Living in the Real World

Texts: Genesis 9:8-17; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15

I have spoken a lot about baptism in recent times, and today the readings raise another question: into what does baptism lead us?  That is particularly the issue that is addressed in our gospel passage this morning.  As soon as we think about the temptation of Christ we recall the story.  We know there were three specific temptations; we might be a bit hazy about the order – even the gospel accounts are not consistent in that respect – but we probably can recall what they are.  There's one about turning the stones into bread; another about bungee-jumping off a high place without a rope; and a third about assuming all political power over the world.

Except that St Mark either does not know there were three specific temptations, or has forgotten.  He gives us a typically terse but very interesting alternative account.  First of all, he links it even more closely than the others with the Jesus' baptism; and the linking agent, so to speak, is the Holy Spirit.  Jesus comes up out of the waters of baptism, he hears the voice from heaven proclaiming him as the Beloved Son of God, and he sees the Spirit descend on him like a dove.  And immediately, says St Mark, the Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness where he was tempted for 40 days.

So now we can begin our answer to the question, into what does baptism leads us?  We might be tempted sometimes to think that the answer is into a sort of improved version of Disneyland or Camelot, where all our problems have magically disappeared and everyone lives happily ever after.  That is the slap-happy gospel we sometimes hear preached by American televangelists.  Come to Jesus and all will be immediately put right in our lives.

The picture painted by St Mark is very different.  He says some to Jesus, be baptised, and enter with him into the real world, and he uses very powerful symbols to tell us the nature of the real world.  He says that in the wilderness Jesus was "with the wild animals".  Think about that expression for a moment and notice the feelings it engenders in you.  Do you feel like exclaiming, "Oh, how lovely!"  Perhaps you see a safari park, with David Attenborough pointing out how close the pride of lions is in that reassuring half-whisper he uses.

Or are you less of a romantic and more of a realist: do you get an immediate sensation of danger when you reflect on St Mark's expression?  Jesus was "with the wild animals".  I recently read a commentary on this gospel by a Jungian scholar who assured his readers that St Mark is using a classic symbol here; he said wild animals represent "of course" Jesus' emotions, his feelings as the full horror of his unique calling began to dawn on him in the wilderness.  Well, in your dreams, I thought as I read that account.

It may well be that the wild animals are intended to carry a symbolic meaning as well as the obvious one; but if that is so, I think it is far more likely that they represent the danger of chaos, of untamed nature, we might say.  If we think about the human predicament in general there are two major sources of threat to our existence.  One is natural disasters – earthquakes, storms, floods, etc.  The sheer raw power of these events is completely overwhelming – we are powerless to resist.  However much we might try to tell ourselves that we live in a safe environment, there can never be any guarantees.  Volcanoes erupt, the earth quakes and opens up, tsunamis cover whole islands, and fire razes whole communities.  I often think that those who try to make theological sense out of human evil ought to try doing the same with natural phenomena.  If God is the Creator of all things and God is all-loving and powerful, how is it that Creation itself is often so horribly destructive?  Answers on a postcard, please!

So Jesus is led into the wilderness representing the real world as it is estranged from God; and there he is in the company of "wild animals" representing all the threats of the natural world.  Secondly, says St Mark, Jesus is in the presence of Satan, the embodiment of evil.  Here is the twin threat to human existence; here we have the evil that works in and through us so that we might properly call it "human evil".  Think for a moment what the world would be like if there was no natural threat to our existence, and no human evil in the world.  We would be at peace – there would be no more fear, no more pain or suffering or death, exactly as the prophets have promised.  But that's not the world in which we live, and it is not the world into which we are lead by baptism.

Fortunately, St Mark assures us that Jesus is not only in the presence of untamed nature and incarnate evil.  He is also in the presence of angels who minister to him.  They represent, surely, the presence of God.  And there we have the complete picture of the life of faith.  Jesus is in the real world; he is in danger; he is in danger from natural phenomena and from incarnate evil.  But he is not alone.  He is guarded, looked after, ministered to, by God's angels, by God's providential care.  And that's surely the world into which we pass through baptism.  We are not plucked out of this dangerous world; nor is this dangerous world magically transformed.  We are given the promise that, no matter what, God is with us and is ministering to us.

Our temptation is to want more; to ask God to wipe out the threat of harm and evil.  Well, our first lesson reminds us that God had that very thing in mind at one stage, but relented.  The cost was too great, and he promised never to go down that track again.  In a lovely little touch in this morning's reading, God says that when he sees a rainbow he will remember his promise.  I wonder if we do the same.  When we see a rainbow do we focus only on its beauty?  Do we remember fairy stories about pots of gold, and all the rest of it?  Or do we remember that God has sworn never to give up on this world, no matter what?  Never to give up on us, no matter how far we might fall away from him?  That's the assurance we need to hang onto as we journey through Lent.

Which leaves this strange little passage from the First Letter of Peter.  Even the most confident Bible commentators seem to become a little less assertive when they get to this passage; and we're not helped by the fact that there is nothing else remotely like it in the New Testament.  The classic Jewish belief was that at death all people passed into a shadowy realm called Sheol, the purpose of which was never very clear; and no distinction seemed to be made between the righteous and the unrighteous.  One of the common pleas in the psalms was for a long life to put off passing into Sheol for as long as possible.  That belief was certainly undergoing revision during the last century or so before Christ; and this passage does seem to suggest that there was a special realm where the unrighteous were held, represented especially by the depraved human beings that were wiped out in the Flood.

