Reflection in PTC Chapel – 1 August 2016

Reading – Isaiah 1:1, 10–20

1 The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.

10 Hear the word of the Lord,
you rulers of Sodom!
Listen to the teaching of our God,
you people of Gomorrah!
11 What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the Lord;
I have had enough of burnt-offerings of rams
and the fat of fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats.
12 When you come to appear before me,
who asked this from your hand?
Trample my courts no more;
13 bringing offerings is futile;
incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation—
I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.
14 Your new moons and your appointed festivals
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
15 When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
16 Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
17   learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.

18 Come now, let us argue it out,
says the Lord:
though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be like snow;
though they are red like crimson,
they shall become like wool.
19 If you are willing and obedient,
you shall eat the good of the land;
20 but if you refuse and rebel,
you shall be devoured by the sword;
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Reflection

I was not scheduled to be doing chapel today and this is not the scheduled reading either. The original reading assigned for today was one on which I have already preached, so I swapped it for this one from Isaiah.

I imagine that this is not a popular reading in the church, but I assure you that it’s on the lectionary. The reasons why I think this reading is not popular should be self-evident. Why should we gather to worship and praise God and then read that God hates our “solemn assemblies”?

Another reason this text might not be popular is that it might be described as self-preaching – in other words it is a text that preaches itself. The message appears so obvious that, once read, the preacher is left with little to do. But is that really the case?

The prophet does not begin with niceties; he starts by addressing the people as the rulers of Sodom and the people of Gomorrah. These are terms of abuse. Yet this form of address sums up the message; these are people for whom condemnation is coming. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah were burnt up for their sins. It is worth remembering what sins they were guilty of. To jog our memories, we turn to Ezekiel 16:49, which reads:

“This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”

This sets the tone and outlines the message to come, that combining pride and vanity with disregard for the poor and needy is sure to gain God’s condemnation.
God rejects the sacrifices of such people. Their feasts are worthless. Their worship meaningless.

The temptation we all face, reading this in our own solemn assembly, is to read this as God addressing bad people who have turned away and who yet strive to be justified by God through worship, rituals and sacrifices and nice words about God. Such harsh judgments are not for us; they are for other so-called “Christians” who have blood on their hands and do not worship with a good clean conscience. We are better than them surely? Aren’t we?

Let’s read further. In verse 12 God speaks “When you come to appear before me”. This is indicative of the attitude of the hypocrites. They come to appear before God as though God is somewhere where we can go to present ourselves to God. But God does not live in some temple or church. God is everywhere, and sees our corruption day by day. God sees both the bad we do and good we left undone.

God also sees how we try to present ourselves in church on Sunday, wearing our best clothes and carrying our Bibles as though God will be pleased that we have ironed our shirt or dress, placed some money in the collection plate, and sung in the choir.

No! God is not impressed by our staged appearances. We are before God all the time. What, then, is the point of all these pretensions and posturing before God?

Is it self-justification? Are we trying to cover up our sins? If so, we take the Lord’s name in vain – we utter the right words, but have instrumentalized worship and in doing so we reduce God to be something less than God. If we do this, we are trusting in our works and deeds more than God. And we have created a reason for worshiping God.

This is should be a great caution in our nations today. There are false prophets and pastors offering reasons to come to their church. “Come to my church and be blessed”, they might say. Or, “Come to my church and be healed”, or “Come and gain a new purpose in life”.

But the truth is that we cannot make true worship serve us and our needs; true worship serves only God, it cannot be made by humans into something that benefits us. To make ourselves into the end or point of worship, inevitably means turning God into a mere means.

This does not mean that we cannot enjoy worship or that we get nothing out of it. But anything we get from worship must not be sought intentionally, even with a good will. Anything we gain from worship must come as the free gift we receive from God when we serve and worship him alone. It cannot be promised, anticipated, or manufactured in advance.

Further on, we read that “bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me.” Here we see God making a double criticism of our worship.

Bringing our offerings to God is important. It helps the church and the needy, and puts money in its rightful place as something we can freely part with. But if we are giving to bribe God to turn a blind eye to our sins, we are fools. We cannot bribe God. God sees through such shallowness. God doesn’t want or need our money. God wants our lives. As Jesus said, we should love God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind (Matthew 22:37). In other words God wants our whole being to be be focused on God.

Incense, as used in worship, is sometimes thought of as carrying our prayers up to God. But the real use of incense was to mask the stench of a sinful humanity. But incense cannot disguise our sin from God. God sees our sinful hearts directly and cannot be deceived in this way. Incense cannot shield the stench of our hypocrisy or be a smoke screen to hide our iniquities. To think we can hide our sins from God is to only fool ourselves.

When we persist in our hypocrisy God even indicates that God will turn away from our us, even if we reach out to God and say our pious prayers. God will fall silent in face of our hypocritical piety.

But we should not despair, God’s silence can be broken when we return to God in due humility. We can and must try to break God’s silence toward us through repentance and true worship.

How can we do that? In verse 16 we see God demand that we clean ourselves up before he will turn to us. We must repent. The verse reads “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean”.

This poses a theological problem. Can we really cleanse ourselves in such a way as to be acceptable to God? Christians usually say that we are washed clean in our baptism, or by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Isn’t it Christ alone who can wash us clean and make us whole?

Christianity rejects the idea that we can reach up to God through any human means. This is what seems to be denied by the first half of our reading which condemns our human efforts at self-justification. Rather God reaches down to us to bring us to him.

Martin Luther, no fan of salvation through works, simply states that this verse says that we should follow the advice of the Psalmist in 37:27: “Depart from evil, and do good”.

That is what is required. We clean ourselves up by turning from evil and doing good. And we can always make a fresh start in doing so. We must turn from evil. That is the first step – do no harm and refrain from evil. But this is not enough. We must pursue the good and justice. This is obedience to God.

Well I could end here and my message would have been simply that we ought to worship with right intention, avoid evil and do good. We might add at this point that the ancient Israelites were foolish to try to justify themselves and deceive God. We might be tempted to think that we are better than them. But before we pat ourselves on the back, we should make sure that we don’t commit a worse sin.

In their attempts to be justified, the Israelites were addressing God, and in doing so were at least recognizing God’s importance. A potentially worse sin is when we try to justify ourselves in the eyes of other people. It is one thing to try to justify oneself before God. It is worse to ignore God and try to justify oneself before one’s peers, leaving God out of the picture altogether. This happens when we try to keep up appearances and live in line with human values and rules. But adherence to cultural and social norms which place us right in the eyes of our neighbor does not put us right with God.

God is not deceived by this posture. It creates another god to which we give all of our selves. This god could be culture, money, technology, or work. But neither God nor society are deceived by this stance either.

Let’s focus on the one true God with our whole being, avoid evil and do as much good as we can under the continual guidance on God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

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Reflection in PTC Chapel – 2 May 2016

Paul and Silas in Philippi – Pieter de With

 Reading – Acts 16:16–34 (NRSV)

16 One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slavegirl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. 17 While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” 18 She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour.

19 But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. 20 When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews 21 and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” 22 The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. 23 After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. 24 Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

25 About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. 26 Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. 27 When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. 28 But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” 29 The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. 30 Then he brought them outside and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” 31 They answered, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” 32 They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. 33 At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. 34 He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.

Reflection

Our long reading this morning begins with an exorcism of a demon from the slave girl, features a court trial, jail scene, earthquake, dramatic conversion, and ends with a household baptism.

It is an exhausting text to read and hear. More happens in these few verses than happens in my life in weeks.

This morning, however, I wish to focus on the exorcism of the demon from the slave girl.

I find this passage very curious, as have many others. We note that Paul does not cast out the demon when he first encounters the girl. He only casts out the demon once he becomes annoyed. And then he impatiently exorcises the demon. Why does he do so? Is he annoyed with her calling out, or is he concerned with her claims about their God?

Both of these two possibilities focus on her effect on Paul. On the face of it, there is good reason to do so, as Paul is very much annoyed. But, one would have to infer, in the absence of any precise textual evidence, about what Paul was very much annoyed with.

Perhaps a better question could be asked: “Who was Paul annoyed with?” Was he annoyed with the girl? Or, was he annoyed with the demon, who might be said to posses the girl, and control her? A third possibility also exists: Paul was annoyed with the girl’s masters who possessed her in another way, and who were responsible for her being in his path on the way to prayer every day.

Perhaps Paul’s annoyance was a combination of these factors, which built up over several days. I prefer to think of Paul’s annoyance more as righteous anger at the injustice of this situation rather than petty annoyance at being followed and being shouted at. He put up with much more than that in the course of his ministry. In this light, it is interesting that the King James translation has Paul as “grieved” instead of being annoyed, suggesting he felt sorrow for the girl.

Another reason to think that the Paul’s annoyance lies in the state of affairs that affects the girl, is that in the exorcism Paul invokes the name of Christ.

There are two important points to note here about Paul casting out the demon in the name of Christ.

