Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 11 May 2014 Easter 4

Readings: Psalm 23, John 10:1-10                                

Let us pray: may your word for us today challenge, encourage and sustain us O God and may we have the courage to live out that which you ask of us.  In Jesus name. Amen.

The Gospel reading for today is a bit of a trap for young players is it not?  For centuries the imagery of Christ as the only gateway to salvation, the debate of who is in and who is out, the idea of fencing to keep out dangers and keep those who are within safe has tended to dominate our understandings of this story of Christ the shepherd and maybe of much of the Gospel message. On it we have based acts of exclusion, of isolation, of judgement and false hope.  That is a pretty strong start to a sermon today for me.  But it is something I feel passionate about – the ways we engage with scripture in isolation from the command of Jesus to love – love God, love neighbour, love self and to hold that command in the light of the empty cross.  

So I would like to take a different approach today - I would like to suggest that these concerns over the conditions of entry, who is in and who is out, are mere distractions – taking our energy and attention away from the core message that our abundance is to be found in the person of Jesus Christ – that he is our sheepfold, our strength, our security and our hope!   

You know so often it is incredibly easy for our faith to get tied up with harmful social perceptions and expectations when we fail to keep Christ at the centre of it. 

We can talk about a church that has told some people that they are not welcome, we can see decades of teaching that suggest the vast majority of the world is dammed because they have not personally accepted Christ as their Lord and Saviour, or even being Christian is not enough, you have to be of a particular sort to get through the gates, that you have to have outward signs of blessing to prove that you are inwardly in right relationship with God.  We can talk about a society that is showing exactly those same values, exclusions and judgements and would ask quietly ‘who is influencing who here?’

Our daughter recently sent me a link that speaks volumes into the way that as a society we apply these same skewed principles to our ways of living.

There is an actress in the states called Gabourey Sidibe – who has starred in various movies and television show, who has been nominated for an Academy Award.  Now she is not your normal svelte, stunningly good looking vision of physical perfection – quite the opposite one might say (in fact when I googled her to find more information do you know that the first suggested search strategy that came up was Gabourey Sidibe – weight – what does that say?)

And her story is one of the most powerful I have come across.  As a young child she and her brother went to live with her Aunt who was a great friend of the Gloria Steinem, the American social and political activist and a big part of the woman’s liberation movement throughout her life.

Gabourey said each day of her life she was berated somewhere for her appearance, made fun of, called names, and with fame and social media it got worse of course.  She says the most frequent question she gets now is why she is so confident in the midst of this continuing battering of her looks?  She has two responses.  First of all she asks: So why aren’t you asking Rihanna that question? Why just me?  And secondly she tells the story of her sheepfold, her place of strength.  Each day as she left her aunt’s house for whatever pain the day would bring she passed a photo of her aunt, also a lifelong activist, and Gloria Steinem, young and determined and with their fists held high in the air.  And she would salute them back and ‘march off into battle’ – her words.  And she says today she is so confident because she dares, she lives, she loves.  Again her words:

"I live my life, because I dare. I dare to show up when everyone else might hide their faces and hide their bodies in shame...If they hadn’t told me I was ugly, I never would have searched for my beauty. And if they hadn’t tried to break me down, I wouldn’t know that I’m unbreakable".

We have a gate that says only those who have the blessings of good looks are allowed into the hallowed ground of success, a gate that keeps out the less than perfect and yet also entices us into ridiculous ways of trying to be what we are not in order to get in that gate. Not so different really to the way some have kept guard on the gateway to the church, deciding who can come in and who stays out.  Might I suggest that the decision of Calvin Church in Gore to exclude from membership a 70+ year old woman because her live-in male companion is not yet ready for marriage and she refuses to tell him to leave sits in this space.

