“When the congregation disperses and Christians go out into the world, the conflict between the Church becomes very explicitly, so to speak, personalised. A Christian lives from day to day in the tension between Church and world, between Christ and Caesar, between grace and law, between salvation and sin, between life and death, and between freedom and bondage.

To live in that tension worship in the congregation and witness in the world must be integral to one another. There is no solitary witness of a Christian in the world, isolated from the congregation, because the sacramental worship in the congregation is the comprehensive and exemplary Christian witness in the world. Any so-called Christian action in the world is void in the inception if it is cut off from the informing support, edification, love and nurture of the celebration of the gospel in the congregation. In reality the Christian bears the tension between the gospel and the world in radical and transforming witness only because he participate in the event of the congregation. It is that event which enables him to witness while dispersed in the world….”

“When the congregation worships God, God is vindicated before all men; the world may see who God is and believe what he has done for the world in Christ. In the Holy Communion, the new community in Christ, the Christian society is manifest in history as over against all other nations and all the societies men make as a witness that the true hope for community is in Christ” (122-123)

[italic s mine]

What do you think? Does Stringfellow claim too much for the liturgical event of Holy Communion? Is it primarily witness or reception? I don’t mean to suggest that these things are mutually exclusive, for it seems to me that the line about ‘worship and witness’ being ‘integral to one another’ is just right.

Anyone know anything about the reception of his thought? Perhaps it has something to do with the irony in the subtitle of Death and Life. I presume this Harvard Professor was an American, however his book is a powerful critique of functional religion in America – worship of death. I imagine such provocative claims did not endear him to many in 1970s US.

Amal (2007) is a morality tale reminiscent of a classic fable. Amal, a poor Indian rickshaw driver is the perfect saint, unbelievably patient and kind and compassionate. A wealthy man near the end of his life, disillusioned with the world is on a quest to see if there is any goodness in the world. He tests those he encounters with his grumpiness and rude offensive behaviour. Amal  astonishes him with his selflessness. The rich man, as his last act, changes his will to bequeath his worldly wealth to Amal, giving his trusted solicitor a month to locate Amal. And so the chase is on, with a predictably wicked and deceptive troupe of family who want to protect their inheritance from Amal. Meantime Amal in an act of compassion is paying the hospital bill for a girl injured in an accident and sells his rickshaw to a wealthy landowner, only to learn that the girl has died on the operating table.

Apart from the captivating portrayal of life among the contrasts of an Indian city, the main interest in this story centres around the resolution of the story. So if you want to watch the movie the way it should be watched, stop reading now and scroll down to my review of Adam’s Apple.

When the month is up, after many twists and turns, Amal is found and delivered in the nick of time to the lawyers office, still unaware of the pending reversal of fortune. He has work to do so does not want to stay long, but out of politeness looks at a letter from his beneficiary without mentioning that he cannot read. When the lawyer leaves to attend to a phone call Amal walks out the door and gives his letter to a beggar girl who has pencils but not paper to write on.

Thus just as the traditional battle between good and evil is about to be won the forces of good and karma, presumably , will do its thing, it all unravels and apparent redemption turns out to be tragedy. Yet it is not tragedy, for Amal is happy as a rickshaw driver, his kindness is its own reward and we are left wondering why we were so keen for him to be wealthy

Adam’s Apples (2008) is nothing if not unusual. It takes black comedy to a new level. So if you’re squeamish, be warned. The main characters are a Priest, Ivan (who takes in convicts for rehabilitation including in this case), a neo-nazi skinhead, a sex offender, a trigger-happy gas station robber and an alcoholic. The priest is disturbingly optimistic and sees the bright side of everything, treating any apparent misfortune as a temptation from Satan. Adam the vicious neo-nazi who arrives for his community service seeks to pop the rose tinted bubble that surrounds Ivan the Priest. On his arrival Ivan asks him about his goals during rehabilitation and he sarcastically replies that he would like to bake a pie. Ivan then gives him the task of looking after the apple tree and baking an apple pie. When taken to his room Adam is given a Bible which keeps falling open at the book of Job which he initially ignores. During his time there he learns from the local doctor of the terrible background to the Ivan’s life. He was raped and abused constantly as a child, when he got married his first child is paralysed with cerebral palsy. His wife then committed suicide. What’s more the priest has recently been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour and bleeds out his ears when under stress. On learning this Adam makes it his mission to burst the priest’s rose-tinted bubble and bring him face to face with reality. While doing this he ends up reading the book of Job and confronts the priest with the view that it is not Satan but God who is delivering him these trials. God hates him. At one point it appears that the Ivan abandons his faith to face reality. In an encounter with Adam’s old mates from the skin head mob Ivan is shot in the head. However we learn that miraculously the shot has simply destroyed his tumour, saving his life. Adam salvages one apple from the chaos, bakes his pie and shares it with Ivan. We are left with the suggestion that perhaps Adam’s brutal realism may also have saved his life and perhaps his mission to the convicts will be quite a different matter from now on.