The first is especially important at this point in the church year at the end of Easter. Jesus has resurrected and ascended to heaven. He is not around to exorcise demons as he did when he was with the apostles. Recall that in Luke chapter 8 Jesus exorcises demons from a man and put them into the herd of swine.

No. Jesus is no longer around, but his name retains its power. Significantly, it is Paul who uses the name of the Christ here. While Paul never knew Jesus personally, he can, nevertheless, use his name to exorcise this demon. Jesus is gone, but the power of his name remains to all those who follow him. That includes us as well.

The second point to note about Paul’s use of the name of Jesus is the contrast he makes with the girl’s owners. Whereas they used a spirit and the girl to make money, Paul invoked the spirit of Christ, not for his own gain, but to liberate the girl, putting an end to exploitative moneymaking.

In doing so, Paul follows the example of Christ. For when Jesus used his powers in miracles and exorcisms, he did not do so for his own benefit, but to benefit others. For example, he did not turn stones into bread in the desert to satisfy his own hunger, but he was willing to perform the miracle of feeding the 5000. If Jesus did not use his power for himself, it is unlikely that Paul would be able to use Jesus’ name to exorcise demons merely so he could walk to a prayer meeting unmolested. No. Jesus’ name was effective for Paul because he was freeing the girl from bondage.

After Paul rids the girl of the demon, her worldly masters, having lost their source of profit, take Paul and Silas to court on trumped-up charges. They are found guilty, stripped beaten and put into prison.

Their treatment is parallel to the treatment of Christ before his crucifixion. The trial and judgment is unjust. Fortunately, they are not killed. But as at the time of the death of Jesus there is another earthquake. Instead of the temple curtain being torn in two, here the symbol of the civil authority, the prison, is torn apart and the prisoners could escape.

Paul and Silas do not escape, and by remaining put they have the chance to witness to the jailer and his entire household who were baptized that very day.

Returning to the theme of the slave girl, there is more that can be said on the alliance in the story between the exploiters of the girl and the legal authorities. Is there any more up to date tale for our time?

The exploitation of girls (and boys) is one of the tragedies of our time. Children continued to be enslaved by the greedy for the making of money.

The International Labour Organisation estimates that worldwide there are 5.5 million children in slavery, trafficking, debt bondage, forced labour, forced recruitment for armed conflict, prostitution, and pornography. [Source]

Paul frees just one child in such a situation, but sends a message of judgement against all such crimes. Yet it is he and Silas, not the slave-drivers, that end up in jail.

The fate of Paul and Silas is one that many activists have faced over the years. To interfere with the exploitation of children for the pursuit of profit is to incur is to disrupt those with earthly power. There are few things more dangerous in this world than to disrupt the flow of profits and money to the already wealthy. It does not matter whether those making money are a band of criminals, a legal corporation, or even a church. If you get in their way, there will be serious consequences.

It almost doesn’t matter what the charges were in this case as they bore no relationship to the so-called “harm” the girl’s owners had experienced.  The consequences for Paul and Silas were severe. They faced an unsympathetic court and were jailed.  Here we see the law operating in the interests of rich slave-drivers and not toward any recognizable form of justice.

This is also a factor of our world today, the law working for the rich and the powerful against the poor and the advocates of the poor and oppressed. Sadly many advocates of justice and peace are silenced and imprisoned in our world today. Often those who speak for those without a voice are killed. One estimate is that two people are killed each week defending the environment [Source].  Few of the perpetrators are brought to justice as it suits the powers in our broken world to keep making money at the expense of our children and our climate.

On Saturday, one my heroes died. Daniel Berrigan was Catholic priest and radical Christian. He became famous for his opposition to the Vietnam War and in one protest poured his own blood on military draft cards. He also initiated the modern plowshares disarmament movement. Taking the text from Isaiah 2:4, that we should beat swords into plowshares, as a command of God, Berrigan and friends broke into military bases and disarmed weapons of death and imperialism. His life’s mission was to cast out the demons of killing and violence; a mission which, upset the establishment and landed him in jail several times.

We might not have the opportunity to cast out the spirits of divination from slave girls. But as modern prophets like Berrigan, we have opportunities to resist the enslaving spirits of consumerism and violence that makes others rich and powerful.

We can also try to rid ourselves, our churches, and nations of the enslaving spirit of corruption where we invoke the name of Christ for the benefit of ourselves, rather than using the name of Christ to liberate others.

The ascended Christ is with us, supporting us and guiding us, just as he was with Paul and Silas. Our challenge is to witness to his power to transform lives and nations.

Amen.

Picture credit: https://www.pubhist.com/w8409

Morning Devotion for Peace Building Workshop – 24 June 2015

Tags

climate change, violence

Dr. Richard A. Davis, PTC Faculty

Reading — Isaiah 24:3-6 (NRSV)

3 The earth shall be utterly laid waste
and utterly despoiled;
for the LORD has spoken this word.
4 The earth dries up and withers,
the world languishes and withers;
the heavens languish together with the earth.
5 The earth lies polluted
under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant.
6 Therefore a curse devours the earth,
and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt;
therefore the inhabitants of the earth dwindled,
and few people are left.

Reflection

Last week saw a greatly anticipated event as Pope Francis issued his second encyclical letter, “Laudato Si’“. The title is Latin, and can be translated “Praise be to you”. The subtitle in English is “On Care for Our Common Home.” For non-Catholics an encyclical letter is a message issued by the Pope for teaching the church, and sometimes others. In this case The Pope addressed his encyclical to all peoples on planet Earth. It was largely on the topic of climate change, which, as we know, is an especially important issue for our Pacific region. The Pope’s wider concern was that humanity is destroying the earth and that we humans need to take greater care of the planet on which we depend on for our very survival.

In place the Pope used colourful language in the encyclical. For example, he wrote:

“The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

He also commented on the kind of situation some of us face in the Pacific. He wrote:

“it is essential to show special care for indigenous communities and their cultural traditions … in various parts of the world, pressure is being put on them to abandon their homelands to make room for agricultural or mining projects which are undertaken without regard for the degradation of nature and culture.”

What does this all this have to do with peace, our special concern this week?

First of all, and most simply, war and conflict is not good for the environment. As Pope Francis rightly observes:

“War always does grave harm to the environment and to the cultural riches of peoples, risks which are magnified when one considers nuclear arms and biological weapons.”

To anyone who has been in conflict or even seen the photos of war, this seems obvious. But even in peacetime, preparations for war are massively harmful. For example, the USA is planning to use Pagan Island, far north of Papua New Guinea, for live bombing practice and land invasion training. This is expected to devastate the pristine forest, home to some rare species. And we all know of the damage done by nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific by both the American and the French.

So it makes sense to say that peace, true peace (in which we are not preparing for war), brings a huge benefit for the environment. But there is another, perhaps more important link between peace the environmental care. And that is that one cannot harm the environment too much without oppressing people and undermining the basis for peace.

Isaiah makes clear the connection between environmental degradation and human sin. In Isaiah 24:5, he writes

The earth lies polluted
under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant.

Firstly, we could say that according to the Pope’s analysis, humanity is at war with the planet. The land and sea and atmosphere have been violated and laid waste by our extraction, production, and consumption. Mining and oil companies have penetrated and attacked the earth so that the earth will be forced to give up its riches. And we have all treated the land and atmosphere as a dumping ground for our waste. I think that this imagery helps us to see more clearly what we are doing to the earth.

We can predict that this war on the planet will become increasingly aggressive as the earth gives up its resources less and less readily. Oil used to be easier to find, but now oil companies are moving to drill in the fragile Arctic. They are already extracting oil and gas through fracking which involves violating mother earth to force it to give up its hidden wealth.

We should also be aware that this is also a war on people. Communities are disrupted and displaced to make way for oil and gas extraction and mining. These practices of extracting and then burning fossil fuels have become the kind of curse that Isaiah wrote about. In verse six he says:

Therefore a curse devours the earth,
and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt;
therefore the inhabitants of the earth dwindled,
and few people are left.

People are already suffering for these industries, whether through air pollution, sea level rise, or other climate change related problems. Scientists fear that the worst is to come.

This curse is often justified in the name of human domination over nature. And here is another important link between peace and the environment. The domination of other humans and the domination of nature are mutually reinforcing. What does this mean? Let me give two examples.

If we think it is OK to remove the top of mountain to get at the gold and copper underneath, we might also think that it is OK to remove the head of the person protesting the arrival of the miners.

Or, if we think is OK to rape someone’s mother, it will probably not occur to us that there is anything wrong with violating mother Earth.

I’m not sure which way the connection works, perhaps we dominate people because we have first dominated the earth, or perhaps we dominate the earth because we first dominated people. Whichever way it is, I’m convinced that these forms of domination and power and violence are closely linked.

In this vein, the Pope writes of our sister creature, earth:

“This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.”

To be peace-makers means that we must seek to be peace at God, with God’s creation and with each other. We cannot separate these.

Isaiah would, I think, agree. The earth suffers not only because we violate the earth, but also because we don’t follow the statutes and laws of God, which are often rules about how we treat each other.

