December 24, 2018

Cate Thorn

Christmas Eve     Isaiah 52:7-10     John 1:1-14

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

We’re almost there, almost to the anticipated day but tonight we pause, we have only a little longer to wait. While we do so I want to share a couple of stories with you and then I want to ask something of you … don’t worry, nothing tricky or dramatic, I want to ask something of you … but not yet. 

Sunday, a week or so ago, we were gathered at the back of St Matthew’s waiting for the service to begin. The organ was playing, accompanied by the slightly muted roar of traffic for the doors of the church were open. I noticed a young girl, maybe 4, tiptoe in. Pink T shirt, long wavy hair neatly pinned back, startling big grey eyes framed by dark lashes. Looking around, wide eyed, she turned slightly and beckoned through the door. “Come in, come on,” she said. I looked out the door. Dad, clad in basketball singlet, baseball cap, lightly tattooed arms was nervously paused there, “Come on,” he beckoned his daughter, “You can’t go in there.” I smiled at him, “You can if you like. You don’t have to stay, come and have a look.” He smiled, tentatively stepped inside. “It’s OK,” I said, “It’s not a usual sort of place, she just wants to look around.” “Look, Daddy,” she said to him, reassuringly taking his hand. A moment later she again looked out the door, arm beckoning, “Come and see,” she said. This time she stepped toward the door. Looking again, I saw Mum in T shirt and shorts, distracted by the text she was sending. “Come on,” she said to her daughter, “You can’t go in there.” I said “It’s ok, she just wants to look, come in, you don’t have to stay.” Mum paused, looking at her phone. Her daughter took the initiative, stepping toward her Mum, hand outstretched she said, “Mum, come and look, it’s a castle like princesses live in, it’s real.” Mum smiled, tossed her phone into her handbag and came in. She crouched down, her daughter leaned against the chair shape of her Mum, arm draped around her shoulder, big eyes searching and looking. Her Mum put her arm around her and said quietly and instructively, “This is a church.” Princesses, castles, churches, I wonder the links that will be made in that little bright wide eyed child self.

A day or so later, while seeking a book for a 2 going on 3 year old, I stepped into the Unity children's bookstore. After perusing the enticing array for a while I decided I needed some guidance. The young woman serving was suggesting books when we were politely interrupted by a woman also buying in the shop. “I don’t mean to interrupt,” she said “I couldn’t help overhear, maybe I can help.” Soon after another older woman also began to help, an anecdotal exchange rippled through the shop, of favourite books and authors, especially Joy Cowley and Margaret Mahy. “Mind you it was such a shame that the ending of the Lion in the Meadow had to be changed to fit the US market,” the older woman commented. “Really,” I responded, “I didn’t know that, how was it changed?” The new version of the book was duly plucked from the shelf. “See in this version the mother’s with her child on the bed. The book she’s reading looks like the Lion in the Meadow, it ends ‘the lion in the meadow became a house lion and lived in the cupboard.’ It’s a very tame, tidied up happy ending. It’s dreadful,” the older woman commented. In the first version the child and mother are looking at a picture book, the child’s pointing to a lion and it ends, ‘The mother never ever made up a story again.’ The woman further quipped “You either believe in the mystery and the magic or you don’t, putting a sappy happy ending to it takes all that away. It makes it an entirely different story and no fun at all.”

A nice tied up happy ending, safe, comforting resolution. Was the change made to protect children or adults from the mysterious uncertain ending? The first version ending it seems to me is also a beginning. We’re left hanging, wondering, pondering. To figure out what we think’s meant, we have to consider the story over again, we have to get involved in the story. It’s not done for us.

Wide eyed wonder and children’s stories this Christmas Eve, with these in mind I now want to ask something of you. I want you to pause for a moment and remember back, if you can. Back before you had to become a grown up adult self, Christmas Eve magic always helps, of course! I want you to remember your ‘young, wide eyed, awestruck, wondering self.’ I want you to remember when days were long and the world was a place alive with your imagining, fantasy, fiction and real life were intermingled. When real was something to be imagined, not yet confined to the real imposed by someone else. Can you remember that young self? It is still in you. 

This season we tell of angels, of young woman pregnant, birthing God, of shepherds and Magi. Tonight the Word that was in the beginning, we're told, is made flesh. Bravely, tentatively, we draw near, curious yet also cautious, disbelieving before what we don’t know. Not for certain. It feels as if we're on the brink of something, as if something's opening up in us. 

Before we try to make sense of it, before we try to make it fit our world, before our credibility censor shuts us down, stop! 

No, it doesn't make sense, not for certain.

We've tried to make a tidy package of the story of this season for years. Weaving different story strands from different gospels together to make a complete story. But it’s full of holes. It leaves more loose ends than tidy ones. Because the story isn't complete. 

It’s risky to get involved in such a story, tangled up in the puzzle of an incomplete story that's still unfolding. It might ask something of us, it might need us. By getting involved we become part of creating the telling, the sense of the story. We become part of the story. For a story’s as dependent on its teller as a new-born is on its nurturer. How a story unfolds, is made real, depends on how it’s telling is embodied. 

This story: that life has come into being. This life, that is, the light of all people, shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never overcome it. 

Who is to tell this story into the darkness in our world? 

Are we wide-eyed wondering enough to notice light being shown to us, insistent enough to tell others this is so, courageous enough to live so to make it real. Are we to tell of the presence of light, despite the darkness, a light that darkness cannot overcome?

December 23, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Advent 4     Micah 5:2-5     Luke 1:39-45

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Mary – brave, active, faithful, not afraid to seek help. Elizabeth – strong, welcoming, speaks her mind.

Mary and Elizabeth are our last two characters of Advent. In the bible group which met last week we noticed the difference between last week’s story about Joseph and today’s story.

Last week we read the Matthew version of the birth story and in it Mary is silent. Everything is done to her. Today Mary acts and speaks. Elizabeth is equally vocal. Joseph is not present.

We have met Elizabeth earlier in Advent with Zechariah as they learnt they would be the parents of John the Baptist.

Mary was just an ordinary girl who went to spend time with her cousin Elizabeth. Mary was escaping the shame and scandal and gossip of being an unmarried mother. She may well have been running for her life. No one was going to believe stories of angels; she did what young pregnant women have done for centuries – she got out of town!

Elizabeth would have been the object of gossip as well, being pregnant later in life and her husband Zechariah mysteriously struck mute in the process. So the two women took refuge together, supported each other.

Mary and Elizabeth would have shared their fears and hopes, they would have sewed clothes for their babies, talked about their strange experiences, encouraged each other. And Mary would have assisted Elizabeth when the time came for John to be born. The biblical version of an antenatal support group.

Woven into this very personal every day encounter of 2 pregnant woman are threads of Israel’s history – when we hear Elizabeth’s words “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb” many of us might think of the Roman Catholic prayer

Hail Mary, full of grace.

Our Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women,

and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

pray for us sinners,

now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

The Hail Mary is of course based on Elizabeth’s words and is still prayed by millions every day. It sounds beautiful and it is beautiful.

But when Elizabeth said these words, or when Luke wrote them for her, they were referencing words found in the song of Deborah in the Book of Judges, and said of Judith in the Book of Judith (Apocrypha) [1]. The song of Deborah (who was a prophet and judge in Israel in the 12th century BC) describes the murder of the Assyrian general Sisera by a woman, Jael. “Most blessed of women be Jael” it says, and then the song describes in grisly detail how she struck him with a tent peg and a mallet (Judges 5:24-27). The story of Judith is set in the time of the exile of the 6th century BC but is not thought to be history, rather a tale of a woman Judith held up as an example for the women of Israel to follow. She too kills her enemy (cuts off his head while he is sleeping) and is praised “O daughter you are blessed by the most High God above all women on earth”.

“Blessed are you among women” began life not as a pious prayer but as a war cry of praise of women who joined men in the battle to redeem Israel. Now Mary and Elizabeth join this line of women who bravely stood up to the oppressor. Mary’s strength also reminds us of Miriam, with Moses leading the people of Israel to safety after the crossing of the Red Sea.

The personal, intimate encounter has woven into it threads of the macro history of the people of Israel. Luke is writing politics here.

And Luke is writing politics in the next verses. Luke says when Mary discovers her part in the story of God’s coming to earth she sings. She sings words based on the ancient song of her foremother Hannah. She sings about God and God’s blessings for the poor and lowly and those who had waited for generations for God to fulfill God’s promises. Her song is a very radical piece of theology about God changing the world.

In Ein Kerem near Jerusalem there is a church built to honour the visit of Mary to Elizabeth when they were both unexpectedly pregnant with their sons. It is called the Church of the Visitation. The Magnificat, the song of Mary, which comes after the passage we read today, is reproduced there in 42 languages. Set in beautiful tiles on the wall of the courtyard of the church her words can be read by all who come.

The Voices have sung a Magnificat for us every Sunday of Advent.

My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,

for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

to Abraham and to his descendants for ever. (Luke 1:46-55)

Mary was a girl who felt called by God to take risks, be brave, and bring a child into the world who would be God’s son. God dwelling with us, Emmanuel, the word made flesh. A child who would show us the way. At one level this is the story of an ordinary girl who had a baby. The way Luke writes it, it is the story of women claiming their place in the changing of our world forever.

So sing with Mary, sing with Elizabeth, delight in their stories and their courage and our hearts and minds will be alive with the transforming love of God this Christmas season.

[1] Richard Horsley The Liberation of Christmas; the infancy narratives in social context p 84 1989 Crossroad

December 16, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Advent 3     Philippians 4:4-7     Matthew 1:18-25

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Joseph – a solid man, an enabler, decisive but not afraid to change his mind, brave, kind, a man of faith. That is how our Bible group described Joseph as we met last week to examine today’s gospel reading. 

Today we have Matthew’s version of the birth of Jesus. Gospel writers Luke and Matthew give us quite different versions of the birth stories.

They are conflated in our minds and added to liberally by carols and Christmas card scenes. 

Matthew has the angel appearing to Joseph, the wise men bearing gifts, and the escape to Egypt. Luke has the angel appearing to Mary, the travel to Bethlehem, the shepherds and the angels. The two stories are quite different.

We did our best last week to stick with Matthew’s version and not bring in assumptions from Luke. We discovered in Matthew’s version that Mary is silent, and has no power; everything is done to her, not by her. Now never fear – next week we are back with Luke and we will see Mary in a different light.

But Matthew’s version is a realistic portrait of the life of a woman in first century Palestine. Women belonged to their fathers and then their husbands, and were at their complete mercy. Joseph and Mary are engaged – which means they are legally bound to each other but are not yet married, nor living together. Joseph discovers Mary is pregnant – he would have been expected to denounce her to the community and call for her death by stoning. 

He chooses not to take that route and plans to dissolve the engagement – which would still leave her as an outcast, but alive.

However Joseph has a dream and an angel appears to him, telling him to take Mary as his wife.

In our discussion we appreciated that Joseph was willing to change his mind; he was willing not to listen to the prevailing world view but seek his own counsel; he was willing to risk public ridicule; all in order to follow the instructions of the angel.

We called to mind another Joseph, son of Jacob, from the book of Genesis, who was also blessed with dreams. This Joseph, was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, ends up in Egypt and interprets the dreams of the Pharaoh, thus saving the people of Egypt from famine. 

He also saves his family who are reconciled with him. 

Matthew’s Joseph is told to name his son Jesus “for he will save his people from their sins” – Jesus can be said to mean “God saves”.

While Joseph might not be Jesus’ biological father he is father to him in every way – in particular he names him which is his right as father, and in biblical writing the power to name is always significant. 

Joseph is resolute, he acts decisively; he acts with compassion and care; he heeds advice; he follows the call of God given to him by the angel and the words of the prophet Isaiah. Joseph is a good man.

Where do we get our guidance from? 

How do we make good decisions?

How do we raise good men like Joseph? 

This week there has been much discussion about violence in our community as a result of the murder of tourist Grace Millane. 

The light of judgement has been shone on our very bad track record as a country in partner violence. 

A major government report has also been released – it is called “Every four minutes” because there is a police or child protection notification of family violence on average every 4 minutes. That is a mind blowing figure!

The fact that 1000s of people attended the vigils on Wednesday is perhaps a sign that we are ready to take stock and bring about change.

The conversations on social media about what women can and can’t do safely are informative. The comment by many that Grace and other young women like her “should” not be travelling alone and going out alone have been soundly condemned with the reply – men should not be violent towards women. 

The report states 

Preventing family violence is very simple and very complicated. Day-to-day, it’s about not ignoring the way your friend’s partner behaves towards her, or not judging the disruptive kid at school and just wanting him kicked out. But it’s also about reflecting on our beliefs about relationships; who is responsible for family wellbeing in our communities; and how public and private resources should be applied. It should be simple to take note of implementation science: start with the needs of children. [1]

This affects every single one of us – some people sitting here today will have suffered from violence; some will have committed the sin of being violent towards someone else. We are all collectively responsible for the way our society is.

We can all be proactive – challenge things we see in our extended families and workplaces – anything from comments that belittle a woman to outright violence and control. [2]

The Christmas dinner table with extended family is often a place we see or hear things we avoid all year because we do not see family members. This year call it out.

Encourage our boys to be compassionate and caring; encourage our girls to be strong and confident.

When I was growing up my father worked in what was then called the Dept of Industries and Commerce, which included the overseas Trade Commissioner service. I can remember him telling me when a woman was first appointed as Trade Commissioner and when women were promoted to senior positions. I wasn’t really that interested – it just seemed like boring stuff from the office. I realised years later he was giving my sister and I role models to aspire to. He also always made a point of saying when we went on holiday – we can afford this holiday because of the salary your mother earns. Again modelling respect.

I thought of him this week as our daughter Hannah graduated with a Masters of International Trade and gained her first promotion at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He would have been so proud!

We can make a difference – from conversations at the dinner table, to conversations at work; we can act and make change; we can seek help if we need to change ourselves and don’t know how; we can offer help.

Joseph listened to the inner guidance of the Spirit. Joseph was able to change and step beyond what was “normal” for his time. He cared for Mary and nurtured Jesus. He raised a good man.

We can too. 

[1] https://cpb-ap-se2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.auckland.ac.nz/dist/6/414/files/2018/11/Every-4-minutes-A-discussion-paper-on-preventing-family-violence-in-New-Zealand.-Lambie-report-8.11.18-x43nf4.pdf

[2] https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/10-12-2018/heres-where-to-channel-the-hurt-and-rage-for-grace-millane/

December 9, 2018

Cate Thorn

Advent 2     Malachi 3:1-4     Luke 3:1-18

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Today is the second Sunday in our season of Advent. This year we decided to pay attention to the characters in the narrative of Advent. The narrative leading us to Christmas when we say God is born with us, one of us, in human form. To look to what the characters do, what the verbs reveal to us of them. We do this together. In a time after church we gather, read the text and pay attention to the verbs listening for what it speaks to us.

Last Sunday a larger number joined the bible study verb searching session. With generous engagement we looked into the scripture. We who gathered were not all familiar to one another or necessarily to the subtleties of the English language. All of us were pretty new to this way of opening the scripture. Even so there was engagement and enthusiasm aplenty. 

John the Baptist was the character of Advent we were seeking to learn more of. It was around his presence that the particular piece of Gospel had been chosen. Not all in keeping with Advent, it is true, yet all preceding the ministry of Jesus. The ending of last week’s gospel left us hanging mid drama. Somewhat in the ‘until next episode’ style of the soap opera genre thechild John we left “in the wilderness until the day he [is to] appear publicly to Israel.”

Last week we learned of Zechariah and Elizabeth and the events leading to the birth of their first child, a son. Before conception the stage is set. The appearing angel promises that the baby to be conceived, to be named John, will be filled withthe “spirit and power of Elijah.” Elijah looms pretty large in the prophet stakes in the Jewish faith narrative, so its fair bet John is likewise to be a prophet. From John’s beginning, we’re told, “the hand of the Lord was with him.” The gospel of Luke read today, exploring the character of John the baptiser, is going to be about a prophet. It is inevitably also going to be a prophetic text. 

Having gathered as a whole last Sunday, we then divided into smaller groups for a time. One group was to look for nouns, one for verbs and the other for adjectives. Nouns were most numerous, then verbs, then adjectives. The process helped us see the familiar text with different eyes. 

Then we came together to consider the verbs, verse by verse. This began straightforwardly enough. The first couple of verses only had a verb or two. Then it got a little trickier. Words from the prophet Isaiah entered stage left. With them arrived some challenge, a little confusion and some consternation. We had worked out what the verbs were but which verb related to whom? Were we looking for the one doing the verb or the one being told they were to do the verb? It wasn’t that one way was better than the other just that we had to be consistent. 

As we mused our many voices spoke into the room, some to the group, some to each other, some to themselves. A cacophony of noise arose as we puzzled and wondered. Different things were being discovered, different voices were present. How were we to talk with, to one another? The context was new, a new group, a new way of doing things. I’m not sure we were all attending to the same task. It made me smile and reflect, nothing like chaos, confusion and competing voices when a prophet is introduced! Were we also distracted by wanting to get it “right” wanting to solve the puzzle, to have an answer? Even as we were simply seeking to discover what was uncovered, perhaps not seen before because of our preference for nouns we could nail down.

Once we’d done the best we could we stopped to look at what was before us. The first verse is stacked with the names of the powerful few. They’re full of titles Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate governor of Judea, Herod ruler of Galilee, his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, Lysanias ruler of Abilene, the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas. They introduce John the baptiser and they allget just one verb, “was.” The powerful “was” on this prophetic stage. 

John’s introduced, he’s more than just of his time. John of the wilderness who’s going about proclaiming a baptism of repentance isn’t just an isolated crazy man. Those collating the stories for Luke’s gospel introduce John then quickly deploy the text from Isaiah. Isaiah prophesies of a future “voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, every mountain and hill shall be made low, the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth.” It’s not spelled out but the deft positioning of this text from Isaiah hints and points, suggests and intimates so we, with Luke's community, will join the dots. John is the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy. John stands in continuity with the lineage of prophets threaded through the Jewish narrative of the Lord their God. Echoing through Malachi, the prophetic messenger comes to prepare the way. A prophetic lineage points from and to. That’s the intention. That’s the link the compiler of these stories for this Luke community wants us to make.

Malachi, then the words from Isaiah in Luke, repeats the imagery of a messenger coming, of preparation for a new way. This strand of prophetic voice, the threat and promise of a fundamental inversion of our landscape, these images are stored in me. I’ve heard them so often they’re like memories, they’re known, if mostly unexamined. The words spoken are of how things shall be. They’re not written as an invitation to participate. It’s more as if we’re being told, being warned of a fundamental rift, shift in the status quo after which things will align.

The voice crying out in the wilderness declares things are going to be other than the way they are. High places shall be levelled, deep places raised, crooked straightened, rough smoothed. The voice from the wilderness spoke this way into that day. The voice of the wilderness crying out in our day echoes same warning. The boundaries between water and land are moving, the effect of climate change, valleys will indeed be filled and hills thus levelled. Certainly we have to align ourselves differently. 

Preparing the way of the Lord involves smoothing, straightening and evening out of that which disrupts, erupts, roughens or chafes. Smooth evenness precedes the way of the Lord. Surely we yearn for this, desire that which shall come to pass. Yet my enthusiasm’s a little muted as I imagine the making real of such imagery. I can’t help but wonder if it’d be a bit boring, a lovely but bland sameness landscape.Yes, I know I need to be careful not to be too literal. I confess to also have an issue with the ideal of heavenly bliss. Maybe it’s because I’m familiar with a world of discord and dissatisfaction. A world disrupted, roughened and chafed for sure. But the competing, claiming clamour of daily survival also energises and enlivens. It causes us to question, to desire to engage and participate to bring change that is life bringing. In a strange way the discord of the world generates a friction to strive against. Our world is far from an ideal evenness but in it you know you’re alive!! I wonder how much we yearn for, want to live in a world of straight, level, smoothed ideal.

Consider the crowds that come to John in today’s gospel. John’s portrayed as a loner, a somewhat rogue character, even if the hand of the Lord is with him. Today’s gospel has John haranguing the crowds. John doesn’t woo them, or bestow reassurance. “Who warned you to flee the wrath that is to come?” Even sothe crowds flock to him. What or, maybe who is it that sent them? What are the crowds restless for? Those who John accuses and convicts of their shortcomings, do they recognise something in John? Something’s stirred in them, they desire to be different, to change. To those coming, familiar with the paths of God, John warns, don’t come thinking you know how it is, don’t come thinking what you know will keep you safe. Your status as a child of Abraham is known as you fulfil your potential and promise to bear good fruit. Being a child of Abraham’s a verb not a noun, revealed through living in a way that brings God’s ways of justice and righteousness to life.We might find ourselves like warned. It’s not sufficient to rest on the laurels of religious tradition if it echoes emptily to serve its own ends.

The crowds who’ve come to repent, be turned, baptised plead, “What then should we do?” “Share,” that’s the verb given to the crowds. The verb for the tax collectors, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed” and for the soldiers, “do not extort, be satisfied with your wages.” It’s not complicated, no one’s asked to give up their day job. They’re told to be fair handed in their dealing, to be straight forward, transparent and honest. It’s as if they, like us, already know how to live rightly, righteously and equally how often we choose otherwise. Prepare for the day of the Lord, is it still to come? Might it come each time we choose to raise up one bowed down. Each time we choose to speak truth to power, relieve the isolation of those in high office and be reminded of our mutual responsibility for care. Each time we heed the cry of the wilderness, open hearts and minds to learn and willing hands to enact a way of being well together.

December 2, 2018

Cate Thorn

Advent 1     Luke 1:5-8, 11a, 12-17, 24a, 57-60, 63-66, 80

Today is the advent of Advent. Advent in Christian context is, we say, a season of waiting, with expectation. It’s a religious season of waiting. A season in which we tell tale of God past, when God became in human form and also of future hope, when God will come again and the world will be put to right. We sort of know this, if we’ve been around a church that enacts this tradition. But how much sense have we of Advent’s point, its purpose in enabling us to journey deeper, to faithfully incarnate divine presence in this world. An ever decreasing number of people have any idea of Advent. Those of us who do, are we ever increasingly wondering as to its relevance? We’re often weary at this end of the year, has Advent become simply a forerunner to Christmas. We go through the motions as required, not really pay much attention. Advent’s a season to be got through rather than lived through. 

Advent, tradition reminds us, that we live in an in between time. There’s more to the story of this creation than first appears, and we wait. While we wait what do we do? It’s fair to say our patience for waiting varies, depending on our level of anxiety, our trust in the competency of the one who’s keeping us waiting, our expectation of how long is reasonable, what we’ve got to distract ourselves in the meantime and so on. While waiting I’ve heard people say they are killing time, or wasting time or spending time. In an Advent time we say we wait with expectation for … God, I guess, God to return … from? Waiting … waiting … you know it could become habit forming. Waiting could become an identity, we the God waiting, God expecting people. A people faithfully telling of and reinventing the God who was, for our time, and holding faith for the God who is yet to be, all the while not expecting to be or see God now. I wonder, really, what we’re waiting for. Maybe, as long as we’re waiting, the onus of responsibility for God being made real in time does not fall on us, it falls onto God, who came and hasn’t jolly well bothered to return yet. 

I wonder whether the time in which this story dwells, the one we tell with past and future, is not linear time at all. I wonder whether, just as Jesus declared “the kingdom of God is at hand,” the presence of God, who was and is and is to be, is at hand. Fully with us in every moment of the linear time in which we live, if we took time to notice, if we were to step into that which is.

The story of the past we tell in Advent, that culminates in the birth of Jesus, God in human form, is populated with a cast of characters. For those of us who’ve kicked around the church for a while we’ll have heard these stories many a time. We pretty much know them by rote. We know who to expect to appear, we know the part they play in the Christian narrative which centres on the miracle and marvel of Jesus, God with us, made flesh in real time. We remember who populates the story, perhaps we wonder who they were, how and where they lived, try to imagine the scenes in which they are depicted. Or perhaps we’re suspicious of the actuality of the story, did it really happen or is it a story that may not have happened this way but nevertheless is true. The role the characters assume has more symbolic significance. We have a habit of noticing, being distracted by nouns, those naming words.

When we hear nouns like Zechariah, Elizabeth, angel of the Lord, temple incense offerings, they’re not familiar to us. We have to translate them into our context so we’re distanced from the scripture before us. ”The text,” Anna Carter Florence writes “stays in its own orbit and we get to live in the ‘real world’ at a safe distance. Nouns … look good in a museum but not in our living room … “ [they] are parts of speech that allow us to isolate ourselves, draw boundaries, designate an ‘other’ and even avert our eyes as if we don’t want to look at what happens next.” [1] By contrast verbs are common across time and culture. We know what serving, entering, offering, appearing, seeing, terrifying, hearing, conceiving and giving birth are.

This Advent we decided to look at what the characters in the gospel text did, to pay attention to the verbs. Considering the text before us this way, looking for verbs meant we entered the text. Rather than it being something a sacred and untouchable other over there we had to take care considering, loaded with all the things we thought we already knew. Because we considered it differently it moved from being a set piece of Scripture, to an ‘alive script’ within scripture. Verse by verse we named the verbs and the character to whom the verb belonged. We discovered certain verbs gathered around each character. We also discovered we’d made assumptions about which characters were doing which thing based on our usual, expected reading of a familiar text. 

