A Word For All Seasons

Month: May 2023 (page 1 of 1)

May 2, 2023 / 0 Comments

MM01 Aboard the Good Ship Eklay Zia

An entertaining parable as a discussion starter on the Church in mission (or not!).

This sermon was preached at the 1999 synod of the Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn, but could have relevance anywhere. The Eklay Zia was the finest of ships but hadn’t been to sea for years. A parable of the Church engaging with the wider community.

Imagine yourself on a Sunday afternoon stroll along the wharves of a large seaport. Admiring the various ships tied up, you note a particularly fine vessel. Built in traditional style she is a stately and gracious lady. You look to see the ship’s name and find it is one of a fleet owned by the well-known Zia family : the name of this ship is the Eklay Zia. Attached to the gang-plank is a sign which says “All Welcome”, and you climb aboard.

On board the Eklay Zia all is a great hive of activity :

  • some structural engineers are busy moving internal partitions and debating whether one or two bulk-heads might be demolished
  • a committee has just completed a year-long process of reviewing the wages and conditions of the crew
  • on the sun-deck a small group is looking at ways to move the chairs around to provide more warmth for the passengers
  • another group is considering options for re-organising the work teams, changing the leaders and giving them new titles
  • the purser posts regular multi-coloured charts of the ship’s finances
  • word has just been received that one of the vessel’s twin engines is to be permanently decommissioned. This will seriously impede the ship’s progress, and may even cause it to sail around in circles
  • the crew are very busy : when they are not part of one or more of the foregoing committees they are fully stretched looking after the passengers. The passengers by and large are an ageing group, some of them pretty grumpy, and quite demanding in their expectations of the crew.

You notice some rather unusual features of the Eklay Zia :

  • there is no one rostered for duty in the crow’s nest to scan the far horizons, nor are there any navigators to chart the ship’s route
  • no one is in the weather bureau to receive news of potential storms or high seas
  • several deckhands stand ready to raise the gang-plank and let go the mooring lines, but the order never comes
  • below deck the engineers wait for the engine-room telegraph to ring up Full Ahead, but the telegraph has been stuck at Stand By for a long time now, and sometimes indicates Finished with Engines
  • some passengers who bought their ticket a long time ago have grown tired of waiting for the departure, and are now trickling ashore to seek alternative forms of transport
  • in the wardroom a particularly noisy debate is going on : it appears there are some who believe the Eklay Zia should not go to sea at all. The practice of sea-going has been replaced by study courses in Virtual Navigation, and Virtual Seapersonship
  • others are deeply concerned there are so many empty cabins, and want to send scouts ashore to recruit more passengers before sailing.

This latter group carries the day and scouts are selected from the crew for on-shore recruitment of passengers. After a period of training they go ashore to sell tickets for the journey, but are discouraged by the response. Hardly anyone wants to travel on the old Eklay, and there are many who have never heard of the ship. But as they travel up Main Street, and duck into side alleys, the scouts discover some surprising things :

