A Word For All Seasons

Month: July 2025 (page 1 of 1)

July 7, 2025 / 0 Comments

MF23 “You are the Holy One of God”: Sermon for St Peter’s Day

St Peter’s, Wellington NZ, 29 June 2025

Bishop Richard Randerson

You may well wonder why the two greatest saints, St Peter and St Paul, share the same feast day while the apostle Bartholomew, about whom little is known, has a whole day to himself. So today at the Cathedral of St Paul they will be celebrating Paul while here at St Peter’s we celebrate Peter.

We are told that Peter was crucified on Vatican Hill c64 by Nero who accused Christians of starting the great fire of Rome.  Peter requested to be crucified upside down, feeling unworthy to die in the same way as Jesus.

He is buried under the high altar of St Peter’s church in Rome  – several layers down where excavators discovered the bones of a 1C Palestinian. Richard Rohr (Catholic priest and writer) said “An uneducated fisherman has the largest tomb in the world”.

Much can be said about Peter:

He was called with his brother Andrew and James and John at Lake Gennesaret, also known as the Sea of Galilee where Jesus said: “I will make you fishers of people”

Then at the time of Jesus’ arrest and trial Peter denied three times being a follower of Jesus – and then was totally devastated and wept bitter tears when he heard the cock crow, as Jesus had predicted.

Then  (John 21.15-19 Peter’s calling is renewed when the risen Jesus asks him three times “Do you love me?” Peter said “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you?” And Jesus said “Feed my sheep”.

 In Acts 12.1-11 we read of Peter’s miraculous escape from prison. At this distance it is hard to verify the exact historical details of how chains fell off and a prison gates opened of its own accord, but clearly for the Church there was a message that their God was a God who sets people free from the greatest bondage and stands with them against all the powers of evil that might assail them.

The two epistles, 1 Peter and 2 Peter, are not thought to be written by St Peter because of  a later date and differences in language and style. Lesser known authors sometimes attributed their work to a famous person to draw attention to their message. The same can be said of the three letters attributed to John and the letters attributed to James and Jude. Together they date from the 2C and are known as the Catholic (for all) epistles.

But the heart of today’s message lies in  the Gospel (Matthew 16.13-19) when Jesus asks his disciples: “Whom do people say the Son of Man is?”  Theologian Raymond Pelly says “Son of Man “ is a title often used and it means a representative human being. Jesus is both human as we are and yet is also the Messiah, the chosen one, the anointed one, who through the Cross opens the way for all of us to become sons and daughters of God.

Richard Rohr said that faith is not about doctrines but lies in putting our trust in God who is perfect love and infinite light.

In John 6.66-69 Peter said to Jesus:“ Lord, to whom else  shall we go? You have the words of eternal life and we have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” So faith is a very personal thing – perceiving the truth in Jesus and committing ourselves to discipleship.

And Jesus said to Peter “This is the rock (Peter=petros=rock), the foundation stone on which  the Church will be built. The rock is not St Peter but the faith which he has just confessed in Jesus as the Holy one of God.

So, on St Peter’s Day we remember:

  • A great saint who was called by Jesus, three times denied him but was restored to serve
  • The Church, likewise called, often fails, but is renewed in every generation to proclaim God’s grace
  • Ourselves – each one of us is called. We too know failure, yet God reaches out to us to bring us back as his disciples.

Like Peter we say:

 Lord to whom else can we go? You have the words of eternal life and we have come to know and believe that you are the Holy One of God.

This has been the tradition of this parish for 177 years, and we are the ones who today stand in that tradition and are called to carry on.

From our offertory hymn:

Work shall be prayer, if all be wrought

As thou wouldst have it done

And prayer, by thee inspired and taught,

Itself with work be one.           AMR 13. Words: J Ellerton

SERMON ST for PETER TEXT 2025Download
July 7, 2025 / 2 Comments

GS15 Sarah Sentilles, God, Faith and the Creed

Sarah Sentilles, God and the Creeds

 Bishop Richard Randerson

Sarah Sentilles’ (USA) (Breaking up with God – a Love Affair), visited Wellington at a Writers’ Festival. The book tells her story of life and faith:

  • A cradle Christian
  • Key church member
  • Had a strong sense of God’s love and protection
  • Set out for ordination (Episcopal/Anglican)

But at university doubts set in

  • How could God of love allow evil? – poverty, war, violence
  • What use was prayer to such a God?
  • The creeds were problematic

She decided to quit the path to ordination and the Church, and today is a teacher and writer, using art as a tool to peace.

