July 7, 2013

Jenny Plane Te Paa

Pentecost 7     Luke 10:1-11, 16-20     2 Kings 5: 1-14

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

E te whanau a te Karaiti tena koutou katoa! E te rangatira, toku tino hoa e Glynn, tena rawa atu koe to karanga mai ki ahau ki te whakatakoto etahi o oku nei whakaaro mo te Rongopai Tapu te ata nei.

Loving greetings to you all my whanau in Christ and very special greetings to my dear friend and brother Glynn for honouring me with this invitation to share with you in this sacred moment something of my thoughts on the always-precious Gospel message for this day.

From the readings this morning there emerge two distinct themes – healing and mission.

The 2 Kings story is at its heart, to do with Elisha’s miraculous healing powers and of the subsequent conversion of the Aramean Army Commander Namaan.

The narrative provides a lovely little vignette of the male centred politics of reconciling ‘strangerness’ – the Israelite King is appealed to by the Aramean King to facilitate access to the healer Elisha for Commander Namaan who has a form of leprosy. 

As was custom with deals struck between Kings, there was first the handover of a massive offering of koha. 

Then as so often occurs in ‘cross cultural’ communication, there arose a potentially disastrous misunderstanding between the two top leaders. 

Just in time Elisha intervenes and the healing deal is outlined but not before the ungrateful Namaan puzzles about the lack of grandeur and spectacle surrounding his curative moment. 

Finally thanks to the faith filled urgings and wisdom of his servants, Namaan does as he is instructed, finds his flesh restored like that of a young boy and dutifully declares, ‘Now I know there is no God in all the earth except in Israel…’

Like so many Bible stories this one also has a reassuring outcome but what irritates me mightily about this story (and so many others) is the absolute lack of recognition of just who it was who actually initiated the healing possibility in the first place and then as I have just mentioned, just who it was who settled the egotistical tantrum of the military man with leprosy.

The nameless young girl captured in Israel and brought to Syria to serve the wife of Namaan was the one with the knowledge of Elisha. Without her voice, without her compassion there would be no healing, no conversion and yet, is there any evidence of recognition of her, of gratitude being expressed to her, of realizing the prophetic nature of her intervention?? Similarly it was the servants who calmed Namaan down and encouraged him to just obey the very simple instruction to ‘wash and be clean’.

How often it is even now in our 21st century time that the precious contributions of those who are regarded as ‘the least among us’ remain unnoticed, unrecognized, unacknowledged.

For example, I have been watching and listening with increasing outrage and sadness the current largely nasty natured public debates about the ‘beggar and homeless’ problem here in our beloved city. 

I long for us to notice, to recognize and to acknowledge that those currently being objectified often so cruelly and dismissively are in fact holding up before us all a God given opportunity to heal our ourselves and thus our society of the evil of greed, of self centredness, of unfettered ambition, of moral deficit. 

No, the poor and the homeless are not necessarily articulating their plight in so many words, but surely the visible, tangible presence of any of our sisters and brothers whose lives are characterized by wretchedness ought be sufficient for us to respond with radical and redemptive love?

Luke’s Gospel provides the responsive template. As long time champion of the underdog Gustavo Gutierrez explains. Jesus instructions have a central nucleus – the disciple’s liberty. ‘Carry no purse, no bag and no sandals’, in other words do not trust your possessions, do not rely on power. Otherwise you will not be able to be witnesses of peace, you will not accept to eat what is offered to you and you will not know how to give life to others. In short you will be incapable of announcing that the kingdom is at hand. 

To the extent that, as individual Christians and as church, we are attached and we are bound to the possessions and powers of this world, so too are we unavoidably tempted by compromise and convenience. Then we attempt to preach a Gospel that does not upset the powerful’.

Jesus knows that in Jerusalem the leaders of the people and the occupying power are going to reject him and mistreat him but that does not make him renounce his freedom as the one sent by the Father. Instead he is intent on offering that same freedom to his disciples – frustratingly both they and we fail on too many occasions to apprehend that incalculably precious gift of faith filled freedom.

The Gospel of Luke is always so compelling in its urgency and in its clarity – what could be more unambiguous than verse 16. ‘Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.’ 