Now just in case you think that this is all getting a bit negative – oh no.  The good news is very much in this reading before us today.  “The Lord is my Shepherd I shall not want!”[1] Jesus is inviting us into a life with him, where his vision is our vision, his way our way, his path our path.  And what is the vision of Jesus – abundant life for all!  “I came that you may have life, and have it abundantly.”[2]

Molly Marshall has this definition of abundant life in Christ:

“a purposeful vocation that serves common good, participation in generative ecclesial community, delight in sustaining relationships and a sense of security in Christ no matter what comes.”[3]

What are some of the things we need to re-imagine here then that will help us be a more Christ centred church living into the vision of abundant life. 

First we need to be aware that security in Christ, that coming into the sheepfold does not mean the absence of danger or disappointment, of predators or valleys of death.  The abundance is in Christ with us, not in our lives being glam and glitter.

Secondly that the Christ the gateway is not there to keep people out or to have people running some gauntlet as the entry price – the way to Christ is for all and it is not for us to set entry prices or judge when we kick someone out.  Not to say that there are not times when there needs to be some serious accountability within that sheepfold but not when people are simply wearing slightly alternative clothes or don’t conform to our ideas of living, rather more when they are hurting others by greed, arrogance and exclusivity.  Use the Jesus yardstick, not our own.

Thirdly it’s not about being separated from the world to keep ourselves holy.  Being in Christ demands that we are part of the world, offering our gifts and our faith to the battering ram that can be the world we live in, being like Gabourey Sidibe and finding our strength and confidence in the presence of Christ Jesus as our shepherd, turning to walk in the world each day knowing that no matter how bad it gets we are not alone and, even more in fact, we are using our gifts to bring pleasure and build relationships, often with those who might mock us.

Abundant life in Christ is dangerous, challenging, uncomfortable, unpredictable and yet within this abundant life we know confidently and with assurance the depths of our beauty in the eyes of God and the unbreakable power of love that is the love of Christ for us in the empty tomb.  And for this we say thanks be to God.  Amen

Margaret Garland

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[1] Psalm  23: 1

[2] John 10:10

[3] Feasting on the Word year A, vol 2, p446

Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 27 April 2014 Easter 2

Readings:  1 Peter 1: 3-9,  John 20: 19-31

Let us pray:

May the words of my mouth and the inspirations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our rock and our sustainer.  Amen.

‘Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”[1]

I love the story of Thomas – and I suspect the early church did too – for it was in the witness of people like Thomas and in the power of the Holy Spirit that they were able to believe without seeing – to be truly blessed as Jesus said. 

Can we talk today about faith and doubt?

Is it possible that we live a double standard when it comes to belief and doubt?  There are many things we take as true because for instance a teacher or a reporter or a television news reader or a person with letters after their name, or indeed facebook.....

There are many things we have faith in – that people will stay on the left of the road when driving, that restaurants will serve what they have on the menu, that the whiskey in the bottle is what is named on the outside....a certain pub that I worked in many years ago in Dunedin had no qualms about a variety of brands being served from a Vat69 bottle!

We believe things, we trust eye witness or written second hand accounts of events or societal standards – yet much of the world would not afford religious faith that same promise of belief, would instead ask for proof of existence! 

Ironic really isn’t it?  Proof expected of the one thing we call faith, whilst much faith is assumed in those things we take as proven.

Ironic too that those who denounce the very concept of a God are in fact also expounding a belief that there is no God – and yet they claim to speak from a position of reason, of proof of absence shall we say.  We can no more prove there is not a God than prove that there is.  There are those who allow that their disbelief of a particular understanding is just that – a belief, not a fact. There is an excellent recounting of a conversation between a Jewish Scholar, Professor Lapide of Bar Ilam University in Jerusalem and Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung and when Kung asked Lapide what he made of the resurrection the reply was:  ‘I must say that I cannot accept what you call resurrection...but neither can I deny it, for who am I as a devout Jew to define God’s saving action?...that would be blasphemous... I don’t know, that is all I can say.’

There is much that we do not know – and yet most people here would claim to have a belief in, an experience of the risen Christ!  Why, when we have neither touched nor seen?  What is it that allows us, in the midst of doubts and questions, to be sure of presence of God in this world today?

And here is the suggestion of an answer: through praise, proclamation and practice!

