A sermon for "Reign of Christ/Christ the King" Sunday

Readings: Revelation 1:4b-5a, 7-8; John 18:33-38a

Just as some of us were surprised last Sunday by being asked to sing an Easter Day hymn in November, we might be surprised again today to hear a Gospel reading focussing on Jesus’ trial before his crucifixion.   (Some of you might be wondering whether your aging minister is losing the plot ... has she forgotten the calendar is racing towards December?  Has she not heard the Christmas music playing in the Meridian; has she not seen Christmas decorations going up around the city? Hasn’t she been aware of shops counting days down towards Christmas for the last two months?  Hasn’t she seen how Easter eggs and bunnies have been replaced with chocolate elves and santas!) 

Of course, some of you won’t have been surprised – either last week or this.  Some of us have become familiar with the long established patterns of liturgy within the church.  We know that at the heart of every Sunday service is an Easter celebration of hope and love overcoming brokenness and vulnerability.  We know that on this last Sunday before Advent, Jesus’ reign as King is celebrated. We know the lectionary, which sets down the readings for each Sunday, offers a window into this “Reign of Christ” Sunday ...and the choice of Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus as King is most appropriate.

   

This surprise we may (or may not) have had, provides a useful reminder of the dissonance which rings through our worship today – and most Sundays.  The Reign of Christ Sunday is a day of unsettling paradox.  This is a day to remind us that just when we think we have our image of Jesus clear, settled and right, it becomes disturbed, uncomfortable and challenging.

“Delores Williams, wise theologian and teacher ... grew up in the South[ern States of America].  [She] remembers Sunday morning [worship] when the minister shouted out: “Who is Jesus?” The choir responded in voices loud and strong: “King of kings and Lord Almighty!” Then, little Miss Huff, in a voice so fragile and soft you could hardly hear, would sing her own answer, “Poor little Mary’s boy.” Back and forth they sang – KING OF KINGS…Poor little Mary’s boy. Delores said, “It was the Black church doing theology.” The answer to the question: Who is Jesus? Cannot be “King of Kings” without seeing “poor little Mary’s boy.”

In her reflection for this Sunday, Barbara Lundblad[1] picks up on the dissonance in these two songs (not unlike the many dissonances we have experienced in our music this morning with images of majestic king intermingling with those of the One who transforms life through love, non-violence and service.)   “The images clash” writes Lundblad.    “One is big and powerful, the other small and poor. Christ the King Sunday is a dissonant day. Some congregations have changed the name to Reign of Christ Sunday to avoid the male image of “king.” But that doesn’t make much difference if we forget that Jesus is “poor little Mary’s boy.””

Those of us, brought up on the old Apostles Creed, will remember how the ancient church placed Mary and Pilate alongside each other – “almost in the same breath”:  ‘I believe in ... Jesus, born of Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate.’  Perhaps this juxtaposition might help as we consider this theme of Christ as King, using John, the Gospel writer’s rich theological text as our window and framework.  Standing with John, on the other side of Easter, we contemplate this one we call King of Kings, this one whom we claim has “changed the world’s direction – and can change the human heart.”[2]

John’s description of Jesus’ trial before Pilate is much richer and more developed than Matthew, Mark and Luke’s portrayals.  John provides a full stage drama with seven scenes shaped around Pilate moving in and out of his headquarters as he deals with a political nightmare – running back and forth from inside the Beehive to outside into the media scrum in the corridors – from interrogation to appeasement.   In Scene 1, religious leaders and political leaders debate: under whose jurisdiction will Jesus be tried.  In Scene 2, this morning’s reading, Pilate has drawn the short straw, and so his interrogation commences.  For Pilate, Jesus’ kingship is political – he’s dealing with a possible act of treason against the power of Rome.  “He needs to know who this Jesus is, because “king” is a political term, and Pilate is a political person...“Are you the king of the Jews?” If so, you’re guilty of treason because the emperor in Rome is the king of everyone everywhere, [whether you like it or not – and that includes all of you] Jews, [including you Jesus].”

Already handcuffed and beaten, handed over as a criminal to the state by his own religious leaders who will soon shout loyally “We have no king but the emperor!” this man, whom Christians declare is King, seems more closely allied to a terrorist than a ruler.  “Poor little Mary’s boy”– the Mary whose song is about bringing the powerful down from their thrones, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. (Luke 1:52-53) The dissonance resounds through the ages.  

