We’re All in this Together – for Now!

 

Texts: Isaiah 44:6-8; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

I understand that the Bishops gathered in London for the Lambeth Conference are starting each day with a series of Bible studies on St John's Gospel.  Perhaps they should interrupt those studies today and join with us in pondering the significance of today's passage from St Matthew's Gospel, for it seems to me that it could hardly be more timely.  Those who wish to exclude others from their midst, and those who have absented themselves from the gathering, it seems to me, have failed to understand this Parable of the Weeds.

For whatever else this parable is about, it surely speaks in opposition to those who are all too ready to separate the crops (that is, those who agree with them) from the weeds (those who do not agree with them).  The Bishops haven't got that tendency alone, of course, but they are a terrible example of it at this particular moment in history.  When they look at some of their fellow Bishops they see, not brothers and sisters in Christ, not fruits of the same Gospel they themselves profess to preach, not even fellow human beings made in the image of the same God they profess to love.  They see weeds – worthless scraps to be plucked out of the Lord's garden and thrown on the heap.

What do they see when they look in the mirror?  I guess they see themselves as fine servants of the Lord, ever anxious to serve the Lord, ever ready to hear his word and do his bidding.  Above all, they apparently see themselves as perfectly capable of judging others, of determining who is and who is not worthy to be in the Kingdom of God.  They see themselves as right on all essential items of faith, which means, of course, those issues that they themselves identify as essential items of faith.

Perhaps today they should polish those mirrors, find their best glasses, and have another look.  This time, perhaps, they may be granted the grace to see themselves as servants indeed – but as the servants of the owner depicted in Jesus' parable.  Then may they also be granted the grace to hear again the dialogue that takes place in the parable between the owner and the servants.  The servants asked him, 'Do you want us to go and pull them up?'  'No,' he answered, 'because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them.  Let both grow together until the harvest.  At that time, I will tell the harvesters: first collect the weeds and tie them into bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring them into my barn.'

And just in case the Bishops are as slow in understanding the parable as the disciples were, they could stop looking in their mirrors and have a look at the second half of our reading where Jesus spells out exactly what he is talking about.  He is indeed talking about truth and untruth, good seed and bad.  There is no muddle, no suggestion that everything is equally valid, all seeds are just as valuable as one another.  In the end truth and falsehood will be separated – but not yet, and not by human hands.

As with any parable, we mustn't push it too far; but it does seem to me that our bolshie Bishops could profitably ponder one detail in this parable.  Jesus says the reason why the servants are not to go weeding just yet is that, in pulling out the weeds, they might uproot the wheat as well.  But who is the wheat?  When we hear Jesus' explanation of the parable, we find out.  The good seed (the wheat) "stands for the people of the Kingdom".  So what Jesus is warning about is the danger of premature weeding to the people of faith themselves.  In seeking to exclude (weed out) others we risk damaging ourselves.  Let us hope that our dissident Bishops have, at least, a strong sense of self-protection before they do too much weeding for their own health.

There is, perhaps, one more detail that we should note in passing, and that is something that is NOT said in the parable.  If we think about a related parable, the one we call the Parable of the Sower, we may remember that there some weeds spring up and choke the good plants before they have had a chance to grow.  Nothing like that is said in the Parable of the Weeds.  They are weeds, they will never produce a good healthy crop to be ground into flour, but they are not, it seems, destroying the wheat.  Perhaps we should note that intervention may sometimes be justified; but we should be far more hesitant to take it upon ourselves to pass judgment on others than perhaps we are.

We ourselves may usefully ponder our national obsession this week with the wretched Tony Veitch affair.  What an awful lot of servants we had telling the owners of a television network and a radio channel that there was a weed in the garden and volunteering to pull it out.  Was there any danger to anyone else – was there some emergency requiring immediate action?  Not that I'm aware of – but the justice system is so slow.  It requires time, and care, and keeps letting the facts get in the way of a speedy solution.  If it ever comes to trial, where will we find twelve jurors who have not already made up their minds, or had them made up for them by the media circus of the last few days?

Isaiah calls us back to essentials.  There is one God, and only one God.  That's non-negotiable.  If there are Bishops who do not hold that view, I'd be supportive of a little gardening.  In terms of the parable, there is only one owner of the field, and, as Jesus explains, the field is the world.  So this is about the sovereignty of God.  Lose sight of that and we're really in trouble.  But that's exactly what seems to happen in these sorts of arguments.  We forget that God is sovereign – not the Bible, God.  God calls whomsoever he will.  If we decide that there are to be classes of people – whether identified by gender, or class, or ethnicity, or orientation, or anything else  – who cannot be called into ordained ministry, we are not breaching their human rights, we're doing something much more terrible than that.  We are denying God's sovereignty.  We are putting people outside the reach of God's call.  We are denying that he is the owner of the field.

And, as St Paul reminds us this morning, those who would follow this approach are forgetting that they themselves are not yet perfect.  None of us is yet perfect – even St Paul didn't quite make it this side of the grave!  We are being made perfect by the working of the Holy Spirit within us, by virtue of our baptism.  We are heirs, but we have not yet fully inherited.  We are wheat, but with weedy tendencies!  Put another way, there is a part of us that still more closely resembles weed than wheat.  It is in our interests that the weeding doesn't start too soon!  St Paul gives us the wonderful assurance that the Spirit himself intercedes for us – which he wouldn't need to do if we were already perfect, would he?

Those who have spent the last week anxious to weed out Tony Veitch might like to ponder if there is anyone in their life who might have reason to wish to do the same to them.  Those Bishops who wish to decide who among them are worthy of the Lord's garden and who are not might like to ponder by what criteria they consider themselves worthy; and who they are to doubt the authenticity of the call of others who seek to worship the same one true God, and to serve the same one true God, they themselves profess to worship and serve.