We have been persuaded by the praise and proclamation and practice of other – by a stream of witnesses throughout the ages who have known and loved God and have been able to express that love to others. 

Another story might help here  – Donald Miller was a man who had never liked jazz music – his reason was that it never resolved!  But then one day he saw someone on the street playing a saxophone.  He stood and watched for 15 mins and never did the player open his eyes – he was completely at one with the music.  After that said Miller, ‘I liked jazz.  Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.  It’s as if they are showing you the way.’[2]

From Thomas to Aquinas to Theresa of Avila to Calvin to C S Lewis we have had witnesses who have attested to the power of the risen Christ in their lives, witnesses who by their very lives show us a deep and abiding faith.  Some of you will know that C S Lewis convicted me in my faith – for he too had struggled with the perceived gap between intellect and faith and resolved it in a way that spoke to me.

From Bach to the gospel music of the slaves to the hymns of John Newton to the powerful hymns and songs of today we have heard through music the praise for a Christ who is with us even in the midst of the horrors of life. 

From the icons of the early church to the magnificent artworks of the centuries since to our Ralph Hotere, we have poured out the passions and inspirations of those who express Christ in their lives through art.  And the poets and the authors and the sculptors and the architects..... all of whom expressed their faith, their belief in the living God in their works. 

Then there are those who practice faith every day – there are the well known inspirers such as Martin Luther King and St Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa but also there are the people who have been inspirational in our lives, they might be sitting next to us in fact,  – who have shown by their actions and choices and commitments that they believe in a God of love and compassion and justice for all – despite that they haven’t seen and touched!

All of these people, this cloud of witnesses, have brought to us and shared with us their belief in the living God in some way, and so we too are able to believe, able to know the Holy Spirit, able to live the Christ centred life, even amidst the doubts and questions that a time like Easter Sunday brings with it.

Thank God for Thomas and his call for hard evidence, for his witness and his proclamation “My Lord and My God”!  May our lives too be the inspiration, the conviction for those around us and those still to come that Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed.  Amen

Margaret Garland

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[1] John 20:29

[2] Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Non-Religious thoughts on Christian Spirituality(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003), ix

Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 20th April 2014 Easter Sunday

Readings:  Colossians 3:1-4, John 20:1-18

Let us pray:  May your word both challenge and encourage, stir and reassure in the name of the risen Christ.  Amen.

 So – is it true?  Is it true that Jesus was raised from the dead?  Is it true that the one and only surety on this earth, death, was somehow broken, made into something new.

Karl Barth says this is what brings people to church week after week – they have this unspoken question: Is it true – that God lives and gives us life?

These are powerful questions – and they are particularly unavoidable on a day like today.  You could say that Easter Sunday is not a day for beginners, that you need to be a seasoned veteran, well versed in Jesus’ life and teachings, aware of his incredibly wise and compassionate humanity before you begin to tackle these big and tricky questions like resurrection! A day when you are asked to believe that which is hardest to believe.

And yet, isn’t it interesting, that Easter Sunday is a day when people throughout the world make a real effort to come to church, when we all want to hear the story again, to participate in the hosannas and the alleluias, Christ is risen.

Even without the rest of the story, the journey to Jerusalem, the pain and suffering, the passion of the cross, there is still something compelling and powerful about this day.  Why is that?

When we look at the first sermons of the church, as recorded in Acts, there is relatively little reference to Jesus life before this event and it gives the impression that the early church pretty much saw the life and teachings of Jesus as the prologue only – a fairly full one but an introduction none the less.  For them Easter Day was the beginning, not a conclusion.  All the rest of Jesus life was seen from the vantage point of the cross, or more specifically the empty cross.  Jesus teachings take on meaning only when we take into account who the teacher is, God’s chosen one who is to die and be raised again.

