after this sermon has been uploaded to YouTube, I can use it to watch it. Its capacity to impact my life seems to be limited only by the creativity and imagination of iPad programmers to create programs called “Apps” that make the iPad do what it does.

And yet I live with no illusions. I don’t for a minute think I need to have an iPad to live a full life. No matter how gifted, the programmers cannot create an app that replaces the love of my life, my family or friends or my passion for my vocation. There will never be an app I can check in the morning to see what is going to happen to me today. Never in all these years of Apple addiction have I thought for a moment that these electronic wonders gave my life meaning and purpose. While we might crave a device that helps us feel loved, helps us control the course of our lives, and gives us a reason to get up in the morning, that is not the way life works. While Apple makes software call iLife, it isn’t my life.

Which is the point of today’s Gospel.

In his parable of the Rich Fool, Jesus has a stark message for us, although not as cynical as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes, who laments everything we do as being vanity. Everything is futile. Nothing we do will spare us from death. All is chasing the wind. But Jesus comes close.

His parable tells about a man who is not a bad person. By worldly standards and his own, he is not foolish. He manages his assets well, is successful and plans for his retirement. We tend to respect such qualities in others. Generally, we think living such a responsible life is purposeful and meaningful, even wise.

In the parable the man is having a conversation with himself about what to do with his bountiful harvest. He makes plans for how to best benefit from his situation. But in the midst of his making plans, life happens or in this case death. God interrupts him to call him foolish. As wise as he may think he’s being, he is not going to enjoy the fruit of his labours. He will die that night. All he has done will not benefit him but his heirs. You can hear the Teacher muttering, “Amen to that! All is vanity.” in the background.

The reason I suggest Jesus is more positive than the cynical Teacher is he goes on to say that it doesn’t have to be this way for everyone, only for “those who store up treasures for themselves” and “are not rich toward God.” While not being specific about how to obtain it, he implies that meaning and purpose does exist for us in spite of all evidence to the contrary. All is not quite vanity.

My read of the parable is that it is more than a cautionary tale against selfishness and greed. It is more than a story to make us feel guilty about saving up for an iPad when people are hungry outside the church door. It is no small challenge to find meaning and purpose in life.

All too often some in the church have perverted this story and many like it to foster guilt, fear and hate to motivate people to seek personal salvation in the next world, leaving the hungry, still hungry. For centuries these stories have been used to manipulate people to support some kind of financial or political agenda. Critics of this theology call it “Empire theology.” [i] As an example, today’s Gospel is often used on Stewardship Sunday to induce giving out of guilt or fear to the church which is conveniently equated with God. They paint a picture of an impassive God, having all power and control of every detail in the world. Creation has little power of self-determination. God’s power is coercive. The way things are, for better or worse, is divine will. This theology projects that kind of power onto our leaders, supporting and legitimizing them. What we are offered in return for accepting the status quo is the empire’s promises of security and comfort in the future.

I believe this is a theology of oppression that insidiously teaches us that our ultimate concern is the next life. It works against hospitality, justice and peace. Since according to “Empire theology” God is only interested in the afterlife, creation has only instrumental value and has little intrinsic value (after all God is going to destroy it in the end anyway). We are free to plunder it for personal profit. By emphasizing only a personal and private relationship with God, where salvation in the form of continued life after death is our primary goal, the common good is undermined. It is a theology of violence and death contrary to God’s voice in the Bible calling us to life not death.

I think that Jesus would find the use of his parable for judgment a travesty. He was not about guilt and fear. While I suspect Jesus wouldn’t choose to own an iPad, I’d like to think he’d play chess with me on mine. He wasn’t a moralist. He might have compassion for my addiction, but he would not condemn me. The only moral teaching he offered was treating others with radical respect. His life, death and resurrection revealed that that which we call God is transformative love working in every present moment to create new life out of all of our experiences of death.

He is pointing us in the direction of finding purpose and meaning in this life, here and now. If we give radical respect and trust transformative love we will find it. It is what he gives Maximus today at his baptism as he proceeds on the journey from birth to death. He doesn’t provide a map like the iPad does but they are excellent directions all the same.

[i] A Commentary by Rick Marshall

July 25, 2010

Wilf Holt

Pentecost 8     Social Services Sunday     Luke 11:1-13


Today we celebrate Social Services Sunday and I guess for me at least it represents a heaven sent opportunity. An opportunity to poignantly raise the issues of our homeless, our marginalised and our local social services. Talk off issues of justice and justice denied.

An opportunity as an ordained social service practitioner to forcefully and even righteously champion the needs of social service agencies and their clients to the congregation of St Matthews in particular and to the wider church in general.

I could in that context become a lion in a den of lambs.

On the other hand – you the “sermonee” may well think – here we go again – stories of deprivation bordering on the uncomfortable, exhortations, incisive deconstruction of postmodern society and of course reference to familiar pieces of scripture and at the very least one mention of "faith without works,” etc. I know you've heard some of those quotes because I have taken us down that path in previous years.

Not today however – I just want to do three simple things:

The first is to recapitulate the nature of diaconal ministry. The second is to examine the nature of prayer, including the various ways of doing it. And finally what is the meaning of faith and its relationship to prayer.

Shouldn't take too long.

Stephen the Deacon

Scripture tells us that Stephen was a deacon. Apparently, as soon as the Apostles had received that fantastic surge of confidence which was Pentecost, they saw that the church would need some organization, and that this would involve separating the people who could do what only the Apostles could do from those who could do what anybody of goodwill could do.

Speaking as befitted the conveners of the second church committee on record, the Twelve issued a statement saying, “It would be a grave mistake for us to neglect the word of God in order to wait at table.”

Whatever they meant by this (and it sounds like a good foundation for committee language) they caused seven to be appointed to do the chores, and of these the only one anybody has heard of since was – Stephen.

I suspect Stephen did a bit more than wait at table – a bit more than handing round the salad and serving the wine. He did however make a great impression as a heater and a preacher, and as befitted a young man he did not mince his words.

Something he said gave great offense to the "Synagogue of the Freedmen" – apparently a league or fraternity of Jews who had formerly been slaves. Why the fraternity should have taken special offense at the preaching of the gospel of liberation heaven only knows. But offended they were so they had Stephen arrested on certain technical evidence which in those days was easy to obtain if you were prepared to pay for it.

He was taken to court, charged with blasphemy and invited to say whether he wished to say anything before sentence was passed. He did, and what he said is summarized in fifty-three verses of the longest chapter in Acts and in the process delivered the first Christian apologetic sermon on record.

But it was not, we gather, the length of his exposition that troubled the court. He started with Abraham, worked through Moses, glanced at the Psalms, and no doubt was all set to embark on the prophets, but at this point he was incautious enough to describe the court as "stubborn, heathen at heart, deaf to the truth." He was interrupted by the judge, sentenced, and then stoned to death.

In his passing he became a hero, a martyr, the first non-apostolic Christian saint and the first male Deacon. I believe he was piped at the post by Phoebe who scripture records as the first Deaconess. [i]

Now it so happened that a young lawyer from Tarsus, who was particularly violent in his views against Christians, watched all of these goings on – and since the next thing we hear about that young lawyer is that he was confronted by Christ on the road to Damascus, we may take it that all this is straight history and poignant history at that.

The Incarnation, says the drama of the church's year, does that to people. It makes heroes of people whose duty is washing dishes and setting tables, and through such it reaches people like Paul. A sort of theological law of unintended consequences!

I raise this story again in the way of a warning. A warning – diaconal service – that servant function – that diakonia of all believers we are all enjoined to undertake can be dangerous and at various levels is. Opportunities of martyrdom, of ridicule, of pain discomfort and disruption in our everyday lives are real.

Perhaps martyrdom is now extremely rare – although I would like to think the murdered priests in the Solomon's in the recent past may give us pause to think.

That unintended consequence of doing good of course is not restricted to those attempting it. Those receiving that diakonia are also at risk for often social service changes people – and change can be uncomfortable and even dangerous.

When we are involved in service so many opportunities arise for both parties.

Now I'd like to explore the little parable found in the middle third of our gospel reading. As a social worker I was immediately intrigued by the first visitor – the friend of the fiend who woke up his friend. What was he doing turning up at midnight? Picture it. The visitor must have come from another village, he wasn't by himself or why the need for three loaves. Why was he arriving at midnight – travel in those days was risky – the roads were poor, people needed good reason to travel and we can imagine that traveling on foot made for accurate calculations on distance and time. Had he got lost, was a member of the party injured – were they fearful of interception by some one or some agency thereby electing to travel at night. The text was no help so I left it.

I then focused on the other friend of the bread-seeking friend – the second friend to be woken. The commentaries were most helpful.

The man is woken, initially resists the request of his friend but eventually relents and gives him the bread – it seems that he only accedes to the request because his friend was persistent – either in his knocking or in his requests.

The man acts – not out of honor (friendship, mutual obligation neighborliness) he acts out of shamelessness because he will be dishonored if the village discovers his friend standing outside begging for what ought to be freely given. He is afraid he will be disgraced in the village. He has done out of shamelessness what he ought to have done out of honor.

But that's not what I want to talk about. What really intrigued me about today's reading was the bread seeking friend. Incidentally he by now may well have woken up a number of fellow villagers seeking other ingredients for the meal such as olives and wine – for as scripture tells us 'man can not live by bread alone'.

This friend has already opened his house to the first midnight friend and welcomed his party in. I'm still assuming it was a party which means that his house was now very crowded – for I again assume that he had a family for in those times it would have been very strange for him to have lived alone – as a peasant he would surely still been living under the roof of his father if he were unmarried. The House most probably had only one room and everyone slept in it – the best posies of course would have gone to the visitors.

So crowded house or not he sets off around the village to gather the necessary food that hospitality demand he serves to the visitor. At this point he could become plagued by doubts. Life was hard for peasant communities – sleep would have been precious – and he has to wake people – dogs will probably start barking, who has spare food, are they going to answer my knock, what will people say when they know I have no food – even for my own family.

Could he even have become angry at his visiting friend for putting him in this situation? Was this visitor bringing trouble with him – why me and why now?

Whether he had any of those thoughts or not – he knocked on doors, gathered food returned home and had his wife prepare a meal.

So why did he do it – what compelled him? What was the secret of his success – for he was successful in ensuring his obligation of hospitality was fulfilled? The text tells us it was his persistence. But is that enough – no not quite – for he acted out of honor, out of friendship, mutual obligation and neighborliness – not I suspect out of shamelessness. In other words he acted the way he did because of the relationship he had with his friends. On the one hand he had a friend in need which he unquestioningly responded to. On the other hand he sought assistance from a friend whom he new would also respond unquestioningly – a simple triad of mutual response to mutual need. Even the bread-owing friend had a need – to avoid being shamed.

This then begs the questions – why then do any of us do the good that we do – does it in fact matter what the explanation is or what fires our motivation – does it matter whether we act out of honor or out of shamelessness – as long as good things get done. That those in need receive what they need. If so then all is good.

Well initially perhaps all is good. At the heart of this parable is the notion of persistence. If I initially act only through shamelessness but that action becomes a habit then the chances are that I will eventually act out of honor. A self sustaining and reinforcing cycle of action that not only changes things for those in need but begins to change those who attempt to meet that need.

In the same way Jesus taught the Lucian disciples to pray and then followed the instruction up very quickly with the exhortation to pray persistently. Develop the habit as it were and that cycle speeds up and change begins to happen. Eventually the knocked on door is opened – perhaps not as quickly as we would like and not necessarily to reveal the visitor we would like but it is opened. Our parable then suggests that prayer is a leaned experience – not simply a release of feeling and that we need to keep at it even if we initially only attempt it out of shamelessness.

These few verses highlight the central message about prayer, and at the same time point out that we should not compare God to a friend who responds only under pressure to an untimely appeal – rather how much more God will answer when we pray – what ever the time. .

These few verses serve to highlight nature of the relationship that can exist between God and us his people. That relationship is the foundation and sustainer of faith.

So when tired, when busy, when just wanting to get through the day – when I would really prefer to look the other way, cross the road, when feeling hopeless or resentful or fearful of what others might think – then perhaps that's the time when I can reach down and draw upon the faith of our midnight friend.

Amen.

[i] Portrayal of Stephen drawn from a sermon preached by Erik Routley. At Princeton University Chapel on the Feast of St. Stephen, December 26, 1976.

July 18, 2010

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 8     Luke 10:38-42


Video available on YouTube, Facebook

The Sufis tell of a certain wise man widely thought to have become irrational in his presentation of facts and arguments. The authorities, fearing he might be a danger to the public, decide to test him.

On the day of the test he paraded past the court mounted on an ass, facing the donkey’s rear. When the time came for him to speak for himself, he asked the judges, “When I rode in, which way was I facing?”

The judges answered, “You were facing the wrong way.”

“You make my point,” he answered. “From another point of view, I was facing the right way. It was the ass which was facing the wrong way.”

This story illustrates the anxiety I am experiencing in addressing the story of Martha’s annoyance with her sister Mary when she chooses to sit at Jesus’ feet instead of helping to prepare tea. Being not as brave – or is it foolhardy – as Jesus who enters into the spat to side with Mary, I am reluctant to enter the fray at all. I have wished several times this past week that I had the foresight to check out what the Gospel was for this Sunday before I prepared the preaching roster. If I had, Ann, Linda, Carolin or Denise would be up here now. While there is more to it than this, you cannot discuss this story without engaging gender issues. As a hetero-male approaching this story about two women in conflict over how best to be a disciple, I fear I will be the ass and not the sage.

What I’ve learned the past week in scouring the commentaries, bantering with the staff team, consulting colleagues, and discussing it over a dinner made by a “Mary” who resents having been culturally conditioned to be a “Martha,” is that this seemingly simple story is heard and interpreted in a multitude of ways. Our understanding is shaped by our gender, cultural context, and experience. For some Martha is the heroine, for others, Mary. The story may seem simple and even familiar from our daily lives, but how to be a good disciple is not made intuitively obvious by it.

On the face of it the story seems to say that the best disciple is the one who sits passively at the feet of Jesus and listens, never saying a word. Being busy preparing a meal, while all well and good, is secondary in importance. It merely supports discipleship. It’s not valued as much. No wonder the women on the staff team thought Martha should’ve taken off her apron and said. “Bugger this, I’ll join Mary. Let’s see what they think ‘the better part’ is when their tummies start rumbling”

Even men should be able to get why Jesus’ rebuke of Martha is a hot button issue for women. Some things haven’t changed since first century Palestine. Twenty-first century New Zealand women are still expected to provided hospitality and prepare meals. Sure there are many men today who know how to cook a meal or at least “man” a “barbie,” but few who live with women feel ultimately responsible for managing the home even if they do pick up their socks off the floor or occasionally dust. If you think things are different than in Jesus’ day, check out how many men help with morning tea after the service. In my nearly five years here I can think of three who did it for a short while.

Considering that reality, no wonder women feel conflicted by Jesus’ praise of Mary at Martha’s expense. Society expects women to initiate and manage all that being hospitable requires, but when they do as expected, then they are not appreciated, but put down for doing it. It’s not unlike when God hardened Pharaoh’s heart and then clobbered him with seven plagues for his hardheartedness. And clobber women with this story we have. Those who opposed ordaining women to the priesthood 35 years ago in the US certainly used Martha to justify their position of keeping women in their place. Their point of view was, “Sure women are important in the church…in a support role.” That has traditionally always been their role was their argument, conveniently forgetting that men made the rules. With England still resisting the ordination of women as bishops and the Vatican this week equating ordaining women with paedophilia by declaring both gravely evil, clearly the clobbering continues.

But because this simple story is not so simple, Mary has also been used to support gender equality when she isn’t being lauded for her silence. Since the socially acceptable thing for Mary, as a woman, was to help her sister, sitting at Jesus feet to be his student was not a passive act. It was a bold act of liberation. She defied convention without a word. From this point of view, Jesus did not put women down but raised them up, even if he still didn’t help make the coffee. He may not have been just any man, but he was still a man conditioned by the social context in which he lived.

To avoid this tangle of gender issues, many a male preacher has focused on the behaviour of Martha versus Mary rather than the role of women. The favourite themes for such sermons are the importance of the contemplative life over the active life or condemning the rivalry between Mary and Martha for Jesus’ attention. Martha tends to come out badly in these sermons.

My point of view, which may make me a wrong-facing donkey, is that the story isn’t about any of these things. It isn’t about siding with either Mary or Martha. They are both worthy disciples in their own way. Ideally, we have some of both in us, be we male or female. Choosing between them is to choose against a part of ourselves. No, it is about how to obtain eternal life.

To get to this viewpoint one must broaden the context. Luke tells the story of Mary and Martha immediately following the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In that story, the lawyer asks Jesus how to obtain eternal life. He then answers his own question, “by loving God and your neighbour as yourself.” But because the lawyer is consumed with himself and his own self-justification he sets himself up for rebuke by asking, “Who is my neighbour?” The rebuke is the Good Samaritan. It is about not WHO is your neighbour, but HOW to be neighbourly. It’s certainly not about winning an argument against Jesus to quell his anxiety about his self-worth.

The Martha and Mary story focuses on the “loving God” requirement for eternal life. In the story both are shown loving God: Mary by sitting at Jesus feet and Martha by inviting Jesus into her home and serving him. The difference was that Martha was anxious about it. Like any good hostess she wanted everything to be just right. What Jesus picked up on was her anxiety. She wanted her service to Jesus to reflect well on her. Like the lawyer, she is letting her need for self-justification limit her love. But for the sake of argument, say it was Mary who was anxious in the story. If she was the one worrying about receiving Jesus’ approval for being a good student, it would’ve been Mary Jesus rebuked.

By juxtaposing the two stories, Luke reminds us that we don’t love our neighbour or God for our own sake. When we put ourselves first we have it backassward. When we let our selves get in the way, being one with the love that is God is unobtainable. From that point of view, it is in losing our selves in loving God and neighbour that marks us as Jesus’ disciples. How to do that is the challenge: be we a Martha or Mary, a male or female, a sage or donkey.

July 11, 2010

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 7     Luke 10:25-37

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Last weekend Lynette and I were in Murchison for a grandchild’s birthday. It is little more than a crossroads between mountains half-way between Nelson and Greymouth. Prior to the party we went for a drive to enjoy the magnificent surrounding scenery. We came to a lookout over the Maruia Falls. Being ten metres high they make a pretty big splash, but once having lived near Niagara Falls I wasn’t overly impressed. Returning to town we still had time to kill so we visited Murchison’s Historical Museum. There I learned that on June 16, 1929 the falls did not exist. After the 7.8 earthquake the following day there were falls on the Maruia River. Now I was impressed. That is truly a seismic change.

Such a change occurred the day a lawyer decided to test his skills of argument and knowledge of the Torah against Jesus. He wasn’t interested in obtaining eternal life, he was only interested in besting Jesus in a religious argument for his own self-aggrandizement. He got more than he bargained for when he asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?” He got the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan.

The day before this encounter there was no such thing as a GOOD Samaritan. It was inconceivable. The Samaritans were considered half-breed heretics who it was socially acceptable to despise and hate. After the parable their brand changed. Today hospitals, charitable agencies, churches and laws protecting doctors when assisting the injured are happy to be called Good Samaritan. Along with the Prodigal Son, it is Jesus’ most well known parable. But because of its familiarity we have grown blasé about it. We have forgotten what it was like before he raised our consciousness. Worse, we have stopped thinking about what he was really saying. We assume we know what it is about. For instance, if I were to give a “quickie quiz” and ask people on the street if Jesus answered the lawyer when he asked, “And who is my neighbour?” I think most would answer, “Yes, the good Samarian.” They would be wrong. Jesus does not answer the question, but asks more questions. The neighbour in the story is unidentifiable. He is the one who got mugged. Stripped of his clothing and robbed of his ID he could have been anyone. He could’ve even been us.

Before Jesus told the parable it was perfectly acceptable to think of God’s love being limited to your own kind. People’s gods then belonged to the tribe. I know it sounds a little primitive today to think that God only loves people who sing the same national anthem as we do or share the same colour of skin or have our gender or share our same sexual attraction or worship the same god in the same way, but really people once thought that way. And here is something even stranger, people used to spend a lot of time wondering about just how little they had to do to obtain God’s love. What was the minimum necessary requirement to keep their god on their side? I know, it’s hard to believe that people were once so self-serving. But I assure you it is true. But worst of all, before the parable, people thought holiness and fear could coincide, hand in glove. That’s why the priest and Levite could walk on by their distressed neighbour without apparent guilt or shame. Helping him would have defiled them. They would have jeopardized their holiness. To intentionally become unclean was a fearful thought and an unimaginable act. 

It was this idea of holiness that Jesus challenged with his parable and it was no small thing. It was a 7.8 earthquake that changed the topography of faithfulness. Righteousness was no longer about what we do or don’t do, but about how we are. It was about being. 

The lawyer claimed to be seeking how to obtain eternal life. I understand that to mean God’s unlimited love, compassion and mercy. He was confident he knew the answer. Follow the Law. The Law said, “Love your neighbour.” But surely God didn’t mean everyone? Be reasonable. There have to be limits. He did not hear the irony in his own question. Jesus’ parable played with his blindness. If you are one with unlimited love is it even possible to limit your love? To use our fears or the Law or tradition or Scripture or even our claims on God to limit that love was a non-starter for Jesus. Limited love is no love at all.

That message rattled the windows of the powerful and knocked their means of control off their neatly stacked shelves. It created a chasm in the social order. It shook the ground of their being. It was an unexpected message that made him exceedingly dangerous. Their only hope to restore order was to silence the messenger. But while you can clean up and rebuild after an earthquake, the landscape is forever changed. Putting the unlimited love of God back in the box of our religion after the parable of the Good Samaritan is proving to be impossible, but not for lack of trying.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve witnessed lots of attempts to limit God. Recently the Presiding Bishop of the US, Katharine Jefferts Schori, was in England. When she was invited to preach at Southwark Cathedral, Archbishop Rowan Williams forbid her to wear her mitre, the sign of her office. As she put it, “How bizarre!” But not so much in a country that is arguing this week at their synod whether or not God intended women to be bishops. But before we start referring to them as “bloody poms,” when she was here recently the Bishop of Christchurch forbid Katharine to even be in her cathedral. A woman bishop forbidding another woman bishop to be in her cathedral goes beyond even bizarre. Her reason was not Katharine’s gender but seemingly her belief that God limits love by demanding unity within the Anglican Communion. Since the US is ordaining gays and lesbians as bishops, Bishop Victoria attempted to keep Christchurch pure by being inhospitable to the highest-ranking leader of the American church. Happily, not all of New Zealand chose to be 100% pure. When in Auckland the Presiding Bishop was invited not only to preach at the cathedral, but to wear her mitre as well. (I’m told both she and it were greatly admired.) 

Following this week of attempted God-containment came the Hermeneutics Hui I mentioned two weeks ago I was attending. It was another effort to put God back in the box. The structure was built around the three Tikanga of Pakeha, Maori and Polynesia. Each took responsibility for examining a passage from either the Old or New Testament that has been traditionally used to justify the condemnation and exclusion of homosexuals. There are not many to choose from so the Sodom and Gomorrah story, a passage from Leviticus and Paul’s letter to the Romans and first letter to the Corinthians were looked at. You might ask why not a passage from any of the Gospels? It seems Jesus never thought an issue that is fracturing the Anglican Communion today was worth mentioning then. 

It turns out that these passages that clearly condemn homosexuality are not so clear after all. Three Pakeha theologians from Auckland, Waiapu and Nelson presented first on Sodom and Gomorrah. Two of them pretty much demolished the idea that the sin of Sodom was homosexuality. Violent, abusive sex, yes. Inhospitality, yes. Homosexuality, no. The theologian from Nelson tried to make a case for the sin being homosexuality, but it was pretty weak. I’m not certain even she was convinced.

The next presentation was by the Maori Tikanga on the Holiness Code prohibition of a man lying with a man like a woman in Leviticus. While generally conservative theologically, the Maori presenters were not troubled by the idea of including gays and lesbians into their common life. It is a matter of hospitality. One Maori synod only a couple of weeks ago approved by an overwhelming 80% to ordain gays and lesbians. It still has to be approved by the whole Tikanga but I found that encouraging.

Tikanga Polynesia gave the third presentation on Paul’s letter to the Romans. It became evident that the Polynesian Church while in many ways the most conservative of the three Tikanga, is untroubled by what they consider the third gender, homosexuality. But while they are a long way from focusing on whether or not to ordain gays and lesbians, they already associate the third sex with the sacred. I found that promising.

The conservative Evangelicals were not particularly pleased with how the Hui was going up to this point, although some admitted it was opening their thinking on the subject. However, their moment came in the last presentation made by an evangelical professor of New Testament. He built his case against inclusion of the GLBT community on Paul’s prohibition of male homosexuality in his first letter to the Corinthians. Paul gives a list of people whose actions are obviously not loving, like adulterers and murders, to which he adds a word for men who lie with men, sometimes translated as homosexuals. Paul states these people will not inherit the Kingdom of God, which is his way of saying eternal life or God’s unlimited love, compassion and mercy. The question raised is should the church exclude them as well? After his presentation I asked if he thought Paul believed a homosexual was incapable of showing God’s unlimited love, compassion and mercy because that would mean he was already a recipient of eternal life? He had no answer. I found that hopeful.

While reading about the Maruia Falls in the museum, I found it interesting that when the earthquake first created them they were only a few metres high. But over the next eighty years the falling water eroded further the riverbed below making them their present more dramatic height. I suppose it is possible in a 1000 more years they might approach the height of Niagara Falls.

The parable of the Good Samaritan was a mighty earthquake. It unchurched God. It made love, compassion and mercy more important than holiness. It made hospitality more important than the law. While the church still tries to limit God’s love, the aftershocks of the parable continue to be felt. The unlimited love of God continues to shape the landscape. Even the church cannot contain it.

July 4, 2010

John Bluck, Retired Bishop of Waiapu

Pentecost 6     Luke 9:51-62

Have you met Jack Reacher yet? He’s the hero of the mega successful best seller writer Lee Childs. Jack is an ex military cop turned lone ranger who stalks the highways of mostly rural America, a cross between a Kung Fu outlaw and a reluctant Robin Hood, doing good but never settling down.

What makes Jack extraordinary and an all time great fictional hero is not just his laconic speech (he’s never been guilty of anything longer than a seven word sentence), or his lethal elbow jab (eat your heart out Bruce Lee), but his steadfast refusal to carry any luggage. Nothing. A credit card, a fold up toothbrush but no wallet, no change of clothes, no home address, no IRS number. Nothing. Jack is utterly unencumbered, available where he’s needed, free to move on where he’s not welcome.

Jack Reacher is a great mystery, but he’s not as great a mystery as today’s gospel reading. The 70 disciples that Jesus sends out ahead of him can’t do kung fu, and they certainly didn’t serve time in the military, but they do travel light like Jack, and they don’t look back, like Jack, and they are confident about themselves and their mission, like Jack, only a hundred fold more so.

But there’s a big difference. Unlike Jack, the confidence of the 70 disciples doesn’t rest in their own skill and strength (which probably was in short supply). We’re not told who the 70 are or where Jesus dug them up locally, but if his earlier efforts to recruit a team are anything to go buy, Jesus wasn’t very fussy. A random collection of fishermen and tax collectors.

Which in today’s terms would be a bit like stopping your car where there’s some road works going on and saying to those guys in the orange jackets, you’ll do, you’ll do, get out of that digger and come with me.

The 70 have had no training, no skill set testing. Their confidence comes in the brief they’ve got from their master, and the unqualified trust and unshakeable belief he invests in them. Somewhere Jesus has got them to believe they can help him change the world. The spirit of what drives them here is the same as the spirit of that Isaiah passage we read and sing every Advent:

And every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill laid low. And in the desert, make straight a highway for our God. (Is 10:4) Maybe recruiting a road works crew would make sense.

But what makes this story so extraordinary is the confidence of the disciples. Where do you find anything like it today?

In some of the fundamentalist churches who are so utterly convinced about their own righteousness? The ones who come to your door and speak about God as though he is sitting on their shoulder, dictating the words. I don’t like it. I say have a nice day and close the door. But I’m left marveling at their conviction.

(And even more powerfully, you find it in the confidence we invest in consumer products that promise to change our world. We wonder about God sometimes but I have no doubt about the power of my Apple computer (which I do own) and my Armani suit (which I don’t, yet). We believe these things will make us sexier and smoother and more desirable. Why else would we buy cars and clothes and flat screen TVs and furniture that cost three times more than we need to pay, if we need them at all.

As someone who lusts after a bigger, flatter TV myself I can answer that. Because when I do get the model I hunger after I know my viewing evenings will be brighter and happier and I’ll go to bed more relaxed just as the ads tell me I will. Millions of us have been taken prisoner by a huge confidence ini the consumerism dream and breaking the habit is harder than giving up on nicotine.

The 70 disciples brought that sort of confidence (but expanded a hundred fold) to their mission. It’s almost impossible for us in our cynicism and world weariness to imagine just how confident they were. It so exceeds anything we know, even the worst of our consumerist captivity.

