From the Vicar's Pen

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (2nd May) 2010

Readings:Acts 11.1-18

Psalm 148

Rev. 21.1-6

John 13.31-35

In telling the story of the separation of the Gentile and Jewish missions, Luke glosses over the apparently robust (to say the least) differences that marked out the early evangelists. Because much of our understanding of the mission of the early Christians is seen through the eyes of Luke we often are given two overwhelming impressions: 1), that the Church grew by a factor of thousands per day, and 2) that all was smooth and fluffy and sweet between the earliest Christians and their communities.

Perhaps it’s just my missiological paranoia, but I have always found these emphases of Luke to be deeply distressing. Where, I ask myself, did I and the church around me (or is it just my perspective on the church around me?) go so horribly wrong? However I struggle, I have never seen the churches for which I am responsible grow exponentially, nor have I seen happy and harmonious relations between Christians and Christian groups wherever I have been. Oftentimes I have wondered: is this the basis on which a resignation should be written and delivered – or perhaps even the basis on which to lapse from my faith and go and join the Buddhists up the hill?

Furthermore I have tended to be deeply suspicious of those who tell tales and write books of the exponential growth and happy harmonious relations in the churches that they pastor. Call me a sceptic, but I have found such tales tend only to boost the egos of the tellers. I remember sitting in clergy groups listening as my colleagues shared around the circle; yes they were so uncontrollably busy, yes, their churches were gong to have to expand soon, yes everybody loved each other and loved especially the pastor and his or her wondrous ministry. I felt appalled: perhaps, in a good year, the churches for which I was responsible were staying afloat, showing some marginal signs of hope, perhaps even growing a little, but hardly with the happy harmonious exponentials of the churches of my colleagues. It took a long time for me to realize that my colleagues were, generally, doing no more than protect their vulnerable psyches in an often thankless role.

In more recent times I have come to understand that even Luke was writing a highly symbolic narrative. Yes, Christianity exploded across the Roman Empire, but that explosion took decades and centuries, and any ‘secular’ confirmation of the sorts of figures Luke uses is conspicuous only by its absence. The Jewish mission, in fact collapsed into near nothingness after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 a.d.; by 100 a.d. Christianity had by and large separated from Judaism, having made only minimal impact on its remaining adherents.

No less a figure than Paul makes it clear that the events Luke depicts as happy love-ins, Beatles’ style, were little more harmonious than the latter years of the Beatles themselves. Paul calls Peter a hypocrite, and suggests that others of the Jewish Christian community should castrate themselves. Even electoral synods, bitter and bloody as they can be, or the sometimes tricky minefields of trans-tikanga relations, are candy-floss compared to the powerful struggles of the Gentile and Jewish missions. Years later, Luke wanted to find a way of pouring oil on the brutal seas of antagonism that had existed between Post-Pauline and post-Petrine Christianity – wanted to demonstrate that the Holy Spirit was and is far greater than mere human failings. He does so with a highly stylized narrative. Tucking the dirty underwear out of sight, he told only the story of outcomes that were, indeed, miraculous.

Echoing the Dean of Southwark, Colin Slee, I suggested a week or two ago that it is almost necessary that a licence be issued to read the bible – or certainly to preach from it. I suggested that in the context of one of St John the Seer’s apocalyptic visions. Luke’s second volume, Acts, is if anything even more volatile a read. He claims to be an historian, and in the 21st Century we have certain expectations of historians. But those (spurious!) beliefs that history can somehow provide a perfect, incontrovertible and objective record of facts are simply not a part of Luke’s world. Luke was a master of spin. To be honest I believe that honesty is a more effective policy in the twenty-first century, and we need to admit the spin of our scriptures. They were a product of their time, as we are, and in the encounter between the two the Spirit’s voice will be heard.

In the gospel reading, as I indicate in my pew sheet notes, John – another stylist altogether – emphasizes that the heights and depths and breadths of God’s glorious love for humankind are revealed only in the horror of the Cross. He, like Paul before but independent of him, has seen that the extremes of divine love and salvation are revealed only when the untouchable heights, the shekinah, the unapproachable holiness and righteousness of God are brought down to the deepest imaginable depths of degradation. Only in the death of God is the inextinguishable blaze of God’s love revealed. Only when God cries out ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me’, only when God ‘breathes his last’ and ‘gives up his Spirit’ is divine love revealed as reaching into the life of every human hell, every life that has cried out ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me’, every human life that has breathed its last, every human life that gives up its wairua into the dark night of death (that dark night that so terrified Dylan Thomas).

John’s word ‘glory’ though is not associated just with the death of Jesus. Good Friday without Easter is just another road smash, just another drowning, just another cancer on the catalogue of human existence. John associates, bizarrely, the lifting up of Jesus on the Cross with the descent into deepest darkness, with the lifting up into resurrection and the even further liftings up of Ascension and future Parousia. For John these are the outcome of the Cross: believe … and have eternal life. Believe, and be a part of the mystery of glorious eternity, that mysterious yet-to-come eternity that John’s namesake calls the new heavens and new earth, where tears will be no more.

Too much that passes for Christianity – indeed much fluffy spirituality of all forms– wants its happy ending without its Cross, its Easter without Good Friday, resurrection without death. Many of the churches that boast the most growth sidestep the harsh realities of suffering altogether, proclaiming a resurrection without a death. Following the financial downturn of the past year or more, the downturn in membership and confidence for such churches, especially those who proclaim the lie of so-called prosperity gospel, should serve as a warning that it is a shallow faith that sidesteps the realities of Good Friday. The glorious vision of the author of Revelation, the hope of eternity in the presence of Alpha and Omega, is the outcome not of the Way of Candy Floss, but of the Way of the Cross. It is to that Jesus summons us. TLBWY

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER

(18th April) 2010

Readings: Acts 9.1-6

Psalm 30

Rev. 5.11-14

John 21.1-19

I suspect over the years a lot of scholarly ink has been spent on John’s story of the exchange between the risen Lord Jesus and his somewhat obtuse disciple Peter – John’s gospel telling does not pay Peter high tribute for his intellectual vigour! Nevertheless, it was the fashion in the early days of my exposure to Christianity, in the late ’70s, to note with great awe, as commentators pointed out, that in the Greek, Peter fails abysmally to recognize the seriousness of the question Jesus is asking: twice Jesus says to Peter “do you agape

me? Twice Peter answers, “sure buddy, you know I philō

you”. Much ink was spent on Peter’s failure to grasp the depth and breadth of Jesus’ question, with its unspeakable emphasis on agape

– or even aroha

– love, greater love than which no-one … and the feeble understanding of Peter which speaks only of a kind of mateship.

The trouble is that interpretative argument collapses at two fundamental points: in the first place, why does Jesus then drop his alleged high standards and on the third occasion merely ask peter “okay, chum – are you my mate then?” I suspect that this entire interpretative approach collapses at that point: the method of the Incarnation is not for God, by and large, to lower divine standards to meet those of fallen humanity, but to infiltrate humanity with the standards of divine righteousness, to permeate our lowly lives with a higher standard than we can other wise attain.

But this infamous interpretative method collapses at a second level; it is a stylistic method of John to play with words. Invisible, often, in English, it is his wont to refer first to a shovel, then a spade, and then to call a spade something else. To avoid aural boredom – because the Greek manuscripts were written to be heard, not read – he plays with words, keeping our imaginations and our interest alive. Do you love me: no matter what word we use, the key question asked of Peter and of us is “do we love Jesus?” Do we? Do I? Never enough, I fear – which is why grace is a rather good idea.

One of the unsuccessful candidates for the job into which Ross Bay was commissioned yesterday made his backers’ task a little harder when he notoriously but I think wisely pronounced that we should need a licence to read the Bible. While he could be accused of setting the reformation back five hundred years, I nevertheless understand exactly what the Dean of Southwark was saying. It is particularly applicable when we turn to the Book of Revelation. The language is surreal: whores and sulphuric acid, multi headed beasts and apocalyptic horsemen are the stuff of sick Christian art, vindictive so-called evangelism and fear-mongering – often enough to make this Christian all but ashamed of the Christian community. ‘Did you ever get tired of the preachin’ sounds of fear / when they’re hammered at your head and pounded in your ear?’ Bob Dylan once asked acerbically, and rightly so.1

But there is in the glimpse we get today, a brief and more edifying insight into the kernel of John the Seer’s weird apocalyptic, end-of-time vision: the final victory of God, that which is yet to come, is about the total submission of all creation, the total reconciliation of all creation to God’s rule of love. Every knee shall bow. God’s love – the agape, but even the philō – even the eros of God, will have the final word. Amen – God’s ‘yes’ to all creation – is the final word, and evil and hatred shall pass away and, as the visionary puts it, tears shall be no more.

