February 11, 2012

Glynn Cardy

Induction Service for Denise Kelsall     Central Parish of Whangarei

Genesis 12:1-4     Matthew 5:13-16

Recently I have been discussing with some older teenagers various career options, and we have tried to define the essence of each career discussed. For a teacher, the essence is seeing that eureka moment on the face of one’s pupil. If that eureka moment doesn’t excite you don’t become a teacher. For doctors and nurses, the essence is healing and wholeness. If aiding healing doesn’t excite you, then don’t be in medicine. What then they asked was the essence of being a priest?

My answer: to pray. By which I mean to open one’s heart and mind to all that is sacred and holy, both inside and outside church. It’s more about listening than talking, more about being receptive than being knowledgeable, and more about recognizing grace than doing good deeds. For the God-of-Jesus is incarnated and can be discovered in all sorts of surprising places, within and without the fences/boundaries we construct.

In this service today we recognize Denise Kelsall as priest, vicar, and partner with you in the ministry here. Hers will be a peculiar type of leadership, for there are no doubt many leaders in your midst. Some of you leaders will have gifts and skills in organization, teaching, encouragement, management, pastoral care, hospitality, property, fund-raising, liturgy, and preaching. May you continue to encourage each other, and make room for any newcomers to join you. 

Denise, like any vicar, will not be better than you at all or even most of these things. Remember the essence of her vocation will be to exemplify and encourage you to keep opening your hearts, minds, and doors to all that is of God. To that vocation the Denise whom I’ve got to know over the last four years has three particular gifts: building community, connecting with people on the margins of church and society, and leading worship.

To those who will share leadership with her in this place please find ways to encourage and support Denise in her giftedness. She will bring vibrancy into your midst, but she can’t do it alone. And the easiest way to discourage her and thwart the potential of your partnership is to make her responsible for everything – organization, teaching, management, pastoral care, property, fund-raising, etc. 

Our first reading tells of the call to Abram in his 75th year – conversion and call can happen at any age!! [John Key note well]. Abram was overwhelmed by a divine urge to leave all that was certain - his land, kin, gods, and ways of worship – and journey into unknown. 

Fulfillment would come from being open to the Sacred, although, as Genesis shows, it is difficult to say what that ‘Sacred’ meant or looked like. The Sacred did not reveal itself in lucid apparitions or clearly defined doctrines. Faith was not easy or life-enhancing. There was no strategic plan, or map. 

Religious people often speak of faith as though it were a matter of conserving the old and traditional, the doctrines and sureties of the past, orthodox faith. But for Abram it was a radical break with the past, with comfort and certainty. 

Abram left not only homeland far behind but also his gods. When he arrived in Canaan, the land of the Promise, he did not bring a Mesopotamian cult with him, nor did he attempt to impose the faith of his ancestors upon his new Canaanite neighbours. Once he arrived he seemed to worship the local high god, El. Continually on the move, Abram encountered El at the traditional sacred sites of Canaan: the land had to reveal its own peculiar sanctity to Abram, and he had to respect this alien piety. 

The authors of Genesis do not show Abraham evolving a theology, a set of beliefs. Rather they show him responding to events and experiencing the divine in a way that broke down old certainties and expectations. [i]

I find Abraham a very appealing character. On the one hand he’s a screw-up. He was a terrible father and a terrible husband. He was deceitful, indecisive, and given to self-pity. Genesis doesn’t disguise these uncomfortable truths. Yet, on the other hand, and the reason that three world religions honour him, is that he had immense courage. He stood up to and argued with an unknown God who he believed could smite him in an instance. He followed the urging of that God into the alien beyond, and saw little reward for that in his lifetime. He opened himself, at age 75, to the risk of the unknown and uncertain.