  • they over-hear side-walk conversations outside the cappucino stops and wine-bars, and are astonished at the hedonistic and narcissistic emphasis in much of what is said
  • one with an economic bent has visited the stock exchange and is dismayed to find copies of the Eklay’s newsletter trampled underfoot amidst the hubbub of greedy voices of those who trade the earth’s resources for gain rather than as sources of life
  • one of the scouts has visited the red light district, and senses something of the pain and compassion of the Eklay’s Owner in the body of a dead prostitute. The woman was a solo mum who was assaulted and killed while earning money to put her kids through school
  • two of the women scouts have started regular visits to run-down government tenement blocks, and have seen hope blossom in the eyes of families cast aside as flotsam on the sidelines of a heedless society
  • another scout has joined the Gay and Lesbian Quire and sings at the regular AIDS-day events. There she has sensed the abiding presence of the Owner’s Son in the midst of the rejected and the persecuted
  • the chief scout has developed a program that gathers up groups of young people and takes them to distant lands to live amongst the poor and the homeless. The lives of the young visitors have been changed as they experience courage in the midst of despair, and new understandings of faith and hope have taken root
  • others have gathered with candles in the streets to witness and pray on behalf of innocent lives taken by marauding militias and complicit governments in other lands
  • another scout has been invited to accompany police on their Friday night patrols : this experience has changed his life as he comes face-to-face with a slice of community life he never even knew existed, and he has been deeply shaken by the vulnerability of the police, and the trauma they and their families face each day and night
  • another has stood beside a tree and monument with the families and friends of those who have died from drug overdoses, and in some way has shared their pain and grief, and felt the Owner’s presence in their midst
  • the deputy chief scout has been invited by the city’s managers to convene a group to address the needs of the hungry, the homeless, the sick, the strangers and those in prison
  • one group of scouts have established a camping spot by the sea for youth, who find in friendship and community the compassion and faith that the Owner offers
  • two others sensed the presence of the Owner as they travelled the Brungle road and saw the green hills bathed in the rays of the setting sun. The next day the same sense of presence was evident amidst the snows and eucalypts on the run up to Cabramurra
  • another is working with a group of environmental planners to save vast expanses of the Owner’s estate from salinity and the rolling sands of the encroaching desert
  • yet another has gathered together several key people who used to travel on the Eklay, but now want a more intimate community in which to explore the links between spirituality, ethics and the challenges of corporate life
  • others have stood with farmers on land stricken by endless drought, with forestry workers whose jobs have come to an end, and with parents and young people made redundant from a fish factory declared uneconomic by financial gnomes in a far-away glass tower
  • two scouts have embarked on a journey of reconciliation with indigenous peoples, working the Owner’s teaching about repentance, forgiveness and new life into the very fabric of the national community
  • others again, seeing the loneliness and suffering of young and old alike affected by breakdowns in relationships, have established groups to provide understanding and support, and to build a community that offers hope and purpose for the future
  • some scouts have attached themselves to schools and tertiary campuses : here they seek to inject a measure of vision and values into curricula shaped by narrow ideologies and pragmatic objectives
  • others have gathered groups of folk minstrels and jazz players together to give new life to the Owner’s music and rhythms.

The scouts are disappointed not many people want to book a passage on the Eklay Zia, but they are exhilarated by their encounters with so many different members of the Owner’s family. In some places they have brought small groups together to study the Owner’s teachings, and in others they have been sustained by the food and drink the Owner plenteously supplies.

Fired by such exhilaration they rush back to the Eklay Zia to report on what they have discovered. They bang on the ship’s doors and windows, but the passengers and crew seem reluctant to let them in. When at last they are admitted they are listened to politely for a few minutes, then dismissed with a cheery wave and a few dollars for pocket-money on the road. Those on board become quickly absorbed again in their very full agenda of Eklay-Ziastical business.

Disillusioned, the scouts walk slowly away beyond the yellow pool of light from the Eklay. They return to the city, shrouded now in the darkness of night and chilled by the cold winds from the ocean. Huddling together for warmth, they walk through the red light district, past the shooting gallery, the closed doors of Maccas and DJs, and alongside the looming hulks of the financial towers of glass.

But as they walk there is a perceptible brightening in the sky. A soft glow is pierced by shafts of light until suddenly the scouts are dazzled by the brilliance of a new heaven and a new earth, and a peaceable city coming down from above. Leaders and peoples from every nation are pouring into it, for in this city there is room for all, and the gates are never shut.

Through the middle of the city flows a river of life-giving water, and along the banks trees which produce fruit, and leaves for the healing of the nations. There is no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God Almighty. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.