But Isaiah also offers a glimmer of hope. In the middle of chapter 24 there is a group praising and honouring of God. It is difficult to tell whether these people are oblivious to the destruction of the earth, or whether they are a faithful remnant in the midst of the unfolding chaos.

One interpretation comes from the Ancient Christian theologian Eusebius of Caesarea. In commenting on Isaiah 24:15, which in the Septuagint translation partly reads “the Glory of the Lord is in the islands of the Sea”, he speaks of the church, “Which is located in the midst of the godless nations as if an island in the sea.”

What might this mean for us in a world of conflict and environmental degradation?

• Can our churches be islands of peace in nations at war?
• Can our churches demonstrate a way of life that respects both our world and our people?
• Can our churches bring the reconciliation of Jesus to fighting factions and the Spirit of God into how we life at peace with other creatures of God?

If our churches can do these things then perhaps we might be able to claim to be those islands of the sea which show the Glory of God. We can be a faithful remnant in a world that is actively destroying its social and environmental fabric.

Eusebius also evokes an image of a church surrounded by a potentially hostile culture. This image also speaks to our lands in a time of climate change. It is other nations, those that surround us, that have largely caused climate change, with the island nations of the Pacific paying a heavy price for their greed.

The sea when it rises will transform from being a source of food and a means of travel into that which washes whole nations into a hostile sea. Can our churches live a different way of live and show the world how to live at peace with the earth and each other?

To be this church we need to transform conflict in our hearts, communities and with the earth. To do so we need to embrace an ecological way of thinking that recognises our interconnectedness. As the Pope reminds us:

“everything is interconnected, and that genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice and faithfulness to others.”

Not only is everything in nature interconnected, meaning that the tree is connected to the bird to the sea and to the atmosphere, but human behaviour is connected to how we relate to other creatures.

In being peace builders we are helping to heal not only human relationships, but also harm to mother earth. There is no more important task today.

Amen.

Reflection for Morning Devotions at the IRSA Leadership and Management Programme, Suva March 2015

LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT PROGRAMME

Institute for Research & Social Analysis – Suva, March 2015

Reflection for Morning Devotions, Wednesday 18 March by Dr Richard Davis, PTC Faculty

 Reading: James 2:1-9

 My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you? You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.

(text taken from Take our moments and our days : an Anabaptist prayer book : Advent through Pentecost (Scottdale, Pa: Herald Press, 2010), 436-7).

 

Reflection

In my reflection this morning I wish to reflect on our passage from James.

The book of James has had controversial past. Among some Protestants is it not favoured because it seems to advocate for salvation by works and not solely justification through faith alone.

But this emphasis on works and correct Christian action may also let it speak to the situation of those Christians who are impelled to act through the urging of the Holy Spirit or those who are paid to act on behalf of their church or organization as leaders and stewards.

In our passage today we are reminded that God plays no favourites among people. All of us are created in the image of God and all are equally distant and close to God. Human partiality toward the rich and powerful, toward leaders even, is no part of the Kingdom of God. Humans are not to put themselves in the position of judging others based on worldly criteria such as wealth, celebrity status or other worldly position.

Yet we continue to do this.

Some might say that this is our culture. Exactly. It is culture that James was criticising. His culture, like ours, at its worst, favours the rich over the poor. Even though the rich can oppress the poor and drag them into court to ensure they stay rich at the cost of the poor, we still give them preference. Even though they buy politicians and lawyers and spin doctors to get their way, we still give them preference.

In some cultures, people can be tempted to think that the rich are somehow closer to God and wisdom. Having money is associated with virtue and somehow by virtue of having money we listen to their supposed wisdom on matters of living and even faith.

Yet James in sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, says ‘No’. God has chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the Kingdom. But even though God has uplifted the poor Christians still keep them down.

As Christian leaders and managers, I know that we do our best. But we all need the constant correction of scripture in order to inoculate us against the twisted values of the world.

Yet how many times do we see in organizations that the rich get preferential treatment? And how often do we see the poor treated with contempt? Have you ever seen this? Have you ever suffered from this kind of treatment?

The churches and its organizations can easily condemn with words the preferential treatment given to the rich in a capitalist where money is the measure of all things.

But how much better it is to act in a better way where we treat all people are equals in the eyes of God. We should not attempt to embarrass the rich by dragging them down, but rather elevate the poor to their kingdom status.

James summarises the way we should treat people. Very simply, and in the words of Christ he says “you shall Love your neighbour as yourself.” Simple words, perhaps, but how difficult they are to act out every day in every situations.

I remember when I working for the Presbyterian Church in New Zealand I had a manager who was keen to attend marketing and management lunches and events to hear guest speakers on various topics related to our work in communications.

One of those events I attended stood out for me. It was a breakfast meeting. The room was full of young upcoming managers from a range of corporations. They were there, it seemed to me, to gain wisdom about the latest management thinking in order to give them an edge.

The guest speaker was the general manager of a successful wine company. A leading brand they are well known around the world as producing reliable good wine at a reasonable price.

What was his message to this audience?

I was surprised. Instead of some complicated management fad, he had one simple rule he wanted to share with us. He claimed that his simple management rule applied in every situation, with everyone, and was the secret to his management success.

We have already heard this management insight this morning.

It is this: “You shall love you neighbour as yourself.” Although for him was rendered something like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Sometimes called the Golden Rule this was his simple and timeless management and leadership tip.

He used this tip with staff, customers, and suppliers, and he said it never failed him.

The room of young executives clearly expected something else. Surely management and leadership of a major company requires sophisticated techniques using psychological insights, sociological analyses, accounting techniques, and marketing acumen. Those things can be used, sure, but they can also be misused if we do not have ethos of care for people in place.

But his message – a wonderful secular sermon, was that an ethic of care, which recognised that the people are an organizations most important asset guides the success of a major company.

The young executives could be seen shuffling in the seats a little uncomfortably. Many of them had come expecting to learn something they did not already know. But everyone has heard of this rule of life and faith. The difficult part is to believe in it and to put it into place.

The rule of love has been ridiculed as being for our private lives alone. For political and economic realists, who preach the gospel of realism, repeatedly saying that love is all very well between individuals and families and in our private lives. But when we get to the real business of managing companies and countries and dealing with the forces of sin in a violent world, love must be set aside and other pragmatic values must take precedence.

But before we reject love we must try it. But we must also not forget about the sinful nature of men and women. We should not be naive that love can prevent harmful things from happening. After the most loving human of all, Jesus Christ, was hung on a cross to die. But the love of God conquered the power of death for our sakes.

We must place our faith in love and its power to world wonder in the lives of our families, villages, churches, city and nation.

Amen.

Sermon: First Sunday in Lent (22 February 2015)

Tags

climate change, exile, Noah

Preached by Dr Richard A. Davis at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Suva, Fiji Islands (22 February 2015)

Reading: Genesis 9:8-17

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

Our Old Testament reading today from the book of Genesis speaks of the covenant God makes with Noah, his descendants, and all living flesh. It is a well-known part of the larger Noah narrative, in which God floods the world wiping out sinful humanity and giving life on Earth a fresh start.

Coming toward the end of the Noah story this particular reading from Genesis would have to be one of the most repetitive pieces of scripture.

When we see repetition, we can assume a bad writer or editor, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that instead God really wants us to learn the point. Repetition here is giving emphasis for a humanity that is perhaps slow to learn. Or, perhaps God wants to reassure Noah and his family about the his change of behavior. I think it is significant that when God asked Noah to build the ark he spoke to Noah alone, but here God, in making the Covenant makes sure that he speaks to Noah and his sons. Noah and his family had just seen everything they knew wiped off the face of the earth, so God was at pains to reassure them all directly that he would not do it again.

The lesson is clear enough it seems, God will never again flood the whole earth. He wants this point to sink home. And it is one we must remember too.

Some might think that because of this covenant it is impossible that God will allow climate change to cause water to inundate low-lying areas or counties.

Sadly, this covenant does not prevent natural disasters and floods. It did not prevent the 1931 Chinese floods that may have claimed up to 4 million lives. Closer to home, it did not prevent the Fiji floods of 2009 that claimed at least 16 lives.

God’s covenant with Noah will not prevent flooding due to climate change either. Evil remains with us, but through the covenant we can be sure that those disasters that do occur are not the products of God’s anger or rejection.

In many cases, disasters have very human causes. While Western politicians debate resolutions at big international conferences while increasing their emissions at home, and protect and subsidize oil and coal industries, communities in the Pacific are already being relocated.

For people tied so closely to the land and sea where their ancestors lived I can only imagine the disruption caused – not only to the communities, but also in the hearts and minds of those affected. We should never underestimate the attachment to a place, especially those who have not much else but the land they farm and which has provided for them and their communities.

Instead of coming from God’s hand, the rising waters of climate change are the waters of human sin.

Humanity was all but wiped out due to its sin. In this covenant with Noah, God will no longer send waters of destruction. This does not mean that Noah’s family and their descendants will eradicate sin. What it means is that sin will not punished in this way.

