Sermon March 27, 2011 10am

Today I invite you to join a roaming, a ramble, a journey, as we continue to reflect on  what it means to be “getting ready, getting through, surviving spiritually”.   The journey for this morning’s sermon started out last Monday morning with a newspaper article entitled “Apple turns into the evil empire”[1].  (For those of you not computer-savvy, this ‘Apple’ is not a healthy fruit to keep the doctor away – nor the fruit of Jesus Christ, the apple tree, about which the choir sang, but a colossal $NZ448billion computer empire.)  The article was accompanied by a picture of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people in a huge orderly queue that brought to mind customs queues at Heathrow airport.  But the people in this picture were not jet-lagged weary travellers, but bright-eyed, mostly 30 and 40-somethings in a queue, winding around and around a square in front of a big New York Store on Fifth Avenue.  Wrapped up warmly against the late winter chill – many with take-away coffee in hand – each person in this crowd was there waiting for the store to open, so they could purchase the latest Apple product – the new iPad2. According to the picture headline, these were ‘the converted’ of the Apple Empire, seeking the latest miracle – a ‘guaranteed route to salvation’.  And many of us, with our iPods, iPhones and iPads would identify with these converts – even if we haven’t stood out in the cold to buy the most recent piece of amazing computer technology.  We marvel and delight at these remarkable inventions, with their immediate accessibility to music, film, books, maps and friends – wondering how we ever managed without them.  (Yes, I too am a convert – even as I found the article rather chilling!)  Putting aside for a moment, the so-called evil-empire with its unparalleled powerful and invisible strings controlling and extending much further than one would wish for any one company – putting all that aside, I wonder how we – converts and never-to-become-disciples – how we operate within the climate of this empire, which extends into and shapes much of the reality we live and breathe. 

With this morning’s Harvest Thanksgiving service firmly in my sights, as I read Monday’s newspaper, many questions began to be framed: 

• how do we give thanks for the many harvests in our lives, including technology  – and, who, or what, or how do we thank? 
• how do we protect ourselves from being subverted by the values which drive the empires behind the technology? 
• is the amazing creativity, which we know within this 21^st century, part of the God of the ancients; or
• is God, in general – and Christianity in particular – just too antiquated to even enter the 21^st century conversation? 
• should we confine ourselves to celebrating a harvest of food, i.e. what we imagine an old version of God to have created – once and for all, long-time-ago; or,
• could we wonder how the whole of our lives responds to the ongoing Alluring and Yearning, Infinite and Mysterious Force of Creativity and Love, to which we apply the short-hand name of ‘God’.    

As I pondered these weighty matters, some smaller questions, within the larger picture, began to emerge:

• How do we, as people of faith, hope and love, live within this world of amazing creativity? 
• Can we live thankfully and generously in response to God – i.e. to the Evolving, Fascinating and Mysterious Creative Heart of the Cosmos?
• Are we so alive and responsive to the presence of this God that our way of being is attuned away from self-centredness and greed into spontaneous generosity?  

Questions we all might ponder at any time, but especially on this Harvest Sunday.

Back to the newspaper article, where I began to speculate: how many people standing in that queue, were buying an iPad to give to someone else?  I may be quite wrong, but I imagined there wouldn’t be many; although quite a number might in the days to come, be generous in a ‘left-over-generosity’ kind of way - passing on their old iPad1 or net-book, now that these older types had been superseded.  But, I couldn’t imagine me queuing and buying for someone else – unless it was a very special person in my life.  I’d be wanting the new one for myself.  All those countless dollars applied to consumerist advertising have done their work well on me.  In fact, the more I’m encouraged to think about it, the more I find myself convinced that my happiness depends on it – that I deserve the latest and the best.  So much for celebrating spontaneous generosity.

Somehow giving away that which is not needed, may well be appreciated by the receiver, but, I mused, does it sit with what we understand to be Jesus’ teaching.  The generosity of the widow’s mite, the paying back four times what is owed, the giving of your shirt to the one who takes your coat, seem to say something more - calling us away from the values of so-called evil empires into something different – a whole different way of being.   