So perhaps the Risen Christ was sent down into that realm to proclaim God's forgiveness even of them; in other words, to proclaim salvation for all.  That has a better tone to it in my ears than the suggestion that he went to show them what they had missed out on through their disobedience!  Anyway, Holy Saturday is traditionally the day for contemplating that particular mystery, so let's leave it for then.

In the meantime, let us continue our journey through Lent reflecting on our baptism and the salvation we have received through it.  The world remains a wilderness, inhabited by wild animals and other natural dangers, and by incarnate evil.  But we are not alone, and never will be.  Never again will the forces of destruction prevail.  That is the promise given to Noah and fulfilled in Christ.

Next time you see a rainbow remember this promise and give thanks.

 

 

Keeping the End in Sight

Texts: 2 Kings 5:1-14; 1 Corinthians 9:24-27; Mark 1:40-45

Once again the Scriptures have demonstrated their extraordinary ability to be timely!  When Vestry at our last meeting before Christmas decided 15 February would be the date of our parish AGM, none of us knew, or even gave a thought to, what Scriptures may have been set for this day.  And yet, here we are, on the day of our AGM, being given a series of reminders of the importance of keeping our eyes on the goal, the aim, the ends we have in mind as Christians and not to get too hung up on the means we use along the way.  Our places of worship, our styles of worship, in fact, all our religious practices, only have value if they bring us closer to God, deepen our faith and our relationship with God, and promote our healing, our wholeness, our salvation, in and through Jesus Christ our Healer, our Redeemer, and our Saviour.

I have given this sermon the title of "Keeping the End in Sight" because it appeals to my love of ambiguity, the power of words to say more than one thing at a time.  The word "End" is a classic example.  Remember how, in the good old days, authors believed their readers were so dumb that they always wrote at the end of their stories "The End", so we would know that the book had finished?  The same was true of films in those days, too, I seem to remember.  At the end of the film, those words would appear, meaning that the film had finished and you had a maximum of 15 seconds to leave the cinema before the National Anthem started!

So one meaning of "End" is "Finished".  "This is the end of an era" we often say, unless we have given up clichés for Lent or something.  Then there's "The End (of the world) is Nigh".  And thinking of that, I can't resist re-telling the story of our friend, Bishop Richard Randerson, who was once asked by some fundamentalist parish nominators if he was a "pre-millennialist or a "post-millenniallist", which has something to do with whether Christ's return is preceded by 1000 years of tribulation, or inaugurates 1000 years of heavenly rule, or something.  Richard said he was neither: he was a "pan-millennialist", which meant that if we didn't get hung up on such issues everything would pan out alright in the end!

But "End" also means "goal, aim, or purpose".  When we get up at some horrendous hour and pound the pavements, or swim hundreds of lengths, or ride a bike around Mount Cook, the end we have in mind is to get fit enough to survive the Coast to Coast, or an ironman event.  We have some particular object in mind, and that object we may call "the end", the purpose for which we are doing whatever it is we are doing.

And the curious thing is that for the Christian those two meanings come together.  God is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, we say in one of our liturgies.  Our end is God, we seek to come to God, to share for ever in his eternal life.  The end of history comes when all things are unified in Christ and brought back to God.  Those are high and lofty thoughts, and we are constantly tempted in our everyday lives, and (it sometimes seems to me) especially in our church meetings, our Vestry meetings, our AGM's, and our seemingly endless(!) review meetings.  So, I repeat, we need to hear what the Spirit is saying to this church this morning through these readings as a prelude to our AGM.

Our first reading is another beautifully told comedy sketche from the Old Testament.  Naaman is a very important man.  He is supreme commander of the Syrian army, but he has developed leprosy.  Understandably, he is desperate to get rid of it but does know to whom he can turn for a cure.  But in his household there is a servant girl (well, actually a slave), captured on a previous raid in Israel and now serving Mrs Naaman.  She has heard of a great prophet in Israel with astonishing powers of healing.

So a tricky diplomatic situation arises.  How can Naaman , the Syrian army commander, safely enter Israel, his enemy?  So he gets a letter from the Syrian King to Israel's King, and part of the fun of this story lies in the terrified reaction of the King of Israel who believes he is being set up to fail.  However, that is all eventually sorted out and Naaman arrives at the home of this great prophet, Elisha.  At this point, of course, Naaman has only one end in mind – a cure from leprosy.  Nothing else matters except that.

But now the story takes a lovely twist, and Naaman becomes like us.  He has a very clear idea in his mind about how this healing should be conducted.  Hear it again in his own words: I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy.  Instead, of course, the prophet doesn't bother to appear himself; he sends out his minion with instructions for this mighty military man to jump up and down in the River Jordan seven times in full view of any curious bystander who happened to be around.  And, human nature being what it is, he is not greatly pleased.

What has happened is that he has forgotten the end he had in mind: he has forgotten that he has come seeking wholeness, healing, and salvation from leprosy, and is now hung-up over the correct ritual to be followed.  This is not, of course, a scientific argument about the alleged healing qualities of the waters of the Jordan compared to those of the rivers of Syria.  No such claim is made for the River Jordan.  This is about whether Naaman will get off his high horse, forget who and what he is, and submit himself to God acting through his chosen prophet.  And for us it is about remembering that the correct ritual is the one that brings us closer to God, and not necessarily the one that we use because we always have used it.