There was a small cast of characters, or groups, each with a particular collection of verbs. Looking at the collection before us, we found our perception of people and of the story shifted. Elizabeth gained stature and place, there was surprise at the prominence of the crowd presence and participation, it was noticed this is a stand-alone Jewish story that doesn’t need Jesus, ‘baby John to be’ is important in his own right. John was born to Elizabeth and Zechariah but also distanced, as if he was born not for them but for the community.

Elizabeth began without stature, not fruitful according to the religious rubric of her community. Yet she is chosen to bring to birth the one who will restore and rebirth the life of her religious community. Zechariah of priestly stature is silenced, it is Elizabeth who names, not in keeping with tradition, the one who will bring, renew life and hope in the community. After Elizabeth has spoken to name this new thing Zechariah regains his voice.

Elizabeth was known as barren, Zechariah as priest in a world where angel encounters were possible because of a community, the people of which they were a part. The community gave them identity. They were made persons in being part of a people, in this instance a people of God, a Jewish people of God. This story has integrity in that community, in the Jewish narrative of God presence. Zechariah, Elizabeth, John are full part players in that narrative. We make them bit part players with role to serve our story, the one we claim completes, fulfils, perhaps even supplants the Jewish story. John is a prophet sent to turn, recall the people of Israel to the Lord their God, he is not simply a preamble, a forerunner to Jesus. John, Elizabeth and Zechariah have stature without Jesus. 

We paused to look for the verbs in the Gospel passage from scripture we read today. We listened for what caught attention, was noticed on that day and to ponder together. Today I speak, and inevitably interpret, some of what the people gathered heard on that day. The process undid some assumptions, gained space for new understanding and an appreciation not so much of who was present in the drama of the script but how they were present. We listened for the script from scripture for us, as mentioned one of the things that caught attention was the integrity of this as a Jewish story. We’ve taken this story and make it Christian. We use to serve the needs of our story. In so doing have we come to colonize it, dominate it with our story? Such small piece of scripture is readily lost in the bigger narrative we insist it serves. By pausing to listen, paying attention to what was before us, it regained some integrity. We gained from this story life and deeper meaning and learned we could shift to accommodate it with its integrity. 

I wonder how many people, contexts, voices, stories, situations we filter, silence, discount, exclude or perhaps manipulate to fit our unexamined story to serve our end or that of a dominating Christian story. In so doing, do we diminish the integrity of a unique speaking into life of divine presence that may be just what we, our church, our world needs? 

We tell this Advent story with claim of the inherent potential of life that renews and enlivens because of a community who gives us identity. We don’t bestow this identity on ourselves. We need reminding that the One creating, enlivening, sustaining the world, imbues our uniqueness as gift not just for us but for the world. The blessing of fruitfulness, of being God bearers in the world is for the world. 

This Advent, how about we look out for the verbs, notice the verbs we choose to live by. How about we kill, waste, spend some time paying attention to what is before us in each moment. Notice what surprises us, what disturbs us in each encounter. Let’s not switch into automatic Advent mode. Reminisce about a story past and pipe dream hope for divine rescue in some future, all the while refusing our responsibility to notice divine presence with us, to participate in being divine presence born in every moment. Let’s seek in each moment, perhaps with expectation, to discern the potential for burgeoning divine fruitfulness in the unlikely and unexpected, in Wilf’s king of the road character, in those deemed unfruitful, in those silenced. This Advent let us pause to listen and turn, realign ourselves with divine desire for the flourishing of life.

[1] Anna Carter Florence Rehearsing Scripture: Discovering God’s Word in Community Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. ; Grand Rapids 2018, 18

November 25, 2018

Wilf Holt

Sunday before Advent

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November 18, 2018

Susan Adams

Ordinary 33     Mark 13:1-8     Being There: Lauris Edmond. p 128, Earth's Deep Breathing

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I have to own I am not a fan of readings such as the gospel this morning that comes from what is often referred to as Mark's ‘little apocalypse’.

I think that is because it reminds me of my teenage years walking up Queen St when is seemed every corner had its ‘end time’ preacher proclaiming the end of the world, reminding passers by how little time we had left to repent and prepare to meet our maker!

On reflection, it seems our world of today is in an even more dire situation than it was then!

Now days it is not just hearsay, we have experienced for ourselves fires and floods and stones tumbling down, we have heard and have seen videos of famine and homelessness, of mass migration and vitriolic posturing by world leaders and religious leaders warning of dreadful things and urging division and discrimination and self-protection – all the things that Christian fundamentalists such as the old street preachers told us signaled the end of the world. I found it very scary when young then dismissed it as 'crackpot' when an all knowing teenager!

Amongst Biblical scholars there is discussion as to whether this apocalyptic style portion of the gospel we know as Mark was written by the same writer who compiled the rest of the gospel or if it is instead a later insert. That doesn’t matter to me, as I’ve mentioned before, my discipline is to address readings head on and not skirt around the ones I don’t like! 

So how can we address this reading today, small portion though it is of what is a chapter, seemingly, about the end of the world as it was known.

Context makes all the difference! And knowing something about the context of Mark's time helps us understand the gospel and be provoked to think about these verses in relation to our own time.

We’ve heard how the time of Jesus, and the years following his death, was one of turmoil and oppression for the people of Judaea. How there had been numerous uprisings and revolts responded to by the Roman governors by bringing in thousands of soldiers to keep a lid on things. The religious leaders, based in the glorious gold and marble and fine-wood Temple, were accused by the people of being in cahoots with the governor and his soldiers. Consequently they were not loved and not respected by the general population who were finding life more and more difficult as a result of the heavy taxes, and the diversion of food to feed all the soldiers and the Roman administration – to say nothing of temple taxes and strict purity laws. Thousands of protestors and ‘revolutionaries’ were crucified during this time and the preceding decades, including Jesus, for their preaching and teaching against this Roman oppression and the Temple collusion. 

So, what if we take a lesson from other parts of the gospel, in particular the parables, and turn the whole account on its head? 

What if, instead of hearing it as a warning of the end times and perseverating fearfully and resignedly on that aspect, we hear it as an account included in the gospel to bring comfort and hope, a call to get ready for action, for change? 

Is this possible do you think?

·      Certainly life and hope is what I want to preach, not death and despair; not passivity and helplessness;

·      Certainly life and hope is what I believe the sweep of biblical teaching offers – notwithstanding the difficult passages of judgment and death.

·      Certainly life and hope is what we seem to need in our own time of despair and world turmoil and predictions of a heating planet and daily news of increasing selfishness and evidence of despair.

·      Certainly we need good-news in our time as Marks contemporaries needed good-news in theirs.

The writer of Mark seems to be convinced that things were just about as bad as they could get.

Then comes the Son of Man, a child of the people, their representative, in all the glory of a redeemed, liberated future.

If we are watching out for a child of the people today, for those who offer us a caution or a message of hopeful change, if we are prepared to engage openly with others who may be different from us; if we are willing to listen to their message and reflect on its capacity to benefit the earth and earth creatures such as us; if we are willing to cast our lot with this Son of Man and resist all that destroys and dehumanises and divides … then things will change for our communities and our world too. Hope and life will be sustained; life will be restored from impending death; resurrection will come to the earth and its creatures; we will find community and a just and peaceful future together.

We have just concluded Living Wage Week, you will have seen the billboard and its message. Overcoming systems that have produced the wealth gap that divides our increasingly unequal society is one practical way life and hope can be restored to a significant number of families and people struggling for fair pay for the work they do. Your support is necessary if this movement is going to bring the change it is working for. So watch and listen for those who are in places and can make decisions to pay people a wage sufficient to live on – be that in your own work place or in local government or central government, ensure those who provide services for you pay a living wage to their staff. 

Keep your ears open for how we can support a sustainable environment … public transport to reduce fossil fuel emissions; reducing the amount of meat you eat; refusing plastic bags; if you have space try growing lettuce and tomatoes; planting trees instead of cutting them down and nurturing our green spaces, our bees and our birds; supporting however you can those people who are doing what you can't do yourself but would like to be able to. 

Pray – bring into focused attention the changes you live for and the people whose lives matter to you.

As Advent approaches and we are challenged to 'read the signs' of the times and to be the change we pray for, I encourage you not to be overwhelmed by the size of the task – the stones of our temples of finance and inequality, despair and disregard for a sustainable future, certainly do look huge, but, our imagination, our faith, our story of hope and of life from death – our capacity to bring about change when we work together is even bigger.

We were called into a community of hope and struggle, those who will be baptised this morning are joining our ranks, and together we will move into a future bringing hope and redemption with us.

November 4, 2018

Helen Jacobi 

All Saints' Day     Isaiah 25:6-9     Psalm 24     Revelation 21:1-6     John 11:32-44

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“There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the thin places that distance is even smaller … poet Sharlande Sledge gives this description. 

‘Thin places, the Celts call this space, 

Both seen and unseen, 

Where the door between the world 

And the next is cracked open for a moment 

And the light is not all on the other side.’” [1] 

All Saints’ Day is a “thin place” day. A day when we feel we can reach through the barrier of time and space and touch our loved ones whom we see no more. 

If we come today remembering someone who has died recently our sorrow might be acute – and that is ok. If we remember someone whom we lost long ago our sorrow will return – and that is ok. Or maybe we are pleased to have a moment to focus and to remember. And so we are not so much sorrowful as hopeful or peaceful, and that is ok. 

I have been spending time the last couple of weeks discovering the stories of people whom I didn’t know but who were known by this church, this space. 

I have been researching the 51 soldiers memorialized on our walls (and the three whose names were left off). We walk past their names every time we walk into church, usually without a second thought. Every now 

and then a poppy is placed on the memorial and we know someone has stopped to remember. 

Next Sunday is Armistice Day, 100 years since the end of World War One; and so in preparation I have been researching and finding myself in one of those thin places. When the memorial was dedicated on 27 February 1921 the bishop of Auckland, Bishop Averill said: “We know that those brave heroes are not lying in scattered graves, but that they form a part of that encompassing crowd of witnesses who have passed from death to life and under the leadership of the Great Captain, are leading a fuller and higher existence.” [2] 

The “crowd of witnesses” is a phrase from St Paul that we use on All Saints Day to think of ourselves joining with the “saints”. St Paul said we are all “saints” not just the super holy, super perfect ones. 

Also at the dedication of the memorial the Governor General, Lord Jellico said “that the call of arms was obeyed by the glorious dead whose memory was perpetuated by the memorial. They had answered the call of duty to God, to the King, to the Empire, and themselves.” [3]

How strange that language sounds to us today. History has taught us the futility and waste of World War One – the trenches, the massacre at Gallipoli. 

18, 277 deaths from our population of just over one million. Everyone knew someone who had died. So no wonder there are 51 names listed in our church. 

The Vestry at the time decided “That marble tablets be erected in the church containing the names of all from St Matthew’s Parish who have fallen, irrespective of denomination and that the names of others who have been associated in any way with St Matthew’s be also incorporated.” [4]

Even in 1920 St Matthew’s was a place for all – to be willing to name anyone of any denomination was a bit radical for those days. 

The vicar at the time was William Gillam – he took leave from the parish and did three tours of duty. When he first left to serve in 1915 the parish threw a big party and showered him with gifts [5]. He served on the hospital ship Maheno at Gallipoli and returned to a hero’s welcome. When he left again in 1916 he asked that there be no farewell. He had seen by then the horrors of tending to the wounded and performing countless burials. He returned much diminished and unwell and never regained his full strength. His son Floyd was killed and is remembered on our memorial. 

Rev Gillam retired in 1919 and when he died in 1929 his ashes were placed in the pillar by the consecration stone – there is a plaque there to him. 

How often do we hear the comment that the returning soldiers never wished to speak of the war; families only discovered, often after their death, diaries or letters recounting the full tragedy and horrors suffered. How hard it must have been for them to marry up the official language of serving king, empire and God with the sheer agony of what they were asked to do. The disconnect would have been unbearable. And so they did not speak. 

Would they be pleased I wonder that we remember them 100 years later? 

Would they be pleased that we want to reach through the barrier of time and touch their stories? I am sure they would ask us what have we learnt, what do we do differently 100 years on? And we would have to confess the wars that have been waged and the lack of peace and justice in our world.

The passage that we read from the Book of Revelation today would have been one that Rev Gillam and his fellow chaplains read at funerals or to comfort the dying: 

“the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” (Rev 21:3-4). 

Did it help them I wonder? Did they understand that God was on no side in the war but with the suffering and the pain and yearning for it to be over? 

Does this passage help us? 

Can we hear that God is not in some far away place but here “among mortals”; here in our joys and in our sorrows. 

The Book of Revelation was written at a time of suffering and persecution for the early Christians so the words are not sweet words designed to cheer people up; they are real words, burnished with suffering that is very real. 

‘Thin places, the Celts call this space, 

Both seen and unseen, 

Where the door between the world 

And the next is cracked open for a moment 

And the light is not all on the other side.’ [6]

The light is not all on the other side; the light is here, where God is present among mortals, dwelling with us, wiping tears from our eyes. 

Thanks be to God. 

[1] http://www.explorefaith.org/mystery/mysteryThinPlaces.html Sylvia Maddox

[2] Auckland Star 28 February 1921 

[3] Auckland Star 28 February 1921 

[4] handwritten in a Minute Book conserved for us by our Diocesan Archives, 24 Feb 1920 

[5] p 75 A Place on the Edge Jack Leigh

[6] http://www.explorefaith.org/mystery/mysteryThinPlaces.html

October 28, 2018

Cate Thorn

Ordinary 30     Jeremiah 31:7-9     Mark 10:46-52

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Today we hear from the gospel of Mark of the encounter between Bartimaeus and the Jerusalem bound Jesus. Bartimaeus is blind, on the side of the road, literally sidelined. Upon hearing that the noise and fuss around him is because the person of Jesus is passing Bartimaeus cries out to be seen and heard. The crowd try to silence him, but Bartimaeus cries out even more loudly, insisting on being heard. Blind, a beggar of invisible status and no particular account calls out. Jesus hears, he stops, calls this blind, made invisible man to him and asks him what he wants. Bartimaeus doesn’t say “heal me,” rather he says “let me see.” It’s as if Bartimaeus already knows he has the capacity to see. Jesus listens, sees Bartimaeus, and speaks “trust/faith,” step into that which you already know, your capacity to see clearly and Bartimaeus’ is able to see again. Seeing clearly a world enlivened and imbued with divine presence Bartimaeus chooses to follow Jesus, to walk in way aligned to this knowing.

Just two chapters earlier in Mark there was another story of Jesus healing a blind man. You may’ve missed it, given the way the gospel is broken up in the lectionary. That time a blind man was brought to Jesus by companions, not speaking, Jesus led him away from the crowd. Using saliva upon the man’s eyes, he can see, but only in part, so Jesus lays his hands upon him and he sees clearly. This man is sent home, instructed to avoid the village. 

Between these two healings of blindness Mark has Jerusalem bound Jesus declare to his disciples on three occasions that he’s to be betrayed, killed and will rise again. Following ‘the way,’ Jesus explains, will require sacrifice of things that lend humans reassurance, sense of surety, security and continuity. Familial ties, financial security (rich young man) and societal status (sons of Zebedee). What’s more living this way claims only in God do humans really know and understand who they are, to be whole and to flourish requires a first allegiance to God, a commitment to being and doing, to living in a particular way that takes priority over any other allegiance. To commit to live and act this way defies the authority of those wielding power and control in the world and will lead to persecution and suffering. The promise is that life lived trusting in God brings wholeness, healing and fulfilment into the world.

But living this way of God is not as simple or straightforward as it first appears. The first blind man saw ‘but not clearly’ until Jesus hands were laid on him, healed away from crowds and privately dismissed. Seeing clearly what following this way entails is not yet ready or able to be perceived. Despite first impressions, just who Jesus is, is not immediately clear, much less the cost of committing yourself to this Jesus way. After Jesus’ difficult teaching, of his impending death, the cost of discipleship, the inverted values of the way, just before Jesus enters Jerusalem, the second, immediate restoration of sight takes place, in midst of, in fact interrupting the movement of the crowd. Trusting in Jesus, his capacity to see is affirmed and sight restored Bartimaeus chooses for this Jesus way.

We can see a structure take shape as we consider a slightly extended section of Mark’s gospel. Symbolism emerges that adds depth and meaning to our hearing of Mark’s unfolding telling of Jesus life and journey. It is lovely, isn't it, nice to get a bit clearer idea of things … but it’s not exactly life threatening, doesn’t confront us such that we’reknocked off our perch, dislodged from our usual, caused to question who we are, how we live, made to want to change. Sure the gospel seems to be telling us that following this Jesus way will have serious implications for life. Require much more of us than a simplistic declaration of faith in Jesus, which hardly causes us to break stride of our usual patterns and expectations of life. But does it really?

There’s good news, isn’t there, that you share over a nice cuppa of your favourite brew. Then there's GOOD NEWS that disrupts the inherent complacency of such settled world. I wonder if in our settled world the good news, that gospel sense one, has become tamed, part of our familiar and comfortable world. One we can keep spinning pretty much as we wish, modulating our exposure to that which discomforts and unsettles us.

Does living good news this way mean we come to sideline and silence disruptive unsettling voices that cry out to be heard? Whether human voice, that of our natural world, or our inner yearning for wholeness. For the wild gospel good news, wouldn’t it be dangerous in the hands of the unlikely, the unwashed, they might want a place at our table of plenty, we might have to live with enough and not too much. What's more they might upend our world, disrupt our tidy ordering of things, open our eyes to see a world patterned by divine delight that is untidy and disordered and inconvenient. Heaven forbid, they might even teach us of divine presence, of how to live the Jesus way, that trusting our broken incompleteness to God brings healing and restoration.

I want to share with you a real life story, strictly speaking it’s not a Jesus story but then again. I’d gone to an Emporium not far from where I live, searching for that “I’m not sure what I’m looking for but I’ll know when I find it” elusive thing. In the shop, other than the woman at the counter, there was just one other couple, she was in a wheelchair, quite physically disabled, and with her a chap, he may have been her partner, a family member, I’m not sure. While I was sifting through things the couple went to the front of the shop and engaged in conversation with the woman behind the counter. I suspect they knew each other as the woman from the shop was enquiring as to how the wheelchair bound woman was as she’d had a bad cold/flu. With a still hacking cough and stumbling sentences it became clear things were not much improved. After a while they drifted off out of the shop, but were soon followed by another guy, wearing Rastafarian striped shorts and a woolly jumper, a few strips of Rastafarian coloured design threaded through his long, partially dreadlocked hair. This chap was enquiring as to how the son of the woman serving was enjoying his new job. It appeared the son had switched from one car dealership to another and was now much happier, “What did they do that made him so unhappy?” the chap asked, “It’s not appropriate for me to answer that” the woman tactfully responded, then ensued a conversation about the virtues of the cars from one dealership over against the other.

I left the shop at that point … still looking, as happens half an hour or so later I returned. The woman in the shop was now in conversation with another man I’d guess in his 50’s or 60’s, somewhat shabbily attired. The conversation seemed to be around a woman who must at times frequent the shop, he was explaining how the woman was a friend but not a girlfriend – that she needed to understand this, she was a bit needy for his liking. The woman in the shop was explaining how the not girlfriend friend was probably just lonely, then followed a largely one way conversation about the merits of the Jaguar as a car and how his neighbour had one and all the things it could do, the woman mumbled periodically in return. By this stage I’d found something of what I wanted so went to the counter, the woman was looking a little tired and a bit frazzled, I made comment about the interesting nature of her clientele that afternoon. Exhaling, she commented, “I don’t know what’s going on, today they’ve all come out. Were you here when that last chap was here with his girlfriend?” “No” I responded, “Well … she said, “That was interesting.” “I left when the chap with threaded hair was here,” “Oh, she said “Well in between time the guy with Asperger’s was in, he’s rearranged and tidied all my ribbons again, I can never find where things are by the time he finishes.”

I couldn’t help but reflect what an amazing, if unrecognised, world of belonging she was providing for all these people who don’t quite fit. I doubt when she goes home that she considers those conversations, the refuge created by her willingness to engage with the silenced, sidelines, ill-fitting people of our community as the work she did that day. This woman lives out an amazing ministry though I doubt she understands herself or what she does in this way. Seeing them as persons in their own right, with complicated and convoluted ways of negotiating life, by hearing and stopping and listening and asking she gains them the stature of personhood. Clearing for them a place to stand, permissioning them a world to walk in, a way to walk, for their uniqueness to have voice.

In her meeting them, was she as God presence for them, was this drawn out of her by their need. It gave me pause to think, I wonder what we would say should the living God ask us what we want, maybe we would speak of our brokenness, our desire to know ourselves whole, maybe it is there in our incompleteness that God is closest to us. It’s hard, I think, in our context to live a radical, wild and untamed gospel life. Yet I wonder how many times we hear and stop for, listen and ask of the need of another, how often we minister to/with, not looking, not expecting, not realising how through us God is made present in the world.

October 21, 2018

Linda Murphy

Ordinary 29    Mark 10:35-45

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When our sons were young they played a game called “shotgun” whenever we went out in the car. The person who got to the passenger door first and said “shotgun “got to sit in the front passenger seat. I was bewildered why would they wish to sit in the most dangerous seat in the vehicle and more importantly why would they want to sit next to me, the most tense driver you can possibly imagine. Nevertheless each time we went out shotgun was played, no matter how many times I explained the negative side of winning this game.

While reading today’s verses from Mark this memory came to mind. Jesus and the twelve disciples are on their way to Jerusalem and Jesus was trying to prepare the disciples for what lay ahead of them when they arrived in Jerusalem. This was the third occasion that Jesus had predicted his trial, suffering, death and resurrection. They were not listening or at least not comprehending what he is trying to teach them.

Jesus’ ministry has been one of boundary breaking: challenging the Empire, the religious purity system and the patriarchal family system. Jesus’s ministry through actions of inclusiveness to those on the margins and his vision of “God’s empire” was totally different to the world they lived in and there would be a consequence for that. The Empire and religious ruling class could not allow this subversive behaviour to continue and Jesus was aware of what would be happening to him in Jerusalem.

He was a radical, nonviolent egalitarian who associated with those on the outside of society, those who had no power or recognition in the social structure of the day.

James and John sons of Zebedee the fisherman who Jesus calls “Sons of Thunder”. They are zealous and hot headed, they ask Jesus in Luke to rain down heavenly fire on a Samaritan village that refuses Jesus its hospitality. Their request was not out of left field they had faith in Jesus believed in him and his message and wanted to support him. Their request was not unusual nor was the reaction of the other ten. The request of James and John brings to light our natural desires to be approved of and rewarded in worldly terms. 

Tom Bissell in his book “Apostle” suggests that Jesus’ reply to their request, “The cup that I drink you will drink”, appears to be predicting that the Zebedee brothers will die as martyrs. There is an early tradition that John, like his brother James was martyred. However what happened to James and John in reality is lost to history.

Following James and John’s request Jesus goes into an explanation about the leadership style of the Gentiles and his style of servant lead leadership. I found an article that talks of nine common leadership styles including: transformational, transactional, autocratic, bureaucratic, charismatic, laissez-faire and servant leadership. I have certainly experienced a number of the above in my own working career and have always found the autocratic and bureaucratic style a demotivating practice as opposed to transformational or servant lead environments.

Currently worldwide we have some very autocratic leaders such the President of the United States Donald Trump or the leader of Russia Vladimir Putin to names just two both have sections of their societies struggling to survive while they appear to live lives not dissimilar to the Emperors of Rome who Jesus was challenging and was crucified for. 

We have a world in climatic crisis with one of the most powerful leaders determined that this crisis doesn’t exist. Famine is being experience in the Middle East due to the ongoing conflicts in this area. We have a world crying out for a leadership style that offers caring, compassion and social justice.

The Markan scholar Chad Myers says of the Gospel of Mark: This story is by, about, and for those committed to God’s work of justice, compassion and liberation in the world. The gospel of Mark is accepted by most biblical scholars has being written around 70CE. This was during a period of violence in Israel the Roman Empire had destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and persecuted anyone who was opposed to their imperialism. The followers of Jesus where in disarray, who would lead them now may have been a constant question among these survivors. Was this gospel from Mark for them! Mark’s Jesus was not suggesting that the leadership would be transferred from the top down. He was not handing out the privileged positions like an emperor or patriarch would. Mark is saying that leadership belongs to those who learn and follow the way of non-violent subversion, and who are prepared not to dominate but to serve and suffer as Jesus. 

I would like to share with you an example of servant lead leadership that I was part of four very short weeks ago.