For Gospel writer, John, Jesus’ kingship is a theological category that redefines the world’s understanding of power.  “So you are a king?” asks Pilate.  “You say I’m a king,” Jesus replies.  “I was born for this, and for this I came into the world, to show the truth.”

And we, like Pilate may well ask: What is truth – “a question left hanging in the air.”

“Was [Pilate] being sarcastic or was he searching for answers nobody else had given him? The answer [confounds, in being neither] philosophical proof nor creedal proposition. Truth was the person standing in silence before Pilate.

[Perhaps unsurprisingly], John’s gospel began with claims that shocked the philosophers. “In the beginning was the Word,” [this Gospel begins], “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The philosophers nodded their heads and pulled their chairs closer to listen. They knew this Word. It was logos in Greek. This was the cosmic, eternal prime-mover, beyond time and space. This was logic they could understand and affirm [....] but they weren’t prepared for the next part: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us…full of grace and truth” (John 1: 14).

“No, that couldn’t be! Eternal Word clashed with earthly flesh. [The jarring] dissonance [found] in the beginning [features again near the end of the Gospel].The truth is a person, the Word made flesh. This Word [this Source of all that is,] living, dwelling with us – literally, “pitching his tent” among people of earth.”

And just as those philosophers are stopped in their tracks, so might we be as we consider what it means to follow this paradoxical king with his challenging, alternative approach to life.  Our desire to be top dog, our tendency to seek revenge, our refusal to offer forgiveness, our sense of entitlement, all sit much more easily with the kind of king we would like Jesus to be – a king made in our image.  King of Kings and Lord of Lords – that’s much easier to affirm – Hallelujah!

Theologian Carter Heywood reminds us that God is likely to meet us often in images [with which we are not so comfortable – images] associated with children, poor women, women [of colour], lesbian women, battered women, bleeding women.... Dark images. Like Mary's poor little boy,” Carter writes, “God is seldom welcome in reputable places. The story is not a nice one. Good theology is not respectable.^[3]

Today, Jesus the king, poor little Mary’s boy, is found offering shelter to victims of violence and abuse – he’s there in women’s refuges, binding up the broken hearted.  Today, he has pitched his tent with the many people of Haiti who nearly three years after the devastating earthquake still do not have homes in which to live.  Jesus the king, stands handcuffed before the Syrian authorities, declared a terrorist in his home county.  Jesus the king is the baby born and bombed in Gaza and Jerusalem. 

If we are truly to be his disciples, we will go into these places with him ... with our prayers, with our wealth, with our politics, and with the choices we make in our daily lives, pitching our tents with the strange and counter-cultural king...even – and especially – as we end this liturgical year and commence our journey towards Christmas – a journey that to be authentic must not – and cannot – lose sight of the Easter story with all its dissonance – its pain and its joy and, at the heart of which, is a poor little Mary’s boy- king whose extraordinary ways transform the world.

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[1] This sermon quotes from and relies on the ideas in A Different Kind of King: John 18:33-37 Barbara K. Lundblad http://odysseynetworks.org/news/onscripture-the-bible-john-18-33-37

[2] Shirley Murray “Christ has changed the world’s direction” Hope is our Song NZHBT

[3] Carter Heyward “The power of God-with-us” http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=440

A sermon for 18 November

Readings 1 Samuel 1:4-11, 20; Mark 13:1-8

 ‘Here is our hope’, we sang this morning – ‘in the mystery of suffering is the heart beat of Love.’  Hannah’s story is an example, of that hope from within the Jewish faith tradition. 

As we turn to hear a word from the Christian tradition, a word of warning:

Many people have used this morning’s Gospel reading as a way of talking about the signs of the end of the world (in my opinion, neither helpful nor hopeful – but rather an irresponsible way – of listening for God’s word of life for today).

So, I invite you this morning to hear it differently – to place this text in conversation with our own context, and within this morning’s theme of finding hope even in the midst of suffering.

We might, for instance, place the opening verses within the context of Deacons’ Court meetings, where we struggle with the very serious and difficult questions about how we continue to maintain our beautiful, but incredibly and increasingly expensive buildings.  You might imagine Jesus present at those meetings – and joining the Deacons, as they go outside into the carpark, and before returning home, pause to gaze up at the floodlit spire.  “Look Teacher”, we might say, “what large stones and what a large building!”

And we listen for the Teacher’s word of hope – and it doesn’t sound very hopeful.

Buildings will be destroyed.  World leaders will deceive people – promising theirs is the way of the future, when we know they bring no real hope for the world. 