Jesus promises them the moon and the stars as well. Oh to revel in the sheer excitement of that promise. I remember the intensity of the anticipation we knew as children when the circus promotions man came to town ahead of the circus itself. He’d stick up gawdy colour posters and throw a few free tickets around to the local shops and trigger our dreams about the greatest extravaganza about to play in the local showgrounds. I’d tick off the days on the grocer’s calendar that hung in our kitchen. Nothing would stop me getting to the tent on time.

The disciples’ expectations were nothing less. We aren’t told what happened when they went out but we do know that it exceeded all their dreams. They came back with great joy, we’re told and whatever they did it caused “Satan to fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.” Better than any circus.

This gospel passage is more about the style than the substance of Christian life. It’s a style that demands we walk with a confidence that is not our own, with bigger dreams than we would ever dare to invent for ourselves, with expectations that the world can really change and the future is going to be hugely better than all the present gloomy evidence suggests. The stuff we strut as Christians is not our stuff. It belongs to God, comes from God and will take us if we dare to let it, right into the heart of God one day.

Don’t ever fool yourself that your achievements in the Christian life of peace making, justice working, relationship building, forgiving, hoping, healing, keeping faith are anything to do with how smart and good looking you are, says Jesus. “Don’t rejoice in the strength I give you,” he warns, “ just be happy that your names are written in heaven”.

Christianity in that sense is a life style, a way of being in the world as much as a way of doing. Let’s face it, the 70 disciples are not asked to do much of anything in this passage. Go out there and tell people God is close, (the Kingdom surrounds them), promise them that, bless them with the peace of God, pray with them for wholeness and healing, be present and available so God can work through you as you eat and drink with them.

And that’s about it. You don’t have to preach any sermons, sign up any members, enforce any moral rules, demand allegiance to any creed, or pray ten times before bedtime. It’s a pretty minimal job description for doing anything.

But it’s a massively challenging way of being. Deeply confident, filled with great expectation, never discouraged or taking offence. If you get knocked back then smile and move on. Carry no baggage of regret, drop off the weight of loss and failure. Break out of the undertow of old sadnesses that suck you back and down. Leave it all behind as emphatically as you shake off the dust from your sandals.

St Matthews prides itself on being the home of progressive Christians. It’s a big, bold claim to make about ourselves. We spend a lot of time saying what we mean by that – and what we don’t have to believe, sometimes more often than what we do

But the biggest challenge from this text for progressive and any other brand of Christian is to live and act as though God really is present in charge of the world, holding the future in loving hands, working out the divine purposes of justice and mercy with a grace that overturns and overwhelms and undergirds everything we try to do.

People stay away from church and don’t think much if anything about God because people like us, even if we’re progressive, don’t look, let alone act as though we’re confident that God really is still creating and transforming the world.

It ain’t easy to be that confident. And that’s because confidence is wrongly equated with certainty, with having all the answers, with conviction that dares admit no doubt, no hestitation.

The gospel is not calling for that sort of confidence. What Jesus is calling us into is a love affair built on risk and trust rather than a contract of unquestioning obligation. He’s calling us to give ourselves over passionately, wholeheartedly to a relationship that matches the excitement and risk of what our faith is all about. And he’s expecting us to dream dreams and live as though anything and everyone are capable of transformation.

The call is nothing less than this: to be the people who believe that what began on the first morning of creation is ongoing, unfolding, and taking us into a future that is something more than we can imagine or desire.

June 27, 2010

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 5     2 Kings 2:1-14     Luke 9:51-62

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Each of us comes this morning with a variety of things on our mind. Putting us in the past, present and future all at once. In my own case I find myself preparing for next week’s meeting with representatives from all three Tikanga of the Anglican Province of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. It has a deceptively obscure but alliterative title. It is called a Hermeneutics Hui. A Hui, as most Kiwis know, is simply a meeting. Hermeneutics is more complicated. I went to seminary just to find out what it is. It is an art form taught to budding theologians. While it is more than this, simply put, it is a process that is the foundation of every sermon. It seeks to tease out of scripture what it meant at the time and apply it in a way that makes it useful today. The root of the word is the Greek messenger god Hermes. Hermeneutics is about bringing the message forward, dusting off the past that it can be heard appropriately today so it might be lived out tomorrow.

In the case of this Hui the intent is to discuss what Scripture has to say about human sexuality. In particular we will be looking at the few instances of where Scripture is purported to have something to say about homosexuality. I don’t think the hope is that the diverse elements in the church will find agreement in what they mean to us today. That is probably impossible. Only slightly more possible is that mutual respect might be the fruit of these meetings. My personal hope is that it might be the first step in dismantling the sacred.

This Hui Margaret Bedggood and I will be attending as two of the representatives of the Diocese of Auckland has gathered twice before since 2007 and will meet once more before it is concluded. It is an experiment that seeks unity in the face of the well-publicised schism in the Anglican Communion. The question to be answered by the experiment is: Will it also lead to justice?

Some believe the fracture is the fault of the Americans and Canadians. The Americans, as we all know, ordained an openly gay man and recently a lesbian as bishops. The Canadians approved publicly blessing same sex unions. Others believe that this was just the proverbial straw that broke the Communion’s back. The forces of division have been in play ever since new prayer books came out in the 70s and 80s that began a process St Matthew’s continues today of favouring scholarship over tradition, and modern and inclusive language over the more poetic but less comprehensible Elizabethan tongue. It was further exacerbated by ordaining women to the priesthood and later as bishops and lastly as a primate in the US. Most of the Anglican Church does not see these women as legitimately ordained on the grounds that it violates the male-imposed traditions of the church. It is not surprising that those most resistant to our renewal of worship and the inclusion of women in ordained ministry are most angered at the idea of openly including gays and lesbians as full participants in the church. It is my view that the Anglican Communion is not divided by the recent acts of the North American churches but by two very different views of what the church has been, is and is becoming.

As a result, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been scrambling to find a way to make the schism go away. What he and a majority of his fellow primates have settled on is a new Anglican Covenant. Most of it is boilerplate. We Americans would describe it as “Flag, Mom and Apple Pie.” They are long held agreements of what holds Anglicans together that few would dispute. But the critical piece gives the Primates unprecedented power to punish up to and including expulsion, provinces like those in Canada and the US that act in a way not approved of by a majority of other provinces. 

By far most of the churches in the Communion are the fruit of the 18th and 19th century English Evangelical missionaries sent to the colonies. These churches have a traditional view of what it means to be church. Under the covenant they will hold immense power over those seeking new ways of being the church. Progressive churches and provinces will either have to stop seeking justice for those the church has marginalised and forsake new knowledge and understanding of what it means to be faithful in the 21st century or continue to do so, waiting to be kicked out. 

Should this Covenant be approved the church will become less divided but smaller by necessity. But in whatever unity it gains it will lose the creative tension that has always existed between what we want to hold onto and what we need to let go of. But for now that tension still exists. From my perspective that still gives the church a glimmer of hope to continue its supporting role of our walk in faith. I don’t believe it can do so if it doesn’t let go of traditions that marginalize some and that it might embrace justice.

As coincidence or grace would have it, as I prepare for this meeting our readings give a road map not just for the church but for each of us in our daily lives. In both cases dismantling is involved.

Our first reading is a story about letting go. Elijah, the foremost prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures, passes his mantle to his successor Elisha. After granting Elisha’s wish for a double portion of his power he makes a grand exit in a whirlwind on a fiery chariot. Looks like a good day for Elisha. He is probably ecstatic at his newfound position and power. Elijah made headlines when he defeated the priests of the Canaanite god Baal on Mt Carmel. It, too, was great theatre. Elijah challenged them to a dual of sorts between their Baal and his Yahweh. Whose god could burn a sacrifice on an altar without using a match? Baal got to go first but the sacrifice remained unroasted. Elijah mocked their god suggesting he had to rush off to the longdrop. Then Elijah, to rub it in, drenched his sacrifice in water three times and then called on Yahweh to show his stuff. A pillar of fire came down and made an ash of the sacrifice. Elijah then did a high five by calling on the spectators to slaughter the 450 priests of Baal. 

While Elisha is aware of this mountaintop experience which he thinks he can now do twice as well, he is not aware of a second one his mentor had that led to his getting the mantle. Apparently bloodlust for God was not as satisfying as Elijah thought it would be. It puts him into a slump. Elijah cries out for death, as he is no better than his fathers (I Kings 19:4). God tells him to go to a different mountain and wait for him. It is on this mountain that Elijah encounters God not in the theatrics of an earthquake or storm but in stillness. The still small voice dismantles his understanding of the sacred. God is not about power. God is not about competition and besting rivals. God is not about sacred violence. In the darkness of the cave Elijah blushes that he thought God was his to use for his purposes instead of the other way around. It is probably at that moment he decided to let go of his position as chief prophet.

In the Gospel reading we have Jesus making plain Elijah’s experience. When the disciples want him to incinerate the Samaritans, notorious for worshipping on the wrong mountain, for being inhospitable to Jews who have long treated them as less than human, Jesus tells them to let it go. God isn’t a weapon of mass destruction. God isn’t about power but love. God is about giving life, not taking it. After dismantling their view of the sacred he offers a new understanding. God doesn’t reside any place, yet is found everywhere. God is not in the past, but in the moment facing the future. Follow a loving spirit. It leads to God’s kingdom.

My hope is that the Hui hears the still small voice of God and like Elijah blushes. I hope it leads to our dismantling our traditional notions of the sacred that it might lead to holiness reflected in justice. Letting go of our prejudices and certainties of the past is not easy. It can lead to a crisis in confidence, but it frees our heart to become one with the sacred now. It will be a wild ride, not unlike riding a whirlwind in a fiery chariot, but well worth the trip.

June 13, 2010

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 3     Luke 7:36-8:3

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Alone in my office, the blank screen taunted me, daring me to begin my sermon on the story of Simon, the righteous Pharisee, and the woman of ill repute. Waiting for inspiration I saw him tentatively coming down the hall towards my door.

“Is this a Catholic Church?” he asked.

“No,” I replied, “Anglican. Can I help you?” 

“I’m Catholic, perhaps I should go see a Catholic priest?” 

“Well, there is a Catholic Church just a short walk from here.”

“I need to make my confession.”

“Anglican’s do confession, I’m happy to listen.”

“Well, I guess one man of God is like another,” he suggests more as a question.

Seriously doubting that, I remain silent. He closes the door and sits. Erect. Tense.

Long silence. I break it.

“Are you an American?”

“Yes, sir.”

A Marine?”

“Yes, sir. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess. Once served a church near a marine base. Are you on R & R from Afghanistan?”

“Yes, sir. Second tour. Did three tours in Iraq. Libya and Kosovo before that”

“How long have you been in?”

“Since I was 17, sir.”

More silence.

“What would you like to get off your chest?”

And so the next hour began. The specifics of the conversation are important only to the God within, between and beyond he and I. Some of this story has been altered to protect his identity, because this is about everyone not him. I share it because it sheds new light for me on today’s Gospel.

Simon and the woman are usually discussed as two separate entities – one righteous; one unacceptable. Simon holds himself to a higher standard than the rest of society. There are rules to be followed. He is proud of his righteous relationship with God. He knows he is not a bad person. He keeps himself pure and undefiled, as the biblical code requires. The woman, on the other hand, is overwhelmed by her failings. She is painfully aware of how others view her and how she views herself. But as my conversation with the marine progressed I began to wonder if the story is really about two separate people.

After he had been unloading for a while what was bothering him in ever more honest bits, the Marine suddenly asked, “Do I seem normal to you. I mean do I sound crazy, sir?” 

At that moment he tried to snatch a fly out of the air that I couldn’t see. I said, “If there really is a fly you are trying to catch, no. You seem sane. Why do you ask?”

“It is like there are two people inside me, sir?”

As we explored what he meant it became clear there really were two people inside him. Not in a pathological way, but two nonetheless. There was the Marine trained to hold himself to a higher standard of honour. It required toughness, both mental and physical. Any sign of weakness was a source of shame and in some situations life threatening. Letting feelings get in the way of one’s duty is unacceptable. Marines don’t hug or cry. A Marine does not belong to himself. He belongs to “The Corps” upon which his survival depends. Being part of “The Corps” means being always faithful to it. It is what Semper Fi, the Marine motto means. He was proud of the Marine in him. It set him apart. He was as the recruitment ads say, one of the few, the proud.

But the other person in him shamed him. This person he was afraid of. He had needs. He had regrets. He ached. This person felt alone and cut off. This person could not ever show himself in the platoon. This person longed for connection yet feared it. This person felt inadequate to relate to anyone outside the Corps, even, if not especially, God. This person hated that the marine in him remained on high alert even walking down Queen Street, looking for the next threat.

This person wanted to share his feelings with a chaplain at the front. The marine in him knew that was impossible. His platoon would learn about it and no longer trust him. The marine hated that this person had to come to New Zealand to talk to someone and had to have a few drinks for the courage to do even that.

This young man was a gift to today’s preacher. He revealed to me that there is a part of each of us who, like the marine and Simon the Pharisee, relishes being among the few, the proud. We have values and beliefs that define who we are and to whom we belong and against which to measure ourselves. Every group within every stratum of society has a code of conduct to which members expect others within their group and themselves to live up to. It sets us apart. Belonging gives us the illusion of self-reliance and purpose and meaning. It tells others in the group that they can rely on us. It helps us make sense of the world and our place in it. 

While it has its purpose the Pharisee in us does create problems for us. The righteousness of the Pharisee cuts us off from others or encourages rejecting others who do not follow our code. This is a particularly difficult problem when the other is a part of who we are as well. Here is a case in point:

On Pentecost Sunday while ironically attending a conference in the U.S. entitled “Building Bridges,” the Archbishop of Canterbury sent out a “Pastoral Letter” condemning the American Church for not observing the moratorium on ordaining gays and lesbians with their consecration of Mary Glasspool, a lesbian, as a bishop in Los Angeles. He further warned Canada not to continue public blessings of same sex unions. He based this not on a biblical code but on a proposed covenant being debated throughout the Anglican Communion that in a very unAnglican way gives the Pharisee in our collective selves the power to decide who is pure enough to be fully a part of the Communion. Then to make clear who will be kicked out should the Covenant be approved, he proceeded to kick American and Canadian representatives off committees under his control.

Anglicans have historically rejected the Pharisee’s approach to keeping the Communion together in favour of having bonds of affection. But in the eyes of some this was permitting the Communion to become impure by the full inclusion of gays and lesbians into the life of the church. It seems that the Archbishop has decided that everyone in the entire Anglican Communion must agree to be loving and just before any of its parts can be loving and just.

That is only a decision the righteous Pharisee in us as a church could make. Sadly it puts us on a road that trades purity for love. Perhaps we do so because the Pharisee has little need for forgiveness if the code has been followed. Yet as Jesus points out in his parable, if we do not need forgiveness, we love little.

It is for this reason the church, Simon, the marine, and the Pharisee within all of us need forgiveness, not because of our moral failings. Loving so little is our unrighteousness.

We need to listen to the woman of ill repute within us. The one rejected and oppressed by our righteous selves. The one who knows the power of love to make whole. The one who has the strength to be vulnerable. Who is willing to embrace forgiveness and respond to the fullness of love in kind.

When the young man began talking about the woman of ill repute within him, the one whom the Marine judged harshly, I handed him the tissue box before the first tear fell. As he went through the tissues one after another he asked how I knew he’d need them. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. “Lucky guess,” I said. Before he left I asked if he wanted absolution. He didn’t say anything, he just got up and rushed to my side of the desk and knelt at my feet, tears streaming down his face. I pronounced absolution, “God never condemns you but God forgives you for condemning yourself. God’s love is there for you no matter how little you think you need it. Accept its embrace.”

As he left the Marine who doesn’t hug or cry, embraced me in a bear hug that may have cracked a rib.

June 6, 2010

Ann Mellor

Pentecost 2      1 Kings 17:8-16     Luke 7:11-17

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I believe in miracles. There I have said it. It’s not easy to say because we are used to ‘dumbing down’ our spirituality. We are afraid that we might overdo it. We risk being misunderstood or labeled or being in danger of taking our concept of miracles to extremes. The word miracle has become mundane as we are bombarded by the daily barrage of miracle face creams (I buy them!), and miracle cleaning liquids…worldly miracles that hold no surprise or doubt in our mind as to their efficacy. Or we think of the miracles of biblical proportions we find that if taken literally, they are well beyond our reach. No… I am talking about miracles from God, now in the present, working in our lives.

The now Miracle experience is when we know that the inexplicable has happened. Moments when we are intricately close to God. When we hear his words, when our life is shifted onto a track that takes us on a new unexpected yet life-giving direction. When things happen that are beyond understanding. As passionate believers then surely we are to embrace all that God offers us in our relationship, and that includes miracles. But so often we leave before the miracle has happened, or we simply don’t recognize it when it does. How many times did Moses wander past that bush as he was tending sheep, before he saw it burning? I ask what sort of relationship we have with God when we don’t bother to stop and smell the roses, because they couldn’t possibly be for us?

Trinity Sunday last week called us to re-vision God, so it is timely to remember that the intertwining of the Trinity represents an egalitarian God, a God where a relationship of equality and mutuality rather than a hieracrchy, opens for us a true relationship with God. This one communion of the divine and human is imaged by Catherine La Cugna, a renowned feminist theologian, as the ‘divine dance’, a vision which I love. Everything comes from God and everything is returned to God – we are a partner in the divine dance – living a life where we partake and exist in the dance. ‘The Holy Spirit brings about the true communion of God and Creature’ says La Cugna, and we celebrate this true union of the divine and human dance at the Eucharist. So… if we understand the Holy Spirit as God’s outreach to the world, we must see miracles as divine happenings that touch us in our world. Love touching us in unexpected ways at unexpected times. Just be sure not to leave before it happens! 

I was in Corfu with Danny Watson and his wife Teresa recently. The three of us headed to visit a Byzantine church. Teresa expected to find intriguing Byzantine pottery, I expected stunning icons and Danny was interested in the history of the church. When we arrived there was a beautiful courtyard to a monastery with a well worn stone seat carved in the wall – framed by a luscious red bougainvillea in full bloom with a faded fresco on the back of the seat. I spent some time there in contemplation – it was a very special place. When we entered the church Danny broke out in a beautiful Waiata. His voice lifted to the high wooded ceiling of this ancient place and hung in the left hand corner. Danny headed through an entrance to the right leaving Teresa and I to reflect in the peace and beauty of the moment, being alone in the church. Then from high up in the corner came a chant replying to the Waiata. It was in Greek we imagine, but it was soft and beautiful. We searched for a monk or a speaker and found neither. This was our miracle.

Experiencing such a miracle left us uplifted, filled with a goodness beyond ourselves, life-giving and powerfully transforming our attitudes. Thankful for the love received in this extraordinary moment, we felt drawn to a deeper relationship with our God whatever that meant to each of us, along with a renewed commitment to pass on that love to others.

We know that powerful bible passage seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened. Clearly, there is no point seeking if we are going to exit stage right just as what we are looking for is presented to us!

In Luke Chapter 7:11-17, we hear of the young man being raised from the dead. In our rational world it is hard to be enchanted by biblical miracles. But if they are seen as larger than literal, if we see them as a window or icon into Christ we can learn more about the Jesus who is being presented to us by the gospel writer. We can translate biblical literalism into ways that draw us closer in our relationship with Christ, to know him better. As Marcus Borg (a contemporary theologian) states, ‘the point is not to believe in a metaphor, but to see with it. The point is not to believe in the Bible, but to see our lives with God through it.’ As a window to Christ in this morning’s gospel we are met with a God of compassion, of new beginnings, we see that a trusting relationship with God brings a new closeness.

This miracle is set in Luke’s gospel narrative to reinforce the power and authority of Jesus. He is referred to as a great prophet and the crowd acknowledges that God has visited their tiny town and go on to spread the news throughout Judea. Today we are called to know Christ, and to be persistent, not expecting instant wisdom, or an immediate epiphany. We can find the means towards transformation through worship, prayer, meditation, time with nature, that all help to fine tune us, programme us to receive. Open hearts and thin places – those sacred spaces, where in Celtic tradition God brings us near through natures beauty, give us the means to transform. Fear on the other hand hinders us in our spiritual growth. Fear of going to the unknown, fear of a God so great, fear of a close passionate relationship with an egalitarian God. Persistence, just as the mother in the miracle story displayed, is indeed required.

As Christians in relationship with an egalitarian God, we can understand that the power and authority in our life today, is the love of Christ. This inspires and directs us, because it is empowering rather than being power over us, so when miracles are acknowledged and shared they become gifts of love, rather than solely for the benefit of the receiver. Embracing miracles that we have experienced boosts our passion in our relationship with God and with others. Our transformed attitudes can be used to connect those at the margins of society with love and justice.

As we reflect on our own miracle experiences, and the miracle story in Luke, we must hold in tension the kingdom metaphors that inform our faith. There is the Old Testament religion of promise, where God intervenes to save nations, speaks to prophets, and creates a covenant relationship with his chosen people. This sits alongside the Kingdom to come, the eternal kingdom that Jesus in the New Testament points towards. We hold these images alongside our egalitarian God, and discover through Gods activity in the world today as we are touched by miracles, that the Kingdom is also here… and yet still to come. Our own miracle experiences involve us irrevocably in the Kingdom now. Our response is to be ready to receive, to wait patiently and still in the presence of God and then to share that love to create a better world. But remember… don’t leave five minutes before the miracle.

May 30, 2010

Clay Nelson

Trinity Sunday


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In 1999 one of those films that has become part of the culture was released: The Sixth Sense. “I see dead people” became a line that immediately conjured up the story of Malcolm Crowe a child psychologist who receives an award on the same night that he is visited by a very unhappy ex-patient. After this encounter, Crowe takes on the task of curing a young boy with the same ills as the ex-patient. The boy’s mother is understandably concerned that he "sees dead people.” The story is supposedly about Crowe curing the child when in truth it was about the child opening the eyes of Crowe to his situation. Near the end of the film the boy tells Crowe that he too is dead, his ex-patient murdered him. The boy explains, "I see dead people. They don't know they're dead. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see."

Like the boy when I look around the church all too often I see dead people who don’t know they are dead. They don’t see each other and thanks to the lens of the Nicene Creed and its trinitarian theology see only what they want to see. They see the church as the sole authority on the nature of God, relieving them and us of needing to experience God for ourselves. Those who are dead in this way, cannot see that an institution the Creed helped established at some point lost its way, “The Way.”

I wonder if Jesus felt the same about Judaism. Did he see dead people that he wanted to bring back to life by challenging institutional requirements that blinded people to their situation?

It isn’t exactly a surprise to any of you who have listened to me for a while that I have a few issues with the Trinity we celebrate today. I confess that is partly due to my perverse nature that needs to challenge blind acceptance. It makes me a little bit of a stirrer. I blame my father who raised me in the Socratic method. There is always more than one truth to be argued. During my eight-year hiatus from Anglicanism when I worked for the Unitarians, I claimed to be their token Trinitarian. Now that I’m back in the trinitarian fold I sometimes choose to provoke with the Unitarian position.

But I am more than just stirring the pot today. I do strongly believe that the Nicene Creed – the formula the Church requires us to believe about God – has become an instrument of death for the church. I will outline some reasons in a moment. But first, that is not to say that Christianity is not trinitarian in its structure. In fact, I agree with Dominic Crossan who argues that not only is Christianity trinitarian, all religions are trinitarian.

Firstly, all religions have a supreme metaphor for the ultimate. It might be nature, goddess or god, nirvana or way. Secondly, all have a physical manifestation in some person, place or thing where the ultimate reality is met or experienced by at least one faithful believer to begin with and later more. Thirdly, since there are both believers and nonbelievers, there needs to be a force to explain why some accept belief and others refuse. He calls this the “trinitarian loop” that is found in all religions. [i] It is the nature of the beast.

My problem is not with Christianity’s trinitarian nature but with the codification of belief about that nature. I believe that the Nicene Creed locked the Godhead into a 4th century worldview box. It turned the mystery of the ultimate into something as prosaic as a recipe for pavlova. The result may taste and look good, but there is little substance to sustain us.

While the whole history of how the Creed became the Creed is intriguing, for our purposes this morning the upshot is this: Early followers of Jesus quickly began trying to understand him and his relationship to their ultimate reality, the Jewish god. It was a lively, vigorous and sometimes violent debate in the philosophical language and worldview of the time. Different schools of thought developed in different parts of the Empire. But all the questions came down to one: How is Jesus like God?

When Constantine decided Christianity was his answer for gluing back together a crumbling empire, he was surprised and disappointed to find that Christianity was just as fractured. He used his power to try to unify it for his political purposes. He called the Council of Nicea to do so. While an oversimplification, the outcome was the Creed. It became an instrument for defining who was in and who was out. Who could be empowered and who could be oppressed. Who is the “Other” to be legitimately feared, scapegoated and destroyed. It made Jesus a God-man like the emperor, when the historical Jesus, a Jew who would have found that blasphemous, saw himself as a counter-weight to oppressive human power. The Creed and how it was used obliterated his whole message that confronted the purity laws of his day. The Creed defined “The Other,” Jesus saw no “Other.” We are all one with his Abba, his metaphor for the ultimate reality. At this point the church lost its way, The Way.

It is a sad commentary that a definition of God formed at a time when people were certain the earth was at the center of the universe and all the stars and planets revolved around us in perfect circles, is still held as our ultimate definition and understanding of divine reality. We wouldn’t go to a doctor and demand he use leeches to cure us of cancer? But it is perfectly acceptable to use fourth century language and metaphors to define who can be a priest, who can be baptized, who can receive communion; what it means to be a Christian. It is like Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin and the Hubble telescope never happened. Saddest of all, it is like Jesus the man never existed. The church’s position on the Nicene Creed is as inexplicable to me as is the mystery of ultimate reality, unless one understands that just as in Constantine’s day it is still about earthly power and control. The result is a dying, if not already dead church blind to its situation.

But at our best, Christians are a resurrection people who are more resilient than our institutions. We can confront our denial and live. The antidote to the Creed for this generation is to stop debating how Jesus is like God. Better to ask how is God like Jesus? That leads to understanding that the more we live like Jesus the more we can recognize God in us. We will rediscover the truth Jesus exemplified, that all is one with the ultimate reality. We will no longer be dead but alive because we experience it – not because we believe it. Experiencing it will lead to living our lives in the way that reflects it. Then the test of our faith will not be reciting an ancient document asserting right belief, but by how compassionate, loving and peaceful are our lives.

No longer dead, we may also discover that we have more in common with other religions than the trinitarian loop. We may discover that all religions at their best seek to transform the world to reflect the trinity of compassion, love and peace.

[i] Crossan, John Dominic, Who Killed Jesus? (1995: p 215)

May 23, 2010

Carolin Telford

Pentecost Sunday     Acts 2:1-21     Phil 3:4-11

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So, here we all are. Not out and about in the fresh air, or downing our second cappucino, or having a well-deserved Sunday lie-in. Here we all are – here. We have chosen from a wide range of alternatives to be the church at St Matthew’s today. We have all turned up. And today is a great day to have turned up, because it is Pentecost, sometimes called the birthday of the church.

Today we re-tell each other the story of that morning fifty days after Easter when the disciples sat down once more in a room together. It was Shavout, the festival of the blessing of the harvest, seven weeks after Passover, and Jews from far and wide had come to be part of the festivities and to plead Y-H-W-H’s blessing on the crops beginning to swell with grain in the fields.

Then some thing which was not any other thing, but something like a wind, something like tongues of flame, poured, swept, leapt through the room and caught everyone there up along with it. It set the disciples alight, it swept them up to a new level of awareness of their gifts; it brought clarity to their vision of who Jesus had been and still was to them, and who they could be if they followed him authentically. Life and power were breathed into them. Uncertainty and hesitation evaporated away. Thus inspired, they poured, swept, leapt out into the world and news about Jesus began to spread like wildfire. And so, from that ignition spark of Pentecost two millennia ago, the church began.

Ten years ago, my phone rang at four o’clock in the morning. It was two days before Pentecost, in the year 2000. A phone call at that hour is always a portent of doom, and thus it was. It was the Vicar of All Saints West Dulwich, in South-East London, ringing to tell me, as Churchwarden, that there was a fire at our church. His description did scant justice to the reality. As I drove down the south circular towards the church I could see the column of flame and smoke, which was rising several hundred feet from the roof straight up into a limpid sky. You couldn’t have imagined that in a brick, slate and stone church there was that much to burn. But burn it surely did. Not to the ground, but it certainly burnt out, almost entirely.

For those less wedded to the joys of the Victorian gothic revival as an architectural form, irritatingly enough the ‘footprint’, the external shape of the building, remained after the fire much as it had been before it – it takes a lot to completely incinerate brick and stone. But the interior surfaces were severely corroded and fractured by the heat, and irreplaceable treasures had been lost – including a fantastical carved wooden font cover from Bavaria, about two meters high, which had a white dove resting on a golden ball hovering above it, suspended on a very effective counterweight system over the marble font. The font itself, donated by a family in memory of their son who had died in WWI, was scattered into pieces, exploded by the heat. The timbers supporting the roof burnt out, falling the considerable distance to the floor and in some cases punching holes through this down into the crypt. One knocked the beak off the brass lectern eagle as it fell.