You might say the through the centuries Christians have begun their journeys of faith by running to the empty tomb.  Don’t forget that the early Christians would have had just as much trouble as us with this story – they would have realised the enormous leap of faith needed to believe that this ‘thing’ could happen.  Yes there was plenty in this happening to doubt.  But there is another way to put it, and I use Martin Copenhaver’s[1] words here: 

“that there was something in the story that reached the deepest regions of their hearts and minds, where both doubt and faith are found.  That is, in the resurrection God gave us such a miracle of love and forgiveness that it is worthy of faith and therefore open to doubt.  The very doubts we might hold attest to the scale and power of what we proclaim.  So the place to begin in the life of faith is not necessarily with those things we never doubt.  Realities about which we hold no doubt may not be large enough to reveal God to us..... what we proclaim at Easter is too mighty to be encompassed by certainty, too wonderful to be found only within the borders of our own imaginations.” 

Easter then might just be the place for beginners after all.  The place to experience the profound mystery and the ‘greater than we can imagine’ God, the place where the stakes are outrageous, where we risk faith to find a larger faith.  That this is the one time where we don’t seem to be able to create God in our own image, or box up teachings to suit ourselves.  This day, this experience of the risen Christ, shatters all our preconceived notions of living and dying,  and invites us into a way of life where, yes, the risks are great, the doubts are present, the way uncertain but where the promise of the empty tomb is so great that we cannot help ourselves running towards it.

And as we gather round the table with Christ in our midst today may this promise of new life be deepened and our hopes be lifted up in the very mystery of the risen Christ among us.  Amen

Margaret Garland

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[1] [1] Martin B Copenhaver in Feasting on the Word (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2010)  p.371

Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 6 April, 2014 Lent 5

Readings: Ezekiel 37: 1-14,  John 11: 17-36

Let us pray:  May the word of my mouth and the mediations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our sustainer.  Amen.

I read recently that there is a surprising resurgence of biblical mega production movies at the moment  – Noah just released and films on Moses, Mary and Herod due out in the next year.  As the news report said: not since the epics of the 50s (Ben Hur, Ten Commandments and Quo Vadis) have we seen so many breastplates and leather, swords and sandals.  And the pull seems to be not just the sweeping storylines but also the possibilities that special effects and 3D afford in bringing these truly spectacular visual adventures to our screens.  So can’t you just see a film maker getting enthusiastic over the reading from Ezekiel!  Dry bones – desert – breath of God –bones knitted together, skeletons rising to a vast multitude.....

But we get ahead of ourselves – let us spend a moment with the ‘dry bones’ themselves –the scene that greets Ezekiel when he first enters that valley of desolation.  Bones as far as the eye can see!

The people of Israel at that time were in a period of deep despair and hopelessness.  Generations into exile from their homes, they had pooh poohed Ezekiel’s prophesies of the destruction of Jerusalem only to hear that the temple and the city had been demolished, and they felt isolated and rejected by God – believing that exile from the promised land meant exile from the protection and patronage and relationship with God.  Ezekiel himself came from a priestly school of thought that closely associated God’s blessings and presence with the promised land.  Where in this sea of desolation so far from home was God to be found? 

One of my favourite hymns – ‘Nothing, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God’.  Yet the people of Israel proclaim the absence of God in their exile, in the time when they needed God most. 

Similarly, in the Gospel reading for today, Mary and Martha both said that if Jesus had only been there, Lazarus would not have died – they noted his absence in their despair,  seeing the resurrection hope only in the promise of the last day. 

We are not averse to claiming the absence of God when things get difficult for us too, digging a pit of pessimism and hopelessness and filling it with dry bones. 

But I wonder if we should not turn that thinking around – acknowledge that the spirit of God, the very breath of God is not absent from our lives but rather surrounding us, waiting to be let in.  Let me explain a bit further.  Could it be that the people of Israel, in their desert place, had excluded the Spirit of God through their mistaken understanding of who God is.  If they believed God would only bless and nurture them in the promised land, in a particular place, then it followed that when they were separated from the place they were separated from God.  Ezekiel and his people had to rethink their understanding of God, to believe that God was present, would renew and restore them to life again, that they would find hope and blessing in the new Zion that they would build, that their dry bones would be filled with life again.