Telling the story in this way highlights the theological themes rather than the comically bizarre and gruesome events which pervade the narrative. However, in the end the movie did remind me of Arthur C. McGill’s account of American spirituality as ethic of death-avoidance and cultivated optimism. For McGill death-avoidance masks a more basic worship of death’s power, in a context where identities are formed in self-possession. In this context McGill argues the function of God and belief in God is to rule the world of appearances in which death is avoided at all costs. Because we know that death rules, “in the world of fabricated appearances, there love can rule and there the God of love can have a kingdom. And as the crucial figure in the illusory world the Christian God helps us veil and endure this nightmare world” (p. 39, Death and Life: An American Theology). Viewed through McGill’s lenses we can see Ivan the priest as parody and an embodiment of this American optimism. In this reversal of the story of Job,  Ivan’s salvation comes when he does curse this American God of fabricated death-avoidance.

We look at the world, and we see injustice… unrighteousness. We see a world whose population has just reached 7 billion. And 1 in 7 of those 7 billion people is hungry. Well over a billion people have to live on the equivalent of $2 a day. We see a world in which incredible wealth and power is vested in a tiny minority – a kind of new aristocracy – while millions die, a world where some countries have a life expectancy of half that of countries like our (yes a life expectancy of about 40 years in some places).

All of our three readings today have this in common: they are confident that the justice of God will come… And the basic reason for this is simple faith in God… the faithful creator. God is not uninvolved in creation or disinterested or impotent… God’s justice will come.

So when Isaiah sees his people oppressed and injustice in the ascendancy the voice of God says to Isaiah. ‘Comfort my people…’ Then the voice cries out:

“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. ⁴Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. ⁵Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

Have you ever stood near a great mountain and wondered what it would take to move it? In the face of apparently immovable and impossible opposition…the justice of God will come to earth.

But how? How does change come?

Our epistle reading from 2 Peter is an odd one in the bible. It speaks of a cataclysmic burning up of the world before the new world. The Epistle of Peter stands alone in the NT with this idea. Revelation 21 talks more neutrally of the passing away of an old world with the coming of a new one, whereas in contrast Paul in Romans talks of the renewal of a creation in bondage.

In short we might say that although the whole Biblical tradition never gives up hope that God’s justice will come, there is some variation on what will happen to the world of injustice that appears right now to be an immovable mountain, and an impossible problem.

One thing they do agree on in the New Testament is that the justice of God has already broken into an unjust world. Change has both come… and is still coming.

For the Gospels the justice of God comes decisively with the life of Jesus. They wrote these things called Gospels or ‘good news stories’ to tell of the good news of the coming of God’s kingdom – justice was breaking into the world in Jesus.

And so today we read of John the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness. John was an interesting change agent. He epitomized the outsider. He left the city and civilization for the wilderness. He stood outside the injustice of the world, he looked like an outsider, dressed in camel’s hair, he ate locusts and honey. [He was like the green party before the advent of Russell Norman when Nandor Tanchos set their fashion agenda.] His keyword was ‘repent’, which basically means ‘change your mind’. I was going to say he was like the Occupy movement… only he didn’t occupy, he went outside. So people came to him and listened to his rant about what was wrong with the world and agreed to turn their lives around. They symbolized this with a ritual washing in the Jordan river, and then headed back to life-as-usual full of good intentions. It was like a Bible Class Camp really… or like a New Year’s resolution.

And like both of these things… I suspect… it didn’t change the world. Perhaps it can never change the world. Recently I’ve been reading a book by James Davison Hunter called To Change the World. He says that the standard view of how the world is changed goes something like this. If people change their ideas, one person at a time, the world will change. It’s about the power of the individual and the power of ideas. This is our default setting. Hunter says it’s wrong. Ideas on their own don’t change the world. The world is not rational like that. Ideas are always linked to ways and patterns of doing things with others. They are bound up with habits and institutions. He says, look at the States… faith communities have been a dominating presence there for all of its history. “As late as 1960s less than 2% claimed not to believe in God (even today you only get 12 to 14%). That means over 80% (nearly 90%) have this belief, and some faith commitment, most having some kind of Judeo-Christian idea of God. And yet in the business world, in government in academia and in entertainment it is profoundly secular and materialistic in it’s culture. It seems like a prime example of a place where ideas don’t change the world.