The Millennium… Pentecost… a conflagration… it seemed that subtlety wasn’t God’s strong suit. And just in case we hadn’t managed to join up the dots, when the fire was eventually damped down and an inventory could begin to be compiled of the little that had survived, it was discovered that one page of the Bible, picturesquely charred around the edges, but perfectly legible, lay on top of a pile of sodden cinders by the beakless lectern eagle.

‘Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, …’

It was, biblically enough, seven years, and nearly seven million pounds, before All Saints was reopened by the Archbishop of Canterbury in April 2006. Seven years of a process which was as democratic and inclusive of church and local community members as it could be made: seven years of debates, investigations, reports, recommendations, meetings, consultations, proposals, surveys, plans, permits. And, it has to be said, seven years of prayer and discernment, of reflection on the unfolding meaning of each aspect of the process which was absorbing so much of our time, illuminated by those words Paul wrote to the Christians at Philippi.

For all this was laid over the same seven years of services, visiting, teaching and preaching: the ordinary time of being church, but being church in school halls and people’s living rooms. The process of rebuilding required our utter attention and concentration, as faithful stewards of a richly symbolic repository of church history and theology, yet we were aware that the building was not and could not be permitted to become the focus of who we were as church.

Circumstances, often pain-filled, unbidden or unchosen events, sear and singe us and reveal to us the heart of the matter of being Christians and being church. And the heart of the matter is not glorious architecture, or beautifully crafted music, or fulsome singing, or the word of God being proclaimed, or being caught up in a vision of what is possible through inspiring sermons, or a sense by the grace of God of belonging to something of enduring significance and meaning in this troubled world, or the joy of being accepted just the way we are, or the satisfaction of finding a place of welcome within a collective in which we can use our gifts and which fulfills our needs, or the blessing of offering this level of hospitality to others. Or rather it is these things, and many others besides, but it is infinitely more than just a composite of all of them.

Our sentence this morning is from the accounts of the sayings of the desert fathers, those Christians who felt that to allow Christ into the desert of their hearts they needed to place themselves within the immensity and isolation of the physical desert. Abba Joseph is replying to a question put to him by Brother Lot, who asks, ‘Abba, as far as I can, I keep a moderate rule, with a little fasting, and prayer, and meditation and quiet: and as far as I can I try to cleanse my heart of evil thoughts. What else should I do?’

What else, indeed?

To be church is to be learning and practicing together in company, the opening of our hearts and our selves to the Spirit of God. It is to allow ourselves to be breathed into and our hearts and minds to be broken open by that Spirit, as we are blown about and re and re configured into church. It is learning to be able to live fruitfully with provisionality, despite this being belied by the physical evidence of constancy around us in the four walls of this, and other, church buildings. It is learning to discern, and to be willing to wait, and to stay with difficult processes. It is a discipline of attention and faithfulness. It is to be in company together with people whom we haven’t chosen, and who haven’t chosen us, learning how to be together as God’s people in this place, and in all the places we will go when we leave here. So, welcome to the church, Riley. And happy Pentecost, happy being church at St Matthews, here in this city in 2010, to us all.

May 16, 2010

Canon Paul Oesteicher

Easter 7

Video available on YouTube

In his sermon following his keynote addresses on peace the day before at St Matthew-in-the-City, Canon Paul Oestreicher, who has devoted his life to peace and reconciliation, spoke on how love disturbs the peace.

May 9, 2010

Linda Murphy

Easter 6     Acts 16:9-15     John 14:23-29

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Here at St Matthew’s our peace is disturbed; Glynn is still very ill. We are all feeling unsettled and anxious for him and his family. Our inner peace is being disturbed, but we are all coping; working together and gaining strength from each other. Is this what the readings are saying?

Our first reading this morning from Acts has Paul the Apostle having a vision; Paul has lots of visions. This particular vision presents itself as a man from Macedonia telling Paul to go to Macedonia to preach the Gospel. This visit to Macedonia represents the introduction of Christianity to what we now know as the continent of Europe. Paul is following his ‘calling’ to preach to the Gentiles. This is stepping outside his comfort zone, he was a Jew and Gentiles were the ‘unclean outsiders’. Paul was a Pharisee and they were forbidden to talk to woman therefore Paul’s encounter with a group of women is significant; he is breaking social and cultural boundaries. Paul had been taught not to be seen in public with women, let alone Gentile women. Nevertheless he and his companions Silas and Timothy preach to this group of women by the river outside the gates of the Greek city of Philippi.

Lydia is described as a “worshipper of God” or a “God fearer” who is receptive to the Jewish faith and belief in the one true God. She is a business women and affluent as she deals in purple cloth an expensive commodity of the time.

Lydia listens to Paul’s Gospel of Jesus and “God opened her heart” and she and her entire household are baptised in the river. This is radical stuff; Lydia is the first European reported to be baptised and she is a gentile! The inclusive message of love, peace and compassion has been heard and accepted by an outsider. Both are taking a leap of faith and Paul is welcomed into her home and accepts her hospitality. The distinctions of clean and unclean, acceptable and unacceptable are passing away.

It isn’t just Paul who has been radical Lydia has accepted the gospel of Jesus and faith in God alone. She then invites, Paul and his companions to her home. That Paul was probably a scruffy looking individual doesn’t faze her. Expect the unexpected when you “open your heart”. Paul and Lydia were willing to suspend all the rules, regulations, and customs that governed their world; for their faith in Jesus Christ and his gospel of love, compassion and inclusion.

Seven years ago Peter and I moved from Mission Bay to an apartment here in the city. The feature of homeless people astounded me. We had seen homeless in Santa Monica and London but in New Zealand I couldn’t believe it nor could I understand why we had these marginalised people. When I heard people say, “It’s their own fault, they don’t want to work”, I decided I needed to get to know these people. I couldn’t come to church each Sunday and listen to the Gospel and not live that message of love, compassion and inclusion.

For the first time in my life I decided to do something radical; I have had homeless living in our apartment, spent many hours down at the District Court and spend time listening to the homeless. Just as Lydia and Paul stepped outside their social boundaries so have I and this is not a comfortable space. This experience has lead me on a path to ordination, something I had never imagined and while I continue to be challenged by this path I am open to whatever changes that path will lead me to. This radical move has led me to an inner peace that I had never experienced before.

In John’s Gospel; Jesus promises his disciples (including us) two things: the gift of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit and peace. Jesus has also given the disciples a new commandment; “to love one another as I have loved you.”

Jesus promises that an Advocate, the Holy Spirit will come to assist them when Jesus has left them and will give them peace.

This peace is not the oppressive peace being offered by Rome, pax Romana; nor is it the current peace being offered by the US and UK to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you”

What beautiful words! I would love to have peace especially at 3 am but living in the city doesn’t allow me that luxury. I am sure peace means something different for each of us. It could mean a secure job, no debt, and a home off the streets or not to be ill, however this definition of peace is more about being secure.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German priest who was executed by the Nazis, said, “Peace is the opposite of security”. He meant that seeing peace in terms of meeting our need for security means we would never achieve peace. There would always be something else we need to be secure; a job, a home, health insurance and a superannuation plan to list a few. This is not the peace that Jesus was giving. This peace would be like this poem by Judy Chicago.

And then all that has divided us will merge

And then compassion will be wedded to power

And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind

And then both men and women will be gentle

And then both women and men will be strong

And then no person will be subject to another’s will

And then all will be rich and free and varied

And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many

And then all will share equally in the Earth’s abundance

And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old

And then all will nourish the young

And then all will cherish life’s creatures

And then all will live in harmony with each other and the Earth

And then everywhere will be called Eden once again

This peace is Shalom not just the greeting but an understanding that peace and wholeness is not something you can get from anyone. It encompasses justice and peace among all people. It demands respect for the dignity of every human being. Shalom, God’s peace means becoming a people who seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbours as ourselves. It comes from a relationship with God through Jesus.

As Paul and Lydia faced radical change so too were the disciples facing radical change; Jesus was leaving them on their own. Jesus knew that this would be a very difficult time for the disciples. Jesus promises that no matter what lies ahead, what fears or unexpected events God will always be with them and us. We can’t plan for the unexpected but we need to put our faith in the mystery that is God; by doing so we are never alone. Just as I decided to become involved with the homeless and the surrounding community, I feel God’s peace is with me and is guiding me.

The disciples have great challenges ahead of them, and the gift of the Advocate would go with them and lead them in ways they could not understand. This future is still full of mystery and uncertainty but there is the joy of new experiences with God.

With the gift of shalom, inner peace, we as the disciples did can face the future, the unknown, and the unexpected.

Next Saturday we are having a day of reflection, discussion and networking and it is entitled “Disturbing the Peace”, an important area for discussion. Given the churches historical involvement in war it seems to me the end of Eastertide is timely to discuss this issue of Peace.

Let us all put our faith in the mystery of God and Jesus by living lovingly, hospitably like Lydia, with courage to embrace the outsiders like Paul and as the disciples walk with the assistance of the Advocate through the good times and the bad times. We have God’s Spirit:

With us to defend us

Within us to refresh us

Around us to preserve us

Before us to guide us

Behind us to justify us

Above us to bless us.

Amen.

May 2, 2010

Geno Sisneros

Easter 5
     Acts 11:1-18
     John 13:31-35


Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Over 5 years ago when I became a card-carrying member of Progressive Christianity, I don’t think I fully appreciated how powerful my literal understandings of the bible actually were to me. I came from a Pentecostal background which is a very charismatic based Christian denomination. Pentecostals take their name from, and trace their roots back to the biblical Day of Pentecost, the day God poured out his Spirit on the first Christians. The modern day Pentecostal movement or ‘revival’ as it’s called started in the US in 1906 and over the next few decades spread around the globe. Small Pentecostal churches were the forerunners to today’s mega-Churches. 

We believed the Holy Spirit had gifted us with such talents as the ability to speak in tongues, the gift of prophecy and the power to cast out demons from possessed individuals. 

Personal salvation was our primary goal and we professed to live our lives each day in ways that ensured we received our reward in heaven tomorrow. Apocalyptic theology was at the heart of the movement and witnessing and proselytizing were shared goals but personal salvation was always the priority. We sung these words at each service,

“I’m on my way to Canaan’s Land, I’m on my way to Canaan’s Land, if you don’t go, don’t hinder me, if you don’t go don’t hinder me, I’m on my way praise the Lord I’m on my way.”

The Bible for us was the inerrant word of God and was understood literally. In many churches including my own, women were ordained ministers and held positions of leadership. For the most part, however, it was definitely a male heterosexual privileged church governed by a male heterosexual privileging god. This god was repulsed and even hostile to people outside of that norm. These ideas had their roots in literal and non-contextual readings of the bible.

So understandably when I hear today’s Gospel reading where Jesus warns his disciples that his time with them is coming to an end and where he is going they cannot go; my mind cannot help but think that place Jesus speaks of is the ‘physical heaven’. [i] This scripture conjures up images in my mind of Jesus ascending upward through the clouds and entering through the pearly gates while angels sing and trumpets sound. It’s all very magnificent and glorious imagery; the stuff movies, doctrines and creeds are made of.

This imagery still kicks in despite my having spent the past five years of my life trying to purge them from my consciousness. I decided some time ago that I could no longer accept them because for me, they were doing more harm than good. I realized that as a gay Christian, a literal interpretation of the bible was reinforcing that male heterosexual privilege that had oppressed me for most of my life. I believed the Christianity I had encountered was a toxic interpretation of what was originally intended to be ‘Good News’. So with the intent to seek out Christianity in its rawest and purest form, I began the search.

My goal was to work my way backwards, ‘Regressive Christianity’ if you will, in the hopes of eventually encountering the Christianity that was the movement started by Jesus, not the movement that became about him. I delved into scholarship and theology and I learned to question everything which was not an easy skill for me to attain. Though a stressful and at times gut-wrenching time in my life, it was and continues to be the most exciting endeavor I’ve ever undertaken. But admittedly, seeking is an ongoing process for which I underestimated the consequences. 

I am reminded today of Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” [ii]

In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, Jesus adds this disclaimer, he says, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed […]” [iii]

And disturbed I was. I begin to strip away the layers of literalism that formed my understanding of the Jesus message. This is not an easy task. In fact supporting movements, who attempt to challenge biblical literalism in the public arena, can be downright dangerous business as evidenced by opponents to St Matthew’s recent billboards.

I begin to understand Jesus not just as Jesus the wisdom teacher, not just as Jesus the prophet, but as Jesus the mystic whose goal it was to take me deeper into the mystery of life. I appealed too to science and reason which I had been taught were the enemies of Christianity. Slowly discarding the layers, I was left with a non-supernatural but mystical understanding of the Jesus message. For me, the Kingdom of Heaven was here and now, not some place up there far removed from the human grasp, not some exclusive paradise I needed to jump through purification hoops to get to. 

But alas, I’m a firm believer that you cannot extract something from the God-shaped hole in our souls and not replace it with something else. I hadn’t realized it at the time but in the process of stripping away layers of literalism, I had inadvertently stripped away my hope of heaven. My goal to achieving personal salvation was gone and I was left with an empty space where those beliefs used to reside. Indeed I was disturbed. Everything that I believed was central to my faith, gone.

During the billboard controversies, I heard many people say that it is not what we believe that is important, that it is our faith that should define and sustain us and I couldn’t disagree more. What we believe and what we don’t believe is central to our faith as I’ve just illustrated. Beliefs are intensely central to faith or billboards questioning long-held beliefs wouldn’t be so contentious. 

In my beliefs there was no longer a literal heaven. God as Jesus had revealed God to me was not a tyrant but the Ground out of which all being took root, not a personal deity who intervened in human affairs when it suited him, but the Creator and Sustainer of Life and the cosmos and of everything that was and is and is to come. I could see God as the Force working through evolution. I could see God as the Cohesion that held all matter together. I could see God as the Energy that animated life and the universe. I could see God as both hidden and revealed; all these things yet so much more and so much more mysterious.

My Pentecostal upbringing means that whether I like it or not, the potential still remains in me to invoke these literal images in my mind when I read the bible. It may always be that way. Old habits die hard especially when those habits have become part of you. The real test for me will be to see how I interpret those images in light of the mystic Jesus, in light of the Kingdom of Heaven being here and now and in light of what God requires of us today, to love one another as Jesus loved his disciples.

Seeking – it can be a profound and disturbing process. It lifts you up and drops you into the middle of unknowing and lets you linger there for awhile until you work your way out. It can be an exhausting and lonely experience but also an awesome and breathtaking one.

And just so you know, I haven’t written-off belief in an afterlife. In fact, I believe the Infinite Mystery that is God strictly prohibits me from discounting that possibility, I remain hopeful. After all, we are spirit beings, but we are spirit beings having a human experience. Sometimes I think we think it is the other way around. I believe God needs me to be more concerned with the here and now, with the human experience. God needs me to be concerned with Haiti and Chile and the AIDS epidemic and the fact that 1/3 of the world’s population doesn’t have clean drinking water or enough food to eat. My belief in heaven was keeping me focused on my own salvation, my own self-preservation; it was keeping me from being what I could be, but that’s me, that’s what I believe.

Indeed, if you believe in a literal heaven and remarkably I happen to make it in, having not based my faith on it, and we’re fortunate enough to be there together, I promise I’ll forgive you if you say, “I told you so” and I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

[i] Matthew 13:33

[ii] Matthew 7:7-8

[iii] The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 2a

April 25, 2010

Clay Nelson

ANZAC Day

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

In preparation for Easter, but before Glynn became ill, I was developing my Easter sermon around a quote by a scholar of comparative religions, Joseph Campbell. He was interested in those aspects of any religion that are shared by all. The quote was that great religions have taught us to let “go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”

Little did I know at the time that Glynn, Stephanie, their family, the whanau [i] of St Matthew’s and I were about to experience that reality first hand. What Campbell’s quote doesn’t reveal is how difficult the transition is. It didn’t warn me that I would wake up every morning hoping the last three weeks have been a bad dream. It does not spell out the anxiety we feel about that new life awaiting us. The nature of that new life has not yet unfolded before us. But in our gut we know everything has changed. Our carefully planned lives so neat and orderly on Palm Sunday have been revealed to be illusions. 

As I slowly come to terms with the reality that for the indefinite future I won’t have my best mate around to share the joys of ministry in this place, I find myself doing something very human but not very helpful. Having lost the life I planned, I find myself planning an alternative life – Plan B. Ironic, since this would be an illusion as well. Worse, it will delay further accepting the life awaiting me, awaiting us. There must be something better I can do.

A number of years ago one of my favourite theologians, Dr Seuss, wrote a book that would become a popular gift for friends who were experiencing milestones, such as graduation. It was entitled Oh! The Places You’ll Go. After telling the reader all the great things he or she will do or accomplish he lays some reality on them. Just as we are flying high, he tells us, we will be left in the Lurch:

You’ll come down from the Lurch with an unpleasant bump. And the chances are, then, that you’ll be in a Slump.

And when you’re in a Slump, you’re not in for much fun. Un-slumping yourself is not easily done.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And if you go in, should you turn left or right…or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite? Or go around back and sneak in from behind? Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find, for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused that you’ll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

The Waiting Place…for people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting.

Eventually Dr Seuss promises we will get out of the waiting place, but what do we do with ourselves as we wait for new possibilities to be revealed and emerge? I think John Salmon offered a possibility last week. The missing link between letting go of the life we had planned and accepting the one waiting for us is remembering. Not remembering as a longing for the good old days or its opposite rejecting part and parcel the past, but as reframing. Reframing is looking at the past to mine at a deeper level lessons and understandings that apply to the present.

Today is a day the peoples of Australia and New Zealand spend a lot of time remembering. We remember and seek understanding of the tragic death of so many of our young men on the shores of Gallipoli 95 years ago. For both countries it was a coming of age moment that continues to shape us in the present day. We sent the better part of a generation to war with great fanfare and expectation, but when more than a third did not return buried on foreign soil and many more returned emotionally and physically wounded something fundamental changed in our national psyche.

It left us in The Waiting Place. We became a country waiting for peace.

As a country we are not conflicted about wanting peace and in that we differ little from most of the peoples of the world, but in how to achieve it. Our differences I believe are rooted in Gallipoli.

We are divided over how much or how little we should be prepared for war or to keep the peace as we prefer to think. We still find ourselves torn by the heroic actions of Te Whiti’s nonviolent resistance to settler surveyors carving up his people’s land in Taranaki and the reluctant hero Corporal Willie Apiata’s exploits in Afghanistan.

When the Waihopai 3 popped the balloon concealing New Zealand’s support of the US war effort, most thought their trial would be open and shut. As they admitted to doing it, conviction seemed all but certain. Their defense was to claim obedience to a higher law, a greater good. What the prosecution did not bargain for is that that defense would resonate with the twelve Kiwis on the jury. I suspect the jury had reframed their remembrance of Gallipoli.

We are seeing the conflict played out again on Queen Street. There some with buckets sell red poppies to remember the sacrifice of the fallen and to support their families. Others with buckets sell white poppies to remember that peace will never be achieved through violence and to support the teaching of peace and reconciliation. The controversy seems to be over when each should be sold. Some feel the red poppy alone belongs to ANZAC Day. Sell white poppies at any other time, is their position. Those who sell white poppies believe both should be associated with ANZAC Day. Red poppies are about remembering Gallipoli. White poppies are about reframing it.

Ormund Burton is an example of a Kiwi who would wear both. He was parishioner at what is now the Community of St Luke in Remuera. He enlisted because he believed the destruction of Prussian militarism would usher in a new age of peace and freedom through forgiveness and reconciliation under God. It was the war we all know that was to end all wars. He returned a highly decorated hero from Gallipoli and the Western Front horrified by the cost and outcome of the war. He became a Christian pacifist and Methodist minister committed to nonviolence as a higher law. Because of his vocal opposition to World War II he was eventually sent to prison for 20 years less 11 months for good behaviour. When he died in 1974 he was still waiting for a world of peace and freedom.

One of the factors keeping us in The Waiting Place for peace is sadly traditional Christianity. The church’s story is deeply linked to war and sacred violence and all too often has supported war efforts implicitly or explicitly. For instance Ormund Burton was expelled from the Methodist Church in 1940 for defying church policy to not preach resistance to enlistment. To the church’s credit it forbid recruitment from the pulpit as well.

It might be reasonable to ask how a movement based on following the teachings of the Prince of Peace ended up supporting violence. The short answer is by becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire. In 312 CE the Emperor Constantine was at war with his rival for supreme rule. The story goes that the night before they met in battle at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine had a vision that he should adopt as his army’s emblem the first two letters of Christ in Greek. The next day he defeated his rival. With his victory he made Christianity legal and then made it the official religion of the Empire. He made Sunday an official holiday and made churches tax-exempt. Lastly, he ended a long tradition of Roman tolerance of other religions, making all others illegal except worship of the Emperor. We also have him to thank for Christmas. He decreed a pagan holiday on December 25th as Jesus’ birthday.

Making Christianity essentially an arm of the state would’ve been damage enough, but then he oversaw the Council of Nicea to end Christian bickering over the nature of Christ. That council officially made Jesus a god-man through Constantine’s direct intervention (and thus his equal, as the Emperor also claimed divinity). This would have been an unthinkable and even blasphemous proposition to Jesus, a good Jew. In the process the cross was transformed from a cruel instrument of execution of a good and holy man into a form of human sacrifice. Only now it was God sacrificing God for the salvation of humankind. By doing so violence became acceptable, necessary and sacred in Western Christianity. 

If we are to move out of The Waiting Place to a more peaceful world, a good first step would be for the church to repent by rejecting a 4th century understanding of Jesus that has supported violence in many forms for 1800 years. That will of course not be easy. But in this case reframing our understanding of who Jesus was and what he saw as his mission could go a long way to bringing about a more peaceful world. It is the life awaiting us.

[i] Maori word for family.

April 25, 2010

Glynn Cardy

Easter 4

Jesus redefined greatness. 

Nowadays if a nation aspires to greatness then its rich will expect help and encouragement to get richer and be taxed less. Its poor will expect help and encouragement to live normal lives. Both measure greatness in terms of wealth and well-being.

Yet Jesus redefined well-being, telling the rich to give away their riches, and the poor to give away their dreams of riches. He talked about giving and mutuality.

Greatness for Jesus was not about the pursuit of happiness. It was not about getting, expanding and controlling. Rather it was about giving and grace.

Antony De Mello tells of two brothers who had neighbouring farms. The first brother would sit up at night worrying about his sibling. He worried that since his brother had no partner or children to look after him he was vulnerable if he should fall ill or get old. So the first brother would creep out in the wee hours of the night, take a sack of grain, and empty it into his brother’s granary.

The second brother also would sit up at night worrying. He worried about his older sibling and the financial burden that children bring. So he too would creep out into the night, take a sack of grain and empty it into his brother’s granary.

And so it continued, night after night, year after year, until one fateful evening the two brothers collided with each other and discovered the truth.

Years later when the village sought to build a church they could think of no holier spot than where the two brothers collided.

Two ‘siblings’ who did not get on great were Christianity and Judaism. 

Following the first Jewish-Roman War of 66-70 CE the revisionist Jews who followed the way of Jesus sought to differentiate themselves from more orthodox Jews for the sake of their own survival, less they be tarred with the same brush with which all Jews were being tarred with by the Romans. One way they did this was to insert a fictitious villain into the Jesus story, bearing the name of the Jewish nation [Judah] and bearing the guilt of betraying Jesus. His name was Judas. Instead of the Romans being culpable for Jesus death, they were portrayed as being manipulated by the orthodox party of the High Priest and Saduccees after receiving a tip off from the traitor Judas.

Around 88 CE the Jesus followers were excommunicated from the synagogues pushing Christianity rapidly into becoming a Gentile movement.

These dates are important because they inform the context in which the accounts of Jesus’ life were written and edited. Paul [writing in the 50s he was the earliest] was totally unaware of the tradition that one of the “twelve” played the role of the traitor. Not only is there no mention of this when Paul wrote the account of Jesus being “handed over,” but also when Paul described the experience of resurrection on “the third day,” he said that Jesus was seen by the “twelve.” Judas is still among them, a fact that would have been inconceivable if he had been the traitor.

Mark, writing just after the first Jewish-Roman war, introduced the Judas story. This story grew and developed as each successive gospel was written until the Fourth Gospel completed the Judas portrait some time around 95-100 CE. 

The character Judas is a composite of tales of other traitors in the Hebrew Scriptures. In II Samuel, for example, where the king is called “The Lord’s Anointed” [later translated as ‘Messiah’], there is a story of King David being betrayed by a man, Ahithophel, who broke bread with him around the table – just as Judas was portrayed at the Last Supper. Later Ahithophel realizing the consequences of his actions hung himself. 

Another example is in Zechariah chapters 9-14 when the Shepherd King of Israel is betrayed to those who are traders in the Temple for 30 pieces of silver, just as Matthew says Judas did.

As each Gospel was written it drew on earlier material. The Judas fable grew more sinister with each retelling as the historical context of late first century Jewish-Christian relations deteriorated. This deteriorating inter-faith context also informs the reading today of shepherds and sheep. The one who climbs into the sheep by some other way is a reference to orthodox Judaism. Words like ‘thief’, ‘bandit’, ‘steal and kill and destroy’, indicate the parlous state of relationships.

Soon fierce hostility toward the Jews became a primary mark of Christianity and its intensity grew in the first centuries of Christian history. The Church Fathers, Polycarp, Irenaeus, John Chrysostom and Jerome, among many others, filled their writings with a blood-curdling anti-Semitism. To them the Jews were “vermin unfit for life” and “Christ-Killers.” Good Friday became a day of peril for Jews as Christians emerged from their churches and cathedrals filled with wrath for what “the Jews had done to Jesus” and seeking revenge by beating and killing them.

The vilification of Judas also continues. This year a news item spoke of the long tradition on the island of Cyprus of lighting Easter bonfires, a tradition beloved by religious and nonreligious alike. On top of those fires they burn an effigy of Judas.

Blame, de-humanizing the blamed, and seeking revenge upon them are strong impulses, not restricted to Christianity or US foreign policy. These impulses both shape and scar us.

Jesus told us to love our enemies, and we need to learn and relearn the consequences of not doing so. Hate distorts our soul. Blame is detrimental to healing. Revenge is corrosive of lasting peace. Yet loving enemies is hard work and scary.

Last Sunday Pedro spoke of his brother’s murder – killed for a baseball cap. Such psychological pain is hard to imagine. Pedro spoke too of forgiving the murderer. Such psychological strength is also hard to imagine. For those of us who haven’t experienced trauma like this we have no idea what such forgiveness costs. Yet we sense something powerful, awesome, and holy here.

Greatness for Jesus was grounded in relationships where he emphasised the ethics of giving and mutuality, and where wealth and personal well-being took second place. Yet there is also at the heart of relationships the need to practice forgiveness, to ask it of others, and to give it to others. As a nation the rich [those who have] need to ask it of the poor [those who have not], and then support policies to prove it. As an Easter people we need to ask forgiveness of ‘Judas’, and all the other caricatures of blame we create.

I am indebted to Jack Spong’s work on Judas – e.g. http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2007/12/did-judas-iscariot-exist-by-bishop-john.html

Also worth reading [in parts] is http://vridar.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/judas-did-not-exist/

April 18, 2010

John Salmon

Easter 2     Acts 9:1-6     John 21:1-19

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Introduction

The Easter season – these weeks between Easter and Pentecost – traditionally focuses on unpacking the Easter stories, as foundations for Christian faith.

But that’s really hard for someone like me… I’ve never been able to swallow either the “dead man walking” version of Easter Day, or the “he died for my sins” understanding of Good Friday. And the post-resurrection “appearances” we heard about this morning provoke all kinds of arguments in my mind…

So I ask, how can we be ‘church’ for people with a view like mine?

1. The ‘Progressive’ Dilemma

I’m telling you what you already know – as a congregation that speaks of itself as ‘progressive’, and aware of the work Glynn has consistently done on this, together with Clay and others. Yet I’m aware that it isn’t easy to be progressive in relation to central Christian stories like those of Easter, and at the same time remain a recognisable part of the Christian community.

I think it helps to keep aware of the dilemma. It’s one that many institutions find in trying to be relevant and connected: how to be in continuity with our heritage while being up-to-date and contextually relevant.

I’ve worried away at that dilemma all my ministry – and most sharply, perhaps, in theological education, with its aim of preparing people for church leadership in a changing world. Churches that dare to call themselves ‘progressive’, face it all the time. We certainly find that at St Columba in Grey Lynn…

How do we make use of the post-resurrection stories we heard this morning? How do we work with what we have received, be faithful to the core of that, and at the same time be contemporary, relevant to the thought-patterns and questions of our context? My view is that the key lies somewhere in the complex idea of remembering: how do we remember?

2. Remembering as Returning

One tendency – or temptation – is to think of remembering as returning – returning to certain key markers. I sometime speak of myself as a new kind of Anglican, a new kind of “C and E” – one that goes to church each week, except Christmas and Easter…

And the reason for this is that my experience in even quite progressive congregations shows a tendency to return to the symbols and liturgies that re-state the tradition around those celebrations.