St Paul uses the image of athletic training to make this point very strongly in our second lesson.  The goal of an athlete is to win the race – the means are what he or she does in training.  An athlete may be fortunate enough to enjoy the training regime devised by the coach, but if it does not enable that athlete to win the race, it must be changed, even if a new type of training is less enjoyable than the old one.  Here again the question for us is clear: is what we are doing in the church today bringing the desired results?  Is the church becoming fitter and healthier, or is it growing tired and in decline?  And if we are honest enough to answer that question, what does it tell us about our training regime and the need for change?  Again, those are important questions for us to take from these readings into our AGM and beyond.

Our gospel reading is an even stronger challenge for us along these lines.  We were surely tempted last week to take Peter's side when he told Jesus off.  The more Jesus healed people, the bigger crowds he drew to him.  The same remains true to this day.  People who are believed to have healing powers are still the best drawcard the church has; and the temptation is to assume that anyone who can draw a big crowd to the church must be on the right track.  But Jesus didn't see it that way last week and we can see why this week.

He ministers to one individual leper – in common parlance, he heals him.  And then he instructs the man to re-connect with the religious community, from which he has been excluded by his leprosy.  Don't go shooting your mouth off about your physical healing; go and resume your religious practices that will lead you back to God and wholeness and salvation.  Of course, the man does the complete opposite, which results in Jesus becoming the outcast instead of the leper.  It is now Jesus who has to remain "outside in lonely places", because of the crowds.

What a message that is for the church!  Our constant temptation is to find some way of attracting the crowds, and it sometimes sounds to me that we are not too fussed about what that way may be.  If it works, let's do it.  Give the punters what they want and, who knows, our parish may be able to afford a full-time priest.

But, despite what one or two clergy apparently believe, the end of the church is not to provide employment for them, nor to draw vast crowds to some spectacular magic show.  The end of the church is to worship God, and to proclaim his message of freedom and reconciliation, to promote the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.  It has never been a popular message – it always leads, not to vast crowds, but to Good Friday.  We are, after all, only 10 days away from Lent.

The good news is that Good Friday is followed by Easter Day – death is followed by resurrection.  To proclaim that message is for the Church –

The End.

Doing a New Thing

Texts: Isaiah 43:18-25; 2 Corinthians 1:18-22; Mark 2:1-12

Today we in the Church stand on the brink of Lent – Ash Wednesday is this week.  And as I started to ponder this it occurred to me that the whole world is also standing on the brink of a Lenten Season.  Lent is a time to pause, to take stock, to acknowledge our failures, our weaknesses, our need to confess our faults, to seek forgiveness, and to prepare for a fresh start.  Lent is a time to let go of the past and prepare to embrace the future.  Lent is a time to look to God, the source of hope, who has promised to make all things new.  Lent is a time of self-restraint, of sombre reflection on the direction of our life.

How much the world needs its own Lent this year!  How many people in the banking and financial industries around the world need to pause, to reflect, to acknowledge their wrongdoings, their greed, and, in many cases, their criminality!  How many of them need to reflect on the direction their lives have been taking in recent times as they have chased after the mighty dollar to the exclusion of all other considerations.  How many people in regulatory agencies and Governments around the world turned a blind eye, and perhaps sought to enrich themselves, instead of blowing a loud whistle and calling a halt to the insanity of it all.  Now they face, we all face, a Lenten period of self-restraint and sombre reflection.

Of course, not all the culprits are ready to confess, and who can blame them?  In the world there is no assurance of forgiveness.  Confess your sins in this world and the likelihood is a claim for millions will be brought against you.  We say we just want the truth – we want to know what went wrong so that we can learn from it and do better the next time, avoid making the same mistakes again.  But meantime the cries grow louder for heads to roll, for someone (anyone) to take responsibility, and we wonder why the real culprits are so reluctant to confess.  Besides, who among us can cast the first stone?  Certainly not the heavily indebted who now blame the banks for making credit too easy.  The greed of the bankers can only be satisfied through the greed of their customers.

All of which is a very sad commentary on unredeemed human nature.  But we in the Church have a great advantage over the world in this regard.  It's not that we are any better than anyone else – we share the same human nature, after all – it's that we are forgiven.  We know that we are forgiven.  We are assured of our forgiveness.  That is the promise that we have as we enter our own Season of Lent – that is the lamp that guides us through this dark period of reflection and confession.  Without it we would be lost in the depths of despair.  We would be without hope.  We would face a future that is simply a repetition of the past.  There would be no hope of anything better.

That is the best our economists can offer today.  The most optimistic thing I have heard any economist say recently is that we have survived recessions in the past, we will survive this one, and we will survive the ones to come in the future.  In other words, our future will be like our past; a period of foolhardy greed and inflationary bubbles, followed by a recession; an endless cycle without any real hope of changing things permanently and for the better.

That's not the biblical vision, as Isaiah makes very clear.  Listen to these wonderful words from this morning's lesson: Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.  See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wastelands.  Things do not have to go on being like this: a new approach is possible.  I don't want to sound like an advocate for the National Party but I do think their election slogan – "Towards a Better Future" – was well chosen.  We need hope.  We need to feel that we can and will do better.  History tells us that it will not come from political leadership, however skilled and well-intentioned it might be; but the yearning for it is deep in our hearts, and the promises of God are addressed to it.

According to Isaiah there are three elements to this hope for a better future.  First, it is God's doing.  It is God who is doing a new thing, and we will see a wonderful illustration of that when we get to the gospel passage shortly.  God is the initiator of our new future: our part in all this is to see what God is doing and respond.  The second element deals with the nature of our response.  In Jewish terms we need to make offerings and sacrifices to God, not so as to win his favour or secure our forgiveness, or anything like that, but out of sheer gratitude to God for all that he has already done.  And the third element is precisely that – God has already forgiven us.  In Isaiah's words, God blots out our transgressions and remembers our sins no more.  That is why we can forget the past – our former things – and look with confidence to the future.