We listen for a word of hope, in the midst of present realities of war, famine and earthquake throughout the world…

And it all seems quite hopeless – unless we listen for - and cooperate with – that heartbeat of love found in the midst of the suffering.  If we listen carefully, we will hear Jesus’ reminder that suffering and destruction are real, but they do not have the last word; new life can and does emerge out of anguish.  It may not be the life we are expecting; it does not in any way discount the pain; but we can attest to its truth that new life does come out of suffering.  We see this demonstrated most clearly, day after day, in the Queen Mary maternity ward just down the road. 

Yes, the Teacher says, the contractions have started, there’s no getting out of this … the pulse of new life is upon us. We listen to the Gospel....

Writing to the Church in Rome, speaking out of his own personal suffering, the Apostle Paul could also be talking about our present 21^st century situation. 

“At the present moment all creation is struggling as though in the pangs of childbirth.  And that struggling creation includes even those of us who have had a taste of the spirit.  We peer into the future with our limited vision, unable to see all that we are destined to be, yet believing because of a hope we carry so deep within.”[1]

In reflecting on this letter of Paul, Marina Wiederkehr[2] writes about her own personal experience of being born. 

“My own birth into this world”, she writes, “began with a proclamation of death.  I was proclaimed dead ... set aside as not living. The nurse, I am told, took me, worked with me, believed in the spark of life in me.  She convinced me I could breathe.

Meditating on this story, I am filled with a mixture of anger, tenderness, gratitude, and hope.  How easy it would be to throw someone away right in the middle of their birth.  I speak not only of that first birth, but of the many ways we are born each day.

Our vision is limited. We need so desperately to learn how to hope more completely in all those little bits of life scattered through our days.  We need to be so very careful lest we throw someone away because of our lack of hope in their potential, their possibility to be.  We need to believe in that mystery within, even when the mystery seems so pale and small we can hardly call it by its true name, life....”

Wiederkehr offers a reflection, which she offers as an encouragement into hope. 

“There was a day in July

many mornings ago

(7.15 A.M. to be exact)

when my hope was so small,

I didn't know I was alive. 

The doctor placed me aside

and announced the sad news of my death

right in the middle of my birth.

But God was good

and gave someone enough hope

to believe in me. 

She leaned forward,

believing in darkness

what some folks refused to believe

in the light.

She believed in me;

and she held me as though

the stirring of the eternal

had just begun, 

as though the mystery within

was just being born.

And the joy of it is:

She was right!

Because of her hope in me

I live!

And ever since the day in July

the mystery within me has grown. 

The eternal within keeps stirring anew

like a fountain of living water

like a spring that never runs dry.

Could it be true

that some folks die

because our hope is too small

to bring them forth?

It is good to remember:

We do not give birth to ourselves. 

We give birth to others

by believing in that first, small spark of life

the spark we can barely see.

It is called hope. 

It is immensely helpful

at birth.”

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[1] Romans 8:22-25, paraphrased

[2] Marina Wiederkehr Seasons of the Heart 1991 p.42-44

A sermon for Remembrance Day

Readings: Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17; Mark 12:38-44

Today is a day of remembrance – a day when a significant portion of the Western World remembers the signing of the Armistice, which led to the end of what we call now the First World War.  Sadly, peace did not last long; another Great War was to follow in what has since been described as “the most war-torn and destructive century in human history”. 

Remembrance Day – a day of memory.  And yet, memories are such strange things – so necessary for self-understanding, so very flexible and sometimes quite fickle.

“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that” writes Virginia Woolf in her novel Orlando. “Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no [one] need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.”[1]

Depending on where we stand and what our life experience has been, the seamstress can take us in so many directions.  On this Remembrance Day, our first thoughts might fly towards those who made what has been termed ‘the supreme sacrifice’.  Rolls of Honour, such as those found in our church entry porch, monuments standing in cities and small towns throughout our country, all call us to remember young men and women who put their lives on the line in the name of a grand expectation; and whose individual deaths broke hearts and destroyed hope for so many families.  Bobbing and dipping memories will take some of us along the paths of strengthening patriotism, the shared cause, the tight comradeship found amongst those who fought side by side in the trenches; we might regard the courage and cowardice of those dark days.  Some of us will bring to mind those who fought bravely and well; some of us will weep for the horrendous loss of what could have been; some will bring to mind the abuse and suffering of people considered ‘collateral damage’ or of the maligned conscientious objectors.  We each bring memories, sometimes contradictory, but none the less providing us with raw material with which we might come to understand ourselves better. 