It is sin nonetheless that leads to climate change. The greed of the West and the violation of mother nature is what lies behind climate change. The curious thing here is that the unintended result of climate change was just that – unintended. No one desired to pump gases into the atmosphere to change the climate. That would be a sin. No, the sins that eventually lead to climate change are most likely greed, pride, and gluttony. These sins continue to drive an inhumane global economy to the brink of destruction.

In some ways we deserve the punishment of a word wide flood as people implicated in the causes of climate change. Some have more emissions than others, but we all have emissions and many of us use beyond what is acceptable for a stable climate.

In our text for today, God makes humanity a promise. God promises never to flood the whole earth and all flesh ever again.

Humans make promises too. And children seem to have a very good memory for promises made to them by their parents. You parents know what I’m talking about.

Have others made promises to you? Too often when people make promises to us we remember the broken promises that that person made before. This reveals both their shortcoming and ours, as we shouldn’t dwell on the failings of others.

But when God makes a promise to us, we should remember all the promises God has made and fulfils on a daily basis to us. God’s promise in our story today is that God will not allow the forces of chaos to destroy us.

Other promises of God include that found in Jeremiah 29:11: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”

But these promises may have a hollow sound to those facing dislocation through climate change induced sea level rise. Those faced with losing their lands and ancestral homes in the Pacific, are in some cases our families and friends and they are certainly our brothers and sisters in Christ.

But a sea level rise is not a flood to destroy the whole earth and all flesh.

To think that the flooding of our land is a flood for the whole earth is self-centred. In itself such a view is a sin that somehow our world is the whole world. That somehow if our world is destroyed, the whole world is destroyed. This is not how we should think at all.

Those displaced by climate change may wonder what God has done in allowing this to happen.

Instead of thinking about what God may have taken we can choose to see what God has given us.

Perhaps these people displaced by climate change can be a gift to the church. They might be able to teaching us that our home is not this earth.

But that I do not mean that our home is in heaven and we should simply accept what we are given here and wait for death. No. I mean that they can teach us how to live here and now.

Those victims of sea level rise forced to leave their homelands have been called rightly been called refugees. This appears to be a correct use of the term. But I want to apply another, more theological, term to their plight, and that is the term “exile”.

An exile is someone forced to leave their home for one reason or another. But it allows us to draw on our own traditions of the Bible and theology as we understand the plight of those moved on from their homes by climate change. They will move, like all exiles, to a strange place and encounter the unfamiliar.

But they are not the only exiles in the church. Our ancestors perhaps faced a greater disruption with the arrival of missionaries and colonization. Christians today face being exiles in a culture which has increasingly little place for faith. All exiles need to help one another deal with the unfamiliar.

For many dislocated by rising sea levels they will end in exile. But unlike the exile of the Hebrews in Babylon, there will be no chance of a return home. They will need to learn how to sing their songs in a new land

The question for them is: How do we learn to be resident aliens, living in exile?

In the famous “Epistle to Diognetus” early Christians were reported on in the following way:

“They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.”

Christians were seen in a way that transcended boundaries with a light connection to place

Noah was also an exile. For Noah there was no going back. His homeland was flooded and everything he had in the whole world was in the ark. Most likely, he and his family had drifted a long way from home. He had to accept his new location as being provided by God.

He demonstrated this acceptance by immediately planting a grape vine. Given that grapes can take about three years to produce fruit, we can see that Noah was taking a long-term view and adopting his new home.

In fact, some scholars suggest that the first 11 books of genesis were written during the Babylonian exile. If true, then this would suggest to us that we might see a criticism of Empire and a way of dealing with Exile in our text.

One thing that the Creation narrative of the first 11 chapters of Genesis makes clear is that our God, the God of Noah, is the God of the whole world.

God not only made the world but is also everywhere present in it. God was with Noah when he set off in the ark and was there when the ark came to rest. Few gods of the ancient world could achieve that feat. They were often being located in just one place.

Climate change forces us to rethink our God. God is not the God of our village or the god of our farm. God is the god of the whole world.

Can we nurture the faith of an exile? -With eyes on the Kingdom of God, which is above nations, hovers over the waters and the land and has no regard for arbitrary national borders.

Can we demonstrate a new way of living – clinging lightly to this earth and the things of this world? I hope we can.

Part of this poses a responsibility on those receiving the exiles too.

Take Deuteronomy 10:19: “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Refugees, asylum seekers, and exiles are being treated terribly in Australia and other countries around the World. We Christians need to open our hearts and encourage government to do better in welcoming the stranger.

As someone in self-imposed exile, a New Zealander, a Kiwi living and working in Fiji, I love the communal life here in Fiji. People are friendly and here in the middle of the Pacific Fiji and other countries are surrounded by some of the worst climate offenders in the World, USA, China, Australia and New Zealand.

What do we have to offer them? I think we can live a life that shows how people can live in harmony with nature and each other under God.

This was the task given to the exile Noah, It is remains our task today.

Pacific Theological College Chapel Reflection (09 February 2015)

Tags

Jesus Christ

Reading: 2 Kings 5:1-14

Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the LORD had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy.

Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”

So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said. And the king of Aram said, “Go then, and I will send along a letter to the king of Israel.” He went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments. 6 He brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read, “When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy.”

When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, “Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.”

But when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, “Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel.”

So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha’s house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.”

But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!

Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?” He turned and went away in a rage.

But his servants approached and said to him, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean’?”

So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.

Reflection

Our reading today is one the great stories from the books of Kings, even of the whole Old Testament. The healing of the Syrian general Naaman is complex and full of characters. It contains lots of drama, and has a great outcome. It may even make a great movie one day.

To some it may seem a gentle, comforting story of the healing of Naaman by the kind prophet Elisha. But it is worth remembering that Jesus was nearly killed when he mentioned it in Nazareth at the beginning of his ministry.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus, following his temptations in the desert, returned to his home town of Nazareth and while in the synagogue read the famous prophecy from Isaiah – and referred to a story about the prophet Elijah, and this morning’s passage, saying:

“There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” [Luke 4:27]

Such was the anger of the crowd at hearing these words, thatJesus was forced to the edge of the cliff where many of the faithful Jews present would have expected him to die a worthy and justified death.

What is so scandalous about this passage that the Jews of his home town were driven to kill him?

To know and follow Jesus, a task we share at PTC, encourages us to understand why this story caused such a deep offence.

Let’sreturn then to Naaman and Elisha.

Naaman was a mighty warrior in the service of a Syrian king. God had given him many victories. But he was also afflicted with leprosy.

This is one of the challenging aspects of the story for Jews – Naaman is a leper, which would have made him unclean in their eyes. Yethe still wins God’s favour. So much so, that according to Jesus, he is healed while other lepers in Israel remain afflicted.So in spite of his leprosy and his threatening status as a foreign general who has previously defeated the Israelites, he remains in God’s favour.

Some commentators suggest that Naaman’s leprosy would have excluded him from society. Yet there is little evidence for this in the text. In fact, in verse 19, which follows our passage, he seeks forgiveness in advance for his sin in offering physical support to the King of Aram in his idolatrous worship in the temple of Rimmon. That he was a leader in Syrian and that the King would touchhim in the temple, suggests that the Syrians accepted him, adding to the belief of the Hebrews that the Syrians were a corrupt and dangerous society. Israelites hearing this story probably were scandalized at a society that not only posed a military threat to Israel, but also allowed a leper to mix with a king.

Nevertheless, God had been good to Naaman. This story is scandalous partly because we hear that God is not simply the God of Israel,but the God of all peoples, including the Syrians.Naaman is just one of several gentile figures in the Old Testament through whom we learn that the God of Israelis the true God of the Gentiles too.

There is another scandalous aspect to the story. This is the relationship between official and political power and the humble and outsiders.

Naaman is a powerful man working for a powerful King. It seems that the Syrian king is the dominant one who gives orders to the King of Israel.Upon receiving the letter from the king of Syria, the Hebrew king rents his clothes knowing that he is militarily inferior. Foolishly,and demonstrating his lack of faith, he thinks that his survival depends on his own power and not the power of God.

Despite the presence of these kings, this is anti-political text. It undermines the pretensions of those in power and who think that having political power makes things happen.Recall that the kings are nameless. Rather than being the main characters, as rulers are often tempted to think of themselves, they are props in the narrative to merely drive the story forward

The Syrian king assumes that the Hebrew King has power to heal. This is a pagan belief. And our neo-pagan rulers today retain misplaced self-belief in their power to effect change and heal nations.

But both kings are powerless in dealing with Namaan’s leprosy. However, there are two others in the story who have the confidence that God can cure Naaman. The first is the slave girl, the lowly captive whose words reach the King of Aram. Second is the hero of the story, the prophet Elisha.

Here are two examples of the how the God uses the weak to shame the strong.God raised Naaman up, but to make him whole he had to take him low, through the slave girl’s advice, to hearing the word of an aloof prophet, to washing in a second-class river.Yet, through all this,somehow hemaintained enough faith to be healed by the power of God.