St Paul is once again on the defensive this morning.  One of the delights of reading his Corinthian correspondence is the puzzle of working out from what he is saying what someone else must have said to him.  Here it is fairly straightforward.  He has promised to come to Corinth to speak to the believers there face to face twice, both on the way to Macedonia and on the way back, but something must have prevented him from going there.  It seems that someone has now complained that he is flighty, saying one thing and doing the other.

He responds as only Paul can.  He insists that his "Yes" means Yes"; but no sooner has he written this than he forgets his personal feelings and turns the whole thing into another wonderful opportunity for theological teaching.  Christ, says St Paul, is "Yes" to all God's promises.  How he got there from his starting-point doesn't matter to Paul, and it shouldn't matter to us.  All that matters is that in Christ God fulfils all his promises to us.  In Christ, the promise we hear through Isaiah this morning is fulfilled.  In Christ, God is doing a new thing; can we not perceive it?

All this is wonderfully illustrated in St Mark's account of the healing of the paralytic man.  Again, we would miss the point if we concentrated on the man's physical healing, as Jesus' own words make clear.  This is a resurrection story if ever there was one.  Let me briefly summarise the action as you try to visualise it.  Some men are carrying this guy on a stretcher between them.  They reach a particular place; there they dig a hole and lower the man down into it.  Now let's pause there.  What does this remind us of so far?  Surely it reminds us of a burial, a graveside interment?  Pall-bearers carry the casket to a particular place where a hole has been dug, and the casket is lowered into the hole until it reaches the bottom.

When this guy reaches the bottom he is met by Jesus, who says two things to him.  First, he tells the man that his sins are forgiven.  Then, following protest from the self-appointed guardians of the past, Jesus says, okay, then, get up and walk.  First, there is judgment; the man is acquitted and set free – his sins are forgiven.  Isaiah would say his transgressions are blotted out, and his sins remembered no more.  Then he is told to stand up again, which (as I never tire of saying) is the original meaning of the word "resurrection".  Judgment and resurrection – it's all there in this perfectly told story.

But we haven't quite finished.  St Mark wants us to note the reaction of the crowd to all this.  This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, "We have never seen anything like this!"  Again, the echoes from Isaiah are clear.  They didn't praise Jesus, as we might have expected, they praised God.  And how were these people described in Isaiah's passage?  The people whom I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.  And what were these people saying?  We have never seen anything like this.  God was doing a new thing and they were having trouble perceiving it!

So as we in the Church enter our Season of Lent, let us do so humbly and thankfully, aware of our need for forgiveness and equally aware that we have been forgiven.  And let us then offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to God to work and pray for the future that is God's will for all, including those who have brought the world to the brink of financial and economic collapse.

 

The Three Journeys of Christmas

 

Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12

Kiwis are great travellers – we like to be going somewhere – we rarely spend a whole day at home.  And, of course, at this time of the year in particular huge numbers of us are journeying all over the place.  So that's one appropriate theme for this first Sunday of the New Year, the theme of journeys.  But New Year is also a time for looking forward, looking ahead, hopefully or otherwise according to our mood.  If the financial pundits are right, it's going to be a tough year, but if financial pundits knew what they were doing we wouldn't be in the mess we seem to be, so perhaps they're wrong.  Let's hope so anyway.

Journeying and hoping for a better future go well together, and they go well with the Christmas Season.  For at the heart of Christmas we find two things.  We find a people on the move; there are at least three journeys in our Christmas story.  And we find God working his purposes out to bring about the future he has had in mind from the beginning.

So what sort of journeys are Kiwis engaged in at this time of the year, and how do they relate to the journeys in the Christmas story?  First of all, not all our journeys are entirely of our own free will, to quote our marriage liturgy.  Sometimes they are made out of family or social obligations, and those are becoming ever more complex with re-constituted families adding to the rich tapestry of life.  How do we make sure that we are treating the grandparents fairly?  Is it our turn to visit, or theirs?  Do we have to visit the in-laws this year or can we skip them for a change?  Whose turn is it to have the children?  Every year we tell ourselves how much we are looking forward to spending Christmas with the family, but that doesn't mean that every member of the family is as much fun as all the others, does it?  Some of our journeys are simply required of us.

Others really are a source of excitement and pleasure for us.  We might be going to a favourite place for a holiday, or investigating somewhere we've heard about but never visited before.  We might have decided to start the New Year with a new adventure; white-water rafting, or exploring caves deep underground, or bungee-jumping.  We're on a journey of this kind because we really want to be.

Or perhaps we are taking the opportunity to pursue a particular interest, more of an intellectual journey.  If we're into genealogy, we may be going to a place where we expect to glean more information about a particular branch of the family.  Or if nature study is our thing, we may be going bird-watching, or walking in the beech forests, or collecting butterflies or wild-flowers.  We may be journeying to watch a sports event or the New Year's fireworks celebrations.  Journeys serve all sorts of purposes in our lives.

The first journey in the Christmas story is that undertaken by Joseph and the heavily pregnant Mary.  It is rather like our first type of journey, a journey of obligation rather than choice.  However inconvenient, it had to be made; it was not an enjoyable experience.  It had all the difficulties of arriving at this time of the year without a prior booking – never a good idea.  Joseph may have come from Bethlehem, but it seems that he had run out of relatives to impose upon; and there was no room for them at the traveller's inn.