And yet here we are as 2013 Anglicans all somewhat at odds with each other over various controversies and doctrinal differences. We fuss and we fret and we squabble like crazy and expend so much good energy on point scoring and upstaging, on diminishing and disciplining each other and on excluding those who listen, but not uncritically, and who then choose conscientiously not to behave as obediently as we think they ought. Effectively then through our judgemental and punitive actions we too are becoming well practiced at rejecting ‘the one who sent me’.

My own experience of our beloved Church in more recent times has given me cause for both deep sadness and just occasional joy. We have not in any consistent and fulsome way been faith filled exemplars of the twin themes of healing and mission and it would seem to me that unless and until we sincerely recognize and then respond with genuine humility and aroha to the voices and the presence of those who are the least among us within our own ecclesial household, then the affliction of our own internal ‘leprosy’ will continue unabated. 

I think we all thought that the three tikanga Constitution was the cure all for all that had previously beset us – post-colonial imperialism in the guise of clericalism, racism, possibly even sexism – (homophobia wasn’t even in popular Anglican parlance in 1992!). I think we meant well all those years ago but so much has changed since 1992 and little or nothing now remains of the lived reality of those times.

I have said it before in this Church, that I believe we continue to uncritically valorize our now 20 plus year old Constitutional arrangements at our increasingly deserved peril. 

As long as we insist upon placing an unexamined premium upon what differentiates us rather than upon that, which unites us as fragile, fallible and precious human beings, then the prospect of us becoming fully and fabulously and credibly God’s mission facing Church remains distressingly remote.

As long as I insist upon being a tikanga (a humanly determined cultural construct) over and above being a tangata (a divinely created human being) then the dust will never be fully wiped off my feet. 

It seems so ironic in so many ways because even here in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is sending the seventy out into the places of unfamiliarity not the places of cultural safety. He is sending the seventy out to be what Freeman describes as ‘a religious group grasped by the absolute experience of God and uncompromising in its desire to be at one with that experience even while remaining humorous, humble and above all, not condemning of those of other beliefs or practice’. 

Does this resonate with our experience of our three-tikanga church – I suspect not and so what are we to do?

My sense is we must find within ourselves the courage to reignite a sense of unyielding hope – the kind of hope that works against all the evidence until the evidence itself begins to change.

My sense is we would do well to insist upon according the highest priority to living not into our currently limiting zones of cultural particularity but rather into newly apprehended understandings of A Gospel for the Common Good. For is not our belief that nothing can so make a person an imitator of Christ as caring for their neighbours – neighbours that is, who are undifferentiated, irrespective of tikanga by any definition? 

I agree with Jim Wallis. Did Jesus not tell us that a new relationship with God would bring us into new relationship with our neighbor, especially the most vulnerable of this world, even with our enemies? This enduring call to love our neighbor unconditionally is then surely the foundation for re-establishing and reclaiming the common good? 

I think we would do well to recognize that the tikanga tango, which continues to dominate our ecclesial landscape, is in today’s unimaginably complex demographic context now nothing more than an increasingly irrelevant dance of avoidance. 

My real sadness is that the only ones calling the tunes are those who are charged with leading our faith communities and increasingly that leadership is turned in on itself rather than outward to where the harvest is plentiful but the laborers few.

My fervent prayer this day is that we might instead begin to think again very, very seriously about Jesus unequivocal response when asked which is the greatest commandment?

There has never been a more radical statement in response – we are to love our neighbours as tangata and not as tikanga, that is to say, we are to love all in our neighborhood’s and not just some, as ourselves. 

Nothing in there about tikanga differentiation, sexuality differentiation, age, economic status, migrant versus tangata whenua – seriously then, how hard can it be to recognize and respond to the poor and the homeless as our neighbours no less?

My sisters and brothers in Christ does this not mean that we actually can no longer delay – does this not mean that the time is now for us to begin conversing about just how it is that we will begin to live more fully, more sincerely, more faithfully into that new found Gospel of and for the common good? 

Does this not mean that we finally get it, that our neighbours concerns, rights, interests, needs, freedoms and wellbeing are just as important and precious as our own? Just imagine the healing, just imagine our future capacity as radical activists and fearless witnesses for God’s mission.

Amen.

Dr Jenny Te Paa Daniel