It is a powerful picture that Ezekiel paints - of the spirit hovering overhead, breathing new life into the dry bones –that John brings of the raising of Lazarus to new life, a life that even death cannot stand against.   And it raises for me the question – what is it that we need to rethink in our understandings of God if we are to be open to the breath of the Spirit that leads and nurtures, even when, especially when we see no way forward for ourselves. 

And I wonder if some of our dry bones have to do with the sidelining of our spirituality, an increasing disengagement with hearing the voice of God for the here and now, for us, the people of God; a reliance on stories that no longer reflect God’s presence and purpose here in this place.   What do I mean by that?  Well there are lots of thoughts about the ways we might limit our understanding of God, but actually today I want to concentrate  not on the what but the why. 

It seems to me that anytime we switch off the Holy Spirit, the presence of God that breathes new life and hope and restoration into our lives and into this world, we end up floundering – noting the absence of God.  One of my early memories of theological thinking was realising that the church I was part of didn’t really ‘do’ the Holy Spirit.  We were a Christ focussed church, managing at the same time to rationalise the divinity of God and skirt around any real engagement of the Spirit in our lives.  Simplified I know but that was how it felt.  Somewhere in our history we have created a church that tends to keep the Holy Trinity of God out of kilter, elevating one aspect above the other at the expense of our relationship with a God who is holy and divine mystery, son, and spirit – three in one!

For when we no longer hear the voice of God, the presence of the Spirit interpreted in the life and teachings of Christ and held in power of a Creator God, then we are a valley of dry bones – and we can become an organisation, a club just like any other gathering of like minded people.  Then the voice we listen to is that of the secular world – we bend with the teachings that say:  self is most important, we make our own futures, injustice is to be accepted, and that love is ok to be conditional. 

I tell you another thing that happens when we shut out that openness to spirituality in our church and our lives – we can become almost apologetic for being a Christian, convince ourselves that there is not much we can do against the detractors and kind of shut ourselves in, quietly and gracefully fading away.  The world we live in is no longer particularly kind to faith communities – and a part of us quite clearly understands why that is.  But how are we responding to the people who are dissing the church, often from a quite ignorant viewpoint – do we have the understandings of God that allow us to respond, to stand  tall in our belief and in fact to believe that we even have the right to also be heard.  Too often we are reluctant to engage, unsure of our voice, diffident about our faith and our God.  And when we are sitting only on the somewhat fragile throne of past glories and not creating our own place as God’s people, not hearing and responding to the voice of God in the here and now are we not dry bones waiting to be covered up by the sand.

In case this has all been a bit theoretical – I would like to leave you with a real life situation here in Dunedin – a place where the voice of the people of God, including my own, has been strangely quiet.

Many of you have ties with the St Martin’s community, with the island that sits out here in the harbour.  When I first connected  with this group four years ago I was quite quickly aware  of some very real tensions between those who honoured the Christian  origins of this group and those who were quite passionately determined to get rid of all this spirituality and focus on the environmental aspect only.  Now there would be not one person of faith there who did not also passionately support care for creation but unfortunately the opposite is not true.  Nowadays we tend to talk of the spiritual value of the community as being much broader than just Christianity but nonetheless this was a fundamental value of the founders of St Martin’s Island Community.  And yet currently there appears to be a real drive to reinvent the group as purely secular – even to the extent of changing the name so the Saint is gone.  Where is our voice in this, or do we prefer to let the breath of God be shut out of this place that for so many of us has been a  restoring  life giving sanctuary, a place of the presence of God ?

Margaret Garland

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A Poem by Dempsy R. Calhoun (unpublished) from Feasting on the Word Year A volume 2; p.124

Bone lay scattered and artifactual

Wind-rowed like dead branches

Whose tree bodies repeat the dessication

All hope bleached and lost

Living moisture evaporated

Calcified memories of what was

Or seeds of what could be

Wandering shards of vessels

That once thrummed with pure energy

Where honour and dishonour wrestled

Stripped of living water to walk the hills

Needing only gravity to line the valley

It was never about the bones anyway

Rather a glimpse of pure power

A reminder of who’s in charge of restoration

Real hope lies in the source.

Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 23rd May, 2014 Lent 3

Readings:  John 4:5-30,  Romans 5: 1-11

Let us pray:  May your word O God speak to us here today and may we find peace, truth and challenge as your people, your body.  In Jesus name.  Amen.

Imagine:  There is a person, let us say a bloke who lives in a quite nice small city, not doing too well but mostly managing in between crisis, currently living with a partner, that’s going ok ish, likes to indulge in his morning habit of popping down to the cafe for his newspaper and a coffee in the morning. He feels in control if he can stick to this habit at least.  But this morning as he is sitting there, in comes a bit of a stranger – immigrant probably, and, though he thinks ‘you can’t be too sure of those folk’ he responds courteously enough to them asking for some of his paper to read (although they probably won’t really understand it, he thinks).  Then you both start chatting and you kind of offer some of your story, picking carefully the details you want to share  – but somehow she know more about you than you are prepared to let on and that sets you back a bit. And then somehow the tables are turned – instead of being the one who has something to offer, you are listening avidly, hearing truths and hopes and possibilities from the lips of this person that you have encountered in this, the most mundane of places.  But annoyingly it is interrupted, suddenly: her family arrives:  suspicious that she is talking to someone unknown, someone obviously not quite ‘respectable’, worried that she hasn’t yet been allowed to order her coffee and breakfast.  Not good. You leave – but boy what a story you have to tell and you do.  And that cafe becomes the busiest place ever as neighbours and friends come to check out and meet with this stranger that has so transformed you.

The story of the Samaritan woman has always fascinated me and I couldn’t resist trying to put it into a current context.  And to think about how it is that this story speaks to us here today. 

This reading has been described as an endless source of preaching – a bottomless well so to speak but today I want to think about just a few words which just leapt out at me – and possibly because we had so ably been challenged by Tui and John on Wednesday night on the subject of the water that sustains –

“Whoever drinks of the water of the well will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water I give them will never be thirsty”[1] says Jesus.

We use the word ‘never’ reasonably loosely these days – ‘I would never do that’ or that fluffiest of phrases ‘never mind’.  But this is a much stronger use of the word here – never doesn’t just mean today or tomorrow or for as long as I can be bothered – it means for all time.  Entering into a faith relationship with God through Jesus Christ is an eternity promise of sustaining life, a promise that will not be withdrawn when we stumble, nor does it rely on anything we might do or not do!

Paul is seeking to say just this in his letter to the Romans – that we are justified by faith – this is God’s grace to us, God’s sustaining love is present in our lives forever.  He too wants to get rid of this understanding that we have to be perfect to earn God’s love, that when we experience suffering it means that God is absent from or sitting in judgement on us.  He wants to remind us that Jesus died not for the good and the righteous but for the undeserving – that the gift of the living water of life was given to the world as it is, not as it should be.

We are accepted into relationship with God as we are through faith.  God is present in all aspect of our lives – not just the good times.  I wonder time and time again how we get to that thinking that only those who are prosperous, healthy and wise know God’s blessing.  It’s just so wrong and so incredibly manipulative of Christ’s teaching.  But I know that we easily, almost inevitably question the presence, or rather absence of God when we are at our low points in life.  I do. Things are going wrong – what have I done?  This hurts – where are you, why can’t you, or won’t you, fix it?.   Our challenge from the readings today I would suggest is to understand the depth of God’s love in every aspect of our lives, but especially in the difficult times, to know the peace of Christ, that core sense of being loved and valued that can get you through (not wipe out mind you but get you through) the most difficult of times, that sustains no matter what is going on.

Paul tells us that this peace, this assurance of the unfailing water of life is especially known through the life and death of Jesus, and that it is this love poured into his heart that has sustained him through the suffering he endured – and that he came out of it stronger in faith and in praise.