The second journey was undertaken by the shepherds, in great joy and high excitement, with a healthy dose of fear thrown into the mix.  They were on their way to see for themselves what they had heard about.  Most likely they were young men, constantly at risk of behaving badly, and egging each other on.  The account of their journey is full of excitement and noise, including a great company of the heavenly host singing in full voice.  And when they had seen for themselves, they went around telling everybody what they had seen – an early version of the tiresome tourist who thinks his holiday pictures are of great interest to everyone else!

We commemorate the third journey today, that of the mysterious Magi from the East.  Theirs is entirely different in nature and tone.  Theirs is an intellectual journey; look how much thought they have given to the gifts they would present.  Theirs is certainly quieter: a silent star rather than a choir accompanies them on their journey.  Their conversation on the way was probably scholarly – speculating on what they might discover as they continued their pursuit.

The Christmas story features three journeys, undertaken by different people, and all seemingly serving different purposes.  And yet they had two things in common.  First, they were all centred on the Christ Child; and, secondly, they all served God's purposes.  Mary and Joseph had to go to Bethlehem, because long ago God had ordained that little town to be the birthplace of the Messiah.  And the shepherds had to go to Bethlehem and see for themselves all that they had been told because God had decided to reveal the Christ child to the least and the lowly, and the shepherds fitted that bill perfectly.  And thirdly, the Magi had to find the Christ child because his birth was good news for the Gentiles as well as the Jews, and God had chosen them to represent that part of the truth of Christmas.

Real Christmas journeys take us into the presence of Christ; and the whole point of the Christmas story is that he is to be found by all sorts of people in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of places.  Some of us may be more like the shepherds: we may have had some sort of overwhelming experience that has set us on the journey.  God may have come to us through our emotions, our feelings, through high excitement, joy or even fear.  Others of us may be more like the Magi, coming to God through intellectual curiosity, thinking things through, trying to make sense of this "Christian thing".  And others will acknowledge that they started on the journey because it was expected of them; they were brought up in the faith by their parents, and simply did what they were told.  In that case their journey is more like that of Mary and Joseph.

What we are talking about here is journeys of faith; and what is important with such journeys is not how or why we started, but where we are going, or to whom are we going?  The start of a New Year is a good time to reflect on that question.  Over the past year, have we moved closer to Christ or not?  As we start the New Year, how dedicated are we to the journey we are on?

We started our Advent journey way back on the 30^th of November, with the great cry from Isaiah, "O that you would rend the heavens and come down."  At Christmas we celebrated God's astonishing answer to that plea: he did indeed rend the heavens and came down.  So now let us start our journey into this New Year with this cry from the same prophet: "Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you: see, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you."

May 2009 see the fulfilment of that prophecy in our land, in our church, and in all the nations of the world.  Amen.

Thank God for St Paul!

 

Texts: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Acts 9:1-22; Matthew 19:27-30

Over the last two weeks I have been speaking about the need of the Church in this modern world to recognise that the centuries of Christendom have ended: that we can no longer expect that people will consider themselves Christian simply because they were born in a so-called Christian country.  We can no longer expect that most people will have their infants baptised.  I'm not sure that any study has been done on this issue, but my guess is that today fewer and fewer parents who are not themselves members of a church even consider the possibility of having their children baptised.

So in the future, I have been suggesting, if the Church is to gain new members it will need to be through adult conversions and baptisms, which, of course, are exceedingly rare in most Anglican Churches.  In other words, we will have to regain the wisdom and practice of the early Church, the Church of the first three centuries of our history, before Constantine & Co made Christianity virtually compulsory throughout the Roman Empire.  We may find that task daunting: people no longer feel embarrassed about rubbishing the Christian faith.  For some reason, it is still not okay to rubbish other faiths, from the other great world faiths, to the frankly bizarre, but it's now okay to dismiss the Christian faith as childish, unscientific twaddle.

Given that intellectual and social environment, we might feel that the task of bringing adults to faith is beyond us; and I was pondering this issue this week as I watched the marvellous sight of the inauguration of President Obama, and saw him standing on the steps built by slave labour not all that long ago.  As he said himself, his own father would probably have been denied service in the restaurants of Washington just 60 years ago.  Who would have thought attitudes of millions of Americans could be changed in such a short period of time?  Who would have thought that the dream one of the great prophets of our time, Dr Martin Luther King, would come to fruition in our own lifetime?

Such is the power of truth; such is the power of proclaiming the truth, of seeing the vision and explaining it to others; such is the power of God's will for this world.  And where was that truth proclaimed through all those years, the dark periods of American history as well as its better moments; where was the vision seen and kept alive; where was the will of God declared over and over again?  In the Church, by people who share the faith we proclaim here in our church this morning.  The Civil Rights Movement, and before that the Movement to Abolish Slavery, was born in the Church.  Not that all members agreed, not that our record in the Church is spotlessly pure.  Far from it.  But good people, people of true faith, carried the torch of truth in that country, and millions of people were in the end able to overcome their history, their fear of the other, the stranger, and to overcome all that had divided them for so long, and elect a president on merit, without regard to ethnicity or other marks of tribalism.

Who would have thought it possible?  How often we heard that comment from ordinary Americans this week.  And who would have thought it possible that Saul of Tarsus would turn out to be, in the words of the Lord spoken to a highly doubtful Ananias, "This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel."  Saul was a man on the way up; a Jew, well-versed in Greek, and the holder of Roman citizenship.  He was a brilliant scholar, and would in time have become a famous Rabbi.  In worldly terms he had everything required for a brilliant career and a successful life.  And then suddenly he threw it all away; and the obvious question is, why?

