Sunday May 15 2011 Guest Preacher: Kevin Ward

Acts 2. 42-47: On Being the Church Today.

Wow! What a church! Wouldn’t it be great to be a member of that first church in Jerusalem!

·         Here is the church where there is an active Christian education program, where people don’t have to drag their kids to Sunday School merely out of guilt or habit, but rather because everyone was so devoted… to the apostles teaching.

·         They had such a wonderful time together they didn’t want to limit it to Sunday’s, even with the add on of tea and coffee in the gathering area. Day by day they met and shared all that was going on in life with each other. They actively cared for one another, having all things shared in common. Mmm! Incipient communism 20 centuries before its time????

·         A church without factions, cliques, divisions, all who believed were together. They prayed, they grew. Every day new people beat a path to their door to become members.

When this picture of the early church painted here in Acts is laid alongside the reality of the church as we have experienced it here in NZ over recent decades, and it doesn’t matter much whether it is Dunedin or Christchurch, Knox or Highgate, we might be saying to ourselves “Oh to be in that church!”

And I guess the basic thing I want to say this morning is, you are! That is you and I, no less than they, live in the same One Church of Jesus Christ in the aftermath  of Easter and Pentecost. Easter wasn’t just something that happened once to Jesus, a dead body raised to life by the power of the Spirit of God, as Paul put it. Acts is telling us Easter continues to happen, breaks out all over as that same Spirit continues to work. Furthermore Easter has communal, economic and political implications, using ‘political’ in the Aristotelian sense of a polis, a people, a city .

Here were these people, a lot like us. They didn’t have all that much in common. They came from different parts of town, different social groups. It’s difficult to get together across the boundaries of class and income. Some of them were poor, some were rich. But something had happened. Here they were around the table, sharing with each other, looking out for one another. No sociological, economic or political theory could explain why these, who had so many things that could divide them, were together. There was no explanation for them apart from the amazing new thing that had happened in their midst over recent weeks at Easter and Pentecost. Something new had broken out among them. New life. God’s life made available to them by the risen Christ and the gift of the Spirit.

I sometimes get asked how do we know that Jesus was raised from the dead on Easter Sunday? Is there proof that Easter is true or is it just some grand myth or, even worse, deception? When it comes down to it the only proof I can give that Christ has been raised from the dead, that life is stronger than death, that there really is a new power let loose in the world named Christ, the only proof is us, the church, a body of people whose life together is so new, so inexplicable by any other means, that the world needs to look at us and say, “Surely Christ is risen, he has risen indeed!”

And at least that is the way the story played in the first few centuries after Easter, which is why it expanded so rapidly. And it is the way it has played out in the last half of last century in much of Asia, Africa, South America. But what about us in western societies? NZ? Dunedin?

Well these things are rarely explained by one factor, are usually multicausal – and that is what I keep arguing when I am wearing my historian or my sociologist hat. But today I am a preacher and what do I have to say.

One thing I am convinced of, is that a very major factor is our over emphasis on the individual at the cost of community. One of the strengths of modern western culture has been its respect for the individual and the way it encourages individuals to realise their aspirations and potential, often subjugated in other cultures and societies. But every strength or virtue when pushed too exclusively can flip over and become a weakness. And believe this happened in most communities in the west, including the church, so that the enduring bonds and relationships of community are weakened and individuals have  become disconnected atoms. As one writer puts it, it is often easier to think of ‘my faith’ rather than ‘our faith’, ‘my’ relationship with Jesus rather than ‘our’ life together, ‘my’ spirituality rather than ‘our’ life as a people.

Yet the whole witness of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation is bent toward God’s intention to form a people who will be a light to the whole world, a blessing to all other peoples on the earth. Sometimes our emphasis on the individual has blinded us to this social and theological reality: God is in the business of creating a people, building a community, and calling each of us into this new community that is defined by new commitments and a new story. And in Acts we see God at work to create a new people who are not to be defined by the old categories of possessions, race, language, gender or social class, but a people united in witness to the death and resurrection of Christ and common life of the Spirit they share that give birth to a new way of living. As one person has put it this is ‘a sociological impossibility’, something only an act of God can create.