And when they have finished with today's passage from St Matthew's gospel they can indeed return to their studies from St John.  I suggest they spend some time on chapter 17, and hear again Jesus' wonderful prayer for unity among all believers – even Bishops.

We Shall Not Be Abandoned

 

 

Texts: Acts 7:55-60; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

 

One of the great human fears – particularly in childhood – is the fear of abandonment, the fear of losing our Mum or whoever it is that seems to be our protector.  Our peace in Waikouaiti was temporarily interrupted last weekend by the panic-stricken screams of a young lass as her Mum drove off in a car, leaving her and her young siblings behind.  She wasn't, of course abandoning her children, but that's what it obviously felt like to this young miss, who ignored the repeated assurances of her older brother and went on screaming, "My Mummy!  My Mummy!"

 

We see another example of this sort of fear in some of the death notices and in memoriam items in our newspapers.  It's not uncommon to find even adult children expressing a belief that Mum is up there looking down and taking care of us.  It would be easy to be dismissive of those sentiments, of course, but they illustrate that deep need for security, that belief that we cannot manage without certain people keeping an eye out for us.  Just in the last few days I saw what I think was a bit of a video made by a young mother who was dying.  In the video she was assuring her children that she loved them very much and would "always be there for them".

 

And that's the theme, really, of our gospel readings from St John during this latter part of the Easter Season.  Jesus is preparing his disciples for his death: this is his pre-death video message to them, so to speak.  In fact, later in these so-called "Farewell Discourses", he expressly says to them, "I will not leave you as orphans".  And, of course, at the very end of St Matthew's Gospel, the Risen Christ, about to ascend, says to his disciples, "And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age".

 

Of course, even with the benefit of two thousand years of hindsight, we are in the presence of mystery here.  How can it be that he is going away, going back to the Father in heaven, and so on, and yet remaining with us for ever?  It's not surprising that his disciples weren't able at the time to grasp much of what he was saying to them.  St John has already used the same approach in his stories of the meeting between Jesus and Nicodemus, and Jesus and the woman at the well.  Jesus talks in symbols and images to get across spiritual meanings, but he is misunderstood by those he is talking to because they are operating at the literal, material level.

 

That's what happens in this morning's reading.  First, notice where this passage starts.  We are back on the evening when Jesus was betrayed, the night before he died, what we now call Maundy Thursday.  Immediately before the start of our passage, Jesus has just predicted Peter's denial: "Will you really lay down your life for me?  I tell you the truth, before the cock crows, you will disown me three times!"  We are so familiar with all this now that it has probably lost much of its shock value for us.  But think for a moment how it must have struck them at the time.  Peter, of all people, was going to deny even knowing Christ.

 

But immediately Jesus started to comfort them.  They can trust in God and in him.  Then this strange dialogue occurs as they talk past each other.  Jesus says he is going to a place, his Father's house, to prepare a place for them.  Then he will come back for them so that they might be where he is; and he assures them that they know the way there.  But they protest.  Thomas insists that they don't know where he is going so how can they know how to get there?  To which Jesus replies that he is himself the way, the only way, to the Father.

 

But who is this Father Jesus keeps talking about?  What's he like?  How can we get to know him?  Jesus tells them that those who really know Jesus really know God.  As they, his disciples, really know Jesus, it follows that they really know God, and, even, that they have seen God (because they have seen Jesus).  But they're still not convinced.  Philip speaks for them all when he asks Jesus to show them the Father "and that will be enough for them".

 

Still they cannot understand; and as we learn later in these chapters, the reason why they cannot understand is that the Spirit has not yet come.  Human understanding is insufficient.  As brilliant as the human mind can be sometimes, as great as human intelligence can be sometimes, there are truths that are beyond the capability of human reason and rationality.  To grasp those we need the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift we receive in baptism.  Even Jesus' teaching is not sufficient without the presence of the Holy Spirit working within his hearers to empower them to understand these spiritual truths.  That's why the disciples, at the end of this period, will be told to wait together until the Spirit comes.  Who is that Spirit?  The Counsellor, the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of Christ, he has many names; but strangely the Scriptures have omitted one name that should surely be attributed to the Holy Spirit.

 

That name is Emmanuel, God with us.  For after Pentecost it is through the Holy Spirit that God chooses to be with us.  It is through the Holy Spirit that Christ fulfils his promise to be with us to the very end of the age, not to leave us as orphans.  That's not how it feels at times, of course, as Jesus discovered for himself on the cross.  "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!" he cried out, much as the little lass in Waikouaiti cried out "My Mummy!  My Mummy!"  Those are the times when our faith is tested, when we wonder if he really is with us.  Those are the times when we know how the Israelites felt in the wilderness when they demanded, "Is the Lord with us or not?"  That is the question that is, perhaps, swirling around all those who have suffered from the tragedy at the Mangatepopo river.

 

What comfort can we offer them at such a terrible time as this?  Perhaps we can point to Stephen, a man, we are told who was full of the Holy Spirit, a product of Pentecost.  When the Spirit came the little group of Christ's followers suddenly expanded from about 120 to thousands – three thousand converts on the Day of Pentecost itself.  Very soon the church was the victim of its own success, as we might say.  Divisions occurred, people felt ignored.  The whole thing had become too large for the Apostles to lead on their own.  So helpers were chosen to attend to the pastoral ministry, leaving the Apostles free to concentrate on teaching.  They called the helpers deacons, and Stephen was among those first appointees.