We now live in an age when the old certainties about our Christian God no longer hold. We are post-Galileo, post-Isaac Newton, and post-Einstein people. We cannot think about God in the same way that previous generations have done. The image of God as an external fatherly being, equipped with supernatural power and ready to come to our aid is simply no longer a compelling one. People in America did little more than laugh when evangelist Pat Robertson explained why God had not stopped the terrorist attack on 9/11. ‘It was to punish us,’ he said, ‘for making abortion legal, for tolerating feminism and for recognizing homosexuality as part of a person’s being.’ 

While pedalling fear needs the corrective of laughter, Robertson’s premise that some Almighty God decides who gets killed and who doesn’t, who is right and who is wrong, is what most find unconvincing. If the Sacred is boxed into being a human-like, omnipotent judge, merely the projection of vindictive imaginations, then worship becomes servile fawning rather than opening one’s heart to the joy and wonder of life.

We need the courage of Abraham to say no to the dominance of this human-like God, and the many other false idols all too prevalent in Christian circles, and face the uncertainty, unknowns, and heartaches of a life immersed in Sacred wonder.

We now live too in an age when the old certainties about church no longer hold. For a long time Anglicanism has been like a club – a collection of people who hold values in common, provide benefits for members, and seek to attract recruits. We’ve been homely, kind, and comforting to all who venture in. Although there is significant variety in Anglicanism most local branches of the club know what they believe, who they worship, and what is expected.

At its best the Anglican Church has been a symbol and a place of belonging for everyone in the community, whether they come on Sundays or not. The church mattered not for itself, not for its paid-up members, but for what it said about everyone mattering. So the Church in central Whangarei is here not just for parishioners, not just Anglicans, not just Christians, but everyone, because everyone matters to God.

Yet Abraham’s story continues to challenge our story. Maybe the sacred sites aren’t just churches? Maybe the sacred truths aren’t just what religions proclaim? Maybe holiness is out and about, unconstrained and untamed, wanting to meet us when we have the courage/faith to venture beyond the expected borders?

Our second reading comes from Matthew’s Gospel and encourages us to be salt and light. I want us to think for a moment about the former, salt, it is an interesting metaphor. In the days before refrigeration, in climates prohibitive of winter growth, the preservative salt was basic to survival. It seems in our text that followers of Jesus are being encouraged to think of themselves as being salt in a community, preserving the goodness and bounty of that community’s labour, and then allowing themselves to be eaten so the community can survive and flourish. It is a metaphor of self-giving service, rather than building up the salt business. It is about finding meaning, truth, and God in the interactions, not in some pure holy society set apart. It is therefore at odds with the idea of the church being a separate faith community trying to attract people to it. 

God resists being boxed. When we think we understand God, all we understand is the paucity of our knowledge. When we think we have God on our side, all we are proclaiming are our arrogant presumptions. When we think others do not know God, we are presuming that we do. It is better to listen, to be receptive, and to allow ourselves to recognize grace in whatever forms it comes. This is the nature of prayer.

Prayer takes courage, and courage takes practice. So be courageous in little things in order to be ready for the bigger things. 

So, people of this place, ministers all, leaders with and including Denise, here are some little things [ii]:

Give food, drink, and dignity to those in need, without asking them to prove their need. 

Open your doors - the doors of your meetings, social events, and the like - to strangers, and their ideas.

Care for the sick. Console the sad. Confront the powerful. Why do we find the last of those so difficult?

Speak up, march, sign petitions, do what you can to stop the relentless forces of impoverishment and inequity.

Forgive what seems to be harm done to yourself. 

Put up with difficult people. 

Tell other ignorant people what you in your ignorance think you know, and be prepared to listen and learn.

Help the doubtful to clarify their minds and make their own decisions. 

Stop being so serious. Take off your shoes, and your pride, and laugh more, play more, and meet the God to be found in the sandpit.

Above all be unusually kind to one another, including those you publically oppose and criticise.

And then, if we are lucky, grace and its blessings may abound.

[i] Karen Armstrong In The Beginning: A new reading of the Book of Genesis, p.54-55.

[ii] Adapted from James K Baxter Jerusalem Daybook, Wellington, Price Milburn, 1971, p.11-12