Let’s return to Jesus who cited this story in the Synagogue in Nazareth. This visit was a homecoming for him. He had been away and now he came back a man at the start of his ministry.

As I’ve already said, Jesus readthis famous prophecy about himself from Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor.”

The reading from Isaiah is sweet to the ear– with good news to the poor and release to the captives.

Luke records the congregation’s favorable reception of Jesus’s words: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”

Yet moments later, after Jesus recalled to their minds the story of Naaman, they want to kill him.

I want to suggest that while they could agree with Isaiah, the real challenge comes with Elisha.

I think that they were upset that Jesus was linking his task to that of the prophet who adopted a universalistic task of the healing the nations and not being a parochial, nationalistic messiah.

Peace for some in Israel at Jesus time meant a nationalistic messiah to come and rid the land of the occupying Roman force and their local collaborators.

This desire showed a limited political imagination and a theological one too. God is limited to Israel. Jesus would be, like the prophet Elisha, a healer to the nations and Gentiles, even Syrians or Romans who had defeated Israel.

No wonder the crowd was upset – to them Jesus had twisted the meaning of their sacred texts and brought them together in such a way that meant that he claimed to work for peace and justice in ways that could accommodate gentiles and even Romans within God’s love.

This crowd would have known Jesus – they would have known Mary and Joseph and been curious to hear what their son, Jesus, had to say. They were amazed, happy,then scandalized to the point they wanted him dead. Immortal are Jesus words “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”

Students be warned! When you complete your studies here are PTC, people at home will be wanting to know if you have changed during your time here. Maybe some have feared that too much learning strange theology in a foreign colonial language ways would change you.Curious, they might even come to church to hear you preach.

But like Jesus, when you return home the lessons learned in the desert, by temptation, and through the faithful reading and study of God’s word will serve both you and your communities.

People long to hear comforting words that reinforce their own prejudices. But sometimes truthful words that need to be spoken can challenge and cause disruption. I would encourage you all to practice the virtue of courage so that when the time comes you too can speak prophetic words at home.

My prayer for you is that if you be disruptive, let it be the holy disruption of God.

Amen.

Sermon: Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (31 August 2014)

Preached by Dr Richard Davis at St Ronan’s Presbyterian Church, Eastbourne, Lower Hutt, NZ, 31 August 2014

Lectionary Readings

• Exodus 3:1-15
• Matthew 16:21-28
• Romans 12:9-21

Sermon

I think that it’s fair to say that our culture values busy-ness. Being busy is valued as a good thing, almost without consideration of what someone is busy doing. Sometimes we ask people if they are keeping busy, with the hope that they are. One of my favourite bumper stickers reads – “Jesus is Coming! Look Busy.”

Being busy is just one aspect of a culture that favours action, we are supposed to getting things done and being active, we have to fix things and do things. The flip side of this is that we are overly suspicious of ivory tower intellectuals who don’t seem to be doing things.

This affects the church too – it is not enough to pray, you must DO something, as though prayer is not an action. I’m not arguing against action, but sometimes we need to make room for the action of God; we need to let God be God. And we do this by living as God’s creatures, and refusing to act as a god.

Our story of Moses’ call this morning tells us one story about God’s action. In response to the cries of the oppressed Israelites, we are told that God listens and God acts. Creatureliness demands that our actions need to take account of Gods actions.

What strikes me about this passage is Moses readiness to be addressed by God. God simply says I have heard your people crying out. And God affirms that God will deliver his people. Having heard the people’s cries from their state of oppression God will take action and deliver the people into a land of milk and honey.

It is important to note that Moses is not the deliverer, but still plays an important part in the story. Deliverance is God’s initiative alone. This is especially important to remember is a time of election promises. No politician or activist can take the place of God and be our true deliverer. Sure their policies affect our lives, but we should be cautious of claims of political parties to offer what we can only receive from God.

Moses takes his role from God’s initiative, preserving his place as a tool of God in the liberation of his people.

In our Gospel reading we see the apostle Peter, the first Pope, deny the words that Jesus speaks about his forthcoming crucifixion. Peter rebukes him with the words “God forbid it! This must never happen to you.”

Jesus responds by saying “Get behind me Satan”.

It would have been hard for Peter to continue to argue with Jesus after such a hard rebuke. In fact, Jesus had the last word here. And we can imagine that Peter would have been feeling fairly sheepish.

Jesus’s rebuke accuses Peter of setting his mind on human things and not divine things. But what is more human than being whipped and crucified at the hands of the authorities?

Peter’s human focus here may be that he thought that he had could forbid Jesus’s torture and death? There is perhaps evidence for this view in Gethsemane where Jesus was arrested. Remember that at the time of his arrest, one of Jesus’s companions (unnamed in Matthew’s gospel) strikes a centurion with his sword.

If Peter, in saying “God forbid it”, does have God’s action in mind, it is God invoked to rescue Jesus for human satisfaction. Rather than follow Jesus’s own guidance, Peter appears to be following his own desires and uses the name of God in order to get what he wants – Jesus ongoing presence and the avoidance of Jesus’s suffering.

Such desires must, in Jesus following words, be denied. Here again the initiative remains with God. We sometimes have to accept the tough lessons that God teaches us through doing things that appear foolish in the eyes of the world.

It is notable that Peter took Jesus aside to talk to him. This make Peter’s views private ones, not fit for public announcement. Peter clearly thought highly of his opinion as to what God wanted for Jesus. But Jesus did not accept this counsel as private, his rebuke was to Peter, but his teaching that followed was for all the disciples, including us. We must be prepared to take up our crosses in following Jesus.

Peter’s rejection of Christ’s anticipated suffering is a lesson in in how we reject the notion of a suffering Christ. And in turn we reject our suffering as Christians. We can be tempted to want a messiah on our own terms and the easy satisfaction of a Christian life free from pain and suffering. But God’s acceptance of suffering for us, should lead, if we are true disciples of Christ, into accepting suffering for God’s Kingdom.

Jesus is no longer around to rebuke us for our foolish words and mind’s orientation toward human things. But we have got his Word and we have his church. In polite society we may not rebuke each other, but we can challenge each other – in love – to think more divine thoughts and to live out the commands together in a community of reconciliation. In a world of revenge and hurt we can be a community of light in the darkness.

When we come to our reading from Romans, we perhaps get to one of the most foolish passages of all. Here in this passage full of advice for Christians, we are commanded do and avoid many things, but the emphasis lies where God is mentioned once – in the commands for Christians to renounce vengeance altogether.

At every point in this passage from St Paul we are told to emulate God. We are to love and bless people just as God loves and blesses people. Like God, we are to embrace the good and despise evil.

However, at one point and one point only, we are not to emulate God. Vengeance remains the prerogative of God alone. This is an important biblical theme – God is only one who can rightly take revenge. We are commanded to love our enemies and forgive them, leaving vengeance to God.

This is a powerful idea and one central to the testimony of Scripture – it is not the role of creatures to take on the Creator’s role. Vengeance is off limits to humans, we must avoid playing God in visiting revenge on those who hurt us.

To many this is a ridiculous idea. But it only appears ridiculous because it is a completely radical idea. But it is not as impractical as many would suggest it is.

This week I watched a moving film about forgiveness. Entitled “Amish Grace”, it depicts the true story of the response to the 2006 school shooting in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. School shootings are very common in the USA, so common that only the worst ones are reported here. This shooting was not exceptional, but the response to it was completely unprecedented and has been the subject of a movie and several books. What made this event remarkable was the response of the Amish community. They immediately forgave the killer.

 

 

The story is one of a lone gunman who wanted revenge against God for the death nine years earlier of his infant daughter who died after only 20 minutes of life. He entered a single room Amish schoolhouse and after letting the adults and boys escape, shot all the girls, killing five, of them and wounding five more. He then shot himself.

[It may seen strange, even illogical or irrational, to kill children in revenge against God. But it only appears that way because we have forgotten that Jesus himself tells us that our measure of how we treat God is how we treat children. Recall his words “Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (Mark 9:36-37). To kill children is to kill God.]

Within hours, the Amish community, even while still grieving the loss of their children and grand children visited the distraught widow and father of the gunman and forgave the killer. They expressed support in practical ways for the gunman’s children and even went to his funeral, when he was shunned by the wider community.

The movie is about these acts of forgiveness and doing good, which one mother in the movie finds it especially difficult to offer. She is right – forgiveness is not easy, but for the Amish, they couldn’t do anything else. By practicing forgiveness in their community in little ways on a daily basis, they were able to forgive when it seemed an impossibility.

The shooter, Roberts, harboured thoughts of revenge of against God for nine bitter years and this revenge ultimately consumed him and lead him to the unthinkable – murdering innocent peace loving children.

Contrast this with the response of the Amish for whom revenge was never an option, and for whom forgiveness and doing good to the family of the killer came instinctively. Forgiveness was not as abstract thing dissociated from doing good. It was, like our Romans reading, embedded in a range of commands to avoid doing and thinking evil while doing good and leaving room for God to judge both their murdered children and their killer.