For us of course there is the on-going micro-issue of the surrender of our own lives. Forgetting for a moment the whole of creation, what of the surrender of our lives to the Lordship of Christ? Do we dare, and do we dare? I know I don’t – which yet again is why the grace of God is rather a Good Thing!

John’s gospel-telling provides some clues as to how we might practice to sharpen our preparedness for our encounter with the risen Lord – whether that be in our dying or in the end of history: breaking bread. Do we practice the presence of God in reverent awe, consuming God’s life-force in bread and wine, and making that energy the energy of our own life? The disciples broke bread with Jesus on the shore – and so must we. Breaking bread in this sense is not just consuming the traditional elements of communion, but allowing ourselves to be transformed by our encounter with Christ in the sacrament he gave us, allowing ourselves to be bread and wine in the world. That is a life-long part of the surrender to Christ’s Lordship – daring to believe that he is present with us, transforming and challenging us to be his hands and feet and face in the world. Do we dare?

TLBWY

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER ~ 11th April 2010

Readings:Acts 5.27-42

Psalm 150

Rev. 1.4-8

John 20.19-31

In a recent ether-conversation a colleague from another denomination lamented the hard work of preparing liturgies and sermons for Holy Week and Easter, and especially for the great Three Days (The Great Tridium). With a deeply sensitive pastoral heart I was able to respond that, coming from my higher sacramental and liturgical tradition, I at least didn’t need to worry about writing sermons, as I permit the liturgies and their symbols to speak for themselves. Those of you who heard the cross fall on the sanctuary floor at the Proclamation of the Cross liturgy on Good Friday will know that its stark and resounding clatter spoke far more eloquently than your vicar ever could of the depths of meaning of Good Friday. Like the ‘space between the letters’ of which I spoke in my mini-commentary on Hebrews, the reverberating sound permitted feelings-beyond-words, feelings of shock, perhaps even of a snooze disturbed, feelings that something was awry in the processes of worship. It was a discordant moment – and what else can the crucifixion of an innocent man be, especially if we are to proclaim that this man was uniquely innocent, uniquely Son of Man, Son of God?

Mark’s gospel, chronologically the earliest written life of Jesus, worked from the same principle. Mark’s gospel telling almost certainly ended, in its original form, at 16.8. The women have encountered an empty tomb where they should have found the body of their loved one. An apparition speaks to them, telling them to go and announce that Jesus is risen. But, on a seemingly negative note, Mark ended ‘they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’. It is hardly a riveting endorsement – indeed it is so negative that successors of Mark added alternative endings. Except, as scholars have begun in recent decades to recognize, there is overwhelming good news here: despite their paralysis of fear the women did go, did stutter their news, and we have heard it too. Go: do likewise, Mark was saying. Despite your fear.

Silence is sometimes the most powerful method of communication. In the sound-cluttered world of radio broadcasting a silence of more than a few seconds will trigger computers that bring a substitute programme to air, desperately trying to hold the attention (and ratings) of listeners who might, unable to cope with silence, defect to other networks or to their ipods. A silent TV advertisement has a powerfully disconcerting impact, attracting attention to its pitch. Silence for so many of our society is so frightening that TVs, radios, ipods or CDs and their subwoofer cousins pump out noise twenty four hours a day. Yet to stand silent in front of a mystery is sometimes the only appropriate response. Even Generation Y-ers will momentarily pause in silence when they find love in a partner’s eyes. At Great War memorials silence pervades, visually and aurally, except when those who hate meaning to life, who hate story, overcome human decency to vandalize physically or to yell abuse saturated with hate.

So, yes, sometimes silence is the only appropriate response to mysteries greater than ourselves. T.S. Eliot writes

After the kingfisher’s wing

Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still

At the still point of the turning world

and while his lines may have nothing to do with resurrection they may have everything to do with it, beyond words:

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence …

because words cannot convey ultimate truth:

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.[1]

Still, to cite a lesser poet (or poets: the Gibb brothers), ‘words are all I have’.

So, while silence is sometimes critically important, and is an essential part of worship, Jesus did not commission us to remain silent. ‘Go, tell …’ the apparition tells the frightened women. And they do. John, the author of the Fourth Gospel, in the end did not remain silent, but told the story: ‘these [signs] are written so that you may come to believe’[2]. Go, tell…’.[3] ‘We have a gospel to proclaim’ the hymn reminds us,[4] or ‘go, tell it on the mountain’ (not, when applied as it was by Peter Paul and Mary to the Exodus, a Christmas song but a song of liberation – and what greater liberation is there than liberation from death?) ‘Tell out my soul’,[5] or ‘the day of resurrection, go tell it out abroad …’.[6]

What though are we to tell? Probably not of our doubts, though there is no need, either, to believe we have any sort of a copyright on understanding the resurrection! But the early Christians preferred instead to proclaim the way in which their encounters with Christ in worship, prayer and scripture had seized and transformed their lives. They told of the signs and sayings of Jesus’ life, as they were transmitted to them – but more importantly they told of the impact those signs and sayings had on their own lives. Those signs elicited belief, and continued to do as those around them saw and heard and believed. These were signs: of love, peace, hope, justice, compassion – all the things Jesus had spoken of which were now experienced by the followers of Jesus. Go: tell – of the encounter with the risen Lord.

TLBWY

[1] All the above are from T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”.

[2] Jn. 20.31

[3] Mk 16.7

[4] “We Have a Gospel to Proclaim”. Edward Burns (1938 - )

[5] “Tell Out, my Soul”. Timothy Dudley-Smith (1926 - ) .

[6] “The Day of Resurrection”; Words: John of Damascus (ca. 675-749), ca. 750; trans. John Mason Neale (1818-1866).

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SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT

(21st March) 2010

Readings:Isaiah 43.16-21

Psalm 126

Phil. 3.4b-14

John 12.1-18

There has often been a tendency, since the Reformation, to individualize the messages of faith and the message of the gospel itself. When the Psalmist spoke of the restoration of the fortunes of Zion he was speaking of the future of his people, collectively. They had disobeyed God and suffered the wrath of God as a result. In disappointment God had surrendered them to exile and to the loneliness of life in a far country (not unlike the individual loneliness of the prodigal son of whom we heard a week ago). God is not in the habit of protecting human beings from their own stupidity.

But to an extent the individualization of faith can be imposed on the psalm or the passage from Isaiah. The God who cares for a dying sparrow does care for the twists and turns of your life and mine. The father who watches the prodigal disappear over the horizon is still the father who loves, and hopes, and waits. In the loneliness of a life grown barren it is human and right to cry out to a God who can re-flood the dried watercourses of our existence, can make rivers in the desert.

Prayer answers are not always immediate (either for physical or spiritual rain!). The disciplines of prayer can slowly however open the cracks for divine light to sneak in, to penetrate, and slowly to transform aching human spiritual drought: ‘Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negeb’. (Having lived in a Negeb-like outback I know only too well the pathos of parched ground that hasn’t seen significant water for a decade, know only too well the beauty of the same land rejuvenated, given new life, as the waters finally flow. On the other hand I understand too the shorter cycles of New Zealand drought, and understand the pain of northland farmers crying out for a break in the so called ‘endless summer’)

The psalmist is talking of his people. Led into exile as a result of their disinclination to commit themselves to God’s demands of compassion and justice, they were now a displaced people, a people without a whakapapa. They were then what the European world is becoming. To lose our whakapapa is to lose our story. To lose our story is to develop amnesia – perhaps even, in its worst forms, to develop cultural dementia, even cultural Alzheimer’s. Those who have known loved ones descend into what Ronald Reagan poignantly called ‘the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life’ will know the slow surrender of the mind into mindlessness, until functionality ceases and even, eventually, the organs forget to work. This was the demise threatening the Hebrew people in exile, as the once hated gods of Babylon became attractive and seductive. This is the demise slowly overtaking the part of the world that was once the hemisphere of Christendom, as gods of post-modernity take over from the stern but loving God of Jesus Christ, and we fragment into the worst excesses of me-nowism.