 

Obviously, he hadn't limited himself to pastoral ministry; he had been doing some preaching as well, as a result of which he had fallen foul of the authorities.  He is condemned to death and taken out to be stoned.  If this had been a Superman story, Superman would have zoomed down from the sky and whisked Stephen away just as the first stones were on the way.  But we don't worship a God who appears among us as a Superman: we worship a God who appears among us as a Suffering Servant.

A god who is with us in our times of suffering, as well as our good times.  Stephen looks up and sees the truth of our faith – Jesus, the way, the truth and the life.  Jesus who is with his Father just as he had said he would be.  Jesus who has gone on ahead of Stephen to prepare a place for him.  Jesus who is with Stephen through the Holy Spirit.

 

And so Stephen dies trusting in all those marvellous promises Jesus has made to us, trusting in God, trusting in Christ.  He dies forgiving those who are killing him, just as Jesus did on the cross.  That did not take away the pain of being stoned to death; but it did give his death meaning, and it did give his companions hope.  That's why we have this story in the Easter Season, to tell us that because Jesus died death has been defeated.  Because Jesus died the Spirit came.  Because the Spirit came God is with us always and we with him in all eternity.

 

We hope that in the pain and tears of the tragedy of Mangatepopo those people will be comforted by that same Easter message.  On the last day those children and that teacher will be raised up because, Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed.

 

 

On the Road Again

 

 

Texts: Acts 2:14a, 36-41; 1 Peter 1:17-23; Luke 24:13-35

 

Next week we will be concentrating on the two great sacraments of the Christian Church – baptism (and confirmation) and the Eucharist; and we will be doing so in the context of this Easter Season.  And today our readings give us an excellent excuse for a review of all that we will be celebrating in that special service.  In our first reading we have the very words that the Bishop will use in setting the background for our baptism, and in our Gospel reading we have the very actions that the priest performs in the celebration of the Eucharist.  To complete the trifecta, as it were, our second reading gives us the connection between Easter, and our own commitment to the Christian life, which is the central principle of confirmation.

 

So let's start with baptism, and with the completion of Peter's so-called 'Pentecost sermon', which we have in our first lesson this morning.  We often hear fierce debates over who was really responsible for Jesus' death – and history is full of terrible examples of anti-Semitism based on the allegations that 'the Jews' killed him.  There is certainly considerable Scriptural support for the charge that the Jewish religious leaders instigated his death, which was authorised by the Roman authorities.

 

But that's not the issue Peter is dealing with here.  Throughout this sermon, given by Peter on the Day of Pentecost, he has been even more blunt than usual.  He says to them, more than once, you killed him, you nailed him to a tree, you crucified him.  Now we might have expected a furious and violent reaction to this from the crowd.  But today we hear their response.  Peter has convinced them of their guilt.  They are mortified, and ask what on earth they can do – (implicitly) to make amends.

 

These aren't the powerful elite, Jewish or Roman, whom we might accuse of putting Jesus to death.  These are ordinary people, with no power beyond that of the mob who frightened Pilate so badly that he allowed the crucifixion to go ahead even though he couldn't find any fault in Jesus.  Yet these ordinary, largely powerless people accept responsibility for Jesus' death.  What on earth could have convinced them of the truth of Peter's charge against them?

 

My guess is, the resurrection.  It is the resurrection that has transformed Peter (and the other disciples) from a demoralised bunch of no-hopers (literally no-hopers!) into courageous and convincing preachers; and it is the resurrection, surely, that now convinces the crowd that they have got things badly wrong.  But can we plead in their defence, they have got things wrong through ignorance and not by their own deliberate fault?  I think we can.  The whole issue for them, as it is for us today, is the issue of Jesus' true identity.  If he is the Messiah, the Son of God, the Christ, God Incarnate, then they have indeed got things horribly wrong.  But right up until the resurrection, they never believed Jesus was who he claimed to be.

 

And if he was not who he claimed to be, then by Jewish law he certainly deserved death.  If he was not who he claimed to be, then his claims constituted the most terrible blasphemy imaginable; and any faithful Jew would have been justified in agreeing to his execution.  But now, seemingly too late, the awful truth has dawned on these poor people, and they are horrified at what they have done.  They cry out to Peter, 'what shall we do?'.  And perhaps they expect the answer, 'there is nothing you can do, it's too late for you.  You had the same chance as the rest of us, but you blew it.'  But of course that's not the answer he gives.  It is simple and clear: 'Repent and be baptised.'

 

And there in essence is what baptism is all about for most of us.  Most of us are like those people in the crowd.  We have not led a particularly wicked life; we have not murdered, raped, or embezzled millions of dollars.  But many of us have got it wrong about God. during some stage of our lives.  Many of us have had a time when we did not believe in God, or we did not believe in Jesus Christ other than as a purely historical figure.  But then we have come to realise our mistake – we have come to realise that we got it wrong about God, about Christ.  And we have had to change our whole mindset, the way in which we look at reality.  We had turned our backs on the whole 'God-thing', and now we have to turn around and face in the opposite direction.  That's what repentance is.

 

And when we have reached that stage it is time to be baptised, to accept that with God it is never too late to start afresh.  Repent and be baptised, said Peter to those people who, two thousand years ago, had got it wrong about God.  And today, and next Sunday, the message is and always will be the same.

 

The essential problem is always the same – recognising the true identity of Jesus of Nazareth.  And we see this wonderfully illustrated for us in St Luke's classic account of the encounter on the road to Emmaus.  Cleopas and his unnamed companion are trudging along the road, with very mixed emotions.  Partly they are still sunk in the gloom of Good Friday; but, as it soon becomes clear, they are also thoroughly confused by the first reports of the resurrection.