Behaviouralists tell us that we have two conflicting life forces built into us. The drive for togetherness and the drive for individuality. And so the idea of community simultaneously attracts and repels most of us. We long for the life-affirming benefits that community can bestow, but we resist the demands that community makes because we want to be an individual. No wonder we find it difficult to know what to do with passages such as this one. In an early chapter of her book Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts, Rita Finger surveys a range of interpretive approaches that have concluded that Christians should not take the communal ethic described here and in Acts 4 as normative. Interpreters since the Reformation have proposed that Acts offers a symbolically idealized portrait of communal life, that these verses describe practices that were necessarily short-lived and limited in scope, or that such practices are simply unworkable in a modern context. Her point is that a lot of us instinctively chafe against these descriptions because we recognize that we have a lot to lose in such a situation – especially if we have much, which all of us do. So much tempts us to dismiss these verses as quaint, or unrealistically idealised, even as we claim to yearn for such conditions as a sign of God's activity among us.

It is important to acknowledge that Acts, taken as a whole, does not hold up this depiction of corporate life as universal in the church's experience. It may represent the best of what God's people are capable of, in the power of the Spirit, but after Ananias and Sapphira defraud the Jerusalem community in chapt 5 we look in vain for any description of community life that approaches the radicalism seen in this earlier chapt. This doesn’t mean that hospitality, charity, mutuality, and worship are not characteristics of the communities that the Spirit still creates; they are, and they continue to be commended elsewhere in Acts. But Acts likewise concedes the flawed nature of believers and their struggles to achieve and maintain unity.

The description given in these verses suggests the possibility of what the Holy Spirit can do. They do not lay down rules or specific structures for Christian living. In their context they indicate that the reign of the risen Christ creates the potential for mutual service that embodies God's justice. The life and work of a Christian community can reflect—even if only dimly—the reign of God that Jesus proclaimed while on earth and secured through his death, resurrection, and exaltation.

This passage presents a summary filled with generalisations, yet several details are instructive for us even today. The community of faith in Jerusalem lives a multifaceted witness, one not restricted to a single place or mode. This witness to the transforming impact of the gospel shows itself in houses and in the temple. It benefits its members and earns the admiration of outsiders. The community exists not for its own sake, but to care for its most vulnerable members and to be a means by which God extends this liberating salvation to others.

There is so much in the culture and daily life of the kind of ‘ownership’ societies that we as churches live in today, that we are easily frustrated in any attempts to build communities that functions as an authentic expression of the gospel, or even to approximate that, and so we settle to life as it ‘just is’. But it is an empowering thing to realize that we as followers of Christ are not left to our own flawed abilities in creating such community. The ministry of God's reign that Jesus inaugurated during his life and secured by his death and  resurrection, is not merely a thing of the past or a faint hope for future days; it continues, sometimes barely perceptibly, in the corporate life of communities of faith, through the activity of the Spirit gifted to us by the risen Christ. And it is important to underscore that these verses describe a community of faith that operates in the power of that Spirit. The virtues of justice, worship, charity and mutuality are not accomplishments of extraordinary people; they are signs of the Spirit within a community of people who understand themselves as united in purpose and identity, shaped as they worshipped together through the apostles teaching… the breaking of bread and the prayers—not a dispersed collection of individuals who occasionally met up in church.

I want to finish by reflecting on the words of NT scholar Tom Wright, who,  concludes his comments on this passage by reminding us that, the challenge remains for every generation of the church to make this kind of community a reality, saying: “Where the church today finds itself stagnant, unattractive, humdrum and shrinking… it’s time to read Acts 2.42-47 again, get down on our knees, and ask what isn’t happening that should be happening? The gospel hasn’t changed. God’s power hasn’t diminished. People still need rescuing. What are we doing about it?”

Sermon Easter Day 24 April 2011

In the name of God who dances “through the dullness of humanity.” 