I don’t know how I would react if my loved ones were gunned down. I fear that I would want revenge. But such thoughts deserve the rebuke of Jesus – “Get behind me Satan”. Revenge perpetuates the division and hurts of the community – it forces people apart and feeds on the anger we hold in our hearts.

Desmond Tutu is his book No Future without Forgiveness writes, “forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss which liberates the victim.”[219] We cannot be free if we allow feelings of revenge to enslave us to the perpetrator of our pain.

Some might say that it is ‘natural’ to seek revenge. That is human nature – is it only natural to want to seek to hurt those who hurt you. Perhaps the Bible’s realism is that it acknowledges the need for forgiveness in place of the common desire for revenge This can be a comforting thought to those who wish to give in to vengeful thoughts. They can justify revenge by saying that is just a part of who we are in our very essence. How convenient.

Christians know better – we know that we cannot be asked to do things by God that are impossible without God’s strength. God love and grace empowers us to leave revenge to God. As we have seen, Jesus rebukes the “natural” reaction of Peter to hearing of Jesus forthcoming persecution.

Instead of revenge, we are commanded to do good. This may heap burning coals on the enemies head, but again this is not our doing. The feelings generated by acts of love are not within our control. Sometimes our loving acts are rebuffed; sometimes they are embraced. But in both cases we can be sure we have done the right thing. And such acts can be transformative.

What encourages us in holding these commands and positions together is the support we have in each other. We need each other in the church to encourage us and perhaps even in extreme situations, rebuke us. And we need to do this regularly. Sunday worship and other church gatherings are not simply social gatherings, but a time for Christians to practice living together in community. It offers us a chance to be retuned for God.

I’m not a musical person, and the only musical instrument I own is a didgeridoo. The good thing about a didgeridoo is that it never needs tuning, you simply blow into it. But even doing this well takes a lot of practice. Didgeridoos are difficult to break and have no moving parts or strings. Other musical instruments need to be tuned on a regular basis. Christians are like these more complex musical instruments, we know the notes we are meant to make, but we are easily influenced by our surrounds to begin to make discordant notes. Regular worship is one practice we have to retune us in line with tuning fork of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.

Part of this retuning is to remind ourselves of our creatureliness. In recognising our status before our Creator, we are reminded of the need to let God be God.

SERMON: Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (27 July 2014)

Tags

mustard seed

Preached by Dr Richard A. Davis  at Waiwhetu Uniting Church, Lower Hutt, New Zealand

27 July 2014

Lectionary Reading

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Sermon

Have you ever looked at something, say a building, from several different angles and learned to appreciate its complexity the more viewpoints you had of it?

In our gospel reading this morning we have several parables about the Kingdom of God, with each one offering a slightly different perspective on it. The Kingdom of God is not an easy concept to understand, so we may consider ourselves fortunate that when it comes to understanding the Kingdom of God we are given numerous parables in order to help us grasp it. In fact, there are more parables about the Kingdom of God than almost any other single topic in the gospels.

I think this suggests that the Kingdom of God was a very important topic for Jesus – perhaps the most important topic. And given that he addressed these parables to the crowds, he must have thought it was an important message for them too. It is worth remembering that the crowd he was addressing was a largely Jewish audience in Roman occupied Palestine.

Let’s begin with a look at the parable of the mustard seed. It is important to remember that Jesus says two different things about mustard seeds – and it’s important we don’t get them confused. In today’s reading, the tiny mustard seed grows into a large tree. Later in Matthew (17:20), Jesus says that if we have faith as large as the tiny mustard seed then we can move mountains. In this second passage, Jesus seems to be saying that if you have even a small amount of faith you can achieve a lot. This was not so much a parable as a simile, being a direct comparison between the apostles’ tiny faith and the small mustard seed which was even bigger.

In our current parable, Jesus is making more a point about the process of the mustard seed growing into a large tree. There is dynamism to the parables of the Kingdom, there is action, and growth, and change.

In trying to understand what Jesus was getting at, it can be useful to attend to common knowledge about mustard seeds that would have been known to Jesus’s own audience. We know that mustard seeds are small, but what is the purpose of the mustard seed? To someone like Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, the sole purpose of the seed would be to make more seeds, thereby perpetuating its genes. This is right on one level – the seed makes a tree, and the tree makes more seeds and in this way the seed perpetuates its genetic code.

But one does need to be an evolutionary biologist to know this – farmers regularly save seed from their crops to use for the next season’s crop. The seed not only grows into the bush or tree – it makes more seeds and they make more seeds, there is no static mustard seed or tree, what we have here is a dynamic system of growth and renewal.

Is then the Kingdom like this? Small seeds which make more seeds and in doing so pass on the code of the Kingdom. As Christians we know that we only know about Jesus because other Christians taught us the faith, invited us to church, gave us Bibles, and supported us when we had almost lost faith in God. And we have also passed on what we know of the faith in our small and large ways, by word and in deed. And as we know, one may sow the seed, and another may reap.

But all this could have been said about almost any tree or bush. Along with the many interpretations of this parable there is a common interpretation of growth through the power of God. This true, but here I want to examine the mustard seed in particular, assuming that Jesus choose to talk about the mustard seed deliberately and did not choose this example at random.

Some scholars have suggested that the mustard plant that was known to Jesus’s hearers would have been the Brassica nigra or black mustard. Knowing a little more about his plant suggests some interesting interpretations of this short parable.

 

 

This plant, from which we get the condiment mustard today, is probably native to the Middle East. And like Christianity, which also started there, it has spread all over the world. It has been cultivated as suggested in the parable, but it also spreads itself by producing a lot of seeds which can survive for 50 years underground before coming to life.

Black mustard can also have an ‘allelopathic’ effect on other plants, inhibiting their growth. This might sound unfriendly, until you realize that perhaps you don’t want other plants coming into your native territory. It is worth remembering that Jesus’s land was occupied by Romans who most likely brought plants from Rome to Palestine to cultivate for food. Maybe sowing mustard, as mentioned in the parable, was a way to undermine the crops imported by the occupying Roman army.

For these reasons, the mustard plant has been considered a weed, and even in Jesus’s time it was not grown in the gardens of Jews. If it was deliberately cultivated at all, it was planted out in the fields. Even though we enjoy mustard with our hot dogs and steak, it remains a weed today – and an aggressive one. In New Zealand black mustard is considered an invasive species. It is humble plant, but an aggressive and subversive one, one that adds spice to life and a threat to settled ways of life.

If Jesus deliberately choose the mustard plant for his parable its very nature suggests some interesting interpretations. But some questions remain unanswered. Are we the sower of the seed, or the seed, or the final tree, or even the birds resting in its branches?

Before attending to that question, let’s look at yeast.

The parable of the mustard seed is paired with the parable of the yeast and there is good reason to believe that these two parables are two versions of the same basic idea about the Kingdom.

Yeast granules are also very small – smaller than mustard seeds. One of the things that yeast and seeds have in common is that they give of themselves in order to become something else. They are not only transformative, they are transformed. You will not find yeast in a loaf of bread, but you know it went into the dough. In just the same way as the seed disappears into the ground in order for there to be a mustard plant, the yeast disappears into the loaf.

We know, like Jesus did, that to make bread rise you need yeast or leaven. Older translations often use the word ‘leaven’ instead of ‘yeast’. ‘Leaven’ is probably preferable as it was not until 1859 that Louis Pasteur first discovered how yeast works. He found that yeast feeds on the starches in flour, producing carbon dioxide which then expands the gluten proteins in the flour causing the dough to expand and rise.

 

 

Leaven was a piece of dough with yeast in it, saved over for the next batch. In this case, a small amount of leaven is hidden into 3 measures of flour, which would produce enough bread for 100 people.

But, you may be thinking, the Jews ate unleavened bread. For the Israelites leaven was a corrupting influence. Later in Matthew (16:6) Jesus warns against the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees, using this as a metaphor for their false teaching.

This metaphor relies on the fact that yeast, even in baking, can be a nuisance. Bakers have long known the airborne yeasts can contaminate their dough. Yet fans of Belgian beer are thankful that Trappist monks use naturally airborne yeasts to good effect to ferment their world-beating beer.

How surprising then, that in the parable we have a woman deliberately adding yeast to her dough. To the Israelites this would have been considered a crazy thing to do. For them leaven is a contaminant. Everywhere else in the Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, leaven is considered a negative influence.

Again, we can ask: in this parable, are we the leaven, the baker, the flour, or the bread?

It is not easy to say.

What these two parables share is the action of someone deliberately sowing something seemingly unwanted into something, which then grows into something new. Jews would not have wanted mustard sown in their gardens, or yeast to enter their bread. And yet this was how Jesus explained the coming of the promised Kingdom.

In these parables Jesus was confounding his audience’s expectations of what the Kingdom of God was. To understand their shocking power we need to understand what the Kingdom isn’t.