The Auckland City Mission after nearly forty years moved from 140 Hobson St to 23 Union St a move that we had all anticipated with dread. However it was such a smooth transition not a break in any of our services with the exception of the Calder Health Centre that did close for two days and moving a medical practice is no mean feat. In the weeks preceding the move our deacon Wilf Holt personified diakonoshe worked like a slave! Wilf wasn’t the only one, from the City Missioner down to our client committee everyone worked together to move the Mission. The hours worked by everyone were amazing and the spirit of positivity was astounding, a spirit of aroha abounded. The planning was meticulous we had instructions for packing and labelling boxes and each team had a timetable to work within all the while still supporting our clients. On Friday the 21stof September we served our last evening meal at Drop In (140 Hobson St) and on Saturday the 22ndwe opened our new Haeata at 23 Union St.

Our leaders worked as servants more often slaves. I am not sure that Chris Farrelly or Helen Robinson ever went home in that last week. There is a delightful picture of Helen cleaning the City Mission’s iconic sign after it had been taken of the Prince of Wales before its relocation to 23 Union St. This is an image epitomising the style of leadership that Jesus was talking about.

In our new location our practice of service has also changed and has been greeted with respect and we have been able to offer dignity with our service which our old building and work practice precluded. There have been little teething problems nevertheless they are not insurmountable and the Mission is busier than ever at our new site.

Jesus brought a radically new kind of leadership into the world. Everywhere he went, he sought out the lost, the forgotten, the ignored, the shunned, the broken, and those most in need.

Servant leadership is unselfish, not concerned with what we can get out of it, but solely concerned with how someone else can be lifted up. Many servant leaders never make the headlines, but they make a difference in people’s lives.

Jesus’ call to servanthood as leadership is offered to each of us as disciples of Christ.

October 14, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Ordinary 28     Amos 5:6-7, 10-15     Psalm 90:12-17     Hebrews 4:12-16     Mark 10:17-31

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Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters are familiar with the phrase which begins a confession – “Forgive me for I have sinned; it has been – however many – weeks since my last confession.”

Well it has been 12 weeks since my last sermon and so my penance is that the week I am back in the pulpit I have to wrestle with “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. Go sell what you have, give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”

There is some divine humour in there somewhere. I have no desire whatsoever to give up what I have. And I am pretty sure you don’t want to either.

Our readings today can either leave us feel pretty beaten up – with Amos who seems to shout “I know how many are your transgressions and how great are your sins” – or the readings leave us feeling guilty and sad like the man who encounters Jesus and chooses not to follow him – or annoyed like Peter “we have left everything and followed you” – we have done our bit, surely, we are here aren’t we?

Many writers and preachers have tried over the years to soften this passage – maybe it is not about literally giving away all your possessions, maybe it is about our attitude to our possessions. There have been theories about the camel – some have claimed there was a literal gate in the walls of Jerusalem where the camels had to be unloaded to get through; and because they kneel to be unloaded it was symbolic of prayer. But as one writer says “In the end, this story is untamable. … it resists simple explanations and denies loopholes, making us so uncomfortable that we are liable to talk circles around it in hope of stumbling upon a basis for softening its message.” [1]

So I will try not to talk circles around it, nor soften its message in keeping with the writer of the letter to the Hebrews who says “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of our heart.” (Heb 4:12-16) Are we ready to be pierced by the Word?

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

Inherit? eternal life. Our unnamed man is using the language of his world – the language of the rich and the entitled who inherit what is their due. In Jesus day, and indeed in OT times, to be rich meant that God has blessed you. We find its parallels in today’s so called “prosperity” gospel where preachers claim the same heresy of wealth equating to God’s blessing. So this man feels blessed by God already – now he just wants to be sure he will have that for all eternity.

Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Jesus is having none of the man’s compliments: Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. But since you ask 
You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’

Jesus lists 5 of the 10 commandments (Exodus 20); but he changes one of them – the 10th commandment is “You shall not covet your neighbour’s house” – meaning you shall not be envious or jealous, or desire to have what your neighbour has but be satisfied with what is yours. But Jesus changes covet to “defraud” – the Greek can translate as to defraud or make destitute; so Jesus is directly challenging and accusing the man of becoming wealthy by dishonest means or at the very least by the exploitation of others. And that was the way of things in Jesus day – you didn’t get rich on your own – using slave labour or indentured peasant labour was the way to be wealthy. 
 

Without a pause the man says "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth."
Right. 

Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go [2], sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."When the man heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

This man is the only person in Mark’s gospel not to agree to follow Jesus when asked.

Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!"

Jesus looked at the man, looked at his audience – the word ‘look’ here means, looked at intently or deeply; looked in the eye; considered – Jesus looks us in the eye, considers our situation, assesses it. 

How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!
No wriggle room at all. 

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.

And we say with the audience – well what hope is there for anyone? 

They were greatly astounded and said to one another, "Then who can be saved?"
Peter began to say to him, "Look, we have left everything and followed you."
I’m with Peter – the disciples have left everything – their businesses, their fishing boats, their homes, their families – surely that is enough?

Up till now we have probably been assuming that when Jesus talks about entering the kingdom of God he means where we go when we die, or life after death, as the man’s question was about inheriting eternal life. But Jesus’ answers are about the kingdom of God, the reign of God, the realm of God which is about the here and now. Jesus often says – the kingdom of God is at hand, or has come near (Mark 1:15). He is talking about life now - 

Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age – houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions – and in the age to come eternal life. 

The age to come part is an afterthought – Jesus says the people will be rewarded now. 

And they will receive houses and families – the Jesus revolution was about people’s economic wellbeing as well as their spiritual wellbeing. Those two things were not separated out like we do today. And Jesus has a lot more to say about money and possessions than he ever does on prayer or believing. [3]

So what do we do with this teaching that pierces us?

Do we go home and on Monday morning sell all we have? We could.

That would be a personal, individual response.

Or we could think about the community, the kingdom Jesus promises is at hand.

And then we would work together to bring more economic justice to our world.

There are things we can do

• pay the living wage to people we employ

• encourage businesses we deal with to the pay the living wage

• support initiatives like the one the government announced this week where loan companies will be controlled to stop debt being able to spiral out of control

• support the City Mission and Lifewise in their Housing First programme

• I know some of you volunteer at the City Mission; at Citizens Advice Bureaus and in other ways support those in need

• get involved politically to hold our Council and Government to account on their promises to improve the lives of those living in poverty

• we know that climate change is the greatest threat to the lives of the poor worldwide, so maybe we don’t grizzle about taxes on our petrol and drive less instead 

• and of course we can always give more, to the City Mission, to other charities we support, to our church.

This story is in the end still untamable; there is no wriggle room: Jesus looks at us, loves us, and asks us to believe that with God all things are possible. 

Even the prophet Amos says that if we hate evil and love good, and establish justice; it may be that the Lord will be gracious to us. 

So let’s get on with establishing justice. 

[1] Matt Skinner https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=402

[2] also means “get up” as often used in the healing stories 

[3] Dawn Ottoni Wilhelm: In the NT there are 2,100 verses on possessions, 272 on believing, 371 on prayer (p180 Preaching the Gospel of Mark 2008). 

October 7, 2018

Cate Thorn

St Francis Day     Wisdom 11:24-12:1     Matthew 11:25-30

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

There’s a famous saying attributed to St Francis doubtless familiar to many of you, “Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.” It lends a certain irony to preaching on St Francis day. I was genuinely tempted to stop there and invite you to reflect in silence for a time on the ways that you preach the gospel without words and then speak, yes use words, to share your reflection with your neighbour. I thought it an interesting way to recall ourselves to the simplicity of the way of St Francis. However I’m not quite sure it would fulfil my brief.

St Francis day falls in the liturgical calendar just after September the month set aside to celebrate the season of creation. That time when we turned to face climate change, the effects of which are transforming the world from the one we know and love, to one we’ll hardly recognise – happening we speak. Climate change – the leading cause for concern for every social issue we as church have sought to address and relieve. The poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised are paying, with their lives and livelihoods, the price of a world we’re disfiguring, outcome of our misuse, our overuse of creation.

Into such context we step St Francis, a man who came to choose a life of radical simplicity and poverty. Obedient to a simple rule “To follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps,” Francis soon had followers wanting to walk this way and early on he sought papal approval for what was to become a religious order. Francis’ way of life was not alluring, yet even today his person and way profoundly influences. People from all walks of life are still drawn to follow Francis’ example, to enact simplicity, to live more attuned to the life of creation.“Probably no one in history,” Encyclopaedia Britannica suggests, “has set out as seriously as did Francis to imitate the life of Christ and to carry out so literally Christ’s work in Christ’s own way. This is the key to the character and spirit of St. Francis, [it] helps explain his veneration for the Eucharistand respect for the priests who handled the elements of the communion sacrament.”

Radical poverty, simple living, obedience to the institution of the church, centrality of the Eucharist, a man who saw visions and was obedient to the divine directive perceived in them. Francis embodied simple dependence, trust in a creation construed in such a way that, as he aligned himself with the way of Jesus, would provide for him. Francis way brought life, he enlived a way of divine priority for creation. Accounts from Francis life especially remembered and loved, are those of his communing with nature, of his relational engagement with the natural world, as genuine to him as his human encounters. Perhaps Francis lived within the real world where humans understand their interdependence in the living and breathing organism that is this planet earth, delicately suspended, finely tuned to spin around a sun, part of a galaxy within galaxies. 

Did Francis know the science of this? Of course not, not in the way we might assert as superior now. But knowing more doesn’t mean we’re made wiser, more able to live aligned with the world as it is. Knowing more might rather lead us to isolate ourselves from the living world around us. Tempt us to create our own imaginary worlds with their own priorities. Then for us to sustain them we take what want, when we want, as we see we’ve need, even if it puts us at odds with, perhaps even threatens to destroy the world that gives us life. You see we forget we can’t continue to have and take at will without repercussion. 

Francis chose to emulate the way of Jesus. A way we know led inevitably and inexorably to death. To live aligned with divine priority, with intention to release life, to stand and speak against ways of being and doing that enact injustice, destroy potential for life and full personhood is dangerous. For such living reveals how powers and principalities retain their sway with vested interest in perpetuating systems that deny life flourishing. What’s more Francis’ life reveals that fullness of life is experienced in living simply and openly. Ignoble as the means of Jesus death may have been, the way the story is told, Jesus death was one of noble and, albeit written back, divine purpose. Through death comes life. Through this particular death, result of insisting with integrity for a life bringing way of living, comes trail and tale of abundant and ending of the power of death life.

I want to take a chance here and wonder whether this way of death-leading-to-life isactually the way and shape of creation. Divinely intended creation coming into being – this is the way things are. Each of us, an intended creation, is invited to step into our uniqueness, to align ourselves with the life of this world – to bring our life for the flourishing of life in this world. Death, dying, which is for us all, releases potentiality beyond what has been known for the life of the world. This pattern and way of regeneration is the DNA of this divinely being created world. 

Let me illustrate with a story from real life. Once, not so long ago, in a land far away, yet no so far from us, a revolution took place. It wasn’t a revolution with war. It was a revolution of change, it became known as the Industrial Revolution.

Its’ success required more energy than that produced by fossil fuels, it required electricity. And electricity needs, or did back then, wires, copper wires and miles of it. For 50 years, Jim Antal tells us, one mine produced a third of the copper the US needed and a sixth of the copper the rest of the world needed. However in the 1940s the price of copper plummeted and traditional mining became unprofitable.

Come 1955, though, a new form of mining, open-pit mining, emerged when the top of a mountain was blown off just outside Butte in Montana. The Berkeley Pit was formed in this place. It soon became the largest mine of its type until it was closed on Earth Day in 1982 – it was no longer profitable. 

Closed for mining it may have been but there was a problem with the pit. It was filling with rain, snow and groundwater. No one was paying for the operation of the pumps so a lake began to form. Not just any old lake but a lake that was a dangerous brew of acid and metals from the ore that had been mined: copper, cadmium, arsenic, among others. Nothing could grow there. Life wasn’t possible. The lake kept growing until its volume made it one of the largest lakes in the US.

Then one stormy, wintry night in 1992 a flock of snow geese, over 300 of them, landed on the lake. For snow geese in a snowstorm it was an obvious place to land, to slake their thirst, to rest so to find food in the morning. But there was nothing normal about this lake and morning never came. During the night locals heard lots of honking but by dawn the geese were silent. The first to arrive at the edge of the pit saw acres of floating lifeless bodies. You see long before the geese landed, the lake had been deemed a Superfund site – land in the US contaminated by hazardous waste and identified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a candidate for cleanup because it poses a risk to human health and/or the environment. 

Then one day, a man carrying a stick with some green slime on it, came into the lab of two biochemists at the University of Montana. He’d retrieved the stick from the lake. The professors were shocked. The slime was alive, having adapted to the life-cancelling conditions of the lake. They called it an extremophile – a kind of life no had ever seen before.

Not long after that, these same biochemists came across a small pile of black slime – yeast actually – with some very special properties. You see, previously few organisms had been found that actually consumed metals. By way of example say you put algae in a beaker of pit water … algae consumes 10-15 percent of the metals in the water. But put this new, black, slimy yeast in and 85–95 percent of the metals are absorbed!

The professors knew of nothing like this so they contacted their colleagues around the world to find out if this yeast was known to exist anywhere else. Finally a vet got back to them. The one place they could find the yeast, he told them, was in the gastrointestinal track of the snow geese.

The 342 snow geese that had died … had left a gift behind. A common yeast from their intestines had not only defied death in the acid bath – the yeast had actually thrived! Using the snow geese’s gift, the scientists could help life return to one of the most lifeless places on Earth. These … geese, Jim Antal writes, had taken into themselves the very worst that humanity had to offer and in dying had returned to humanity something that might actually restore the most forsaken and wounded corner of God’s creation.” [1]

Does such rationalisation make this story any easier to bear? Perhaps not, but might it suggest the DNA of creation is for life. The biochemists became famous for uncovering an extremophile and revealing the life restoring properties of this yeast. Even as the life forms they uncovered and revealed were already present in creation. Is it too far a step to imagine from such discovery, of the miraculous restoration of life from lifelessness, that it is of the nature of creation, inherent to creation to heal, to evolve so to restore wholeness and regenerate life. I wonder, if we’ve eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts and minds open to receive, that solutions to restore that which we’re destroying may already exist. Unbeknown as yet to us regeneration may already be happening, may even be realisable but not if we insist on imposing unsustainable expectations for life on the life of this planet. Francis lived simply, present to his world, openhearted in his care and concern for all of life in creation, aware of his interdependent place within God’s good, life bringing and evolving creation. Now is the time for us to relearn we have place, yes, we do have a place, as interdependent beings in, as part of this divinely breathed into life organism of creation and we need to take our part for its’ flourishing, for us to have future.

[1] Jim Antal Climate Church, Climate World: how people of faith must work for change Lanham: Rowland & Littlefield 2018, 37-39

September 30, 2018

Hayden Smith

Ordinary 26

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

September 23, 2018

Louisa Wall

Patronal Feast

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

September 16, 2018

Christine Costley

Ordinary 24

Tena Koutou Tena Koutou Tena Koutou Katoa

I am up here this morning to talk with you about an event that happened 20 years ago! The Hikoi of Hope.

To share what being part of that event meant to me. 

And to ask the question if that event has relevance to our lives today?

In May 1998 The Anglican Synod, Te Hinota Whanui, the church’s governing body listened to testimony from it’s three Tikanga – Maori, Pakeha and Polynesia & heard stories of desperate poverty

• Poverty that was entrenched in some communities

• The widening gap between New Zealand’s richest and it’s poorest citizens

• Maori and Polynesian communities carrying the heaviest load of unemployment, ill-health and despair.

The response of the Synod was to undertake this country wide initiative, a Hikoi. A march to Wellington to our elected representatives. To present them with the stories of those who were suffering the most. To ask them to hear what the people who are hurting most in this country are saying. It was a rallying call to act and many of us did and were excited, pleased and proud to. It seemed the Christian church really did care about its most vulnerable people. It was demonstrating Christ like action & showing compassion.

The Hikoi of Hope was to walk to Wellington, to be led by the Anglican Bishops of Aoteaora.

There were 5 planks/demands that the Hikoi wanted addressed:-

Creation of Real Jobs

Affordable Housing

Dependable Public health

Accessible Education

Benefit & wage levels that lift people out of poverty

Real Jobs – In the 1990’s there were high levels of unemployment. Jobs connect us to the economy, to society, give status and opportunity. Not having a job can lead to feelings of despair and hopelessness. The recently passed Employment Contract’s Act changed the employment environment, the minimum wage was low & casualization of some jobs.

Housing –Affordable housing that is dry & warm is the cornerstone of any programme to reduce poverty. The government of the day had altered the way State Housing rents were set, these now came to be linked to market rates, ie at a higher level. This meant low income families were spending more of their income on rent, and having less money for other essentials, like food and clothing. There was an increased need to access food banks to help families put food on the table. A lot of the rental houses were cold and damp – state ones as well as in the private sector. Cold damp housing leads to health problems especially for babies, children and the elderly. Overcrowding is more likely to occur when rents are high & places are scarce. Overcrowding has detrimental effects on the health [mental & physical] of family members.

Pause – these issues sound familiar?

Health –The need for a public health system that New Zealanders can access & trust. A user pays system excludes those who have vulnerable health due to poverty. Services and agencies working with vulnerable populations had their funding altered or cut, increasing anxiety in this sector.

Poverty –The Hikoi of Hope called on the government and the nation to listen to the voices & experience of the poor & to acknowledge the need for different policy approaches which enable justice & dignity for all New Zealanders.

Education – Accessing high quality affordable education was proving difficult for many New Zealanders. Government funding for schools was not meeting the cost of running the schools. The wealthier communities could fund raise with greater skill and success than the poorer communities. 

[Just look at the facilities that are present now for schools in affluent parts of Auckland and the condition of the buildings and facilities in the poorer suburbs.]

On the 1stof September 1998 the marchers were to start, in the North Island at Cape Reinga and walk south and in the South Island to start at Bluff and walk north. All were to arrive in Wellington on the 1 October.

Sir Paul Reeves wrote that ‘‘The Hikoi of Hope is not simply a powerful way of saying ‘Enough is Enough’ it says the future is ours and not in the hands of some anonymous economic process. The theme of the Hikoi is to show every New Zealander who lives in poverty that we see their plight, find it intolerable and are walking to change it.’’

Everyone who sees this poverty as intolerable is welcome to join in. And many did. There is an estimate of 30,000 or possibly more who converged on Wellington. There were many who walked the full length of one of the islands, others walked or gathered for sections of it. 

Peter Beck was the vicar here and he was one of the leaders & organizers. I was, at that time part of the St Matt’s social justice group. Here was something we could do. Jenny & Pat Blood, Jeremy Younger and others. We used to meet in a room at the Presbyterian church, just across the road. That building is no longer a church. Meryvn Aitken was the minister. There was a covenant between the two churches. It was a positive relationship.

Then there were the meetings to plan, promote & strategize. Weekly meetings from July onwards. These meetings were held in the choir practice room downstairs. George Armstrong, Peter, Rod Oram and others participated. There was talk about previous events e.g the protests around the 1981 Springbok tour. I felt I was in the company of special people. People I see & meet here, people who moved on from St Matthew’s and I am happy to see when our paths cross.

There was energy in this parish to do all that was necessary to make the Hikoi a success.

I went with Peter, Andrew Willis and Meryvn to Northland for the start of the walk, up to Cape Reinga. That was an amazing experience, the place, the people, the prayers and blessing. Then we set off. Waiora has given me some photos to share with you. We walked for most of that day. And returned to Auckland the next day to pick up our day jobs.

There was amazing levels of hospitality made available especially in marae along the way both in South and North Islands. Maori are such good hosts! The two nights I had on marae in Northland I remember feeling so privileged to gather outside and be welcomed in and hosted in comfort and style. That was repeated throughout the country. It was like these communities were ready, willing and able to facilitate this Hikoi. These Maori communities showed us the importance of hospitality sharing what they had. We were all grateful.

On the 13 September St Matthews hosted the walkers for lunch [soup & rolls etc], right outside the church. They came up after the service & Eucharist in Aotea Square. They had walked up Queen Street from QE2 Square - which is now Britomart and a construction site!

Then on the 30 September many of us got on the overnight train to travel to Wellington and getting off before it reached the city so we could walk with the banner waving, chanting crowd along the Hutt motorway down to the Railway station before then march to Parliament.

There was a spectacular church service in front of Parliament steps. We participated in prayers, bible readings [the ones given here today] singing hymns, praying. It was an uplifting and unforgettable experience. I was there. We were there!

There are some items of interest on display, papers lists, the background pieces from the Hikoi office. And photographs. Please look through them.

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What happened to this momentum for change once the Hikoi was over. It seemed nothing? Why? I don’t know?

Maybe we had done too much walking and talking and then after it was over ‘we went home!’

Maybe some in the church this morning have ideas/thoughts on this & wish to comment.

I know I went back to the things I was doing before. I got on to Vestry and had that responsibility for the next 3 years.

Significant levels of poverty, homelessness, employment issues, the beneficiary system, our tax system, concern about access to public health and quality education are present2018 issues.

There was a ground swell of action calling for change 20 years ago. I am asking today if there are people in this congregation that are interested in undertaking some initiatives that connect us to the plight of the poor?

Please, while you think about that question, I need to say that the close supportive hands on relationship St Matthews has with its neighbour the Auckland City Mission is most commendable. Maybe concentrating on enhancing that relationship is sufficient. It has a long established history.

Any thoughts/ideas please share them.

My desire is to continue to live in this country where the most vulnerable members of our society receive a fair deal – around housing, health, education, social welfare, justice & employment.

How I might work towards that as an individual or as part of a congregation or community of like-minded people is up for discussion. Let us talk more of this after the service. 

Na Ku Te Rourou

Nau Te Rourou

Ka Ora Ai Te Iwi

With my basket and your basket we can feed the people.

September 9, 2018

Susan Adams

Ordinary 23     Isaiah 65:17-25     Earth Prayers, p131. Teilhard de Chardin     Matthew 13:10,13-17

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

We need a church that is ‘down to earth’, and has the courage to take up the theological responsibilities of exploring who we are as human beings - earth creatures - in a time of ecological crisis.

In a way this is the standalone part-two in considering the issues of ‘creation’, and the implications of our inherited theology, that we began last week. It seems to me that the church is need of another Reformation. This time an ecological Reformation, one that will bring into focus our earth-home this time not just human persons.

For too long the church has be overly concerned with getting the God-stuff ‘right’, and policing the boundaries of ‘church and faith’ to make sure the rest of us stay within those boundaries of agreed ‘rightness’. There is an old saying that seems to me to contains a wise challenge for our time, it declared; 'the church is so heavenly bound that it is no earthly use'. 

I’ve been thinking about this, and what that saying opens up for us. Many of us have, ourselves, fought the church’s 'heavenly-attachment’, whether that be in demanding recognition and place as women, seeking acknowledgement and acceptance as people who are gay and lesbian, or for simple acceptance because we are different from the narrowly drawn norm of western traditions. We would like the church to be more focused on what is good for people, and their lives of mutual care and concern, rather than on being ‘right’ so we can please a God up in heaven and get to heaven eventually ourselves. If we, the church, can shift our gaze, and the focus of our minds, from the concerns of heaven and the God who inhabits that place up there, then we will see the whole earth here that needs our loving attention and concern.

Church leaders and theologians can take a lead in this, and all of us can do our part. All it requires is for us to remember who we are - earth-creatures - and to live with dignity and graciousness, and with gentleness toward the earth because we belong here. This is our place and no other. In other words, live holding in focus the integrity and interdependence of the earth and all its creatures of which we are one. We can make the Isaiah dream our dream and choose to ‘live it into being’, making choices that will shape our lives and communities to make this possible.

Last week we focused on the idea of ‘creation’, and recognised that it is we human beings that have shaped our understanding of the earth and its becoming; we are the ones that have chosen how we live in the earth; we have set the boundaries to our reality and our dreams. What's more, we thought we had it all under control because of this, and that our inventiveness and capacity to manage things, and to solve problems, would see everything would be alright! Based on this sense of our own importance and management skills, I don’t think it is too much of a leap to use the challenging and provocative term coined for humans by Yuval Noah Harai, that is to recognise we think of ourselves as ‘homo deus’ (human gods). 

While we might like that sound of that, it is not good enough in this time of climate change and ecological challenge. The earth in all its parts is not manageable or controllable by our human endeavors, though we have tried very hard as ‘homo deus’ to do just that. Imagining ourselves to be over and apart from the earth, to be transcendent to it, and with sufficient controlling and managing powers to fix anything that gets out of kilter. The earth, however, in its fullness and unpredictability, is still surprising us with her responses to our human growth, our development and our excesses. 

It is clear today that our scientists and theologians and intellectuals of every shade, have their work cut out to enable us simply to make good the impact of our excesses and our carelessness, and our Christian 'other world' fixation. The new reformation that I am seeking for the church is one that prioritises the whole 'household of God', the oikos - the ecology. This time embracing the earth and all sentient creatures and vegetation, rivers and seas and mountains along with human persons. This ecological reformation includes the systems we humans have shaped to enable us to live together - our economic structures for the distribution of wealth as well as how we provide for access to education, healthcare and participation in decision making. 