As I continued to reflect on the newspaper article, I wondered, have 21^st century people forgotten how to be generous?  And the answer is a resounding ‘no’ – the ongoing outpouring of money and gifts in the aftermath of recent disasters is clear evidence that we have not forgotten.  However, I continued to muse, is the present generosity some form of latent Christianity, which we might join – or, do those of us who follow the Christian Way, still need a different focus and perspective?

My musings continued into a week filled with experiences of what I continued to recognise as forms of well-intentioned, not to be despised, but perhaps not particularly Christian exercises of ‘left-over-generosity’:

• A radio interview of a little girl in Christchurch who was thinking of giving her dolls house to a friend who’d lost her mother in the recent earthquake – “I don’t play with it any more”, the little girl explained.
• Loose change that found its way into various counter-boxes in cafes and stores – all labelled ‘for Christchurch’
• The restaurant urged diners to give tips, which would be matched in gifts for Christchurch.

And so to the supermarket, where I buy for harvest festival, reluctantly recognising that even there, left-over generosity is at play, as I balance how much to buy for ‘us’ and how much for ‘them’.

Bringing me to a realisation that most of my life – and I imagine yours too – operates with a well-engrained scarcity mentality; focussed on self and those closest to me above all else; nurtured by consumer values; fearing the rainy day that might come, when we might not have enough; reluctant and resistant to true generosity. 

And there, in the supermarket, I hear afresh the words of Jesus, as understood by the one called John – words which summon us on our faith journey:  “I have food to eat that you do not know about.  My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to complete God’s work.”

Doing the will of God – completing God’s work – bringing about God’s alternative empire, or kin-dom – bringing hope, healing and wholeness for all doesn’t quite tally with left-over generosity.  Ghandi’s reminder continues to be a challenge to try to live by: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every one’s need, but not every one’s greed”

The words of the hymn we have just sung come to mind: “God, shake us with the force of love, to rouse us from our dreadful sleep; remove our hearts of stone, and give new hearts of flesh, to break and weep for all your children in distress and dying for the wealth we keep.  Help us prevent, while we have time, the blighted harvest greed must reap.” (Alan Gaunt)

My friends, perhaps it’s time for us to become new converts - to a new spirituality; a new sense of perspective, where gratitude becomes the key framework and generosity the natural outflow.  Perhaps it’s time to plug into the spirituality of abundant sufficiency, where enough is enough and abundant giving is our default position.  Perhaps this Lent, now is time for us to re-synch our iPads, our iPods our iPhones and even our very I-selves – to another computer – direct to the Main Server – that which we call God. 

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[1] “World Focus” Otago Daily Times March 21-27, 2011, p.5

Sermon 20 March 2011 10am

"Go. Live. Become." It’s the title of a movie – and could be the title of this morning’s readings – from both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel. It could also be the title of early Dunedin’s Pakeha settlers, who packed up and set off to this, the other side of the world. “Go. Live. Become”.

The movie is set in Sudan, in the mid 1980s, in a crowded refugee camp. We’ve all seen pictures of people in such situations – camps where there is not enough food, not enough water, not enough medicine, no apparent way out for countless displaced people; people and hope fading away into death. It’s out of this situation that Israel has decided to rescue thousands of starving and persecuted Ethiopian Jews. The camera zooms in on a nine-year-old boy’s mother – a Christian – watching a Jewish woman’s son die in his mother’s arms. Within the tragedy of the Jewish woman, the Christian woman recognises her one and only opportunity to save her own sole surviving child. The camera shot shifts from the graveside agony of the Jewish mother, to the Christian mother waking her son from a deep sleep, urging him to join a surrogate mother on the plane that will take them to Israel to commence a completely different life in a new society and, for the boy, a new religion. As she pushes her son towards his new life, his mother urges him to: "Go. Live. Become." Tears fill his eyes for he does not understand why she wants him to leave her side. But he obeys and begins a journey that will take him to faraway places and experiences beyond the day-by-day survival he's known at the refugee camp. [1]

“Thrust into an alien culture and religious traditions in Israel that are not his own, the shellshocked boy, renamed Schlomo, at first rebels against his circumstances” [2] but, gradually – and not without his fair share of difficulty – he finds a place to be – eventually discovering himself in ways he never could have imagined. As one film reviewer puts it, “through the ennobling saga of Schlomo's frequently sabotaged efforts to fit in. .... [we follow] a vivid story of a spiritually stateless character who survives his confusion by exceeding everyone's expectations.[3]