Who of us would not identify with Sarah on some of those issues?

Some say the creeds with mental reservations over parts of them.

The problem of evil is only a problem if you think of God as a divine train controller without whom nothing moves.

We don’t put our faith in creeds. The creeds are merely signposts, words and pictures constructed by humans wrestling with some of the big issues about God and humankind.

The creeds point to God and can help us on the journey. Like an AA roadsign saying Wellington: we don’t confuse the sign with the city, but if the sign helps us on our way, it’s done its job.

Faith begins with an experience, not with a creed. Here are some examples:

Exodus 3: Moses at Mt Sinai (Horeb)

  • minding his father-in-law’s sheep
  • Hears God’s call and encounters God in the bush –burning but not consumed
  • “Put off your sandals: this is holy ground”, God tells him.
  • His vocation follows to liberate Israel from Egypt

Faith begins with an encounter. Seldom an encounter like Moses had at Sinai, or Paul on the Damascus road.

Fast forward to the same mountain c 850 BC: Elijah fleeing for his life from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, to Mt Horeb/Sinai, site of God’s covenant with Moses. God asks ‘What are you doing here? And Elijah pours out his tale of woe.

There follows the wind that splits the rocks; then earthquake; fire – God was in none of them. God was in the silence that followed, the ‘soft whisper of a voice’.

So our encounter with the living God is very often a small voice, an idea that comes in the night, or in a conversation, or seeing something that moves us on the media. As Joan Puls  says: “Every Bush is burning”.

In John 3 we read how Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, comes to Jesus by night, searching, sensing that in Jesus something deeper of God is to be found.

Jesus tells him he must be born again, of Spirit, to which Nicodemus responds. Later he appears again helping to take Jesus’ body down from the Cross.

So we find Moses, Elijah, Paul, Nicodemus and countless others each encountering God in their own way, as does each one of us. What have been our own encounters with God?

But then, as the Church has always done, we try to put experience into words – doctrines and liturgies – which may or may not help.

When Moses asked ‘who are you?’. God replied: “I am who I am”. Tell my people ‘I am has sent you ‘

That very cryptic ‘I am’:  the word for being, essence, simply what is. No fancy words, no creeds. What lies at the heart of life: otherness, transcendence, energy, being part of something bigger than ourselves.

Sarah Sentilles adds similar words: mystery, love, justice, accountability, agency, creativity.

And as Jesus says to Nicodemus – the spirit is like the wind; you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes. The spirit of God is on the move. Believing in God is a willingness to ride the divine wind and to let God take us where God wishes.

So faith is not primarily an intellectual exercise but a direct and personal encounter with the divine mystery.

Notice also the shift in emphasis in the creeds in our worship:

  • p. 410 (NZPB): intellectual propositions
  • p481:  ‘You’ – personal encounter…>>>

And it has an essential communal dimension which reaches out to embrace all people and all creation.

This captured in the doctrine of the Trinity. There’s only one word I find helpful to describe the Trinity – perichoresis (peri –around; choresis – dancing) – dancing in partnership.

Think of a divine dance, as in The Lord of the Dance. So the three persons of the Trinity are not three static entities. They are dancing together, bonding, alive, moving, responding, inter-acting, loving, relating, changing.

And that deeply symbolic picture of the nature of a dancing God reaches out to encompass all else that is.  It is the image for our relationships with one another – the most intimate of our relationships, as well as those of friends and whanau, society, nations and tribes.

It is the model of the Body of Christ – the Church -part of the divine dance of interaction, love and support.

It drives our commitment to justice and peace – as Moses was called to liberate God’s people:  dancing with the poor and oppressed.

And also, of course, dancing with all creation in caring for the environment, seeing all living creatures, sun, moon and earth as brothers and sisters with us.

So I’m sorry Sarah quit the Church, because everything she stands for, the Church stands for also. Our calling is to encounter the living God, to enter into the divine dance so that the fire that is not consumed lives in us, and through us sets all life and creation ablaze with love.

Sarah Sentilles- God and creedsDownload
July 7, 2025 / 0 Comments

AA26 Centring the Edge: Churches, Crises and White-Hot Faith -Dr Andrew Shepherd

A review essay on Duckworth and Jamieson, In-tensional: A Way Forward for the Church. Dr Andrew Shepherd, Department of Theology, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ has written a review of Archbishop Justin Duckworth and Alan Jamieson’s 2024 publication In-tensional: a Way forward for the Church. The essay focuses on the historical, theological and missional aspects of the topic.

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