The psalmist and Isaiah alike call their people to remembrance – ‘lest we forget’, the great remembrance saying of Returned Servicemen wisely and iconically intones. Lest we do indeed; it was once asked whether Reagan remembered being President of the United States, a silly question, because inevitably in the progression of Alzheimers there comes a time when even the President of the USA must succumb to forgetting.

While there are some churches whose leadership think it ‘relevant’ to sing songs that are no more than five years old, and pray prayers only made up on the spur of the moment, the story of faith is one deeply rooted in the past, and the futures of God are attainable only when we hold onto the story of our forebears in faith. We have a story to tell, and to tell it we must be immersed in it. A ‘me-now’ faith community is a rootless people .

Our faith-story is a slippery one. Just when we lock ourselves into a gospel of personal salvation it will segue into a story of corporate responsibility. Just as we rumour a God of glorious victory we will hear a call to suffering. As we hear a call to feed the poor we will find a woman opulently pouring priceless ointment on the feet of her saviour, and find only the villain Judas pleading the cause of the poor (with gospel-teller John digger the knife deeply between the shoulder blades of Judas’ reputation!!).

Paradoxes will remain: we are called to speak of an opulent God – the church that meanly slops the last centimetre of eucharistic wine around the chops of the last 30 communicants (as we have often done), or burns the altar candles down to the last millimetres of life (which we have not done) is not a church that speaks of the glories and magnificence of the God of resurrection hope. Yet we are called to give sacrificially to the peoples of the third world and to the missionary endeavours of those who work there: God is a God of paradoxes.

Those paradoxes will take meaning in our lives only as we know and learn from the whakapapa of our faith: as we saturate ourselves in the scriptures and liturgies of belief and avoid spiritual amnesia. It is to that that Isaiah and the psalmist call us – only in that saturation in story can we know the resurrection Christ-hope that lead the adoring Mary to pour opulence upon the feet of Jesus

TLBWY

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

QUINQUAGESIMA (last Sunday before Lent)

(14th February) 2010

Readings:Jer. 17.5-10

Psalm 1

1 Cor 15.12-20

Luke 6.17-26

It is too easy to absorb a cosy comfort from the blessedness of the poor. An earlier generation particularly of Anglican believers crooned gently “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate, God made them high and lowly, and gave them their estate”. That verse of a once much loved hymn has been excised from all but the most recalcitrantly nostalgic hymn books, but it took decades even to partially erase the sentiment from Anglican consciousness. By around the end of the twentieth century, though, it was largely gone. There was in some quarters still embarrassed preferences for Matthew’s “how blessed are the poor in spirit

”, but generally preaching was not addressing the issue of poverty as if it were a God-given state that was good for the soul of those who were trapped in it.

There was then something of a counter-movement in much Christianity: based on the growth of liberation theologies, with their correct emphasis on God’s “bias” or “preferential option” to the poor, preaching began to treat poverty in a new way: the poor were blessed, and as such were in some way iconic. But what did this mean? Often waving a few cheque books and some platitudinous statements about social became the sum total of Christian gospel action; that way we could all go home satisfied, pleased that we had somehow participated in God’s transaction of blessing. After all, the dioceses had social justice commissioners, and they could do the work on our behalf, couldn’t they? We continued though, as Baxter put it, “to vote on the side of the bosses”, to live lifestyles that withheld blessing from those most needy.

To be honest, Jesus didn’t seem to help matters: “the poor will be with you always”, he said. Proponents of prosperity gospel laugh all the way to the bank when quoting that verse. Sometimes Jesus can be a frustrating Lord! Context is everything in interpretation of that verse, as the woman associated with the name Mary Magdalene anoints the feet of Jesus with incomprehensibly expensive perfume. For that is a Jesus saying about worship and adoration and love, not about our work to transform, as the Anglican Consultative Council puts it, unjust structures.

The poor and cycles of poverty making injustice will, it is true, always be with us, but there is a both/and quality to this part of the Christian mission: we must both work towards transformation of unjust structures and know that, nevertheless, only the fullness of God’s Reign will bring perfect justice, the peace perfect peace beloved of sentimental hymnody that is ultimately the presence of justice, perfect justice.

So in Luke’s telling of the Jesus story there are stern warnings. How blessed are you who are poor. Woe to you who are rich. This is not the stuff of a cruisy comfort zone. Luke is reminding us that Jesus was not greatly interested in petty self-improvement or self-satisfaction programmes either of the “think and grow rich” genre coined by Napoleon Hill, or the endless personal enrichment, psychological enrichmentof pseudo-psychological “it’s all about me” self-help programmes. It is no accident that our bookshops are choked with the empty wisdom of the “Power of Positive Thinking” or “I’m Okay You’re Okay” variety as western humanity focuses not on any blessing of the poor but solipsistic, “all about me” self-enrichment programmes. Jesus by contrast was not particularly interested in warm fuzzies, or reconstituted egos, but in the hard yakka of touching and transforming lives with self-sacrificial compassion for others.

And it is complicated beyond words. We can’t set Matthew’s “poor in spirit” against Luke’s “poor” because the two are often inseparable. When waking up to scratch for food for your children in Haitian rubble or a Somalian refugee camp it is not easy to be rich in spirit. It is worth recalling that the devastation wrought by the Port au Prince earthquake is as much, no: more the result of economic injustice as it is the result of tectonic re-arrangement. God did not make the poor at the gate poor to the extent that they must live on dung heaps – while the rich send super yachts around the coast of Valencia at incomprehensible cost for negligible outcome. How blessed are you who are poor. Woe to you who are rich. Yet we’d be kidding ourselves, most of us, if we pretended we’d rather be in Port au Prince than Valencia.

I hold a secret belief that one day, Dies Irae, the day of wrath, we will face the eyes of the poor: “what did you do for my children as they lay emaciated in a Eritrean camp?” It’s a painfilled image, and I implore God that God indeed is merciful on Dies Irae. But wallowing in guilt, mine or yours, is hardly helpful either. I know I am a not good enough Christian. The passage is primarily about blessing. Let us at least try to touch the lives and the structure we can in our infinitesimally small way: our giving to aid agencies that do touch lives and transform structures, as well as our welcoming attitudes to the vulnerable and the outcast, whoever they are, around us. And let us always offer to God our selves, all that we are and all that we have, living sacrifices in the service of the gospel. TLBWY

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

EPIPHANY - 2nd January 2010

Readings:Isaiah 60.1-6

Psalm 72. 1-7, 10-14

Ephesians 3.1-12

Matt. 2.1-12

Since the late-eighteenth century reading biblical stories in the European world, and particularly reading the scenes surrounding the early life of Jesus, is to risk seeing through the polluted skies of European Romanticism. Little has done more to pollute our understanding of the Gospel of Jesus than this naïve Romantic pollution – (however understandable it might be in its psychological origins). Few elements add more credence to the complaint of Maori Christianity that much Christian teaching is not the Gospel of a Palestinian Jew but the gospel of European colonialism. That perhaps is another story, but it serves as a warning: when Matthew wrote the story of the wise men he was not working for Hallmark Cards, envisaging snowy scenes with token misplaced camels borrowed from our Isaiah reading, but was recording a bitter struggle between the gospel of Jesus Christ and the gospel of the Caesars.

In a brilliant commentary on Matthew biblical scholar Warren Carter heads his chapter on this passage as “The Empire Strikes Back”. God has dealt human structures of sin a bitter blow by placing a Saviour within the womb of that powerless and peripheral Palestinian Jewish child-woman, descendant of King David, Mary. God does not fight revolutions with the normal myopic and sin-laden human methodology, by which one civic evil, overthrown by blood and guts, is replaced by some new flawed and bloody human structure. God has other methods, in which we are invited to participate.

Mary, not “mild”, but feisty and politically subversive, by her obedience to the requests of God, gives birth to a story vastly different to the dominant story of life in the Roman Empire. This is not the stuff of “christian children all must be / mild obedient good as he”, as Europeanised Romantic hymnody would have it, but of love, faith, obedience, righteousness – all the gifts of God – subverting constitutional evil. An act of obedience to God is a costly act, risking death by stoning, risking ostracism by the community and by her own whanau. While the mechanics of Mary’s pregnancy need bother us no more than they bothered the gospel writers, the fact of her risky obedience should bother us: we are always called to risky obedience.