I think he’s right. And I think John the Baptist realized too that something was wrong with what he was doing. Resolutions do not a revolution make. At the end of our passage we read:

“The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. ⁸I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Baptism with water is merely a way of symbolizing one’s own determination to change one’s ways. Baptism with the Holy Spirit is a whole different kettle of fish. It‘s God’s entry into and engagement with the inner working of our psyche and our social life. So John, in spite of all he had been doing on the outskirts of town, ends up declaring that unless God’s justice interrupts our world and invades the innermost workings of our lives nothing will really change.

Will Watersford, the NZ Director of the Global Poverty Project, tells a parable that he thinks Jesus forgot to mention, but should have. It’s the parable of the sardines.

The kingdom of heaven is like a School of Sardines. A School of Sardines has the same biomass as a Blue Whale. A whale takes about 3 minutes to change direction. On the other hand a school of Sardines switches direction in an instant. It appears positively nimble in comparison. But what happens with the Sardines is that there needs to be a group of ‘committed sardines’ (to use the technical scientific term). And when there are sufficient ‘committed sardines’ moving in a certain direction the whole School will suddenly turn.

Slow down the video over 2000 and more years… what appears ineffectual (from the point of view of the committed sardines)… just a small proportion of people, not simply people with different ideas, but people with different lives, going against the flow, can quite suddenly make an enormous difference. So that in the end it seems like a school of sardines suddenly changing direction.

We think history is a whale… (like Isaiah’s mountain)  but it’s really a school of sardines.

It matters that we are, unlike John the Baptist, in the world. It matters that like Jesus we are empowered by the Spirit of God with the courage to live differently (not simply to have the idea of God in our head). It matters that we are ‘committed sardines’, even if the world seems ‘hell bent’ on destruction.

Let’s go back to the Epistle of Peter, even if Peter does see the world as destined to be consumed by fire…. Let’s go back to epistle, with eyes more shaped by Paul’s vision of a world in bondage, being set free by the work of the Spirit within…. and in that light, let’s read the exhortation that Peter offers us.

¹³But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home. ¹⁴Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; ¹⁵and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.

Good things do take time. God is patient. The world is not a whale (it’s got committed sardines in it). God’s Spirit will transform the world. The coming of Jesus will be completed. And in the end it may appear like the twinkling of an eye.

¹³But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

We find ourselves living in a world in which righteousness is not at home. It is creation but it is not treated or perceived as such and so apocalyptic consciousness is alienated. Apocalyptic consciousness is called to a life of patience the premise of which is God’s patience with the world in anticipation of the renewal of creation and with it a creation-consciousness and a gift economy.

In Mark 13 Jesus paints an apocalyptic vision of what it will mean to be his disciple. In the short term it will mean suffering, war, persecution and the destruction of the temple. Ultimately it will mean the dissolution of the world. Jesus distinguishes clearly between immediate suffering and “after these things” the coming of a new world with the New Human. The point of his apocalyptic discourse is, like his admonition in the Garden of Gethsemane, to keep them awake.

But what does it mean to stay awake? What does it mean to remain alert to the end of the world-as-we-know-it?

Firstly the focus of the alertness in Mark’s apocalypse, is not any immediate, or pressing downturn in fortunes, nor the current suffering or economic crisis. Alertness is called for in spite of such imminent or present suffering or danger with its fight-or-flight inducing properties. Secondly, it is what comes “after these things” in its own unpredictable time and manner that is the focus of apocalyptic alertness. Thirdly, what comes “after these things” also comes to the world from beyond its capacities in the homecoming of the True Human (or Son of Man). Fourthly, the apocalyptic homecoming is the dissolution of one world and the establishment of another. This last implication needs to be further elaborated.

The presupposition of such an apocalyptic consciousness is a distinction between two notions of world, between the world of gift constantly given by God (let’s call it creation) and socio-political world of culture and history constituted by possession and grasping. Apocalyptic consciousness, as Jesus presents it, refuses to be seduced by the apparent power and permanence of this latter world. It anticipates the coming of the New Creation in which the fragility and ephemerality of the fallen world is revealed in its dissolution. Its dissolution is not the dissolution of creation, but rather the establishment of creation in its true form and freedom.

It is this conflict over what is stable and what is fragile, what is real and what is ephemeral, what is powerful and what is weak, which lies at the heart of the struggle to stay awake. In the immediate future, rather than the apocalyptic future, disciples are faced with a constant temptation to act as if the fallen world is more constant, more real and substantial  than it is, to lose sight of the New Creation and so to sleep on the job. The temptation is to suspect and live as if the “gift economy” is nothing more than a form of idealism – a dream which renders disciples out of touch with the so-called real world. In apocalyptic perspective it is the fallen and self-possessive economy which renders us out of touch with  the real world.