The stories are told in the usual way, the old hymns or carols are sung, the liturgical patterns are repeated. The cross and the angels re-appear. Many of the accretions of church and cultural history return to the sanctuary for the occasion. The words of the liturgy continue to reflect old ideas and patterns…

We argue that we want to connect with people from the wider community who know and want these familiar symbols and patterns. I understand that: but there are other places – other churches – that meet the need for such a remembrance of return. Someone like me is re-alienated from the tradition by that act.

Another reason given, is that these celebrations and stories are so central to ‘being Christian’ or ‘being church’ that they have to be returned to and held on to. There’s truth in that – but this congregation, with its constant re-working of symbols and ideas and its radical billboards, is aware that the insights and issues of Easter and Christmas stories can be presented without the traditional word-pictures.

I do not believe the dilemma is well resolved by remembering through returning to the traditions just because that might be familiar, what people want, or what the church expects.

What’s progressive about that?

3. Remembering as Rejecting

Of course, we can be tempted the other way! Our remembering can be rejecting – we remember the tradition, all right, we remember the stories, their interpretations, the symbols and liturgies that have been built around them, but we reject those. We then move right way from the core stories and their message. Instead we focus on things like seasonal symbols – appropriate given the origins of a spring festival like Easter, but making a complete break away from Christian themes, if it’s all about autumn leaves and the dying of the summer.

There are times when I’ve been there. I’ve been part of groups (some that have met in this building!) that want nothing to do with anything from the tradition, but aim to build new stories, new symbols, new liturgies. In settings like that, today’s stories will simply be ignored… I have a strong empathy with that: there’s so much garbage in what we have been taught, so much twisting of the core insights, so much rigid ritualising, that it can seem irrelevant to hold to any of it.

Many who get to that point leave the church, and in order to find a way of helping them, we have tried to strip away everything we can’t believe or which seems hopelessly outdated. Yet few are really attracted by that, and any sense of ‘being Christian’ or ‘being church’ becomes very tenuous indeed.

I don’t think that’s not an effective progressive strategy either.

4. Remembering as Reframing

I’d rather we worked remembering, not the superficial stuff or the feel-good bits or the medieval interpretations or the 19th century liturgical formulations, but the deep-down insights and themes of the Bible and Christian ideas. I now consider the most helpful progressive response to the tradition-relevance dilemma is in remembering as reframing.

The tradition is not lost, we engage with it, we remember it at depth – but it is not returned to as a finished product, it is not told in the old familiar way.

Here we seek to talk about and ritualise significant human concerns and experience, like the Easter representation of ongoing suffering and of the renewal of hope and possibility – but without the cross or the empty tomb. Or the appearance to Paul is seen in terms of the deep shifts of insight we can experience as humans, and the stories about catching and eating fish as relevant to setting of goals and priorities.

We will tell the stories, but we re-tell them, too, so that we scrape off the accretions of old ways of thinking. We re-tell them, so our interpretations relate directly to our contemporary personal, social, and political lives.

Conclusion

Even progressives need to remember. Remembering in a way that keeps us in touch with our heritage while reframing that heritage for here, now, is – I think – the mark of a progressive Christian.

April 18, 2010

Clay Nelson

[Presented on 18 April 2010 at Common Dreams 2 Progressive Religion Conference in Melbourne]

I am here this morning to tell you about a billboard. How ridiculous is that? It was just a billboard. However, it is a parable about the importance of progressives doing public theology. As Sherene [a progressive Muslim speaker at the conference] pointed out in her talk about contextual Muslims getting their message out, it isn’t an easy thing to do.

But it wasn’t me who was supposed to tell you about it. My colleague Glynn Cardy was invited to tell you about how we do public theology with billboards. I assure you he would much rather be here than in a hospital bed, so I thought at least his image could be. This is Glynn. 

This is a bad news, good news, bad news situation. My best friend became seriously ill quite unexpectedly during Holy Week and will be convalescing for at least nine months. The Good News is I get to be at this conference with four hundred wonderful progressives to tell you about our billboard experience. The bad new is when Glynn got ill on Maundy Thursday he had not yet prepared his talk. So while I am delighted to have gotten a free trip to Melbourne out of the deal and to be part of this conference, I wish he had written this talk before he became ill. As a result you will notice that my title for the talk is a little different than his.

Glynn was invited here because he had the courage to approve a controversial billboard. I am here because I’m the only other option available. It is my responsibility to develop with our advertising agency, M & C Saatchi, our billboards. My claim to fame is that the billboard he agreed to go with offended about half of the known world. 

It displayed a dejected Joseph and a wistful Mary in bed with the caption Poor Joseph, God was a hard act to follow. While St Matthew’s has been putting up billboards for over six years this is the first to go viral in our Internet age. 

In the month following putting up the billboard our website had 35,500 visits from 177 countries. I know that we aren’t in the same league as Francis McNab trashing the 10 Commandments, but we were pleasantly surprised when we had visitors from nearly every country on the planet from Argentina to Zambia. I really want to meet the one person in Mongolia who checked it out. 

On Google gave the billboard over 77,000 hits. Blogs both pro and con had a field day. Every major newspaper in the world and lots of smaller ones published articles on it. Letters to the editor were abundant. A poster art museum in Switzerland asked to include it in their permanent collection. Numerous magazines and journals covered it as well. The New Zealand Herald had stories on it for nine straight days.

We were swamped with comments both pro and con on the website, in emails, phone calls and letters. I’ve been asked by the conference organizers to share a taste of the reactions. Here are some emails expressing disapproval.

Some were concerned about our soul:

Your billboard is disgusting, perverted and does not reflect any of the great values of Christianity that you are meant to be preaching. Who ever came up with this absurd idea should be extremely ashamed and who ever approved it should be even more so. I hope who ever is involved in this will go to confession and purge their sin. This is a mortal sin and the penance should be great.

This correspondent might be surprised to know that the team leader at M & C Saatchi is a highly committed Anglican Evangelical. The illustrator is an active Roman Catholic who is hoping the Pope doesn’t find out. And the team member who came up with the idea in a brainstorming session, was afraid to tell her mother that she had done so.

Some were concerned with the souls of others:

Please do not put up your billboard again with Our Lady and St Joseph in bed! It is disrespectful to the Mother and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It makes every one who sees it have impure thoughts and maybe actions! 

Some thought we were being disrespectful of the faithful like this one:

I was overseas and thus unable to take part in the Rosary of reparation against the vile and cruel blasphemy that you and your parish committed against the Most Holy Trinity, the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Joseph. It was a disrespectful and callous attack on the faith, love and devotion of all Christians, especially Catholics.

Not only Christians were upset. This is one from a number from Muslims:

I was especially shocked and disappointed that a Christian organization could commission such a distasteful poster. How would you feel if a cartoon depicting your own mother in bed with her husband post coitus was placed on a billboard in public? Then imagine how painful it is to see the blessed mother of Jesus – regarded by both Christians and Muslims as the best of women – portrayed in such a crude and undignified manner?

Some were concerned about the ecumenical movement:

How can we reconcile Anglican and Catholics if you allow Billboards like the one with Our Blessed Mother and Our Blessed Lord?

Many worried about those we offended:

I am a person in my early 30's and have a fairly liberal view on things. I come from a Christian background, but by no means consider myself overly religious. However, I found your billboard rather offensive to my sensibilities. I know your intent was to start a debate, and I concede that you have achieved this, however at the expense of Christians out there who are very hurt and upset by this billboard. You have to ponder if the debate you have created by putting up this billboard, justifies the offence and hurt caused to many.

This one seems to believe religion should not be offensive:

I realize there is a range of doctrines within the body of Christ. However I think we need not go out of our way to offend others – especially those within the body. 

Some tried to argue theologically while questioning whether or not we were Christian:

You seem to have the idea that even if there was a virgin birth then God would have had to send sperm down from above. I can't believe that a Vicar of a supposed Christian church is so stuck in worldly thinking that you cannot grasp the idea of the power and vastness of God and that he is not constrained by time, space & matter. It seems that you can only think within the confines of this world and in this respect you are no different from an atheist. So what are you doing as a vicar for a Christian Church when you do not believe the basic theology of the church or has the Anglican Church lost the plotaltogether. Surely you would be better off spending your time working for some Humanistic New Age church or charity that does not claim to be Christian when you are obviously not a Christian. In fact I would say that not only are you not a Christian, but are in fact anti-Christian as you are using your position in a church to attack it from within. 

One worried about our stewardship in a rather bigoted manner:

Lucky you are not a Muslim... you would be a target for zealots who would aspire to earn themselves 21 virgins in the hereafter if they could score you, but what amuses me more than anything else is that you employ funds donated by people who expect you to utilise their monies to promote good Christian works so you immediately open your purse and give a commission to the world's largest Jewish advertising agency... com'on Rev... tell the world how much Christian-donated funds given to you in trust and good faith have you spent with Saatchi from initial briefings, concepts, and final production costs). Just tell NZ honestly how much of your parishioners' funds went into this obscenity?

He would be surprised to know that we are not charged for M & C’s creativity, which is donated. We pay for producing the art and about $250 to have the skin printed and installed.

Many just didn’t like us like this one signed by someone with the sweet name of Chelsea:

SON OF A BITCH! YOU WILL BURN IN HELL!!!!

In the face of such acrimony it was a relief to get many letters of support as well. 

Many clergy responded appreciatively:

Thanks for your humour and courage to post the image of Joseph and Mary. I am an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada. Our closest link your way is the Uniting Church of Australia. 

It takes tremendous courage to let the truth be known. Living next door to the Christian fundamentalist types in the USA, I do appreciate the havoc your campaign created and the liberation in it as well.

Whoever thought that up was very smart to put it mildly. As a church minister who believes it is my job to do my best to reshape Christianity to become closer to what we know of the person of the real Jesus, I wish I had thought of it.

I'm an English Methodist Local Preacher, and want to say I think your controversial billboard is a scream. If I can imagine God as having human attributes, then I think he’ll be having a good chuckle. The serious side of the message is well made and it is absolutely right that Christians should always be questioning and exploring. I wish you and your church every blessing in all your endeavours.

One that I personally appreciated was from the person responsible for Latter Day Saints’ publicity in NZ:

You and your team have done some awesome work in the last 4 to 5 years. Even if I felt uncomfortable at first with the latest billboard, how could it not be a success with all the talk it has generated? 
I would not be allowed to approach it in this way, but I hope you don’t get discouraged by what some people might be saying. I really value yourapproach and judgment. I think religion needs more people like you and your team.

We heard from many of different faiths and those who claimed no faith at all:

I don't live in New Zealand, and I long ago stopped considering myself "Christian" precisely because, in my experience, most so-called "Christians" are so enmeshed with the narrative of Jesus that they fail to get the point of his ethical and spiritual teachings. 

It often seems that it is the people who are most emphatic in their self-identification as "Christians" who behave in a fear-based, destructive way to those whom they perceive as "other" – in total violation of the values and ethics taught by their "Christ.” But, if I did live in New Zealand, and saw a church with a billboard such as you recently put up, I would probably feel like I had to check it out, and maybe even re-think identifying as a "Christian" once again! Kudos to you! Keep up the good work! 

While Catholics were more often critical, we heard from many who were appreciative. Here are two:

I'm a Catholic who believes in the virgin birth, and I thought your billboard was really funny. Christianity is too often sidelined by popular culture as being boring, irrelevant and old fashioned, whereas in fact it's the most interesting, topical and fun thing in the entire world.

And this one:

Thank you for your courage. 

I am an older, gay catholic (former religious monk) with a life partner living near LA. Because of your billboard I have read and explored your website and wish you were near our shores not an ocean apart.

Humanists and rationalists were quick to express their appreciation, which wouldn’t surprise our detractors:

Thank you for starting a debate and for educating me about Progressive Christianity. I am heartened to see that not all Christians believe the bible stories are factual. I'm an atheist & humanist myself yet whole-heartedly believe in following Jesus' #1 message – Treat others as you would like to be treated.

My personal favourite from the atheists was this one:

I’m a rabid atheist – but what has happened to you guys with your nifty poster stinks! This is a blow for freedom of speech. Send me your bank details and I will direct credit you $50 to get this poster back up.

Here are a few who were just pleased that we were generating a conversation:

Love the poster. Love that you're stirring the thought processes of the reluctant. My theory is that sometimes you can't tell if something is dead until you poke it. Keep poking.

Clay, I wanted to contact you because I was so impressed with your comments to the New Zealand Herald on the St Mathews billboard. Too often actions are carried out in the name of religion that are not loving or rational acts. Good on St Matthew’s for attempting to get New Zealanders to consider their faith and get people talking about religion. And good on you for pointing out that abuse and threats are not consistent with Jesus' message. I am not religious myself but I respect the work St Matthew’s does and I respect religion that aims to better the lives of others, especially the weaker members in society. Thank you for your stance. 

It is a shame that the faith of so many is still rooted in literal interpretations, but it is encouraging that there are those such as yourself who will not compromise a far deeper understanding. Never dumb down the teaching to please the masses.

Please keep the billboard; it generated much healthy debate here at my university. I wish you strength to brace the storm. A friend in Texas.

Just wanted to write in support of your billboard. I am immensely cheered by it. It's about time some real Christians stood up against those who would use Jesus’ name to preach intolerance and discrimination. 

It is certainly creating discussion. As someone who has just been diagnosed as a Unitarian Universalist, it not only drew me to your site but has me reading half of the articles.

Some appreciated our making Christianity more accessible:

I am sure there are many people in societies around the world who share Christian values (but may or may not consider themselves Christian) who will have found Christianity a little bit more accessible and relevant as a result of your billboard.

Hurray for people like you. Where is it written that God does not have a sense of humour.

Blessings be on you all for your thought-provoking and playful billboard. And to think in the West we like to say that it is Muslims who have no sense of humour about their religion!

I have great admiration for what you are doing. If you want to make a difference and want your message to be heard you have to be prepared to do the unexpected and push the boundaries.

I admire you for choosing to make a difference!

Many thanks for having the guts to put up the billboard. It made Christmas real and relevant.

In the week after the billboard went up Glynn and I were swamped by media interview requests. At the hour the billboard went up I was officiating at my mother-in-law’s funeral. Throughout the service I could feel my phone vibrating. Checking voicemail afterwards there were 18 requests for interviews from radio, TV and print media from around the world and it didn’t stop for days. Glynn was especially brilliant as our primary spokesperson.

While many traditional Christians felt we were misguided or insensitive or going to burn in hell, they never thanked us for opening a media window for them. For instance, BBC radio featured a lengthy debate between Glynn and Lindsay Freer, spokesperson for the Catholic Church in New Zealand, where she had ample opportunity to put forth the Catholic position on the virgin birth and Mary’s perpetual virginity. We sincerely doubt she would have gotten that coverage without us. Did we get a thank you note? No!

What has been the most surprising aspect of this experience is discovering the billboard is immortal. Yes, even though it and its replacement were up a total of only twelve hours before being defaced and then stolen twice, it won’t die. In March when the Advertising Standards Authority ruled against those who had made complaints about it by declaring it not obscene, it once again got international coverage in print and on the Internet. When our Easter billboard went up on April Fools Day, the whole world was waiting. Every story about it referred to the Christmas billboard. When the Easter billboard was defaced the media covered it again referring to the vandalising of the Christmas billboard.

I am certain that the day you read Glynn’s or my obituary in the paper it will be under the heading, Will Billboard Priest Go to Heaven or Hell?

Viral billboards don’t just happen

To understand how “just a billboard” garnered so much attention, one must look at the context – the church that put it up.

St Matthew-in-the-City is a downtown church in Auckland, New Zealand right next to the Sky City casino and their iconic Sky Tower.

It is a beautiful neo-Gothic structure that is 105 years old located on the busiest surface street in New Zealand.

Within a few blocks are the offices of every major media outlet in New Zealand. The congregation has been part of Auckland since its earliest days. As the city grew St Matthew’s was on the wrong side of the tracks. It was the neighbourhood of the poor, working class and shopkeepers. The wealthy and powerful lived on the other side of Queen Street and attended their own churches. Because of these circumstances St Matthew’s has long had a bias for those who got the short end of the stick. Early examples include founding the Seafarer’s mission down at the docks and a school for the children of working class families on the site before there was a church. This perhaps accounts for St Matthew’s being on the edge of polite society and their respectable churches still today.

Over the years vicars with an affinity for being on the edge and somewhat edgy themselves were drawn to St Matthew’s. Canon Blackwood Moore for example, was the first to use modern media to challenge the establishment. Radio New Zealand at the time broadcast live services at St Matthew’s. However, the Government was not pleased with his comments on topical issues in his sermons so he and St Matthew’s services were banned from the airwaves. (After Glynn, he is my hero.)

In the 1960’s when protests in America were most strident, St Matthew’s most radical act was allowing sherry and dancing in the church. But in the 70’s and in particular the 80’s things began heating up.

St Matthew’s became a hotbed of controversy in respect to social justice issues. My present day office was where those plotting to disrupt South Africa’s Springbok Rugby Tour met. After apartheid fell in South Africa it was from St Matthew’s pulpit that Nelson Mandela came to thank New Zealanders for their support.

Anti-war singer, Pete Seeger played a concert from that same pulpit during the Vietnam conflict.

When the US sought to bring ships that might have nuclear weapons aboard into the Waitemata Harbour, the Revd Dr George Armstrong, a non-stipendiary priest at St Matthew’s and a professor at St John’s Seminary led a flotilla of small boats to block the harbour entrance.

When it was still illegal to be homosexual in New Zealand, the congregation founded the first congregation to serve the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer community in New Zealand.

We are to this day the venue of choice for the AIDS Foundation’s Annual Candlelight Service and the Transsexual community’s memorial service. It is no longer surprising to me to witness a funeral led by drag queens.

St Matthew’s is where many who die from HIV/AIDS choose to hold their farewell.

Today St Matthew’s is the only Anglican Church in New Zealand that publicly permits Civil Unions for gays and lesbians in the sanctuary and to my knowledge I am the only parochial priest who is also licensed to perform civil unions.

St Matthew’s was an outspoken supporter of women’s ordination and has had a long line of women priests on its staff. They have made sure inclusive language has had a high priority.

Being next door to the Auckland City Mission, an Anglican diocesan institution, the city’s rough sleepers use our pews for naps on rainy days and doorways as their bedrooms. We are on a first name basis with many. One homeless woman listed us as her permanent residence on official forms. We become intimately involved in their lives. They attend services, potlucks and even church picnics. We have done their weddings and baptisms and helped them find better lodging and get needed services. We are in the midst of a $100 million joint project with the City Mission to build a state of the art center for rough sleepers and homeless women with children.

So from our founding we have been a church on the edge. However, there are two sides to this edge. Polite society might prefer not to, but does know who we are. 

Under Peter Beck, one of our more respectable vicars, now Dean of Christchurch Cathedral, St Matthew’s began connecting with the business community of Auckland. In establishing relationships with downtown business leaders, he was able to raise millions to refurbish the badly deteriorated structure that the diocese was considering demolishing. Those relationships also established us as the pro-bono client of M&C Saatchi, our billboard co-conspirators, and Network PR, a public relations firm. However, his greatest gift to the church was tearing down the original wooden church to build a hideous looking but highly profitable car park. Thanks to the car park and other assets the church is financially secure. We recognize that having that security is a gift most churches do not have. It gives us the freedom to say and do things others might wish to say or do but can’t because of a lack of resources or they don’t dare because it would risk their financial viability. Having the freedom, we feel an obligation to be their voice as well.

When Peter left for Christchurch to become dean, the church called Ian Lawton, a young, outspoken Aussie with an earring, gifted pen and brilliant theological mind to be the next vicar. Ian’s contribution was huge to St Matthew’s present ministry. The billboards began under his tenure, the first somewhat primitive website compared to today’s was launched and a virtual online magazine was published to theologically reflect on church and culture. Ian resumed St Matthew’s reaching out to those on the wrong side of the tracks, but in this case it was those who were seeking spirituality, not necessarily religion.

But his other contributions included opening the church to the community for uses beyond services and classical concerts. The pews were made movable so they could be removed for fashion shows, cocktail functions, dances, media events and on one occasion a Rave.

These “scandalous” uses of the church and tentative attempts at liturgical renewal annoyed many in the congregation, culminating in the music director’s departure and along with him most of the choir. Their departure would prove to be a godsend.

He was not with St Matthew’s long because Bishop Jack Spong, who coincidentally was my bishop as a young vicar, recruited him for a nondenominational church in the US where he is continuing to make wonderful progressive waves.

The congregation he had walked into and later left behind was not a highly functional one. Like many liberal churches, St Matthew’s had a long history of being inclusive to a fault. She tried to hold within her embrace:

• Anglo-Catholics who were “liberal-ish” in their support of women’s ordination but were still in love with Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. Until two years ago the 8 am service stilled used the 1663 service.

• Evangelicals who were liberal about social justice issues but conservative scripturally and liturgically.

• Dysfunctional poly-Conservatives, who were never sure where they were on any issue, except protecting and maintaining the historic building.

• Liberals who were broad in theology and inclusive socially, yet avoided being critical of theological differences within the church.

• Radicals who resisted a male-dominated church hierarchy and wanted inclusive language in the liturgy with new metaphors for God.

This eclectic mess is probably what made America attractive to Ian and what killed off at least one vicar and made life exceedingly difficult for the rest. Building community out of such theological, liturgical, and socio-economic differences was made all the more difficult by the fact that most of the congregation did not live within the parish boundaries, but came from a wide geographical area.

It was into this parish mix Glynn was called in 2004. Perhaps they called him after Ian because he came from a respectable suburban parish, was older, and not having an earring looked safe. I’m not sure if they noticed his criminal record. As a young seminarian he was arrested protesting for Maori land rights and was convicted of disturbing the peace.

He spent his first year getting the lay of the land and figuring out how to make St Matthew’s a staff-driven church. As he began to build his team I was immigrating to New Zealand. The day after George Bush was re-elected I felt a need to make a statement in opposition to the Iraq War and his dismantling of the Constitution. Moving to New Zealand was that statement. At the time I had been away from the Episcopal priesthood for eight years, working for the Unitarian Universalists as an administrator and was a member of their ministerial fellowship preparing to be received as a UU minister – a goal I gave up to immigrate. My first Sunday in New Zealand I attended St Matthew’s because they had a large banner flying from their bell tower that resonated for me, “Make Poverty History.”

Inside I listened to an excellent progressive sermon from Glynn while holding my breath because of the overwhelming body odor coming from an obese homeless woman asleep in the same pew. 

In the pew sheet was a notice that they were looking for someone who had communication and marketing skills, as well as proficiency in website development. Having some knowledge of Anglicanism was considered a plus. Having acquired qualifications in web development after leaving the priesthood, I went back to my hotel and applied. While I wasn’t sure I wanted to work for the church again, I decided that it was better than driving a taxi. I got a call the same day from Glynn coaching me on how to prepare for the interview so I would get the job. His counsel was probably good but since I couldn’t yet understand his accent, I missed most of his good advice. At the interview I shared my vision of creating a virtual progressive church online. Two weeks later I was employed to start building it. A month later Glynn broached the subject of me getting back in collar. With some reluctance and great reservations I agreed to give it a go. But in doing so I promised myself not to hold back what I really believed even if it meant being tried for heresy. After all, it worked out pretty well for Sir Lloyd. So far, the best Glynn and I have been able to do is to be accused of heresy with demands made to the bishop that we be disciplined. Not liking publicity, the bishop chose not to act. We were sorely disappointed.

Glynn and I are in many ways quite different from each other, but we discovered we have the kind of rare synergy forged in close friendship, common purpose and a willingness to break the rules. Unlike Peter Kennedy [of St Mary's-in-Exile, Brisbane] we have never been mistaken for the Messiah, but like him we can be naughty boys. Through our writing and preaching we began climbing further and further out on our progressive theological limb. Putting it on the web for all to read committed us further to continuing our progressive journey. Eventually the congregation began to notice that what we were preaching was often being refuted by language in our Book of Common Prayer liturgy and the hymns. But putting aside the prayer book in the Anglican tradition is not something done lightly. For many Anglicans the prayer book is more sacred than Scripture.

The opportunity to begin making the liturgy congruent with our theology came in 2006 in planning a U2charist, a Eucharist using U2 music instead of hymns. At the time U2charists were sweeping across the US, but they were just putting Bono’s music into traditional liturgies. As the one initiating and planning the event, I asked Glynn, the poet on the team, to write a liturgy that reflected progressive theology for our U2charist. That was the beginning of our liturgical renewal. We now have several liturgies we use during different seasons of the church year. While Glynn offers the first draft, the congregation is actively involved in developing and evaluating each one. We consider each a work in progress. They are all available on our website. Feel free to use all or parts of any that move you.

In retrospect, I believe that how we approached liturgical renewal and the content of the liturgies themselves accomplished what none of Glynn’s predecessors had been able to achieve – they formed St Matthew’s into a cogent community. A few, of course, are not happy about not using the prayer book but they can still do so at the 8:00 am service if they choose – most don’t. To their credit they accept that the new liturgies represent the community. A few have left, but many more have come. In the last three years worship numbers have grown by a third. Even better the congregation is considerably younger and more diverse than before. They are proud to be part of a church on the edge. This was never more evident than when the furor hit over the billboard. A few were uncomfortable with it, but only one member of the congregation left because of it. The vast majority was totally supportive and happy to defend St Matthew’s billboard to their families, friends, co-workers and neighbours.

Liturgical renewal not only helped us to form a community, it under girded the development of the Christmas billboard and the decision to go forward with it.

Our earliest billboards were sometimes clever but exceedingly safe.

But about a year and half ago I changed the brief we had with M & C Saatchi. I told them that one measure of a successful billboard for St Matthew’s was that it wouldn’t be comfortable in front of any other church in Auckland. I wanted our billboards to make it clear that not all Christian churches were the same flavour. In particular I wanted our billboards outside the church to reflect the progressive Christianity being exercised within.

Lastly, whenever possible I want them to reflect our whacky Kiwi (or in my case, American) sense of humour. It was this brief rooted in our liturgy that produced “The Billboard.”

What lessons have we drawn from this experience?

There are three. The most important lesson, I believe, is the realization that being an inclusive church has its limits. Yes, all are welcome, baptized or not, Christian or not, to receive communion. But we should not be concerned if some choose not to be included. Progressive Christianity should not be afraid of offending. Our view is that Jesus wasn’t.

The second lesson is related – unity is highly over-rated. Many of our colleagues in the diocese were not pleased with us because they believe the church should speak with one voice. This is an idea that we find laughable. The church has never spoken with one voice. They were upset with us because some of their parishioners were upset at them because of what we’d done. They felt put on the spot and they didn’t like it. Some even advised that we should get prior approval from the bishop before we put up future billboards. Yeah. Right.

Their lack of support was disappointing, but not as much as the silence from some of our mentors, near and far. But nevertheless, we continue to believe that some things should not be sacrificed on the altar of unity, no matter how lonely being troublesome can be. Change in the church or any other institution has never been accomplished without someone being troublesome. If unity is to be found it is on the other side of being troublesome. 

Another lesson is that in a secular society that rarely looks at the church, one cannot be too bold in doing public theology. Our critics would say we resort to being tacky, not bold, to get headlines. I subscribe to the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity, with the possible exception of one’s own obituary. We make headlines sometimes by making fun of ourselves or by seeming to ignore the religious sensibilities of others, standing up for the GLBTQ community or working for peace.

We also gain media from having services for non-members like our annual animal blessing for the SPCA, children’s Christmas service with Santa and a Christmas fairy and on occasion events like a teddy bear blessing.

We also make headline by sending out media releases on topical issues – the most recent being a statement condemning NZ Bus for refusing an ad from the Rationalist Society saying,

“There’s probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy life.” Lastly, Glynn frequently and I occasionally send letters and opinion pieces considered controversial for publication in the NZ Herald. We are published more often than not.

The third lesson concerns issues around freedom of speech. Our experience is that the biggest threat to our freedom of speech is our selves. Self-censure is a much bigger threat to getting our message out than anything our detractors or the diocese can do to silence us. Fear is at the heart of silence or failure to act. Glynn and I have done a lot to build up goodwill in the congregation and the greater community, if not always the institutional church. That goodwill is like chips painstakingly won in a poker game. They do us no good if we don’t put them all in once in awhile. 

When to do that is always the question. Whether you do or you don’t always has consequences. For instance, Glynn and I both loved the first billboard we were presented by M & C Saatchi for Christmas but we differed on whether it was worth cashing in our chips. They proposed a billboard showing a giant flouro sperm coming down presumably from heaven. The tagline was from a Christmas carol – “Joy to the World…” The implied second line of the carol was the joke. In retrospect I am delighted Glynn’s didn’t go with the first one. If he had we would not have gotten the one we put up.

We also discovered that one has to consider the consequences of exercising freedom of speech. After the billboard was vandalized twice and stolen twice the question was how to respond visually. We developed two possibilities and were ready to go with this one, but it was never used. It had become clear that the team was exhausted dealing with both the controversy and getting ready for Christmas. We decided reluctantly to hold our fire at least until Easter.

So in conclusion when doing public theology there is a time for tact as in tactical, but ultimately being tacky and troublesome are important tools for reshaping society’s understanding of Christianity, which is defined all too often only by Evangelicals and the institutional church. We can’t make a difference if we can’t get anyone’s attention.