Matthew goes on to tell a story that pits divine powerlessness against the might and power of Rome. A story without its roots in history would be meaningless, so when I use a phrase such as “tells a story” it is not to say that, for example, Matthew or Luke created a fabrication of lies. The events of Jesus conception, infancy, childhood and pre-ministry are hazy and unimportant. The facts of his ministry and its impact on those who joined him are the critical tale. An unimportant roughly middle class workman in an unimportant backwater of the Roman Empire would change human history. Certainly much evil has been perpetrated in the name of Jesus, but so too has enormous good. The evil has been perpetrated when the followers of Jesus forget the vulnerability of his origins: The creator of the universe risks all in becoming powerless, in choosing the womb of a feisty but powerless woman from an unimportant region on the edge of the Roman Empire. The creator of the universe never takes up cudgels against civic might, but speaks of a way of love: within decades the quality of Christians’ love and compassion was spreading the news of the life and death of Jesus throughout the territories whose all-powerful leader had him executed. Paul, imprisoned by the authorities of Rome, will rejoice in writing to the Philippians, as the very servants of Caesar surreptitiously and at great risk turn their lives to Christ. Later an emperor of Rome would, arguably, turn to Christ, but that questionable conversion (“In this sign I will conquer”, identifying the Cross of Christ as a military talisman) will sadly begin the slow pollution of the gospel, fusing church and state.

This small gospel passage sets the scene for the whole story of Jesus, and indeed for the whole story of the faith to which we are called, and in which we are called. The might and scheming of Herod and his Caesar is powerless against the gentle (but feisty) will of God and the servants of God.We are, in accepting Jesus, not given a mandate to power, but a mandate to love, not a sign by which to make military conquest, but a sign by which to practice costly love and justice. We are given, in that love, a simple wisdom that will still attract those who humbly seek meaning: wise men and women still seek Jesus. It is not our wisdom, but the wisdom of God. It is not the wisdom of neon lights, but of the rumoured words of faith: he is risen, and love conquers even death. This is “the wisdom of God in its rich variety” that the author of Ephesians rumours to the world, to which the wise men foretold by Isaiah travelled, and in which we gather still in strange rites of prayer and worship.

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SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT

(13th December) 2009

Readings:Zephaniah 3.14-20

for the psalm: Isaiah 12.2-6

Philippians 4.4-7

Luke 3.7-18

I suggested last week that Luke spends some time as it were introducing us to John the Baptist in order to establish an unbreakable link between the Hebrew People of God and the New Testament people of God. For Luke the former was of course a tribal people, and any sycophantic relationship between the Christian community and the mdern state of Israel is tragically misguided. It can be argued that there are parallel peoples of God, but the current Hebrew people of God, for want of a better phrase, is the practicing Hebrew community that not only acknowledges the Lordship of the Creator God, serving God in worship and prayer, but which, as Isaiah put it long ago, “learn[s] to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow’ (Is. 1.17).

But Luke is not sloppy in his expectations of the New Testament people of God either. In Luke’s hands John the Baptist serves as a warning, a clarion call to both communities. In Matthew’s hands John the Baptist addresses his warning to the Hebrew people, but Luke makes no such distinction. The whole audience is addressed, and that, in Luke’s hands, includes us, his audience: ‘share … act justly … do not extort.’ It is worth noting, as the richest nations in the world largely ignore the plight of the most vulnerable at Copenhagen, that we all stand chastised, if not utterly condemned, by the Baptiser’s harsh proclamation of judgement. Luke’s understanding of Christian – or even human – compassion does not extend to embrace the oil-rich nations ignoring the desperate cries of a Tuvalu or a Bangladesh or a Samoa. ‘And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.”’ We don’t need to be Einsteins to work out that, while the wealthy nations have a vested interesting in pumping petroleum gasses into our infrastructure to ensure our continued lifestyle, the poorest nations are closest to the heart of Luke, of John the Baptist, of Jesus the Christ, and even the heart of God.

Of course neither you nor I can do much to change the macro-policies of the powerful nations of the world. We can make micro-changes, opting for lifestyle practices that at least carry some small promise for the future: we can refuse to buy products that exploit the most vulnerable workers on the earth – as a church we should be ashamed that the coffee and tea we serve is not Fair-trade. We can refuse the plastic bags that not only clog the waterways and the bellies of our fish, but are themselves petroleum products. We can join Martin Porter’s push to ensure that any extensions we plan to this building are environmentally, as well as aesthetically friendly. We can give gifts that benefit the poorest peoples on earth, buying Fair, buying Third World. There is something faintly obscene if, as we give gifts that recall the coming of the Christ Child, our giving simply perpetrates further profiteering for the rich and powerful, and in no way benefits those who today are born in mangers or worse.

We can leave our cars at home more often, opting to walk those short but carbon-unfriendly distances to the corner store. Above all – if we are ourselves making micro-efforts (and of course I am challenging myself as much as you) – we can pray that the leaders of the world’s power blocks may hear a small and powerless voice from long ago: ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise’. If we make micro-alterations to our small lives it is just possible that the noise of our sin-lives becomes a God-ward silence, and our whispered prayers for God’s world more easily reach God’s ears. Then, but perhaps only then, the great hope of Zephaniah can becomes ours:

The Lord has taken away the judgments against you,

he has turned away your enemies.

The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst;

you shall fear disaster no more.

FROM YOUR PRIEST
You can, these days, rely on Facebook friends and acquaintances to keep you in touch with all
hings obscure, abstruse (okay, I just put that one in for alliterative effect) and, given some of the
friends and acquaintances I have kept up over the years, obscene. You may breathe a sigh of relief: I have no intention of relaying any of the last category in a family oriented pew sheet – and there may well be enough obscurity and
abstrusity (which, while given a strict dictionary definition of ‘profound’ is more often used to
mean little more than ‘incomprehensible’), but occasionally amongst the dross there glints a
speck of gold.

So a friend in the States drew my attention to the
priceless piece of information, originally published in the Science Daily (Aug. 23, 2010), that, as the
headline put it, ‘do-gooders get voted off the island first’. To followers of Jesus this should not
seem particularly new information. If Jesus is the Embodiment of Good (and while the scriptural record
may not use such stuffy language it is pretty much one of the implications of the gospel narratives), then embodying – or ‘doing’ – good pretty clearly leads to
sticky endings. Jesus was, to borrow the language of ghastly reality television shows, voted off the island in fairly dramatic fashion.

The author argues that the general public, workmates or street-sharers or universe-sharers of those
committed to good works are often shamed into dislike. Confronted with someone who lives selflessly, they will retort that “the person is making me look bad” or is breaking the rules. Occasionally, they would
suspect the person had ‘ulterior motives’, according to the article. Rather than being inspired to lift our game to new heights of decency, we denigrate the person doing good. It is no accident that ‘do-gooder’ is one of our society’s most pity pejoratives, certainly no term
of endearment.

Nevertheless we are called to emulate the life of the
Ultimate Do Gooder. Like striking damp matches, our lives are a process with occasional impact. We will not ignite the lives of those around us by any human factor that we can summons, but by surrender to the God of Jesus Christ. When a match does spark and
we find ourselves touching another life it will be in the service of the gospel, drawing the owner of that life closer to God (indeed, we may never know it has happened). The process will not win us brownie
points or viewers’ accolades in the Big Brother world we live in. On the other hand we are not here to win
human accolades: ‘my grace is sufficient’, says the Source of All Goodness.

Michael Godfrey

The Celts, with characteristic wisdom, speak of the ‘thin places’ – there is even a website, http://www.thinplaces.net, dedicated to the concept. These are places in which something of
the supernatural, the otherness of a world or existence beyond our sight or ken seems almost to break through and make itself known to us. This can of course all become very New Agey: the test of that would be whether the ‘thin place’
leads to an encounter with the God of the Cross as revealed in Judaeo-Christian traditions – not necessarily more ancient yet to us more sacred
than pre-Christian mythologies.

Some of these thin places are clearly associated with the Christian tradition. Oihi and the Marsden Cross, which I first visited some three years or so ago, is slowly dawning on my consciousness as
one such place. I was privileged to visit Iona, seat of the Celtic Mission on the West of Scotland, ten years or so ago, and that for me (and for many) was a powerfully thin place. Strangely, Lindisfarne on the opposite coast did little for me:
these things can be utterly subjective, and others may find it more powerful, but I suspect that the closer proximity to the coast has led to easier commercialization
of the site and the resultant loss of something sacred. (On the other hand, Tintern Abbey seemed to me very holy, very sacred).

