Readings: Psalm
121, Genesis 12:1-4a, Romans 4: 13-17, John 3:
1-17
Let us pray: As we explore your word for us O God, may our
hearts and our heads find affirmation, challenge and truth in Jesus name. Amen.
Some of us were able to attend the
Commissioning of Maurie Jackways, the new Head of Salmond College, last Sunday
afternoon. Thank you to the music group
especially – I was asked afterwards if you hired yourselves out, so impressed
were they.
At the service Ray Coster, the current
Moderator of the PCANZ preached a challenge – partially to Maurie but to all of
us to stop focussing on right and wrong in the church and embrace instead
both/and. I read this as embracing our diversity, respecting each other and our
understandings of God, and being inclusive particularly in our Ministry of the
Word and of pastoral care. And this is
where I would have liked to pursue his line of thinking with him a wee bit more
– for I got the impression that he felt Parish ministry was particularly
susceptible to this, to telling people what is right and what is wrong. That in preaching and pastoring we tend to go
after this right/wrong approach to the truth of God more so than in other
streams of ministry such as prophesying and evangelising. Maybe I’ll get a chance to follow that
through with him but in the meantime I wanted to pursue today his use of the
terms ‘right/wrong’ and ‘both/and’ in relation to the way the church is to be.
The lines that we heard read today from
Genesis might be few – but they are weighty and challenging too.
They tell us what it means to be God’s
chosen people. They tell us that God’s
blessings, not curses but blessings, will follow us always and those blessings
are to flow out into the whole world, to bless the people of the whole
world. And, this is interesting, they
are the words to the patriarch of three faith traditions as we know them now –
Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Three
belief systems that were given the same instruction – go out and take your
blessings to the world. Now, three
thousand years later, give or take, those three have become thousands of
divided, often aggressively so, sects whose purpose, most often it seems, is to
prove that they have the right of it and all others were wrong. I hope that it
is not too cynical a take but when you look back on history, it’s pretty up
there. Within Christianity we have not only denominations but we have division
within those – and I am reasonably sure that this is what Ray was alluding to
last Sunday. The challenge from the
sending out of Abraham and Sarah was to go – but more than that it was to go
and share the blessings – and we can’t do that if we are using all our energy
to protect our patch, so to speak. Now I
am not saying that we should be working towards a one monotheistic faith in the
God of Abraham, or even one catholic (small c, universal) form of Christianity
– we are far too diverse in our thinking, our theology, our understanding of
God, our experience as Christians of the life giving person of Jesus Christ to
try and cram us all into one box. And
even if we wanted to – for instance when we look at our diverse theology alone
it seems hopeless. The work of
sociologists such as H. Richard Niebuhr suggest that there are many factors
that produce the differing theologies of Christian denominations; and that
whilst the proclamation of the gospel produces the community of faith, the
particular theology emerges from the context of that community – so searching
for a common doctrine is almost impossible in a world as culturally,
economically, geographically diverse as we have. And I for one do not want a monochrome world
of sameness that some futuristic movies offer us to live in.
For you see Nicodemus was living in a
particular world of understanding – he had a particular version of the truth of
God – he was a priest, a Pharisee, one might say locked in to particular
theology, a particular way of living his faith that he no doubt thought was the
truth. But somehow Jesus had touched his
edges – have penetrated in some way – enough of a way to make him curious and
to follow up that curiosity, albeit in a rather clandestine manner in the
middle of the night. And what did Nicodemus
find? A rabbi who likens this
‘interesting’ behaviour of coming in the night to visit to a child still safe
in its mother’s womb and rather gently suggested that Nicodemus needed to
emerge from the safety of the womb and take the step into full relationship
with God, wherever that might take him.
His faith as it is, is immature, incomplete, hidden away in the dark,
unable to grow in the light that is Christ. But coming into the light may well
mean getting that some of his ‘right/wrong’ understandings had to bend a bit,
find new ways – I wonder if it was this that held him back, made him tentative
in his uptake of the offer of rebirth in Christ?
You see I don’t think God wants us to spend
our precious life span on pursuing either sameness or rightness. Because the
world and humanity is not like that – we are created in all our uniqueness, our
differences, our cultural and personal perspectives and Jesus understood that
and worked with that. Nowhere did he try
to make people put on another person’s
clothes or way of living – the change he sought was to bring them into
relationship with the living God – God would work with the rest as it was.
What seems to cause the problem of
division, what prevents us from effectively ministering in our communities, is
the desire to prove that we are better, superior in our understanding and/or
that we need to make everyone else subservient to that particular view. We as a church need theology – I, for
instance needed a reformed church to allow me to become part of the body of
Christ again – but we also need the humility and recognition that our truth is
just that, ours, and may not be the ultimate
and only truth about God for everyone.
Once we get past that need to prove ourselves and our credentials to
others then maybe we can get on with sharing the blessings of God with
others. God told Abraham that he and his
people would become a great nation – but he didn’t stop there – so that you
will be a blessing to the world. All
the time we spend figuring out if we are right or wrong is time we could spend
in ministering to those who have need of blessing. In fact it is in our very diversity that we
can reach out into the world and share our blessings – we all have different
gifts and skills that used together in the power of the Spirit can make an
immense difference in our world. We can
work alongside someone who is of a different theological bent in feeding the
hungry, can’t we? We can discuss our
disparate understandings of the doctrine of Holy Communion as we march against
poverty in New Zealand or agree to not agree on the role of gay people in
ministry leadership whilst we bake for the family down the road who is
struggling to eat. Diversity is
something to be celebrated, indeed to make us continue to think and grow and
learn – with respect for each other and the light of Christ as our oneness we
can continue to bring blessings to this world. Thanks be to God.
Margaret Garland
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