April 11, 2010

Sande Ramage

Low Sunday


Video available on YouTube, Facebook

It’s official. Corporal Willie Apiata is hot. And it’s not just his smouldering good looks or toned up body parts that do it for us. According to the recent ‘you sexy things feature’ in the Sunday Star Times magazine it’s because, with automatic rifle in hand and sizzling with 12 kinds of fire in his eyes, he strode purposefully from a building where he’d probably just wasted three baddies. [i]

Richard Dawkins and the Atheist Bus Campaign are probably on the wrong track. It’s not what we mean by God that’s the problem; it’s the power of destructive mythologies embedded in the human unconscious and which influence negative human behaviour that need debunking. 

The myth of redemptive violence that suggests we can be made safe and whole through violent actions is on the rise in our culture supported by heart warming stories and advertisements in the media courtesy of the military PR department. Strange that none of the ads enticing young people towards a leadership career in the military ever mentions that its central purpose is to apply the maximum amount of force on the enemy. But maybe Willie’s candid shots from Afghanistan have got that omission covered.

In case we should be in any doubt that war stories are the flavour of the month, Television One has been rerunning Band of Brothers which will culminate in Spielberg’s, The Pacific, delivering us wrung out and grateful worshippers at the altar of redeeming violence on the state’s most holy ANZAC Day.

ANZAC commemorations draw heavily on the value of redemptive violence by honouring the role of the soldier, sketched out as a saviour figure sacrificed in battle so that we can live in peace and freedom. Across time this mythology has been used to soothe the internal human terror of being overwhelmed by forces we cannot control and ultimately our fear of death.

If we think beyond this imagery we know that ANZAC Day only remembers part of the story. A more complete memory includes the women raped in military campaigns, children bombed, conscientious objectors tortured and imprisoned, families torn apart, cultures, animals and environments destroyed and political deals done in the name of greed. 

Perhaps it’s a peculiar mix of compassion and guilt that keeps us locked into this annual ritual of forgetfulness. Compassion for those young soldiers sent to experience terrors they should never have been forced to endure on anyone’s behalf and our guilt for being part of a system that allowed it then and now encourages its continuance by inducting another generation into the belief system.

In Australasia as we trudge towards ANZAC Day we also tread the road to Easter. Transplanting Christianity to the southern hemisphere has located Easter at the wrong end of winter and locked two mythologies in an awkward tango, jarring and jostling one another for space in the collective unconscious.

This year the dance sequence has been disrupted by the Waihopai Ploughshares 3 in New Zealand and the Bonhoeffer 4 in Australia. Both groups have used non-violent but newsworthy direct action against military installations in the belief that these systems cause immense suffering across the world. 

As you know at St Matthews, an element of theatre is necessary to gain attention in a distracted world. The Easter story has drama in spades, parts of which dear Thomas in the gospel story today was, frankly, sceptical about. Like Thomas, the Waihopai Ploughshares 3 and the Bonhoeffer 4 have a healthy disrespect for the stories people in power want us to believe. Their moral compass guides them on a form of Christianity that is transformative but which can bring dishonour, danger and even death. In this regard they walk in the footsteps of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian honoured in our liturgical calendar last week. 

Bonhoeffer had a constructive story to live by. He maintained that the followers of Christ are called to peace, not just having peace but making it; to be concerned with overcoming evil with good and establishing the peace of God in a world of war and hate. For him, living this way in Nazi Germany meant an involvement with the political underground movement which led to his arrest by the Gestapo in 1943 and his execution at on the 9th April 1945. 

Christianity, Bonhoeffer said, stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. He didn’t think Christians were doing enough, instead asserted that Christendom, and lets translate that to the institutional church today, adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. 

Constantine, that politically savvy operator got us hooked early to the worship of power when he claimed at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge that God promised victory to the Romans if they would paint the sign of Christ on their shields. As a church one of the ways we still live with the remnants of that master stroke is in having chaplains embedded in the military and continuing to bless the machinery of war. Military chaplaincy is a poignant symbol of our association with power. 

Anglican pacifists during World War II struggled with this power dynamic. Geoffrey Haworth in his book Marching to War notes they were toughened by years of opposition and disillusioned by their church’s perceived compromising of its core beliefs. He quotes Charles Chandler the vicar of Cambridge who said, ‘by and large the Church is on the side of the big guns and as ready to stone her prophets as ever she was in days of old’. [ii] 

Today the institutional church stands on the margins of society with limited formal power. That’s the proper place for us to be so that we can run with Bonhoeffer’s advice to give more offence, shock the world far more and take a stronger stand in favour of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong. 

There are points of similarity between the Easter and ANZAC stories which will help us dance in step. Both stories require a journey to the interior encompassing times of hunger, loneliness, despair and pain. Both ask that we stand up to evil regimes and the unreasonable imposition of power on the weak. Both recognise that people will die in the attempt to make peace. However, our stories will stumble over any attempt to retain the myth of redemptive violence as a framework for the future. 

The Ekklesia religion and society think tank in Britain suggests that this pivotal moment of realisation offers us the opportunity to begin reimagining remembrance. To mourn all lives lost in conflict, not just our side. To continue to hear the stories of soldiers but to make space for others including conscientious objectors, those New Zealand tortured at the front and the 800 imprisoned at home during World War II. To listen to the women who picked up the pieces when men broken by the devastation of war returned. To weep for the needless destruction of the land, animals and cultures and for the poverty of the human spirit which led to deals done in greed. 

The White Poppy project can be a quiet but powerful way for the institutional church to begin influencing the reimagining of remembrance in New Zealand. This project dates back to 1926 when it was suggested in Britain that the centre of red poppies could be imprinted with the words, with no more war. The request was refused. But by 1933 the Co-operative Women’s Guild had produced the first white poppies to be worn on Armistice Day and very slowly the idea is catching on. Here in New Zealand Peace Movement Aotearoa co-ordinates the project and through donations collected is supporting White Poppies study scholarships.

One reading of the Easter story challenges us to wonder if humanity can evolve further than resorting to violence to calm our inner fears of being overwhelmed. The history that is often sidelined tells us this is possible, if we dare. As sideliners in the world of politics we thankfully don’t have the power to overwhelm anyone with this message of potential. We do though have the ability to ask others to dance. Up close and personal in the sultry and passionate tango, we can whisper words of love into our partner’s ear so that the whole story can be told and we are all made whole by the truth that will inevitably set us free.

[i] Sunday Star Times, Sunday Magazine, ‘you sexy things’, 21 March 2010, p18.

[ii] Geoffrey Haworth, Marching as to War?, Wily Publications, Christchurch 2008, p188.

April 4, 2010

Clay Nelson

Easter Day     
Luke 24:1-12


Video available on YouTube, Facebook

While I know we are here to celebrate resurrection, there is a problem we tend to gloss over. We don’t want to hear that experiencing resurrection has a prerequisite: new life requires death. Death is something we would prefer to deny or put off.

Intellectually, even those of us who are not the sharpest tool in the box know that to live is to die. Nothing lives forever. No matter how often we visit the gym; no matter how many of life’s pleasures we forego to advance our longevity, few of us will receive the Queen’s congratulatory letter upon our hundredth birthday. If we were swans infamous for their belligerence we might live to 102. If we were happy as a clam we might make it to 405 like one found off the coast of Iceland. If we were content living an isolated existence, barely growing in order to just survive in exceedingly harsh conditions, we might live as long as a Bristlecone pine. The oldest found was 4900 years old. Of course we could opt for suspended animation. There is a bacterium that was in stasis in sea salt that was 250 million years old before being revived. But few of us are willing to wait so long to get a life. Eventually, if we are alive, we will die.

This existential reality is the fly in the hearty soup we call Easter. We don’t like the prerequisite. My evidence is attendance figures. Easter Day is a lot more popular than Good Friday. 

Furthermore, it is why so many people get upset with theologians and preachers like yours truly who suggest that Jesus’ resurrection was not a physical, bodily resurrection. I hate to be the one to break it to you. Jesus did not physically return from the dead, even as a holy ghost.

Theologians have for many years tried to explain that resurrection is not the same as resuscitation. Lazarus was resuscitated. Eventually he was put back in a tomb for good. Resurrection is not about turning upside down the laws of nature. I know the post-Easter stories of Jesus having a fish fry on the beach with his mates, breaking bread in Emmaus with grieving friends, and entering locked rooms to have a reunion with fearful disciples suggest otherwise, but Jesus the man died and stayed dead just like the rest of us will some day. Having no evidence to the contrary, and because it is a comforting thought, I grant the possibility of some kind of afterlife, but the Easter story is not about having an afterlife. Afterlife is not the same as resurrection or new life. Resurrection is about the here and now, not the hereafter. Resurrection is about how we live fully now the life we have, not about getting a life after death.

I know you may not be enraptured to hear this. We really don’t want to die. Aging, frankly, is tough enough. So we hang on to the idea that Jesus’ resurrection was physical and the equivalent of an afterlife. We hang on to the notion in hopes that we will experience the same. To say otherwise is to accept the reality that the death of the body we have is permanent and unavoidable.

Some of you might be wondering where the joy is in that Easter message? My answer is that the idea of resurrection as an eternal form of physical resuscitation has to die if we are going to embrace the joyful reality of resurrection. The longer we hold on to the hope of a physical resurrection, the less time we have to begin living a life full of Easter joy. The bottom line is that Easter isn’t ultimately about what happened to Jesus, but what is available to us. 

But first what exactly happened to Jesus? The truth? We don’t really know unless we believe the Gospels are the same as newspaper accounts might have been at the time, but even then we know not to trust every thing we read in the paper. 

What the Gospels do tell us is what happened to those who followed Jesus after his death. The resurrection stories are not historical, but metaphorical accounts that seek to give a sense of the disciples’ faith journey after Jesus died. That journey began in disappointment and despair. The life they planned on those three years following Jesus was not to be. It was over. The powers of oppression and domination had won…again, or so it seemed. 

Their disappointment led to unbelief. This is captured first in the story of Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb to anoint the body. It was an act of unbelief to expect his body to be there. The second act of unbelief was after she told the disciples of what she had not seen – his body, Peter and the others didn’t believe her and came to see for them selves. Later we have Thomas doubting the others when they said they had seen Jesus.

As the story unfolds it becomes clear unbelief is not such a bad thing. Joseph Campbell, a student of comparative religions, looked for the transcendent truths that under gird all religions. He noted that they all require letting “go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” Unbelief is about letting go of what we once accepted as true, as real; as possible versus impossible. It is a death experience that requires grieving. Not only did the disciples mourn the loss of a dear friend, they had to mourn the death of their belief that Jesus was a political messiah who would overthrow Rome. They had to mourn their lost opportunity to help him rule this new kingdom he had talked so much about. His death had killed the life they had planned. But letting go of those beliefs left them open to new possibilities, new experiences.

They discovered when they gathered at the synagogue on the Sabbath and listened to the Hebrew scriptures; so much of what they heard reminded them of their dead master. He seemed to be there giving new understanding to the ancient and familiar words. But where was he? After a long day working their boats, gathered around the fire for their evening meal, reminiscing about the last three years, it was like he was roasting a fish with them waiting for them to understand. But where was he? In their travels, they remembered how before walking with Jesus the sick and poor and the marginalised were invisible to them. Ever since he died they have found they can no longer ignore them and walk by. Like it was when he was alive they have to stop and engage them, offering comfort, healing and acknowledgment. But where is he? 

With time they began to doubt again. They began to doubt whether or not death had really had the final word. Their lives were changing. When they spoke of him, sharing his stories and acts of love, they experienced hope again. Joy again. It was a new unexpected life. Certainly not like the one they had planned. It seemed he was alive in them and them in him. Death had not separated them after all. They began to be aware that the divine love he embodied had been in them all along. Knowing that changed everything. No longer were they afraid. No longer were they locked up in themselves. They had new priorities. God wasn’t in their planned lives. God was in the new life waiting for them. With that awareness came knowledge of their oneness with their neighbour and with God. They had never imagined they were part of the Godhead. Yes, for the disciples who accepted the life awaiting them, Christ is risen – in them.

Now it is our turn to stand before the tomb. It is our time for unbelief. What plans for our life do we have to let go of? We have had the six weeks of Lent to consider this and other questions: Are we willing to consider the possibility that life can be better than we imagine? Are we prepared to give up our resistance to new possibilities? Are we willing to consider that there are truths beyond our own making? Are we willing to let God out of the box of our own making and lead us no matter where, no matter what?

Are we going to have the courage to walk out of the tombs of our own making and accept a life of hope, love, justice and freedom? It is the one Jesus showed us is waiting for us. Are we ready to accept it here and now? It’s Easter, how about we give it a go? The clocking is ticking. There is only so much time left each of us. Why miss one joyful moment?

April 3, 2010

Glynn Cardy & Clay Nelson

Easter Vigil

Before illness struck, Glynn was scheduled to appear on the television show Close Up last night. To help him prepare, the producer sent him a series of questions that might be asked. It was Glynn’s intention to share his answers with you tonight, so I will share them for him. The questions and answers have the feel of a catechism. The catechism was the means of teaching the doctrines of the church to those seeking to be baptized since the earliest days of the church. They have traditionally been in a question-answer format that those who were about to be baptized or later confirmed were expected to memorize. And memorize they did because it was not uncommon for the bishop to quiz them before the congregation at the Vigil. For this night has been the traditional time to welcome and baptize our newest members. It is why we renewed our baptismal vows on this night even though we were also baptizing Nessie.

What is different about Glynn’s catechism is that it is a summary of his beliefs as based on his life-long journey in the faith. While it is important to be familiar with what the church has taught, memorizing them will not change your life. They are statements of traditional belief. Glynn’s answers are his personal beliefs. While important, having beliefs is not the same as having faith. What you believe or think is important only in so far as they help us live a life that reflects how Jesus lived his life. It is our faith that marks us as Christians, not our beliefs. So here is Glynn’s catechism:

Why do you believe in God?

I have experienced a mystical life-affirming power that I would call ‘Divine Love’. This touches my soul. It encourages the best in me. It waters the seedlings of compassion within. It seeks to build connections of mutuality with fellow humans and the natural environment. I know and am known by this love.

Christians experience God in a variety of ways. Some people hear a small inner voice. A few see visions or an ill-defined presence. Some feel the mystery and wonder of the universe somehow reaching out and touching them in a very personal way. Most experience God as a power of love, not dissimilar to what Jesus talked about and seemed to experience.

Most Christians don’t believe in the Divine because they’ve logically thought through the great philosophical and scientific questions of the age and concluded God exists. Rather they’ve experienced something mystical first before delving into rational thought. Not that rational thought is anathema to faith. On the contrary our faith seeks to resonate with our context, and mix with our meanings and understandings.

What does Easter mean?

Easter is the central Christian festival for celebrating the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In particular it remembers and in many places re-enacts the last days of Jesus’ life and how his followers found new hope and power after his death.

Easter was originally a pagan festival and is named after the goddess of spring. In the Northern Hemisphere it marks the transition from the barrenness of winter into the fertility of spring. All the beautiful wild flowers come out to play.

Christians thought this festival was a great way of celebrating their experiences of life triumphing over despair, liberty over oppression, and love over fear. Relationships of life, liberty, and love are the means and the ends of Christian discipleship.

At their best the add-ons to Easter pick up these themes. Chocolate, a luxury best consumed infrequently and in moderation, is symbolic of celebration. In a number of Christian communities Easter is celebrated with feasting, including all sorts of delicacies. Bunny rabbits as well as eggs are symbols of fertility, the prevalence and power of new life. Bright painted eggs are a wonderful tradition in Orthodox countries.

Did Jesus rise from the dead?

There is a wide range of beliefs within the Christianity community. None of us were there. Some will read the texts and believe that a literal flesh-and-blood Jesus was reanimated from the grave. Others will conclude that the texts are mythic rather than historical in nature, addressing issues of importance for the early Christian community. Still others will say that a number of his disciples, probably over a period of years, had mystical experiences of an apparition-like nature as they sought to come to terms with his death. Those experiences were empowering for them.

For some Christians the resurrection is important in proving that Jesus is divine and paving the way for believers to go to heaven. Other Christians see the resurrection, symbolically or literally, as God vindicating the life and ministry of Jesus – as Jesus now being in God, as God was in Jesus. Still others see the resurrection as a metaphor for the triumph of love and freedom over fear and oppression.

What do you believe?

I believe that Jesus was fully human, and in the fullness and depth of his humanity was his divinity. For me his divinity is not reliant on a supernatural miracle.

If there is any historicity in the post-resurrection appearance accounts then it seems many experienced a temporal post-death presence. This presence was both Jesus and not Jesus, both real and ghostly. St Paul, a long time after the Gospel of Luke’s ascension, equates his experience on the Damascus Road as similar to the experiences of Peter and the other disciples. The picture is not consistent. These accounts are consistent though with other religious mystical and grief experiences.

In focusing on ‘what happened to Jesus’ however we can lose sight of the bigger story, namely what happened to his followers. Through slowly coming together, learning to trust each other despite their weaknesses, being sustained by the memory of Jesus presence – particularly as they ate together, they experienced the Spirit of God moving through and among them, igniting their desire to live out the Jesus vision.

There’s a well-known hymn that has the line ‘He arose in silence’ – a reference also to the imperceptibility of that resurrection event. Its followed though by the resurrection truth in the next line: ‘for the Love [of Jesus] to go on we must make it our song, you and I be the singers.’

What was the point of your Easter billboard?

One of the great traditions of Easter was cracking jokes. Our billboard has a cartoon of Jesus on the cross saying, ‘Well this sucks. I wonder if they’ll remember anything I say…’ Humour can point to both the reality of pain and the will to overcome it with life-affirming laughter. 

The words of the cartoon also remind us that Easter is about more than a rugged cross, a supernatural miracle, or a chocolate bunny. It’s a time to reflect on all the words and actions of Jesus, how he disrupted his world through self-giving love, and how we might do likewise.

The billboard we didn’t put up was one of Jesus crucified with his hands extended in a Y formation and three guys beneath the cross making formations of the letters M, C, and A.

So it’s Happy Easter from all the village people and me.

April 2, 2010

Glynn Cardy & Clay Nelson

Good Friday


Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Jesus was killed for disturbing the peace. This is somewhat ironic when his followers would later call him ‘The Prince of Peace’.

Peace is one of those words like love, hope or truth that can be interpreted very differently depending on where you are standing. 

Love, for the control conscious, can be a synonym for obedience. Hope, for the rich, can be policies that increase their wealth at the expense of others. Truth, for the powerful, can be whatever they think it is.

Love, for Jesus, was a synonym for generous self-giving. Hope, for Jesus, was policies that increase the wellbeing of the poor at the expense of everyone. Truth, for Jesus, was the path of compassion – the way to the heart.

Pilate, procurator of Palestine, knew what peace was. It was the absence of conflict. It was law-abiding activities. It was obedience to the authorities. It was Pax Romana.

Palestine, home of the Jews, was occupied and controlled by Rome for the sole purpose of benefiting Rome. It was a land to be subjugated and milked dry of any ‘honey’ or anything else of worth. In the process collaborators were rewarded, fear encouraged, and resisters severely punished.

Pilate’s duties entailed ensuring a compliant populace as Roman tax-collecting policies were implemented and carried out across Palestine. He was not a monster. He was an ordinary Roman governor with no regard for Jewish religious sensibilities and with brute force as his normal solution to even unarmed protesting or resisting crowds. [i]

Peace, for Pilate, meant obedience to the rule of Roman law and submission to its demands. 

Jesus had a different understanding of peace. It was a visionary and aspirational understanding. His vision didn’t politically exist, save in his own person. He lived his vision, and for his vision he was killed.

His vision had 4 elements.

Firstly, it entailed knowing one was free in one’s own soul. Jesus had an inner freedom, a liberated soul that gave him an inner power.

In countries where an oppressive regime holds sway it is not uncommon for the populace to internalize that oppression. As their rulers treat them with disdain, so they begin to treat both their neighbours and themselves with similar disdain. 

We see this too in families where an overbearing and abusive adult treats children as incompetent and worthless. In time those children learn to treat their siblings and peers in the same way. They also understand themselves to be incompetent and worthless. 

Steve Biko’s major contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle was not so much in political maneuvering, organization, or clandestine activities. His contribution was reaching the minds and hearts of his fellow black South Africans. He called it psychological liberation. His message was ‘You are worthy’, ‘You are lovely’, and ‘You are free’. So, treat yourself and your fellows as worthy, loved, and free.

Biko said, “Whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior.” [ii]

Jesus said in effect, ‘The powerful must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with the powerless. They must be made to realize they are also human, not inferior.’

It was a message to die for. Like Jesus, Steve was murdered for disturbing the peace. In 1977 he was beaten to death in a police cell.

So, peace is firstly something that is in the mind and heart of an individual intimately linked with empowerment.

Secondly, peace is not so much about belief. It’s about behaviour. It is not so much about an ordered and orderly society where there is no conflict, but about relationships of mutuality.

Pilate saw himself as a peacemaker. He was in favour of order. The powerful usually are. They want their society to run smoothly and efficiently. Dissent affects the economy.

Some modern-day politicians are similar. They are in favour of assisting the poor in order that good order and a good economy are maintained. Social welfare, like law enforcement, is a tool to ensure that the privileged retain their privileges, and the impoverished grumble but don’t revolt.

Jesus’ peace was about how we treat one another. It was about innate equality, mutual inter-dependence, and freedom to thrive. It was symbolized by a table fellowship where anyone could come, as long as they didn’t mind who they sat next to. It was a meal where you could eat whatever was on offer, as long as you didn’t mind who’d brought it. It was a fellowship where the distinction between masters and servants, and men and women, was deemed of little importance; and masters and men had to have the ego-strength to endure the relegation to equality.

It therefore was implicitly critical of all hierarchical systems that sought to discriminate between the worthy and the unworthy, deserving and the undeserving, the pure and the impure. It was critical of discrimination of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, and age. And those with a stake in maintaining hierarchical systems for the sake of good order, personal power and security, or institutional gain saw Jesus and the early Christians as a threat to be, if necessary, eliminated.

Peace for Jesus was about forging mutual relationships where others were empowered to be more fully who they could be. The acts of befriending, loving, and making justice incarnate the peace of God among us.

Lastly, peace for Jesus was about choosing a less travelled road of offering one’s own vulnerability as a source of resistance. Remaining non-violent in the face of overwhelming personal and structural violence takes an amazing resilence and strength of soul.

Matthew records Jesus as saying: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. (Matt 5:38-44)

It is a mistake to think that Jesus was advocating passivity, a roll-over approach to the oppression of Rome. Rather it was the non-violent strategy perfected much later by the likes of Te Whiti, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King. It is grounded in maintaining your dignity and appealing to the humanity hidden within your enemy. When he strikes you don’t retaliate but stand your ground. Yes, he may strike you again but has also seen the strength of your determination.

When he bullies you into forcibly taking his gear one mile, offer to take it two. Don’t let his violence take away your generosity of spirit.

Admittedly, it is not an easy thing to do. Our old “lizard” brain at the base of our skull and atop the spine is wired to take flight or fight in the face of threats. As our species evolved we developed the neo-cortex. With it we are capable of considering other options – including nonviolent resistance. But primal fear can still over-ride this higher functioning. The cross is our reminder of our freedom. Fear does not have to have the final word. But it is not overcome by simply choosing not to be afraid or proclaiming the cross has made us free. It won’t just happen. It has to be painstakingly learned and practiced. It has to be lived. And it can’t be done alone. It is learned through our relationships. There is no other way of attaining that higher consciousness that knows everyone is one with all that is. It is that awareness that leads to a fearless life disturbing the peace with hope, love, and truth.

It is a life of resisting violence actively but not violently; by resisting retaliation, working for reconciliation; by overcoming evil with good; by loving out enemies; by loving our neighbours – even when different or foreigners; by accepting and absorbing hostility; by working for justice and by healing imaginatively without the use of force.

The cross is our reminder that there is an alternative to Pilate’s authoritarian understanding of us-them social and relational power, both inside and outside the church. The cross is our reminder of Stephen Biko’s understanding of mutuality: You are worthy, I am worthy; you are loved, I am loved; you are free, I am free. The cross is our reminder that healing a broken world, is not a private or individualistic task. We can’t do it alone nor can anyone do it for us. Fortunately there are enough crosses to go around. Disturbing? Yes. But until we know Jesus’ peace we will know no peace.

[i] Crossan, J. D. Jesus: A revolutionary biography, p.140

April 1, 2010

Glynn Cardy

Maudy Thursday

A reflection adapted from Dom Crossan [i]

One of the distinguishing practices of the Jesus movement was that no matter whom you were – a woman, a taxcollector, a Pharisee, or a child – you sat and ate at the same table with everyone else. There was no barrier to those who were considered impure, inferior and unworthy. This egalitarian, inclusive behaviour spoke louder than any pronouncements of belief. The table was for all.

In the post-resurrection stories there are two forms of Eucharistic meal, that of bread and fish and that of bread and wine. The link between these meals and the inclusive table fellowship Jesus practiced are four key verbs: took, blessed [or gave thanks], broke, and gave. That foursome appears, for example, with the bread both at the Last Supper in Luke 22:19 and at the Emmaus meal in Luke 24:30. What is their importance, and why have they become ritualized expressions for those Eucharists?

If we turn to the library of the Dead Sea Scrolls, written by the Qumran Essenes we get an interesting comparison. Hierarchical rank rather than egalitarian table protocol was symbolized in their meals. 

One of the manuscripts, for example, that dates to about 100 C.E. says, “and when they shall gather for the common table, to eat and drink… let no man extend his hand over… the bread and wine before the priest. Thereafter the Messiah of Israel shall extend his hand, and [then] all the congregation...” [ii]

In this scroll the emphasis is on hierarchy, precedence, and the order of dignity. A very different emphasis appears at Jesus’ meal table. Took, blessed, broke, and gave have profound symbolic connotations maybe dating back to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.

They indicate, first of all, a process of equal sharing, whereby whatever food is there is distributed alike to all. This is, as you may remember, the issue that St Paul admonished the Corinthians about. [iii] The rich wanted to keep the food they’d brought for themselves, while the poor at the other end of the table went hungry.

But these verbs also indicate something even more important. The first two verbs took and blessed, and especially the second, are the actions of the master or leader. The last two broke and gave, and especially the second, are the actions of the servant. Jesus, as master and host performs the role of the servant, and all share the same food as equals. Being both master and servant affirms the innate equality and mutuality between human beings.

There is however one further step to be taken. Most of Jesus’ first followers would have known about but seldom experienced being served at table by slaves. The experience of the male followers would have been that women both prepared and served the family meal. Jesus took on himself the role not only of servant but female. Not only servile but female hosting is symbolized by the juxtaposition of those four verbs. Far from reclining and being served, Jesus himself serves, like any housewife, the same meal to all, including himself.

Jesus’ table practice was counter-culturally open and inclusive. All were welcome into this community of equals. All were to be treated and fed equally. Yet these four verbs took, bless, broke, and gave also point to the radicalness of Jesus’ leadership. He opened the door to women leaders as well as men, valuing the spiritual wisdom and service of both. It is a pity that the Church is still trying to catch up.

[i] Crossan, J. D. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, p.180-181.

[ii] The Rule of the Congregation or Messianic Rule

[iii] I Corinthians 11:17-22

March 28, 2010

Glynn Cardy

Palm Sunday

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Today is the start of Holy Week. In St Matthew’s Holy Week involves services on Palm Sunday, Wednesday in Holy Week, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Day. For most of the week there will also be a candle-lit labyrinth for people to come, walk, and contemplate within.

Holy Week is on the one hand a quasi-reenactment of the events that alleged happened around the time of Jesus’ death in Palestine, 33 CE. Christians for centuries have used this time to reflect on the meaning of his life, death, and resurrection and whether there are cosmic theological implications. Was this the unique, once-for-all-time, for-every-culture salvation event?

On the other hand, there is also a long history of Christians using the events of Holy Week as a time to allegorically reflect on their own lives and their community’s. It is in this vein that I speak this morning.

On Palm Sunday Jesus rode upon a donkey into Jerusalem to much acclaim. The crowd loved him, placed their hopes on him, and bowed before him. 

Jerusalem was the centre of religious and political power in Palestine. This was the place where the forces of oppression, which Jesus had criticized from the Galilean countryside, coalesced. If there was going to be any national change it needed to change here.

Sometimes we need to leave the comfort and security of the place we know [our Galilees] and travel to the centre of power [our Jerusalems] to seek the change we hope for. We have to go there, to be face-to-face, and to risk our future. The risk-adverse never leave Galilee – and will therefore never experience crucifixion or resurrection. They just stay home, go to Church, and pray that someone else will save them.

There is a love that is welcome, and there’s a love that’s not. There is a love that is encouraged and affirmed, and there is a love that is disapproved of and punished. May we know and emulate the Jesus who risked all to pull down the walls separating the welcomed and the unwelcome, the accepted and the rejected. His was a bigger love. 

Jesus chose to ride in to Jerusalem on a donkey. It looked rather silly. Not exactly the triumphant-military, adorned-with-armour, riding-a-stallion look? 