We can be tempted to think that the Kingdom grows like a plant from small beginnings to be a huge church. This was a comforting thought at the height of Christendom. But Jesus’s parables do not contain any teaching of inevitable growth or progress. Our experience today is that the church in many places is shrinking – it is becoming small again. But smallness, as our parables teach, is no bad thing. Rather than focus on size, we can be attuned to the ways in which God can use the small but potent force contained within our lives and our churches in the subversive work of God’s Kingdom.

Nor is the Kingdom of God politics as usual. It was not the kingdom or empire imposed by the Roman Empire. The Jews had no trouble understanding that. But the Jews expected some kind of political kingdom, like the restoration of the Davidic Kingdom which we read about in the Old Testament. The coming Messiah would, many of them hoped, usher in a new earthly kingdom. But the Kingdom of these parables is not political reawakening. It is humble and subversive and not of the order of this world.

I want to suggest that in these parables we are the seeds and the leaven planted by God in the ground and in the flour to make new things for his glory.

Sometimes considered by the world to be worthless or a blockage in the world – we Christians can can planted, like the individual mustard seed in the parable, by God to get in places where we can make a small but important difference. We confess that we are sinners, and may think we are not worthy to be a part of God’s Kingdom. Even s0 – God has a place for us in his Kingdom. Like leaven we can be placed into situations in order to corrupt the values of the world and let God’s bountiful Kingdom come forth.

In this process of allowing ourselves to be used by God for the work of the Kingdom we can die to our old selves, like the seed or the yeast, and give our newly transformed lives for the expansion of the Kingdom and something greater than ourselves. Some Christians have done this in witness to Jesus’s message. Consider the subversive witness of someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted Hitler’s Nazi regime, training ministers underground in defiance of the law. His legacy lives on today.

God can see the potential of our small lives and can plant us in situations where the Kingdom, through his power, can grow and flourish. The Kingdom is within us, like the tree is within the seed. We only need to allow God to plant us where we are needed.

AMEN.

SERMON: Third Sunday after Pentecost (29 June 2014)

Tags

Abraham and Isaac, child poverty, sermon

Sermon by Dr Richard A. Davis preached at St Ronan’s Presbyterian Church, Eastbourne, Lower Hutt, New Zealand

29 June 2014

Lectionary Readings

• Genesis 22:1-14
• Psalm 13
• Romans 6:12-23
• Matthew 10:40-42

Sermon

Today’s Old Testament reading tells the infamous story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.

It was said of Thomas More’s short book Utopia that it takes an afternoon to read and a lifetime to understand. Our story of Abraham and Isaac takes only a moment to read and is perhaps not understandable within our lifetime, this is because to understand this story requires nothing less than to understand God.

We might not be able to understand God, but perhaps we can understand something of Abraham. To learn about Abraham is not only helpful in grappling with today’s reading, but because Abraham is upheld as the father of three faiths, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, the quest for peace in the world today demands we understand each other’s faiths and where they came from. And Abraham remains central to this task.

Abraham is a towering figure of the Bible and world religions. But in studying this passage the esteem in which he is held seems to be very strange, for the actions Abraham displays here are as much worthy of being condemned as being praised.

So curious is this tale that the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard wrote a whole book on this story entitled Fear and Trembling.

But Kierkegaard, even though he was a great philosopher, and knew his Bible well, is hardly of help to the preacher who wishes to explain his passage. The more Kierkegaard looked into this passage the less he understood it. In the end he concluded that we can only admire Abraham, not understand him.

But in his various stories and retellings of this text, Kierkegaard did offer one warning to the preacher and to you!

He tells the imaginary story of a preacher who, in preaching this text, convinces someone in the congregation that Abraham ought to be emulated, and so the parishioner goes home and kills his most precious son. The preacher then visits the poor man in prison and exclaims: “You despicable man, you scum of society, what devil has so possessed you that you want to murder you son?”

In a sense this is simply Kierkegaard’s dark humour. In another sense, he uses this story to point out that what Abraham did is not ethical and that as much as he is upheld a faithful man we should in no way emulate him. Here is the paradox of Abraham for Kierkegaard.

The passage, as read today, is a puzzle, but it is perhaps best seen as the end of a process Abraham has been through.

We must remember God’s promise that Abraham and Sarah, even though they were old, were promised uncountable offspring. God’s covenant with Abraham, was that God would give him ancestors as numerable as the stars in the sky. It is against this promise that Abraham’s action and faith can be understood better.

Among characters of the Bible it is Job who is best known for his patience. But I’d say that Abraham and Sarah should be the ones credited with patience. Abraham was promised numerous offspring several times and they never seemed to arrive. The first time was way back in Chapter 12 of Genesis and Isaac isn’t born until Chapter 21. We don’t know how many years that was, but Abraham was already 100 years old by then.

Yet, suggesting that Abraham was patient might be a little inaccurate. He did not fully trust God and took matters into his own hands to survive his trials and ensure that he had an heir.

In Chapter 12, for example, Abraham, (then known as Abram), left for Egypt to escape a famine. Thinking he might be killed by the Egyptians who might desire his beautiful wife Sarah (then known as Sarai), he made up a story that they were brother and sister so that they would both be safe. Weird? Perhaps. But the point here is that he did not exactly trust God’s promise that he would father a great nation. Would God really allow Abraham to be killed before his promise could be fulfilled?

Later, in another example, Abraham and Sarah, impatient with God’s timing, decide that Abraham should try having children through their slave-girl Hagar. This does not go well. Even while Hagar was pregnant with Abraham’s son Ishmael, there is strife between the two women. And then God says to Abraham, “Yes I will bless Ishmael, but the son you shall conceive with Sarah, is the one I will make covenant with.” So God effectively says that you tried to get around my plans for you, but you will follow my way in any case.

Eventually Isaac was born to Sarah and Abraham. After decades of waiting for a child of their own, Isaac was their blessing and their hope. They loved Isaac.

Then God asked Abraham to kill him. To sacrifice Isaac would mean the end of their hopes. There seemed to be a contradiction here as God promises offspring yet requires that their long-awaited son be sacrificed. But what appears contradictory to us is not contradictory to God. We may be tempted at some point to cling to the things we like most – the promises of God and not the challenges, the rewards, and not the trials.

This temptation is hard to resist. We may prefer to focus on God’s blessings and what God promises and gives us, rather than God’s trials and what God requires of us. Can we instead remember that God is in control even when he tests us?

Abraham appears to be prepared to sacrifice his future blessings of his children’s children and further generations in his faithfulness to God. If he had sacrificed Isaac we might not be here now. In effect it would have been the end of history, with no Jacob, no Joseph, and no Moses.

This raises questions for us about what we sacrifice and to what. Abraham is prepared to sacrifice his child in obedience to God. What do we sacrifice out of command for God? And what do we sacrifice to other gods?

Last week I was at the launch of a new book by Professor Jonathan Boston and Dr Simon Chapple entitled Child Poverty in New Zealand. Based on their long research of public policies to help children they have written a timely book about an issue all New Zealanders should take seriously this election year and beyond. But let’s not be fooled; solving child poverty will not be easy to fix, even with a change of government. To lift some 285,000 children out of poverty will require nothing less than a fundamental change of heart among New Zealanders. For too long we have accepted child poverty as an acceptable sacrifice for our way of life.

In the time I grew up, parents, mine included, made sacrifices so that their kids could have a better life. This was a common theme in the post-war depression and post-war periods. Parents were determined to give their kids a better life than the one they had. This meant they were prepared to make sacrifices for them so that they could go to university and have experiences that they never had the chance of having.

But in recent years something has changed. Many kids are now worse off than their parents. And many kids fear inheriting a New Zealand with entrenched child poverty, gross inequalities, and a massive environmental debt they did not incur themselves.

I’m not wanting to blame individual parents here, but one way of describing what has changed is that just as once parents sacrificed their present for their kids’ future, nowadays, as a society, we seem prepared to sacrifice the future of our children. This is, I suggest one way in which to understand how it’s now tolerable that as a society we are doing so little about climate change and child poverty.

But to what have we sacrificed our kids? Several things, perhaps, but it is almost certainly our own present. We, like the younger Abraham, have decided to take things into our own hands rather than depending on God’s promises to us for peace and a life in all its fullness. In this quest for a human-made future we have set aside God’s plan and timing for us.

In general, we can say that whatever justifies not spending more on our children is an idol we have sacrificed them to. If, for instance, we say that we cannot afford to fund policies that will help alleviate child poverty, we sacrifice our children to what we’d prefer to do with the money.

Abraham knew better. A lesson he learned the hard way was this: if you are going to sacrifice your child there can be only one reason for doing so – that the one true God requires it. Only that can justify the sacrifice of a child, nothing else – ever.

But as we know God didn’t require the sacrifice of Isaac, only that Abraham be willing to do so. Abraham, by showing that his obedience to God is greater than his love for this son demonstrated his fear of God.

In this way we can see that in the end the story is not really about the sacrifice of Isaac, but the sacrifice of Abraham’s own will. Having made so many attempts to secure his future in his own way he finally comes face to face with the reality that wanting to have his own way requires disobeying God. God forces Abraham to face the reality that his own actions are not enough to secure both God’s favour and his earthly reward.

In the end of the story Abraham names the place of the sacrifice ‘The lord will provide’. Was Abraham talking about God’s provision of the ram? God provided much more than that. It was at this place that Abraham finally came to see that God not only provided him with an heir, but also that God had been faithful to him all along.

Abraham endured much, including the test of sacrificing his only son for whom he waited decades. We don’t know whether God would have given an heir to Abraham earlier had he demonstrated more faith in God’s promises. God’s timing is something that remains obscure and a mystery to us. But perhaps Abraham would not have endured so much if he had simply trusted God to be faithful to his covenant.

Throughout his life, God remains faithful to Abraham. And to his credit, Abraham was finally obedient to God. By faith, he passes the test of God.

May we also be willing to submit to the tests of God, and through faith endure them, and in doing so work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.

AMEN.

SERMON: Fifth Sunday of Easter (18 May 2014)

Sermon Preached by Dr Richard A. Davis at St Ronan’s, Eastbourne, 18 May 2014

SCRIPTURE READINGS

• John 14:1-14
• Acts 7:55-60
• 1 Peter 2:2-10

SERMON

For our nation and our church these are times when we are tearing down and building up. No more so than in our second biggest city, Christchurch, which is still recovering from the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. I was amazed to see on Campbell Live the other night Christchurch’s CBD, which still has so many empty sites and so few people walking around.

Some of the shops and offices that previously buzzed with workers, shoppers, and tourists, now no longer exist and people are finding other places to be. The churches there have also been hit hard, requiring a rethinking of their mission, building needs, and an unanticipated pastoral focus on healing the hurts of such disruption. People are in mourning, not only for those killed in the quakes, but also for their city, neighborhoods, and homes.

In Lower Hutt at the moment there is outcry about demolishing the Town Hall and Horticultural Hall, landmarks in our city, and sites of so many happy memories. My own parents, who celebrated their 52nd wedding anniversary this month had their wedding reception in the Horticultural Hall, considered the venue in those days. But perhaps if these halls are demolished a new generation can make their memories in new places fit for new purposes.

Human buildings fit for human purposes are essential for human flourishing, but this morning I wish to focus on the building up of the church by Christ, who makes his church out of “living stones”, as we heard read this morning from Peter’s first letter. This passage, rich with metaphors, speaks directly to our life as Christians growing from new born infants in the faith, to become a people set apart for the purposes of God.

This passage from 1 Peter offers counsel, as individuals, and as a church. Indeed, the passage talks of our role as living stones that are bound together to form a new people with a new role in the world.

What a strange expression – “living stones”. Clearly there are no such things as a stones that live, but here is an expression of a truth of our life together as a church.

But, what is the church? There is no simple answer to this question.

Some would see it as a club of Christians who agree to come together for a common purpose. But this voluntaristic view of the church denies the role Christians have traditionally affirmed for the role of Christ in making the church.

Another answer is that churches are the stones, glass, and wood that combine to provide us places of worship, hospitality, and community life. This is some truth in this position – churches are buildings. And there is a good case that buildings offer an architectural testimony to the community that worships there.

What do you think or feel when you see a church? If you have visited the magnificent cathedrals of Europe, or the ancient churches of the Middle East, you will surely agree that the very buildings, their surroundings, and furnishings cry out, even if the priests are silent when you visit.

Churches are testimonies to a continuity of Christian witness in those places, and they come to be identified with very places they are in. Consider St Paul’s in London, Notre Dame in Paris, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, St Basil’s in Moscow. These cities are unimaginable without them. Closer to home the Christchurch cathedral, still on the logo of the City Council, stands as a reminder of Christianity’s place at the heart of the city.

But as we all know, the church is the people even more than the buildings. The early Christians had no separate buildings they worshiped in. They would have met in each other’s homes to read letters from the first Christian leaders and to read the scriptures together. They practiced radical hospitality, attracting new Christians by the lives they lived together.

What does it mean to be a royal or holy priesthood? Over the years this phrase has been used to suggest that the Church stands separate from the world. We are made from stones the world has rejected, standing on the cornerstone that the world rejected and crucified.

Many of us may have suffered for being Christians. And with an increasingly secular society that we live in the church cannot ask for any special favours. With the rise of militant atheism, and with more people rejecting faith altogether, the mocking of faith is something we need to prepare for. We are being separated from the mainstream, whether we like it or not.

I was very fortunate to spend several years studying theology in Edinburgh. Many weekends I would travel to the Highlands to go “hillwalking” – this isn’t tramping, but climbing hills much lower than our mountains, but usually in conditions that made them challenging nonetheless.

One common feature of the hills of Scotland are the dry stone walls that marked out fields and sometimes provide useful markers up ridges. They were usually built from the stones on the fields nearby. Made without any mortar, it is remarkable that these walls can withstand extreme climates and strong winds.

It is said that a good wall-maker will only pick up each stone once and find its perfect place in the wall without putting it back down. When you see how many stones there are, you don’t want to be lifting them up and then putting them back down, only to have to lift them back up again. A good wall builder can do maybe three metres in a day, which entails lifting about three tonnes of stone. This requires years of experience.

 

We can see ourselves as stones like these, living stones in the phrases of Peter. We are those stones, rejected from the pasture, pushed to the margins, and perceived to be useless in the field where the real action takes place. But in the hands of Christ we are placed, all of us, whatever our size or shape into our perfect place in the structure that fulfills his purpose. And once picked up by Christ out of the dirt, we are not put down, Christ uses us, in unison with others to build his Kingdom. We all have our place in his church, working together for the good of all.

A field is pointless without a wall around it; indeed it is not a field at all. The sheep will escape, or the ram will get in when you don’t want it to. The wall made of the stones pushed to the margins makes the pasture useful. In the hands of the skilled wall-maker the stones make the pasture what it was meant to be. This is an important point. The wall serves the pasture it encloses, it helps to make the pasture the best it can be.

Does our church serve the world with a message of peace, justice, and reconciliation? Or it is interested only in its own integrity, becoming a wall without any purpose except one that points to the fact it was formed by its maker?

As we know, in addition to wall-building, stones have many uses, and some are far from humane. Our reading from Acts this morning recounts the story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr who was stoned outside Jerusalem.

This is the very reversal of the images I have been using where the stones come together in unity to build up something new for Christ. In the story of Stephen one can imagine that if not enough stones were lying around, the people may have started to dismantle a wall or path using those stones to kill Stephen. If so, the rejection of Christ and the killing of Christ’s messenger meant the breaking up of the stones into individual weapons of violence and death.

Before he was condemned, Stephen, in this speech to the crowd, reminds the people of what the prophet Isaiah had said: “Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands”. Instead, as we learn from Peter, God builds his church out of living stones.

It is worth noting that Saul was present at the stoning, and approved of Stephen’s execution. This Saul later converted on the road to Damascus, became St Paul, the first Christian theologian, who was himself flogged, shipwrecked and imprisoned and may himself have been martyred by beheading or upside down crucifixion. Who knows what effect Stephen’s martyrdom had on him, and the others? We shall never know, but to this day the stories of martyrs have continued to inspire Christian faith.

There are still people who are being killed for professing Christ. This week a pregnant women, Meriam Yehya from Sudan was condemned to prison, lashing and hanging for apostasy in abandoning Islam for Christianity and for refusing to renounce her faith in Christ.

Have you ever wondered what you would do if faced with death because of your faith? Would you take the chance to renounce your faith and escape death? You might feel like me – I know what I would like to do in that situation, but I’m uncertain what I would do until I’m placed in that position.

Christians who face persecution because of their faith may remain faithful for two reasons. First, that they have built their faith on the sure, unshakeable foundation of Christ. Second, they have a community of other Christians around them supporting them and perhaps facing persecution together. As living stones of the church we are not isolated from communities of support, but are bound together by God into a structure that can withstand anything the world can throw at it.

In the church today images of stones may be useful in thinking through the meaning of church and our role in it. As some churches are demolished, rebuilt, or sold, brick by brick, the image of living stones can be useful as we know, as Stephen reminds us, that God is not bound by the work of human hands and lives in our midst.

Finally, in addition to the image of living stones, I wish to offer another image of stones for our churches today. In a declining church, some of our Presbyterian parishes may feel isolated as other parishes around them close, encouraging them to look further afield for help. Such churches, rather than being a stone bound to others in a strong church, may appear to be more like a stepping stone – far enough apart to be just in reach from the next with a long stride. One should not be disheartened by such an image; anyone who has been hill-walking in Scotland will know that hikers seek out those stepping stones which are just above water in order to make the journey with dry feet and a sure stable foothold. Those stones carry us forward, and we can be grateful for them, whether we stand there only the once, or whether it’s a daily or weekly resting spot on our journey of life.

Amen.