Other spots are not necessarily associated with Christianity: it is almost impossible to fail to be grasped by the power of Uluru (Ayers Rock) and Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) in Central Australia take my breath away. So too does Cape Reinga, while ‘our own’ Mt Manaia has, ever since I first saw it when I was 11, stood in my consciousness as a powerfully sacred spot (though perhaps then I would not have used such words). One or two others are perhaps sacred only to our own journeys: the Awhitu Peninsular,
south of Auckland, is one such for me.

These thin places can of course be pooh-poohed away by a rationalist. A massive caldera such as Mt
Manaia, or a sandstone monolith (technically an ‘inselberg’) such as Uluru will inevitably impact on our
most visceral senses, reminding us of our vulnerability in the vastness of the landscape. The Huka Falls
terrify me with their sheer power; by contrast, the socalled Drop Scene mesmerises with its stillness and
beauty. It is easy enough to remove God from the equation, if we choose to. God often chooses to be
vulnerable to human pride. On the other hand it is worth asking why beauty should ever move us at all:
what evolutionary purpose does it serve that I might be deeply moved by the sight of a big Kauri Tree
named Tane Mahuta, by a few steep fern and moss clad cliffs on a North Island River, or by a seemingly
friendly Piwakawaka (fantail) dogging my footsteps? Sure, it is only chasing insects, but why should I be moved by the sight: ‘my heart … stirred for a bird’, as Hopkins put it. Thin places, thin moments: allow these always to drag from our souls a gasp of praise to God.

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A useful venture particularly for clergy, but perhaps for all of us, is to ask in what way the encounter with Christ changes our response to issues and events. I have often observed church leaders working well in a particular context and with a particular set of skills, but failed to see a distinctive Christian, or, as I
often prefer to say, Christ-bearing dimension to the work. That is not to say that we as Christbearers are supposed to parade our sanctimoni- ousness around, like the woman who
once picked me up in her very flash Mercedes coupe as I hitch-hiked north from Bulls. “I’m only picking you up”, she said, “because I am a
Christian”. Somehow the line felt false, contrasting with the patronizing attitude she conveyed. Hypocrite that I was, I swallowed my pride: hitching north out of Bulls was in those days a notorious black spot for rides (second only to Queenstown), and rides in Mercedes
were few and far between: thirty years later I am still a sucker for a flash car, against all my social conscience!

Social conscience. In some ways that drives to the heart of the matter. There is a form of Christianity that I often refer to as “Greenpeace at prayer” – a play, naturally, on the now outdated
concept that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer. A laudable concern for the envi- ronment and other justice issues is in some circles, unaffected by any distinctive Christian perspective or practice. Many clergy in particular
become indistinguishable from social workers, activists, and others.

I wrestle with this. My Mercedes driver was sanctimonious. But at the same time, are we meant merely to blend into the background, offering no alternative to social programmes? The old anglo-catholics had something right: at the heart of the social action they undertook was the eucharist, providing (incense filled!) mystery and connection
to a God who, while concerned for the plight of the poor and the plight of the earth, was not earthbound.
We are called to work for and proclaim the values and compassion of the reign of God, but to know that ultimately we have Another City, which we preview, as it were, in our encounter with Christ in Word and Sacrament. If we lose that focus then we are no more – and admittedly no less, but no more than just another social network.

Michael Godfrey

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The conversations regarding division of the assets of the former Parish of Whangarei continued this past week, with an extraordinary Vestry meeting (in the true sense of ‘extraordinary’) last Sunday and a scheduled meeting of the Parish Council, a strictly financial body (of which I am not a part), on Wednesday afternoon. There is in general great good will about the future of our new neighbours, the LSMU Parish of Whangarei Districts: the presence of 17 Christ Church parishioners at the ordination to priesthood of Alf Bedggood was a further sign of good will.

There has been from time to time some misunderstanding, and even misinformation, about the processes involved in this creative separation. Hopefully this is all coming near to completion, now, and the necessary steps can be taken to finalize establishment of the neighbouring ministry units as legal and financial entities. Our vestry meeting was, I felt, a warm-spirited affair that sought to ensure the Districts were well equipped for their future, without denuding the future of this continuing central Parish. The word ‘magnanimous’, which I struggle to say, and need Bill Gates’ help to type was bandied around. On the other hand, only Christ Church members were present, and what seems magnanimous to one party may seem positively (or negatively!) mean-spirited to another.

The Parish of Christ Church, Whangarei will nestle happily between the LSMUs of Kamo-Hikurangi and Whangarei Districts, and on will go the mission of God’s Reign. There will be many opportunities for cooperative ventures as we seek to live and proclaim the values of that Reign across this city and surrounding regions in the years ahead. Please continue to keep in your prayers our neighbours, ourselves, and our leadership as we negotiate our way into God’s future

Michael Godfrey

Speaking of Vaughan Park, I attended a lecture this week by the Ven. Dr Ellen Clark-King, who of course preached here some weeks ago. Ellen argued for the importance of the Church listening to the voices of the unheard in its membership, those in the pews outside the formal decision making, policy making, theology making processes of the Church. Her
lecture was based both on an earlier book, in which she recorded interviews with believers from four faith communities in Britain’s socio-economically challenged Newcastle on Tyne, and her current study of the lives of (comparatively) voiceless figures in Church History.

This in a sense is the hub of the glorious doctrines of All Souls and All Saints. As I pray in our church I like to think of those who have faithfully prayed in this place – including in previous buildings – as part of the witness and life of faith in this wider community. I have written here before of the past clergy, who inevitably but unfairly raise a higher profile in parish histories than do the lay people, but
what of the great and small players who have dwelt here in the pews? How have they influenced the people of God that we have become here, today? The Mrs Smiths and Mr Joneses: not only how did they influence us, but what did the community of faith offer them?

To some extent we’ll never know: there isn’t an Ellen Clark-King interviewing our people, recording their stories. It would be fascinating to emulate her
study here: why do you come to church? In what way do faith and gospel and worship impact on the
story of your day to day existence? In what ways has that changed over the years? Forget the vicars and other clergy: we come and go! It is those of
you who stay on who are the deeper narrative of church life.

It might have to be a project to which I return in retirement! In the mean time, one of the great strengths of Ellen’s research is that it reminds us that the Church is you: not a bunch of funny people in dresses, but you, in all your human strengths and weaknesses, as you come week by week (or month by month, or just occasionally) and offer in this place your thoughts and prayers, hopes and fears. And these are all – all – caught up in the purposes and plans of God.

Michael Godfrey
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On occasions those present at the 9.30 liturgy will have heard me mutter about the overhead data technology. I do so, I should add, with great respect and admiration for those who make it happen. I, though, have long believed that liturgy, which is sacred drama, should avoid the ephemeral and trendy. That was often used as an argument against the ‘new liturgies’ that emerged
from the late 1960s. That criticism was a little unfair: while there is much that is wrong with the new liturgies’, including NZPB /HKMOA, they generally reach far back behind the 16th and 17th
Century liturgies that became our 1662, and, in my opinion, strive towards far better theology of grace, redemption, and joy (the latter not greatly
present in 1662!) than the ‘Old Book’.

Why do I mutter darkly about overhead data? Certainly it removes Anglican noses from books, which I applaud. But it often only moves noses from books to a screen. For that reason we don’t
‘screen’ (to coin a verb, which everyone does, these days) much of the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving. There is a great and sacred drama going on in the hands of the presiding priest, and that, not the printed words, should be our focus. In this the Roman Catholics do well: Mass books tend to remain on the distribution trolley, and the rite is known by rote. That too can generate problems, and the Mass and its actions are often performed at a pace the average race-caller would admire!

It’s a battle I am doomed to lose, but I continue to believe that a book is not just a collection of pages, but a ‘signifier’. If you pick up one of the ancient copies of the gospels you will see that the scribes gave this document great mana; in the news just yesterday (at time of writing) was a report on the
Garima Gospels, now believed to be one of the oldest documents of Christian writing, inscribed on goat skin and painstakingly illustrated as early as the 4th Century. Our liturgical Book of the Gospels, from which I read the Gospel each week, is not quite in the same class, but it is a reminded of the sacredness of the texts of our faith. Compare that with a Mills and
Boon, and you’ll know what I mean by ‘book as signifier’.