Here is our hope:

in the mystery of suffering is the heartbeat of Love,

Love that will not let go.[1]

In Susan Hill’s novel The Service of Clouds, Flora has just attended the funeral of her teacher Miss Pinkney.  Much more than just a teacher, Miss Pinkney saved Flora’s life – nursing her back to health at a time when she was friendless and quite alone.   After the funeral, Flora finds herself returning to a local park, which has been a very special place for her in earlier years.  "Then, [Susan Hill writes] as with the rush of grief, so came the next thing, a devastating, split-second of presence, and awareness.

She was between the high, dark shrubs, out of the sunlight.  A blackbird scuttled in the soil at the holly root, after fallen berries.  The sky was bright, above her head.  Somewhere, on the other side of the water perhaps, a child laughed.  And in that second, Miss Pinkney was beside her, or just ahead, or at her shoulder, unseen but sensed and so absolutely that mere sight was quite unnecessary.  The sense of her, the simple presence, made Flora stop dead, her hand flying to her mouth, made her say aloud, "Oh.  Oh, so you are ..."  And then, for a time out of time, they stood together, speaking what was not spoken.  The vividness, the certainty and clarity of the moment which was less than a moment and was a lifetime, was absolute and imprinted on her heart and mind and memory forever, so that she never questioned or doubted it afterwards - nor spoke of it, save once.   She did not look for meaning, reason, explanation, and neither understood nor tried to understand.  That it had been was sufficient, then, and later.”[2]

“The stories of the resurrection appearances” Rebecca Lyman writes “are not philosophical arguments, but rather affirmations of unbroken relationships within divine reality.” There are times in our lives, when we, like Flora, discover a shimmering connection with the mystery of life that overcomes our fears, our denials, our betrayals – and even death itself.   These are the times that convince us that light is stronger than darkness, love is stronger than hate, life is stronger than death.  Today we celebrate this power of light, love and life.

“I like to think of creation and resurrection” Lyman says “as this immense energy that moves and illuminates our ordinary life rather than verbal propositions to be affirmed or denied. Doctrines do not satisfy us; life in God does….

Mary Magdalene goes to the garden seeking her teacher, and finds not a new revelation,” not a new teaching, not a new creed, “but the One she loves. Only something so ordinary as the sight and sound of your lost friend could be this holy.”  Today we approach the Easter story seeking that Holy Other.  “We have come looking for nothing else. Love in its incredible tenacity and mysterious appearances walks with us in our grief[s] and [our] skepticism.”[3]

All the way through Lent, we have acknowledged that this pathway is challenging.  It’s no easy Sunday afternoon stroll; it’s not easily achieved with an Easter Egg and a good holiday.   It’s about learning another way of relating – a costly way – but one which is life-changing, leading to heart-felt hallelujahs.   The Easter message is clear:  if we choose to embrace in our everyday lives reconciliation, forgiveness and non-violence, we will find the power of Love and Hope.   We’ve seen this marked so clearly on the faces and in the lives of people:  people like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, people like Ghandi and Aung Sun Su Xi, people like Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King – and of course, for Christians, supremely in Jesus of Nazareth – people who will not let the deathliness of vengeance, weaponry and abusive powers overcome them.    In the garden, early on that first Easter morning, the women, arrived with hearts full of grief and empty of hope – but they leave with hearts filled with joy, knowing that the Divine Presence has not left them alone - knowing that Hope, Healing and Love cannot be defeated by pain, sorrow and death.

Wendell Berry, in his poem Manifesto invites us into a practice of resurrection – throughout our lives – so that we too may know “the vividness, the certainty and clarity of the [Easter] moment.”[4]  Some excerpts from Berry’s poem:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
....So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it. ...

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
...Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts. ...

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
....As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.[5]

And so today, we practise resurrection so that we will know the full, abundant and flourishing life, which Jesus promises.  We will practise resurrection: forgiving and loving - dancing through our dullness, celebrating with signs of new life, baptizing a baby, remembering our own baptisms, singing Hallelujahs, seeing everywhere in “our bloody and blessed world” [6], the face of the divine mystery that is Love – Love that will not let us go.  Hallelujah!