To Discuss

  1. Dos the Eklay Zia sound like a church near you?
  2. If you analyse the agenda of your church, how much effort is devoted to outreach in the wider community?
  3. What would need to change to enhance a mission of wider engagement?
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May 2, 2023 / 0 Comments

MF17 Trinity: Additional Notes and Quotes

In contemporary theology the Trinity has become a symbol of an interacting diversity in unity: God is expressed in three activities (“Persons”) of creating, redeeming, giving life. While each “Person” is different, yet they live in dynamic interaction with each other. A Greek word  perichoresis expresses it : peri (around) choresis (a dance). The three Persons dance together, hence the modern hymn “I am the Lord of the Dance”.

This divine and trinitarian community becomes the symbol of all of human existence :

  • each of us is called to be part of the dance, with God and with each other
  • the Body of Christ, the Church, an interactive community, diverse gifts in shared mission with other faiths, not blurring our Christian heritage, but working together to cross the divides of cultural, racial and credal difference in the interests of peace and well-being for all
  • we see our links with all members of God’s family, reaching out to others in a relationship of mutual compassion
  • we share in God’s special work of compassion for the poor
  • example in today’s reading from 1 Kings 17. 8-16 : Elijah the prophet comes to the widow of Zarephath seeking food. A poor woman, she has very little but gives of what she has, her act of generosity reflecting God’s grace which ensures her food supply is never depleted.
  • Jesus’ life-giving compassion is seen in this morning’s Gospel (Luke 7. 11-17) where he restores life to the son of the widow of Nain
  • tragic example with the death of Folole Muliaga (woman on a life-support machine at home whose power was cut off for late payment of a bill). The Chair and CEO of powerful corporations and the Prime Minister all descend on a lowly dwelling in Mangere where a family is devastated and grieving. Remote decisions by the powerful are seen as having human consequences in a world where we are all bound to one another.
  • the Earth itself and all Creation are part of the Dance also (Genesis 1)

Thus the Trinity is far more than a philosophical attempt to explain what is after all inexplicable mystery. It becomes a symbol of all of existence in the way we relate to God, each other, all of God’s people and creatures on Earth, and indeed the Earth itself. It is the basis for our trust in God which leads to our mission of compassion, justice, peace and stewardship of the Earth.

James K Baxter : (1) Song to the Lord God (2) Song to the Holy Spirit (NZPB pp 160,157)

Lord God, you are above and beyond all things;

Your nature is to love. You put us in the furnace of the world

to learn to love you and love one another (1)

Lord Christ, you are the house in whom we live

The house in which we share the cup of peace

The house of your body that was broken on the cross

The house you have built for us beyond the stars (1)

Lord, Holy Spirit, in the love of friends you are building a new house.

Heaven is with us when you are with us.

You are singing your song in the hearts of the poor.

Guide us, wound us, heal us. Bring us to the Father. (2)

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May 2, 2023 / 0 Comments

MF16 Trinity Sunday

The divine interaction of the Holy Trinity enables the same life-giving and loving interaction of all people and parts of God’s creation. (With a note on the Athanasian creed).

How many of you have ever said the Athanasian Creed? It is prescribed to be said on Trinity Sunday butI have never used it in 50 years of priesthood. It was probably not written by St Athanasius, more likely St Ambrose around 400AD. It incorporates some traditional affirmations, but includes material designed to exclude some heresies of the day.

Here are some of the words of it:

The Catholic Faith is this that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity

Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the substance

For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost

But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one.

The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible

As also there are not three incomprehensibles, and one incomprehensible.

Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled he shall perish everlastingly.

Note the sting in the tail if we get it wrong!

Such a creed seems a long way from the experience of Pentecost when the disciples were filled with joy and sent out to change the lives of others. Yet how much of that core experience remains when it is poured into the lifeless formula of the trinitarian doctrine, a concept which owes more to Greek philosophy than to the living God?

Let us explore three layers of meaning in the Trinity:

First, the three persons of the Trinity – Father/Creator; Son/redeemer; spirit/life-giver.