Of course it’s a both/and. The Scriptures are Living Word: we need to study them as well as recognise their solemnity. We don’t actually study, often, the Prayer Book. It is a ceremonial book shaping our collective prayers as we gather each week. It is for that reason worth preserving – indeed that is a major reason I am Anglican (though I don’t confuse ‘Anglican’ with salvation!). We risk losing solemnity with overhead projections. At 7.30, of course we don’t. There I only ever use the 404 liturgy; I do so in part because I have serious liturgical concerns about 456 and 476, and partly because I believe a more traditional service needs sameness. 9.30 is a different culture. I won’t really ever renege on my promise tokeep the data projection, but it is important that we know, week by week, that the drama in which we engage is both sacred and very, very ancient.
Michael Godfrey

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I received news a few days ago of the death in England of a former Vicar, A.E. Prebble (vicar from 1942 to 1949). The bishop’s office wrote:

The Reverend A E Prebble, known as Bert, died in England on June 1st at the age of 101 years. His last office before re-locating to England in the early 1960s was as Vicar of St Mark’s, Remuera. Bert held the offices of Vicar General, Archdeacon of Auckland and also of Manukau and Waimate during his years of ministry. He was also Vicar of

Pukekohe and Whangarei. Our prayers are with his extended family at this

time. Yours together in Christ

+ Ross Bay

It was only a few weeks ago that I was writing here of Bert Prebble’s predecessors, and talking with the, by then, quite frail Pat Lawrence of her memories of this once vibrant (and what we would these days call a  rather‘spunky’ man. Prebble emerges through the pages of Florence Keene’s history as a man of steel, of warmth, and of vigour. Keene quotes his farewell letter: ‘May the years which lie ahead see much progress towards perfection, both in the lives of you who are parishioners, and also in the general welfare of the parish.’

The post war era was one in which, theologically, ‘perfection’ was an expectation, for with the defeat of Hitler and of Japan there came the expectation of a better world, the cessation of war, and the great triumph of Christian values. Perhaps that was over-optimistic, ignoring what earlier theologians had known to be the inescapability of sin. But they had been through much and their optimism was understandable. Some things though do not change. Prebble expressed wishes that the ‘instruction of Church children’would continue (what would he think of the small numbers but genuine faith-enquiry of our young people today?), wished well for those planning a new church (it took another decade), and added ‘Give your new Vicar all the loyalty and the generous and willing help of which you are capable’. His successor went on to be archbishop, so something went well! But Prebble’s final wish in Whangarei was timeless:

‘May God bless you and give you his enabling power to do all things in accordance with his will and for his great power.’

Indeed: may that prayer echo always in our midst. Bert Prebble, aged 101, has now entered the timelessness of God.

Michael Godfrey

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There has been much concern expressed about the Renewal of Vows eucharistic liturgy held at Christ Church on June 3rd. The main point of concern was not so much the large Māori language content, but the absence of translation. Given that one of the founding doctrines of Anglicanism was that liturgy shall be conducted in a language ‘understanded of the people’ the complaints are most apposite. The 39 Articles, the Foundational Document of Anglicanism, state ‘It is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church to have public Prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments, in a tongue not understanded of the people. The reference was of course to rejection of Latin, but it could certainly be considered applicable to other languages.

I was deeply concerned by other matters, too. The age-old tradition of asperges, the sprinkling of water around the church on those renewing their vows, was omitted. The gospel, which was read from the lectern, was from a non - gender-inclusive translation. The Great Prayer of Thanksgiving was interrupted midway, despite clear rubrics in the Prayer Book of the New Zealand Church to the contrary, to change from a standing to a seated (seated!) position. And, while there was a passing renewal of the baptismal vows of all present, that most fundamental of all the renewals was drastically understated. These are all serious liturgical concerns.

The liturgy used was not drawn up by representatives of the Maori Pastorate in Whangarei or by any representativeof tikanga pakeha, here or elsewhere. It was not theturn of tikanga pakeha to host the event, and I was told that the bi-lingual liturgies that Archdeacon Moses Cherrington and I had produced for previous years would, while consulted, not be used. I was also told that ‘the main mission of Tikanga Māori was to preserve te reo’.

As I subsequently reflected in The Advocate, I have great respect for te reo Māori, and, while I am a woefully inadequate linguist, I delight in its preservation and use. Extinguishment of a language, as has happened countless times around the world, is cultural genocide, and I believe that the preservation of te reo Māori, sometimes against the odds, has been and will continue to be a masterstroke of cultural sensitivity of which Aotearoa new Zealand, including the Anglican Church, can be proud. I baulk, however, at the suggestion that

preservation of te reo Māori, or for that matter te reo Rātina (Latin) or te reo Pakehā (mediaeval, Reformation or modern!) is the primary mission of the church.The events of that night were shameful. It is however time to move on.

Michael Godfrey

You may be aware that I have been slaving over a hot, er, doctorate for many years now. I submitted it for examination twelve months ago, and it was passed ‘subject to amendment’ shortly before we went to the USA in October last year. I made those amendments and resubmitted the documents in January. They were agreed to in April, but have been awaiting final documentation – I’ve been entitled to use the honorific ‘Doctor’ for some time, though have tended to some caution in its use and use of the associated letters. Actually I still will –titles can be so pretentious – but it’s nice now to have all the paper work and final agreements complete. An aged mother and patient wife are ensuring that I do travel to Melbourne later this year to collect the silly hat and piece of paper, so I guess I’d better do that. What was it all about? The thesis is entitled Run that you may win it: contingency and emotional connectedness in the language of Paul. I have to submit a ‘layman’s summary’ (my university, the Australian Catholic University, appears to have forgotten inclusive language!) with the bound copies, so this is what I say: Since the 1970s, emphasis has been given to the importance of contingent circumstances, rather than chronological development, as an interpretative key to Paul’s letters. Each letter is topical, addressing specific pastoral circumstances, so I explore the possibility of a statistical analysis of Paul’s use of key words and phrases to calibrate the emotional distance between Paul and his various audiences. By ascertaining his ‘emotional connectedness’, it is possible to ‘weigh’ the value of the statements that Paul makes regarding human salvation in Christ. There – I’m sure that’s all clear now (a bit like the trinity in last week’s sermon)! Basically it means Paul had bad hair days and hissy fits like the rest of us, and this is a way to measure them.

In my acknowledgements I say this:I am grateful too to the faith, and wider communities of Orange and Casino in New South Wales, Semaphore, Port Adelaide and Walkerville in South Australia, Charleville in remote Southwest Queensland, and Whangarei in New Zealand, who have survived the experience of a Pauline spin on everytopic imaginable. I hope the great apostle hasn’t been misrepresented, and that the Spirit he served has indeed been the Spirit that has informed my pastoral and liturgical ministries in thesecommunities.

Please know that those words are heartfelt, and that the faith community of Christ Church, Whangarei is target of a lion’s share of my gratitude.

Michael Godfrey, M.A. Hons (Massey), B.D. (M.C.D), Ph.D.(A.C.U.)

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Having promised last week to whisper a prayer for you ‘wherever I found myself at church’ in Melbourne, I didn’t! The church I was heading for had been sold and was now Greek Orthodox, not quite what I was ready to experience. I knew of another church in the next suburb, and walked on – but when I got there I found theservice was another hour away, and I had to tackle the long walk home for an appointment long before that liturgy would end. So I whispered my prayer for you amidst the hustle and bustle of inner city Melbourne traffic, and know God heard it!

Perhaps then that’s all we need to do, anyway? Oh for a dollar for every person who says to me ‘oh I pray, but don’t need to go to church’, or ‘you don’t need to go to church to be a Christian’. Er, no. But worship is a bit like that other activity that we won’t mention in a church newsletter, that is (at least in theory), an essentialelement of marriage, of erotic companionship. It’s not critical, but a marriage or love relationship of similar nature is charged,energised, by the desire for expression of that energy. That’s why Paul Tillich spoke of the erotic nature of the relationship between the believer and his or her God – there is, for the lover of God, a compulsion to worship.

Strangely, I think society, even long post-Christendom, remains charged with a desire for liturgy, too. The graduation ceremony I attended was utterly liturgical: processions (a mace was carried instead of a cross), ceremonial dress (it’s worth having a doctorate just for the glad-rags!), sermons, prostrations, exchanges of peace – all were a part of this liturgical gathering – all, though, devoid of that transcendent, devoid of God.Strangely, I suspect the graduands would have felt cheated had the chancellor merelyinsisted that they collect their degrees from a post-office ora booth in the cafeteria. A life-defining moment needs a liturgy, whether or not we pronounce the presence of God in that liturgy.