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[1] Shirley Murray, “Christ is Alive” Alleluia Aotearoa 15

[2] Susan Hill, The service of clouds, 1998 p.147.

[3] Rebecca Lyman, “Ours the Cross, the Grave, the Skies” in http://www.journeywithjesus.net/  Easter Day 2011

[4] Susan Hill

[5] Wendell Berry (b. 1934) Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/675

[6] Rebecca Lyman

Sermon Palm Sunday 17 April 2011

What would you do, if you knew there was just one week left?   Just a week to say goodbye to your nearest and dearest; just a week before your world comes crashing down; just a week before all that you have known and loved is changed forever.  What would you do?

I wonder what our friends in Haiti, Christchurch and Japan might have done had they known, what they know now, about the way their world would be shaken so disastrously in recent times.  Would they have prepared themselves differently?  

For as long as I can remember, Civil Defence has urged New Zealanders to develop survival kits in our homes.  Water and food, transistor radio, torch, batteries – get ready, so you can get through – we have been urged.   How many of us have done that?   My guess is, not many – although I do believe that in recent months, throughout this country, there has been a more intentional effort to become better prepared.  Our apathetic and ignorant confidence that natural disasters happen in other places – not here – and our laissez-faire dependency that, if they do happen, someone else will take care of us; all this, since the 22^nd of February, has been shaken to the core.  For those of us outside the earthquake zone, our aftershocks have been practical rather than geological. We’ve been jolted into the realisation that personal preparation and community action are essential for survival.  We’ve filled our bottles of water, built up a stash of candles and know where the matches have been stored; we’ve started to re-connect, getting to know neighbours, valuing cooperation and sharing.  Should disaster hit, we just might get through.

I don’t know if Jesus knew he had only a week left – but the storm clouds were gathering; the signs were there; his time was certainly limited. Let’s clear the mists of interpretative fog for a minute – let’s sweep away all the fulfilment of prophecy, all the murky mist that smothers a human being with a story about a God-man-puppet being led to the scaffold to fulfil the vengeful plans of a manipulative God.  Let’s cast all that aside and see, for a moment, this very human man – just 33 years old – facing up to hatred, scheming, lies and betrayal of seismic proportion – and imagine, what must it have been like?  How could he possibly be ready – how could he possibly see the week through?  

So, back to the question:  what would you do, if you knew you had only one week left for life, as you know it at the moment?  Would you quickly assemble your ‘bucket list’ and try to fit into that week all the things you had not bothered with over the years, but still had a hankering for – or would your direction be more focussed, drawing on a spiritual survival kit that you had been developing intentionally over many years – a kit that would bring about, even in the toughest of times, a blossoming into unbelievable flourishing life? 

Should you want to go the way of the ‘bucket list’ – that is, the list of things you want to do before you kick the bucket – there’s plenty of help at hand:  just Google ‘bucket list’ to find over 7 million hits in just 0.12 of a second – movies, books, web sites and social networks abound – all encouraging you to ‘kick start your life goals’.   The American based social networking site Bucketlist is “where you go to keep track of” ... “all those things you swear you're going to do before you die” such as “Climb a volcano ... Get the other guy elected ... Perfect your chili recipe ... Learn to play oboe ... Visit New Zealand ...”[1]  All interesting  achievements; but it seems to me a bucket list on its own doesn’t help much when you are facing your own death, minus one week, one month, or one year. Sure, having climbed a volcano or been to New Zealand – or Alaska – might be nice to look back on, but, life offers much much more than the ticking off of achievements.  Don’t we need something behind the list; some meaning that takes us deeper into a more expansive way of being?