Theologian Sally McFague wrote a book many years ago in which she explored ways of thinking about God. (I mentioned it last week) It was called ‘Models of God’[i]and was used in theological colleges around the world as a bold new offering back in the late 80s. In it she made the shocking (at the time) suggestion that we think about the whole earth, from its most minute quarks and nano-particles to the swirling gases of its atmosphere, as the 'body of God'. And this God was still in the act of creation, this God was still becoming - with us humans in on the act. 

So we are not breaking new ground when we talk about all this! Work on a radical rethink of our theology has been going on a long time.

I love this way of thinking about God: God fully immersed in Earth as we are. It is so hopeful and creative: I am part of it, nothing of me will ever be lost or beyond the love of this God this actively creating-God. But, and here is the rub: will I choose to be open to and positive about this ongoing creating activity, about the earth’s surprising capacities as it shifts and changes, or will I try to hold it to the status quo, try to contain and manage things so as to maintain what we have come to know as normal and desirable? Will I choose to protect me and mine by accumulating goods and wealth? Will I hold to my personal security and lifestyle and disregard the rest of you?

These are important questions for me to ask myself, because how I choose to live has implications for you as well as me, for our neighbours at the Mission as well as those who occupy the Beehive. My faith insists that the choices I make about by own life should be available for you too. So, how I choose to live makes plain what I value and what I desire, and what I want for your life too. 

I can be limited by what I have been taught, by the boundaries set out for my by the church and society in the past, or I can dare to look beyond this boundary toward a different way of being, of living. And, it seems to me, some of that different way can be found in the stories of the First Testament, and the stories about Jesus and his teachings.

I’m wanting to suggest that a different way can be found in the wisdom available to us in the stories and myths of our past, stories such as in the vision in the Isaiah reading we heard this morning, coming to us from 2500 years ago, and even from the ‘myths’ of Ancient Greece with warnings of human self-aggrandisement, and the importance of knowing ourselves and our place so the balance can be kept between life and death, work and leisure, enough and too little, between humans and the gods.

When we forget we are humans emerging from the substances of the earth, when we forget that we are part of it all - the molecules, the minerals, and the energies - and instead desire for ourselves the immortality of the gods in heavenly places beyond the confines of earth, then everything gets out of balance and 'salvation' retreats. 

Remembering, however, that we are created by the substances of our earth, and that in our Christian tradition the earth is infused with ‘godness’, in which we ‘live and move and have our being’ (to quote a great theologian (Paul) as recorded in our scriptures) is to know that God is intimately engaged with our being, our living and our becoming. Remembering and retelling this wisdom helps us to respect our earth home: to acknowledge the mutuality of our creative capacities and the need for ongoing mutuality of care between humans and the earth; it is to know the life of our Creating-God still walking the earth and proclaiming 'it is good'.

[i] McFague, Sally. Models of God; Theology for an ecological nuclear age. Great Britain, SCM Press. 1987.

Some Resources

Bouma-Prediger, Steven. The Greening of Theology:The ecological models of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Joseph Sitter and Jurgen Moltmann. The American Academy of Religion. Atlanta Georgia. Scholars Press. 1995.

Hoggard Creegan, Nicola & Andrew Shepherd. (edt) Creation and Hope: Reflections on Ecological Anticipation and Action from Aotearoa New Zealand. Wipf and Stock Publishers. Eugene, OR. 2018.

September 2, 2018

Susan Adams

Ordinary 22     Genesis 1:26, 28-29     NZ Herald editorial     John 1:1-5

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

It’s not difficult for us these days to nod our heads at the thought we have to do our bit to ‘take care of creation’.

In the words of my 8 year old great nephew, who knows all about this he assures me ‘cause they studied it at school, “we have to look after the environment and not throw our rubbish about, especially not our plastic stuff, cause it gets into the food chain and could make us sick as well as the fish and birds.”

I’m really glad that schools have environmental studies in the curriculum these days and that youngsters are aware of our human responsibilities to clean up after ourselves. It doesn’t seem so long ago that we expected the earth herself to take care of all our waste: be that vegetable waste from our kitchens, our food packaging, oil-spills - or carbon emissions. Now days we know we are pouring more rubbish into our environment at a faster rate than the earth and its atmosphere can biodegrade or clean. We are growing heaps of plastic and other non-biodegradable matter on land, and creating floating islands of it in the sea - and our climate is changing along with all we pump into the atmosphere. We know we have to do more to care for the earth, and the sea, and the sky. We know that globally we have to do something urgently. 

But, we seem reluctant to change our lifestyle to do that, or to put sufficient pressure on those in government to legislate for care. We seem to be more concerned about what the changes needed to manage environmental degradation will do to our current lifestyle, and to employment - as we heard when the discussion of mining permits on conservation land on the west coast was taking place.

I want to speculate for a while on how we got into this precarious situation regarding the earth’s capacity to support life on into the future in the first place. 

It seems to me, as inheritors of western Christianity, that our originating problems are theological. It is primarily from within our Christian nations of Western Europe that industrialisation made its impact on the world, with both its upsides and its down-sides. It’s hard for Christians to imagine that ‘God the Creator’, who invited us to ‘have dominion over the fish and the birds and over every living thing’ including plants and trees, will allow the world to self destruct because we humans are using the resources of the earth to ever ‘improve our lives’ just as invited. (Genesis 1 verses 26, 28-29)

Medieval Christianity, which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, wasn’t worried about human responsibility - that idea was not on the agenda - they had a mandate set out in the Bible and they knew all life was God’s responsibility. ‘His’ to give or to take, ours to make the best of what we were given. God was the ‘Father’ of all; the Creator of all things (progenitor to use a theological term).

A few centuries later, during the time of the Renaissance, theologians began to wonder about the nature of being human and how we shaped our selves and our world, thus they set the scene for the Reformation movements in the church during the 16th C, and for the enlightenment which followed - with its emphasis on human reason; with its quest to understand the world scientifically. New ways of undertaking biblical study and theological enquiry developed - reasoning and scientific enquiry entered theology.

Humanity emerged from all this as partners with God - to use language we are familiar with to today. 

We morphed from being the pinnacle of God’s creative efforts, the ones for whom all else was made and to whom the charge was “to have dominion over” - to being stewards or caretakers of creation. As the debates over theology took place we moved on further, to becoming that part of creation (humanity) that now must share with God in ensuring creation keeps happening and keeps healthy. We gave ourselves more responsibility: for co-creation with God. 

Some would argue that we should not worry at all about our current precarious state of environmental affairs: about what God has in mind for the earth and its creatures. After all, one who creates something has in mind the purpose for their creation: they know, or imagine, how their creation will function according to that purpose, and they care about what they have made. Some say we should leave the worry and the repair to God. 

To speak of God as the Creator is to a acknowledge this point of view. It also to locates the Creator outside of that which has been created, and that includes outside of our human nature - beyond us, transcendent! In this way, God the Creator can keep an eye on creation and be petitioned to fix things that go wrong. Our language is important yet we don’t think about it very often we simply accept what has become common.

It seems to me, here at St Matthews that we are exploring the idea that God is with us, within us, and between us. We use ‘Creator God’ language, because we have no other, as yet, and we want to signify a reverence for nature and all living things, for diversity, for individuals and for community. 

I believe we need to rethink the concept of “creation” altogether. To shift from an external ‘creator’ with whom we are a junior partner, to an ongoing creative process, here and now, in which we are active participants, with the earth herself. 

Along with other Christians at critical stages of change throughout history, we are in a time of transition in theology and in how we, ’be church’:

•   we are not part of the early church trying to ascribe to Jesus in story and song the importance we have experienced,

•   we are not part of the emerging Roman Church establishing doctrines and formularies to mark ourselves as different from the myriad of faith expressions,

•   we are not part of the Renaissance or Reformation humanist movements, 

•   we are not struggling to assert scientific authority, but we are struggling to hold on to a concept of God in our time of postmodern fragmentation.

We often find ourselves without the language we need to express what we are feeling, and sometimes without the confidence to express our thoughts - in case others think we are weird or not really Christian at all! To that end, we are like people in those earlier times struggling to find their way with God.

After church today, and again next week, there will be time to talk about all this - plus the material from next week’s sermon.

As we face the environmental crisis of our time in history, and watch on television the fires of the northern summer, and the ocean floods washing away land and homes, it becomes important for us to go deep within ourselves and find our desire for life, exposing as we search, the centuries of church teaching about helpless sinful humanity alongside the teachings about the power and benevolence of God. 

Somehow instead of learning all the earth is for our benefit and we are the high-point of God’s creation, we have to experience our oneness with the earth itself: our very nature as earth creatures made of the same substances as water, air, rocks and mountains along with all the other sentient beings. In this way the earth has made us. We and God who moves among it all are of the same substance as the earth herself, this is what we reverence, this is what must honour with our care and our love.

Our environmental crisis did not manifest overnight - nor will its repair manifest overnight. According to the scientists who study the earth, we unfortunately, unlike our forbears, do not have the luxury of hundreds of years to adjust our understanding of our human relationship with the earth! nor to reconceptualise our understanding of God, nor to change our behaviours accordingly! What we do know, is that it is critical to use all the contemporary means of communication at our disposal right now, to persuade our contemporaries and our governments of what we value: those things being 

life and freedom for all, 

a sustainable earth, 

shared wealth, 

peace not violence and 

loving respect for each other.

If we choose these things rather than the accrual of wealth by any means whatsoever, our lives will more adequately demonstrate the God who lives and breathes within and between us; and to borrow the words of theologian Sally McFague we will be respectfully honouring the earth as ‘God’s body’.

August 5, 2018

Cate Thorn

Social Services Sunday     2 Samuel 11:26-12:13     Mark 6:30-43

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Social Services Sunday, the day marked in the church calendar to give voice and thanks to the many people who enhance the life of our communities through the work they do to serve the needs of our community. I’m not sure it’s my place to speak for there are people whose direct engagement far better qualifies them to be the one to tell of the work they do. However, I’m thankful and grateful for all who give of themselves, their resources big or small, their expertise or their simple heartfelt will to give, to share to make a difference in the lives of others, to rebalance the scales of injustice.

Our nearest neighbour the Auckland City Mission is place in our neighbourhood through whom much of this contribution is made. The City Mission was first launched in 1920 by a then curate of St Matthew’s the Rev Jasper Calder. Reflecting in 1934 on those early beginnings Jasper wrote: When one’s mind travels back to the 10th June, 1920, when the Mission was first launched, amazement is the only emotion which is possible … when we began our ministrations we had no set programme, other than that we were out to help the underdog in his grim battles against life’s difficulties …. We started with no money, no rules, but with an excellent committee, a lot of enthusiasm and a mighty big faith. 

Jasper challenged the Anglican Church in his day to respond to the neglected poor in the community. The City Mission on our doorstep continues to challenge us and the community of Auckland to respond to the needs of the neglected poor, although the Mission now languages it this way: “Together we stand with those in desperate need. We provide immediate relief and pathways to enable long term wellbeing.”

Today we focus on the ministry of care and the sharing of resources, often as not from those who’ve more to those who’ve less. It’s good for us to do so but I own sometimes to be troubled. For it seems so often to be understood as a one way exchange – of resource given rather than of mutual exchange of dignity, of our need of one another. An exchange does take place. Perhaps we fail to recognise what we receive, for its value is currency foreign in the economy of our daily trading.

Each reading today reveals an economy of exchange. In each trading takes place with available resources to achieve an outcome. In one reading trading takes place with an economy of scarcity, the other with an economy of abundance. We enter the saga of David a little after the deal is done. We discover David trades with an economy of scarcity. Although king with power and controlling possession of most resources David desires more, wants what he cannot have, enough is never enough. Through guile, dishonesty and abuse of loyalty David murders the one who stands in his way so he can satiate his desire. Today Nathan holds up mirror for David to see, despite his actions the fire for justice still burns within David, yet he cannot see who he’s become, until it is told him.

By contrast the gospel trades with an economy of abundance. We’ve a context where many are gathered with little or nothing to eat. Existing resources are found. Though scant, they’re seen as sufficient. Thanks is given for the blessing of what there is, it’s divided and distributed for each to take and then to give one to another. The resources available prove more than enough when shared open-handedly. In scarcity we hold and hoard for ourselves out of fear of insufficiency. In abundance we give, we take and then give to others for we trust there’s more than enough.

Our faith tradition lineage extends from David through the offspring of the child born of David’s deceit and murder, of David robbing the life of the poor. Whichever way we wangle it the successful continuity of this divine-human story we tell depends on the inclusion of this story of scarcity of a murderer who abused his power and enacted injustice against the poor. We, quite rightly, might want to rail against such divinity. Yet maybe this is a more a human tale. What’s told is that it’s in brokenness, in the suffering we cause by deceit and wrongdoing, in the failing, falling short stumbling of being human that the seeds of future, life, hope are able to take root and grow. 

Does it make this anymore right or suggest wrongdoing and suffering are right or noble? You see here’s the perplexing conundrum – if you’re suffering it’s absolutely not right or noble – you just hurt. But is suffering actually the way things are? Our wrestle is we want life to not be like that. Just as we want God to be sweetness and light. For God, or faith to rescue us from the challenge and tedium of daily life, to make our world better, right, OK, restored, not like it is. But what if it’s not the way things are? Have you ever wondered what life would be like if we lived in a world without suffering, where we didn’t have to strive and struggle with the incomplete brokenness of life? How would we live, what would we do, what would impel us to the creative impulse for transformation and restoration? Our aspirations for, imaginings of utopian perfection do they arise from the myth of a once perfect Eden? Yet has life ever been this way? Is this to suggest suffering is necessary?

I don’t know. I just know it seems to be the way things are. I want to be one who seeks to relieve suffering, to bear hope. Maybe by holding open a space for another person to be, occupy, speak, they can enlarge and learn to inhabit their unique life. I can’t know how to respond to the need of another if I don’t first listen, ask, be guided by their wisdom. Too often I presume I’m the one with resource and knowledge. I’m immensely privileged and have responsibility to pass this on – but not on my own terms.

The City Mission provides such space as it responds to immediate need and seeks to restore dignity. This isn’t extraordinary it’s having the courage to be fully human. In 1920 Jasper and those with him began with nothing, more than once in its history the Mission has had to begin from nothing. At one time St Matthew’s provided space for it to begin again. In time with the enterprise and the will of the community the Mission grew again, for the needy do not go away. For forty years the Mission has been housed next to us, a catch all place with open doors. The vision for a purpose built facility providing intentional, proactive engagement imagined some years ago is about to be realised. The shape and way of doing this formed in conversation with those who serve and are served both here and from other places whose way of being and doing has proven its worth.

There’s an exponential growth in need in our community. The Mission still desires to respond. It’s learned what it does best and that in partnering with others who are also part of creating solutions they can together be of greater and more effective service. For the next 2-3 years the Mission is relocating while a new building is constructed on the current site. There’ll be some changes to the way things are done in response to the wisdom of those serving and being served.

On Social Services Sunday we pay attention to the suffering and need in our community. We pay attention to what we do in response. As people who stand in a particular faith lineage we gather around the figure of One crucified and say in brokenness the divine is revealed. This is uncomfortable of course. We live in presence of homeless, hungry, sick and broken people. In our discomfort we want to rush to help, cover over, fix and this is right for first we must respond to hunger, homelessness, sickness and suffering. But are we willing also to sit with brokenness and listen, hurt, sit with our squirming discomfort unsettling us. Remain present to the discomfort of pain we cannot fix. Just maybe hope for restoration will arise from the ashes of despair when we stay with one another and wait. Discover it’s our presence to one another that matters, that eases and restores, discover we’re each needed and necessary because of who we are. We are something to live for. In sitting present to suffering our grip on our ideals of perfection may loosen, our expectation of God only in the good, as if somehow absent in our broken world. Deliver us to see the living presence of God filtering through the cracks, the fractured lines of our world’s broken perfect imperfections. Deliver us to see how much we need one another, how much we have to give, how whole we become as we let ourselves be gift to one another. How many get fed and how many baskets of bread for living are left over.

July 22, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Feast of St Mary Magdalene     Song of Solomon 3:1-4     John 20:1-18

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Who was she this woman who appears fleetingly on the pages of our gospels and then pours out her love and grief at the tomb?

Mary she is named, Mary of Magdala.

There are lots of Marys in our Bible – so just to be clear – she is not Mary, the mother of Jesus; she is not Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.

There are also many unnamed women in the Bible with whom she has been conflated: she is not the unnamed woman, a “sinner” who washes Jesus” feet with her hair (Luke 7:36); nor is she the woman “caught in adultery” (John 8:3); and she is most definitely not a prostitute. 

At the beginning of the 7thcentury, Pope Gregory (590-604) merged Mary with these unnamed women and cemented the tradition of Mary Magdalene being a prostitute. For centuries following, medieval art and writing contrasted Mary the mother of Jesus, the unattainable virgin, with Mary the whore, forgiven but ever penitent and submissive. These were the options for women in the church – virgin nuns; or penitent sinners. [1]But this was not how it was for Mary of Magdala.

Mary is named Magdalene for the place she was from. A town on the shores of Lake Galilee, a Jewish town under Roman occupation. A place of trade and commerce. Mary is not named as wife of, daughter of, sister of, like most women in the Bible. She stands alone, in her own right. 

Mary is mentioned 14 times in the gospels, which is a lot for one person. 

Whenever there is a list of women given, her name appears first. 

So in Mark we hear 

“There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.” (Mk 15:40-41)

Luke says that Mary has been healed of “seven demons” and then proceeds to remove her name from the lists the other gospel writers use. The equivalent passage from Luke reads:

“But all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.” (Luke 23:49). 

 So I think Luke was not such a fan of Mary Magdalene. 

Every character in our gospel stories is at the mercy of the writer’s pen and subsequent editors and copyists. Come on Luke, Mary was not an “acquaintance” of Jesus.

Even with this editing she remains on the pages of the gospels as a leader of women; a woman of some means, supporting herself and the disciples; a woman of courage, remaining at the cross and returning to the tomb. 

It is in John’s account that we see even more – she is a disciple, a companion, and someone who loved Jesus deeply. Despite the storytelling of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and many others, I do not think Mary was married to Jesus. Some people have argued that she was, it is certainly possible, but I think that diminishes her stature as much as making her a prostitute did. She did not need to be married to Jesus to have a place in his life. She was a disciple and a leader of the disciples.

In the poignant and beautiful scene at the tomb we see Mary’s love for Jesus. She is weeping at the loss of his body. She wants to care for the body, anoint it, see it properly buried. She searches for him like the woman from the Song of Solomon searching for her lover. “I will seek him whom my soul loves.” (3:2) She then turns around and sees him but in her grief she does not recognize him until he says her name. 

Mary. 

(Makes us think of the good shepherd (John 10) who calls the sheep by name and they recognize his voice.)

Mary responds to Jesus with the word “Rabbouni” (like Rabbi) which means teacher.

If he is her teacher then she is his student, his disciple. She has sat at his feet for instruction and learning, like Mary of Bethany. Learning at the feet of a rabbi was reserved for men in Jesus’ day; Martha of Bethany rebukes her sister for it; Jesus sides with Mary. Mary Magdelene was a disciple, and seeing Jesus at the tomb, she wants to go back to the way things were. She reaches out to touch Jesus, to take his hands, to be reassured. But unlike Thomas who is instructed to touch Jesus, Jesus says do not try to hold onto me, I am no longer your teacher as I was. Now you have a task, a vocation; it is to go to the others and tell them what has happened. You will be the apostle to the apostles, you are the one whom I chose to send.

Extraordinary really, to send a woman. A woman’s testimony was not allowed in a court; a woman’s word was not to be trusted. Luke says as much in his version “Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” (Lk 24:10-11) She does though do as she is asked; she begins the work of the gospel, begins to share the good news “I have seen the Lord.”

We do not know what happens to Mary Magdalene after this; many legends have been woven, but the rest of the Bible remains silent – nothing in the Book of Acts, nothing in the letters of Paul. Plenty of other women are mentioned as leaders of the early church so women’s leadership continued.

There is another group of gospels though. Gospels that did not make the final cut when the Church Fathers came up with the definitive list of what was in and what was out of the New Testament. By the time Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria, published his list in 367, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas have either been lost or ruled out. [2]

These gospels and other writings discovered between 1896 (gospel of Mary) and 1945 (Nag Hammadi texts) all mention Mary Magdalene. Discovered hidden amongst other ancient texts these writings show Mary Magdalene continuing as a leader and teacher in the early church. Her leadership is debated and challenged – in the Gospel of Mary we read

“Peter responded “Did he (Jesus) then, speak with a woman in private without our knowing about it? Are we to turn around and listen to her? Did he choose her over us?” [3]

And her leadership is affirmed – in the Gospel of Philip we read 

“there were three women who always walked with the Lord: Mary his mother, and her sister and the Magdalene, the one who was called his companion.” [4]

The recent movie Mary Magdalene [5] paints a picture of Mary Magdalene consistent with the Gospels of Mary and Philip as well as the biblical texts. She is portrayed as the leader of the women followers of Jesus and the resurrection scene is straight out of the gospel of Mary. The reviewers didn’t like the movie much but I did! 

Mary Magdalene is a saint for our time. She is a woman who despite best efforts could not be silenced. Her devotion and love of Jesus and her vocation to speak out is not silenced. In our world where we see daily the truth twisting and turning in the wind Mary stands with those who wish to  speak out, those who will not be silenced. 

Refugees in camps, mothers separated from children; the women of the #metoo movement; people silenced by poverty in our city.

Mary says to them and to us “Do not weep and be distressed nor let your hearts be irresolute. For his grace will be with you all and will shelter you. Rather we should praise his greatness for he has prepared us and made us true Human beings.” [6]

As the poet Rilke says 

he wished to make of her the lover

who needs no more to lean on her beloved,

as, swept away by joy in such enormous

storms, she mounts even beyond his voice. [7]

[1] Marina Warner Alone of All Her Sex - The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary 1976 p228

[2] commonly called the “gnostic” gospels, or the Nag Hammadi Library The Woman Jesus Loved – Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi Library Antti Marjanen 1996

[3] 10:5-6 Gospel of Mary Karen King p 17 

[4] p150 The Woman Jesus Loved – Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi Library Antti Marjanen 1996

[5] Garth Davis 2018 

[6] Gospel of Mary 5:4-8 Karen King 

[7] Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, Second Part, 1908, translation, Ann Conrad Lammers, 1998 Searching for Mary Magdalene Jane Lahr 2006 p150

July 1, 2018

Cate Thorn

Ordinary 13     2 Corinthians 8:7-15     Mark 5:21-43

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

I’ve been reluctant to speak of or about Trump. In part because speaking of someone publicly enlarges their profile, for good or for bad it enlarges their presence in the public square. I’ve not wanted to participate in that. However there comes a time when keeping silent before someone who is a catalyst for bringing out the worst in others becomes a silence of complicity. 

It would now be easy enough to enter into a diatribe against Trump. His dangerous, boorish, narcissistic, nationalistic protectionism, his playing loose and easy with truth, morality, ethics, his admiration of tyrannical systems of absolute power and leadership, his withdrawal from participation in global systems providing mutual accountability. Even the seemingly ironclad US constitution with its instituted system of governance designed to protect against misuse and abuse of absolute power is looking like the thing that it is - a humanly generated document able to be humanly unstitched if you have a person in power willing to disregard it. It’d be easy to put all of this onto the persona of Trump, to make him scapegoat. I’ve wanted to do this, to lay blame at his feet. I’ve not wanted to face the wider implications of his success. 

The reality is Trump’s simply a person of no particular stature who’s been a successful lightning rod for a sufficient majority of the US. He didn't get there by himself and he isn't staying there by himself. Judging by his recent unbridled rhetoric in the opening of a hockey game in the US that drew chanting crowd support, even though Trump’s words were littered through with lies and twisting of the truth, he’s still supported. Trump’s a phenomenon who breathes life into something that already exists. Trump’s not creating a way of thinking, of self-understanding in the world. Trump’s allowing it voice, allowing it to become incarnate, to have life. As Adrienne Brown, a young African American woman writes things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. we must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil. [1]

That Trump’s succeeding is so astonishing we are and have been left speechless, powerless to know how to act to counter the audacity of such raw, unbridled, uneducated access to and use of enormous power on the world stage. The Trump phenomenon is perpetuated because there are enough people in the US who prefer to live in a world where it’s better to look out for yourself, your kin, those like you, before anyone else. To get what you want regardless of the consequence, to objectify and vilify difference, to have the right to do what you want when you want. To respond with anger in the face of shame, to assume a position of bullying dominance because you perceive you/your country as superior beyond compare, answerable and accountable to no one. Unless it’s of benefit for you to decide to and even then you reserve the right to change your mind and then lie about it. 

Another reason I've kept silent is from fear that by speaking out against the U.S. in general I tar with a brush the many and varied people who make up that nation. The many good people equally horrified by this phenomenon that are actively resisting or working to derail this behemoth. Increasingly strong words are being spoken against the Trump phenomenon within the U.S. and wider. Even so, how is it that the steamroller of this government can roll on without check, flattening decade long relational ties, flaunting international accountability, flexing trade negotiation muscle with impunity without regard for the potential to destabilise global markets? 