Well, we know his answer to that question, and the Church has been preaching that answer for two thousand years.  The official, orthodox answer is that, one day, on the Road to Damascus, he encountered the Risen Christ, and his life was turned upside-down.  That's his answer, and our answer, to the obvious question of why such a gifted and well-connected young man, with a brilliant career ahead of him, should suddenly abandon the lot and become an ardent preacher of the Christian gospel.  And my challenge to those who would rubbish this official answer is simply this: what is your answer?  How do you explain the transformation of Saul of Tarsus, arch-persecutor of the Church, to Paul, the greatest of all the apostles of our history?

Let the doubters scoff.  Better still, let them read the Scriptures for themselves and ask a simple question: does the scriptural account have the ring of truth about it or not?  If the New Testament is a spin job, designed to show the Church in the best possible light, why is this story of St Paul's conversion recorded in the way it is?  Why do we find Ananias speaking back to the Lord in the way we do?  Ananias, a godly man of prayer, apparently thinks that Jesus has not kept up with developments, and does not know that Saul has been persecuting the Church, so he tries to correct him!  It's a nice comic touch, and has (to my ears, anyway) a ring of truth about it.

Perhaps even more telling is the reaction to Paul by the saints in Jerusalem.  St Luke puts it this way: When he came to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he really was a disciple.  Does that have the ring of truth to it?  It sure does to me!  They thought he was trying to infiltrate their group, to do it harm.  There is no suggestion that these great leaders of the Church in Jerusalem were blessed with great spiritual insight, and immediately saw in Paul a fellow servant of the Lord.  They smelled a rat, and they tried to get rid of it.

Saul/Paul was a hard nut to crack.  He was not an evil man, but a godly one.  In his own way he was following what he genuinely believed was the right course.  He had dedicated his life to God.  He was a great scholar of the Scriptures; he was a man of prayer.  He was convinced that the Christians were heretics and blasphemers and he was determined to stand up against them.  Whatever happened on the Road to Damascus convinced him utterly that he had been wrong, and so he changed direction (repented or was converted, to use church language).  And what happened then?  Believers ministered to him, and brought him to baptism, and the rest, as we say, is history.

I finish where I began.  We need not doubt the power of the gospel to convince adults of its truth.  We live in an age of astonishing change, not all of it good, but some of it marvellous.  Those of us who lived through the so-called Cold War – I was in the Sixth form at the time of the Cuban Crisis when many people believed that the end of the world was a real possibility – never believed that we would see the Berlin Wall come down.  It came down – in part, through the work and prayer of a Polish Pope.  This week we have seen an equally astonishing event.  Good does overcome evil.  Right does prevail against wrong.  God is working his purposes out in and through history.  Those who believe it, proclaim it, and  work and pray for it, are, in the new President's phrase, on the right side of history.

Just as so much of American history seems to be embodied in President Obama's personal story, so today we celebrate St Paul, one man whose personal story encapsulates the history of our faith.  The truth of the Gospel of Christ was so powerful that it transformed Saul's life, and overcame all intellectual, cultural and religious convictions and prejudices of one of the greatest and toughest human minds.  And did you notice how it started?  Not with words of condemnation or a demand for an apology.  It started with a question: Why are you doing this?  That's where, perhaps, we need to start.  To invite the cynics to reflect on that question.  Why are you doing what you're doing?  Why are you doubting?  Why are you going in this direction?

Those questions are just as relevant to people today as they were in Paul's day.  And the answers are just as important.

 

Starting at the Beginning

 

Texts: 1 Samuel 3:1-10; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51

Last week in my sermon at Holy Trinity I talked about baptism; and I took the opportunity to talk about how our baptismal practice is going to have to change in the future.  I pointed out that it is now generally accepted that Christendom has finished; there is no longer a belief that certain nations are Christian and that any child born in them is Christian by birth.  That was a widespread belief during the heydays of Christendom; that's what underlay our practice of "christenings" – nobody ever talked about adults being "christened" – only infants and children were christened – and a very large percentage of them were.  It was not thought of as a major spiritual event; a christening was simply a glorified naming service, a ritual recognition that the child was one of us by birth.

But all that is passing away.  The canon law of the Church still stipulates today that a wedding may only take place in a church if at least one of the parties is baptised; so when a couple approach me about having their wedding in the church the first thing I have to check with them is whether or not either of them has been baptised.  When I started in 1990 I never struck a couple where that was a problem; in all cases both parties had been "done" as infants.  Twenty years on that has already changed, and my guess is that today only a minority of infants born in this country are baptised.  Which leads us to the obvious question: if we become members of the Church by baptism, where are the members of the Church to come from in the future?

And the answer, if there is one, must be through adult baptism, a practice that predominated in the Church for the first three hundred years of our history, but almost fell into disuse during the centuries of Christendom, except, of course, where missionaries made converts in some distant non-Christian land.  So the challenge of the Church in the post-Christendom future will be the same as it was in our pre-Christendom past – to convince adults of the truth of the gospel, to convert and baptise adults, and to encourage adults to share their faith with their children.  So how do we go about that?  Well, today's readings are a good place to start.

The first lesson this morning is one of my favourite comedy sketches in the whole of our Scriptures.  The author, whoever he was, obviously had great fun telling this story of the call of Samuel.  Let's just picture the scene.  We're told that this scene is set in the temple, but, of course, this is not the great Temple built by Solomon.  This is a sort of proto-temple; it may even have been a tent.  It was wherever the Ark of God was being kept at the time.  Eli the priest was attending it, and Samuel had been given to him by his mother, Hannah.  The story takes place at night.  Samuel, a young lad at the time is lying down in one part of the temple, and Eli in another.  The author tells us that Eli's eyesight is failing; but since there is no further reference in the story to his physical sight, this may be a veiled reference to his lack of spiritual awareness.