A month or so ago I remember a news item about a farmer on the Taieri who thought he had found a geep on his farm. A geep is a cross between a sheep and a goat. They’re very rare. As it turned out he was wrong.

But it was a nice idea don’t you think? Something in between sheep and goat, some grey area to soften the black and white of Jesus’ story. No such luck in today’s story.  It’s judgment time, the time when all is revealed and Jesus wants us to know in black and white what is at stake in the kingdom of God

The camera zooms out and we see a great panorama of all the nations of the earth. The Greek word is ethne (as in ethnic) same as the Hebrew word for gentiles. All those outside the community of faith and of Israel are gathered before ‘The Man’ usually translated Son of Man (we might say the God-Man).

It is time for discrimination. Discrimination is a term that has had a bit of bad press. But in this judgment scene the God-Man discriminates, not on the basis of race, or gender or sexual orientation. In the end what defines the discrimination of God is reasonably straightforward. It is how they have responded to him.

I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick or in prison and you visited me.

But Lord we didn’t see you! they say. It reminds me of the “Where’s Wally?” book. Where is Jesus in the world? Where is the God-man? … It looks as if he’s in a very similar place as he was during the 30 or so years of his life. He is desperately needy – among the hungry and thirsty. He is a stranger… (i.e. outside the social networks), he is naked and vulnerable (like a man hanging on a cross), he is among the sick (who, in a world prior to the scientific understanding of disease were the untouchables), he is among the criminals in prison (the enemies of society).

And it is a bit like “Where’s Wally?” because the nations have no idea they have met Jesus? They haven’t seen him and yet they have responded to him, one way or another.

This is a deeply disturbing parable… I wonder where you put yourself in this parable? Do you imagine yourself among the sheep, or among the goats, or among the hungry and naked, the strangers and prisoners? Who do you find yourself identifying with?

I go away from this parable definitely feeling like, when all’s said and done I’m numbered among the goats. I don’t think I’ve known anyone or visited anyone in prison. I am polite to strangers and occasionally open up my life to them, but mostly it’s not really a welcome which costs me anything, it’s just a greeting. I visit hospitals but mostly cause it’s my job. I’m paid to do it. It costs me nothing. As for feeding the hungry and thirsty… I do my bit for charity but it’s hardly a real love which costs me anything significant. It mainly just makes me feel better and less guilty. As for naked people…

I don’t like this story.

But wait, maybe I can get off the hook here. Scholars tell us that Jesus probably had a very particular group in mind when he said, “what you have done to the least of these who are members of my family, you did unto me.” To put it simply, this way of reading the story notes that in Matthew’s gospel Jesus calls his followers and disciples the ‘little ones’ and so it is argued ‘the least who are members of my family’ is Jesus way of talking about Christians sent out in mission. So you’ve got the nations, gentiles being judged on how they have treated the little ones, the disciples. To put it another way; the world is being judged on how it treats the church.

So, if we read it like that…we can forget about the poor. Right?

But there’s something wrong with that reading isn’t there? The followers of Jesus are not just church members who believe in Jesus… the ones Jesus calls the ‘little ones’ in Matthew’s gospel, are followers sent out without a purse or a change of clothes as strangers to a way of vulnerability. The followers of Jesus live like and look like Jesus. This story doesn’t just tell you that Jesus is present in the church, it tells you where the real church is. Do you see the point… if the disciples of Jesus are ‘the least of these who are members of my family’ then the story identifies for us the location of these disciples. The same ‘where’s wally problem’ exists for the church as it does for Jesus. The church and Jesus are equally hard to spot. They are as invisible and as visible as each other. The real church is not defined by who turns up on a Sunday morning or has their name on the Presbyterian role. It is to be found among the hungry and thirsty, among the strangers and outsiders, among the naked and desperate, the sick and imprisoned.

Just when we think we are off the hook, we discover that Jesus exists with his disciples (the little ones) and they exist as and among the poor and vulnerable.

I am told I should preach practical sermons. Let me say a little about two issues that this story addresses… and then finish with a brief comment on our other reading.

At our recent Forums we have been talking about where we should have our main worship centre… what are the strategic places of mission for us, where it might be important to have a worship centre which is accessible to us and to others? How do we decide between the options… of course we need to be practical, we don’t have much money and are quite constrained and it would be wrong to put enormous resources into a building… and yet we still face choices. The question might be as simple as the question arising from today’s parable. Where is the true church to be found? Perhaps it will give us a clue as to where our centre of worship ought to be in the future. The parable asks us, if we are not living among the most vulnerable, are we following Jesus at all?