 

As they walk along deep in discussion the Risen Christ joins them, but St Luke says, 'they were kept from'.  He doesn't say by whom or by what they were kept from recognising him.  Perhaps we are to understand that some angelic or spiritual intervention was at work here, but it is difficult to see why that might be the will of God.  Why would God want to keep these two followers from Christ from discovering the good news of his resurrection?

 

More likely, they were kept from recognising Jesus from their own misunderstanding of the Scriptures, and their own experience of Jesus among them before his death. They had recognised him as a prophet, 'powerful in word and deed before God and all the people'.  They had even dared to hope that he might have been the long-promised Messiah, the one who was going to redeem Israel.  But then came his death, so that seemed to be the end of that.  And yet…

 

They have heard the women's account of finding the tomb empty, and seeing a vision of angels who said that Jesus is alive, although the women didn't actually see him.  At that point, perhaps, they sank into silence, being unsure, being even a little embarrassed to talk about empty tombs and angelic visions with this unknown stranger who seems to be so out of touch with recent events.

 

Jesus then takes over and begins by helping them to a new understanding of the Scriptures, which, for them, of course, means the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament.  They had got it wrong about Jesus precisely because they had not understood the role the Messiah was to play when he came.  He was to come, not as some all-conquering military hero, but as a suffering servant, who would be killed and then raised to life on the third day.

 

But the penny didn't drop for them at that point.  It was only when they were seated with him at the supper table, and Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to them that the penny dropped. And St Luke is so determined that it will drop for us, too, that he spells it out twice in this passage.  They recognised him in the breaking of the bread, or, as we would put it today, in the Eucharist.

 

And as soon as the penny had dropped, they forgot it was dark outside; they abandoned their meal and set off at once for Jerusalem, which, we have already been told, was about seven miles away.  There they shared their good news with the other disciples who shared theirs with them.

 

So today, when we have once again recognised Jesus, risen and alive, in the Eucharist we will share shortly, all we have to do is running away home and tell our families, friends and neighbours our food news.  That's part of the life to which we are committed through our baptism and our confirmation.  As our second lesson makes clear today, that commitment involves other thing, too.

 

But I'll leave that for the Bishop to talk about next week.

 

Learning from Cyril

 

 

Texts: Acts 17:22-31; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21

 

The thing about university study is that it involves a lot of reading interesting but heavy stuff.  And every now and again it's good to read something a little lighter, just for the pure enjoyment of being entertained.  So over the last few weeks, on the recommendation of a number of people, I have been reading the stories of Alexander McCaull Smith, particularly those set in Edinburgh.

 

Those of you who are fellow devotees will know that one of the most interesting characters in these stories is a dog, called Cyril.  Cyril has many appealing features, including a gold tooth, a characteristic he shares with his somewhat eccentric owner, Angus Lordie – partly explained by the fact that Cyril and Angus share the same dentist!  Among Cyril's other idiosyncrasies is a habit of winking at attractive young women (thereby showing off his gold tooth to advantage), and enjoying his own wee mug of beer at the local.

 

But it's his inner musings that appeal to me because of their clear theological content.  Through Cyril, we learn a lot about the world as it is experienced by dogs.  We learn that dogs are aware of their dependence on human beings, in particular, of course, their owners.  They know that they have a certain sphere of freedom – in which they can do doggie things – but that sphere of freedom is necessarily circumscribed by virtue of the very fact that they are dogs.  They are owned by someone, they are not truly masters of their own world.

 

Central to Cyril's life as a dog is his relationship to his owner, Angus Lordie, and so a lot of Cyril's musings revolve around this relationship.  When temptation comes Cyril's way in the shape of some particularly tasty looking ankles, he resists it by reminding himself of what biting them would do to his relationship with Angus.  The ankles belong to a guy called Matthew, a pleasant if rather wet young man whom Angus knows.  Cyril realises that if he gives in to the strong urge to bite Matthew's ankles, Angus will feel obliged to punish him physically and verbally in order to soothe Matthew's feelings.  Cyril might even be excluded from future social occasions, lest he bite someone else's ankles; and so, after a monumental struggle with his canine nature, Cyril manages not to bite Matthew's ankles.

 

But in the course of his musings there are three other key points to note from a theological perspective.  First, Cyril reminds himself that he loves his owner, and therefore would not enjoy displeasing him.  And secondly, he is quite indifferent to Matthew's feelings.  If he had bitten Matthew's ankles it would not have been personal: he had no wish to hurt Matthew, it was just that those ankles were a delight to the eye.  Conversely, his final choice to refrain from biting those ankles owed nothing to any desire to please Matthew.  Cyril quite likes human company in general, but he seeks to please only Angus, his owner.

 

And thirdly, there is an interesting aspect to his love for Angus.  It is perfectly genuine, but it also has practical implications.  Angus is the source of his food and other essentials.  Cyril is perfectly clear about that: his love, however genuinely from the heart, can never be entirely disinterested.  Cyril's love for Angus brings with it very practical rewards.

 

Now let Cyril's musings guide us as we look at today's Scriptures.  The first point to notice is the exact parallel between the canine world and our own.  Just as Cyril's freedom is always and inevitably circumscribed by the fact that he is a dog and not a human being, so ours is circumscribed by the fact that we are creatures, not the Creator.  As St Paul would have put it if he had met Cyril, we are not masters of our own world precisely because we have an owner.  We are owned by God as surely as Cyril is owned by Angus.  We are necessarily dependent on God just as surely as Cyril is dependent on Angus. 

 

Secondly, when we notice how well behaved Cyril is, we must qualify that in one important regard that applies to all well-trained dogs.  They do not obey commands, they obey their master.  If Angus tells Cyril to sit, Cyril will sit.  If anyone else tells Cyril to sit he will decide for himself what he wishes to do at that moment.  Dogs know their masters' voice, and can effect profound deafness to the voice of anyone else.