For memories are not just about dwelling in the past.  They have the potential to restore – or to destroy – the future.    “They [can provide us with] links with the future, [as] our way of learning the lessons from the past in order to guide us in our living in the present.  Memories [can be] the source of our hopes and vision of a better world for our children and our children’s children.”[2]  But, it’s not guaranteed they will lead us in positive directions.  It’s possible for our dipping and flaunting recollections to drive us – and thus the world – towards hatred, revenge, and more war.

Is it possible to take these disconnected fragments of our lives to enable positive transformation – or must we leave them tossed about in the gales of life?

Some of you may have read in the newspaper last week about Nicholas Day’s research on memories from infancy.  He suggests “the average earliest ‘fragmented and lonely’ memory, ...goes back to around age 3....What interests Day in particular is what makes the first memories stick and he believes it’s actually more to do with parents than the maturity of neural pathways.  Children with the earliest memories have parents who talk a lot to them about past events.  They narrate these events, ask questions about them, often answer those questions and generally talk about them in general conversation.  This reinforces the memories.... It’s not surprising then that Day regards Maori as having, at age 2, the earliest memory of any culture because of the elaborate way the past is shared orally.”[3]

We have a similar heritage in Judaeo-Christian community, where memories and stories have been shared orally through faith generations.  As Christians we believe that remembering, (i.e. “re-membering) not only helps us to live in the present and orientates us towards the future, it is also the opposite of dis-membering.  Re-membering is ‘a putting together again’; it’s about healing and reconciling.  As we come together as a people of faith, we draw on this ability to take our brokenness and to re-member ourselves again as a people of hope and transformation. Both biblical stories we heard this morning, re-call us into this process of re-membering.   In both the story of Ruth and the Markan gospel account of the poor widow, we are [re-minded] [of] God’s concern for the dis-membered in our society – for the poor, the dis-abled, the outsider – for the ones overlooked by the powerful.  Here, once more, we are invited to be re-membered into a community where generosity, compassion and survival are celebrated; where hopeful stories reconstitute a broken people into those who walk the way of God’s transforming kin-dom.[4]

That’s what the Choir will be assisting us in doing tonight as they present, for Remembrance Day, the beautiful and challenging Mass for Peace – the Armed Man – composed by Karl Jenkins.   To understand what lies behind this Mass, we must take ourselves first to Britain’s oldest national museum, The Royal Amouries’, which grew out of the arsenal of the medieval monarchs of England housed in the Tower of London.  [The museum’s] main purpose [is to] display the hardware of war – and through this, [to encourage] an understanding of what war really is, and what it means and does to the people involved in it. ... We were looking for an appropriate way for the Royal Armouries to commemorate the millennium” writes Guy Wilson, Master of The Armouries. The theme, of the 15^th century song “L’homme armé” - that ‘the armed man must be feared’ “seemed painfully relevant to the 20^th century and so the idea was born to commission a modern ‘Armed Man Mass’.  The framework of a Christian musical and liturgical form, seemed the best way both to look back and reflect on the most war-torn and destructive century in human history, and to look ahead with hope and commit ourselves to a new and more peaceful millennium. And so the idea developed to combine within the basic mass form a variety of poetry and prose and a wide range of musical styles reflecting the multi-cultural global society in which we live” [5]  – re-membering a broken people into hope.

This Mass for Peace has certainly done that.  Commencing his composition as the tragedy of Kosovo unfolded, and calling on re-membering texts as diverse as poetry from Hiroshima, gems from English Literature and worship resources from Muslim, Jewish and Christian sources, Jenkins demands the listener face the menace and horrors of war before considering their choices for the future.  After being re-minded: “The Armed Man must be feared”;   “Better is peace than always war”, listeners are asked to consider, “Do we want the new millennium to be like the last? Or do we join with Tennyson when he tells us to “Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace”? 

When we come to the Litany of Remembrance at the end of the service this morning, we bring with us our many memories – fluttering and flickering, taking shape around this Table of Remembrance which calls us to be members of the Body of Christ.  And so we will re-member the broken bodies and the spilled blood, recalling the pain of the past – and also our strong commitment to live fully and faithfully within the present so that God’s vision of justice, peace and hope – God’s Shalom - might be a reality in our personal lives, in the life of our community and for the life of the world.  “Ring out the thousand wars of old and ring in the thousand years of peace – Ring in the Christ that is to be”[6].