So can we, like the people in the Psalms, worship God in spirit and in truth no matter what is going on in our lives.  The people of Israel had known enormous suffering: war, invasion, destruction, deportation – and yet with every fibre of their being they could raise this powerful awe-inspiring song of worship –

O come, let us sing to the Lord;
   let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! 
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
   let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!

God was deep and present in their hearts, in their lives no matter what was going on around them.

So how might that look for us?  Lets go back to the story I started with - the bloke wouldn’t have gone home to find job offers overflowing his letter box, that his relationships were all sweet and sugar coated, or that his decisions were always wise and fruitful.  No way.  But he would have gone knowing that he was not alone in dealing with these daily issues and the love of God was with him always, guiding, nurturing, nourishing him through.  That deep heart core was assured of the love and grace of God.  Maybe he might have found he couldn’t stop smiling or bursting out into fairly untuneful singing or was suddenly able to sit at peace just listening for the sights and sounds of God around him in people he’d known all his life.  Maybe next time disaster hit he was able to hold back on the anger, the frustration, the sense of aloneness and even to find in it a sense of God at work.  Maybe he might even have gone to find others with whom he could talk and share and question and find comfort.  And he might have found it in his heart to persist even when those people didn’t get where he was coming from or seemed to shut him out sometimes.  Maybe he found he had more gumption than he thought and could offer some of his learnings into others experiences in a way that might help.

And maybe he found in those people some who understood his new found joy in life, who like him wanted to know how to live a better life, and how the teaching of Jesus helped him do that – people who didn’t laugh when he sang loudly his songs of praise and who seemed to welcome him unreservedly when they ate together even though he didn’t quite get the way things were done.

Maybe he had tasted the water of life and nothing was ever going to be the same again – for he was never alone, never ever unloved.  And for this we say: thanks be to God.

Margaret Garland

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[1] John 4: 13-14a

Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 16th March 2014. Lent 2

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

Sermon, Opoho Church Sunday 9th March 2014

Readings:  Matthew 4:1-11

Let us pray:

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

The temptations of Jesus in the wilderness.  Not the easiest start or the most comfortable fit for the first Sunday of Lent as we look for a gentle introduction into our journey toward Easter.  Placed as it is in Matthew’s Gospel directly between Jesus baptism and the beginning of his journey to the cross, the passage clearly is of import for us, but how?

Is this reading primarily about struggle – God’s Son and the Devil battling it out on the desert plains.  Confrontation, battle, fighting for control, dark moments like this painting by Rosetta Jallow.[1]

Or is it about the act itself - ‘temptation’. Warning us to beware, bulking us up for the strength to resist.  Probably most of us will, I imagine, know the hymn by Horatio Palmer written in the 1860’s

Yield not to temptation, for yielding is sin;
Each vict’ry will help you some other to win;
Fight manfully onward, dark passions subdue;
Look ever to Jesus, He’ll carry you through.

Yet while I was studying this passage, I came to a different (for me anyway) understanding that kind of distracted me from this ‘struggle for supremacy’ and ‘evil of temptations’ interpretation and guided me into a rather simple message that spoke clearly to me.  And that is that the thing that most leads us away from God is the misuse of power.  This is suggested by the way that Matthew has presented this story to us.

When you look afresh at it, this is a narrative almost totally devoid of practical advice, spiritual encouragement or moral exhortation.  It is what we call today an action sequence.  Very little personification, deliberations or value judgements at all are given to us to ponder.  This is what happened – end of story.

When we look at the brief mention of the wilderness experience in Mark’s Gospel: we have a sense of both the earth and heaven strengthening Jesus for unknown temptations.  He was not alone, held in the care of creation and creator.  Even in Luke’s story, similar to Matthew in much of the detail, there are more obvious and ongoing battle lines drawn – the devil waited till Jesus was hungry from fasting before approaching, and quite clearly hadn’t finished with Jesus – the last line is ‘when the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.’[2] Much more relational and manipulative than Matthews version.