It exposes the enormous vulnerability of our global dependency on one another and of what happens when one member of our globally dependent family decides to not want to belong. Or rather believes their stature grants them the inalienable right to dictate the terms of belonging, unrealistic as that may be. How did it get this way? 

We are right to be afraid. For fear sharpens us, makes more acute our need to act to preserve life in face of ready and present danger. Do we feed our fear to the devouring furnace of Trump phenomenon or do we use it to fuel the fire of our resistance? If we choose to resist we must speak out loud our ‘No’ to such rhetoric, make public our dissent, use the history people of our generation remember, we who hold lived memory of the immoral reality of a totalitarian nation. For “no human entity,” Edwin Friedman writes, “is more invasive than the totalitarian nation, equally invasive of the lives of its citizens and the space of its neighbors. … There is … almost no example in history of a sensitive or understanding approach to an invasive nation that successfully staved off a war in the long run. This seems to have been as true for Rome and Carthage, Athens and Sparta, the Allied Powers and the Central Powers of World War I, or the Allied Powers and the Axis Powers of World War II. On the contrary, history is filled with examples of democratic countries trying unsuccessfully to stave off conflict with invasive nations by trying to appease them … the invasive forces get their way because the “peace-loving” lack the will to confront them.” [2]And at this moment our world is ringed with leaders of such nations. Trump is not alone, even as the U.S. is the last nation we thought to name alongside such companions.

It’s time to speak out loud our No and join ourselves with others speaking this way, also willing to act with their fear to resist. It’s time to change the rhetoric from hate to hospitality, from fear to faith/trust in the risk of otherness, from scarcity to abundance. Before our hearts turn to scorn before the fairy dust this sounds like in face of such real and present danger let me remind you. The terms of rhetoric that’d dismiss this are the ones presently determining what’s real, what truth is, what’s possible. We don’t have to accede to a world on such Trump phenomena terms. We do need to be clear eyed to see such rhetoric for what it is.

Let me tell you a story about a woman almost without hope, incurably ill rendered invisible, nameless and unseen. Unsuccessfully she’d tried every cure, received all wisdom from the healers of her world. Still she sought wholeness, held thread of hope of restoration. One day she heard tell of a person in whose presence God seemed made real. They were passing through her town. In hope she joined the crowds that came to see, as the person passed her she reached out and brushed their clothing. She knew herself made whole. The story could end there but the frame freezes, the person in whose presence God seems made real stops. Being made whole changed not only this woman. It was experienced by the God presence one who was changed also. The woman is asked to make herself known, become visible, speak her story. Her wholeness is made real, we discover, because she held a thread of hope for wholeness and for what could be made real by joining herself to the life of God present in the world she inhabited. She’s not the only one I heard of today who on that day held tight to thread of hope despite overwhelming derision and disbelief, held tight to what can be made real in the world when we humans have courage and humility to join ourselves to the life of God in the world.

Did it change the world, such small act, you might challenge? Let’s notice a couple of things here, wholeness and healing aren’t done to either of those in the stories today. Each one who seeks healing holds the thread of hope, steps toward, initiates relationship from which wholeness is restored. Wholeness is outcome of their decision to step into relationship. There’s no divine intervention that does something tothem. Holding thread of hope and stepping toward that which brings life in the midst of apparent hopelessness changes us. It changes the way we understand the world, how we live, what is possible. It reminds us also that much of what we experience in the world is result of the choices we make and have made – it’s not done to us. 

This is a story around which we gather. Our story is one among many. With urgency we must gather with others of many and different stories, and speak our ‘No’ for it may just be the preservation of our humanity, the future of this planet, the restoration to wholeness depends on it. We need one another for we are mutually vulnerable whether we like it or not. Let Adrienne Maree Brown have the last word: we must deepen our connectionsto each other. there is no way the majority of us will survive this time if we continue working in isolation or in competition. we must meet at the intersections and lovingly figure out how to be in right relationship. we need the largest, and most authentic, collaborative efforts for justice and liberation that have ever been witnessed on this planet. we must increase our collective tolerance for truth. we must take the risk of leading. … not only are we the ones we have been waiting for, but this is the exact moment we have been shaped for. … here we are, in this moment, the present moment, naked and messy and visible right down to our roots. … the veil never hid us from others, it only ever hid us from ourselves. now that more of us can see who we truly are, we must begin/continue to move towards who we truly want and need to be in order to sustain human life on this planet. liberation is no small task – it is appropriately daunting for miraculous beings. it is a gift, to be given such undeniable purpose, such immense odds. hold each other tight, and let’s do this work. [3]

[1] http://adriennemareebrown.net/2017/02/03/living-through-the-unveiling/comment-page-1/

[2] Friedman, Edwin H. A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, Revised Edition (Kindle Locations 2926-2938). Church Publishing Inc.. Kindle Edition.

[3] http://adriennemareebrown.net/2017/02/03/living-through-the-unveiling/comment-page-1/

June 24, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Ordinary 12     Job 38:1-11     Psalm 107     2 Corinthians 6:1-13     Mark 4:35-41

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

Jesus has suggested to the disciples that they travel across the Sea of Galilee to the other side by boat. Since a whole bunch of the disciples are fishermen that would have been easy enough. Jesus wants to go to the other side though – where the Gentiles live – foreigners, strangers; so as they leave the shore there is already a bit of anxiety rising. But they are leaving the crowds behind so at least that was good. And Jesus gets to have a rest and goes to sleep in the boat. But a storm whips up – apparently they are pretty unpredictable on the Sea of Galilee – which while it is actually a lake and not a sea, it is a pretty big lake so weather is a factor. The waves beat into the boat and the boat was being swamped. And Jesus is asleep.

Now Mark’s community when they hear this story will immediately think of the story of Jonah, from the Hebrew scriptures. God asked Jonah to go to Nineveh and Jonah did not wish to go and went in the opposite direction and hopped on a ship, which proceeded to sail into a huge storm, while Jonah was asleep. The captain comes to Jonah and wakes him up and says – pray to your god, none of our gods are answering, we will perish. And then Jonah confesses that he is fleeing his god and so no doubt the storm is punishment. So they throw Jonah overboard and the storm stops and Jonah is swallowed up by a whale. 

So when the disciples wake Jesus and say “Teacher do you not care that we are perishing”, we are supposed to think of Jonah. And the disciples seem more concerned about Jesus’ indifference to their fate than they do about the storm. In waking him up they have no expectation that he will calm the storm. They just think he could care a bit more about what is happening with the storm!

Do you not care that we are perishing? 

Job from our OT reading has a similar cry – do you not care? Do you not care, God, that I have been suffering and have been afflicted by multiple calamities? Job dares to demand from God an answer; and demands that God be present to answer for the suffering of Job (13:3) as in a court room trial. God’s response is the passage we heard today – who are you Job to question me God says – where were you when I was creating the world? Where were you when I was controlling the seas? 

Mark’s community will think of Job as well as Jonah when they hear today’s story. The disciples do not expect Jesus to do anything about the storm, because they still do not understand who he is, but Mark’s community do know. And so the echoes here of Jonah, Job, and also of the creation story, all fit together in their growing picture of who Jesus is.

But back in the story in real time if you like, Jesus rebukes the wind (rebuke, the same word used to speak to “demons” in Mark), and says to the sea – peace, be still. This does not reassure the disciples at all! They are even more afraid now – “who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” They know that God alone can do this – from the stories of Jonah and Job and others; God alone can control the forces of nature – so who is Jesus?

And Jesus says – puzzled – why are you afraid? Why are you afraid of the storm? Why are you even more afraid now that the storm is gone?

This dialogue – do you not care that we are perishing? and why are you afraid? is also our dialogue with God. Do you not care God, that children are in prison, that millions starve; that violence reigns; do you not care? we say. And God answers – why are you afraid? or maybe, why do you always start from a place of fear? Which doesn’t seem to be an answer.

When I was in London at the international network meeting this month our group was privileged to meet with the brand new Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally. A woman appointed to follow Bishop Richard Chartres who always refused to ordain women (God has a sense of humour!). And Bishop Sarah said to us “if we operate out of a place of fear, we miss the creativity of the Holy Spirit”. She said that in the context of a discussion about the ongoing Church of England debate on the ordination of women and how that affected her, but her words apply to any situation. “If we operate out of a place of fear, we miss the creativity of the Holy Spirit.”

Why are you afraid? What are we afraid of in our daily lives?

Failure?

Being vulnerable?

Losing face?

losing a loved one?

being judged?

not having enough money?

being found wanting?

losing our home?

another person – a bully at work or home?

getting sick? dying?

Fear is used in our world too often by world leaders – fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of the other; fear of those who live on the other side of the lake, or the border.

Jesus says, why are you afraid? Do not be dominated and driven by fear; cast out that fear and receive instead peace and stillness. The peace and stillness of the becalmed lake.

There is an amazing documentary on Netflix at the moment called “Attack on Paris” which recounts the terrible series of attacks including the Bataclan nightclub in November 2015. The documentary is a series of interviews with people recalling the night’s terrible events and their fear, their terror and trauma. 

But at the end of the series you are not left at all with a sense of fear but a sense of the amazing dignity and strength of the survivors. You witness their ability to process and reflect with some eloquence what happened to them that night. They are not afraid. They are strong. There is a stillness and a peace about them which is quite remarkable. In the midst of it all they certainly cried to God or to anyone – do you not care that we are perishing? But they are no longer afraid.

In our boats, and our storms, we cry out to God – do you not care that we are perishing? And Jesus says, be still, receive peace, do not be afraid.

June 10, 2018

Cate Thorn

Ordinary 10     2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1     Mark:20-35

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Jesus and his newly named disciples are inundated, not able to rest or eat properly. Jesus’ family think he’s lost the plot and is being overrun. Out of concern they want to rescue him, to take him away from those that crowd about and besiege him.

As if to confirm their concern we almost immediately hear that scholars of the religious establishment from Jerusalem, city where the religious elite reside, theologians and thinkers, those respected for deep learning and erudite scholarship turn up. They too are seeking to bring reason and reasonableness to the table. Rather than validate the draw and gathering power of this itinerant teacher whose power defies entrapment by convention, they generate a logic that fits their end. Such uncontrolled attracting power can reasonably be explained as that of Beelzebub, ruler of demons, source of chaos and disorder. By their very logic however Jesus’ unstitches such argument, the spirit of that which disrupts and destroys would not generate the gathering of people in hope, the restoration and coming to wholeness of people. Those who deny the source of that which brings life, especially such leaders who should know better, in so doing deny the source of their own life.

This Jesus we meet in Mark is disruptive and difficult, unstitching and redefining relationship boundaries. Boundaries necessary for establishing belonging and identity so you know who is who and who is who in relation to the other, they’re about safety, especially when negotiating difference. This is scary stuff – the rules that govern, define and structure family and religious alliances and lineages the very bedrock for self-understanding, for knowing who you are with respect to others is being excised, cut away, redefined and reformed. If there are no boundaries then upon what can you depend, how do you know who you are or where you stand? 

Jesus is not being reasonable. He’s portrayed as being passionately engaged without counting the cost. This sounds rather a lot like madness. The sort of thing I think I’d be worried about if it were my child involved. 

And yet, and yet we say there is something reasonable about this. As we listen to this account from Mark, influenced to hear it in a particular way because of our religious inclinations and this is a gospel after all, we don’t tend to side with his family or with the great teachers and thinkers of his religious lineage, we tend to side with Jesus and those who crowd around.

For those who want to join this Jesus tribe what shows that you belong is how you do the talk of the good news you proclaim. How you do what you say you are. What matters more than affirmation of creed or allegiance to religious tradition, doctrine or dogma, familial ties that constrain, even if from loving concern, is doing that which brings to life the abundant, transforming presence of God in real life in historical time. This isn’t about theory it’s about practice. Who’d like to leave now?

Choosing to stay, to understand yourself already a part of this movement in history of God’s transforming presence, the idea that what you do reveals what you believe is confronting. How do you know what you reveal by what you do? Do you examine what you do and then reflect on what this reveals about what you actually proclaim/believe? Do you proclaim/believe and then pay close attention to what you do to make sure it has integrity with what you proclaim/believe, mindfully and consciously pay attention to what you do? Then you’ve got to wonder, if you’re so busy self-examining you haven’t time to live, to do, this abandoned, dangerous, boundary busting carelessly extravagant way of Jesus.

I want to share with you my third hand retelling of a story, from a podcast a friend had been listening to, it comes out of Chicago. A young man in the States, in his 20’s, a Type One diabetic lapsed into a diabetic coma. He was a young man who lived in denial and defiance of his diabetes so ate all the types of foods he should not. After a period of time the medical facility where he was being kept alive suggested to his family that they should make the decision to turn off his life support for there was little hope. His close friends could not bear to participate in this so they all stayed away the week it was scheduled to take place. Instead they began to post messages, eulogies and memorials to their friend. 

In the meantime however the family had had a change of heart, they didn’t switch off the life support but did shift him to another facility. Within 3 days the young man regained consciousness. His brother actually posted this on his brother’s Facebook page but as it didn’t get any likes it disappeared in the out pouring of messages from friends. A week later the young man posted on Facebook that he was indeed alive. 

The young man had chance to read all the tributes to him, the person his friends described was not the person he saw himself as, understood himself to be. He’d no idea that he was this person others saw him as. It provided him with the impetus to change the way he lived, to want to live and be the person others recognised him as. It gave him back his life.

It’s hard to see ourselves as we are, to see the person our doing reveals. We need people and a process that enables us to see the outcome and consequence of our action and behaviour. For us to see in ways we’re willing to receive and able to learn from, so we can choose whether to modify, adapt and change, actually do differently so be the people we aspire to be and/or realise the person we are that may surprise and empower us. We need this especially if we’re to be people willing to break the bonds of relationship that ensnare and prevent the unconventional, justice bringing love insisting life of God into being. I guess we might understand a witnessing community of faith such as this one to be such context. 

Today we’re delighted to welcome Callum, a part of our community of faith in baptism. Callum’s journey these past few years has not been easy but with Callum’s willingness and quiet tenacity, the wrap around care and support of a community, a whanau of Mission family and friends Callum’s story is for us a story of life and hope. An inspirational story of transformation within the everyday, of how doing and being with another makes all the difference for life.

May 27, 2018

Susan Adams & John Salmon

Trinity Sunday

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Today is Trinity Sunday so the theme for the day is obvious: Trinity. Last year John had to deliver my sermon on Trinity for me so I’m having another go!

As we are going to continue our discussion of Mark’s gospel after church this morning I thought I would try to open up what the writer of the Gospel of Mark – who, although we don’t know who it was, we call Mark – says about this idea that we Anglicans love so much. This, 'one God in three forms' – notwithstanding that it is one of the church's significant heresies! So, back to Mark and what he says about he says about the concept of Trinity.

That will be difficult to identify, Susan, because Mark’s gospel – like the other Gospels – says nothing about Trinity, as the church speaks of it. In fact, the word Trinity does not appear anywhere in the Bible!

Yeah, yeah, I do know that John, but I think that perhaps we might find traces of ideas that could point toward Trinity in Mark’s Gospel – ideas about God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit or, as we are used to reframing it to avoid the sexist language: Creator, Redeemer, Life giver.

Yes, but those three in themselves do not make ‘Trinity’, in the way the Church formulated that idea. Trinity, as shaped by early Church Fathers, describes for us one God with three divine presentations to the world: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in a kind of hierarchy. It is difficult for us to get a handle on – and in fact the great Thomas Aquinas said the concept of Trinity was incomprehensible to the human mind and simply had to be accepted on faith!

So where Mark uses God he is invoking a divine being, ruler of all, not a composite being. And his use of 'Son of God' (which he uses a lot) simply indicates Jesus has a special relationship with God – but is not himself divine – is this right?

Yes. For Mark, Jesus is not a divine figure. He underlines this by his use of ‘Son of Man’, a term from the Book of Daniel, and used to indicate a human – an ordinary human representative of a group of humans. So Jesus is as human as are all humanity – all of us, children of human mothers and fathers. 

Ok. So as ‘Son’, Jesus (according to Mark) has a special relationship with God the divine one, but is himself an ordinary vulnerable representative of all humanity. 

And the Holy Spirit? We do know that all the Biblical language describing the Holy Spirit is feminine, and for many she has introduced a female dimension into the otherwise all masculine Trinity – or Godhead as some would say. We read in Mark that Jesus calls on God to send the Holy Spirit to help out.

Well, I’d say the Holy Spirit is the enlivening female dynamic in that otherwise male brotherhood! Not that I think those earnest early Church Fathers, meeting in convocation, would have thought about this in the early 300s when these doctrines were first being shaped.

Well, so what is so important about the doctrine of the Trinity if it is not Biblical? Why do we use the formulation at every opportunity; and the churches of the World Council of Churches insist that baptism must be in the ‘name of The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – no other words will do?

Trinity is a symbol, pointing to a core Christian tenet: God is one, yet with a threefold nature and activity. In the doctrine, we learn that while the Father and the Son share the same being, the Spirit is a subset of both. And all three are worshipped together. The Spirit has the role of inspiring the message of the prophets. An early expression of the doctrine is set out clearly in the Nicene Creed, first agreed in 325. The Apostles creed from a bit later in the same century does not mention a divine Trinity. Both however set out statements of Christian Faith acceptable in a diverse religious milieu.

It seems to me that ‘Trinity’ as a symbol of unity taking shape in the midst of great diversity, could be helpful. In a time and context of diverse religions and cultures it aimed not to offend the major players of the day: Jew, Greco-Roman or Christian. It opened space for them all to engage while at the same time, it seems to me, it aimed to stake out the particular Christian territory, pointing up the differences with the other religious groupings. 

It might even have been acceptable across the emergent different ways of being Christian in that time of competing expressions of Christianity. 

But it doesn’t tell us why the doctrine of the Trinity has survived through the centuries given it is so dense theologically in its doctrinal formulation. Unless, that is, it functions as a ‘marker’ of who is a 'proper Christian' and who is not – much as it was in its earliest setting in the time of Constantine.

Can you comment on that?

First let me note that this idea of “unity in diversity” was radical. It was probably quite shocking in times when religious wars and persecution were raging. 

Here is a doctrine of the Church that sought to hold together all the differences:

• The Jewish ‘God’,

• The emerging ‘Christian’ Jesus –Christ, as some (like Paul and his followers) were promoting,

• And the widespread Greek and Roman Spirits.

There were lots of gods and plenty of spirits around, with their adherent communities. The Christian Church was marking out its distinctiveness, and clarifying its message. The Emperor Constantine and the King Bishops wanted a coherent following that could provide unity and be called on to confront the ‘pagans'. So they basically called the various Christian groups together to get an agreement that would stop them arguing about 'true faith' and enable the ‘Christian’ armies to fight for the Empire. As a push to reach an agreement, Constantine offered tax incentives – a very contemporary thought! But a long time after Mark – 200 years or so!

Ok, let’s look at Mark: in the opening verses of chapter1 we have a human Jesus presenting himself to John, his cousin, for baptism; God ripping the barrier between heaven and earth apart and declaring a familial relationship with Jesus, ‘my son’ he calls him; and the spirit in the form of a dove descending. All the elements are there but that is not a doctrine, each of them acts according to their own nature, they do not make one God! Mark’s point seems to have been to present a man of power. His Gospel presents clearly a man of power who can heal and cast out unclean spirits because they recognise his power, who declares ‘all (who, like him), do the will of God are his brothers and sisters and mother’ (Mk 3:34-35) – all children of God. It seems to me that it is not what you believe but what you do that locates you in the family of God. After all, a doctrine is a formulation of the later church, shaped according to context and current issues, mostly around 300 years after Jesus' death. 

Nor, like this one – the doctrine of Trinity – are they necessarily set in stone for all time. Scholars tell us that this particular doctrine has never been fully explained or even agreed…you could say it's still in formulation!

Well that’s interesting. Are you saying what was once dismissed as a heresy, such as modalism, could be acceptable, even orthodox today?

Yes, it could. I think we can use ‘creator, redeemer, life giver’ if we must have three attributions to describe God, and we do use even ‘wisdom, love, and power or other ways of describing attributes of God – modes of being or acting.

And I suggest understanding Trinity as a symbol that holds in unity our great diversity – while it might still be a radical notion – is helpful to us in our current diverse world. 

But there is nothing magic in a ‘so called’ Trinitarian formula – beloved by Anglicans, though it might be. Finishing prayers with a 3-fold attribution does not add weight or more power to the prayer.

No, but perhaps it reminds us that God is with us, within and between us, acting through us in different ways to bring healing and peace. 

May 20, 2018

Cate Thorn

The Day of Pentecost     Acts 2:1-21    John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

I wonder if today, Pentecost Sunday might more aptly be named Hold onto Your Hat Sunday. I mentioned this idea at a staff meeting and was met with slightly puzzled stares, “You mean we should wear hat on that Sunday?” What I meant was, this is the Sunday we proclaim that the spirit of the Living God is let loose in the world so watch out, who knows what is going to happen, who knows what we might be filled with power to enact in the world, so hold onto your hat!!!

Pentecost is sometimes described as the birthday of the church, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the gathered early Jewish Jesus followers. I understand how such idea has come about, even as it could presume the Holy Spirit that breathes creation into life were somehow holding back until this special bunch of human beings came along. Tempt us to inward focused complacency, as one of the special ones included in the outpouring Spirit that’s sufficient, as if such outpouring is for the benefit of the church, it’s purpose for church’s perpetuation.

What we hear however is that the followers of Jesus, faithful Jews gathered in Jerusalem for a Jewish festival experience a spirit descending on them tongues as of fire divide and rest upon the head of each of them. Strong winds and speaking each in languages known to those who are present. This isn’t a secret for a special sect, this Spirit of the living God is comprehensibly familiar, able to be heard and understood no matter where those present are from or the language they speak.

As if those who’ve gathered in this one place from far flung places to which they’ll return are made able to speak of this in their first language, in words sign and symbol of their culture and knowing. As if the purpose of this spirit coming is not to dwell, stay in that place rejoicing at the experience, the special, chosen miracle of the moment but in order to propel them from that place, to act and take that which is revealed with them. For each to become a spirit indwelt person wherever they are whatever they do, whoever they happen to be.

It is from Acts we hear the account of Pentecost, a book that tells of the Acts of those who followed, what experiencing Jesus propelled them to do, the what next making real in act and deed.

Something appeared to those who witnessed the event that seemed like tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on the head of each one of those who would come to be leader of this Jesus way movement. Tongues of fire, yet fire that doesn’t consume, it reminded me of an image in another story from this faith narrative, one from way back when, a young man called Moses and an encounter in a wild and deserted place.

In course of a two day workshop I recently attended, on building power in community, led by Sister Maribeth Larkin, a member of the Roman Catholic Sisters of Social Service of Los Angeles, thetopic of leadership was raised. We were asked to note qualities of leadership we appreciated and admired which we then shared and Maribeth wrote them up. We were then asked whether we thought any qualities were missing. After a pause Sister Maribeth wrote three words on the board, ego, anger and humour. Three qualities of leadership she saw that were missing. Ego, not as in being egotistical but as in knowing deeply who you are and who you are in response to others and situations, being self-differentiated. Humour, well it’s really important not to take yourself too seriously.

Anger, now this was an interesting one. Sister Maribeth illustrated it this way, as best I can remember it. It seemed pertinent in light of this day of Holy Spirit breathing and tongues like fire. Moses, she said, is known as the most meek of God’s people. Meek, as understood through the nuance of Hebrew language lens. Not as we might imagine of submissive, self-deprecating, servitude but of obedient transparency to God. One, Maribeth proposed, who enacts anger, not uncontrolled anger of rage, but focused controlled anger that moves one to act for justice.

The story we have of Moses, Maribeth sketched, is that he’s a Hebrew, adopted and raised as an Egyptian prince under the protection of Pharoah’s daughter. As a young man he one day witnesses a fellow Hebrew countrymen being beaten by an Egyptian overlord. Enraged Moses checks to see no one’s looking, then murders the Egyptian and buries the body in the sand. As it turns out Moses was seen by a fellow Hebrew who rats on Moses. So what does Moses do? He flees, runs from the consequences of his act of rage against injustice. He comes to marry Jethro’s daughter, prince of Midian and settles into a quiet life. But one day, while wandering in the wilderness keeping his father-in-law’s flocks he’s confronted by a bush that burns yet isn’t consumed. Moses knows this as divine presence. Maribeth proposes, this flame that burns without consuming is the anger of God that burns against injustice. This anger against injustice Moses knew, for it had incited his younger self to react in rage and kill. However this anger of God he meets burns but doesn’t consume the one who enacts it. Unlike rage this powerful anger impels Moses to act with focus and clear headed intent for justice that transforms.

How many of you have experienced the kind of anger that flares in your belly when you witness injustice. Belly anger when confronted by injustice, at the diminishment of another, to situations and scenarios you know destroy people, relationships, creation, life itself. Belly anger that people, families in this country are hungry, no matter how hard they work not for lack of food but because rents are high and distribution is unjust. Belly anger that our planet’s in peril because of the rapacious greed of fossil fuel cartels, we who’d protest against an atomic bomb let every day the equivalent effect of 400 Hiroshima bombs be unleashed on our world by the burning of fossil fuels. Belly anger that decisions of self-interest made by the current leadership of the US is undoing decades of relational trust, teetering Europe and the Middle East on brink of critical conflict. Belly anger at small injustices you witness each or any day that thrust you toward, to name, to act to redress injustice.