And, Sunday by Sunday, we gather in liturgy because we believe that the encounter with the risen Lord is life-defining. We could get our sermons, prayers and even ‘communion’ wafer on-line or in the mail: but would it really be communion? Dare I suspect not? Yes, I can pray for you on a Melbourne street, but ultimately I want to connect with a God greater than the humdrum of everyday life, praying and praying in a context of holy awe.

Michael Godfrey

As you read this I am swanning around in that southern city, not my favourite spot on earth, home of the Melbourne Cup. In the eight years I lived there I never grew to like it: a couple of nice parks, some good restaurants, but apart from that I’d infinitely prefer the main street of Taihape, or, closer to home, Tangiteroria. I’m not a city sophisticate (though I cut it with the best of ’em driving amongst the trams and incomprehensibly strange road laws of the Melbourne CBD, ‘hook turns’, tram stops and all).

Four years ministry, three years theological training, a year in odd jobs and non-jobs: our lives take remarkable twists and turns. When I left for Melbourne on New Year’s Eve 1982 I had no idea which Australian city was in which location – I vaguely knew where Darwin and Perth were, but not the others. I was shocked to discover that Australians were not Kiwis: Melburnians had never heard of rugby (a tiny few had heard of some game involving 13 players, but it turned out to be Rugby League). They were passionate about some strange hybrid game played, admittedly, with a prolate spheroid ball (the technical name for the shape of a rugby or league or AFL ball!). The ball was similar, but there similarity stopped. AFL (it was still VFL in those days), better known even in Australia (where the word ‘Aussie’ isalways an adjective, never a noun) as ‘Aussie Rules’ remains utterly incomprehensible to me. What kind of game is played on a spherical field, with eight goals posts, men in white coats at either end waving feather dusters, and a peculiar obsession with bouncing and punching the ball? I was nonplussed.

Three children and a degree later I left Melbourne, diaconally and presbuterally ordained. Hook turns amuse me, trams bore me, the weather offends me. But one of those first three children has gained her first degree. Natasha has graduated with a Bachelor of Health Sciences with Honors (Australians don’t use the ‘u’) from La Trobe University. She’s my second daughter to graduate; her elder sister Vanessa has a Bachelor of Animal Sciences from the same university and now works training seeing eye dogs. Whilst there I have to do my best to persuade the third daughter, Rosalind, to keep going with her degree, to hang in there despite the boredom and seeming meaninglessness of it all. Two others are training as strappers in the horse racing industry, while Phoebe, who was here in 2007, continues at school. I will watch lots of netball – five of the six girls play – and hope to find one or two church supplies unavailable in New Zealand. I won’t be watching any activities involving prolate spheroids, even though they are all but unavoidable in the concrete wastes of a Melbourne weekend. So there you are – a glance at the hidden family life of your Vicar!I will whisper a prayer for you wherever I find myself at church, knowing that in Christ we are always united in the mysteries of God.

Michael Godfrey

By now I have reflected more than once on the grief we, collectively as a faith community, have journeyed through in recent weeks. Shortly after I last wrote, Pat Lawrence too surrendered after her short illness, and entered the mystery of death – the mystery from which we believe Jesus alone has emerged conqueror and predecessor of our own future resurrection. The ‘hows’ evade us – we may have discovered quarks but we haven’t, with all our supposed intelligence, really unlocked the mysteries of creation – let alone of the Creator, to date (and never will).

I spoke of Pat at her funeral. Like Jim Currie, she leaves a vast gap, and a vast legacy of works done, visions realized. Just as our hearts will continue to embrace Jean as she continues down the trail (and trial) of bereavement, so we will embrace Brian, too, together with both families, in our love and prayers. We might want to recall, too, Pat’s practical compassion: a casserole or other life-enhancing gift was never far away, for those in times of trial, when Pat was around!

What is this trial we call grief? ‘Trial’ is in Greek that same word we use in the Lord’s Prayer –‘save us from the time of…’ – may trials never be too great, never have the final word in our lives or the lives of those we love. Is there a right way to grieve? A right period – like the old mourning period during which those left behind wore black for a suitable time? Absolutely not! Grief will follow its own course. Black skies occasionally turn blue, only to turn grey and black again. Or sometimes don’t. Lonely hearts and nights do not come with a ‘use by’ date.

Nor is there a right behaviour for those who grieve: some throw themselves into activities, others withdraw. There is some potential for dysfunctional grief, but, as long as we are able to voice our feelings, speaking out, not bottling up, or feeling that it is weak to express feelings, we can journey through the valley of the shadow. Dawn will break: the resurrection dawn of reunion with those we love, but also the this-life dawn, when the birds sing once more, and darkness slowly dissipates. Alfred Tennyson, poet and author of the unparalleled grief poem “In Memoriam”, took 17 years to complete his poetic journey from darkness to resurrection light, from ‘ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain / On the bald street breaks the blank day’ to the famous ‘ring out wild bells’. There is no right process or duration.

We the body of Christ are, though, called to be a resurrection people. We do not deny pain, grief or death, but we support each other through the journey.We are, too, an apostolic people, standing in the footprints of the apos- tles and all since.As I have written before, Pat and Jim have done a work.The continuation of that work is ours now:we have a gospel to proclaim.Let us pick up the works that were theirs, and, however similarly or differently, move on into the future God has promised.

Michael Godfrey

The events of recent weeks, as some of our dearest faith community members have slipped into terminal illness and death, will inevitably have impacted on us all. In the funeral liturgy that I tend to use the prayers of introduction speak of our being reminded ‘of our own coming death and judgment’, but add the rider ‘Yet Christians believe that those who die in Christ share eternal life with him’.

In recent years our society has opted for the phrase ‘celebration of life’ for the rites that were generally called ‘funeral’. The perception has been that funerals are miserable, and that a celebration of life is somehow a joyful, jolly affair, not leaving us too disturbed in our own enjoyment of life, continuing, while thankful that the departed has passed through our sphere, to live our lives freed from the Big Questions.

Some years ago Anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote a Pullitzer Prize winning monograph entitled The Denial of Death. Becker argues that all our conscious experience is spent obliterating the memory that we are mortal, and that one day we will die. His argument is eloquent, but is, I suspect, a little over the top. Nevertheless there is much in our society that denies death: we don’t die, we ‘pass on’ or ‘pass away’, ‘leave the room’, whatever. I promise I am going to die!

The Anglican liturgies of death and dying are unremitting in facing reality: ‘we face the certainty of our own coming death’ says the liturgy I use. It adds the words ‘and judgment’ – those words are more in the realm of faith than certainty, but are a part of our faith. Perhaps they are the part of our faith that has made our society opt for a celebration of life, instead?

Becker was over the top. But we do live our lives in the valley of the shadow of death: ‘stone cold dead as I stepped outside the womb’ was Bob Dylan’s more poetic rendition of the facts. On the other hand, absolutely we celebrate life. We celebrate life becauseit is lived in the shadow of resurrection: life without resurrection-hope leaves us the hollow men of one of T.S. Eliot’s great poems. But life lived in the shadow (as it were) of resurrection is a life of hope. We lose our lives and our loved ones’ lives not into black nothingness but into ‘the glorious hope of the resurrection’. Death is a pain filled blow, but it is not the end of our story: ‘to God’s loving care and mercy we commend you.’ Hallelujah, amen, we might add. Jim Currie, may you rest in peace and rise in glory.

Michael Godfrey

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I received an invitation several weeks back to attend an investigatory seminar exploring the possibility of taking on a voluntary chaplaincy role with the St. John’s Ambulance Organization. The links between Anglican Christianity and St John’s lead, albeit tenuously, back through the reformation to the monastic origins of the organization in the Crusades – not a happy time in Christian history, but the Hospitallers of St. John was a non-violent order dedicated to healing. The links are somewhat tenuous, as dear Cromwell and his friends did their best to smash anything smelling faintly papist, but eventually Queen Victoria re-established the Order in 1888.

The Order is now secular: the ambulance crews are not expected to live in monasteries or pray the daily offices! Nevertheless the chaplaincy role – ecumenical and even potentially interfaith – is a respected part of the organization. In Australia, where the Ambulance organizations are state based, the role of the chaplains is constitutionally more peripheral. In New Zealand the old ‘saint’ part of the title carries still some residual meaning.