 

The theological significance of that is surely clear.  We must first know our master's voice, for that voice alone is the only one we must obey always.  That's part of the teaching we can draw from our first lesson today.  St Paul is in Athens, and as he wanders around the city he is struck by the plethora of shrines and temples to a whole range of 'gods'.  And he even finds one that is dedicated to 'an unknown god'.  All this appalled St Paul, of course, a convinced monotheist.  But instead of stamping his foot and raging against them as hopeless pagans, he tells them who this unknown God is.  He is the only one, says St Paul, the creator of all things seen and unseen.

 

He could have put it this way.  Up until now you have been listening to so many different voices and trying to obey them all.  You are like dogs with multiple owners.  But I have good news for you.  There is only one owner, who owns everything and everyone.  There is only one voice you have to obey.

 

Well, what sort of owner do we have?  How can we know what he is like?  St Paul is able to tell them what they need to know.  They have an owner who loves them, an owner who cares for them and provides for them and protects them.  An owner who, in turn, they may also love.  An owner whom they are called to obey.

 

And on that point we can switch from St Paul to St John; because here in our gospel passage today we have this same point expanded.  How do we prove our love for God (for Christ)?  By obeying him – hearing his word and doing his word.  And if we truly love him this will not be a burden to us.  We will want to please him precisely because he is a good and loving owner – precisely because we love him.

 

And that is not diminished in any way by the fact that it is also in our best interests to love and obey him.  Just as Cyril recognised that loving and obeying Angus brought its own rewards, so we are assured that if we love and obey God we will be richly rewarded.  And notice what the nature of that reward is, according to our gospel passage this morning.  It will be our owner's presence with us – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – the God who is Holy Trinity –will come to us and make his home with us.

 

And, yes, there is one more story about Cyril that illustrates this for us.  At one point Angus is visiting a friend who doesn't like dogs inside, so Cyril is tethered to a railing outside.  Suddenly some terrible scoundrel comes, unties him, and drags him away, onto a bus.  Both Cyril and Angus are devastated at the thought they may never see each other again.  However, Cyril manages to escape from his abductor, and, to cut a long story short, someone recognises him and brings him back.  Fittingly his reunion with Angus takes place in their favourite pub.  As he is led in through the door he sees Angus at the same time as Angus sees him.  Both let out a whoop of delight as Cyril bounds across the floor and leaps into Angus' waiting arms.

 

And, says the author, a time of strange quiet descends on the other customers, for it is not every day that you see such a display of tender love in a public bar.  It reminds us, perhaps that there is joy among the angels of God over one sinner who repents.

 

Not that Cyril is a sinner, of course!  That would be far too heavy for such light reading.  Yet there is one important difference between Cyril and ourselves.  As I noted above, Cyril had no feelings one way or the other towards Matthew, the owner of the tempting ankles.  Dogs feel no calling to love their neighbours as well as their owner.  That's what makes us so superior to dogs, isn't it?

Judging By Appearances

 

 

Texts: 1 Samuel 16:1-13; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-141

 

The readings today, and especially our first lesson, are remarkably well timed for me as I have spent a lot of time over the last few days working with others to select a new manager for Koputai Lodge.  It's a difficult process, not made any easier for us by the high quality of the applicants.  I found myself in a position similar to Samuel's: as each candidate appeared before us, I began to think to myself, 'Ah, surely, this is the right one'!

 

When we had completed the process, we met together as a panel and tried to reach a decision.  Who should it be?  And, as a first step, on what basis were we to make our decision?  We agreed that as far as possible we should tackle the matter as if unsuccessful candidates had a right of appeal.  They don't, but it meant that we had to be able to justify our decision to ourselves on the sort of grounds that would stand up to independent review.

 

So what did we have before us?  First of all, we had their CV's, summarising their qualifications, experience, and matters of that kind.  Obviously, all that's important in determining the relative merits of the candidates for us.  Then we had their referees' reports.  These always have to be viewed with some caution because the referees are chosen by the candidates, and are likely to have been chosen carefully, shall we say.  Nevertheless, they are another source of information, which needs to be taken into account and followed up.  This week's scare story from Wanganui Hospital was a good reminder for us there.

 

So far so good.  But the third leg of the trifecta is the interview.  What is the purpose of that?  Apart from checking any details in the written material, or clarifying any point that wasn't clear, inevitable what we are doing in the course of an interview is trying to get a feel for the person before us.  And it's hard to avoid the word 'judging'.  What sort of a person is this?   What sort of personality has this applicant got?  And all the while we have to bear in mind that the interview process is artificial and stressful.  It's not a social function: we might be making small talk, but a lot is riding on the outcome, for the applicant and for us.

 

How will this person relate to the residents and other persons to whom Koputai provides services?  How will he or she relate to our present staff, and they to him or her?  Is this person one with whom the Board will be able to get along easily, or are we about to make a rod for our own backs?  What all this is about, we might want to call personal chemistry, but that doesn't mean that it is in any way scientific.  Things like intuition – or do we mean gut feeling? – or do we mean instinct? – or do we mean irrational dislike? – start coming into play.  Should they?  Could we justify not appointing someone because one member of the panel 'felt uneasy' about that person?  How could we justify that to an independent reviewer?

 

Should we take into account their appearance, or their mannerisms, and so on, and so on?  In other words, just like Samuel, we found the task very difficult, because, in a way, we were trying to do what only God is able to do.  We were trying to look into the hearts of the applicants, whereas our eyes are good only for looking at appearances.