I know it’s rather an anachronistic thought, but I do wonder what kind of bucket-list Jesus might have drawn up.  Without his deep spiritual preparation, it might have read something like “get baptised, do some miracles, teach some stuff, participate in a parade, go see the sights of Jerusalem.”  All ticked off, all completed one week before death.  But, somehow, I can’t see him getting through this next week on such trivial achievements.    Rather, I think his list is much more that of building a spiritual survival kit over a life time (even a very short life-time) and expressed in much more disturbing terms:   hang out with the losers, be wasteful in love and passionate about justice, get rid of religious hypocrisy, provide provocative alternatives to governments ... ongoing life-style choices, all based on a deepening relationship with God and about which it’s not very easy to say ‘been there, done that – got the t-shirt’.

Over recent weeks some of us have been meeting in study groups, developing an integrated sense of self; others of us have journeyed in a weekly pilgrimage, focussing on our thirst for living water; and as we have all come together in worship each Sunday during Lent, we have been invited into building a Jesus-focussed spiritual survival kit - built not on things but on relationship.  In all these explorations, we’ve been preparing for something important.  We have learnt to take risks, to venture into the unknown with wasteful generosity, justice and love, to encounter the strange and the stranger and to be radically transformed.

 And now here we are, with Jesus, poised at the beginning of a week that could change our lives forever.  It’s crunch time.  After all our weeks of preparation, the tectonic plate of our spiritual lives crashes against that other tectonic plate of holidays, travel, easter bunnies and chocolate. 

Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem acts as our shake-up call.  It’s an earthquake off the Richter scale – reminding us of our deep need for our survival kits. 

So, how will this next week be for you? 

There’s just one week left .......

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[1] http://bucketlist.org/

Sermon etc. April 3 2011, 10am

Children’s Story: Seven Blind Mice by Ed Young

The seven differently coloured blind mice go out one by one to investigate the strange Something (an elephant) by the pond, but each comes back with a different idea of what it is.

Introduction to the Gospel

At first sight, you might think this morning’s gospel story is about a healing – the healing of a blind man.  But a closer look seems to point us into a much more expansive view – perhaps even to a totally different vista.    It’s a long reading.  Out of the forty-one verses, only two describe the actual healing.  By far the majority of the chapter is about conflicting views – disputes, arguments and misunderstandings.  The scene is set, right from the very first verse, where Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who had never been able to see; a man who had been born blind – someone to whom Jesus was able to bring sight – not just physical sight, but a breadth of view, much greater than what others around him could see.  As we are taken through these forty-one verses of questions, heated discussion and differences of opinion, which are as relevant today as they were two-thousand years ago, a picture unfolds – a picture of one considered of no account entering into a life-changing relationship with Jesus.  As we listen and watch the unfolding scene, we too are invited into an encounter with the living God, where our eyes might also be opened.

So let’s approach this gospel reading with the acknowledgement that our way of seeing may not be all that it might be – that we too may need healing.

Dramatic Reading of John 9:1-41 

Hymn: “Teach us, O loving heart of Christ” words Shirley Murray Alleluia Aotearoa

Sermon/Reflection

As we all know, the Gospel of John is a sophisticated theological reflection on the life of Jesus.  While it is likely that the reading, as we now have it, could be based on an actual healing story, there are many more layers to be uncovered and explored.  Seeing this reading as a simple healing story is like a blue mouse encountering an elephant’s tail and assuming the elephant is a rope.[1]   The tail/tale is there – but, if we do not expand our sight/site, we will see only distortion.

And so, as the writer, whom we know as John, reflects on the life and ministry of Jesus, he invites us into a theological exploration that takes us – we who are disciples, teachers, relatives and religious leaders – taking all of us into a place where our eyes might be opened, so that we too can see in a radically new way. 

The scene is set with a simple encounter between Jesus and a man born blind.  And the disciples, the eager students and followers of Jesus turn to their teacher, seeking to bring what they have learned to their ongoing education.  So, they ask Jesus, “who sinned?”  There had to be a reason - someone had to have caused the blindness – was it the man himself, or his parents? Who was at fault?  Somehow the pain of disability, disease or death has to be someone’s fault – doesn’t it – or does it?  Isn’t this the question lying beneath so much stumbling in the darkness of our lives?  Who can we blame?  Whose fault is it?  And, the unspoken question, often underlying the fault seeking, is the question of divine punishment.  For, who caused that fault?  If the man’s – or his parents’ – sin had caused his blindness, then it was God who punished.