Schlomo’s story is repeated over and over again in many different forms and in many different places. Perhaps not always writ so large – although every bit as dramatic for survivors of recent earthquakes and tsunami – we all, at some time in our lives, have sharply shifting, dislocating experiences. Buildings, ideas, people: what we thought was familiar, what we understood as ‘home’ is, for one reason or another, no longer true. This is the experience of countless people in Christchurch and Japan, where piles of rubble now mark where once there was sanctuary, society and security. But the story of a loss of home and certainty is not only the story of people in Christchurch and Japan. The empty, yearning, aching that remains once ‘home’ has been swept or shaken away, is also known in different forms and experiences. Most of us will find similar patterns, if we look deeply into our own hearts. For those of us journeying through the last decades of our lives, we experience the dislocating shift as we come to recognise our own mortality – an acknowledgement that we will not remain at home for ever in what are our increasingly failing bodies. For those of us journeying through mid-life, some crisis, more often than not, has shown us that the way we have been, is not - and cannot be - the way we will continue. Sometimes small shifts – other times seismic – these changes happen throughout our lives - as we leave the parental home - as our bodies change, mature and let us down - as jobs and relationships end, as friends betray us.

I wonder if Nicodemus was at one of those dislocating points in his life journey. What was it that led him to seek Jesus out, under cover of darkness – at night? Had he reached a point where he needed a new direction, a new guidance in his search for meaning? In hearing this story, it helps to understand that the Gospel of John is laden with theological allusion: the Light of the World approached by one in darkness; the Word of God illuminating the Good News with double meanings; the Living Water quenching an aching thirst. “No-one” Jesus points out to Nicodemus, can see the kin-dom of God unless they are born again - unless they begin again, setting out on a new journey. “Don’t be astonished about this” says Jesus - you’ve got to start again. And don’t expect any certainty about where that journey will take you – yes, it will take you out of the night-time of your fear – but it won’t take you necessarily where you expect to go. “The wind blows where it chooses – you hear the sound of it – but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes.” That’s what it means to be a person of God. We don’t know for sure whether Nicodemus took up that invitation to go into the unknown, allowing the spirit of God to blow him – not where he chose to go, but where the spirit chose. But that’s what it means to walk this journey with Jesus – entering boldly into God’s unknown.

And when the road runs out – when the signposts end – when we come to the edge of today[4], the most natural thing in the world is to try and cling to what has been – but that might not be the life-giving choice for us. Like Schlomo, we cannot believe there could be anything more safe, more home-like than that which has been wrenched from us. Grief for the loss and fear of the unknown grips and paralyses us. The map has been destroyed, we no longer know the way. How could we possibly survive this trauma? How could we get through? Letting God’s spirit blow us where the spirit chooses, is truly an act of faith.

Like Schlomo, “Abraham left all that was familiar — all custom and comfort, family and friends, all the regularity and rhythm of his life. The only thing he would retain of [his old home] was the power of memory. He journeyed from present clarity into a future of profound ignorance. Abraham journeyed from what he had to what he did not have, from the known to the unknown, from everything that was familiar to all things strange.”[5]

Like Abraham, Schlomo set out in faith – holding to his mother’s fierce command. Not particularly knowing where he was going – far from clear even as to why he was going, only clear that he had been sent. “Go, live, become” Schlomo’s mother commanded him. “Go, from your country and your family and your parent’s house” Abraham’s God commanded, “and I will bless you and you will be a blessing.”

Go, live and become.




[1] Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, “Live and Become” Film Review http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/films/films.php?id=17812


[2] Tom Keogh http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/movies/2004310517_live28.html


[3] Tom Keogh http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/movies/2004310517_live28.html


[4] Colin Gibson “Where the road runs out”


[5] http://www.journeywithjesus.net/

No Sermon for 13 March 10am - a short comment

As we step into Lent, we take a step back in the Gospel of Matthew – thirteen chapters away from last Sunday’s reading of the Transfiguration.  Whether our journey to this reading of Jesus’ temptations is liturgically – from the Transfiguration – or sequentially in the Gospel, after his Baptism – in both cases, these temptations follow an awe-filled moment of revelation. However we approach it, this Lenten journey, begins immediately after  Jesus’ encounter with the Holy Other, who names him as a chosen one and dearly beloved. 