Second practical implication: we are in the middle of elections in New Zealand. And today we read about the judgment of ‘nations’. In a way we are called to make a judgment call on what kind of a nation we want to become. Will our nation be among the sheep or the goats? I know there are enormous complexities which parables don’t pretend to address, but what do you think? Does hospitality to the stranger have implications for immigration policy? Does feeding and clothing the poor have implications for New Zealand’s tiny contribution to international aid (now being administered under the category of trade)? Does prison visiting having anything to do with restorative approaches to justice?

It’s interesting that we should be reading of the judgement of nations so close before an election.

To finish I want to go back to that sense of hopelessness that I felt and perhaps some of you feel as you read this story of judgment and think about your own life.

The reading from the letter to the Ephesians has something in common with the parable of the sheep and the goats. Just as the nations of the world are judged by how they treat the least who are the family of Jesus, so Ephesians reminds us of how central the community of the followers of Jesus is to God.

Ephesians 1:11-23

11 In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, 12so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.

There’s hope for us yet, says the writer… ‘that we might live for the praise of his glory’

13In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; 14this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory.

The writer goes on to say that the one who raised Jesus from death, the one who raised Jesus the naked, imprisoned, thirsty stranger, who was cast out of the world, he will accomplish all things… in particular the God of Jesus will make sure that, though it seems impossible, we will indeed live to the praise of his glory.

God wants the little ones to be like Jesus… so that the nations of the world will see. The writer says this is our inheritance, if we have been marked by the Spirit and caught up into this Jesus-faith. God will not abandon us, but will free us to be the followers of Jesus.

The writer says that God raised Jesus to the centre of all things and of all history “for the church, which is his body”. Not for some wealthy institution which cosies up with kings and rules the world though, but for the most vulnerable… among whom will be found the followers of Jesus.

Thanks be to God… amen

“The kingdom of heaven is like this…”  What does Jesus mean when he begins all his stories with something like that? He means if you want to know what it will be like when God really does rule… as opposed to what it’s like at the moment… then listen up.

Jesus was a prophetic voice for a different world. Jesus was not happy with the world as it was. I don’t know if he’d be part of the protest in the Octagon if he were here today… but it strikes me that he’s much more likely to be among the protestors at St Paul’s Cathedral in London than among the church leaders who threw them out.

In the Octagon, they don’t exactly have a clear outline of what the future will look like. I’m not even sure if they have parables to tell about it… but they know in their bones that something is terribly wrong with the way the world is… And so did Jesus. And I wonder whether we do.

For Jesus the kingdom or rule of God is not here… yet! Jesus said, when questioned by Pilate about his political aspirations said, “my kingdom is not from this world”… it comes from elsewhere, but it is coming and it’s coming here. Jesus is talking about a future that is coming by God’s grace whether you’re ready or not.

There are signs of it sneaking in like a little mustard seed. You can see it in a father forgiving his wayward son, you can see it in an eccentric employer who pays the workers nobody wants a full days wage for only working the last hour, you can see it in an enemy citizen who goes out of his way to be kind to a guy beaten up on the roadside. You can see it here, you see it there, but still the predominant, the surrounding background reality is a world in which God’s rule is excluded, and various forms of empire compete to control and compete for our loyalty….

So Jesus stories tell us what to look for, as the future starts to sneak into our world. Today’s parable is a little different. Its main point is not so much the shape the future, but the importance of being ready for it.

There are two groups of bridesmaids, old translations have virgins rather than bridesmaids. There are virgins with olive oil in their lamps and virgins without. And their job is to wait for and escort the bridegroom to the banquet. And suddenly the bridegroom turns up in the night and those without oil plead to those with oil. Give us some of your oil. And they reply we have no extra virgin olive oil.

So the unprepared virgins rush off to the merchants for oil and when they get back the doors are closed and the bridegroom doesn’t recognise them “Truly I tell you, he says, I do not know you.”… they are unrecognisable witnesses.

What do you think it means to have ‘oil in your lamp’? Some of you will remember the old chorus from your youth “Give me oil in my lamp keep me burning”. What do you think it means to be ready for the entry of God’s rule? of a new way of ordering life, a new economy, a new politics.

Let me offer a suggestion. Jesus announces in the Gospels that the kingdom is at hand, in his life good news is coming to the poor, the future is breaking in, the kingdom is near at hand. He brings, if you like, the oil. His life is the oil that lights the lamps and provides the light in darkness which points the way to the wedding banquet. Those who share in his life now…. those who share in his way of being in the world now… because they find themselves set free from the grip of the world as it is now…are ready for the life to come. They have oil in their lamps. They can be recognised as part of the advance guard of this kingdom that Jesus launched in his stories and established in his death and his resurrection.