Observing injustice first hand can enrage us, cause us to act impulsively. Rage consumes and is short lived, a passion that flares and saps. It can leave us wondering at our action, perhaps frightened by our capacity for harm. Questioning whether we’re much different from those we’ve reacted against? Afraid we’re complicit for we know we participate in and so perpetuate the systems that cause such injustices. Perhaps overwhelmed, helpless to know what to do, hopeless as to whether it will make any difference, it can be easier to flee. Evade the discomfort of such possibility and decide to just get on, to live a regular perhaps unremarkable but as expected life. Caught in disjunction, we discover we’re victims also oppressed by the injustice against which we rail.

Then one day, walking by the same injustice we’ve witnessed and numbed ourselves to walk by for too many days, something shifts. This injustice continues we realise because we don’t take our place against it. We don’t take a stand, don’t act my “No, this isn’t how things have to be.” This injustice continues because we don’t do anything, don’t choose to act differently. Injustice isn’t inevitable it isbecause we take our part in allowing it to be. The belly anger rises, we recognise, just as Moses did before the burning bush that was not consumed. But this time rather than reactive rage, this anger is steady and determined. It insists a world of just outcomes can be made real. It’s fearless in speaking truth to power – naming, uncovering, making plain the unjust share of resources, of decisions that for economic advantage, conceal truth of harm to people and place and planet. With focus and clear headed intent it impels us to act, not to impose our sense of what is just, but to free the bonds, the bindings of injustice, to allow the oppressed go free. There is potential here for us to be frightened by the potency of what might then be enacted. We run serious risk of having to change and that’s likely to be mighty inconvenient.

On Pentecost we say the Holy Spirit, flame, divided tongues as of fire that burned yet did not consume came to rest on the heads of those who were to be leaders in the early Jesus followers. It rather suggests the dangerous potential for the breaking out Spirit of the Living God mantle of leadership is placed upon you and I, people who linger in such dangerous, potential for empowering place like this. This Holy Spirit dancing like tongue of flame rests upon us, known to us – to impel us from this place. To impel us to act, to look and notice, to listen and do, for that belly filling anger to cause us together to do something about the state of the world. For human choices have got us to this out of balance, unjust state of being and human choices that can change it.

Pentecost, hold onto your hat Sunday, we’re the leaders who are to live this way in our world, to make real that justly sharing resources and power is sustainable, a viable and life flourishing way to live. That is the mandate given us by such out pouring Spirit. Look around, look who is with you in this, look who you can join yourself to, go from this place, step into your vocation and act for through who else is God’s justice to be made real?

I want to leave you with Annie Dillard’s words of warning to those of us who gather together and dare to invoke the living God:

“Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.” [1]

[1] Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Perennial Library/Harper & Row Publishers, 1988), 40-41.

May 13, 2018

Susan Adams

Easter 7     Mark 1:1-14

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I’m departing from the lectionary today in a way that is uncharacteristic for me as I undertook, many years ago, to preach the lections (the list of readings set for each day in the church year and for each festival) for the day as given and not to pick and choose so as to avoid awkward readings I didn’t like! But today I feel justified in departing from the list as without the Gospel of Mark, about which I want to speak and from which we heard the introductory verses read, it is unlikely you would be sitting there or I would be standing here. And what is more, even if we were, the shape of our liturgical year may well have been very different.

What am sharing this morning are some introductory comments about the gospel of Mark preliminary to the conversation that we will have after church – if you wish to stay and participate in delving a little deeper. Today will be the first of two such conversations John Salmon and I are looking forward to.

The gospel of Mark is foundational to our understanding of the story of our Christian faith. It was the first of the gospels to be written, about 40 years after Jesus death. It is unlikely to have been written by a man named Mark – like most of the other gospels no one knows who wrote it. We do know that the way in which it is written – that is its attempt to make a story out of the collection of remembered ‘sayings’ and aphorisms that were circulating and attributed to Jesus – set the model for the other three gospels. Mark, (let’s follow tradition and call him Mark), in many ways created the Jesus and his life that we are so familiar with. ‘Jesus’, I emphasise, not the post-crucifixion Christ that Paul and his earlier writings is more interested in.

There is some suggestion, however, that another purpose lies beneath the telling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth – the peasant artisan who became an itinerant preacher and leader of a revolutionary reform movement within Judaism – and that is the shaping of a lectionary of readings for festivals for Jesus-followers within the Jewish synagogues, and that parallels the Jewish festivals of the synagogue. We need to remember that in Mark's region, in the early stages in the development of what became ‘Christianity’, the followers were members of the local synagogue – they were adherents of Judaism.

It might be curious to note that, although the gospel of Mark is the gospel for the year, you have not heard much of it yet this year! If you think about that you might wonder why, then you might recall that there are no birth stories in Marks’s gospel, and that most of our favourite familiar parables are missing, nor are there any stories of post-Easter resurrection appearances – which is bit of problem for the church in this season of Easter!

There seem to be some obvious gaps in the story! It is very difficult for us to read this gospel without the additional infill stories provided by Matthew, Luke and John that have coloured the way we ‘remember’ the story. But, just because these three gospels were written later that does not make them more historically accurate, nor proof they had recourse to a greater number of reliable documents. Each of the four gospels were written in a different context and addressed a different set of contextual issues.

I’ve already noted that there is some exploration these days into the development of a parallel lectionary for Jesus followers to the synagogue lectionary and festival readings. Mark uses a structure that reflects the shape of the Jewish year, tracing

•  Jesus' baptism and stories that indicate the emergence and purpose of his ministry.

•  The teaching period in which he instructs his disciples on the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, using the healing stories to point towards social change and salvation.

•  The Passion, Passover and Crucifixion (which some would argue is the beginning).

More commonly it has been thought that as the second coming, that Jesus followers were expecting, had not happened it was important to organise the available oral tradition in a way that gave gravitas to the intentions of those who had committed themselves to the way of Jesus. The writer therefore makes extensive use of references to the First Testament especially Isaiah and Deuteronomy. These references would have been familiar to Jewish people and added credibility to Mark’s Jesus as he takes shape. Mark was writing for his Jewish community living under Roman occupation on the edge of Galilee or Southern Syria.

His style of writing would have been familiar to his hearers. By that I mean he was not recording the truth of history as we understand it today, verifiable by external documents or eyewitness reports, but rather pointing us to a deeper truth relating to the human condition and desires that is available to us through myth and story, through the actions of our heroes and the aspirations of our community. He was linking Jesus with the First Testament prophets with the stories about them and the hope and challenge they presented to his Jewish contemporaries. When we read Marks Gospel with our post-enlightenment eyes we need to take care that we do not find ourselves in the place of ‘category confusion’, in which we read metaphors as descriptions and myths as history. This is an action-packed, rapidly-moving story, aiming to help adherents, and others with an interest, to locate the significance of Jesus. To help them find the courage to live the ‘Jesus way’: the way leading to change in social ordering and in priorities and in religious practices. It invites committed discipleship from us all – not just those fishermen whom the story tells us were the first to be called.

To this end, Mark’s Gospel holds the key for us to unlock the complexities of our Christian faith.

It tells, in narrative form, the ‘story of Jesus’ without recourse to rearranging the matter of the universe, or the Christmas card and Christmas carol images we have pasted onto our eyeballs!

•  It re-presents the metaphors and myths that surround First Testament prophets and heroes, and attaches them to Jesus to underscore his place in Jewish expectation and to reassure followers

•  It calls for those followers to be courageous in the face of oppression and persecution and to hold fast to the vision of mutual care and concern among people; to hope and to courage

•  It uses everyday life-examples to ‘teach’ The Way, encouraging us to be ‘awake and aware’ of what is going on in our world, and to act toward each other with compassion, bringing healing and wellness.

•  It reminds us that in Jesus we can glimpse the God of justice beloved by Jews, as well as the love and concern the God as we Christians proclaim.

So, echoing Jesus' invitation according to Mark: "Repent", that is turn away from all that is unkind and divisive and have courage "and believe in the good news".

May 6, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Easter 6     Acts 10:44-48     Psalm 98     1 John 5:1-6     John 15:9-17

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If you keep my commandments you will abide in my love … so that your joy may be complete. 

Last week Bishop Ross talked about belonging, believing and behaving. 

A circular pattern of our Christian life – we belong to the faith community; we come to believe; and then we behave or act or live in a certain way. 

Keeping the commandments of Jesus is about the way we live, the way we act; the way we love our neighbour and our enemy. 

In our final session with the confirmation group this last Wednesday we talked about what now? 

You have been confirmed; what is next; confirmation is not the end point – like baptism it is the beginning point of a journey of discipleship. 

We talked about what God calls us to in our lives; what kind of ministries. When we hear the word ministry we usually think of ordained ministry – priests and deacons; or ministry within the church – like leading the prayers; or bringing food for the City Mission. 

Ministry is much wider than that – we can be disciples and ministers of God in our families in our workplaces, in our communities. 

So we talked about how God calls us to be leaders in our workplaces; leading by example; acting with compassion, honesty and care; looking for the best in others.

Being the best we can be, bringing all of ourselves to the task in hand – that is being a follower of Jesus; that is ministry. 

Different congregations often have clusters of different occupations. 

When I was vicar of St Luke’s in Wadestown in Wellington pretty much everyone was a public servant working in government departments. 

In Napier we seemed to have lots of teachers. 

St Matthew’s is more of a mix but one thing we have noticed is that we have lots of doctors and nurses in our congregation. 

Last year Cate and I invited the doctors to gather for a conversation – and simply asked the question – is there anything you would all like to talk about together as medical professionals and people of faith. 

How is it for you in your working lives?

The result of that conversation is today’s after church conversation on death and dying and the End of Life Bill which is before Parliament. 

Today’s conversation is an opening conversation and if there is interest we will carry on with more conversation or maybe host a public forum for the community. 

Like all of us our doctors have a diversity of opinion on end of life options and are keen to have a place to explore those views and listen to each other.

For Cate and I, we think it is really important that before we form an opinion on the End of Life Bill as individuals, that we first face the death and dying conversation. 

Facing the idea of death for ourselves and our loved ones is a hard thing to do; we don’t like to talk about death; we don’t want to seem morbid; we want to keep to happy topics. 

But being able to think about what our wishes might be and share that with our loved ones can be a positive thing to do. 

There is a prayer at the end of the funeral service which says “Strengthen faith and hope in us so that we in turn may not be afraid to die”. 

As followers of Jesus, as people of the resurrection, we can face death because Jesus has been there before us.

Stephen always says if you get a bunch of clergy together you don’t have to wait long before we are telling funeral stories; some funny, some not so funny. So maybe we are used to these conversations but we all still struggle as well within our own families and for ourselves. 

We are no different in that regard. 

We each bring attitudes and beliefs about death from our families; from our cultural backgrounds. 

So today for those who are interested we will begin a conversation with each other and listen to some of our fellow parishioners whose calling it is to assist people in health and in illness.

Then if people wish we will use the skills of others – lawyers, ethicists, nurses, people in the disabled community, friends, as we think about death and dying and the End of Life bill. 

There is also a wealth of information written which we can share and read. 

In these conversations and in other life conversations we might have together we hold on to the thoughts at the heart of today’s gospel reading – “the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” 

One writer says this love is “an excellence of character that God has by nature and in which we participate by grace. 

Such love is primarily interested in the good of the other person, rather than one’s own.” [1]

God has this love by nature, is this love, and we participate in it by grace. 

And in this love we are called to reach out and become community – friends, as Jesus puts it. 

So as we cycle through the life pattern of belonging, believing and behaving and back again, we give thanks for that grace, that love that we find here and that we then take with us into our daily lives, our ministries, our callings. 

And whether our conversations are about tough things like death, or happier things we know that God’s intention for us always is to abide in God’s love and for our joy to be complete. 

[1] David Cunningham p 498 Feasting on the Word Year B Vol 2

April 29, 2018

Bishop Ross Bay

Confirmation Service / Easter 5

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April 22, 2018

Wilf Holt

Easter 4

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April 15, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Easter 3     Acts 3:12-19    Psalm 4     1 John 3:1-7     Luke 24:36-48

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In her Easter sermon Cate said a striking thing: “At Christmas we celebrate God with us; at Easter we sacrifice that God. We didn’t intend this. We only wanted to kill the God who was not of our preferring. When we realise what we have done we find we are left with nothing, our hands are empty, our hearts torn open.” [1]

“We only wanted to kill the God who was not of our preferring – we put to death God who threatens our accustomed way of living and being.” [2]

This is what Peter is saying in his sermon recorded for us in the Book of Acts. The setting is Jerusalem, not long after Pentecost, so a couple of months after the Good Friday/ Easter events. Peter and John were heading for the Temple to pray when a man “lame from birth” asks for help and they heal him in the name of Jesus. 

Understandably the crowds gather and Peter begins to preach. Why are you astonished we have healed a man he asks – you killed Jesus but he has been raised, and we follow the risen one. Then Peter accuses the crowds saying “you rejected (or denied) the Holy and Righteous One” (3:14).

Peter who himself only two months before had denied he knew Jesus when challenged on Maundy Thursday; the same word for deny or reject is used here. [3]

Peter knows what it is to deny Jesus, and now encourages his listeners to repent of their denial of him and to become followers.

Remember that the Book Acts is written by the same person who wrote the gospel of Luke. We don’t really know his name but let’s call him Luke to keep things simple. Luke it seems wants to ask the same question Cate offered – what have we done?

In both the gospel and in Acts Luke wants to reassure people – even though we did this terrible thing crucifying Jesus it will be alright because “it is written that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day.” (24:46)

Now Luke is not making a direct quote – that phrase is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament; what he is meaning is that the whole of scripture – from Moses, through the prophets, and the psalms – describes a God who is to be found in the actions and history of the world, working for love and the wholeness of creation. [4]

So the life of Jesus, and his death and resurrection, are consistent with the nature of God and God’s intentions for the world.

Rather than a specific prediction or proof text we can point to, Luke is talking about the sweep of history with God, “salvation history” if you like. And yes this God, this Jesus does threaten our accustomed way of living and being.

So Peter and Luke say – you can walk away – or you can repent and then be a witness to these things.

And so the first followers began to be witnesses and to build their communities – 3000 and 5000 were added to their numbers after each of Peter’s sermons, according to Acts.

They do not at first have any intention of building a separate Christian community; they worship and preach at the Temple much to the consternation of the Temple leaders who try to silence them. They do though begin to live in community selling their possessions and caring for those in need (Acts 4:32). The Christian community and Christian worship will emerge from there.

They do their best to not make God in their own image or to keep on putting to death the God who threatens their accustomed way of living and being. They try to change, to find a new way. They struggle of course, they debate who is in and who is out – Jew and Gentile, women and men, poor and rich.

As they break bread together and the eucharist emerges as their focal point they continue to be witnesses to God’s love for the world.

During Lent we focussed on our worship together, and how our worship creates our identity as a community – it is the same for us as it was for the first Christians 2000 years ago. Our worship forms us and gives us our identity – we used the tool of our chasuble/ garment which we made together from the fabric symbolising our gifts. It reminds us that we can create something beautiful and lasting together which we cannot do alone.

This morning we commission our Vestry members – Vestry are the leaders of our community – like a Board of directors; together with the clergy they have the responsibility of leading our community – everything from worship to the buildings to the finances to our outreach. We elected them at our AGM in March and today is the first opportunity we have to pray with them and ask them to lead us for the next year.In doing that we also need to give them the tools to do their job – hence we have given you today the Generous Spirit brochure in order to prompt you to think about your financial giving to the parish. If we are to be a community with a strong identity that works and worships together we also need to think about our financial support of thecommunity.

There is no point commissioning our Vestry today and saying – go lead us

– if we don’t give them the tools to achieve things on our behalf. We all have different incomes and situations so it is up to each of us to examine what we can offer and do. The important thing is that we do think about it and commit so we are playing our part in our community.

Today we have the grand sweep of “salvation history” writ large for us by Luke and Peter, yet in the midst of the big picture they paint we also see the life of their community, going to worship, wrestling with their questions, working out how they will care for each other.

It is the same for us – listening to scripture, singing our hymns, praying our ancient prayers, connecting to our tradition and our past; and then looking ahead to how and what we want to be as individual followers of Jesus and as a community of Christ.

In two weeks time we will be having a service of confirmation with our bishop. Confirmation is when an individual wants to make a public affirmation of their faith, confirming for themselves the promises made in baptism. Our candidates have been working hard since January, meeting as a group, meeting with their sponsors, reading, praying. We are supporting them with our prayers and in particular with the parish retreat day on Saturday 28 April. I would encourage you to think about attending.

In this way as we continue to be witnesses, continue to build our community, continue to seek to be followers of Jesus; and so open ourselves up to God who creates, redeems and loves us; God incarnate at Christmas and God rising at Easter.

Thanks be to God.

[1] Easter Day sermon 1 April 2018 

[2] ibid 

[3] arneomai Luke 22:34 and 57 

[4] Barbara Essex p427 Feasting on the Word Year B Vol 2

April 1, 2018

Cate Thorn

Easter Day     Acts 10:34-43     Mark 16:1-8

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Today is Easter Day … it feels different doesn’t it? Maundy Thursday we stripped the church of decoration, of sign and symbol of Christ, God present with us. Told the story of betrayal, light fading from the world, leaving us in darkness … stripped of decoration and light the church somehow seemed emptied, more a building, less a place that gathered and held us.

Good Friday we walked that barren path to the foot of the cross where in silent dread we witness and cannot change that we put God, intimately known to us, to death. In bleak darkness we left that place, knowing the world is changed and that we had part in such change.

Then this new day, Easter Day dawns, and something’s different, there’s a joyfulness, a lightness, as if a burden’s lifted. I don’t quite know how, but there’s something about Easter Day that feels like a change for the better, as if despite our actions or inactions we’ve been relieved of their consequence.

One thing we’re not relieved of, though, is the strangeness and unbelievability of the Easter story of death and resurrection that’s core to the faith we profess. Once, in conversation with our son Nathanael about the Easter story he was musing, “Imagine if you found Jesus’ fossilized bones … but how could you prove they were his because they didn’t have DNA banks to hold records so you couldn’t prove it.” “Yeah,” I responded, but it’s a bit more complicated than that because the story says that the disciples never found Jesus’ body when went to the tomb.” “What? Where did it go?” I replied “The way the story’s told Jesus came back to life, his body wasn’t found because he came back to life, we’re able to continue to meet and know Jesus because in some way he continues to be alive.” “Nah, nah, that’s just weird, it doesn’t make any sense, that’s just crazy, who could take that seriously?” Mmmm, interesting, eh?

I remember talking to a colleague about Easter sermons and mentioned I thought to include this conversation in a sermon. She looked at me aghast and said “But then what? Where do you go from there?” I didn’t have a flash answer, it just seemed to me important to let it be said that for many people the Easter event – that humans could and did put Jesus (God in human form) to death and that his closest followers recognised Jesus in human form, as if he’d come back to life after death, this Easter story core to the Christian faith – is pretty unbelievable, it doesn’t make credible sense.

We know the story well enough, the enthusiasm with which we joined the jostling halleluia-ing crowds of Palm Sunday, tempered with sadness for we know what’s to unfold. Holy Week as we tell the story of Jesus’ last supper, his betrayal, Gethsemane agony, trial, as we stumble with Jesus to place of his crucifixion, witness his death, we do so sombrely and quietly. We don’t think to shout out in protest, we don’t say – it shouldn’t happen this way, we’ll not agree, we’ll support this Jesus, we’ll rally and be as this Jesus is, we’ll defy the power systems of our day. This Easter event doesn’t seem to stimulate in us a spirit of dissension against the injustice of the systems in our day. Rather we focus on Jesus the exemplar. Maybe because we’ve joined ourselves to a strand of tradition that says and sees there’s more in this than just one act, and just one man in time. We’ve come to proclaim divine presence in Jesus whose acts defy the human powers at work in our world. Perhaps we trust it to divine power to overcome injustice. 

Or might it be that our still, witnessing silence expresses our willingness to be aligned with such divine power yet our fearful reluctance to act. For laid bare before us is the crucifying reality of what can happen if we do. We find we’re rather too much like the disciples who desert Jesus at his arrest and flee. Or the women confronted by figure in white and empty tomb who “made their way out and fled … bewildered and trembling; … they said nothing to anyone, because they were so afraid.”

This is a big drama writ large to which we attach significance beyond that which takes place. We may feel overwhelmed by what’s revealed of our potential, of what’s asked of us. Yet, as I joined in the strange and unbelievable story of Easter, it struck me. This isn’t story of an historical event back in time apart from me before which I’m helpless. It’s a story I know only too well. My stubborn reluctance to comprehend or embrace the unknown, my fearful fleeing from vulnerability and obstinate insistence on remaining unchanged, each time I choose this way I deny, betray, reject, put the life of God to death, God who knows intimately the travail of human life and desires for me to breathe deeply the fullness of life. I can learn to choose differently.

It’s curious that just three months ago we celebrated the season of Christmas. We prepared ourselves to receive and welcome the Christ child. Born in our midst, God with us, made incarnate in human form. God in form we identify with, God made of flesh and blood, like us, vulnerable to all that is life in this world. We rejoiced to know God walks with us. God choosing to be in the world in this way reveals that God is present in the world in tangible, relatable, knowable ways. Which is great, but tempting for us to proceed to make God in our own image. Replete with ideals and expectations of God, complete with conditions and regulations to define who’s acceptable and can gain access.

Easter’s Passion story reveals how inadequately God as we imagined, the Messiah of our hopes and expectations comes up to the mark. In the story of this season and in our liturgy we put to death God who threatens our accustomed way of living and being. And we see we have a part in it. With altars stripped on Maundy Thursday, kneeling before Jesus hanging crucified on Good Friday, emptiness of Holy Saturday, we feel the stark absence of God. Sure, intellectually we can distance ourselves see it as simply an enactment of ritual. But, you know, it gets under our skin, strikes at our heart, bereft, we experience what absence of God might be like.

At Christmas we create God with us, at Easter we sacrifice that God. We didn’t intend this. We only wanted to kill the God who was not of our preferring. When we realise what we have done we find we are left with nothing, our hands are empty, our hearts torn open. 

Then quietly as the light of Easter dawn creeps across the landscape of our lives we feel small flicker of hope flare in our torn open hearts. There’s something about this flicker that’s familiar. We know it and yet, like those first disciples, we don’t quite recognise it. This life of God arising – it is new to us.

Confused and bewildered, we’re still trying to make sense of this, to understand quite what has and is taking place. For all our knowledge we cannot crack the paradox, just can’t make this killing of God and resurrection make sense. That we cannot do so seems to make the story unbelievable, to unstitch our Christian faith. That is, if this faith thing depends on the acquisition of knowledge, knowledge gained as result of study and learning. What if faith is more about wisdom upwelling from engaged experience, wisdom that changes and transforms us from within, that makes us different than we were, we know not quite how? We can talk and talk, persuade and cajole, read and become most erudite but it will not transform our heart or the heart of another. A paradox is inherently unsolvable through logic, but if we sit with it, grant it place, take it seriously in its own right, we might just find we do gain some understanding that draws us more deeply into truth, into what is real. 

As the light of Easter dawn creeps across the landscape of our lives we feel small flicker of hope flare in our torn open heart. It’s somehow familiar, while yet to be known. This life of God arising is new to us. We need to learn the shape it now takes. Jesus asks we not hold onto him, that we free him from our bondage to that which has died. Free ourselves to discover God who is still with us yet in ways we’re still to know. That flicker of hope catches and we find our hearts are burning within us. With great joy we rush to share our experience, our hope filled meeting again and together our voices rise in thanksgiving, Christ is risen we say. He is risen indeed!

March 30, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Good Friday     Mark 15

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The Mark version of the crucifixion story is stark. 

It is the first version to be recorded. 

It has Mark’s signature style of simplicity and focus. 

No words wasted. 

No analysis and theologizing.

Yet the clash of worlds and power is there for all to see.

On one side human power – represented by the palace, the governor’s headquarters; the whole cohort of soldiers; the purple cloak which is a sign of royalty, and the crown of thorns; Jesus is labelled King of the Jews, or King of the Judeans (which has a more political ring to it) and the soldiers pay homage to him. Mark’s community are to be in no doubt that this was a political execution. Jesus is crucified between two bandits, not “robbers” as is sometimes translated. These are not thieves who break into your house; these are bandits – armed rebels who steal and plunder from those in power. [1]  This is the same word Jesus uses when he throws the moneychangers out of the Temple – “you have made it into a den of robbers”; you are just like the bandits roaming our roads. (Mark 11:17).

Then there is religious power – those who pass by mock him and remind him that he said he would destroy the temple and build it in three days; 

the chief priests have the upper hand now. They will protect their Temple. 