This is no out-of-this world blissful, spiritual encounter, separated from the realities of life.  Somehow, Jesus seems to have understood the implications of what it means to be God’s dearly beloved – implications we, on the other side of Easter - know only too well.

It’s enough to make anyone run away – anywhere – even into the harsh wilderness.

It’s in this reading that we, with Jesus, encounter our deepest fears.  It’s here where our faith is tested most.  It’s here we are reminded that the One in whom we live and move and have our being – the One whom the psalmist assures us is our shelter and hiding place – does not seal us up in a protective bubble preserving us from the horror of earthquake, tsunami and the harsh rule of military junta. It’s here in the story of Jesus’ temptations, we discover that the One who loves us completely and unconditionally, is found at the heart of every human pain and challenge.  Here we remember there’s no simple fix to feeding hunger, no easy way to prevent personal injury, no quick cure to abuses of power – survival depends on worshipping and serving God.     Here we learn our calling to live that love in risky places and perilous ways – places where Jesus has walked and where we will follow.

The Gospel Reading:   Matthew 4:1-11
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.
The tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread."
But he answered, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"
Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'"
Jesus said to him, "Again it is written, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me."
Jesus said to him, "Away with you, Satan! for it is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'"
Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

            This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ:

Praise to Christ the Word.

Hymn “Do not retreat into your private world”

Words: Kathy Galloway[1] Tune: Sursum Corda CH3 458

So let’s not retreat into our private worlds.  Let’s step out into the “rage of life” and “dance within the storm.” 

The Council has agreed that our international partnership project commitment this year will be with the Presbyterian Church of Myanmar - a place experiencing more than its fair share of the storm.    We welcome today, Angela Norton, from Botany Downs Church, who, on behalf of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand is coordinating the partnership project with the Presbyterian Church of Myanmar.

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[1] “Love Burning Deep” Kathy Galloway SPCK 1993.

Sermon 6 March 2011 10am Transfiguration

Amy Frykholm has written a reflection for Today – Transfiguration Sunday.  Entitled “Illuminating the Ordinary”, she writes about a poem by Christian Wiman.  “Wiman, begins the poem in a reduced state, a state in which he is unable to believe in anything, except what he calls the “truth of grieving.”   [This is a man] who has described coming to Christianity as “color slowly aching into things, the world becoming brilliantly, abradingly alive,”   [But he’s not there at the beginning of this poem. Here he grief overwhelms.  Here he acknowledges himself stuck inside the truth of grieving.  This is what] is ordinary for him, an old habit....   Looking out his window, he sees something that at first appears impossible: “a tree inside a tree/rise kaleidoscopically,” as if leaves hidden inside the seemingly barren tree had suddenly taken flight. He feels, in a moment, like he is seeing the spirit of the tree, like he can see beyond it. “Of course,” he writes, he knows the tree is just a tree, and that the “leaves” are birds suddenly taking flight.

“And yet” Frykholm writes, “the event changes his perception. The ordinary world is fuller, more real, endowed with some “excess/of life.” [Wiman] understands that he is participating in the creation of this image, that his mind has helped to create a transfigured understanding. But he resists the idea that this is a sufficient explanation for what he has seen. Instead, he says, the life perceived through the tree and birds is larger than he is and is connected to the holy. When he recognizes this series of connections, he experiences joy. His perspective has shifted — the limits with which he begins the poem have become something else entirely.” [1]

“From a window”

by Christian Wiman[2].

Incurable and unbelieving

In any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree

Rise kaleidoscopically

As if the leaves had livelier ghosts.

I pressed my face as close

To the pane as I could get

To watch that fitful, fluent spirit

That seemed a single being undefined

Or countless beings of one mind

Haul its strange cohesion

Beyond the limits of my vision

Over the house heavenwards.

Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood

Exactly as it had and would

(But why should it seem fuller now?)

And though a man’s mind might endow

Even a tree with some excess

Of life to which a man seems witness,

That life is not the life of men.

And that is where the joy came in.