 

But another word of caution is required here, according to today's readings.  Sometimes we can make the opposite mistake.  Appearances can be deceptive but they are not always.  Sometimes we need to believe our own eyes.  We see a bit of this in this story of Samuel trying to pick the next King of Israel from 8 possible 'candidates'.  Having been told that we should not judge by appearances, we're told this about the favoured choice, David: He was ruddy, with a fine appearance and handsome features.  Bite your tongue, Samuel!

 

But it's in this marvellous gospel story that we see this issue played out in all its comic intensity.   It is a very funny story, at least in the way St John has chosen to tell it.  As I have suggested in the notes, he sets it up almost like a Shakespearean drama, with the man born blind playing the role of the fool or jester.  At its core, this is a very simple story.  A man who was born blind is healed of his blindness by Jesus, and different people react in different ways to this event.  But look how John plays it.

 

First of all, the disciples are with Jesus when he first encounters this man.  Far from any expression of compassion or sadness at the man's condition, they treat him as a theological problem.  Blindness, they assume, is a punishment for sin.  If this man was born blind, then how could he have sinned to deserve blindness?  Perhaps he has been punished for his parents' sin?

 

Jesus responds by telling them they are on the wrong track.  And then he launches into a bizarre and detailed piece of alternative medicine, otherwise known as quackery.  He could have simply spoken the word, and the blindness would have been healed.  But on this occasion he performed this curious exercise, perhaps to make it absolutely clear that he was healing the man; or perhaps St John wanted to present this part of the story in this way to advance the plotline later.  How did this man heal you?  Well, he took…

 

Now comes the reaction.  First of all, the neutrals in the story – that is, those who are not members of Jesus' team or with his opponents – rather naturally express amazement at what has happened.  It all seems so unlikely that they begin to doubt the evidence of their own eyes.  Perhaps it's a case of mistaken identity?  He certainly looks like the guy who used to sit and beg, but perhaps it isn't really him?

 

And then come the Pharisees – and what marvellous modern-day trial lawyers they would have made!  There first point is that whatever happened shouldn't have happened because it was the Sabbath.  Therefore, if Jesus did heal the man, he is no man of God because he broke God's law.  But that was quickly shot down: who but a man of God could have performed such a miracle.

 

Okay, then the second point is that nothing actually happened.  This man claiming to have been healed of blindness was not born blind.  It's all a con or a mistake.  So they summoned the parents of the man and asked them what was going on.  They stick to the basics.  We know he is our son, they say, and we know he was born blind.  That's all we can say.  How it is that he can now see, we don't know.  Ask him.  So they do, but first they attempt to discredit Jesus.  Give glory to God, they insist, not to Jesus who is a simmer.  But this simple man, this Shakespearean fool, has the perfect answer.  He's not into theology.  All he knows is that he was blind and now he can see.

 

And that's the crunch of this story.  We can be so blinded by what we think we know, that we fail to see the evidence to the contrary before our eyes.  And it may well be as true about our faith as about anything else.  The Pharisees believed that God's law forbade healing the sick on a Sunday.  Therefore this miracle could not have occurred at all, or, if it did, it could not have been done through God.  The simple truth of a man born blind and now able to see was not enough to open their eyes to the truth.

 

All of us have preconceived ideas sometimes, about other people, and about God.   Samuel thought it most likely that the eldest son would be the chosen candidate for the job, particularly when he saw that he was physically imposing.  Each one of us on the interviewing panel probably had in mind the 'sort of person' we were looking for in a manager.  The Pharisees thought they knew what God did and did not allow on the Sabbath

 

But, as Fr Gerard Hughes famously said, we worship a God of surprises.  He did not look much like God when hanging on the cross on Good Friday – at least, not if we assume that God gets his way through overwhelming power.  But if we look for a God who knows human suffering from the inside, who knows how to suffer with us, then the cross is the right place to look.

 

Particularly as we journey through Lent.

It’s All True!

 

 

Texts: Acts 10:34-43; Colossians 3:1-4; Matthew 28: 1-10

 

If a person is born blind, then he or she may never have an experience of sight.  If a person is born profoundly deaf, then he or she may never have an experience of sound.  Such a person may tell us that he or she has never had such an experience; but what he or she could not do is to go on to say, "and no one else has had such an experience either.  There is no such thing as sight or sound."

 

But that is precisely the error that atheists make.  An atheist may well make the claim that he or she has never had an experience for which the word "God" would be appropriate as that word is usually understood within the Christian tradition.  Or has never had an experience of meeting the Risen Christ.  So far as he or she is simply reporting on his or her own experience – or lack of such an experience – it is not for any of us to argue.  What he or she cannot do is to go on to say, "and no one else has had such an experience either.  There is no God: Christ has not risen."

 

To assert that there is no God – or that Christ has not been raised from the dead – is just as dogmatic as to assert the opposite.  Atheists are as dogmatic as any other breed of fundamentalists.  What they have or have not experienced becomes, in their minds, a universal truth to be held by all.

 

That necessarily means that all those millions of people today who believe in God, Christian, Jew or Muslim, are wrong.  They may genuinely believe that they have experienced the reality of God, but they are mistaken – and with them, all the millions of other people who for the last four or five thousand years have believed in God.  All of us are mistaken, according to the atheists, because they have never had such an experience.  Those who are blind are denying the reality of sight; those who are deaf are denying the reality of sound.

 

Or faith in God – our faith in Christ – our faith in the Holy Spirit – is rooted in our experience, and in the experience of our fellow Christians.  Sometimes we seem a little worried about that.  Experience sounds a rather weak basis for something as important as our faith.  It sounds a bit subjective – rather too open to wishful thinking, perhaps, or self-delusion.  And there are dangers there, of course.  That's why we need to check with the experience of others.  That's why we need the Church.  We need a measuring rod, sometimes, to make sense of our own experiences.  When we find that other believers have experienced something similar, then we can be reassured that we are not imagining things.  Self-delusion tends to be personal – not a shared experience across many cultures and many centuries.