Prior to entering the arena of the powerful we need to consider our strengths and how we want to appear. The humble donkey was a symbol, both to the biblically literate and to the Roman elite. It symbolized that here was one who had no need for muscular might and the assumptions of the culture of violence. Here was one who was not afraid of being alone and seeming to be stupid. Here was one who trusted in a God foreign to the halls of power.

The best argument doesn’t usually win the day. The courts of the powerful listen to the language of power, both the cultivated and the raw kind. To enter as one who will not play the power-game, who seeks to champion the unpopular, is at best to be a loser. Yet what can’t be dismissed so easily is one’s integrity. In the end, on the losing side of some Golgotha, all you have is your integrity. I suspect the acquittal of the Waihopai trio last week was due to their integrity.

To truly love one person is to innately like all people. To truly care for one person is to be concerned for all people. A soul that is grounded in God is grounded in compassion. When people die in foreign conflicts, such a soul suffers too. And such a soul must act, no matter how foolish or futile it seems.

Although Holy Week is filled with poignant exchanges let’s now jump forward to Thursday night. The powerful are elsewhere. Jesus is among friends. He takes bread and wine and likens it to his own life broken and poured out. These elements are sustenance for the journey, and a bond between us his followers. In simple food there is a simple grace. In simple grace there is a simple power.

Jesus next takes a towel, in the manner of a servant, and washes the feet of his guests. Leadership is to be like this: in the end none of us is greater or more worthy than anyone else, and therefore all are to be treated as special. The marginal and the mighty both get smelly feet. Both need help. Both can help each other – though one is not used to bending.

There is great potency in these rites of connection, mutuality, and equality. They summarize Jesus’ hopes for his friends.

Hope sees the deep truth that our difference does not define us, rather our commonality does. We are brothers and sisters of the planet. One’s giftedness is less important than one’s belonging. When we are home to one another there is hope.

That night the betrayal happens. The Roman soldiers find Jesus and arrest him. He has disturbed the peace of the powerful and insecure long enough. Judas, who paid 30 pieces of silver for a kiss, delivers it. After a show of bravado the other disciples either flee into the night or surreptitiously tag along until noticed. It is Peter’s cowardice that is highlighted. Brought before the authorities it is the fawning crowd who seemingly only yesterday held palm branches who now cry out that he should be crucified.

When the opposition mounts the applause and accolades of yesterday quickly evaporate. Likewise the friendships and intimacy of yesterday. We are alone. It is then that you know what strength you have, what courage is in your soul. Sometimes, when you think you are weak, your soul surprises you.

It is at this place of aloneness that every little flicker of what could be support counts – from a man who is press-ganged into helping you, from a soldier who serves you vinegar, from a thief who suffers with you, from the distant watching and weeping figures of a handful of women. It makes you realize how powerful a small encouraging word is, and how often you have not given it.

Only a few churches now, and none that I know of in this diocese, hold a vigil throughout Thursday night and into the morning. It is the time of aloneness, of nursing bruises, of darkness, of questioning, and having no one to answer.

Hope is a vulnerable thing, easy prey for the powerful to squash. Hope is a little thing. It is glimpsed in every kindness and every green shoot. Hope is a fickle thing. It flickers in the breeze and is blown by the winds of darkness. Will it be re-lit, and who will do it? 

On Friday morning Pilate asks the question, “Are you the King of the Jews?” For Jesus’ Roman accusers this is the nub of the matter. Forget all the religious palaver about sons of god and celestial seating arrangements – the nub is this-worldly power. Kings and kingdoms matter.

It’s been convenient for Pilate’s successors to locate Jesus’ power in some off the earth, heavenly realm. Yet Jesus was a threat to Pilate’s patch, and despite some writer’s wish to exonerate him of culpability, it was Pilate who ordered him killed.

There is a power that seeks to control people, to bend their wills to ours. In greater or lesser degrees this is the power that continues to dominate in the higher echelons of politics and wealth, and that we in the lower echelons often seek to replicate. Yet there is another power that seeks to make people free, without needing or wanting the coercive methods of the former. It is a power of the heart. A kingdom that only exists to liberate others has no need of kings, hierarchy, and obeisance. For anyone concerned about control it is to be feared.

The story goes that on Friday at 3 p.m. Jesus died. At dawn on Sunday, some 39 hours later, his resurrection is said to have already occurred. God raised him from the dead. Whatever this means – and it’s meaning launched a religion – it is grounded in his life and the events of his last week. Love, hope, and freedom always have a context.

March 21, 2010

Clay Nelson

Lent 5     
John 12:1-8

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Today’s Gospel on the face of it is troubling. While at a “Back from the Dead” party for her brother Lazarus Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with a very expensive perfume and her tears. Judas expresses what everyone is thinking: her act is inappropriately extravagant. It would be like taking Mother Theresa an $800 bottle of wine. Then we are caught off-guard by the seeming callousness of Jesus’ response, “You will have the poor with you always, but not me.” 

While I can appreciate John’s literary genius of using this story to foreshadow Jesus’ washing of his disciples feet and Mary Magdalene’s failed attempt to anoint his body after his death, over the years I have struggled to make sense of how someone who identified with the marginalised could sound so indifferent to their needs.

A passage in a book I count in my top 100, To Kill a Mockingbird, offers some insight into what Jesus was getting at. The book tells of widower Atticus Finch, who is raising his young son and daughter amid the racism and classism of Depression-era Alabama. Jem and Scout face the taunting of neighbors and school peers when Atticus agrees to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman. Mrs. Dubose, an elderly neighbor, sits on her front porch and torments the children with comments as they walk home from school. One day Jem takes his revenge by grabbing a baton and bashing all of Mrs. Dubose's prized camellia bushes. Atticus punishes the children by having them go to her home and read aloud to her for two hours every afternoon for a month. Scout remembers, "An oppressive odor met us when we crossed the threshold, an odor I had met many times in rain-rotted gray houses... It always made me afraid, expectant, watchful."

Each afternoon, they read while Mrs. Dubose sleeps and drools until an alarm clock rings, and then the children run outside to breathe fresh air. Finally the month is up, and not long afterward, Mrs. Dubose dies. The children are surprised when Atticus tells them that she was addicted to morphine, and that their reading sessions helped her to wean herself so she could die in freedom. He says, "I wanted you to see what real courage is... It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do." Incredible words. I wish I could say them like Gregory Peck, but they bear repeating anyway: "I wanted you to see what courage is... It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do." Jesus couldn’t have said it better.

While Atticus’ explicit lesson was about courage, he was teaching his children an essential skill. He was teaching them empathy: How to see the world from the perspective of another by being fully present to them. And how losing our self in another, even those we might find disagreeable, can make a difference.

Empathy is a hot topic these days, ever since Obama said empathy was an important quality in a Supreme Court justice. Neuroscientists, educators, psychologists and a few theologians are exploring its importance to humanity. It used to be thought that empathy is what makes us human. But Frans de Waal, who has spent a lifetime studying primates, has published a book entitled The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. Referring to numerous animal behaviour studies he makes the case that lab rats, chimpanzees and even elephants exhibit a capacity for empathy. Neuroscientists have even identified the part of the brain where our empathy is hardwired. But even though we have a capacity to empathize, we still have to learn to use it over a lifetime. It is a little like our computers at home. There are many things it can do, but if we don’t know how to use the software, it won’t do them.

Empathy is often misunderstood and confused for other things. So it might be easier to explain by explaining what it is not:

Empathy is not the same as Love. If love is the giving from our heart without expectation, empathy is a quality of being fully present to another person, focusing on the other, which often opens our hearts to such giving. Love is abstract without empathy. Empathy brings love to action.

Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy requires agreement with the other person’s views. Empathy means we fully let in what the other expresses, without agreeing or disagreeing with them. Empathy implies seeking to understand, not seeking agreement or disagreement. Empathy leads to unity; sympathy divides us.

Empathy is not being nice, but it is kind. If by being nice, we mean polite “proper” behavior, empathy can often be the opposite of “niceness.” Empathy calls for our authenticity and our honesty. Empathy acknowledges what is often kept hidden by the politeness and niceness, bringing uncomfortable issues to the forefront. Being nice can hide the seamier side of life. Empathy breaks through denial and tells it the way it is. For instance it is kinder to tell someone they have body odor, than to let them continue to offend unaware.

Empathy is not passivity. Being empathetic does not mean becoming a door mat without needs and expression, or indifferent to conflict. Empathy is an active process of presence, listening, observing and internally opening to someone other than our selves.

In fact, empathy moves us to the center of conflict. Human beings are always going to disagree, misunderstand, react and so forth. Our world is full of examples of this. Empathy works directly with this truth. By deeply understanding another, we can reduce misunderstanding. We can see clearly how our views differ. We build trust through the truly courageous act of letting another human being fully into our awareness and maybe even our hearts. It doesn’t mean we agree or disagree, sympathize, lie down, or be polite; we simply give another the gift of our presence and understanding.

Empathy isn’t naïve. Empathy is exactly the opposite of naiveté: Empathy ends naiveté. When we fully receive another person and seek to understand, the maximum amount of information is brought into the open. This doesn’t mean everything is rosy and now we’ll hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It means we are now aware of another’s needs giving us the maximum opportunity to act on accurate information and the deepest level of trust. What we have done is relieve ourselves of the naïve idea that some problems are unsolvable; that violent disagreement is absolutely inevitable.

Empathy isn’t selfless. It is the meeting ground where the needs of all are acknowledged and understood. Although empathy may seem like it is a selfless act, it is not. When I deeply understand another, it has been my experience time and again, that having been heard, the other person is now far more open to hearing and understanding me. Empathy gives me a much greater chance of bringing my own needs and values to actuality.

Scientists say we are hardwired to be empathetic. Clearly being empathetic benefits us personally. Thanks to global communications and commerce, what were once exotic cultures are now available to us in a few keystrokes. This week Glynn was blown away by a Pakistani he met this week who complimented “the billboard” telling him, that thanks to the internet, it was the talk of the town when he was home at Christmas. At staff meeting this week Glynn marveled that our billboard was being discussed over dinner tables in Karachi. Such a bridge across cultures allowing for greater understanding is still a very new phenomenon.

Yet in spite of the pluses of being empathetic and an environment increasingly conducive to it, polarization seems still to be the rule: Israel continuing their provocative housing projects on the West Bank. Republican opposition to anything and everything Obama does. Christian resistance to atheists exercising freedom of speech. Anglicans threatening schism – again – over American Anglicans approving the consecration of Mary Glasspool, a lesbian, as bishop. A colleague in the diocese sending me photos of Muslim fundamentalists protesting with hateful signs in response to our respectful attitude towards those of other faiths.

Yes, we may have the hardware for empathy but we need to learn the software that runs it. We still tend to see those that oppose us as the enemy. To see their humanity, to know they are pretty much like us seems naïve. To protect our own self-interest we must set ourselves a part. This may be the dominant view of reality, but it is still a false one. Today’s Gospel is the antidote.

Empathy is fully on display. Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet seems extravagant to Judas and perhaps to the others in attendance, but Jesus accepts it as an act of empathy on her part. She understands that Jesus’ ministry it reaching its climax and that he expects to pay the ultimate price for being the personification of God’s love. The anointing with expensive perfume is her recognition of the value of his life. The anointing with tears is recognition of his courage to carry on even though it seems he’s licked. To wipe his feet with her hair is to make herself one with his mission, even unto death. His commitment to the poor and the marginalised will live on in Mary. Because he knows the poor will be with us always, those who care about them need to be with us always as well. How?

By recognizing the love Jesus embodies is within each of us. By recognizing ourselves within him, his love for the poor, the oppressed, the sick; the marginalised lives on. 

Like Jem and Scout with Mrs. Dubose, spending time with Jesus will teach us that the stink of death, the odor of oppression; the reek of injustice does not have to defeat us. Spending time with Jesus will give us courage to anoint the afflicted with the perfume of love. It will open our eyes to knowing we are one with them. It may not always make the world a kinder, more loving place, but sometimes it will.

March 14, 2010

Glynn Cardy

Lent 4     Luke 15:1-32

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The Prodigal Son is, when understood, an insightful parable about the nature of the Christian and Jewish God, whom I respectfully call ‘Love’s Fool’.

It is the quality and actions of costly love, portrayed by the father character in the parable, which informs us about the nature of Jesus’ God. God is not an old man with two sons. God is the love that the fictitious old man exhibits. It is a love that can withstand insult and humiliation. It is a love that includes offenders. It is a love deemed foolish. It is a love that values the relationships between people above society’s and religion’s conventions. 

The parable also, progressively, takes the emphasis off beliefs and puts it on behaviour. Beliefs around family, inheritance, conformity, and penalties are deemed secondary to the restoration of the relationships in the family. Rather than obey the rules and expectations of 1st century Palestinian society, costly love bursts the boundaries to include the disgraced one and the disgruntled one back into relationship. Relationships are more important than rules. The latter are there to serve the former, not vice versa.

In this parable there are six shameful – some might say ‘sinful’ – acts. They first two happen immediately. The younger asks for his share of the property, and the father gives it. 

The primary act of wrongdoing by the younger son was not misusing his inheritance but asking for it. When he asks for his share of the property it is tantamount to wishing his father dead, for property usually only passed on to the next generation after death. [i] [ii]

The second shameful act in this story is the father’s. In granting his youngest son’s request the father shows himself to be a fool. He chances losing his honour, his support, and his control. In ceding a third of the estate [what the younger was entitled to] the father also put in jeopardy the financial well-being of the whole family unit. As events unfolded, with the younger son frittering his finances away, the father’s wanton generosity would have been seen as bringing shame not honour upon the family. 

The restless son came to the loving father and insulted him by demanding the resources to be free. The son did not want to be caged by family, responsibility, and duty. The loving father, like many parents, thought of the consequences of denying the request. Then the father knowing that his other dependents and neighbours would think him foolhardy and irresponsible, yet also knowing that satisfying relationships can never flourish where there is coercion, took a deep breath and said yes. Love bore the cost.

The third shameful act was the youngest son’s squandering of the inheritance. It’s portrayed in the story as self-destructive. Working for a profane foreigner and feeding profane pigs are signals to the Jewish audience that he not only has sunk as low as one can go, he has also lost his faith. His squandering also loses him his family – for he would in future have no means to fulfill his duties and provide support to his kin. Love’s gift of freedom can easily be lost.

The prodigal ‘comes to himself’ and decides to return to the ancestral home in order to work as a hired hand. The parable does not portray this as a cynical calculation to escape poverty, although the audience may have wondered. Rather he is portrayed as desperate. He has no expectation that he will be restored to the privilege of being a son. Indeed he can no longer be a son for he has forfeited those rights.

The fourth shameful act was the manner of the father’s forgiveness. Love goes overboard. The father’s behaviour is out of character: he seems to have been looking out for this reprobate. He runs – not the seemly thing for a patriarch to do – kisses and hugs him. He confers forgiveness when there is no evidence of the son’s sincerity, or even the request for such forgiveness. 

This display of emotion indicates that the father is not bound by the legal and paternal roles expected of him but rather by his deep and nurturing love for his children. The father’s disregard of legalities is evident when he asks his slaves to carry out orders that have the appearance of restoring the son to his former status, not inducting him into the duties of a hired hand. Love not only wants to forgive and include – regardless of what others think – but it also wants to restore.

The father has received the son back and as was normal is still in control of the property. The welcome means that the younger son can be supported from the property as long as the father lives. In a limited-goods society however the youngest son has not only wasted one third of their communal resources but by being received back will ultimately be a financial burden to the detriment of his elder brother.

The fifth shameful act is that of the elder brother. He feels the reception of his wayward sibling is unjust. He does not want to join in the feast given on the return of the prodigal. He is angry. Love has gone too far and forgotten its responsibilities. 

The elder brother’s refusal to dine with his father is culturally a very shameful act. Just as the younger boy shamed the patriarch in asking for his inheritance so the elder shames his father by not eating with them. He too violates the 4th commandment.

The elder son sees the father as having brought dishonour on the family by ceding to his brother’s request, and then welcoming him back. His sees his younger sibling as having brought dishonour in both his request for inheritance and his squandering of it. The prodigal has further shamed the family, according to the eldest, by consorting with prostitutes, therefore compromising the family’s bloodline. 

The story cleverly at this point shows how, with the reference to non-existent prostitutes, the stay-at-home fantasizes about leaving home and projects both his envy and his fear upon his brother.

The sixth shameful act is the father’s response to this jealous sibling. As in his dealings with the younger, the father refuses to assert the authority and discipline of the patriarchal entitlement. He comes out to him and affirms him not as a ‘slave’ but as a companion and co-owner of the farm. The father’s response however goes beyond a simple legal affirmation that the elder is the one true heir and addresses him with the affectionate term teknon: ‘child’. 

The father is stepping away from dealing with this family crisis by technical legal means. Addressing the elder as child serves the same function as the kissing and embracing of the younger son. It is relationality not legality that is paramount. It is the finding and loving of his children that concerns him, not his honour as represented by the inheritance. Love seeks not to defend its own honour and importance but to reach out to heal and embrace.

The father rejects neither of his sons. Upon his death the estate will go to the eldest who will assume the responsibilities of the patriarch. Yet the father is interested in the end not in morality or inheritance but the ongoing relationship between the two boys. The purpose of doing the dishonorable thing and allowing the younger his inheritance; doing the dishonorable thing and unconditionally forgiving this son; doing the dishonorable thing and coming out to the elder who has shamed him… the purpose of doing all this is for relationship, and ultimately for relationship not with him but between the two sons.

Likewise the costly love called God is not only for the purpose of bringing individuals into a relationship with the Divine, but ultimately for the purpose of bringing individuals into relationship with each other.

Costly love gives when it does not have to, is generous when it seems foolhardy, and suffers when the beloved is estranged. Costly love forgives even when it isn’t asked to, restores when it is viewed as unwise to, and suffers when others don’t understand. It serves the mending and nourishment of relationships, and will overstep the boundaries of society and religion to do so.

It is a mistake to view this parable through the lens of ‘repentant sinner’. We don’t even know how repentant the prodigal actually was! It is far better, and a far wider lens, to view it as ‘love’s fool’ – namely Love’s fearless commitment to building and restoring relationships, come what may, cost what it will.

[i] Occasionally in this 1st century culture a deed of gift could happen during a patriarch’s lifetime, but the beneficiary [in this case the younger son] still had responsibilities to use the gift to support the benefactor [his father].

March 7, 2010

Elaine Wainwright

Lent 3     Isaiah 55:1-9     Luke 13:1-9

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Everyone who thirsts, come, come to the water… This is one of those many phrases of the poet that we call Second Isaiah that reverberates in our spirits. But in today’s reading from this poet and prophet there is not just this one imperative – come – but the reading is, we might say, riddled with imperatives, with exhortations coming from our God: come to the water, come buy wine and milk, listen carefully to me, incline your ear, come to me, listen, see, seek me, forsake evil ways, return… return: turn your life around. And while the gospel is not filled with imperatives as is the reading from the prophet, it reiterates the phrase unless you repent, unless you repent. Return … repent. There is a call to change, to change one’s mind or way of thinking, to change one’s heart, to change or to turn around one’s life – a most appropriate invitation to us at Week Three, almost midway along our Lenten journey. We are invited to pause on this Sabbath day to reflect whether or perhaps how we have turned our life around or how we might do so into the second half of our Lenten journey.

Such thoughts are, however, not new and as I listened again to our poet/prophet I heard the closing words of our reading: my thoughts are not your thoughts says our God, nor my ways your ways. Indeed, we are drawn into the wonderful imagery: as the heavens or the skies are higher than the earth. Let your imagination envisage that – the distance, the space between the earth and sky – this is the space between our thoughts and the thoughts of our God who calls to us today in the words of the prophet. And we are being called to repent, to turn around our lives so that our thoughts may be God’s thoughts, our ways, God’s ways.

And as I listened anew to this call to repent or to turn around through the imagery of our readings and the actuality of our lives in today’s world, I heard a new call, a call to ecological repentance, to a turn around of my life, of our lives that is not only between me/us and God, or between us as human community. No, the call is there in our readings to a new relationship between us as human community and the Earth community to which and within which we belong. Indeed, the poet/prophet Isaiah catches us up into this expanded web of relationship.

Let’s listen again to the opening call and it is a call because it begins with an exclamation [in Hebrew Ho, Wow – make sure you listen!] And it is a call not just to a few: everyone who thirsts, come to the waters and you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Come to the water/s, to water that sustains life, not just human life but life on planet Earth, all forms of life that together make up Earth including humans with all other Earth beings. And the invitation of God is to all to come to the water/s, for all to have sustaining waters. Not only those who have acquired more than others, have acquired that social commodity that the human community calls money. No water is a gift of life for all. This call, this imperative to enable all to have access to this most fundamental sustainer of life, has an urgent ring in our world today. We are aware that water may not be the endless commodity that we once thought, that the changes we are making to Earth and hence for the entire Earth community is threatening this basic commodity water. What can we do this week, this Lent, to turn around our lives so that we know the gift of water, that we use it with reverence and care as gift so that it is available for all in the Earth community. That all may come to the water they need for life and have it without cost, without price.

And the poet goes on: come buy wine and milk without money, without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labour for that which does not satisfy. We are caught up in the intricate web of the human and more than human. Our economic structures shape human life [what would we do without money – surely the prophet is simply deaming/fanticizing!] But the prophet knows that it is this which makes for those who have more and those who are hungry and thirsty. And this economic system is intimately connected to all that is more than human – to water, to the grape which gives wine, the animal which provides milk. It is to all this that the prophet calls us to listen, to incline our ear. This is the call today, a call to listen attentively to the intricate web of relationships within the Earth community, not just human relationships but human and more-than-human. And if we find that these are not in the right order, if they are unrighteous, if they are wicked – again listening to the language of the prophet – then we are called to ‘repent’, to turn around, to re-turn to God’s ways and God’s thoughts.

Jesus the parabler, like the poet/prophet, knew well the just or right relationships between God, the human and the entire Earth community. He drew on this imagery to call for repentance, for change of heart, for change of life when those relationships broke down. And so today’s gospel also invites us to ecological repentance: unless you repent … unless you repent – it repeats. And it is the parable that Jesus tells to reiterate this call to repentance that captures our imagination. It speaks of relationship, the relationship between the more than human and human as well as two different human reactions. The parable contrasts the owner of the vineyard that has a fig tree in it and the gardener or the one who tends the plants. The owner wants the tree to produce, immediately it would seem – an attitude which so characterizes us in our world today – immediacy. The gardener, however, the one who knows about soil and composting and even the care that one must give to plants that are to grow and flourish, this gardener says ‘no – don’t cut it down prematurely. It is not ‘wasting the soil’. Time, care, attentiveness to soil, water, earth and plant – from these we learn a new attitude to life, an attitude, a perspective which like that to water will bring us to change, will bring us to repentance, to ecological repentance.

And so today’s readings are heard through a new lens, the lens of our contemporary ecological imperative as human community which must be in right relationship with all participants in the Earth community. These readings call us to repentance, to a new repentance, to a turning around of our lives. Return to these readings during this week and let their call, their imagery, their poetry invite us to reflect on an ecological repentance that puts us in right relationships with all Earth creatures: for this is to be in right relationship with our God. Let me conclude with the wonderful poetry of our poet/prophet that follows on directly from the reading we heard:

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,

And do not return there until they have watered the earth

Making it bring forth and sprout,

Giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

It shall not return to me empty,

But shall accomplish that which I purpose,

And succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

February 28, 2010

Glynn Cardy

Lent 2     Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

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Abraham is moaning to God. In Genesis 15 he is lamenting the lack of a male heir. Culturally this lack was huge. Without a male heir his name and his memory would not live on and his possessions, including his wife and slaves, would become the property of another. Previously his God [i] had promised Abraham progeny numerous as the stars of the sky and the sand of the sea. Yet now, chapters later, Abraham still sees no evidence that this will happen. 

The entire ancestral narrative from Genesis 12-25 is dominated by the question of an heir. Anxiety and doubt are frequently part of Abraham’s conversation with his God. Doubt and faith are not mutually exclusive but woven together. So too are failure and faith. Maybe that’s why this reading is set in Lent!?

To briefly summarize the succession saga in the forthcoming chapters: Abraham’s wife Sarah is past childbearing age. She therefore suggests, as was common in the Near East, Abraham has intercourse with her maid, the Egyptian slave-girl, Hagar. Hagar conceives and bears a son, Ishmael. Abraham is delighted. Sarah however is envious. ‘Hagar’, she moans to Abraham, ‘is treating me with contempt.’ Abraham tries to dodge the conflict: ‘She’s your slave!’ 

A number of years went by and then, according to the story, God decided to favour Sarah and she too conceived and bore a son. His name was Isaac. Sarah however was not content. She petitioned Abraham to cast out Hagar and his teenage son Ishmael into the desert, where they would surely perish. Abraham, though in grief at this situation, consults his God who seems to agree with Sarah – the child of the promise would be Isaac, not Ishmael. So Hagar and Ishmael are cast out, though later they are divinely rescued. This flip-flopping God who seems to want to ‘put a dollar each way’ saves them.

There are four interpretative keys we need to be aware of when reading this narrative. The first is ancient biology, the second patriarchal power, the third ‘texts of terror’, and the fourth are the fragments of God we find in Genesis.

In ancient times male sperm was considered to be ‘seed’ – namely what we would call a fertilised egg. The woman’s womb was merely a garden or incubator for the seed. All the chromosomes were thought to come from the male. So any child a man fathered, regardless of the status of the mother, was 100% genuine offspring. Abraham’s first-born son and heir therefore was Ishmael, not Isaac. To follow the directions of his God and his wife Sarah and to cast Ishmael out was to visit upon his rightful heir a huge injustice. No theological gloss by later editors can disguise this fact. Further, this injustice around inheritance would be perpetuated in generations to come causing huge distress and enmity. 

The second thing to understand is patriarchal power. Abraham and Sarah did not have a 21st century relationship of mutuality and equality. The patriarch ruled the clan. All slaves ultimately belonged to him. He had the power and responsibility.

So when Sarah moaned to him about Hagar’s behaviour Abraham had the authority to mediate a just solution, which he fails to do. Hagar is punished and Sarah’s envy is not bridled. Similarly after Isaac is born, when Sarah outrageously requests him to not only elevate her son to be heir but to cast out Ishmael into the desert Abraham needs to use his patriarchal authority to mediate what is best and uphold what is right. Again Abraham fails. He seems to emotionally freeze up and become incapable of exercising leadership. In a patriarchal world it is not fair to blame Sarah for what happened to Ishmael and Hagar. It was not Sarah’s decision. Her power, compared with the patriarch, was minimal. It was Abraham who failed. In casting out Ishmael he grievously wounded his heart, and his heart never recovered.

The phrase ‘texts of terror’ was coined by Phyllis Trible [ii] to describe the stories in the Bible that were thoroughly bad news for women. Not only were the women in these stories – and she uses four examples – victims of cruelty, but the text portrays God as either silent, absent, or assenting to the cruelty. In a similar way Philip Culbertson [iii] has written about texts of terror for men, including this example of Abraham, in response to the petitions of Sarah and apparent will of God, abandoning his firstborn son to a desert death. Abraham has argued with God before, arguing for compassion rather than punishment, [iv] yet here, when it is his son’s life at stake Abraham loses his steely backbone and succumbs to the pressures upon him.

Not everything in the Bible is written for the purpose of emulating. Not everything is of the mode: ‘Abraham did that and we should also’, or ‘God said that and we should obey it’. Some parts of the Bible are written as history, some as poetry, some as fables, some as salutary stories, some as visions… And some parts of the Bible are written for us to recognise injustice, its origins, the connivance of the powerful, and the culpability of the God involved. These stories invite our participation in making sure they are never emulated. To mistake a text of terror for a ‘go and do likewise’ narrative is not only to misread the Bible it is to repeat again the injustices of old.

So what is God in the Bible? Divinity in Genesis can be friendly and benevolent, but also terrifying and cruel. The attributes of divinity seem unable to be held with integrity within the concept of one God. Simply God cannot be loving and cruel, for the love would undermine the cruelty and the cruelty would undermine the love. Hence some authors talk about Gods in Genesis, including those named Yhwh, Elohim, and Al Shaddah. 

Karen Armstrong talks about Genesis offering us “glimpses of the divine which can only be fragmentary, imperfect, and coloured by the cultures’ experience of life’s inherent tragedy.” [v] I think God is, and yet more than, a cultural construct. Each culture and historical period tries to name and describe its individual and collective experiences with the spiritual. Each tries to name and describe their transcendent yet immanent experiences of divinity. 

Early Hebrew culture was no different. Although primogeniture [the first born male inheriting the power of the patriarch] was the norm, time and again it didn’t happen. Stories evolved to explain why it didn’t, and why God didn’t intervene to prevent what was unjust and destructive of patriarchal normality. Stories evolved to explain why the eventual heir, the winner if you like, became the winner. In God’s mouth was put the rationale of the winner. 

Yet also in these stories are hints that winning isn’t everything. Isaac, though heir, would a big loser for he never gained his father’s unconditional love and never learnt how to show and teach his own children such love. In the next generation Jacob, who tricked his first born brother Esau out of his inheritance, lives a conflicted life in a conflicted family, and then bequeaths it.