After Jesus dies the curtain of the Temple is torn in two. This was the curtain that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Temple. 

Only the high priest was allowed to go behind the curtain which was where the ark of the covenant was kept – God himself was thought to dwell there. The curtain is torn from top to bottom – not by human hands.

And the account finishes with Joseph of Arimathea going to Pilate to ask for the body – just to remind us about Pilate again – and political power.

Political and religious power triumph.

Rowan Williams says “Good Friday presents us with a stark duality – human power revealed as hostile to meaning and hope, and divine meaning and hope exposed as completely vulnerable to human power.” [2]

It seems human power has triumphed.

In the middle of Mark’s account the political language pauses and we hear that complete and utter vulnerability: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark has darkness cover the land to emphasise this darkest of hours. There is nothing left. The politics don’t matter.

The religious debates don’t matter. All is lost.

Jesus is alone and forsaken.

Like a mother holding her dying child; like a refugee in Syria with no food, a father who cannot feed his children; like a child cowering in a school cupboard as another shooter is on the rampage in the US.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”

“divine meaning and hope exposed as completely vulnerable to human power.” [3]

Gospel writers Matthew and Mark include the words “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me”; Luke and John do not – edited out maybe because they are too stark; too alone. 

And yet I think these words are the heart of today, Good Friday.

They tell us that God does not flinch from pain, our pain, it is real, it is not pretend.

One of the early heresies of the church was that Jesus did not really die – he somehow slipped away. Mark has Pilate double check with the centurion that Jesus is really dead – yes he is dead. 

“divine meaning and hope exposed as completely vulnerable to human power.” [4]

Why we ask? What was the reason for all of this? Some grand plan?

Remember the gospel writers are writing after the fact. 

They know about the resurrection, and they aren’t writing history as we would understand it, so we need to be careful of the words of “prediction” that are put in Jesus mouth –  eg Mark 10:32 “they will mock him and spit upon him and kill him and in three days he will rise again”.

Jesus in the moment on Good Friday is dying and he does feel completely forsaken. This is not pretend suffering.  

Rowan Williams says all we can then do is to keep silent before the cross. 

He says all there is “is our own stillness, learning to look death in the face” [5].

We look at death, and because we find God there then we are not afraid.

It is not that we do not suffer, we do.

It is not that we do not feel our pain and the pain of others, we do.

But we are not afraid.

Rowan Williams again – the cross “is the darkness in which God is allowed to be God, in which the world descending into inner chaos, returns to the very moment of creation, when God speaks into the darkness. 

Our silence, our acceptance of the death of creation in the death of Jesus, makes room for the word that recreates the broken world.” [6]

[1]Greek word is lestes/ lestai “Bandit was the generic term for any rebel or insurrectionist who employed armed violence against Rome or the Jewish collaborators.” Reza Aslan Zealot p18

[2]Rowan Williams “The Shadow of the Crucifix” in Darkness Yielding ed Jim Cotter et al 

[3]op cit 

[4]op cit 

[5]op cit

[6]op cit

March 18, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Lent 5     Jeremiah 31:31-34     Psalm 51     Hebrews 5:5-10     John 12:20-33

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“We wish to see Jesus”.

They were a group of Greeks, foreigners; they come to Philip, one of the disciples and say “we wish to see Jesus”. Philip is not sure what to do – Greeks?! really? are we going to waste the Master’s time with more foreigners? So he goes to consult Andrew and together they go to ask Jesus. Safety in numbers.

So if a foreign tourist came up to you as you were walking into the church and said “we wish to see Jesus” what would you say? You might be a bit perplexed but you would probably invite them into church?

But if they came up to you on the street away from here, or at your workplace, or across your neighbour’s fence and said “we wish to see Jesus”; first of all you might think they were a little crazy. But if they insisted – They wish to see, to know, to experience Jesus. [1]

You might say

• when I look after my grandchildren and see their delight in playing on the beach I know the joy of Jesus

• when I sit with someone as a volunteer at the hospice I know the courage of Jesus

• when I serve one of the street people who come to the City Mission for dinner I experience Jesus in the person I am serving

• when I rage in grief at the loss of someone who died too young. I hear the words of Jesus – my God why have you forsaken me

• when I have achieved something at work or school that was complicated, and took all my focus, I hear the parables of Jesus from everyday work situations – the farmer, the vinegrower, the merchant, the woman at the well

• and you might say – I wish to see Jesus too, who seems elusive often, and other times so present. And so I come to worship, to be in community, and to seek nourishment, to know him.

You might talk about the conversations we have had this Lent about worship – and how our worship forms our identity, like a garment we might wear. How in worship we engage all of our senses as well as our mind. How we need each other to discover who Jesus is.

We wish to see Jesus – what would you say?

What is it about our life and experience of faith which draws us here; what is it that we value in our own faith and so we want to share with that faith others. I know in our very secular A/NZ context we find it hard to talk openly about our faith. Faith is ridiculed and belittled all the time in the media and in the public domain. We feel awkward. But new people show up here every Sunday and in my office during the week looking for something, looking for Jesus.

This year we have 2 people being baptised on Holy Saturday and 5 being confirmed at the end of April. They have bravely said – we wish to see Jesus. We wish to stand up and be counted; we wish to claim our faith in Jesus and to seek the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We have been doing some work together to prepare and the most powerful part of our group discussions is not the Bible study or the topics we discuss, but each person’s personal story which we are sharing one person a week. Precious stories of family, life and faith. Stories where we hear the call of God on our lives.

Cate told us the story last week of a young girl asking about the meaning of the eucharist. And Cate said it was a really hard question to answer when someone has no idea of the story of Jesus or the biblical context.

And when also she did not know the girl’s story. Our faith becomes real within the story and tradition passed to us and within the context and story of our own lives. That is what “incarnation” is all about. Jesus incarnate – means Jesus made flesh, a human being; and Jesus here amongst us in our lives too. In our language, in this place, in this time.

Cate said of the eucharist: Around this table we re-enact, make real in our time that which Jesus did with his disciples.  … There is something curiously more to this than simply action and word. When we engage in this drama we do so together, it is not an individual enterprise, and we engage not just with our intellect. We gather around this table to hear a story of identity revealed in the person of Jesus and we choose whether to take this into ourselves, and in doing so we are willing to be changed. 

Then she asked the question: What do we know of this Jesus of whom we speak, what might be the outworking of ingesting such identity ? what might be required of us? [2]

Going back to the original story with the Greeks and Philip and Andrew buddying up for support; what answer does Jesus give?  Well we don’t know if the Greeks actually ever got to see Jesus. But Jesus says to Philip and Andrew – “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Which doesn’t really seem to be an answer to the request “we wish to see Jesus”. “those who lose their life will save it.” That’s not an answer either.

Or is it. Jesus’ answers are about himself and those who will follow.

Jesus will lose his life and find it; in baptism we are called to “die to our sins” and to be born anew; over and over again each year in our liturgical cycle at the beginning of Lent we are marked with ash; then we walk this road to the cross and come through to the other side; like a grain that dies in order to bear fruit.

So if we want to answer the question again, modelling ourselves on Jesus, we might say

• I see Jesus best when I have decluttered my life of too many possessions

• when I give a decent donation to the cyclone Gita appeal even when I think I really can’t afford it; and cut back on dinners out instead

• when I sacrifice some time to help a neighbour who most of the time I find really annoying

• when I lose myself in the music on a Sunday morning

Different ways of the grain seed dying to bear fruit. Different ways in which we allow ourselves to see Jesus.

Next Sunday we begin the walk of Holy Week which moves from Palm Sunday through Good Friday to Easter. I would encourage you not to jump from Palm Sunday to Easter Day without at least attending on Good Friday; seeing Jesus and knowing Jesus is only possible via the way of the cross, the way of suffering. None of it makes sense otherwise. Jesus incarnate means Jesus present in all of life the bad and the good, the suffering and the joy. The labyrinth walk that we will have installed in Holy Week also helps us slow down and ponder the journey of Jesus and the journey of our lives. It helps us see Jesus.

The prophet Jeremiah promised long ago that we would all know God – he said God’s law will be written in our hearts. Our worship together in Lent and Holy Week writes the story of Jesus into our hearts. All we need to do is say – we wish to see Jesus.

[1] The word the Greeks use is “eido” which means to see, and to know, and to experience.

[2] Sermon 11 March 2018 

March 11, 2018

Cate Thorn

Lent 4     Ephesians 2:1-10     John 3:14-21

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

This fourth Sunday in our Lenten consideration of liturgy and identity, we are to consider the words, the enacting of our eucharist, the last supper of Jesus with his disciples, bread and wine, sharing and being sent. Some years ago when I was in parish ministry I was asked whether I would host a parishioner’s Girl Guides troop and talk to them about the church, religious symbolism and so forth, as a part of one of their badges. That sounds like fun, I thought to myself, a group of youngsters, a bit of an exploration of the church, talk about the things I thought I knew. Things began well enough once the shock that I was female and not grey haired had worn off. Then we went up to the altar area, I showed them a few of the vestments, had to negotiate a curly one about how I could be priest when one young lady told me her Catholic priest had told her the bible said women couldn’t be, and then there was the young lady, I’d guess 12-13 year old, sitting a little way back, separate from the bright eyed younger ones. With that wonderful dark scowl only girls of that age can perfect. This delightful crossed arm sceptic spoke up, “What is it with the bread and wine, the body and blood stuff, what’s so important about it? I mean it seems like it’s the main thing, the most important thing, how can eating the body and drinking the blood of a dead person be so important, it’s like celebrating cannibalism, it’s gross.”

Yay, I thought weakly to myself, I love questions, what on earth could I say? How could I translate, what would I translate, had I considered it deeply enough so I knew myself in that embedded way you need to so you can make simple sense of it? Did I really know quite why it was so important? Where do you begin when a young person says something like this, especially when you’re trying to give some context of religion and the importance of religion or its significance? I honestly am not sure what I said but I’m pretty sure it was a stumbling half complete response. You know it’s kind of plagued me. I’m still not sure what to say. Partly because I suspect she had a vested interest in disruption rather than enquiry, partly because it’s really hard to explain something, for it to make any sense without a shared context.

From her perspective how is what I’m saying important, how is it credible unless we have a shared context to speak within, an agreed story from which we make meaning or seek understanding? For this ritual we enact stands in the context of and continuity with a specific narrative. One that says God’s threaded through time, is agent in history in a particular way. A narrative that interprets the world and history and what has and is taking place in a way that makes meaning for those who share it. Not just know and tell the narrative but also assent that what it speaks of is real. Without such context, story, backdrop then the kind of ritual we’re engaged with is challenging, potentially meaningless, full of wrong meaning, well, meaning which isn’t helpful.

So where do you begin? Without context, without a longer story, a deeper narrative a greater understanding of what we do and why, I think words will be just that. Of course a good story well told is always engaging but we claim this story is different, this story is about a different way of living and being, this is a story, as John puts it in today’s gospel of light in darkness that we can choose for. We can with words teach the story so it can become known but how have we ingested it? How do we embody and live, communicate the story that we have taken into ourselves, live as if it is true?

On this fourth Sunday in Lent in our exploration of liturgy expressing identity we’ve arrived at the sharing of the Peace - in times gone by the kiss of peace, but we may want to pass on that. It’s time to make up, to greet one another as people reconciled, a community of common identity gathered as one. We turn our focus to the altar, the open table of God’s hospitality. We bring and offer ourselves, we bring and offer gifts of bread and wine, a share of our abundant resource for our Mission neighbours. The table is laid for our shared meal, bread and wine are placed upon the altar and all is made ready. We gather and hear spoken our story, the story of God’s blessing, provision and presence throughout history and we give thanks and praise. We hear told the story of Jesus’ last supper with his gathered friends, we give thanks and praise for what has been, what is now and for the hope and promise of what is yet to come. We pray God’s blessing upon us and upon the offerings we bring as we remember, re-enact, we name and know God present with us in this moment. We break bread and pour wine, share the food and drink of divine sustenance with all who find place and welcome at this table.

Around this table we re-enact, make real in our time that which Jesus did with his disciples. It is this and more though. We say we take into ourselves in the bread and wine the body and blood, the life of this God made flesh in time human being. We who call ourselves the body of Christ in the world do this. There is something curiously more to this than simply action and word. When we engage in this drama we do so together, it is not an individual enterprise, we engage not just with our intellect, not to bear witness to magical things happening to the bread and wine over there on the altar. We gather around this table to hear a story of identity revealed in the person of Jesus and we choose whether to take this into ourselves, as if in doing so we are willing to be changed, to be and live this way. What do we know of this Jesus of whom we speak, what might be the outworking of ingesting such identity require of us?

Roger Haight boldly proposes, ”It is no less than God with whom we are confronted in Jesus.” “A profound faith statement,” Barbara Fiand expands, “by which we hold that the Holy One, the source of everything that is, emerged most fully in Jesus of Nazareth. We hold that in everything Jesus stood for, lived, proclaimed, he was and still is the clearest expression of God’s presence in our midst. Our faith proclaims God as the source of the perfection, goodness, compassion, mercy and love made manifest in Jesus. The divine in him graced and sanctified his humanity; allowed it to … manifest no less than God. And … even as Jesus embodied divinity in his humanity, he challenges us to follow him. … Since we are human too, we are … called to the truth and integrity and holiness of our humanity. The life of Jesus was the “presencing” of God. Ours is called to be that as well, as we embrace the fullness of our humanity and walk into the Christ story that becomes … a saving grace for all of us.” [1]

We might understand that in the Eucharist, through the Holy Spirit, two things are at work. Bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ and those who are gathered become more fully the Body of Christ. There is no visible change. The bread and wine retain their appearance and effects. Reference to those gathered as Christ’s Body is clearly symbolic. The effects will ultimately be visible only in the way we live our lives and embrace the new covenant to which once again at this eucharistic meal we have committed ourselves. Which makes sense for those of us who know the story but what does it look like to those without.

Take John’s confronting gospel today. Although it includes the much loved verse “for God so loved the world that he gave His only Son that whoever believed in him may not perish but have eternal life,” it continues that without belief in Jesus you’ll not receive eternal life - in or out, your choice. For someone without a context or back story there’s so much in this that’s not known. What does eternal life mean and do you even want it? If you’ve no context why would you put yourself in a story your likely to be excluded from because no one ever explained the rules much less the reason for the game?

But is this an exclusionary text? What if the writer of John is speaking of his lived experience? Eternal for the author of John is thought to be a way of describing life as lived in the unending presence of God. To have eternal life is to be given life as a child of God, it is near, it begins in the believers present. So for those with hearts willing, those open to receive the possibility that this is being made real in them in life, this indeed is made real, experienced. This is the experience of the one writing John’s gospel.

Equally though it’s the author’s observation that there are those like Nicodemus who came in darkness, (for this passage is a continuation of Jesus conversation with Nicodemus). Who want Jesus’ teaching to fit an existing system evolved with integrity and genuine faithfulness over centuries to express the human divine relationship as revealed, to preserve and keep it safe. Those who are curious, with deep love of God and care filled integrity who hear what Jesus speaks of, yet find his dangerously intimate familiarity incomprehensible, it makes no sense from their context, is perhaps a step too far. The author of John observes their retreat from the light of invitation into intimacy he sees revealed in Jesus.

Thinking we know what we’re doing and why, what we think we’re speaking is being made real in our time, made me think of my startled response to that young woman’s scepticism. What if her sceptical yet honest interrogation of this ritual we enact has a wisdom we need to be confronted with? What are we doing? Have we become fixed in our ways, insisting by this telling and enacting of story in this way that is faithful through time, we are revealing something of God made real in human form? While we yet struggle to recognise the intimate familiarity of God made present in our neighbour who suffers hunger and homelessness, injustice, rejection, racial, religious, gender and sexual orientation exclusion. For genuine hospitality of inclusion might be our undoing, might make us unfamiliar to ourselves, might transform us in ways that break us apart, pour us out for the life of the world.

[1] Barbara Fiand, Come, Drink “Deep” of Living Waters (The Crossroad Publishing Company: New York, 2016), 24-25.

March 4, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Lent 3     Exodus 20:1-17     Psalm 19     1 Corinthians 1:18-15     John 2:13-22

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

The people who lived at Corinth in the first century thought they were pretty cool. Corinth was a relatively new city having been destroyed in 146BC and by the turn of the first century it was well established again, but without the ancient feel of some other Roman cities. People were pretty upwardly mobile and the city was expanding, bigger houses being built. Corinth was a commercial trade centre, a port with goods coming in from all directions. It was a centre for banking; and for regional government. People travelled from all across the known world to Corinth and there was a sizeable artisan community selling fine pieces of art and household items. [1] It was cosmopolitan, educated and exciting; Jews and Gentiles lived alongside each other; slaves and free; all sorts of people living in this vibrant city.

I have never been to modern day Corinth – but the city is still there in southern Greece. The descriptions of ancient Corinth sound a bit like modern day Auckland to me.

Paul establishes a Christian community in Corinth, about the year 50 and then writes letters to encourage and admonish the community there. The piece we read this morning is hard core Paul and pretty essential to our Christian understanding.

The Christians at Corinth thought they were pretty cool too; they were into this new faith, this new way of thinking; something new to get excited about. But Paul’s teaching about everyone belonging and being equal – “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, man nor woman” (Gal 3:28) struggled to take hold as the community lapsed back into their ways of being a fairly stratified society of separate classes. And they seemed to be following Jesus like any other wise teacher or philosopher. It was all a bit in their heads, all a bit intellectual.

So Paul brings them back to the cross. The cross – a bloody instrument of torture and oppression; not to be talked about in nice company. A dark side of Roman rule.

The idea of the cross – even with the resurrection – was “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.” A stumbling block to the Jews – the Messiah when he came was definitely not meant to die. The Messiah was to be the one who would save Israel (Lk 24:21) – throw off the Romans and bring about a new world order. And foolishness to the Gentiles – Greek wisdom, was all about philosophy and higher thought – not death and suffering. Paul says “Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom.”

In our gospel reading when Jesus disrupts the Temple the leaders say “what sign can you show us for doing this” – what can you do to show us you have the authority to come in here and turn us upside down? Paul does not offer signs or conventional wisdom – but foolishness. Only the paradox or contradiction of the cross. Definitely not the way to found a new religion. Paul was not really trying to found a new religion.

He simply wanted people to engage with the transformative power of this cross. This understanding that God is not separate in heaven, but here in the nitty gritty, hard stuff of life. In the cross Jesus faces into the suffering of each of us and does not flinch; takes it on; and stays the course.

Jesus died on the cross because of the way he lived – full on love and life and hope – and the dark side of our humanity cannot deal with full on love and truth and so we crucified him. And he did not flinch. And God’s love embraced us anyway and so resurrection happened and the cross becomes the turning point, the centre. And still a stumbling block and still foolishness. And we are called to embrace this foolishness as best we can.

Today in our after church discussion for our Lenten programme we are talking about this middle part of our liturgy – the ministry of the word – the bible readings, the sermon, the creed and the prayers.

As we weave our Christian identity as we worship we listen to scripture and reflect on it and try and make sense of it. Thinking about how we approach the Bible today is a bit like the challenge of the cross for the Corinthian Christians.

It is not really the done thing to admit to reading the Bible in 21st century NZ. Like the upwardly mobile, intellectually superior Corinthians we think what good could there be in reading an ancient text which we know contains some things we don’t agree with like “women should keep silent in church” (1 Cor 14:34) or outdated rules like the prohibition on wearing clothes that were a mix of wool and linen (Dt 22:11).

How do we unpack what we read? how do we decide what is useful to guide our lives and what is ok to set aside? What do we believe about the Bible?

We know the Bible is described as “the word of God” but what does that mean? Well it does not mean that it was dictated by God. The Bible is the story of the people of God, in the words of the people of God, and as heard and understood by the people of God. It becomes the word of God for us in our context and time and place when we allow ourselves to engage with it.

So today the richness of concepts and words and experiences from our passages could engage us and stay with us (or not, as the case may be). Which words will stay with you? which words echo in your hearts and minds as the week unfolds?

the cross

foolishness

wisdom

discernment

signs

proclaim

power

weakness

strength

the Temple

people selling

money

overturning the tables

my Father’s house

disciples

signs

three days

body

raised from the dead

they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

One word or line is enough – allow it to echo within you during the week; puzzle over it; pray/ meditate on it. See what it shows you. Then the word of God is alive, and at work within us.

Paul invites us to engage with our scripture, to lose a bit of our 21st century superiority, to take a risk in believing that this ancient text might offer a window for us into God’s heart; even though it goes by the way of the cross.

“For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

[1] The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity Gerd Theissen 1982 pp99-102

February 25, 2018

Cate Thorn

Lent 2     Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16     Mark 9:2-9

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Last week we began our Lenten series of paying attention to liturgy and how it expresses and shapes our identity as Anglican. Helen opened by inviting us to use each and every one of our senses in our encounter with the divine. Asking how that would be, stretching us sideways and inviting us to a full bodied embrace of God encounter. For in liturgy, this very particular communal act we join together in, we participate with all of our senses. In posture and word, music and ritual, unlike anything we do anywhere else, together we speak into being an understanding of divine presence alive among us. Our liturgy provides us a framework to express ourselves within, our building gives us a place to be held and housed within. In the workshop that followed the service we explored further, took a quick glimpse of the history from which our liturgy has emerged. Of shifts and changes in theological and social landscapes that have had profound effect on our understanding of how we enact liturgy together, of what we do. Profound effect even as the structure of the liturgy remains, we continue to be obedient, if you like, to tradition, to liturgy’s structure and form. Just as this wonderful building housing us expresses a theology from a time and social context quite different to now, it is still a place we can belong with integrity and relevance to these times. So the liturgy we inherit has a shape and form from a tradition predating us yet still can house words, music, action, colour and drama with integrity and relevance to the context of our time.

Perhaps an example might help to illustrate the influence theological understanding, contextual world view has on what we make real, visible, express publicly in our set aside sanctuary spaces we name church. Holy Trinity Cathedral is a building that reflects in its structure both theological change and contextual application. I came to know a bit about the building when I was in ministry there. Those of you who know the building will recognise in the chancel, the older, first built part of the Cathedral a structure and style of building not dissimilar to St Matthew’s in its form. With high reaching arches that draw the eye skyward literally upward toward the heavens. The altar is at the far reach end, long way from the common people that gather. The walls are thick and impenetrable, with little natural light, seats are in choir formation facing one another and so sideways to the altar. The newer part of the Cathedral is entirely different, it was once explained to me thus, as it happens by an architect. The intention was to create a sense of a roof that floated with walls of glass porous to the outside world. The coloured glass of those walls reflecting, expressing the world in this place, Aotearoa, NZ, the Word in this place. Rather than shut itself away it was to be a place that mingled with the life of the everyday where people gathered, a market place of intersect where world and Word, the real life of real people gathered in the embrace of divine presence. As you can gather it is an image, an ideal, an idea the stuck and stayed with me. Since my time there more changes have taken place, removing the divides between old and new, integrating the building and constructing another chapel with transparent walls to the outside. It provokes a confidence to dare say we too can find and know God as revealed in this place, we are responsible to speak, make real with the things of this land that experience.

But to return to us to liturgy as expressing identity, seeing it as a framework to gathering us, let’s now look into the colour, the fabric we use to enhance the liturgy we receive. Pay attention to the garments or vestments as they’re known within church context. Peculiar to churches that align themselves to practices of tradition through time, vestments also carry a story and trace a history of continuity through change. Some of the vestments are coloured and change colour according to the season of the church year. Seasons determined by the cycle of the liturgy, patterned by the story of Jesus life, rather than cycle of nature’s seasons. Even so, the colours of vestments, the motifs and symbols that may appear on them reflect not just religious motifs but symbol and sign of divine presence experienced in creation’s seasons. As inheritors of a tradition grounded in the Northern Hemisphere our experience of seasons is inverted. This season of Lent for example gains its name from the lengthening of days experienced from winter toward spring. New life and light of Easter from darkness experientially makes much more sense when you’re moving from winter to spring. Whereas shortening days, a journey from light into darkness is the Lenten journey to Easter we in the Southern Hemisphere take. It changes the experience assumed by much of the material of liturgical tradition. The journey’s no less powerful, yet the potency of symbols and colours perhaps require some translation from that first intended.

Vestments, these garments we wear now almost only in or for liturgical context do seem strange, especially without a frame of reference. How many of you have been to a big church occasion, say consecration of a cathedral, ordination of a bishop, the sort of occasion that attracts archbishops, bishops and other people of hierarchical significance all kitted out in beautiful regalia, with mitres and copes and all manner of things? If you take a step back, imagine yourself as a bystander from the street it’s the strangest sight to behold, truly appears as if you’ve stepped back in time, without code to interpret it might appear as if some arcane ritual is being enacted and everyone so serious!! Yet these garments we wear that may now seem strange in fact have very humble origin. Vestments that have become almost works of art were once common workaday, ordinary garments, the alb an undergarment, the chasuble an over garment. Garments at first kept plain so to conceal identity in a persecuted church came to be retained after threat was gone. The garments of everyday from that time remained even when fashions changed but that is a story for the workshop.