Then God calls to Samuel by name.  Samuel hears his name called – but he naturally assumes that it must be Eli calling him, and so he goes brightly to his master and presents himself.   Eli sends him back to bed.  It happens again, exactly as before.  Then, when it happens a third time, the penny drops for Eli.  Why did it take so long?  Well, the author has already told us: In those days the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions.  Eli the priest was not used to hearing or seeing God.

Nor, of course, was Samuel.  He was too young.  Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord.  The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.  So Eli had to tell Samuel what was going on, and how to respond if it happened again.  And it did happen again.  God had a message that he wanted Samuel to tell Eli.  It concerned Eli's children, and Eli's failure to discipline them.  His sons made themselves contemptible, and he failed to restrain them.  It seems that God had already warned Eli about this, but Eli had not done anything about it.

So what have we got in this story?  We have an old priest who has failed to listen to God directly.  So God needs a messenger to speak to Eli for him.  The only person to hand is young Samuel; but Samuel doesn't know God's voice.  Eli has to interpret for him, so that Samuel can give Eli a message about his awful children!  As I said, it's a great little sit-com; but what message does it have for us?  Following on from last week's theme, it says quite a bit about how adults and children come to faith.  It says that Eli has been falling down in his responsibilities as a parent.  It says that God can speak directly to children, but children need the guidance of adults to recognise God's voice, to understand what is going on, and to respond appropriately.

Above all it says that institutional religion, represented by Eli, is in itself inclined to blindness and deafness.  It requires the direct intervention of God – the prompting of the Holy Spirit – to breathe fresh life into the Church.  It requires obedience to the Word of God, however awkward that may be.  We can understand Samuel's reluctance to pass on God's message to Eli.  But passing on the message is precisely what the Church is called to do.

We meet variations on that theme in our other two readings.  St John is already dealing with the identity of Jesus; and in this first chapter of his gospel he has already said some amazing things.  Frankly, it is most unlikely that John the Baptist said of Jesus in those early days: "Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!"  It is much more likely that St John the great theologian put those words in the prophet's mouth.  They are part of his struggle to make the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus clear, a struggle which went on for some time in the infant Church.

Be all that as it may, when we get to the calling of the first disciples an interesting pattern emerges.  According to St John, it was John the Baptist who first pointed Andrew in the direction of Jesus, and we know what happened next.  The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, "We have found the Messiah" (that is, the Christ).  And he brought him to Jesus.

We find this same pattern in today's story; and this time, apart from another comedic touch, a point of interest is how often the word "find" is used.  Jesus is leaving for Galilee, and, "finding Philip", he calls him into discipleship.  Philip then "found" Nathaniel, and told him, "We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote – Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph."  We should notice in passing how down-to-earth this description of Jesus is, in comparison to the words attributed to Andrew.  But above all we should notice that the first task of a disciple is to seek and find others and share the good news with them; and bring them to Jesus so they can see and hear for themselves.  Nathaniel is unconvinced by Philip; he has the same view of people from Nazareth as we have about people from Auckland.  But when he meets Jesus he is quickly convinced.

St Paul reminds us of the ongoing need for teaching in the Church.  Evangelism is not enough.  Having brought people into the faith, he continues to teach and encourage.  And his exhortations are the sort that Eli failed to give to his sons.  True belief should be manifested in our way of life, our lifestyle, as we might call it today.  That is not a matter of law: we are free to make our own choices, but the choices we make reveal the sincerity or otherwise of our faith.

In March our diocese is having yet another conference to consider our future.  We could start by recognising that we are rather like old Eli; still faithfully doing what we've always done, but with little expectation of hearing God or seeing visions.  We could start by recapturing confidence in the gospel, boldly and consistently preached, to convince and convert adults.  We could start by reviewing our lifestyle in the light of biblical teaching.  We could start by learning from our own past history, the good and the bad.

That's how we could start.  Or we could play it safe and have another conference like all the others we've had in recent years.  Eli would have enjoyed those, but Samuel would have run away.

Precious Infants

 

Texts: Jeremiah 31:15-17; 1 Corinthians 1:26-29; Matthew 2:13-18

Well, Christmas is over for another year, and this First Sunday after Christmas can sometimes seem a bit flat.  But not this year: this year this First Sunday after Christmas is anything but ho-hum in the Church Calendar, and is especially exciting for this congregation this morning, as we welcome Ethan Scott Haines to the family.  We'll get to him soon, but first I need to say something about this special day in the Church Calendar.

We are marking the Massacre of the Holy Innocents; and I must confess right away when I was preparing a list of services for December and January, I hesitated when I got to this one.  This commemoration is fixed for 28 December, so in most years it doesn't fall on a Sunday, and we can successfully overlook it.  But not this year: here it is on Sunday 28 December, the First Sunday after Christmas.  And when I noticed that back in November, I wondered if I should duck it.  Isn't it a bit heavy for us just three days after Christmas?  Are we ready for it; are we in the right mood for such a solemn commemoration so soon after Christmas?  Could we stick with the theme of love and joy, peace and hope just a bit longer?