Father/Creator reminds us of God’s creative presence in all of life and Creation

  • Genesis 1: God’s word hovers over the formless void and brings Creation into being
  • There is an awesomeness about God’s over-arching presence. In Isaiah 6 we hear of the young prophet being totally overcome with awe as he came face to face with God in the temple and was sent out to call God’s people to turn again to God.   
  • That same sense of the awesome presence of God was described by Pelagius in 4th century Britain. The early Church condemned Pelagius as a heretic, but many see him today as being one of the early exponents of Celtic spirituality. “Everywhere”, wrote Pelagius, “narrow shafts of divine light pierce the veil that separates heaven from earth” (Philip Newell, Listening for the Heartbeat of God).

Son/Redeemer, Jesus: But the God of mystery and awe is also intimately and personally close to us in the life and presence of Jesus. As the disciples walked with Jesus they perceived the special person he was. They noted his singular devotion to God, and his total self-giving love for all. They saw the way he overthrow convention and creed to let God’s love run free. They noted how he satisfied the deepest hunger and thirst of ordinary people.

From this long exposure Peter proclaimed (John 6.68): “Lord to whom else can we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God”.

Spirit/lifegiver: Pentecost brings alive the reality of God as Spirit, as we recall (Acts 2) the tongues of fire that descended upon the disciples, and how they were filled with the Holy Spirit and sent out to proclaim the risen Christ to people of every nation and tongue.

Second layer: So far, so familiar, but Wait! There’s more. In contemporary theology the Trinity has become a symbol of diversity in unity: God is expressed in three activities, or Persons, of creating, redeeming, and giving life. While each “Person” is different, yet they live in dynamic interaction with each other. A Greek word perichoresis expresses it: peri (around) choresis (a dance). The three Persons dance together, hence the modern hymn “I am the Lord of the Dance”.

Third layer: This divine dance becomes the symbol of all of human existence. Each of us is called to be part of the dance.  The Body of Christ, the Church, is an interactive community, with diverse gifts in shared mission. We interact with other faiths, not blurring our Christian heritage, but crossing the divides of cultural, racial and credal difference to bring peace and well-being for all.

Richard Hooker, 16th century Anglican theologian, wrote : “God hath created nothing simply for itself: but each thing in all things, and of everything each part in each other have such interest, that in the whole world nothing is found whereunto anything created can say, ‘I need thee not’.

The relationship with Earth itself, with every creature and element, is expressed movingly in the words of Anglican priest, the late Maori Marsden, who writes of Papatuanuku, the primordial Mother: “Papatuanuku is our mother and deserves our love and respect. She is a living organism with her own biological systems and functions creating and supplying a web of support systems for all her children whether man, animal, bird, tree, grass, microbes or insects”.

So I’m frankly glad we don’t say the Athanasian Creed on Trinity Sunday, as its doctrinal exactitudes exclude the richness of a Trinitarian God. That richness is experienced:

  • In the awesome presence of a God whose word hovers over all creation
  • In the person of Jesus whose love brings us healing, reconciliation and compassion
  • In the Spirit who fills us and enables us to go out with joy and bring healing to others
  • In the perichoresis – the dance of life that links us to all people
  • In our love and care for Creation – God’s gift to us, our children and grand-children

Seen that way the Trinity is far from a lifeless doctrine. It is a symbolic perception based on an experience of the living God that shapes our whole life, our vocation and the Church’s mission. Incomprehensible? I don’t think so!

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May 2, 2023 / 0 Comments

MF15 Pentecost: God’s Spirit Enlivens All Creation

At the 1988 Lambeth Conference, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, told the story of a young British couple who had gone out on colonial service to Africa. In their first letter home they wrote: from our house on the hill we look down on a valley filled with dozens of African families, all living in grass thatched-roof huts. Our nearest neighbours are 200 miles away at the next British post.