So these garments worn were primarily made to be usable and functional, to protect and enable the person wearing them to carry out the tasks of their day, they needed to be fit for purpose. Retained as garments for liturgical purpose it’s perhaps interesting to ask about the purpose they serve. They are identifiers, for sure. They’re worn by people doing certain functional tasks within liturgy, often around the sacrament of word or bread and wine, a liturgy that is breathed into life through the presence and participation of us all. In this place those in the serving party wear an alb, the white garment, over this is laid stole of office if a person is ordained and a chasuble is worn by the person who gathers and leads us as we re-enact the drama of Jesus’ last meal with his friends, in breaking bread and pouring wine. The white of the alb is intentional just as is the seasonal colour of the stole and chasuble. They tell of a continuity of practice through time, they remind us of the changing seasons in life, in our journey with God, in our world. We’re people creating liturgy as we participate grounded in space and time. The vestments identify the purpose of a role within liturgy, a role intended to enhance liturgical flow, not to interrupt but to complement our movement of worship.

Vestments provide us a visual focus in liturgy. In so doing in a curious way they teach and inform, for they reflect something of the identity of a place. Imagine, well in a city church such as this it’s easier to simply observe, when people wander in to have a look around during a service, say on Sunday morning, what do they see? Perhaps you too have done this when overseas, maybe unknowingly. What you observe tells you quite a lot, your interpretation, of course, but the language of body posture, action, sound, colour, smell, all of the senses as Helen said last week, speak to and of the people in that place. Liturgy is our act of worship, our actions, words, participation, building, all speak they, we are of a piece in expressing our faithfulness as wanderers of the Jesus way in our place and time. I wonder how intentional we can be about this, engaged in our activity with understanding?

Let’s consider this day. We exist in this historic time and this geographical location. We’ve physical place in specific city and building, and we have a particular religious lineage with its unique story. Right now the unique religious story is speaking in the season we call Lent, the colour is purple, Alleluia and Gloria are not spoken, the music is more sombre, the readings are of repentance, insisting we’re to be and act differently. Today’s gospel can be uncomfortable especially if we hear it filtered through a tradition that interprets it as advocating the merit of self-denial for self-denial’s sake, of rejection of the world as place of temptation and turmoil. Such tradition of interpretation does exist, we could choose to listen and enact faith and life this way. Today’s gospel does tell that choosing to follow for this Jesus way will change us. From the outset Jesus call to disciples is, “Come and see” or “Follow me.” We can choose whether to accept this invitation. There’s risk in accepting such invitation for we don’t know where it will lead. “When we yield to the invitation of another to come and see, in the very act we give up our own plans, our own direction and our own aspirations.” [1] Remember we’re invited to choose by a God made real in life who’s character Mary Jane Miller thinker and iconographer writes, “does not force us to drink from the well of life, walk the path of freedom, or take on a life of prayer. God does not demand we build communities of love and inclusion, or journey in the desert. God does not insist we look into our neighbour’s eyes with compassion and understanding, or gaze into a pool of water and see the beginning of creation. God does NOT demand we see ourselves as loved without question.

How, in our liturgy, do we speak this, see this, taste and touch, invite participation in this? Our colour for this season is purple. Our liturgy reflects such choice to follow, to live in a world that reveals we’re beloved of God and that will ask something of us in return. To raise our eyes from only self-concern, to risk opening our hearts and lives to learn of divine presence that turns us in turn to open our hearts and lives to the world in which we live.. Our faith is of a piece it would seem, we’re asked to choose, we’ve only the stuff of this creation, these amazing bodies, this most marvellous creation with which to speak and act and bring to life, to reveal and make present in this time the faith we each and every day are learning of. In this place where we gather to share, to strengthen, to listen, taste, touch, see, experience that which is other and in us, we together make real in time the God we are coming to know.

[1] L. Cunningham and K. Egan, Christian Spirituality: Themes from the Tradition (Paulist Press: New Jersey, 1996), 109.

February 18, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Lent 1     Genesis 9:8-17     Psalm 25, 1     Peter 3:18-22     Mark 1:9-15

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

“What does repentance sound like?

How does the kingdom of God smell?

What colour is the good news?” [1]

Barbara Brown Taylor asks these questions of today’s gospel; she asks us to use all five of our senses to engage with scripture.

We could add – what does temptation taste like?

If we could touch God, what would God feel like?

We are invited to walk into scripture with our whole selves, our bodies as well as our minds and hearts.

Today’s readings have a lot of food for our senses:

In the gospel Jesus is baptised in the Jordan – think about the touch of water, the stones or mud underfoot, would the water be cold or warm?

Would the water be clear or muddy – the Jordan today is pretty muddy.

Then the heavens are “torn apart” – the same word Mark uses for the tearing of the veil of the Temple in two after Jesus dies.

What would that sound like? thunder? a lightening crack?

Then a dove is seen to descend –we think of the dove that is part of the Noah story – the dove that Noah sends out to search for land after the flood begins to subside.

Mark says the dove is the Spirit – like the Spirit, the wind, the breath that moved over creation.

It would be white, can we hear its wings beating the air?

Then if that is not enough a voice is heard – does everyone hear it? or just Jesus?

“You are my son, the beloved” – how much do our hearts long to hear that voice from a parent, from a lover, from God.

You are my beloved.

Then when we are in sensory overload Jesus is driven into the wilderness.

The hot, dry, desert.

Cold at night, hot in the day.

Empty? maybe.

The other gospel writers expand this part of the story – Mark just gives an outline – Jesus is tempted by Satan – what does temptation sound like, smell like, taste like?

The angels wait on him – what do they sound like, smell like, can you touch an angel?

Then we get a summary of Jesus preaching: the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news”

Hence BBT’s questions

“What does repentance sound like?

How does the kingdom of God smell?

What colour is the good news?”

The story of Noah also gives us a sensory overload – a flood, devastation and destruction, the animals that are saved, the rainbow in the sky – forever a sign of hope.

BBT encourages us to think of our worship in the same way.

“Worship is a bodily experience and not one for our spirits alone. There are faces to be looked at, voices to be heard, hands to be touched, bread to be tasted, and wine to be smelled.

We sing things we could just as easily say and bow when we say other things, some of us touching ourselves gently on forehead, chest and shoulders as if we were tracing across.

Sometimes we kneel, assuming a posture that is all but gone from this world – like troubadours, like lovers, like servants, we kneel, and our hearts follow suit. Then we stand to sing, and sit to listen, dancing the peculiar ballet of the people of God.” [2]

At the very beginning of our worshipping life we are baptised.

Whether as a baby or as an adult we feel the water poured over us; just as Jesus was baptised, or maybe as the flood of Noah washed everything away.

The font is at the entrance of the church to remind us as we come in of our beginnings in faith.

In our confirmation group we have been discussing baptism.

We read together an article by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.

That led us to talk about how if we take our baptism seriously it is a long way away from our lovely images of a baby in a baptismal gown cooing at the godparents.

RW says “if being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny.” [3]

“It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied … you don’t go down into the waters of the Jordan without stirring up a great deal of mud!” [4]

Oh we thought – bother – that sounds very challenging.

Which is why we need to come together each week to support each other on the journey and to hold each other accountable to the promises of our baptism.

As Jesus came up out of the water and was immediately driven into the wilderness so we come out of worship ready for the “wilderness” times of our lives and world.

Jesus discovers his identity at his baptism – you are my beloved Son;

what identity do we discover or form for ourselves in worship?

Anglicans hold to the tradition lex orandi lex credendi – what we pray is what we believe.

What does an Anglican believe about the nature of God, or the eucharist, or baptism – look in the Prayer Book – what do we pray? what do we sing?

At St Matthew’s we wrestle with our liturgy, and our hymns;

what theology do we want to reflect?

how do we decide?

we each have a unique understanding of our own beliefs – how do we come together as one to worship? and to be formed in our faith by that worship?

What colour is our faith?

What does our prayer taste like?

What does the word of God sound like?

What do our inner most beliefs smell like?

What if we could touch God?

Over the next 4 weeks of Lent we will be exploring these questions together as we seek to understand more deeply our life of worship together.

We have in our service begun to weave a garment together and we will talk more in our after church discussions.

As we dance the peculiar, and maybe dangerous, ballet of the people of God.

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor in Feasting on the Word Year B Vol 2 p 49

[2] BBT p 63 The Preaching Life 1993

[3] Rowan Williams Being Christian – Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer p 5 2014

[4] ibid p 6 

February 11, 2018

Cate Thorn

Ordinary 6     2 Kings 5:1-14     Mark 1:40-45

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Today, from 2 Kings and the gospel we have stories of lepers being cured. In both of these accounts, who takes the initiative toward healing? Naaman, having taken a woman’s advice, is the one who travels to Israel to Elisha, the man of God. to be cured of leprosy. The leper, before Jesus begs, kneels and asks Jesus to choose to make him clean. The disease they have in common, but their expectations for a cure vary. Naaman goes seeking to be healed but very much on his own terms. Replete with power, Naaman goes to trade, to buy the healing he needs. Elisha, the man of God, apparently oblivious to Naaman’s grandeur, doesn’t dignify Naaman with an audience, simply directs him as to what he must do to be healed. Elisha doesn’t negotiate on Naaman’s terms. Naaman wrestles, resists, for he’s unaccustomed to being treated this way, to being the one without power. Naaman’s required to do something to achieve his end in a way he does not expect. He wants to achieve the end but to do so Naaman has to conform to the instruction of the man of God, to acknowledge and submit himself to a power not in his control, beyond and outside his reach and influence. Being healed of leprosy will make a difference, he will not be as he was. Naaman wants to be healed of leprosy but to achieve it he has to do differently, to change.

By contrast the leper-before-Jesus asks his cleansing to be Jesus’ choice for him, the leper calls on divine mercy to be healed, he asks for it. The leper is willing and ready to be cleansed, ready for change. Despite the fact he’s not obedient to Jesus instruction to go to the priest in the temple and offer what Moses commanded for his cleansing, the leper is cleansed. Mark’s giving a fairly big clue that change is afoot, there’s something powerful at work through this Jesus, part of the tradition of the Law yet more.

Willingness to change, obedience, being cleansed, they’re all themes of the season that we’re about to move into, the season of Lent, a season of preparation for Easter, a season of repentance. We’ll begin this coming Wednesday, with ritual in which we’re marked with ashes, a reminder to us of our mortality. Not in morbid sense but to remind us, recall us to live – life is time limited and is precious, so let our lives express that. In Lent we more intentionally place ourselves before God and ask for healing. Ask for healing of that which mars and disfigures us and our lives, keeps us from living fully that we may be made new, begin anew. At Easter we renew our baptismal commitment, symbolically sprinkled with water, we’re washed again in the waters of rebirth. Maybe not seven times do we dip in water but we engage in a ritual of cleansing.

Ash Wednesday to Easter, six weeks to reflect on how we are before God, how we are in our life, how we are with those around us. As means to enable this we may choose in that time to live a little more simply. Historically of course Lent’s been the big discipline season – the time to give something up or, in recent years, to give something to a need or cause. Strangely, though, in our world of plenty I sometimes wonder if it becomes a season of heightened guilt awareness. Of how we fall short, of how foolishly attached we are to certain things, especially if we’ve given them up for Lent, of how inadequately holy we are. In a curiously inverse way we can become distracted by our self-discipline, or absorbed in self-recrimination that turns us inward, away from God and others. Such disciplines can reinforce the sense that we’re the ones in control, in charge, as if by sheer dint of will we can change ourselves, be better people, more worthy of God.

Which brings Naaman to mind – thinking we can trade our way to healing, that we think we know what the process of healing involves, what healing, being healed will look like. We can do the change, we know what we want, just tell us what to do, we’re up for it!! Unless it requires something unlike anything we expect, especially something unreasonably easy, close to home normal, everyday, overlooked, ordinary. Something that means we’re healed, know our wholeness NOW, in what may seem the unremarkable present tense of our life. Something that asks us to be honest, present with ourselves, as we are, without trappings of achievement or power or acquisition, just us moving toward God saying, in the words of Mark’s leper, “If you choose you can make me clean,” open to divine choosing that we know we are whole. We can tangle ourselves up with words like sin and repentance, the need for penance and discipline, as if we can somehow make ourselves worthy. Tying ourselves up in knots so preoccupied, thinking we have power to make ourselves good enough, so busy we don’t give ourselves chance to hear the One before us say, “I do choose.”

How can we learn to hear, put away our expectations of condemnation? Perhaps this image from Reformed Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig, on the occasion of Yom Kippur, might help. To give you a brief frame of reference for Yom Kippur: within the Jewish calendar year there’s a period of ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, these days are known as the Days of Awe. We might understand them a bit like Lent, it’s a time for reconciliation not just with God but also with people we’ve wronged in the last year. Yom Kippur literally means “Day of Atonement,” it concludes this time. Perhaps the most important day of observation in the Jewish Year, it’s a day set aside to “afflict the soul,” to atone for the sins of the past year.

Rabbi Wenig asks, “What if we went home to visit God this Yom Kippur? God” she said, “would usher us into her kitchen, seat us at her table, pour two cups of tea. ‘Let me have a good look at you,’ she says. And at a single glance, God sees us as both newly born and dying. In a single glance she sees our birth and death and all the years in between. She sees us as we were when we were young: when we idolized her and trustingly followed her anywhere; when our scrapes and bruises healed quickly; when we were filled with wonder at all things new. She sees us in our middle years when everyone needed us and we had no time for sleep. And God sees our later years: when we no longer felt so needed. She sees us sleeping alone in a room that once slept two. God sees things about us we have forgotten and things we do not yet know.

When she is finished looking at us, God might say, “So tell me, how are you? Can you imagine that, how it would be? God is sitting and waiting for us” Rabbi Wenig closes, “as she has waited every Yom Kippur, waiting very patiently until we are ready.”

Rabbi Wenig’s image of God as an old mother in the kitchen with tea, wanting her children to come home once in a while, is a liberal interpretation of the ancient tradition of Yom Kippur. Wenig alters the traditional images of sin and guilt and repentance and forgiveness into a more human, loving image. The task is still to make an assessment of one’s life, to consider how one has been and to set an intention for where one will go next. Her image, however, softens the traditional language of sin and guilt, repentance and atonement.

That God Rabbi Wenig describes sees our whole lives, from beginning to end, as one whole piece. There’s no life without moments of error as part of it. But would that kind of loving presence expect to see any human life that didn’t experience the whole range of emotions? Would any parent really wish for their child to never experience regret, for them to never make selfish or unthinking mistakes? What parent would feel comfortable raising a child who’d never experienced the difficult realities of life that shape a conscience and a soul?

Can we let ourselves be that beloved, just come home, child of God? Put down what weighs us, relinquish the hurts we’ve sustained and /or inflicted on others? How willing are we to unhook ourselves from our unforgiveness – of others and ourselves. How much is it the stuff of our identity, keeping us in thrall to, entrapped by our past?

I wonder how it would be to live present to each day, not unaffected, not unscarred, not unchanged by our past but able to choose to live now in the fullness of the person we are because of our journey. To let it be possible that the wounds of our past can be healed, so our past need not still be our present. To accept the hospitality of God who waits for us, who asks us to name how we are, that we might be unburdened of that which diminishes us, our lives, our capacity to give of ourselves for the life of the world.

February 4, 2018

Rod Bower

Ordinary 5

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

January 28, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Epiphany 4     Deuteronomy 18:15-20     Psalm 111     1 Corinthians 8:1-13     Mark 1:21-28

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The Gospel of Mark is like a James Bond movie – fast, exciting, not much subtlety, the battle of good and evil; except the women in the gospel are probably dressed more modestly than in a JB movie.

We are reading the gospel of Mark this year and I would recommend sitting down and reading it in one sitting.

Even better read it out loud.

Get a sense of the pace – Mark is no nonsense, quick fire, from one story to another.

In a James Bond there is always an incredibly dramatic start where 007 does some amazing stunts or escapes from somewhere impossible and those first few minutes usually have nothing at all to do with the rest of the film; other than to establish for the viewer that Bond is capable of anything.

Rather than a build up of suspense or tension as happens in the rest of the film, we know from the opening scenes who James Bond is.

Mark is like that.

We are still in chapter one and following the call of the disciples we heard last week Mark gives us high drama.

Jesus and the disciples go to Capernaum, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and it was the Sabbath and so they went to the synagogue and Jesus taught there.

He was a rabbi and so he taught the people.

There is in Capernaum today ruins of a synagogue from the 4th century which may well have been the site of the first century synagogue.

Mark says “Jesus taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (a dig at the clergy there).

His words carried weight, had power, rang true.

What did he say?

Maybe something like we heard last week “the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news” – I wish Mark would unpack that a bit for us.

But he’s not one for stopping to let the viewer catch up.

Last week in our first confirmation group discussion we wondered about what Jesus meant by “the kingdom of God has come near” – was it a promise or expectation of political change just around the corner – and so was something that belonged 2000 years ago; or was it something about a new presence of God’s spirit that could break through any time;

and why is it near and not here?

Well while Jesus’ listeners in the synagogue are pondering the same questions we have our dramatic James Bond moment.

A man we are told is suffering with “an unclean spirit” – now remember in Jesus day if you were sick in any way it was assumed you must be being either punished by God, or that you are possessed in some way by an evil spirit; they did not have the benefit of our medical knowledge;

commentators believe that this man may have been suffering from a mental illness, or something like epilepsy; neither of which were at all understood.

But Mark’s focus is not on the illness per se but what the man says to Jesus: a dramatic declaration of who he is – “the Holy One of God”;

Jesus does not commend the man for what he says – why not if he is telling the truth?

The power to name someone was seen to give you power over them.

Think of God changing people’s names – Abram and Sarai to Abraham and Sarah; Saul to Paul; Jesus changing Simon’s name to Peter.

And the way the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures decline to use the name of God – Yahweh – and instead use Lord.

In our reading today from Deuteronomy Moses reminds the people of what they had said to Moses when he was receiving the ten commandments – we cannot see or hear God and live – so you go talk and come back and tell us (Dt 18:17, quoting Dt 5:24).

Like in Harry Potter where people dare not say the name of the Dark Lord Voldemort – but I am mixing my movie metaphors!

Back with Jesus in the synagogue – this spirit, nor the people will claim power over God. Jesus sees the attempt to name him as an attempt at control. This is a battle befitting a movie opening.

Hiding behind a couple of lines of text is Mark’s drama – good and evil are in battle here. When Mark says Jesus “rebukes” the spirit – it is really stronger than a rebuke – the original might be better translated conquer or make subject. [1] Jesus is banishing the evil kingdom and ushering in the kingdom of God. No wonder the people are astounded and his fame spreads.

David Lose says of this passage that the kingdom of God appears, God shows up, in the places we least expect God – in our times of loss, despair, shame, brokenness, disappointment

“God is still at work casting out the unclean spirits of the world, and God is using us to continue (Jesus’) work. Mark shares this story of confrontation and freedom first, because it’s at the heart of the Gospel story he tells, and at the heart of the Gospel story we are invited to live into and through.” [2]

After the dramatic opening story Jesus goes on to do more dramatic healings; they come quickly one after another.

For us, in our perhaps less dramatic lives, we can nonetheless live into this story.

We all come this morning with our own spirits of depression, or illness, or sorrow, or pain, or shame, or worry.

We’ve all got something going on.

And if we wish we can allow the voice of Jesus to name those spirits, and call them out.

And begin in us a process of healing, maybe not as dramatic as Mark’s gospel; but healing nonetheless; we know that “naming our demons” takes away their power – that is why groups like Alcoholics Anonymous start their meetings by introducing themselves – hullo I am …….. and I am an alcoholic.

Our lives might not be as dramatic as a movie or a gospel story; but Mark still writes for us – the kingdom of God has come near in the life of Jesus; the kingdom of God can come near to us today and bring healing.

Thanks be to God.

[1] Richard Horsley Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel p137

[2] http://www.davidlose.net/2015/01/epiphany-4-b/

January 21, 2018

Linda Murphy

Epiphany 3     Mark 1:14-20

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Today’s gospel from Mark is very different in style to Helen’s gospel from John last week. Mark is simplistic and economical with his words however he is dramatic in his presentation.

Mark allows Jesus merely to appear from out of nowhere, emerging humbly from the heat vapours emanating from the desert floor to be baptised by John. Then at the very moment when we expect the curtain to rise on the drama to come, we end up in Galilee.

Why on earth did these four ordinary Galilean fishermen just drop everything and follow Jesus?

James and John, the sons of Zebedee immediately followed this itinerant man, Jesus. What must have Zebedee thought when he saw his otherwise sensible sons all of a sudden do the unthinkable, by leaving their workplace, family and community behind to follow a little-known travelling preacher?

The fact that Jesus is out alone at night and that the four all leave their families to follow him was considered abnormal and deviant behaviour in 1st Century Palestine. Their families, friends and whole community would view this behaviour with alarm and suspicion. It was tantamount to a contradiction to their social fabric.

Loyalty to one’s family and strictly observing all social convention’s, were paramount in world in which Jesus and his followers inhabited.

To follow Jesus, as admirable as that may seem from our advantaged perspective, meant James and John were not only giving up of a not insignificant amount of trade from their fishing, but also their family and their community.

Peter and Andrew, also fishing on the Sea of Galilee that early dawn, “followed him”.

Mark’s Jesus gives no explanation for his challenge. Nor does he give his followers any idea why and what they are in for other than… ”The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Peter, Andrew, James and John have just got up and followed him, without thinking about the offer of becoming ‘fishermen of people’. No discussion took place with their families and friends. Few of us today would leave our nets, much less the comfort of our homes to follow in the Jesus footsteps as did James and John, Peter and Andrew.

So why did they do it!

Let’s look at what life was like for these fishermen in Galilee. Galilee had been a hotbed of revolutionary activity for centuries. Rome had been particularly brutal to Galilean people after the revolts preceeding Herod the Great’s death in 4 BCE. Galileans owed tithes to the ravenous Temple treasury and Rome exercised control over every aspect of Galilean life through the puppet administrator, Antipas.

The fishing industry was steadily being restructured for export, so that the majority of fish were salted or made into fish sauce and shipped to markets throughout the Roman Empire. All fishing had become state-regulated for the benefit of the urban elite, made up of Greeks or Romans who had settled in Palestine following the military conquest or Jews connected with the Herodian family. Thus fishermen were falling to the bottom of an increasingly elaborate economic hierarchy. The elite looked down on them, despite them being dependent upon their labour.

With such rigid state control of their livelihood and the oppressive economics of export, it is hardly surprising that in Mark’s story fishermen were the first followers of Jesus’ message of an alternative social vision. Restless peasant fishermen had little to lose and everything to gain, by overturning the status quo.

If fact Jesus actions was not unlike Gandhi’s attempt to mobilise the “untouchable” classes in India, with campaigns such as his famous Salt March, or similarly Martin Luther King’s fateful choice to stand with the sanitation workers of Memphis in 1968.

These fishermen had little to lose. In this ancient world leaving the workplace would have entailed both loss of economic security, as well as a rupture in the social fabric of the extended family. In that sense, to join this movement demanded not just assent of the heart, but an uncompromising break with “normal life”. Jesus has called these disaffected workers out of an exploitive system and back to a network of “fictive kinship” that practiced mutual aid and cooperation.

Jesus did not look like someone who offered riches. But perhaps he did look like someone who offered these men a chance to bring people into the Kingdom whose nearness, Jesus had been talking about ever since arriving in Galilee. Possibly the thought of transformation into that better place was sufficiently enticing to motivate these men to start modelling their lives on the life of an unknown man whom they did not know, but who believed in a future greater than could be imagined at that present moment.

“And Jesus said to them, Follow me and I will make you fish for people”. This well-known verse is beloved to evangelicals, who traditionally interpreted it to represent the vocation of “saving souls”. However we miss the point if we remove this text from its social context and if we ignore the roots of this metaphor in the Bible.

This image of “fishing for people” then, should be understood more in the sense of Dr. King’s struggle “for the soul of America” than in terms of the evangelical call of “saving souls”.

Now it makes a bit more sense.

Our first reading from the book of Jonah is also a story about ‘calling’ but with an ironic twist. Jonah is called to proclaim a message to people he doesn’t like. A message he hopes will not be accepted. After trying unsuccessfully to avoid his calling, he finally arrives in Nineveh and delivers the shortest sermon in the Bible, an eight word threat of destruction. To his surprise the sermon is effective. The book of Jonah ends as God makes clear to Jonah that mercy is for everyone who repents.

Jonah’s call included the message he was to deliver, but in our story today the four fishermen are called with no further instructions whatsoever. They are called to a completely uncertain future and would surely have been scared out of their wits had they known what lay in store for them.

What the early disciples must have instinctively known, is what we must not forget – In following Jesus we leave everything but lose nothing. That is “the good news of God” that Jesus and his disciples proclaimed, with great joy throughout Galilee, and to us and across our world today as well.

To follow Jesus is to commit ourselves to intentional time with the One who, even now, calls us. To repent, to change our mind, is to shake off the regret and worry that holds us hostage, and to recognise that the God of the everlasting present, The God who is Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, is now and forever truly with us.

Amen.