However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that this commemoration is a real part of the Christmas story.  The Massacre of the Holy Innocents, as we see from our Gospel reading this morning, remembers the orders given by King Herod to kill all baby boys born in and around Bethlehem in the preceding two years in an attempt to get rid of the child who, according to the Magi, had been born to be King of the Jews.  That event only makes sense in the context of Christ's birth; it is part of what Christmas means.  It underlines for us how extraordinary the Christmas story really is – that God should chose to come to us as a defenceless baby in a world that all too often destroys the young and the vulnerable without mercy.  Herod is only one example of tyrannical leaders down through history who have taken up genocide and infanticide as part of their policy to retain power.

So, yes, I thought, we will follow the Church Calendar and commemorate this event today.  And then Rose approached me and said that Amber and Scott would like to have Ethan's baptism on Sunday, 28 December, and would that be alright?  And, of course, the way she said "Would that be alright?" made it clear that the right answer was, "Yes, that'll be fine!"  But then the same worries re-surfaced.  Would it really be appropriate to talk about the Massacre of the Holy Innocents with Ethan present?  Hopefully, he won't understand what I'm on about, but it might give the heeby-jeebies to Amber and Scott, and the rest of the party!  Should I change plans or not?

And once again, thinking about it made me realise what a gift it is to have Ethan with us this morning, on this particular day of commemoration, and just three days after Christmas; because Ethan reminds that what we were talking about at Christmas, and what we are talking about today, is real flesh and blood, real babies and infants.  At the heart of the Christmas story is a real baby.  Sometimes that simple fact can be disguised with all the nonsense that we have added to the Christmas event through our carols, our pageants, our cards and all the rest.  I can never quite forgive the author of "Away in the Manger" for insisting that baby Jesus didn't cry.  I'd be seriously worried for the health of an infant that never cried – definitely a case for the Plunket Helpline there!  Look and listen to Ethan, and you will see and hear what baby Jesus was really like.

And the word that comes to mind is helpless.  Babies are completely dependent for their survival on those who are caring for them.  And there is nothing like having a baby of your own to drive that point home to you.  I think Ethan is about 10 weeks old now (is that right?), so perhaps Amber & Scott are over the first nervous moments; but I can still remember my own from almost 37 years ago.  My first child was born in Bethany Home in Wellington; and in those days the conveyor-belt system of delivering babies had not been invented.  Mothers and their infants were not looked upon as unfortunate charges on the hospital budget: the practice was for them to stay in hospital for 8-10 days after birth – particularly for first-borns – before being sent home.  So my wee daughter would have been about 10 days old when she came home.  And I can still remember those first few nights, when I woke up every few minutes to make sure she was still breathing!

So at the heart of the Christmas story is the astonishing decision God made to come to us through the birth process; to suffer the trauma of birth, and to put himself into human hands, completely helpless and dependent!  Ethan reminds us of that.

And on this day when we commemorate the Massacre of the Holy Innocents we are reminded of just how much at risk infants are.  It is not just accidents by well-meaning parents and others that threaten their existence; sometimes they have to contend with the darkest side of human nature turned against them.  In recording the story of Herod's murderous edict, St Matthew recalls the Exile of the Jews when their land was conquered by the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C.  He refers to Rachel weeping in Ramah because her children are no more.

Rachel was the second and preferred wife of Jacob, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, and through them the matriarch of Judea.  Ramah was the place where the Jews were assembled before being carted off into exile in Babylon; and according to one of two traditions, it was also where Rachel was buried.  That's why Jeremiah uses this image of Rachel weeping for the lost children at Ramah (although Matthew goes with the alternative tradition and favours Bethlehem as Rachel's burial place).  Perhaps of even more significance, Rachel died in child-birth, again reminding us of the reality with which we are dealing in our Christmas story.  At Jesus' birth, Mary herself was in danger.

In our short lesson from St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, the great apostle is putting the Corinthians in their place.  They were a boastful lot, to put it mildly; they were particularly proud of their spiritual gifts – they could speak in tongues, they had words of knowledge prophecy, and so on.  But St Paul pricks their bubbles; God is not impressed by such things.  God chooses the foolish to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong, the lowly and the despised.  Today, if God was choosing one of us for some important task my money would be on Ethan, if only because today he is the most Christ-like of us all.

And so to Ethan.  I said in my Christmas Eve sermon in St Barnabas that what we had in the Scriptures that night was a birth notice; but one with a difference.  For the Scriptures say, "Unto you a child is born; to you a son is given."  And they weren't addressing Mary and Joseph – they were talking to us all.  And I think there is something very important in those words for us all to ponder, especially in this country as we come to the end of this year.  We have a horrendous record for massacring holy innocents; and perhaps a good first step to stopping this outrage is for us to learn that all babies are born, not just to their parents, but to us.  They are given, not just to their parents, but to us.  If we are one people, all members of the one human race, all members of the one family under God, then all babies are born to us, and are given to us.  It is, therefore, our business if any of them are being mistreated or harmed in any way.

And if that is so through birth, how much more true is it through baptism!  As soon as I have baptised Ethan this morning with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, you will say to Ethan, "Child of God, blessed in the Spirit, welcome to the family of Christ."  Welcome to the family of which we are members through our own baptism.  Today he is given to us as a brother.

This morning, then, as we gaze upon Ethan, let us see in him the miracle of Christmas; and let us commit ourselves anew to pray and work for a world in which all babies are welcome, and loved and nurtured and treasured.  May we have the wisdom of the Magi to defeat the tyrants who resort to genocide and infanticide; and may we as a country be always ready to offer sanctuary to refugees and their infants, as Egypt gave sanctuary to the Holy Family!  Amen.