What is so likeable about Abraham is that time and again he questions the reasoning and integrity of God. This is how the Bible understands faith – not parroting some credal formulas – but courageously risking to question and probe, and to engage with the expanse of God. Abraham pushes at the boundaries of his culture’s experiences of God, and often crosses them.

Philip Culbertson points out the contemporary relevance of the Abraham and Ishmael story. There are many men and women who have, due mostly to divorce, two families with two sets of children. Their current spouse or former spouse tries to influence the relationships with your children – like Sarah did. You feel pressured, caught between the demands of these spouses and your feelings for your children. To give one set of children all your attention, for example, is to cause grievance to the other set. As for wills, legacies, etc there is the potential for much bitterness. The man or woman in this predicament is conflicted by a desire to express their love for all their children, to express their love for their current spouse, to do what is right and just, and to feel loved and rewarded in turn. There is significant potential for getting it wrong.

What I like about the Abraham saga is that the authors do not shy away from revealing not only their hero’s faith but also his failures. Abraham, in abdicating his patriarchal power to Sarah, in listening to his God instead of his heart, in doing what was expedient rather than what was right, grievously wronged his first born son Ishmael and seeded an enmity between the ancestors of Ishmael and Isaac that continues today. Abraham screwed up. He failed as a family man. He failed as a patriarch. He didn’t question the motives of the God he was listening to. His faith froze and he became a servant of circumstance.

Yet there is something wonderful about the biblical editors leaving all this for us to learn from. There is a message here that the faithful do fail, often with irrevocable consequences. The faithful do screw up, and usually the screw ups can’t be put right. Spiritual growth is all about stepping out, risking uncertainty, putting a foot wrong in the attempt to put a foot forward. As Joy Cowley says “People who don’t make mistakes don’t make anything.” If Abraham had stayed safe at home in Ur, with the Gods he knew, none of this would have probably happened. But he didn’t. He took a risk. A series of risks, compelled by his understanding of God – fragmentary though that was. He risked being wounded, and he was wounded… in the heart. A life of faith and a wounded heart often companion each other on the spiritual quest.

[i] Genesis 12

[ii] Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

[iii] New Adam: The future of male spirituality, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1992.

[iv] Genesis 18:22-33

[v] Armstrong, K. In The Beginning: A new reading of the Book of Genesis, London : HarperCollins, 1998, p.68.

February 21, 2010

Clay Nelson

Lent 1     Luke 4:1-13

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Some Sundays are more fun to preach on than others. The first Sunday in Lent isn’t on my list. Part of the problem is that it focuses on the same story every year, which while told from different perspectives, still has Jesus being driven by the Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days after his baptism. Which of course is why the church made Lent 40 days long. Luke and Matthew expand the episode by describing Satan’s temptations of Jesus that foreshadow his last temptation, not going to Jerusalem. The church uses the temptations to justify asking us to give up something “meaningful,” you know, like lollies or ice cream for the duration, as if by doing so we will be plunged into the wilderness.

It isn’t that the wilderness and temptation aren’t rich themes to explore but in their frequent reoccurrence within a given year and annually, saying something that hasn’t been said countless times before is nearly impossible. The temptation is to just get the sermon done. Say the predictable things the church has always said about how being miserable, sinful beings we need to be purified. We do it by paying the price for our fallen state with fasting and confession. The implied message being: Easter won’t be any fun unless we suffer first. Sure the congregation will tune out as soon as they realize they have heard this sermon before, but I will have done my priestly duty and extolled the importance of Lent to being good Christians.

I’m sorry I just can’t do it any more. Lent has lost its luster. I only need to point to an interview of Vice President Biden on Ash Wednesday this week. The interviewer, who later confessed to being Catholic, asked if the black smudge on his forehead was a bruise. 

Considering such evidence, perhaps it is time for a renewal of Lent.

It is only fitting. Lent began as a grassroots renewal movement. In spite of its use of the number 40 which reminds us not only of Jesus’ time in the wilderness, but Israel’s 40 years in the wilderness, and the 40 days Moses spent on Sinai receiving the Law and the 40 days Elijah spent on the same mountain before hearing the “still small voice of God,” Lent is not biblical.

Sometime early on in the life of the church, probably after it became clear that the world was not going to end in their life time, as Jesus foretold, the early adrenalin rush of being part of the young movement began to subside. Christians stopped expecting so much from God or themselves. It was easier to nail a cross to the wall and remember the good old days of being radical advocates for a topsy-turvy world where love was more important than power and the meek would inherit the earth. Risking your life to worship in a subversive community lost some of its allure. Better to blend in than draw attention to yourself by getting arrested for standing up for the poor. Eventually it became OK to be comfortable and Christian. 

It was in this context that the earliest forms of Lent began to emerge. It may of come about out of a frustration that being a Christian had become “safe” and “respectable." The earliest practice was to pray and fast for 40 hours from Good Friday to Easter. I suspect it began as the individual spiritual discipline of a few and then caught on. It was extended to 40 days perhaps out of pious over-exuberance or because of a misplaced comma in a translation of Eusebius’s History of the Church that unintentionally changed the length of fasting from 40 hours to 40 days. But for whatever reason, it was an established part of the church’s life by the Council of Nicea in 325. It was no longer an individual response for radical renewal but an institutional requirement for conformity. While intentions might’ve been good, making it an externally imposed requirement led us to a lusterless Lent.

As soon as it became a quasi-legal requirement imposed on the faithful by religious authority it became something to be resisted through negotiation. “Bishop, define fasting please?” Is it everyday, or do we get Sundays off? Do we fast all day or can we have a ham sandwich after 3:00pm? If not ham, how about fish and chips? Well, if after 3:00 is OK, it would be a lot more convenient to end the fast at noon in time for lunch. And so it went until the only required fast days were Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. From one point of view our rebellious desire for comfort became more important than our faith. From another point of view living faithfully isn’t the same as following rules. 

The focus on loopholes in Lenten fasting became a distraction from what the season might have been, an opportunity for transformation. Since just going through the motions of Lent won’t transform any of us, perhaps it is time for us to give up for Lent what Lent has become.

Instead of giving up one of our vices or dessert we should get real about seeking transformation. One interpretation of Luke’s story of the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness may point the way.

The wilderness Jesus was driven into by the Spirit is the bleakest place I’ve ever seen. There certainly isn’t one like it in New Zealand. It is a barren land gouged with canyons between steep cliffs pockmarked with caves. It makes Death Valley look like an oasis. If you have seen it the impression you are left with is that nothing grows there but rocks.

The story says Jesus fasted there, a spiritual practice of many religious traditions. After several days of water only, the body chemistry changes, often resulting in altered states of consciousness, including visions. To do this in solitude puts this practice in a category called by anthropologists and historians of religion a “vision quest.”

Vision quests are often rites of passage, similar to initiations. In some traditions it is a preparatory rite for a young shaman, or healer.

While in this state Jesus is reported to have had three visions where he and the Devil are the two main characters. The Devil in his vision is the personification of those cacophonous inner voices that seek to rationalize avoiding the harder path. Choose comfort over self-denial they seductively suggest. Choose power over love. Choose safety over risk and blaming over personal accountability and everything will be OK. Through these visions Jesus becomes clear about his relationship with God and what his mission is and is not. While clearly this was a demanding and difficult experience, the wilderness became a welcoming place for Jesus. Numerous times he is reported returning to the solitude of the wilderness during his ministry, perhaps to reclaim the direction the visions gave him in the face of uncertainties, doubts and temptations that beset him day to day.

While a similar quest is at the very least physically beyond most of us, the goal of such a quest is what I would encourage us to seek in Lent. However, for the more hearty of us there are organizations that for a price will help you experience your own vision quest. 

But really it would be silly to pay for a wilderness experience. Live long enough and they come freely and unexpectedly into our lives. They come in many shapes and sizes. It can look like a doctor’s waiting room; the cubicle of a dead-end job; the sheets on the bed of a cheap boarding house after experiencing foreclosure; the long bus ride home after being told your job has been shipped overseas; the wedding ring tossed into the harbour after your spouse walks out; the visit in the middle of the night from the police to report your child was in an accident. Sometimes it is a kind of desert in the middle of your own chest, in the dark of night, where you beg for a word from God and hear nothing but the wheezing of your own breath.

We would not wish such moments on anyone, let alone ourselves, but they do provide an opportunity for transformation. How we engage them will make a difference not only to us but those around us. But will it be for good or ill? Will we come out of it lost or with a greater sense of who we are? Whose voice will we listen to: our inner demons or the still small voice of the divine within?

I know it sounds a little crazy, but a Lent that could make a difference would be to willingly revisit the wilderness, if you are not already there: Not to suffer, not to be punished for past misdeeds, not for penance, not out of some perverse sense of unworthiness, but as a vision quest.

How you might ask? Simply take some time each day to look around for what we normally count on to save our life or give it meaning. Then imagine it gone. I know it is not the same as it really being gone, but perhaps revisiting the feelings we had in the past when they were will give them substance. Staying with those feelings we will enter Jesus’ reality of having no food, no earthly power, no special protection – alone except for a Bible-thumping devil spouting scripture in his ear and, of course, a whole bunch of rocks.

If by Easter we have come out of that place with a sense of wonder that being hungry didn’t kill us, then we are in a new place. If by Easter we understand that the only power and control worth having and using is the divine love instilled in us and that that is OK with us, then we are reclaiming who we are. If by Easter, we understand that testing God by asking for divine protection is a distraction that keeps us from hearing the still small voice of God – the one calling us to live out the divine ministry for which we were born – then Lent will have regained its luster.

Lent is the Spirit’s gift to each of us, not the institutional church. Welcome it as a means to expect great things again of God and ourselves. Make use of it to believe again that all things are possible no matter how grim the wilderness.

February 14, 2010

Glynn Cardy

Last Sunday of Epiphany

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I was asked in an interview last week what was the job of a priest. I gave a two-word answer: “To pray”. However it is not only the job of a priest, it is the vocation of anyone who calls her or himself Christian. To pray is not primarily a bow-the-head, bend-the-knee, direct-requests-to-the-heavens exercise, but an opening of one’s heart and mind to the music of divinity within, around, and beyond us.

Each year I go on a journey to Lake Waikaremoana. There I listen for a different melody, without the ongoing cacophony of telephones, emails, and people. It feeds my soul. Yet souls are complex things, and in the midst of the city there are also many sustaining and inspiring songs. God is not restricted to quiet places off the beaten track.

The metaphor of journey is commonly used in relation to spirituality. We are often guided in our formative years by parents, peers, or Church, learning one travelling tradition, and then finding it unsatisfactory and leaving it, maybe never to journey again. But many people do travel the way of faith again. Some will travel with companions down a well-known road. Some will travel on a less-known path. Others will leave the known altogether and head out across the fields or over the seas. The paths of faith are many, and not restricted to the maps of the Church.

On the journey beliefs are like cairns: a mound of rocks, marking the path others have followed, bringing travellers to this point. We need to remember the beliefs, the cairns, of the past and learn from them. They are stories that often hold deep truths.

Some people camp around cairns, building churches or theological colleges on the spot. After awhile however, especially when the discussions seem to be about who’s got the biggest cairn or how to make the camp more attractive, many move on. Beliefs are not an end point. 

This is how I understand the text, “Seek ye first the realm of God.” It is encouraging us to go on a journey and not be distracted by our physical and emotional needs, or the dogmas and decisions of the past. Don’t worry about what others will think of you, whether you believe the right things, or have the right friends, but seek first after the music, that symphony of the Spirit, called God… come what may.

Faith is not belief, or having beliefs. Faith is that urge to move on. Faith is about taking the risk of leaving the familiar to journey into the unfamiliar. Faith though is not irrational in the sense that it is unreasonable or folly, though to some it will seem so. Rather faith comes after carefully weighing up of the options, the known verse the unknown, and then taking a step. Those who never step out, never find out.

The journey of prayer has no end point. You don’t find God at the end; or heaven; or even self-fulfilment or contentment. Some say that you find these things along the way. I’m not so sure. They can be quite elusive. There are few guarantees in the spiritual life.

The person that is comfortably camped with a fixed set of beliefs, enjoying the security of certainty, is not to be pitied. When new events or knowledge shake their world they will try hard to incorporate those things within their camp. I envy them in some ways. 

I know for myself, and a number of others, that we have no option but to take leave of the familiar camps and travel on. Not for any reward. Not for any peace of mind. Not for any higher calling. We travel simply because our soul is so drawn to the zephyrs of God that we have no other choice.

Prayer is therefore often characterised by hard and costly work. It is the work of listening, questioning, reading, and delving. It is the work and discipline of self-examination. It is the work of practising, refining, and adjusting – always trying your best. It is the work of being with people when you want to be alone, and being alone when you want to be with people. It’s an uncomfortable vocation.

Back in the days when I was a young priest I was shocked to hear that my vicar had refused to pray for a lady. She had come to him to ask for a prayer, and he’d said no. It felt like he’d breeched the bedrock of pastoral care. The lady certainly thought so.

Sometimes what people ask for is not what we should give them. My vicar had prayed with this woman many times in the past. He became convinced that this prayer was actually a barrier to her spiritual growth, and he now refused to collude. It wasn’t an easy decision for him.

One of the primary tasks of a priest is to help people find their own way into the expanse of God. The priest is simply a fellow traveller, who, like others, is pointing out things of beauty, interest, and challenge along the way. The priest also has the job of encouraging people to get off their posteriors and keep moving.

As Christians we need to be the change we wish to see in the world. We need to acknowledge our privileges and power, and then use both to guide and to lead. It takes courage to work for change. If we never offend people we’ve forgotten our exemplar, that man from Nazareth. We need to listen, to build trust, and to be open to change within ourselves. Change is a journey, and helping change come about is both an art and a prayer. 

There is an episode in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn where Huck is deeply uncertain if he should tell Miss Watson where her runaway slave Jim is located. His uncertainty is magically overcome when he realizes that the ‘plain hand of God’ requires that he turn Jim in. Everything he has learned in Sunday School, everything his mother drummed into him, points in that direction. He writes the letter of betrayal to Miss Watson, feels all clean and pure, and is able to pray. But then he thinks some more, thinks of his love for Jim and the laughter they have had together. He finally tears up the letter, says no to God, and declares, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” [i]

Sometimes in life you come to a chasm. Behind you is all you have known, including God, ‘mother’, and morality. Ahead of you is the unknown seemingly Godless, motherless, and immoral. Then breathing deeply, saying no to fear and yes to courage, you jump... 

My favourite definition of faith is ‘the courage to jump’. The opposite of which is not unbelief but fear. Fear is a reaction to apparently insurmountable challenges. We fear failure. We fear the cost of failure. We fear that too much is being asked of us. The chasm before us is too wide to jump.

Fear is also a natural reaction to circumstances beyond our control. Most of us spend considerable energy stabilizing our lives, rationing our time and resources, and keeping alert to impending crises. Fear can come when a crises looms larger than our ability to cope. We fear that we are not in control, and usually we are right. It is in the moment of crisis when we will decide to give in to fear or to give voice to faith.

Giving in to fear involves a closing down. The hatches are battened and the individual withdraws into what is safe. The so-called ‘security wall’ that the Israeli Government has built to fence itself off from possible Palestinian attacks is a good case in point. The wall pretends to offer security. In fact it does no such thing. It serves merely as an affront, another obstacle on the difficult road to peace.

There is a time to feel fear, to feel its power. There is a time to feel what it is like, to wrestle with it, and understand a little of how it captivates and imprisons so many. But there is also a time to pray, move, and jump. Indeed fear will not be overcome unless someone jumps.

Today I set before you prayer and journey, faith and beliefs, courage, change, and fear. Do not give in to fear. If nothing is ventured, nothing is gained. Fear is corrosive for Christians, both individually and institutionally. Rather, like St Paul who often wrote from prison cells, open your heart and mind to the expanse of God, feel the freedom of it, and then jump into it. 

[i] Adapted from Hamilton, W. A Quest For The Post-Historical Jesus London : SCM, 193, p.15.

February 7, 2010

Glynn Cardy

Epiphany 5

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Baptism literally means ‘to dip’. Nobody really wanted to call this great rite of the Church ‘dipping’ though, and besides to the politicians it sounded like fully immersing someone in water. So the Greek word baptizo was simply appropriated without translation.

There is something about baptism that gets the theological arguments going. In our patch of Anglicana, for example, you can, within some limits, create a Communion liturgy quite distinct from those in the NZ Prayerbook [as we have done]. You can also, within limits, help couples create their own marriage liturgies that often are distinct from anything in the NZ Prayerbook. With funerals there are very few limits – we specialize in accommodating the dead. Yet with baptism we are meant to follow the dictates of the NZ Prayerbook to the letter. Interestingly, very few parishes or priests do. 

A number of church leaders see baptism as entry to the club: the Church club. This is why some want parents to be well informed and committed to the doctrine and discipline of the Church, including regular attendance. This is also why some are sceptical about children being baptised. How can children possibly be committed? And can parents/godparents really be surrogates when it comes to commitment?

In broad terms there are two understandings of Church, ‘gathered’ and ‘comprehensive’, which are at odds with each other. The former sees Church as those who attend, are on the parish roll, and who participate. Like a club you know who is a part of it and who is not. The latter understanding sees Church as those attendees and non-attendees who try, even occasionally, to live the way of love, justice and compassion known in Jesus. I don’t think you have to be clairvoyant to know which understanding of church I have. 

For those of the comprehensive bent, baptism is not so much about entry into an organisation called Church but about celebrating our entry into this whole sacred wide world. The world is not an evil place from which children and others must escape. Rather the world, like the church, is infused with godness. At baptism we acknowledge our immersion into the life and mystery of the sacred all around us. 

Baptism isn’t about erecting boundaries. It’s about God rejecting boundaries. It’s about God’s ‘yes’ to each one of us. God’s ‘yes’ precedes any response to God that we might make. God’s ‘yes’ is the energy, mystery and source of all life embracing us tenderly and lovingly, not because we are special but because everyone is special. 

Baptism is not about proclaiming our commitment so much as proclaiming that the God best known as Love is committed to us – always has been, and always will be. It is not about proclaiming that we love God, but that God loves us. In baptism the child does not so much acquire some new identity or magical blessing from on high. Rather the community simply acknowledges who that child has always been and might potentially become in the embrace of the God called Love.

One of the ongoing tasks of the Church is wrestling with language. Language cannot contain God. God is bigger than words. Words also change in meaning. Some words, important in the past, are no longer real for people in their daily lives – like ‘Saviour’, ‘Lord’ or ‘sin’. Some old words are important enough to re-interpret, but most aren’t. In a baptism liturgy cramming a sentence full of outdated church words might satisfy some theological purist but it is nonsense to many who have to say it. One of our tasks therefore is finding words that make sense, that have meaning, that connect with people’s lives, and encourage them into all that is good and possible.

In the NZ Prayerbook Liturgy Of Baptism, after hearing quoted a passage from the Book of Acts about receiving the promise of the Holy Spirit the parents are asked ‘How do you respond to this promise?’ Their response is prescribed: ‘We hear God’s call and ask for baptism’.

The question is problematic. What is the promise of the Holy Spirit? Come on, you’ve been in Church for years and years, what is it? And what is it in language that makes sense in our day and age?

This idea of telling parents the words they have to say seems, to my mind, to be quite revealing. There is a subliminal institutional message: ‘We want you to think as we tell you to think’. We don’t want to hear anything different or original from you. We don’t want to hear your beliefs; rather we want you to fit into ours.

Then there is this notion of ‘call’. Do you have to feel called by God, however you understand that phrase, in order to bring a child for baptism? Let me be personal. I don’t feel called to go to church, celebrate life, join with others in working for change, go to parties, host parties, or recover from parties... There are lots of things I do because they are a part of who I am. Bringing my children to be baptised is no great existential decision. It is simply a part of who I am.

Second question, [same as the first - little bit longer and a little bit worse] ‘Do you renounce all evil influences and powers that rebel against God?’ Church-think seems to have this historical hang-up about evil. The question sounds innocent enough [1]. But why are we asking questions about evil at a baptism. Why not ask them on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday? This question is a legacy from the days when the Church considered kids to be born evil and baptism supposedly washed out the evil as God poured in the good. 

Third question: ‘Do you trust in Christ’s victory which brings forgiveness, freedom, and life?’ The forgiveness, freedom, and life sound good. What’s this business about ‘victory’? Well, it is military language, and it was applied as one metaphor to understand the death of Jesus. This is all that stuff about some great cosmic battle, Lord Of The Rings style. While it makes for good fantasy, depending on your preferences, it doesn’t connect with the reality of most people today. 

The parents prescribed response to this one question is ‘In faith I turn to Christ, my way, my truth, my life, as I care for this child.’ To be frank this sounds like the writing committee that put together this baptism service had too much piety in their cornflakes that morning. I don’t think there are would be many of us who want to get to our feet and declare Christ as ‘my way, my truth, my life’. What do we mean by ‘way’, ‘truth’, and ‘life’? And who says that to be a committed Christian you have to own a statement like this? And, more importantly, why are we are asking this of parents of children being baptised? It is club-think: requiring parents to recite what some in the church believe as a precondition for their child’s baptism.

I have been offering open questions to baptismal families now for 22 years. Sometimes people put no thought into it, or are too nervous to express their true thoughts. But, time and again, more often than not, I hear wonderful things. Beautiful thoughts. Beautiful poetry. From the heart addressed to all hearts. The wonders of sacred love in people’s lives are magnificent, and it is not to be contained and controlled the Church. The sad thing is that without creating an environment for open questions the Church will never hear it.

The fifth and last question in the approved baptism Prayerbook service is a good one: ‘How then will you care for this child?’ The ‘then’ is unfortunate, as is the set response of ‘I will love this child and share my faith with her/him’. For the question provides the opportunity for parents and godparents to talk about their love and commitment to the child. This is an opportunity to put those deep feelings into words. The words will not be adequate, but they will offer a small window into the passion, power, and promise of parental love.

Knowing oneself to be loved makes the world different, and a world of difference. Being loved for who you are can enable a person to exercise their gifts and abilities more freely and confidently. It is somewhat intangible this thing we call love, and yet it empowers the one loved to give of who they are.

A number of years ago I officiated at a baptism service with a difference. The difference was a paddling pool, 4' x 4', surrounded by native plants, particularly ferns and a young totara. The family had brought all this into the church the day before. It was their idea. I just smiled and said ‘Yes’. When it came time to christen the child, the mother handed me a naked baby whom I sat in the pool and proceeded to baptise by scooping up water onto her head. Whilst this was happening the baby’s older sister, who didn’t want to miss out on the fun decided to strip off and join her sister in the pool. The mother, anticipating this and suitably attired, also got into the pool.

The congregation were deeply moved by the service. The abundant water seemed to symbolize the love of God that the baby entered and splashed in, naked, unashamed and uninhibited. The family too immersed themselves in this love as they paddled with their daughter and sister. The congregation also got a little wet, so say nothing of the floor!

At the conclusion of the service the whole congregation followed the family outside to plant the totara in the church grounds, taking water from the paddling pool to give the totara its first drink in its new home. It was if Love was surrounding and sustaining the planting and growth of something new and powerful.

In the beginning we belong. We belong before we claim that we belong. We belong to our parents and family. We belong to the comprehensive Christian community and to the community at large. Primarily, however, we are a part of that which is transcendent, unfathomable, and mysterious love – that which we call God. This is what can draw us beyond the confines of self-interest. To become who we truly are. To forsake being a bystander and instead plunge into the beauty, misery, and passion of our world.

[1] Although ‘rebel’ infers a cosmology/world view we might not want to own.

January 31, 2010

Clay Nelson

Epiphany 4     
Luke 4:21-30


Video available on YouTube, Facebook

I confess that at times I can be a little competitive. You don’t want to know me in the middle of a hotly contested Scrabble game. It with some embarrassment that I remember, as a kid, resorting to cheating to beat my little sister in Monopoly. While I should be, I am less embarrassed that I never let my children just win at Candyland. They had to beat me. But there are times I know when I am out-gunned and just refuse to play. 

That was my temptation this week when I realized that last week Glynn preached on this week’s Gospel. At first annoyed, I thought of this as an opportunity to have a preach-off with the master, but then I remembered I’d lose. His was an outstanding sermon that I wanted to nail to the front door of St Matthew’s emulating Martin Luther’s “Here I stand” moment. So, I considered being uncharacteristically brief this week and end the sermon here with, “What Glynn said.”

But being out-gunned doesn’t mean not wanting to seek a little vengeance. I contemplated retaliating by preaching on his Gospel for next Sunday and seeing how much he likes it, I harrumphed. 

The problem with vengeance is it is so sweet in contemplation but so sour in execution. I was reminded of this when I read in the paper this week about a church sign that suggested, “Love your enemies, you made them.” Even a little friendly revenge between colleagues could add one more to the list of those who see me as the enemy. After the billboard I probably don’t need anymore. So I decided if I can’t beat him, I might join him. Maybe this Gospel reading can inspire more than one 14-minute sermon, no matter how on point his was?

As those of you who were here or have watched or read the sermon online will remember, Glynn asked how important is unity? His position was “not so much” if Jesus’ sermon to his hometown is any indication. Jesus could have played to the crowd’s delight that a local boy was making the rest of the region sit up and take notice. Instead he preached a sermon that transformed the congregation from a cheering crowd into a lynch mob ready to throw him off one of the cliffs that overlook Nazareth. Glynn argued that Jesus’ message is that unity is only possible as an outcome for a community that seeks social justice for those on the margins. He chastised especially the church for making unity a goal that trumps justice for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender community. I couldn’t agree more and I would co-sign those sentiments. But I would also argue that the church does not need to seek unity we are already united – by original sin.

Some of you may be wondering if you heard me right. We don’t dangle people over hell’s fire as sinful beings at St Matthew’s and we certainly don’t look at babies as contaminated because they were created by S-E-X. But, yes, you heard me right. 

There is a scientific theory that has gained considerable acceptance by anthropologists and other social scientists that humans are born with “Original Sin.” Rene Girard first articulated it. It is called the Mimetic Theory. Mimetic simply refers to the act of imitating. A painter imitates a landscape on canvas with oils. A novelist imitates life on paper with words. But Girard’s theory is that not everything we imitate is benign. We also imitate each other’s desire and the objects of our desire are not desirable because of need, scarcity or intrinsic goodness but because someone else desires them. The advertising world understands this well, using celebrities to model desire for whatever they are trying to sell.

This modeling of desire is found throughout great literature and even in bad movies where two guys compete for the affection of the same woman. The woman is not desirable simply because she is beautiful or charming or brilliant or playing hard to get. She is desirable because someone else wants her.

We see this in the story of the first sin in Genesis. The serpent reinterprets God’s generosity as shown in the bountiful Garden to makes Eve believe that God’s withholding of one tree from the gift of all trees shows that God desires it above all others. So of all the trees there is only one God values according to the serpent, namely the one he won’t give or share. By this means the serpent seduces Eve to imitate God’s desire. It becomes for her the only tree she wants. The original sin the story illuminates is that desire compels Eve’s desire to thwart God’s desire. She turns God, her loving and generous creator, into her rival. When our relationship with the source of our being turns from gratitude to rivalry, we displace God and become our own creator. [i] This results in Eve and her mate’s expulsion from the Garden to a life of hardship.

So Mimetic Desire is competitive and the theory argues that competitiveness often devolves into violence. The desire to possess the object gradually becomes secondary to the desire to best the rival. In Hollywood there is a saying that it is not sufficient for the actor to succeed, their best friend has to fail.

What this theory argues is that this desire that leads to violence is universal. It is the original sin that lives usually in a pre-conscious state in each of us. In that sense we are unified. If this violence were allowed to go unchecked by society we would live in violent chaos. What has evolved is the creation of a culturally sanctioned system of scapegoating. We unify ourselves by expelling from the community the targeted person we blame for all our problems or ironically we kill him to appease the guilt in our own violent souls that we might be innocent. Primitive civilizations resorted to human sacrifice, which evolved to the sacrifice of animals, which evolved to the ritual sacrifice or the “god-who-dies-for-us” once and for all. By this process, violence has been made sacred and defended as a necessary component society. It suppresses individual violence and brings some order.

Jesus was an affront to this understanding of violence and became its target. He had the temerity to tell the hometown folk that the way to manage violence is not by destroying our enemies but by loving them. We might as well. God didn’t make them enemies. We did. God loves them. The corollary to this truth is that God loves us too when we are the enemy. The good people of Nazareth, and eventually the respectable religious and political authorities reject him and his Gospel not just because it is a challenge to the human heart but to the social order itself. It challenged us to recognize that the violent nature we see in our enemies resides in our own hearts. It challenges the prohibitions and purity laws used to contain that impulse and the myth of our own innocence. The study of human nature suggests we are not overwhelmed with gratitude at learning we are no different than our enemies. We treasure our violent nature. It is a violence that blinds us to the divine that also resides in us. Our blindness to that reality allows us to demonize and hate with impunity. It allows us to go to war; to punish and not rehabilitate the criminal; to seclude and restrain the mentally ill; to beat our spouses and children in the name of discipline and order; to perpetuate economic policies that strip people of their dignity and hope; to justify depriving those who do not mirror us from the human rights we enjoy. Lastly, it allows us to scapegoat and sacrifice anyone who carries on Jesus’ Gospel that society and the church have rejected.