Matthew, by using such an unadorned way of writing and refusing to provide, as one commentator put it, anything remotely useful to reader or preacher, is I think seeking to turn our attention away from the struggle (for it can be argued that there is the sense that the outcome is never in doubt, Jesus shows not a chink of vulnerability) and away from the teaching inherent in Jesus responses (for it seems to be more about Jesus and his strength of character and obedience as God’s beloved than any user-friendly guide to how to deal with temptation) and toward other truths.

Actually I loved the image that Gregor used for the front of the service sheet today – and I went searching for some more of the images by Stanley Spencer – they all seem to interpret Jesus time in the wilderness in the same way as Matthew - as not much about whether Jesus can survive the temptations but rather to show that he is grounded and unassailable in the power of his relationship with God.  The one that particularly connected for me is this one – where Jesus is contemplating the hen with her chicks and experiencing the 40 days of wilderness living.  This suggests that Jesus was not the woebegone, on the edge, vulnerable figure locked in a battle with the devil but someone really fully aware and safe as the beloved child of God in the power and protection of the oneness of creation.

So if Matthew is not writing to teach how to deal with temptation or to tell of struggle between Jesus and the Devil, what does that leave us with?  I would say  it leaves us with the questions - that the Devil asks. 

This was the Devils big day – planned for and anticipated with some hope of effective sabotage.  And so what, after great consideration, is put before Jesus as the best shot – the temptation of power.  Miraculous power , spectacular power, termporal power and this last the most powerful of all.. 

This was felt to be the surest way to lead us astray – the offering of power

Jesus saw it for what it was – the quickest way to distract us from God, the best thing to destroy love, the most effective way to replace God in our lives.

How might that look today?  Well you could liken the changing of the stone into bread as an attempt to set aside the laws of nature and experience of this world, one that God created and was pleased with, and to introduce a new order - as one commentator put it – a redemption theology that leaps straight to the kingdom without the cross, seeking to bypass the world as it is and look only to a miraculous new world. And this gives us permission to ignore what is happening around us, to abuse the planet and dismiss the suffering and refute the world we live in with all its tensions and paradoxes and vey human ups and downs – it takes us right away from the way of compassion and love that Christ calls us to here and now. 

Then the second temptation – the  power of the spectacular – jump and let us experience the thrill as the angels catch you at the last moment.  Show us something amazing and we will aspire to it.  If it’s not exhibited with all the fanfare – we won’t call it good.  Our current obsession with celebrity status surely underlies this message.  The church when it denies its humanity, its fallibility, which seeks to  promote a Jesus whose role is to make all things right for us – again takes us out of the real world and into a place of aspiration for that which is not – there we go, off the track again.  

And then the power of political control – blatant, no persuasion used here – just plain total control of the world.  Domination – my way or no way!

This is the scariest of the scenarios – the right to say how it’s going to be.  We see this where a religion seeks to control access to God, when we hold up a Christ that exercises not the power of love but the power of retribution and exclusion.  Hey how is this for a story of power that the devil would be absolutely delighting in. The person who posted this on FaceBook suggested that it makes you want to give up Christianity for Lent. 

 There is a pastor in a Christian church in ?  US who is offering as a raffle prize at an upcoming service ( and if you haven’t choked on that alone) he is offering a AR-15 assault rifle – oh and just in case that isn’t enough the bible verse he is quoting in his posters is John 14:27  ‘my peace I give unto you.’  This same weapon was used to slaughter 26 school children and staff in 2012.   The power of having certainty of right for others is perhaps the most invidious and invasive of all.

We talk about and believe in the power of our creator God, the gospel of divine love made known in the life death and resurrection of Christ, (and here’s a statement that you can challenge me on) but never in the history of the church has anyone succeeded in exercising the power that puts self first without diminishing in the only power in the world that Christ calls us to exercise:  the power of reconciling love, especially for the weak and the suffering and the vulnerable, for us. 

Margaret Garland

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[1] http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/jesus-the-temptation-rosetta-jallow.jpg

[2] Luke 4:13 NRSV