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[1] Virginia Woolf, Orlando, Feedbooks.com p.46

[2] Clare McBeath, “This is a Day of Remembrance” Timeless Prayers for Peace, compiled Geoffrey Duncan, 2003, p.93

[3] Ian Munro, “Sharing makes a memory stronger” Otago Daily Times: Weekend Magazine Saturday 3 November 2012, p.46

[4] Clare McBeath p.94-95

[5] Guy Wilson, Master of The Amouries, “The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace: The history of the commission

[6] Lord Alfred Tennyson, “In Memoriam”

A sermon for All Saints 4 November 2012

Readings: Psalm 146; Mark 12:28-34

In giving his report on General Assembly to us last Sunday, John Elder – our Church Council Clerk – spoke about one of the difficult themes which seemed to run through the meeting of our church national governing body: that of attempting to regulate belief and behaviour.  I think the way John put it was:  Purity of belief by regulation and purity of behaviour by regulation.  This tendency to over-regulate is the reality of institutions struggling to cope in a changing context.  As societal behaviour and belief challenge past traditional ways of doing things, we find ourselves naturally asking: so how do we live within this changing context?  One way of responding to change is by building a wall, tightening rules, and limiting choice.   It brings to my mind an experience within the University of Otago in the 1960s.  I can’t remember all the details, but I do remember (even as a very law-abiding person) the outrage I felt when the University Council banned mixed flatting.  It all seems laughable today; but less than 50 years ago, in an attempt to protect and ensure the morality of students (and the community at large), flats were regulated to include students of only one sex, all university halls of residence (by constitution) were single sex institutions (with strict curfews and rules about visitors) and, a rule which particularly galled me, no female student was ever to enter the Knox College dining room!   Various demonstrations and strategies, including active disobedience and a mass sleep-over in the University Union, led fairly quickly to significant change, which was more appropriate for the growing freedoms of the 60s. 

Within any community, any institution, rules and regulations are essential; they enable a society to live well. But over-regulation can be abusive and destructive; for example:

·        when risk management strategies require two hours of paper-work to be done before emergency rescue could proceed in the collapsed CTV building[1];

·        when regulations suggest narrow norms which prevent the flourishing and fullness of life for all people;

·        when rules give privilege to the powerful majority and oppress further those have no voice

Then, questions must be asked and challenges made.

The ancient Israelites, like all communities, formulated rules for a way of living that made sense for their context. The Ten Commandments became a foundational understanding for that community.  Over the years and decades and centuries of evolving faith communities, other rules and regulations were added and developed to respond to changing contexts and situations.  Some of those regulations can be found in Leviticus where we hear of rules which make absolutely no sense today – but may have been appropriate for a different context.  None of us would feel constrained to live within these regulations today where eating meat that contained blood, wearing clothing of mixed fibre, appointing priests with a physical blemish, planting two types of grain in a field, and eating shellfish were all prohibited.

This morning’s Gospel offers a voice within the context of our day and its own day. One of the scribes – one of the church lawyers – impressed with Jesus’ wise and skilful debating asks him, “So which commandment is first of all.”  I understand that in Jesus’ time “there were over six hundred prescriptions in the Law.  Naturally, questions about priority arose.  Which was most important?  How would they be ordered and interrelated?[2]  And Jesus answered, “The first is that God is One”.  This understanding takes us beyond individual beliefs and theories of God-ness into the presence of the Holy Mystery, the Horizon of our Becoming. The One for whom we long and who calls us into relationship.  This is not a God that sits alongside, or above, other Gods; this is not a God that can be regulated – it is the Source of all Being – Holy Oneness in whom all of what we call creation (people, animals plants, planets, galaxies and cosmos) dwell.  The first commandment, Jesus says, is that God is One and that you shall love that God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength: heart, soul, mind and strength united into loving communion with this Holy Oneness. And when we are drawn into this Holy Oneness, we are propelled into loving others as ourselves. 

Love God and love neighbour as ourselves – “although these are two, they are inseparable.  Therefore, they form one commandment, ‘the first’ [-the one to which we dedicate ourselves wholly and unconditionally]. 