I have been thinking about this in the light of the build up to the elections. It’s easy in political debates to limit our discussion to the world as it is. To live simply as if we were at the end of history, as if the system we live in now is (well… problematic… but) the best of all possible worlds and all we can do is tinker with it, because basically the future can only ever be more of the same. Like the virgins without our oil, we go to sleep unprepared… We think those who occupy the octagon must be basically crazy. We talk of disaffected youth… as if Jesus were not disaffected with the world. We talk of them as being eccentric and on the fringe, as if Jesus didn’t live on the fringe and call us to do the same. We talk as if criticism of greed and the greedy speculation of the market crash … as if our unquenchable thirst for economic growth is destroying the physical sustainability of this planet… is simply naïve. I hear people saying why don’t they just knuckle down and make a contribution to life… of course it’s not perfect.

My question to those who just knuckle down in the world as it is, is this…. That’s fine… not everything thing is wrong about the world we live in. But is that all you can do? Is there any oil in your lamp for a different future.

What the protest reminds me of is someone who I think did have some oil in his lamp. His name was Te Whiti o Rongomai. Anyone know who he was? In the latter half of the 19^th Century he was one of two leaders at Parihaka. In a time when the Colonial Government of NZ was (greedy, like the financial speculators and bankers in our current financial crisis), they were confiscating land, by force, left right and centre, Te Whiti and his fellow chief Tohu Kakahi were not only schooled in their ancient maori traditions, they were Christian pacifists who looked forward to a different world. The called their people to a non-violent response to the government. They had some creative ideas, they pulled out the surveyors pegs. And when their fences were broken down they had teams of fencers who built them again overnight. And so on the 5^th November (Guy Fawkes Day) 130 years ago today, the government invaded with an armed constabulary. Over 2000 adults had been sitting in silence since midnight expecting them. They had baked 500 loaves of bread for the constabulary as a gesture of hospitality. The children greeted them with dancing and singing. And the Officers read the Riot Act and arrested Te Whiti and Tohu and took them off to Chch for two years without trial. Many of their men were imprisoned in Dunedin and built the causeway and the road around the Peninsula. Many of them died (about 1 per fortnight) of cold and influenza). After taking away the leaders the soldiers came back the next day and destroyed the town and raped the women.

About this time Mahatma Gandhi was a teenager and was inspired by their commitment to non-violence. According to the faith of Te Whiti and Tohu, in the purposes of God the ends do not justify the means.

This week a friend Kristin and I went down to the Octagon to talk about this… and to speak to the idea that in Aotearoa New Zealand we could celebrate those guys rather a Dutch Catholic who tried to blow up an English Parliament

But what I see in that story is some people who are caught up in the way of Jesus. And they have oil in their lamp. They can be recognised as followers of Jesus. And even if as a nation we don’t honour them, surely the church can remember with pride… people with oil in their lamps. People whose imagination, whose sense of what is a possible future… was shaped by Jesus.

It’s about being ready for the kingdom. Our Jesus imagination means we can be visible (lamps lit up) rather than invisible Christians whose faith is hidden away in our private life.

Is it time to occupy St Clair?

There’s a wonderful cameo moment of epiphany in our Old Testament reading today, in which Moses realises he is going to die. More than that, he is going to die without reaching the Promised Land. On the high mountain the Lord says to Moses:

“This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants’; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.”

Moses has spent his life on this Promised Land project. This is not just a car journey that finishes at the end of a day or two. This is a lifetime of wandering and living with a group of people. This is a life project. And his life is going to end before the project is completed. Is seems like the very definition of failure? A life project, where the life finishes before the project? Perhaps it feels like any time to die is too soon. There’s always more to do.

On holiday this week, before picking Chrissy up from the airport, we drove around the centre of Christchurch and had our lunch among broken buildings – deserted monuments to someone’s life project. And I thought about the amount of effort and life has been invested by people in building up beautiful gardens and houses, only to see them lost forever.

How does it feel to think that the future is not going to include you? That life will go on without you? That you can do nothing much about it?

Do you withdraw increasingly into a little world you can control? Do you start to shut down your horizons? Do you lose interest? Do you get angry with the world? Do you sit in front of the tele and vent your bitterness at the current crop of politicians or church leaders?

The bible doesn’t dwell much on psychology. We don’t know how Moses felt about it? We are just told that he died in sight of the Promised Land. Like Martin Luther King jnr he had a dream… and then died.

I wonder what it means to die well, as a Christian. What does it mean to follow Jesus (to be on a journey to a promised land) and on the journey you have to start letting go of things? Leaving things unfinished? When people you love start dying, and you don’t have the energy to do things you have always wanted to do… what do you do? The word Euthanasia means ‘good death’. So what is a good death?

I wonder how much depends on what you have done up to that point? Have you spent all your life avoiding death? Some would say we live in a culture of death avoidance – obsessed with cosmetics and security and health. If that has become our life project, if we’ve been avoiding death all our life, and this avoidance has dominated our life, then death, when it comes, is by definition a failure.