This is a Pentecost story, one that asks who are our neighbours, and pushes us to look beyond the established and comfortable parameters of our identity (in this story ‘being British’) to seeing ourselves as part of a much greater community, one that encompasses all of humankind. Those multiple languages the disciples spoke in following the outpouring of God’s Spirit at Pentecost symbolise the Universalising of the Gospel – the Word of God is to go out to all people, all races, all nations.

Let me mention three aspects of Pentecost:

First, the personal: the disciples were fired with the spirit (Acts 2. 2,3) – the pentecostal experience of wind (= pneuma = spirit) and the tongues of fire that came upon them.Knowing the presence and power of the living God is for us all. For some the encounter with God comes in dramatic ways (eg Pentecost, Paul on the Damascus road). (The story is told of a man who came to an Anglican church service and was waving his arms around and speaking in tongues and generally disrupting the worship. At length an usher came and asked him to desist. And the man said: ‘but I’ve got the spirit’. And the usher replied: ‘that may be so, Sir, but you didn’t get it here’).

I have not had a Pentecostal experience as described in Acts 2. My experience of God has been a gentle one, like that of Elijah on Mt Horeb (1 Kings 19. 9-15): God was not in the wind, the fire or earthquake, but God was the still small voice that strengthened him and gave him courage to continue. Or think also of the disciples on the Emmaus road (Luke 24. 13-35): it was the slowly dawning realisation that the stranger they were talking to was Jesus, and that renewed life and hope and faith for them. We must be wary of prescribing any normative manner in which the Spirit comes, but be open to God’s spirit in the multiple experiences of life

Second, MOVING OUT beyond our comfort zone. There were major problems as the disciples encountered those many races and languages. They were astonished to find that God’s Spirt was poured out even on the Gentiles! The Jerusalem Church was not impressed and said ‘they must be circumcised like us and obey the Law of Moses’. Peter, Paul and Barnabas argued robustly against this, and the rules of the church were modified to become more inclusive and less prescriptive.

James Alison, an English Roman Catholic priest and theologian, commented: In a very short space of time in Luke’s story-telling we have gone from something rather like ‘You are no part of our narrative’ through ‘You can be part of our narrative, but only on our terms’ to ‘Heavens, we are part of the same narrative, which isn’t the one either of us thought it was and isn’t on the terms set by either of us’.

Pentecostal faith means being open to difference – different  generations, races, faiths, nationalities, churches, or socio-economic deciles.  In his 2003 book The Dignity of Difference, the then Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes: The test of faith is whether I can make room for difference. Can I recognise God in someone who is not my image? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.

Third, what about all those DEAD BONES in the reading from Ezekiel 37. 1-14? The bones were those of the whole House of Israel, and the two sins that had deadened them were idolatry and injustice. We don’t worship foreign gods in the 21st century, but we do worship the gods of complacency, self-centredness, corporate greed, neo-liberalism and many others. And injustice and inequality are rampant in the western world, and worse when we think of Third World nations. Can the Church and our self-satisfied society live again by being spirit-filled and returning to the paths of the true God?

Pentecostal Christians, then, are those who feel God’s Spirit at work in their own lives, within the Church and all Creation. Michael Mitton has written: “The Spirit is not a tame bird”. We cannot put chicken-wire around the ecclesiastical coop. The coop may contain the chickens, but not the Holy Spirit of God which blows wild and free, and calls us to join courageously in God’s Mission in all its aspects.

Let us think deeply on Ezekiel’s words:  God said to the wind: Come and breathe on these dead, and let them live. So I prophesied as he had ordered, and the breath entered into them; they came to life again and stood up on their feet, a great and immense army.

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May 2, 2023 / 1 Comment

MF14 Ascension Day: God’s Encompassing Love of All Creation

In a visionary essay (Humankind: a hopeful history) this week Dutch historian Rutger Bregman observes that during the COVID 19 crisis hedge fund managers and multinational tax specialists have not been in great demand as being vital for human survival. Instead the key players have been doctors and nurses, social workers, teachers, supermarket staff, transport operators, cleaners and, one might add, the many volunteers at foodbanks and in family support.