“This twofold ... commandment of [top priority] is engaged by an interior act of love.  This establishes the proper flow, from the inside to the outside, from unitive consciousness to unitive acts.” This flow from inner love to outer love ‘is what is threatened when believers are faced with many laws.”[3]  When church (or state) over-regulates, prescribes and proscribes, we find ourselves turned inside out – away from that first commandment to place ourselves first and foremost within the context of Holy Unity and Love.  There are two serious problems when we do not make the One God that is Love our beginning point.  First, we find ourselves, with the Scribe, asking the wrong question – what is the Law, and what does it entail, and how can it be kept.  With our consciousness firmly fixed on the exterior, the emphasis is on obedient behaviour (as set, often by fearful boundary-keepers).  So that dying people, hurting people, overlooked people are denied justice, hope and love.  Secondly, when the inner world that accompanies the behaviour is overlooked, the law can be kept with a hard heart, a dark mind, a sick soul, and only a minimum of strength.  So that highly respected people behave in anything but loving ways (as evidenced recently by the appalling sexual abuse perpetrated by Jimmy Savile[4] and the Kaitaia prominent businessman, church pastor and school principal.[5])

Many who follow Jesus fail to catch the transformational enormity of his message; they miss his beginning point focussing on an interior commitment to Loving Oneness. We can see this lack of understanding in some of the early church documents – especially in some of the later Epistles found in the New Testament – this desire to start with the outside – to regulate and control.  But the Gospel is not rule-focussed – Jesus’ way of life and teaching was never about creating purity of belief and behaviour by regulation.  Rather, we are called to the much more challenging and transformative action of tuning and training our hearts and minds, our souls and our strengths to Universal Love – so that we might be that Love in the world. 

When we have turned our inner selves towards that focus, then questions of mixed flatting, same-sex marriage, leadership and sexuality, the substance of our faith – all these questions take on a different context – for they are seen first and foremost through the lens of love.

It is within that context that a group calling themselves “Christians for Marriage Equality” have made a submission to the Government – a very different submission from that of church bodies which have ruled that marriage can only be between different sexes.

In their submission, Christians for Marriage Equality, write:

“As members of Christian churches, we have an understanding of Christian sexual ethics that values the quality of the relationship. We believe that sexual relationships should be loving, committed, faithful, mutual and respectful. Same sex and different-sex relationships both have the potential to be ethical and therefore acceptable in the sight of God. Our experience as people in faith communities leads us to conclude that different-sex and same-sex relationships have more similarities than differences. Both have the capacity for love and both have the capacity for destructiveness. Both involve two people who share emotional interdependence and a sexual relationship. Both have the possibility of parenting responsibilities. Both require trust and commitment to flourish. Both entail social obligations. The similarities make it obvious that both need equivalent legal protection, social respect and encouragement.[6]

And the scribe said to Jesus, You are right Teacher; you have truly said that God is one and besides God there is no other – and to love God with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself – this is much more important than rules about burnt offerings and sacrifices.

And seeing that he answered wisely, Jesus said “You are not far from the kin-dom of God”  And after that, no one dared to ask him any question. May it be so.

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[1]  “a rescuer with vital listening equipment spent two hours filling out forms delaying their arrival at the building collapse. Jane Parfitt from Civil Defence admitted two hours was too long..” Coroner’s inquest into the collapse of CTV building during Christchurch Earthquake http://www.3news.co.nz/Machines-needed-in-CTV-rescue---demolition-expert/tabid/423/articleID/275071/Default.aspx 1 November 2012

[2] John Shea Eating with the Bridegroom: The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers 2005, p.260

[3] John Shea p.260-261.

[4]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/jimmy-savile/9620223/Jimmy-Savile-He-was-the-tip-of-the-iceberg.html 19 October 2012.   Sir James Wilson Vincent "Jimmy" Savile, OBE, KCSG was an English disc jockey, television presenter, media personality and charity fundraiser en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile

[5] Parents in Kaitaia have every right to feel apprehensive following the arrest last week of a businessman on 17 charges involving the sexual abuse of boys, according to ECPAT Child ALERT director Allan Bell, although its recent experiences were not unique.  He made his comments after the "prominent businessman" appeared before Kaitaia District Court last week. The accused entered no plea and was remanded in custody, for a second appearance today. His arrest by police in Kaitaia was the third in quick succession. Former school teacher James Parker, who had been the deputy principal at Pamapuria School until his arrest, is due to appear in Kaitaia District Court on Thursday next week for sentence on 49 convictions of sexually abusing boys, while 63-year-old church pastor Eric Reid was in the District Court at Kaikohe yesterday for call-over on sex-related offences involving two women, one of them a teenager. http://www.northlandage.co.nz/news/kaitaias-child-abuse-problem-not-unique/1605271/ November 1 2012

[6] Margaret Mayman representing Christians for Marriage Equality submission on the Marriage Amendment Bill. http://www.scribd.com/doc/111356591/Christians-for-Marriage-Equality