 

Besides, what other evidence could there be apart from experience?  How do we know love exists?  We can't bottle it, or look at it under a microscope, or weigh it.  We know there is such a thing as love only because we experience it.  But once we experience it – and once we hear of others who have experienced it, too – we can never deny its reality.  The same is true of beauty, for example, or delight.  They cannot be verified – they are outside the purview of science – but look at the harbour, or a perfect carnation, or listen to the Moonlight Sonata, and no one on earth will be able to convince you there is no such thing as beauty or delight.

Our faith is rooted in personal experience.  And it begins, of course, with the experience of those who first discovered that the tomb was empty.  Of course, the knockers and the doubters have always tried to pour scorn on the reports of the empty tomb.  They have rightly pointed out that the accounts in the four gospels vary widely.  Follow any court case for any length of time and you will note something similar.

 

It's not the details that matter.  It's the fact that the tomb is empty that matters.  That's what first unnerves everyone and sets them running in all directions.  Clearly, this was completely unexpected.  If this was a carefully thought out scam by some of Jesus' followers, we can rule out a lot of people from any list of suspects!  The women were not in on the plot, for a kick off.  They are scared witless.  Earthquakes are scary enough at the best of times.  And early in the morning while it is still dark is not one of the best of times to have an earthquake!

 

Nor outside a tomb that is supposed to contain a corpse but is in fact empty!  Throw in a dazzling white angel and the old nerves are going to get a trifle frayed before it is all over.  The tough guards were so terrified, says St Matthew, that they shook, and became like dead men.  They fainted, presumably – collapsed in a heap.  The angel gave the women a message for the disciples, and off they went "afraid yet filled with joy'.  Then they met the Risen Christ, and prostrated themselves at his feet.  He gave them the same message for the disciples.

 

What we have here is their account of what they experienced – terror, fear, joy – and an encounter with an angel and with the Risen Christ.  Why should we believe part of what they say, but not the other part?  Why do we accept that they ran away in both fear and joy, but refuse to accept their account of whom they who they were running away from?

 

And St Matthew emphasises that this is not some weird episode in fairyland – this is rooted in the history and geography of the Holy Land.  For he alone deals with the pragmatic attempt of the chief priests and the guards to cover up the incident.  Does that ring true?  Would guards be embarrassed to have to confess that a dead body disappeared from a tomb they were supposed to be guarding?  Sounds about right to me.  And would the chief priests want to hush it up to the point of bribing the guards and offering them immunity from prosecution?  That sounds about right, too.

 

In other words, whatever actually happened to Christ's body, the accounts we have of the reaction of the people caught up in the drama ring true.  They are clearly based on eye-witness accounts – accounts of personal experiences.

 

And when we turn to our first lesson today an eye-witness account is exactly what we seem to have.  It is sometimes alleged by critics of the Christian faith that the story of the resurrection was a much later invention; but that simply doesn't wash.  Even those who argue that St Peter did not utter the words attributed to him in this passage from Acts acknowledge that what we have here is an extract from a sermon, a sermon that was certainly preached in the first century, and probably no later than 80AD.  It is therefore a window into the core beliefs of the very early Christian communities.

 

It is set in the house of Cornelius in the city of Caesarea – probably an early "house church" – and Peter is invited to speak.  Notice how many times the emphasises that what he is talking about is already well known among them: You know the message God sent…you know what has happened throughout Judea.  He is not telling them anything they haven't known already – he is summarising it and helping them to understand it's significance.  Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit, went around healing the sick, etc.  How do we know?  We are witnesses of everything he did, says Peter.  We were there – we saw it all.

 

What else?  They killed him by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him from the dead on the third day, and caused him to be seen.  By whom?  …by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.  Again, we are confronted with what purports to be an eye-witness account.  And the question arises again – why should we believe Peter's eye-witness account of the life and death of Jesus, but not his account of his experience of the Risen Christ?

 

I want to finish today with our theme.  It is very short – just one word, in fact.  That word is YES!  The Resurrection is God's yes to everything Jesus offered on our behalf on the cross.  It is God's Yes to Jesus' supreme act of faith to suffer an agonising death on trust that God would vindicate him.  That Yes means, love does reign in the universe.  That life is stronger than death.  That Yes means that our faith is real – that our experiences of God and of the Risen Christ are true.

 

God's Easter Yes is addressed to the whole world, for it was to the whole world that he sent his only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.  He asks only that we say Yes to him.

 

 

Peter and Paul – Leaders in the Faith

Texts:  Acts 12:1-11; 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18; Matthew 16:13-19

"Take me to your Leader."  If you ever spent part of your youth watching early science fiction films, or horror films, those words should sound familiar to you.  Although invading aliens tended to have quite strong accents they all seemed to have a remarkable ability to speak English; and they all took it for granted that we would have a leader.  Perhaps they studied such useful subjects as sociology and anthropology as part of their training to be space travellers, along with such insignificant trifles as engineering, aeronautics and navigation over long distances.

And they were quite right, of course.  Our own experience tells us that with any group, from a small house-group up to a nation state, some sort of leadership is essential.  Groups that start of with the clear intention of having no leader usually follow one of two trajectories: either a leader emerges and is recognised and accepted, at least tacitly, by the other members; or the group slowly but surely falls apart.  I was once a member of a small Christian group who tried to meet without a leader.  The first half of the meeting was usually taken up with discussing who would take the minutes for that meeting; and then for the rest of the time we would try to fix a place, time and date for the next meeting.  That's only a slight exaggeration: I promised myself when I extricated myself from that group that never again would I become involved in a group that did not have a leader.