Wiman’s poem resonates with a message I received this week from Geoff King, minister of Knox Church, Christchurch.  After what must have been one of the most stressful weeks Geoff has experienced, he describes how he was out walking with his dog, wondering what to say to his homeless congregation as they join with others today in another church building – one not blown apart by the quaking, shaking earth.  Geoff writes:

The birds were back this morning.

I could hear one or two of them singing

As silt-laden wind chased the dog and me around our broken streets.

The birds were back, and with them the song of something other than sirens

Or the low-pitched rumble of an earthquake,

Or the terrified screams of fleeing lunchtime shoppers

Or the muffled sobs of brave and bewildered men, women and children

Trying unsuccessfully to fight back tears.

The birds were back,

and as the sun strove vainly to pierce the swirling cloud of pulverised masonry and liquefaction

their song sounded

a

bit

like

hope.[3]

‘Colour – slowly aching into things’ ... a bit like hope ...a transfiguration ... a shifting of perspective, a moment when hearts and minds, eyes and ears are invited – perhaps even challenged to see beyond, into what is, from a different viewpoint, quite unbelievable:  the Holy Presence – the mysterious Life Force of the cosmos: the Transfiguration of Jesus – the transfiguration we experience in our everyday lives, reminding us that joy can be experienced – even from ‘the truth of grieving”; that hope does come again. 

In our present age saturated with information technology, exploding with scientific discovery, we are reminded again and again how new possibilities continually blossom – springing out of ignorance, darkness, hopelessness – bringing light.  We are surrounded by epiphany-aha, moments, where light bursts through, changing our lives forever.   Mountain tops aren’t the only places from which new viewpoints can arise – but within our faith tradition, they have come to symbolise those peak experiences of enlightenment.  It is from such accounts, and our own life experiences, that we draw meaning for our faith journeys.

Many of these experiences go way beyond our limited ability to explain with words – we resort to poetry, music, the arts to describe that which cannot be encapsulated. This morning’s gospel is an attempt to describe the indescribable.  Remember, as with all the Gospel, this account was written as an attempt to explain the unexplainable – an attempt to describe the joy, possibility and transformation that Jesus brought into an aching world: a story of wild hope and astounding love – that flourished – even after cruel betrayal, torture and murder.  In looking back, post crucifixion, post resurrection, post Pentecost, Jesus’ disciples remember those mountain-top indescribable experiences they had with him, which transformed their lives forever.  But, we must never forget, that the understanding of this transfiguring power emerges out of deep pain.  It is no coincidence that, as the gospel writers put their story together, this transfiguration account is bookended with Jesus’ deeply distressing reminders to his friends that he will suffer and die.   

Today, the church celebrates the Transfiguration of Jesus to remind us of how God continually breaks into our lives.  Over the last few weeks, through the season of Epiphany, we’ve tried to heighten our awareness:  with the increasing light of candles, we’ve symbolised how the choices we make can make a difference to the way in which Christ’s light breaks into the world.  With each choice for Christ’s way – over against the ways of self-serving greed – we continue to embody – to incarnate – the enlightening, flourishing and transforming, kin-dom of God.

Today, on this transition Sunday between Epiphany and Lent, we find a marker, a sign-post on our journey with Jesus.  With the disciples we open our eyes, our ears and our hearts, to see Jesus and the ancestors of our faith – to hear the voice of God – reminding us of faith, hope and love – even on the toughest of journeys.  This is not the place to stop – it’s a marker that reminds and sends us on.  Like the memorial cairn being built on the communion table in the chapel, we have reached a boundary point where we remember what has happened and now know that life can never be the same.  And so, down the mountain we will go, into Lent, carrying hope in our hearts - even in the midst of brokenness, heart-ache and deep pain -  knowing that if we should open our eyes we will see “color [is] slowly aching into things, the world becoming brilliantly, abradingly alive”.

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[1] “Illuminating the Ordinary: Transfiguration Day” Amy Frykholm http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs

[2]  From Christian Wiman, Every Riven Thing (2010), http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/09/17/poetry-reading-by-christian-wiman/

[3] “Beyond the cordon” Email communication from Rev. Dr. Geoff King, Knox Church Christchurch, to electronic groups NZPres and NewThing, March 2, 2011.