But perhaps there are more noble life projects, like getting involved in the church, teaching Sunday School, going on Session or Managers, or your vocation, or getting involved in the local bowls club, or raising your children and grandchildren… all sorts of noble and less noble things make up our life projects… and at some point you start to let go of things and your project winds down. And you face the great challenge of dying well.

What I really like about today’s story is that it reminds us that whether our life projects are merely a kind of selfish ambition, bound up with consumerism and an obsession with cosmetics and insurance and health at all cost, or whether they are more noble, what matters in the end is that the project is not really our project, it’s God’s project. In the end of the day it matters that it’s not all about me.

The project that Moses has invested his life in has a future. The future will happen with or without Moses… and this is the point that Moses realises that it’s going to be without him. Hi condition is terminal. But it’s not all about him. He can be involved right up to his death. And then he can die in peace, knowing his contribution has been valuable, knowing it will not be lost. This seems to me to be genuine “euthanasia” – good death. Not taking his own life, but giving it up graciously, without ever losing sight of the Promised Land.

Perhaps that’s where our Gospel text comes in… the scholars come in and ask Jesus

“What is the greatest commandment? Jesus replies “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

It’s interesting to compare the gospels on this great text. Where Luke, for example, emphasises the unity of the first and the second commandment as one single commandment in two parts where love of God cannot but result in love of neighbour and love of neighbour is bound up with love of God (and in Luke Jesus goes on to tell the Good Samaritan story as an illustration of this) Matthew, as we’ve just read, emphasises the priority of the first commandment. A life given over to God in heart and soul and mind is what the great commandment is all about.

Even in death the great commandment addresses us. Perhaps death is the culmination of a life under the great commandment. Because as we die it’s so easy for everything to be about me. From how we plan our funeral, to how we feel about who visits us and who doesn’t, how we face up to all the issues we’ve been avoiding all our life.

Moses lost sight of the Promised Land often throughout his life, and yet in the end he is given a vision in which he is reminded at the last, that God hasn’t given up on him, that it’s not all about him, it’s not his story, it’s God’s story. And he has been privileged to play a part in it. All that he has put his heart and soul and mind into, can now end in peace.

We talk about the “Law of Moses” and its greatest commandment, we talk about the “journey to the Promised Land”… but in the end of the day, for us these are shadows and anticipations of the central moment in God’s story. In the life of Jesus, God’s life enters history. The greatest commandment becomes incarnate. Jesus loves God with all his heart and soul and mind… and his neighbour as himself. And in his life, love of neighbour and love of enemy become the same thing.

In the end, learning to die well is like learning to live well. It’s a matter of following Jesus… and we don’t follow Jesus in isolation, we follow Jesus in the midst of neighbours and enemies (who are often the same people).

In following Jesus we see the Promised Land as clearly as we will ever see it…. And we can die with him knowing the promise of the Promised Land is secure, beyond any power that death might have had over us, or might now appear to have. We can die but death is powerless. We can die well because death is powerless!

Thanks be to God.

Texts: Exodus 16: 2-15, Philippians 1: 21-30, Matthew 20: 1-16

There were some people who lived under the shadow of the greatest superpower of the world, it was their version of the developed world with the latest technology, and there was plenty of food to eat. But they were slaves in this world. And the work was getting harder by the day. They were enslaved to the progress of the empire.

They would have been lost and forgotten to history, but for the fact that someone called Moses came along and they were led to believe that God had different ideas, so they left that world to form a different community and now find themselves suffering and hungry. At least that’s one way of reading the story.

Their big ideas seem a little shakey when their bellies are empty and they don’t know what the future holds. Now they’re not so sure about this God who wants something different. It’s hard to have faith when your stomach is rumbling and the future looks uncertain.

Looking back the life of slavery doesn’t seem so bad after all. How is God fair, taking them away from their comfortable world and giving them hunger and suffering and an uncertain future? That’s hardly just. Surely justice is when those who do what is right get good outcomes, right?

In the wilderness, the story continues, God does provide them with food. They do get what they need to be the people God is calling them to be. In the end the resources are there. They certainly don’t have all they want, they certainly don’t have the security of being in control of the process and knowing where it is going and knowing it will be a comfortable life. In fact they are caught in the middle of a process that they don’t understand. What God provides is what they need for their journey. At least that’s one way of reading it.

When I was a kid we were told this story of the Israelites grumbling in the wilderness often. And, if I recall correctly, the moral of the story was simple. “Don’t complain or you won’t get any pudding”. And it is true as you get older, you realize who much easier it is to get on with those who put on a brave face and look on the bright side… who never complain and how depressing it can be around those who are always complaining. The flip side of this is the tyranny of niceness. People who feel they have to be stoically positive about everything… therein lies the way to madness. And I don’t think the Bible has an interest in either of those ends of the spectrum. But it does tell us a story about suffering… and about complaining.