This being election year, we will hear a lot about leadership.  We will be told that at a time like this we need experienced leadership (by those parties who have experienced leaders), or fresh, innovative leadership (by those parties whose leaders are still a bit new to the role).  Much will undoubtedly be made about "strong leadership".  This is a bit trickier than experience, because there is, apparently, strength and strength.  Many of you will remember the ill-fated Bill Rowling, who suddenly found himself Prime Minister following the unexpected death of Norman Kirk.  One of the ablest and most pleasant men ever to hold that office, in my humble opinion, but he was mercilessly portrayed as weak by his political opponents (which included most of the newspapers of the time), and he was thrown out of office in a landslide.

So began the Muldoon years.  He was certainly not weak: famous for attacking anyone who dared to criticise or even question him, inside the party or outside, he terrorised his own colleagues as much as the Opposition.  For a time the electorate loved him for it, but then there was a mood change.  His strength became seen in a different light; he was arrogant and power-mad.  David Lange came preaching consensus and consultation, and we threw Muldoon out with the same sort of landslide we had given Rowling.

So what are we looking for in a leader?  We have a few months left to answer that question in the political realm.  But what ofleadership in the Church?  What qualities should we look for in a church leader?  Well, I have been involved in three electoral colleges in my time, the first two to elect an Assistant Bishop and then a Bishop in the Diocese of Wellington, and then to elect our Bishop in this diocese.  What qualities were we looking for on those occasions – what qualities was I looking for?  Now I am involved in the process of finding a new Dean.  Do we look for the same qualities in a dean as we do in a bishop?  Are there qualities of Christian leadership that apply at all levels of the Church, and, if so, what might they be?

Bishop George upset some people in the Diocese by saying that he did not see his role as setting out a vision for the Diocese; he thought the diocese should tell him as our new bishop what our vision was.  Was that a sign of a good leader seeking to draw out the wisdom of the people and refusing to impose his ideas on them, or was it an abdication of the sort of leadership we rightly expect from our bishop?  Part of the great difficulty of leadership arises from the fact that on questions of that kind opinion is likely to be divided in any group, inside or outside the Church.

And so often, the answer lies somewhere in-between.  I remember in one of those electoral colleges a priest saying several times in the course of his address, "the question is, do we want a bishop who listens, or a bishop who leads?"  It seemed to be beyond his comprehension that we might want a bishop who listens, consults, takes advice, and then leads.  We were told the other night that we are seeking a dean "who will lead us forward".  Of course – why didn't I think of that?

Of course, there is always some clever Charley who will suggest that we are not looking for certain qualities at all; what we are looking for is evidence that this particular person is being called by God to this particular position at this particular time.  I remember a suggestion in the Welling case by a priest who told our large gathering that we had got the whole process for choosing a new bishop completely wrong.  We should not be having a fierce debate about the relative merits of the candidates, followed by a democratic vote to determine the winner.  We should leave that sort of thing to political parties and other secular organisations.

We should remember that we are not to be like that.  Among us there is to be no worldly ambition, power games, or eye-gouging.  Instead, we should seek the will of God.  This, he frankly admitted, was not always easy, and he thought it would be impossible in a body such as Synod because not every member of Synod had the necessary gifts of discernment.  We were just on the point of taking him out and stoning him when he hastened to assure us that he himself lacked those very gifts.

Could he therefore suggest that we set aside, say, ten or twelve people known to us to be leading a life of serious and deep prayer, and ask them to wait upon the Lord until it became clear to them whom God was calling to be the next Bishop of Wellington?  There was some support for this radical idea, if only from those who saw it as their only hope of getting home in time to watch the rugby test on TV that night.  But of course it was hopelessly impractical:  the chances of the House of Clergy agreeing on which of their colleagues were more gifted in prayer and discernment than themselves were virtually nil.

But in principle, surely, my brave colleague was quite right.  And today of all days we ought to see that.  Who among us would choose as a leader one who has denied ever knowing Jesus in order to save his own skin?  Who among us would choose as a leader in the Christian Church one who had thrown himself energetically into persecuting Christian believers and having them killed for their faith?  If we had been on an interviewing panel, would we have been impressed by either of them?  Or would we have dismissed Peter as a blusterer, lacking in substance and stability, ever likely to put his foot in it and say the wrong thing?  And what of Paul?  If we judge by appearances he wouldn't interview too well.  Short, bald with rheumy eyes, apparently, and altogether far too fond of his own opinion on everything.  A classic bigot, we might think.

Oh, dear – how wrong history would have proved us to be!  With the benefit of hindsight we can see that these two men rank as the greatest of all the leaders the Church has been blessed with in its long history.  So what was it that made them so great – what do they show us we should look for in a leader?

Above all, surely, absolute conviction that they have experienced the Risen Lord in their life.  Only from that conviction comes the power to convince others of the truth of the Gospel.  Only from that conviction comes the strength to persevere no matter what the response, what the criticisms that may be hurled at them.  And only that conviction confirms that they were filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit.

So what am I looking for in the next Dean of St Paul's  Cathedral, Dunedin?  Someone who relates well to the city?  Desirable, but not essential.  Someone who understands and supports our three-tikanga constitution?  Desirable, but not essential.    A good liturgist, teacher, preacher, or pastor?  Someone who relates well to the young?  Someone who sings well and appreciates the Cathedral choral tradition?  In each case, I would say, desirable but not essential.

I am looking for a person who, from his or her own experience, is convinced that Jesus Christ is risen and that that one fact makes all the difference in the world.  A man or woman who, in that respect, at least, reminds me very much of Peter and Paul.