It is this last point Glynn and I and anyone who wishes to live out the Gospel must remain aware. To preach Jesus message from within the institution is risky business. For the church rewards and depends upon scapegoating. It has a long history of supporting sacred violence. Battling the infidel during the Crusades and persecuting the heretics during the Inquisition and burning witches until a couple of centuries ago are just a few examples. But it is still true today. It would be naïve to think that we can preach to a marginalised group and name how the institution excludes them without risking expulsion ourselves from the church.

It is also risky because we are human, and united with everyone else in the original sin of mimetic desire that leads to violence. We must call on ourselves, not just the rich and powerful, to become aware of our propensity for violence – a propensity that labels and defines the enemy. If we are confining our criticism only to those outside of our community and not to ourselves inside, we must hear our words for what they are – calls for violence. When we challenge institutional violence and it is an institution of which we are a part, we may become the target of violence. It is not likely we will hear much cheering for our preaching the Gospel but rather calls for our blood will ring out. We also must know that when we do we won’t always be able to escape the lynch mob unnoticed. Sometimes they will find us in Jerusalem.

If we take this journey, we must do so knowing that preaching peace is a blood sport. It is a daily competition in our souls to listen to the “Two Bloods.” The blood of Abel that cries out from the ground for vengeance, and blood of Jesus that whispers to us all, “Peace be unto you.”

[i] http://www.hamerton-kelly.com/talks/Anthropology_of_the_Cross.html

January 24, 2010

Glynn Cardy

Epiphany 3     Luke 4:14-21

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Jesus was a hit. He was the new phenomenon in Galilee, and the locals were proud. Then in Luke 4 he came home to Nazareth and read to them from 2nd Isaiah. Full of expectation the home-town crowd encouraged him to explain the text. They wanted to hear how he would cure their poverty, blindness and oppression.

In v.23ff Jesus doesn’t explain, but just mightily peeves them off. He describes himself as a prophet, like Elijah who though there were many poor in Israel helped only the widow in Sidon, and like Elisha who though there were many lepers in Israel helped only Naaman the Syrian. His audience was enraged. How dare he be a prophet for outcasts and Gentiles but not for them! How dare he assume that those who raised him, who nurtured him in the faith, were not worthy of his ministry! How dare the locus of his ministry be directed towards those who did not obey the God-given laws of religion!

The reading Jesus gave in the synagogue was not offensive – as most of the Bible is not offensive to Christians. It was rather the choice Jesus made about the direction of his ministry that gave offence.

Jesus was not a focus of unity. He was not kind and considerate of everybody. He seemed to favour those that the good Saturday-by-Saturday pious didn’t. He wouldn’t have made a good bishop, and nobody righteous would have elected him.

If Jesus had a PR advisor he could have done the whole preaching in the Nazareth Synagogue thing very differently. He could have begun by saying that God loved everyone – ‘you, me, them’ – and God had chosen people for various tasks. If it had been written by then [which of course it wasn’t] he could have used that Pauline body metaphor of us all belonging to each other. He could have helped them to see that he was their expression, their ambassador of God’s love to others. He could have worked them round so that they could have all affirmed each other and had a nice hug at the end.

Instead he got them offside. Like prophets of the past he wasn’t much of a crowd pleaser. He failed diplomacy school.

I was sent to Anglican diplomacy school in 1982. Yet it was then a school that had recently disregarded the Church’s subservience to unity and had embarked on a different path. 

Some five months before I started the Springbok Rugby team had toured New Zealand and met with fierce opposition. The country was divided, so too the Church. St John’s College, due to the actions of a number of students and staff, was seen as clearly aligned with the anti-apartheid movement. A number were beaten. Threats were made to burn the College down.

In the Church there were those opposed to the tour due to their desire to see the end of apartheid, there were those opposed to the tour due to the divisions it was creating in New Zealand, and there were those supportive of the tour due to their belief in sport being non-political.

While many opposed racist tours, including this Church of St Matthew, I’d be surprised if they were the majority. My guess is that the overwhelming rejection of the Government’s pro-tour stance by the Church was due to the divisions being exposed. The Church has a long history of being opposed to anything that exposes or creates division. Mostly it favours unity before justice.

I therefore arrived at theological college in the aftermath of one of the most visible contentious political protests this country has known. The priority of unity in the Church and nation seemed to have temporarily taken a backseat to justice for blacks in South Africa. It was extraordinary. 

In 1982 Maori land rights was the pertinent issue at the College. There was no Waitangi Tribunal, no legislation that enabled judicial assessment of past injustices back to 1840, and plenty of fear and prejudice. Bastion Point was still very much an alive issue. The settlement with Ngati Whatua O Orakei that we know today, that benefits not only the local iwi but the public of Auckland with a wonderful green space, was a long way off.

The so-called ‘celebrations’ at Waitangi were also a strong point of contention. Each year the Government tried to promulgate the myth that we were all one people whilst ignoring past injustices. Dignitaries gathered, the navy and band were there, and a Church service was held. Each year protesters gathered to refute the Government’s position and many Christians joined these protests.

In 1983 nine Christians were arrested for disrupting the Waitangi Church service. The circumstances seem almost comic today. An Anglican cleric, supportive of the Government and believing in the importance of unity, was primed to lead the outdoor service. Police lined up, shoulder-to-shoulder, down the pews looking for dissidents. Two young people, one of whom was Maori, were escorted out before the service begun on the suspicion that they might have been there to cause trouble. They’d done nothing but sit and pray.

At 3 minutes to the hour a group of six European clerics and laity stood up and began leading the service along the theme of repentance. The flustered Government-approved minister blubbered and directed the police, who led the six away. Later another unapproved cleric got up during the intercessions and offered a non-approved prayer. He too was led away. As were two theological students who had sackcloth under their clothes and sprinkled their heads with ash. I was one of them.

The weeks that followed provided a useful insight into the Church. While official Church statements had promoted justice for Maori, the arrest of the nine brought harsh condemnation from many religious quarters. It was as if the nine had created division in society. We were labeled anarchists, destructive of the unitive fabric of the nation.

Church unity is a by-product of following Jesus. When people work together, pray together, and suffer together for a common vision, then bonds are inevitability built. The vision comes first, then the commitment, and then the actions; a consequence being the building of unity. I suspect it’s similar for a nation.

When bishops, cathedrals, or clergy begin to describe their key task as building unity then alarm bells start to ring. Unity has taken the place of vision, or even worse unity has become the vision. 

Not so long ago a dean told me he wasn’t prepared to offer blessings to gay or lesbian couples because of his cathedral’s role in the unity of the diocese. He wasn’t prepared to act without the agreement of the whole diocese. 

A favourite verse of those who don’t want to do anything offensive is from First Corinthians where Paul talks deprecatingly about causing a brother or sister to stumble [8:13]. A conservative minority can, in this thinking, stall or prevent any change.

Bishop Jack Spong has been one critical of the Church's over-emphasis on unity. He says the priority of unity often supersedes the priority of truth. Truth however can be a fickle thing, and the basis for determining truth controversial. There are Christians, for example, who believe that Biblical truth condemns homosexual relationships as wrong and sinful. Others, such as me, would argue that the Bible is silent on committed relationships of equality between same-sex partners and, further, the Jesus movement was supportive of people and relationships outside of the heterosexual norm. 

Using the Bible as the sole standard for truth is therefore problematic. The wisdom, experience, and reasoning of the community are necessary. Yet still what is truth is not easily arrived at. It usually requires a choice to prioritize one or more values over others. Regarding same-sex relationships, for example, I prioritize the rights of a minority to enter into mutual loving relationships over the dominant tradition within Christianity of disparaging such relationships.

I would submit that to follow in the footsteps of the prophet Jesus one has to make choices, choices that have the strong possibility of putting one offside with the majority. Too often Christian leadership sees itself as maintaining the best of the past, sensitive to the needs of all the people, and being resistant to any change that will alienate support. This is the type of leadership that the institution affirms. It’s said to be caring. It doesn’t offend people. The altar of unity is very seductive. 

There are however a number of Christians and Christian leaders who walk a different, less trod path. They have chosen to turn their back on the vision of unity and instead, knowing their actions will be offensive, stand with the unpopular, the foreign, and the despised. The marginal are prioritized, not the mainstream. Many of the priests and laity of St Matthew’s have trod that path, and I too am proud to try and follow their example.

January 17, 2010

Clay Nelson

Epiphany 2     
John 2:1-11


Video available on YouTube, Facebook

When I was still a “baby” priest, a curate in my first parish near Buffalo, New York, either the Vicar or I did a children’s homily each Sunday. So it must have been the Second Sunday in Epiphany in 1983 when I had to do a homily on the Wedding at Cana. I came up with what I thought was a clever idea. I got two pitchers. One I filled with water and in the second I put cherry Kool-Aid, what Kiwis call Raro, in the bottom. As I told the children the story I poured the water into the second. The clear water turned red. All was going well with lots of “oohs” and “aahs,” but then one little wide-eyed three-year old exclaimed, “Turn it back.” 

What is the difference between my story and the story of Jesus’ first miracle at Cana? Mine really happened. While there may be a metaphor or two to be found in it, it is historically factual. There is no historical truth in John’s account. It is a metaphorical story that John uses superbly in his Gospel to make his theological point. It is an excellent literary device. As a result we don’t have to get tangled up in questions about whether or not Jesus could turn water into wine. It never happened before or since, so it didn’t happen this time either. We don’t even have to worry about where Cana is. On my two trips to Israel I have been shown three places the tour guides swore were Cana. Since it is a mythical place it can be anywhere we want it to be. It can be anywhere transformation occurs. But don’t be distressed. The meaning of the story doesn’t depend on it having happened. It is a signpost saying Jesus was a radical change agent. It does not say following Jesus will mean we will have a cellar full of fine wine.

I don’t think what I’m saying is too shocking. Earlier this year we had another billboard that showed a famous painting of the Wedding at Cana. There was a magnifying glass over it showing the guests sneaking in bottles of wine. The caption was a question, “Gospel Truth?” Couldn’t have been too controversial, no one painted over it or tore it down.

But the metaphorical truth John is telling in his story is that controversial. He is saying that Jesus’ radical call for change, for transformation comes with a warning. It has a direct connection to his crucifixion. John connects Jesus’ first miracle, a miracle of transformation, and his crucifixion with a conversation he has with his mother on both occasions. John uses the phrase “the mother of Jesus” instead of her name on both occasions. And on both occasions Jesus addresses his mum as “woman.” The only difference in the exchange is at the wedding he tells her his hour has not yet come. In the second, he speaks from the cross – his hour has now come.

The story is full of signs and symbols the church has pointed out over the centuries: Jewish water for purification pointing to the sin-cleansing water of baptism; wine for the feast pointing to the communion cup; the marriage pointing to the intimacy of the divine-human relationship (Jesus the bridegroom and the church the bride); the wedding feast pointing to the bountiful nature of God’s reign. It is hard to say if John intended all of this in his metaphor. The nature of metaphorical language is that it often conveys more meaning than the author intended. But it is clear John intended to say that the story of Jesus is about a wedding feast where the wine never runs out.

What did this mean to John? Being a mystic he could not explain without poetic language the nature of the abundant life Jesus would have us live. But a party that never runs out of good wine comes close. What would make up an abundant life besides having a hangover? Looking at Jesus’ life it would seem to include living a life of integrity that is true to the divine image residing within us. It would mean living in the moment where guilt and dread cannot drag us down. It would involve enjoying and appreciating others and treating them with respect. It would be a life lived fearlessly. As I believe fear is the opposite of love. It would be a life where love permeated all our actions.

So the question becomes how do we join in the feast? How do we make the Jesus story our story?

Leo Tolstoy once observed, “everyone one thinks about changing the world, but no one thinks about changing him or herself.” He seems to be suggesting, that where change is concerned people prefer to behave like an ostrich. When we do it might be good to ask, if our head is in the sand, what’s up?

One of my favourite past-times on the internet is reading the comments after news reports and blogs. Some I find amusing, some intelligent, some informative but a lot of the time I see “what’s up.” These are the comments that tell others how to make the world more to the blogger’s liking. They are not offering a vision of a more perfect world for all, but blaming others with disdain for their personal dissatisfaction with the way the world is. There is no suggestion that they might take personal responsibility for making a difference or more importantly, that they are part of the problem. When I read their comments, I ask, what’s up? But it is not just bloggers who do this.

This week in response to the horrible tragedy in Haiti, a televangelist who once ran for president in the US, Pat Robertson, chose to use his popular forum to blame the victims for their tragedy. He said that the people of this island nation, one of the poorest in the world, were being afflicted because their ancestors made a pact with the devil. The supposed pact was made in the late 18th century when the slaves of this French colony rose up against their masters and threw them out. They then established the second oldest democracy in the world. What he was doing was blaming poor, black people so he wouldn’t have to look at himself. A slave revolt is a threat to anyone who holds or desires to hold power. What’s up Pat? Why not use your forum to invite people to contribute to Oxfam or some other agency trying to help? Better yet, why not contribute a significant portion of your millions to helping them? It beat’s making Christianity even harder to swallow than it already is for many.

Of course if I spend my time complaining about the likes of Pat, rather than focusing on how I change myself, I have to ask, what’s up Clay?

For if I want to be part of the transformational story of Jesus, if I want to participate in the feast that he is, I have to look at how I can be part of that story. How can I be more like him, the human face of God?

Let’s look at the Epiphany story up to now for some insight. In John’s prologue we learn that the early church saw Jesus as filled with such grace that he had to be of God. That understanding led to the recognition that the divine is fully a part of all creation. That includes us. Transformation begins in our acceptance of being one with the divine. That doesn’t make us more special than anyone else, for it is true of all of us. But it does unite us with one another. So how we treat others is how we are treating ourselves. When a child grieves for his dead parents in Haiti, it is we who are weeping. Accepting this underlying unity is the RSVP to the invitation to the wedding feast. In an abundant life there is no sense of otherness, only oneness. When we accept this we are transformed. Like Kool Aid we can’t turn back.

Last week at Jesus’ baptism we remembered that what empowered Jesus was not his belief in God but his experience of God. Jesus was open to God’s presence in both the extraordinary and ordinary aspects of life. He expected the unexpected presence of God. In the wilderness or in downtown Jerusalem he knew God is there. At a party with friends or alone in prayer, God is there. When his friends were hailing his feeding of the multitudes or when they had scattered after his arrest, God is there. At sunrise or sunset, God is there. Living an abundant life is being open in a disciplined way to experiencing God’s presence in all things. Once we experience God we are transformed. Like Kool Aid, we can’t turn back.

Once we come to the party we can’t turn back. Next week, we will hear what happened to Jesus after beginning his ministry by preaching in his hometown, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he said, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” I don’t want to be a spoil the ending, but his neighbours weren’t impressed. But he did not turn back. He went on to show us that ultimately transformation leads us to giving ourselves a way to those in need like free flowing wine at a wedding feast. His life assures us that the love within us that we call God will never be depleted.

If we really want the world to reflect the wedding feast, we must become the wine. When we do there is no turning back.

January 10, 2010

Clay Nelson

Epiphany 1     Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Last September on holiday Lynette and I traveled around the American West. It was a time for introducing her to my family, seeing grandchildren, showing her a part of the world she had not seen, and having some relaxing time together. But there was another reason underlying it all. Many of the places where I grew up were near or on the way to seeing family. Having met me at 59 there were a lot of gaps in her knowledge of how I came to be the “me” she knows. Visiting these places spurred memories and stories that I could share with her. While she may have tired after five weeks of walking down my memory lane, she graciously did not show it. Such trips have the same purpose as sharing family photo albums with new friends. They are windows not only into our past but also into who we are now.

It would be nice to have such an album for Jesus. Yes, Matthew and Luke show us baby pictures and Luke has some snaps of a 12 year old Jesus getting side tracked at the Temple and being left behind by his parents, but I know of no respected biblical scholar that believes these are historic photos of Jesus early life. They have been Photoshopped to tell us how the early church understood the unique person of Jesus after his crucifixion. Mark doesn’t even have copies of these early photos, he jumps immediately into his gospel with Jesus’ baptism. Matthew and Luke skip quickly over the 30 years after his birth to his experience with John at the river Jordan. Thirty years is a pretty big gap. 

In truth we have nothing reliable about Jesus before his baptism, which seems perfectly normal to me. No one had any reason to think, “This kid is going to change the world, I better take notes.” Even his baptism was before he had made his mark, but all four gospels speak of it, even though their accounts differ. So even that first portrait has multiple exposures making it more than a little out of focus. However, what they all agree on is that Jesus had a uniquely intimate relationship with God. God was the central reality of his life, not because he believed in God, but because he had experienced the reality of God.

This raises the question of when did it happen? Was he a child, a teen or young adult or was his baptism the first time? Since there is no historical account we won’t ever know, which leaves room for the imagination. Author Christopher Moore took a stab at filling in the gap with his book Lamb: The Gospel according to Biff, Jesus’ Childhood Pal. While extremely funny, I don’t recommend it to anyone who was offended by our billboard. 

The story begins with the narrator, Levi bar Alphaeus, who is called Biff, meeting the Savior as a boy in the streets of Nazareth at the age of six, where the son of God is repeatedly resurrecting a lizard his younger brother keeps smooshing. Joshua (Hebrew for Jesus) and Biff become best pals, a dynamic duo of which Joshua is the earnest and good-hearted half, and Biff, the source of much mirth and more than a little mischief. They are like any other pair of good Nazarene boys – studying the Torah, arguing over who gets to play Moses and who Pharaoh, and occasionally smiting one another in the eye.

The story really picks up when Biff and Joshua leave Nazareth to seek out the three Magi who foretold the coming of the Messiah and were present at Joshua’s birth. In an adventure-filled trip to visit Balthasar, Gaspar, and Melchior, Joshua and Biff travel along the Silk Road to China and later to India and along the way learn the tenets of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism; Joshua also studies yoga, and Biff, who frequently uses his chaste friend as a “chick magnet,” predictably studies the Kama Sutra.

The book is filled with some wonderful wisdom like Biff’s lamenting, “It's hard for me, a Jew, to stay in the moment. Without the past, where is the guilt? And without the future, where is the dread? And without guilt and dread, who am I?" But as much as I would like to think Jesus had a Biff in his life and took an OE to learn more about the world and his place in it, I accept it is only a story full of truth, not a true story. But it is also a story that reminds us that Jesus’ baptism did not just happen out of thin air. A dove from heaven didn’t just magically transform him into the beloved son of God, and give him the necessary gifts for his ministry. There is a prologue to this event.

What some scholars argue is that sometime in his twenties Jesus left Nazareth and journeyed to the wilderness where John the Baptizer was active. His decision suggests a deepening religious passion. Why else would he leave home and family to be with a wilderness prophet?

John was a prominent, larger-than-life kind of guy who even Herod feared. He was anti-establishment and anti-Temple in his views scorning both political and religious leaders. His baptism of repentance was not ritual of remorse for sinfulness as it came to be understood by Christians later. In Judaism at the time repentance meant something else. For John, to repent meant to return, to follow the way of the Lord from exile into the Promised Land. It had a connotation of going beyond the mind you have – going beyond conventional understanding of what life with God is about. [i] 

Clearly Jesus’ time with John was formational. We don’t know how long he followed John or even what kind of relationship they had, but we do know John served him as a teacher and mentor. For Jesus’ later ministry showed the marks of John’s radical views. We also know Jesus regarded him highly, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist.” [ii]

At some point in his time with John, Jesus decided to participate in John’s baptism of repentance. We don’t know what went into that decision. Was it a spur of the moment impulse? Was it carefully considered? What expectations did he have, if any? Did those around him encourage him or was it solely his idea? Was there self-doubt? Like Biff did he suffer guilt about his past? Did he dread the future? Was he suffering any kind of identity crisis? We don’t know what it was like to be him at that moment. We do know that reluctantly or eagerly he waded into the Jordan with many others to see what might come of following in the way of the Lord.

While Mark, Matthew and Luke differ on the details, they agree Jesus had a mystical experience that day that may have been both visual and auditory. He had a God experience that may have given him clarity of vision. It appears that at least part of what was revealed was that his formation period was over; it was time to carry out his calling. 

Since many consider him to have been a mystic it may not have been his first God experience or his last, but it was still surely a surprise. 

In our post-modern world we look a little askance at anyone with the temerity to say they have had a mystical experience of this kind. Some end up being tended to by Lynette, a nurse, in the mental health ward. We are tempted to consider such experiences solely the provenance of the unstable or the fanatical. We are more apt to consider them to be delusions than having any sense of reality. But such experiences I suspect are not all that rare, only under-reported, for obvious reasons. 

The religions of the world are filled with stories of experiences with God or the sacred. Historians of religion, anthropologists, psychologists, and scholars of mysticism have studied them. American psychologist and philosopher William James spoke of such experiences as being the most striking and extraordinary psychological phenomena known. He called them “the unseen.” Abraham Heschel, a famous Jewish theologian of the last century described them as “radical amazement” in which we experience a sacred reality beyond all our categories. Martin Buber, his contemporary, described it as encountering “the You” [with a capital Y] beyond the you and me of our ordinary experience. Psychologist Abraham Maslow named them “peak experiences.” Historian Rudolf Otto called them the tremendous mystery that fills us with awe. Scholar of world religions, Huston Smith described it as another level of “what is” beyond the observable.

Those who study such events believe they fall into two categories: experiences of the sacred as a person or being in another level of reality such as Paul’s experience of Jesus on the road to Damascus and experiences of the sacred as a presence flooding the whole of reality. In the latter everything and everyone is what you would expect them to be. There are no visions or extra beings but everything looks different – wondrous, radiant; glorious.

Whatever one makes of these kinds of experiences and whatever one thinks their implications are, we need to take seriously that they can happen, even to us. They can even be nurtured through various spiritual practices – solitude, fasting, prayer, chanting, drumming, rhythmic movement, contemplative or centred prayer and meditation. Simply meditating on a verse from the Psalms like, “Be still, and know that I am God” (46:10) can surprise us like Jesus was surprised in the Jordan. But there is a risk in such practice – experiencing God.

When we do our life, our being is forever transformed. After his baptism we have lots of photos showing the way Jesus lived, with whom he associated, whom or what he confronted, what he taught. They reveal his compassion, his ethic and his imitation of God. No Photoshopping required. 

We are now in the season of Epiphany, a time of revealing. Its focus is on a divine presence full of surprises about where it can be discovered – from the magi from another land and faith tradition to Gentile converts; from seeing the divine in strangers and enemies to, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, in our own lives. The lesson is if you don’t want to radically change your life, beware of the sacred.

[i] Borg, Marcus. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, Harper One: 1989, p 118.

[ii] Mt 11:11; Lk 7:28; and Q

January 3, 2010

Clay Nelson

Christmas 2     
John 1:1-18

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Today, nine days into Christmas, we finally get the other version of Christmas, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” While it is a little like asking a parent, “who is their favourite child”, if pushed, I would have to say that I prefer John’s mystical version more than Luke and Matthew’s baby in a manger. Yes, it is more abstract and philosophical, but that alone allows more room for the imagination.

There is a French website where its creator has collect classical works of art portraying different parts of the Bible. [i] For Luke and Matthew’s Christmas the site has over 500 works of art. For John’s version there are none. While the portrayals of a baby in a manger are often beautiful and inspiring, it is not unlike going to a movie after reading the book. We can be disappointed when the characters and the world they live in don’t look like they did in our imagination.

With John we are given, in beautiful language, a concept to play with. It is a radical concept. It is the radical notion that the divine was made flesh in the person of Jesus. While Christianity has traditionally seemed to imply this was only true in Jesus, an alternative understanding is that Jesus revealed all of humanity to be the flesh of the divine. How does a painter paint that unless it is a portrait of six billion people?

But language is no less limited than paint on canvass. While words may point the way, they will never put flesh on the mystical. So, I begin this sermon knowing I will fail to capture what it is I wish to impart, for my meaning will be behind the words. So I invite your imagination to carry you to that place.

It is the mystery of grace that has captured my attention. It is John’s words, “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” that challenge me. It isn’t that the language isn’t beautiful, it is. It isn’t its suggestion that through our experience of Jesus we finally got it: We are all one with the divine. We are. My problem with it is the idea of grace. Frankly, I need some grace to deal with grace.

It is one of those theological words that while not as shop worn as “sin,” is still getting a little frayed around the edges. It’s meaning has gotten mushy from over use and multiple uses. For many, or perhaps just me, it has lost a lot of its texture making it hard to sink our teeth into. It also presents some embarrassing challenges for those of a progressive Christian viewpoint. Yet, in spite of that, I am reluctant to let it go, because I know from my own life experience it is real. It may be mystery but it is not supernatural.

Classically grace is an undeserved, unwarranted blessing that we receive from God. It is not a concept without power. Grace was at the root of igniting the Protestant Reformation. Luther rebelled at the notion we could do anything to save ourselves. Only God could save us, not the church or its sacraments; not our good works; nothing but the grace of God. While theologically rooted, it is a word that has adopted secular meanings as well. What could be more secular than MasterCard giving us a “grace” period to pay our Christmas bills? 

Amongst many uses of the word, we hear it most often in two ways in our daily lives: Grace is something we say before a meal in thanks for what we have to eat, although there may be exceptions. When a youngster was chastised by his mum for beginning to eat before grace at his grandparents, he explained that it wasn’t necessary here like at home, “Nana knows how to cook.” In its best sense it takes meal time out of ordinary time and places it into sacred time at least until the kids spill their milk or refuse to eat their veggies. In its worst sense it is gratitude that we won’t hunger while many, many live in abject poverty wondering where their next meal is coming.

Secondly, it is also used to express relief when we encounter the less fortunate. “There but for the grace of God go I” is the phrase we commonly use. My problem with this statement is not the gratitude of having been spared or the compassion it may engender but that it is terrible theology.

I find it hard to believe that there is a god that intentionally breaks into someone’s life to lead them, guide them, or make things happen for them, and so on but not for another person. Is it grace or just dumb luck that someone survives a catastrophe like the tsunami in Samoa. Were those who lived saved by God’s grace? If so, were those who died not in God’s favour? Such theology makes my skin crawl.

Ultimately though, my problem with grace is that there has to be a giver and a receiver. Generally a god in our own image is presumed to be the giver, but who is the giver when our image of God is no longer a person? Where does it come from then? What is the source of grace? I do not presume to know the answer to this mystery. For me, it just is.

While I believe grace is at the heart of Christianity, I would agree with Frederick John Muir that “the experience it names is common to virtually all religious and spiritual tradition.” [ii] However, I would go further to say it is available to all, religious or not.

But what exactly is the nature of the gift. What is it?

Traditional Christianity largely views grace as a private matter captured by the hymn Amazing Grace. It is about an individual’s sinful state and the redemption we receive IF we believe Jesus died for us on the cross. This view understands grace as something for the here after, obtaining eternal life. It is about how we die, not how we live. But the life of John Newton, the slave ship captain who wrote Amazing Grace, gives grace a more here and now understanding.

The myth says that the captain was in a storm and in danger of losing the ship and his life and so in desperation he prayed for help. He, the ship, and the cargo survived the storm and he had a conversion experience that made him see how evil slavery was. That was the myth. The truth appears to be that the good Captain retired from the sea after earning plenty in the slavery business, returned to England, and became a talented preacher and eventually an Anglican priest. He also had a talent for writing hymns and wrote hundreds of them. As time went on, John Newton must have seen the error of his ways and became an ardent opponent of slavery. Out of this understanding, he wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.” While clearly an evangelical with a traditional belief in the saving grace of the cross, his life story suggests that grace is all about being transformed in and for the now, not the life to come. Jesus’ story clearly inspired him but it was not right belief in church doctrine that transformed him. So, what was the grace that could turn a slave captain into an abolitionist?

Theologian Paul Tillich offers this suggestion: "Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life… Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness [and] everything is transformed." [iii]

What I take from Tillich is that the conditions for grace to happen are universal, and so is the “wave of light.” And I agree that if our lives are not transformed we have not experienced grace. Grace is all about transformation. I only take argument with his idea that grace only strikes in the difficult times of our life. Does that mean we don’t need to be or cannot be transformed when our lives are blessed?

I think the problem is when we think of grace as being something that breaks into life, rather than the essence of life itself. It is the mysterious substance behind the Word that was in the beginning, ever present and ever available to us in the world around us, in each other and in ourselves. It is there, ever waiting to transform us. 

But to access it we must not wait for the wave of light, but seek it out constantly in both the ordinary and extraordinary. Ideally it becomes a way of life. And when it shines on us, our task is not to close our eyes. We must fearlessly invite it to enlighten us every moment of every day. If we only wait for when we need it, we may not know how to receive it when we do.

I can’t paint a picture of how we do that anymore than Rembrandt could paint John’s Christmas story. But within our imaginations may we begin to visualize the possibility, allowing it to transform and bless us in the now.

[i] http://www.artbible.net/Jesuschrist_en.html

[ii] Muir, John Frederic. Heretic’s Faith: Vocabulary for Religious Liberals. p 104

[iii] Tillich, Paul. Shaking the Foundations