So does our gospel reading. It’s the story of the workers who are looking for work. Some come at the beginning of the day and work hard all day and get the same pay as those who are hired at the end of the day. It just doesn’t seem fair, certainly those who have worked all day are annoyed. If they’d known they would have arrived at the last minute. This is not justice. It doesn’t make sense. God seems random. There is no relationship between work done and reward. The kingdom of heaven, the story suggests, is like a place of work where everyone gets what they need, regardless of what they do, where there is no comparison and no competition, where there is no incentive to work harder. What purports to be a wage, is effectively a gift…sure they all do some work, but the relation between the work and its reward is not like a wage at all. In the end God provides what each person needs, even though they don’t understand the logic of it. The kingdom of heaven is like a gift and gifts are not fair, gifts are gifts.

Two stories: The travelers in the wilderness who have followed what they believe is God’s guidance towards becoming a new people are not happy because they are suffering, and the workers in the vineyard who have worked all day are not happy, because someone else seems to be happy when they should be suffering (or at least less happy).

I wonder if you find yourself unhappy… because things have not gone right in your life and you don’t see the big picture. How can you? All you see is injustice. Or perhaps you feel unhappy because you haven’t gotten what you deserve out of life. Or people you love haven’t gotten what they deserve out of life, perhaps they died young. Or perhaps you look at those who earn millions for merely becoming celebrities or who have made it to the top through some accident of circumstance and you ask yourself, how can the world be like this, if there is a God?

Life is not fair, as far as we can tell. Everybody is not equal. So how can there be a God?

It’s interesting to place these experiences of injustice, inequality alongside the witness of Paul writing to Christian’s in Philippi. Paul is suffering in prison and his readers are also suffering because of their faith. Paul concludes, for “he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well”… ‘the privilege of suffering’!

I don’t want to use Paul as a way of telling us not to complain: Suck it in and look on the bright side! As I suggested before, that way lies madness. However, as I have reflected on this I think there is something to be learned by contrasting Paul’s thoughts on “suffering as privilege”, with the complaining of the Israelites and the Early Bird Workers. For both the Israelites and the Early Birds God is on trial in a particular way.

It’s a bit like us, when we look at the world and all its injustice and also the examples of injustice in our own life… and no matter from what angle we look at it, it seems unfair, so we decide against God, whether in theory or in practice, we stop trusting God. And from that perspective it is an eminently reasonable decision.

What strikes me is that Paul’s faith in God comes from a different place. His trust in God is not the result of an assessment of the state of the world. He believes in God for other reasons.

You see Paul’s belief in God, Paul’s christian belief in God, came from a moment of encounter, when ‘he saw the light’ (in several senses) on the road to Damascas. And the light said to him ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting’…. So Paul was doing his religious duty, making the world a better place, getting rid of dangerous sectarian groups. And the voice of God interrupted him. And it didn’t try to persuade him that the world wasn’t so unjust after all, instead it said to him, ‘YOU are part of the injustice of the world’. God said to Paul, I am YOUR victim. I am the victim of your religiousness. I am the victim of your selfishness. I have lived on the receiving end of the injustice of the world, died on the receiving end of the world’s injustice. I have not simply wiped out that injustice, I have suffered it… What’s more as one of the victims alongside all your victims I am not even now getting my revenge. I am not seeking justice in the sense of revenge. I am coming to you, to give you a part to play not in the justice of revenge, but in the justice of reconciliation!… If my life was a gift, my resurrection is the same gift given to the universe… but given specifically to you who need to know that you are not merely victims of an unjust world, but victimizers also.

The truth is not nice, you might say, but it is a gift. It sets us free. The gift given sets us free from any sense of self-righteousness, from any easy place to put God on trial. It also sets us free to share in God’s solution to the injustice of the world. Sure the world is unjust. But Paul’s God does not sit back and leave it to it destruction, nor does he come in with a big stick. He comes back with another gift. The same gift given again. Jesus (the risen Jesus) is the gift of forgiveness. The one who comes to those who arrive late and those who work all day, and has the same word for them both. “You too can live in this gift”.

What strikes me is the difference it makes for Paul, facing suffering in his life, if his belief and trust in God comes from this place, rather than from some supposedly ‘objective’ survey of world history. The reasonable response to one stance is atheism, the reasonable response to the other is Christian witness. I struggle to see other options.

To conclude let’s listen to Paul’s comments on suffering later in his letter to the Philippian Christians:

“I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes the faithfulness of Christ, the righteousness from God, based on his fidelity. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead”