Abide in Christ - the Church's 'core business'

Sermon for Feast of St John the Evangelist

at Choral Mattins

Gospel for the day

John 15:1-8

Text: If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.(John 15:7)

One of the privileges of my vocation is that people feel at liberty to accost me, to fix me with their glittering eye like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and then proceed to tell me (because clearly it must have escaped my notice) that people no longer go to church as they once used to; and also ask me (as if I were the Pied Piper and had stolen them) where are the young people? All of this is usually said in a tone that nicely combines general lament with pointed accusation.

One frank response might be to inquire – ‘And where are your children (grandchildren) today? That might not be thought a very kind or sensitive response – but it would be revealing; because for many of us that thought would remind us of how the world has changed; how society has changed; how assumptions about belief and the expression of faith are now different; and how our current spiritual environment is now largely ‘post-Christian’. For example, how many of our children or our grandchildren know the Lord’s Prayer? That is something worth checking – because we can no longer assume that everyone does. However most important – the question ‘Where are your children or grandchildren today?’ reminds us all that we ‘catch’ faith in the nurturing of family life. If a close following of Jesus Christ is central in a family’s life through all the formative years, something of that tends to stick with the children and through the generations.

Of course I understand and often share the unease of those who accost me to lament and accuse. There are dissenting voices about the church. There are many who speak of the church as dying and who are looking for new signs of life, for ‘fresh expressions’ of faith; there are church leaders who talk of letting the old church die and of investing all our energy in a new way of being church. I admit to getting a little impatient when I hear this sort of talk – and there’s a lot of it about – if only because it displays a consumerist way of thinking about the church, a way of thinking that is all too close to the market forces mentality of the moment. It reminds me of the prophetic comment attributed to Dean Inge (the famous ‘gloomy Dean’ of St Paul’s, London) that ‘the church that is married to the spirit of this age will be a widow in the next’. The church’s real inner life is always at odds with the world; the church is a counter-cultural reality – always pointing us to the truth about who we are and what we are called to be. Such a church resists the commodity mentality and insists upon the mysteries of the inner life even as it calls us to resist the darkness of the world - injustice and the oppression of the poor.

In this context the appointment of Justin Duckworth as the new bishop of Wellington is especially interesting. Only recently an Anglican and recently ordained priest, Justin is associated with Urban Vision, what is sometimes called the ‘new monasticism’; groups of Christians living in communities working with the poorest, the least and the most marginalized. Urban Vision has placed itself under the spiritual oversight of the Anglican Church – it realized that its social activism needed a deep nurturing contemplative spirituality – and it discovered this in the New Zealand Prayer Book and the Anglican spiritual tradition.

Now this is not a reason for us to indulge in some self-congratulation about the wisdom of the Anglican tradition but really to remember what is the core business of the church and our ‘core business’ as followers of Christ. Our core business is captured in Jesus words: If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.(John 15:7).

Now my guess is that you know what this means. Can you think back into your faith story and recall when you realised or decided that Christ was going to be ‘it’ for you? Was it through friends? Was it through a Christian group or community? Was it through reading the Bible or a book of prayers? Was it through the influence of a priest, evangelist? Was it through some experience – where suddenly the faith all made sense and you ‘knew’? Can you remember how you felt? It may have been a warming of the heart and mind, a sense of joy, of peace … something that beggars the most vivid description? Hold onto that memory, that recollection of the initial experience of Christ in your life. That is a precious clue to the life we seek.

You see, it seems to me that a church that is riddled with anxiety, fears, conflicts and resentments is a church that has temporarily forgotten the secret of its very existence and its calling – namely to ‘abide in Christ’. Let’s try and spell out what that means – at least in some rough summary fashion.

· It means to live in close connection with our Lord Jesus Christ.

· More than that, it means to constantly let Christ be the deep grounding reality of our lives.

· Let’s try again, and not pull any punches: it means that it is Christ who is our life; and to abide in Christ is to let Christ take us over. That’s what Paul meant when he said ‘It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2:20). That is the heart and the absolute goal of the spiritual life.

· To abide in Christ is to know what it is to live fearlessly – to know that all that we are and all that is - everything is held in the deep and loving purpose of God. To a fearful age and an anxious church that is a transforming knowledge – it is precisely what Paul understood when he proclaimed: ‘For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Romans 8:38-39)

So I am going to suggest a few practical considerations to help us on our way as we seek to ‘abide in Christ’.

• · Do we have a ‘rule of life’? Have we thought about how we live our life in Christ and have we set time aside each day for things as simple as daily prayer and bible reading; and things as practical as giving of our money, time and talents in God’s service?
• · Do we encourage one another – by sharing our experiences and our stories?
• · Do we spend time being together – whether just a cup of tea or having meals together? I would love to see our cathedral community doing that – and getting to know one another in the process.
• · We need to share the faith wisely, graciously – consider inviting others to worship at the cathedral with you and to have lunch together; - and yes try to check that our children and grandchildren know the Lord’s Prayer!

ANZAC DAY 2012

It has been a splendid ANZAC service with the RSA choir in good voice and a very good congregation of all sorts who have come very purposefully for the occasion and others who have drifted in from the Octagon.  My address for the day is below:

Anzac Address 

St Paul’s Cathedral Dunedin 2012

I want to draw your attention to two claims I have heard about ANZAC Day.  (1) I am told that each year ANZAC Day services grow in popularity, especially among the young, and that increasingly in local communities it is the local observance at some local memorial that seems to be increasingly valued and in demand.  I merely report what I have heard; I have only this anecdotal evidence – no proof of my own.  (2)  I am also aware of opinions and speculations that say ANZAC Day is really our national day in the sense that it commands far more respect and attention than Waitangi Day.

If this is so, then we may be fortunate observers to a strange phenomenon: (1) it is amazing that an occasion that has its roots in a military calamity nearly a century ago, has not died out with its generation of combatants but expanded into our future generations and (2) equally amazing, that this day, for all it is remembering great loss and sacrifice, has for many become a day of more significance and imaginative appeal than our official national day.   How is this so? 

 I have no answer to offer but merely voice my hunch that the human spirit instinctively looks to where it may find hope and meaning. If that is so, then on this day, at dawn parades; in cathedrals around the country; and, most importantly, in a thousand communities; in country halls; and at various wayside shrines and memorials, we are all  bound together in a common purpose that we may find hard to put into speech and which, in fact is best expressed in that time of silence that we all share.

Yesterday my attention was caught by an article in the ODT on a debate about ANZAC Day.   The debate, hosted by the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, presented different attitudes to Anzac Day through the contrasting images of white and red poppies.  It seemed to me a valuable debate and one that allowed there to be merits on both sides.  But, I wonder whether it forgot to take into account our moments of national silence on ANZAC Day. 

You see, when we stand in silence on this day our thoughts are too big, too nebulous, to capture the whole horror of war in our net of speech.  Imaginatively we are simply overwhelmed.  Perhaps behind the mystery of this day is that somehow, almost miraculously, amidst and despite the horror and waste of conflict, human goodness somehow survived.  There were heroes who were decorated for their courage on the battlefield; and there were heroes of peace who refused to fight but won admiration for their integrity – and here I especially remember Dunedin’s own Archibald Baxter;  but heroism took many forms – not least at home as families endured and mothers and wives waited for the postman on his round or the dreaded telegram-bearing official on his bicycle.

On this day we grieve for all the waste and all those lives lost or utterly changed; but we also want to say ‘Thank you, God’, for the countless acts of courage, decency and goodness that happened in the very midst of the carnage; those moments when we sense the best of the human spirit to be shining through; those moments, those men and women, in whom we might catch a glimpse of the best we can be.

The New Zealand war poet, Mike Subritsky, captures something of this wonderful gift of humanity in a poem from the Vietnam era and dedicated to the kiwi nurses – called ‘Sister’.

SISTER
(A tribute to Pam M-T and all the Kiwi Nurses)

Young man, you ask me who I am,

and why I wear this faded yellow ribbon...

I am the woman, who held your dying uncle's hand,

and wrote a letter once that broke your grandma's heart.

I am she, who met the 'Dust-Off' at the door,

and carried bloodied, broken bodies through to triage.

Then cut through muddied boots and bloody combat gear,

and washed away the blood and fear and jungle.

I kept the faith when even hope was lost,

and cried within, as young lives ebbed away.

Those hours when death, frosted dying eyes,

mine, was the last smile many young men saw.

I have the voice, that blinded eyes remember,

and the touch of reassurance through the pain.

In darkest night when combat would return,

it was my name that many soldiers called.

I have dressed their wounds, and wiped away their tears,

and often read them letters sent from mum.

I hugged them close, and willed each one my strength,

and smiled and prayed that each boy made it home.

       

And here today, you ask me who I am...

I am the Nurse, who served in Vietnam.[1]

Here is a triumph of the human spirit that survives despite the wars. In such things new generations continue to find hope and meaning. We thank God for it.  We continue to stand in wondering silence on Anzac Day largely because of it.

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[1] Mike Subritzky
©Copyright 2001

A Sermon for Charles Dickens’s 200th Anniversary

Sexagesima 12^th February 2012

For the sermon this evening I have announced my intention of a theological reflection upon the work of Charles Dickens, in this his 200^th anniversary. But which Dickens will we discuss? There is the Dickens we know as the champion of the poor; and the Dickens who largely created the Victorian Christmas not only with his ‘A Christmas Carol’ but also with his ‘Christmas books’; there is the Dickens of the public performances; there is the Dickens who appears in his published letters, and the Dickens who especially used St Matthew’s Gospel and was very familiar with the Book of Common Prayer. But, what I hope I might achieve instead is to help draw out the religious underpinning of Dickens’s literary imagination.

Remember now, if you can, Holman Hunt’s painting known as ‘The Light of the World’ (1853-54). I am confident that you are familiar with the painting. If you can I want you to try and see it in your mind’s eye. It is an allegorical painting representing the figure of Jesus preparing to knock on an overgrown and long-unopened door, illustrating Revelation 3:20: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me". According to Hunt: "I painted the picture with what I thought, unworthy though I was, to be by Divine command, and not simply as a good subject…" The door in the painting has no handle, and can therefore only be opened from the inside, representing "the obstinately shut mind". Hunt, even 50 years after painting it, felt he had to explain the symbolism. The painting seized the popular religious imagination of the time; it drew huge crowds and went on a world tour (the original is in Keble College, Oxford, and he made a life-size copy for St Paul’s in London). I will come back to this painting in a moment.

For the moment it is enough to say that we can be confident that Dickens was familiar with Hunt’s painting and with the work of others of the Pre-Raphaelite school. He was not especially well-disposed to the school: for instance he wrote a scathing review of Millais’s immensely controversial painting ‘Christ in the House of His Parents’ when it was exhibited at the Tate. It shows Joseph at his workbench and the young Jesus having just had a nail taken from his hand. Dickens accused Millais of portraying Mary as an alcoholic who looks “so hideous in her ugliness that … she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin shop in England.” He claimed that Millais presented our Saviour as a "wry-necked boy in a nightgown who seems to have received a poke playing in an adjacent gutter" and the Holy Family look like “alcoholics and slum-dwellers”

In Dickens’s extravagant language I suggest we recognize not just the critic entertaining his readers with a lively demolition-job but that he is enraged; that he sees the work as blasphemous. Dickens is furious because he sees in Millais’s realism a serious detraction from the idealised concept of the Holy Family that he held dear and which flows into various aspects of his work. Millais had touched a nerve in Dickens!

Now come back to Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World. There we see the kingly Christ, bearing the light in the dark wood of the world, and rapping gently at the door of the shut or darkened mind – now that is a painting that tells a story, it tells a story that one can live by. Hunt’s style is realist but it is, as he described it, a symbolic realism. And the same concept, I suggest to you, is at the very heart of Dickens religious imagination and forms the guiding principle of the great novels. Where Hunt paints with a symbolic realism, Dickens writes with a mythic realism: a shaping master-narrative – the Christian story – informs his vision. In short, he brings to the novel what we might call a ‘mythic’ imagination; a story to live by. This gives an underlying unity to what can otherwise seem a meandering and sprawling narrative – and think of the practicalities of him publishing books in monthly episodes – how difficult it would have been to have kept some inner coherence! I suggest that running through all the realism of Dickens’s narrative, and holding it together (even as month by month fresh sections of David Copperfield were published) is an underlying Christian mythos.

The locked door, the shut mind, the foolish deluded heroes of Dickens’s greatest narratives repeatedly demonstrate variations on the great Christian story of salvation - enfolding all who lose their way in the world’s wood, who fail to see the true source and goal of their lives and who only later grow to grasp the truth and figuratively to ‘see the light’. One may rightly consider the parable of the Prodigal Son as a masterful paradigm of this theme but Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’ images it visually with Christ bearing the light in a dark place.

Dickens’s heroines are often bearers of the light of the world – and Agnes in David Copperfield is a good example. At the close of that long and wandering novel, after all the errors and misadventures, David eloquently acknowledges the light that is Agnes Wickfield.

…one face, shining on me like a Heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And that remains.

I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me. My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence without which I were nothing, bears me company.

O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!

Agnes helps David in his journey from darkness to light; she is his light, his type of the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, and the Light of the World. Yes, I am suggesting that her name is no mere coincidence but part of the greater shaping vision that structures the work.

If Dickens’s imagination is, as I argue, essentially formed by the great Christian narrative of salvation it is also given further substance and resource by the many ways in which he deploys his knowledge of scripture. So, in the second book of Samuel we find the story of King David as the King of Judah: and there we also find the account of how the King desired the wife of the Hittite Uriah, and arranged for his death in battle. How extraordinary then that Dickens has his David (Copperfield) similarly engage with Uriah (a most un-English name); compete with him for the affections of a woman (Agnes); and, while not arranging his death, dream of it more than once – as he says ‘I believe I had a delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of the fire and running him through with it.’ One speculates how deliberately Dickens made such an association in his work.

We see operating through the pages of David Copperfield, mainly through the heroine Agnes Wickfield, a testimony of light, an ethic of all that is won for humanity through the gift of the constant, tirelessly serving, selfless life. This ethic is what many would claim as our true Dickens, the Dickens we best like to remember: ‘the opponent of social injustice in the name of all victims, especially children, the orphaned, magistrate-hounded, mistaught, neglected, half-starved Olivers, little Dicks, Nells, Smikes, Dorrits, Davids, Jos, Pips wandering in the wilderness (Dickens’s figure) of an uncaring because still un-Christian world: ’ a world of debtors’ prisons and squalid rookeries, of corruption in high places and greedy City bankers – perhaps not so unlike our own time after all.

It is said that when Dickens wrote Great Expectations he re-read David Copperfield to prevent himself from any ‘unconscious repetitions’. The personal elements of the Expectations story were strong, especially in the vulnerable young Pip wandering in the darkness and marshes. The underlying creative religious vision, with its pattern of moving from error (or sin), through repentance to regeneration holds true but in Great Expectations an emphasis on forgiveness comes to the fore. The failure to forgive and its consequences are most powerfully imaged in the ghastly haunted figure of Miss Havisham and her death by fire.

The figure of Estella (the name signifies a star) is ‘The Light of the World’ for Pip, though she throws a much more diffident and ambiguous light than David’s Agnes. Yet light she is and at the close of Great Expectations (an ending notoriously worked over by Dickens) it is the evening, the time of star-rise, when Pip visits the site of Satis House and chances upon Estella. The words they exchange are luminously charged with grace and forgiveness and these two human figures (symbolically the latest Adam and Eve) leave the ruined garden with a new light about them.

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.’ GE,493

The Christian mythos that shaped Dickens’s imagination and subtly informed his greatest works, still has the imaginative power to subtly reach his readers today; to make us question how we live and relate to others; what it means to live honourably and – to bear the light of Christ in the world.

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Advent Thoughts & Elections 2011

McCahon's paintings speak of a quintessential New Zealand and a land that has about it something speaking of the Holy, the numinous. Some very innovative spirit has borrowed the McCahon canon and adapted it with a comment, speaking for land and what New Zealanders decided at the polls yesterday. I think it is very clever - but more than that: it is also heart-rending.

When I see what seems to be happening to this country ...

White Ribbon Week

Today the occupiers in the Octagon cleared their tents away and stored them in the Cathedral for a few hours so the official White Ribbon Day could be celebrated in the Octagon unimpeded. I thought that was a splendid example of goodwill from two groups who are both working for a better society for us all to live in and it puts some of the negativity generated by a few letter-writers in the ODT in a more generous and (I think) a more accurate context.

Last Sunday night the White Ribbon Riders (otherwise known as 'The Patriots') arrived in Dunedin on their ride through the South Island to promote the White Ribbon message of men saying no to violence against women. They were met in the Octagon, greeted by the Mayor, and then came over to the cathedral for the bikes and riders to be blessed and to share in a service where they told their stories and we listened to Lesley Elliot with her story. The Cathedral is the spiritual home for the Elliot family and it was wonderful to have Lesley share her story in this place which holds such poignant memories for her.

It was an extraordinary service in every sense: we had a wonderful kapa haka group from the students at Kings and Queens in South Dunedin; a small group of talented and courageous young people from the Samoan Assembly of God Youth Group from Lookout Point sang us a song composed for the White Ribbon - 'These Two Hands'; while, running through the service, the Cathedral Choir provided, as it always does, the most beautiful music.

I can now admit that I had been a bit anxious about how these various cultural and musical threads might hold together in such a formal setting as our Cathedral - but somehow, by the grace of God - they did. At the end, as votive candles were lit and the choir sang Samuel Wesley's superb 'Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace', I had a new sense of what a cathedral can hold together in its service to the city and what a privileged ministry this is - in every sense: one is privileged to work with wonderful people and colleagues, and with outstanding community groups. This is a city where people do care and there is a real sense of community.

Inside Job & Global Financial Crisis

It was an extraordinary Saturday afternoon with nearly 150 people in the cathedral - people from all sectors of the community: the occupiers in the Octagon, the DCC and the university as we showed the film 'Inside Job' with its devastating account of the financial crisis of 2008 in America and the extraordinary greed that has affected the world so seriously and yet seems so unashamed and difficult to correct. The film was a fairly solid 'watch' but we still had about an hour to share responses to it and there seems to be a very positive response and strong desire for further discussion. Watch this space!

Remembrance Day 2011 - a sermon

Did you read Friday’s ODT editorial on Remembrance Day?

It took us back to the memory of the First World War and the society that bore the immediate devastation of that conflict 93 years ago. One in every 4 New Zealand men between the ages 20-45 was killed or wounded; one in every four, - imagine that! It seems the ratio was even higher in Otago and Southland because of the higher rates of volunteers from our region. One in every 4 – no wonder that even today nearly every New Zealand town still has its War Memorial as a crumbling legacy of the war that shredded a generation. In this Cathedral also: that Memorial Window bears the badges of all the Otago and Southland units that served in that War. But there is more: there above us is the flag that Hoani Parata, a Curate (and later a Canon) of this Cathedral, took and used as Chaplain to the 1st Expeditionary Force in France and Egypt. Each year, on the 21^st of October, the Anglican Church of New Zealand remembers him.

The war changed everything and the human cost was immeasurable.

The generation that went to war was not only shredded but it returned with its confidence and hope badly dented. All around were the signs of absent contemporaries. Try and imagine what that absence might have felt like: everywhere, in every street, there were absent sons and daughters, parents, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, lovers, friends, colleagues, neighbours. Everyone who survived would daily have felt surrounded by loss.

Perhaps the greatest loss in the war was immeasurable – and it was the loss of faith in human purpose, human meaning and our institutions. There was no longer any automatic belief in such things as national righteousness, wise government, the trustworthiness of official communication and popular media alike – was shaken beyond repair. All the spiritual and intellectual maps and landmarks of that generation were damaged beyond recognition. In the spiritual winter that followed, they experienced the Great Depression, the sugar bag years, and the economic consequences that splintered the nation and saw riots in Queen Street and unemployment rise to an estimated 30%.

Yet despite the horrors and losses, some good things happened.

For some there seems to have been a new moral clarity and I think of such things as:

· a deeper understanding of social injustice;

· a renewed determination that war should not recur;

· and a new kind of idealism that led to the Welfare State and visions of a sustainable society;

· and, for some, there was a new understanding of God

What I mean by this last point is that the shambles and agony of war caused (for some) a new understanding of God to come painfully into being. The God of nations and Empires, God the problem-solver, many familiar but questionable understandings of God, began to change.

For example, one of Hoani Parata’s chaplain colleagues illustrates the sort of change that began to emerge: Chaplain Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy (better known as ‘Woodbine Willie), who doled out smokes while he chatted to the troops, and wrote his poetry in the language of the ordinary soldier in the trenches. He was no ordinary chaplain. In one of his meditations on prayer he recreated a scene in the trenches and says: 'I wish that chap would chuck his praying. It turns me sick. I'd much rather he swore like the sergeant.'

In the mud, the muck and the misery Kennedy is revolted the thought of a bland problem-solving God and all the pious platitudes that reloigion can produce. Instead he looks at the cross and to the God who is discovered in the heart of one’s own endurance and pain – a God is not a solution, not a Father Christmas or a fairy godmother, but simply the one who ‘holds’ your deepest self, shareing your suffering, and so makes it possible for you to look out on the world without loathing and despair. I suspect that the way Studdert-Kennedy talked and wrote was pretty well the only religious response that was at all credible to those who were living through a daily nightmare. Throughout the mayhem he maintained his discipline of prayer – a discipline that kept his heart and imagination open to who he was, and that kept him grounded deeply in the reality of the suffering Christ. Doubtless some found their lessons at the front through other disciplines, but whatever kept them grounded in themselves, and with one another – I’d say God was in that anyway.

However, the trouble was that after the war, people being what they are, too many forgot to keep asking those questions, and abandoned the disciplines of mind and spirit that nourish us and keep us honest: many religious people went back to cosy shallow ways of thinking about God, while others settled for easy clichés about world progress, and so the hard lessons learned on the front line were forgotten. And the winter of the spirit, and another war, were yet to come.

So Remembrance Day is not just a sad and wistful looking backwards but very much a day to search our hearts for what it means to be a human being and for what kind of society we are building. It is a time especially to be wary of what Chesterton described as ‘The easy speeches that comfort cruel men’. In our current Global Financial crisis, with the power wielded by faceless unregulated global financial agencies, it may be that those who now camp in the Octagon and protest at what is happening to our country are asking the questions we should all ask. The generations we remember today walked forward with courage and held the bonds of our society, our nation and our Commonwealth together. Today may we ‘remember the lessons they learned and may we be spared from learning those lessons the way they had to’.