Even in our so-called secular world, this kind of question emerges time and again.  Sometimes hidden within assumptions and sometimes blatantly spelt out.  I heard it at the meeting of our church General Assembly last year in Christchurch.  It was only a matter of weeks after the first earthquake. In prayer as well as public and private comment, the language of God’s protection of Christchurch featured.  “No people died in Christchurch because God particularly blesses us” people were heard to say.  When challenged about the thousands of deaths in the Haiti earthquake, the one who was speaking was quick to explain that the people of Haiti were wicked – the infidel – and God had punished them.  (Since more recent events in Christchurch, his mind may have been changed).  What an appalling interpretation and aberration of a loving God!

“Who sinned?” Jesus’ disciples asked.   “Wrong question” Jesus replies.  “Rather, look to see how God’s light is shining.

Whether we ask “Who sinned?” or the question lying beneath: “how could God take the lives of innocent people?” we too are asking the wrong question.

Wrong questions and limited perspectives pile one on top of the other.  Neighbours – and even parents of the blind man – can’t quite get their minds around his transformation that is of elephant-like-proportions!   Their scepticism and suspicion assume people can’t change – that miracles never happen – that rational explanations are the only way to understand the totality of life.  How blind they are!  

Have you been there?  I know I have ....

Of course, the best is kept till last.  It’s the professional clergy – the religious leaders – who are completely on the wrong foot.  Again, as is so often the case in Jesus’ stories, those who come from the religious establishment, those who one might reasonably expect to provide healing and wholeness, are the ones who cause the most harm.   It’s enough to make any minister stop in her tracks!  For it’s the clergy who refuse to believe what others tell them of miracles.  They’re more concerned about correct belief and ritual “than to love a human being and rejoice in his wholeness.  They blabbered pious clichés.”  And, just as they will to Jesus in the days leading to crucifixion, “they scapegoated the victim and ‘hurled insults’ at him.  They condescendingly claim a spiritual elitism that intentionally humiliates.  They demonize him as a ‘sinner’.  As they throw him out of the synagogue their rage explodes, ‘How dare you lecture us!’  [And] With that, their own tragic blindness is confirmed.”[2]

So often we get things terribly wrong ... so often we are blinded by our own self-righteousness ... so often our understanding of God is mouse-like in its perspective – so often we forget to see others – and ourselves – as God does.  How difficult it is to perceive the wider vision of God’s kin-dom, about which Jesus taught and the psalmist speaks – where there are righteous paths, genuine comfort, and abundant hospitality for all.   But surely, the first step in being able to do this is to acknowledge we don’t have all the answers – that we could be wrong.  From this perspective, we might be open to learn from each other– each of us with our limited viewpoint – filtered by who we are, whether we come from a red, blue, green, yellow or purple perspective – seeking a bigger picture – a more expansive understanding of what it means to be the people of God.  And above all, may it be that as we ask our questions, debate our understandings, we may experience the transforming miraculous vision of the true Light of the world and so participate in bringing about the amazing possibilities of God’s kin-dom here on Earth. 

Affirmation of Faith

The hymn after the affirmation of faith is an invitation to conversation, as we seek a broader vision in the midst of overwhelming pain.  We sing it today particularly in memory of 16 year old Chloe Anson, who died a week ago.  We are tempted to ask why such a vital young woman should die so suddenly – but we hear the echoes of Jesus’ voice and vision and recognise this is not the question to ask.  So we sing from another perspective, one which might shed light on a bigger picture.  In this hymn, we hold Chloe and all who loved her, in the holy mystery of Love – that which we call God.

But, first, we affirm

We are not alone – I invite those who are able to stand.

Hymn: Nothing is lost on the breath of God;

 words and music by Colin Gibson Faith forever singing

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[1] Reference to the story read to the children earlier in the service Seven Blind Mice by Ed Young

[2] Daniel B. Clendenin www.journeywithjesus.net – tense changed

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.