Bregman further comments: “The general rule seems to be: the more vital your work, the less you are paid, the more insecure your employment and the more at risk you are in the fight against the coronavirus.” Dr Ashley Bloomfield has more than earned his salary, of course, and security of employment is probably not as issue for over-burdened doctors and nurses. But for many of the lowly paid – the ones that deliver our groceries and pizza, or clear away our trash – vulnerability is an ongoing dynamic.

Add in those who have no job at all, or those living in crowded slums, refugee camps and prisons, and one sees just how many billions are affected by COVID 19 worldwide. COVID can strike any of us, rich or poor, but what Bregman is saying to us – and we know he’s right – that it strikes the poor and vulnerable disproportionately compared with many of us. Which leads us nicely into Jesus’ Ascension, which the Church observed on Thursday.

In Acts 1.9 today we read that Jesus ‘was taken up into heaven as the disciples watched, and a cloud hid him from their sight’. (You may recall pictures from Sunday School days of the awestruck disciples gazing upward at two feet hanging out the bottom of a cloud).

It is a symbolic image that begs the question: what does the Ascension mean in our global society today?  Jesus’ life and mission were lived out among a particular people (the Jews) in a particular place (Palestine) in a particular time (1st C). His incarnation was local, but God’s mission was always universal, for all people in every age and place. The Ascension symbolises the lifting of Jesus from that local context into a global one for all time. Just as COVID 19 is binding together the whole human race, so Jesus’ ascension symbolises the love of God in Christ encompassing every person and place, binding us as one family. Whoever “they” may be, “they” are part of “us”.

In Acts 1. 8, 9 Jesus tells his disciples that they will be filled with power when the Holy Spirit comes upon them, and that they will be ‘witnesses for Him in Jerusalem, Judaea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’.  Thus the feast of Pentecost, which we observe next Sunday, is foreshadowed – the day when the Holy Spirit fell with tongues of fire on the heads of the disciples, and God’s word was heard by people of every race, each in their own language. These verses also remind us of Jesus’ call to us to be “witnesses unto me” in all we do – life, work and conversation.

In today’s Gospel (John 17. 1-11) there are two key themes, one about eternal life, and one about the nature of God’s glory. John speaks of eternal life as the special relationship between God and Jesus, a relationship extended to Jesus’ disciples. V3: this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 

Eternal life is not about life for eternity after we die (Life after death is a topic for another sermon!). John uses the Greek word aionios, (eon in English) not in a chronological sense, like going on for ever and ever, but rather life of a different nature, or quality, perhaps tikanga Christian, not bound by time, but life lived in relationship with God in Christ. It is a present reality lived by all those who know God, and Jesus Christ whom God has sent. Each one of us can live this eternal life now.

Secondly, the Gospel talks about God’s glory. Jesus prays (v1) : “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you”. God’s glory has been revealed in Jesus throughout his life, seen (for example) in Jesus’ miracles, or signs, most recently in the raising of Lazarus from the dead (John 11.1-45). But now Jesus will glorify God through his death on the Cross. Thus the glory of God is revealed not just in strength and authority, but also in weakness, the weakness of love and self-giving. As he died on the Cross Jesus said “It is finished” (tetelestai,  from telos, meaning purpose). His work/purpose on earth was complete.

St Paul puts this well in Philippians 2.6-11 when he writes of Jesus who, being in the nature of God, took on the very nature of a servant,… and   humbled himself by becoming obedient to death…Therefore God exalted him to the highest place…so that every tongue might confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God.

Asension Day speaks to us of God’ love which extends over all the earth, binding us together as one family, and one Creation. It is with this perspective that we should approach the Covid pandemic. Rutger Bregman writes that “the age of excessive individualism and competition could come to an end, and we could inaugurate a new age of solidarity and connection…I am not optimistic, but hopeful, for hope propels us to action.”

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