I have long been committed to chaplaincy roles, especially to emergency and military services. I was a part time stipendiary police chaplain in Queensland, and chaplain to the fire service in both my last two parishes. Recent events at Pukerua Bay have brought to mind, too, the vulnerability of our military service personnel: I have assured Katene Eruera of our prayers for him and for all the service chaplains at Ohakea (and indeed Linton Camp) and throughout the forces. All will be deeply involved in the pastoral care of the families and service men and women involved. It will have been an unforgettable baptism of fire for Katene in his new appointment.

The St. John’s chaplaincy bosses have, incidentally, demonstrated the same ‘geographically challenged’ status revealed by many south of the Harbour Bridge. The plan until this week was that Neil Fuge and I would share responsibility for chaplaincy in Northland – until Neil pointed out that Whangaparoa and Whangarei are not exactly proximate! It would have been fun to work closely with a former vicar, but the geographical distinctions have been sorted, and we will be covering separate regions.

I will therefore be adding St. John’s Ambulance chaplaincy to my involvements in the local community. I am looking forward to learning the ropes, and to working to support the work done by an intrepid and highly professional team of both paid and voluntary workers.

Michael Godfrey

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We were host to three rather special visitors last Sunday. Glenys Edwards, Jean Claridge and Janice Mandeno are great-grandchildren of the fourth (and longest serving) Vicar of Whangarei. Florence Keene devoted several pages of her history Cross Over Kauri to the Rev’d Cubitt’s remarkable 34 year tenure. He came from England (via Onehunga) as a curate and then deacon-in-charge, becoming vicar at his ordination to the priesthood two years later. He emerges from between the lines of the pages of Mrs Keene’s book larger than life, often lending the parish money (at interest!) to develop the properties, and expressing strong opinions. He died in 1929 after living in a Devonport hotel for many years.

I often wonder about previous vicars. Not their names, but their natures, their gifts, their strengths and weaknesses. Cubitt was followed by the on-again off-again, but much loved George Cruickshank: these two were seemingly larger than life, leaving a mark on the place. Cruickshank was later bishop of Waiapu, but was forced to resign due to ill health after a little over two years; he died in 1951 in the Bay of Islands. Between Cubitt and Cruickshank was the six month serving Joseph Brocklehurst, described by Keene as ‘a delicate man’, and seemingly thistledown in the history of this parish. Yet, despite on-going ill-health, Brocklehurst went on to be Dean of Waiapu, to be injured in the Napier earthquake; he too was offered, but declined, the bishopric of Waiapu, and died in 1957.

Vicars are not the essence of a faith community’s life. You are. Some of the “yous”, too, have left a mark – Florence Keene of course not least amongst them. As I hike the Dobbie track on Parihaka most days I assume it was named after the church choir master from the 1880s. Then there were the significant personages (as Keene notes), after whom streets were named: Bedlington, Davis, Hunt, Mair. Who were they, what were they like? Sadly there are some awkward silences – a long list of communicants ends ‘and 11 Maori Communicants’, not worthy of a name in the attitudes of the time.

A faith community has a whakapapa. We also have what is traditionally called ‘apostolic succession’. To those in the Catholic (including anglo-catholic) tradition apostolic succession is the actual physical transmission of tradition administered by the laying on of hands: Ross Bay was consecrated by David Moxon who was consecrated by Jabez Bryce who was consecrated by Alan Johnstone, who was consecrated by Reginald Owen …… and so on back to the apostles.In that tradition only those who are ordained by a bishop in that succession are “validly” ordained.In the Protestant traditions “apostolic succession” is more related to the content of preaching – that it is consistent with the truths proclaimed by the apostles.Either way there is awhakapapa of faith in which we stand and remain. I thank God for those who have kept the flames of faith alive in this place – remembered and unremembered.Above all it is a joy to know that all are remembered in the heart of God, part of the Reign that is to come.I look forward to having a beer with Cubitt, Brocklehurst and Cruickshank alike in the coming Kingdom.Michael Godfrey

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Sunday 11 April 2010

Our creative friends at St Matthew’s in the City have been at it again. Perhaps their Easter billboard has been a little less tasteless than their Christmas effort, but I doubt either the Nobel Prize for art (there isn’t one) or the Nobel prize for scholarship (there isn’t one) need book a flight to Auckland.

A cartoon figure crucified Jesus saying “Well this sucks” trivializes suffering. A lot of people rather like Jesus, which makes the offence particularly offensive, if I can put it that way (try mocking Mohammed and see what happens). But, at a deeper level, a death is a death. Crucifixion is a nasty way of dying but no death should be trivialized. To mock the bones in an ancient Māori burial site would be considered tasteless. But Jesus? No worries: he’s a bit of a joke, really.

Presumably the deeper level of meaning in the church’s billboard was in the next sentence: “I wonder if they’ll remember anything I said”.A fair enough question? Yet one might soon point out that the existence of the gospel records, the transmissions of Jesus’ tightly constructed oral teachings, suggests that the satirized figure need not have worried. A parable as pithy and vivid as the Prodigal Son, or most of the other 30+ (some count as many as 60) parables of the synoptic gospels (there are none recorded in John, though allusions to Jesus-parables can be found there) were easily remembered, and remembered accurately. Parables make up some 35% of Jesus’ sayings. “I wonder if they’ll remember anything I said”: yes – there was little doubt of that. It was not in any case likely to be a thought foremost on the dying Jesus’ mind.

Another question, though, is raised: is the life and death of Jesus merely about remembering a whole heap of teachings? The gospel writers of course treated Jesus’ teachings with enormous respect. But they were not the totality of the Jesus event: Paul never (or barely) mentions them. John devotes far more time to the suffering of Jesus than to his teachings. And even the synoptics use the teachings constantly to point to a more defining moment: the life-transforming death and resurrection of the one they called Lord. Even Mark, whose gospel account originally ended with the resounding words ‘they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’(Mk. 16.8), expected his readers to notice: ‘hang on –something happened, because we’ve heard!’

FROM YOUR PRIEST

Sunday 28th March 2010

We enter now into that one sacred unbroken eight day liturgy: blessings are (or should be) with-held at the end of each liturgy until on Easter Day we hear sacred words of hope once more. Palm/Passion Sunday: as I hinted last week ago, this glorious and popular celebration (often out-doing Easter Day in attendances by far) is a celebration of getting it wrong! We gather to welcome a glorious and conquering Messiah. We gather waving branches and strewing his path, expecting the overthrow of the evil Oppressor, the Roman Empire. Yet within days our dreams go awry: the crowd is fickle. We are fickle. Our hopes of the glorious overthrow of Rome are broken, our expected Messiah pontificates about love and stuff, and we desert and crucify him. As that most heart-breaking of hymns puts it, ‘then crucify / was all our breath / and for his death / we thirst and cry’.

So we enter into a journey. In a sense what we do this week is journey into our own propensity for sin – or into our own sin, potential and actual. The readings we will hear at the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday Eucharists (7.30 a.m.) travel through the confusion of perhaps mis-guidederos,(Monday: Jn. 12.1-11), of attempts to control God (Tuesday:12.20-36) and utilizing God to serve private ambitions (Wednesday: see Jn. 13.21-32). They could travel through other ‘misguidings’: the bravado of Peter, the cowardice of the fleeing disciples, even the iwi-ism of Jesus’ own people (Jn. 8.31)(including, of cause, pakehaiwi-ism).

Through Thursday and Friday we travel deeper and deeper into the mire. Jesus acts in ways increasingly alien to human power machinations: he breaks bread and shares wine at the Passover, but washes feet as well. He speaks of servanthood, and of being hated, he sweats blood, refuses to provide answers that could save his life, or call down divine wrath. Ultimately, most confusing of all, he forgives his tormenters and executioners. And dies.

Only then do we receive at last hints of glorious victory. But oh, what an enigmatic victory it is, as we allow ourselves to be, in Wordsworth’s words, surprised by joy. Rome stays in the hands of the Caesar, and Christians die for their faith. But it no longer matters: for those earliest witnesses saw and grasped a Resurrection hope so far greater than the merely political or merely life and death. And they invite us to do so, too. After the travel into deepest (well … symbolically deepest) darkness. Join me, then, in a journey through darkness visible into light impenetrable.

Michael Godfrey

In my comments on Luke’s ‘Tower of Siloam’ exchange I mention the comparative force of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes, suggesting that economic factors drove the almost incomparably different death and social displacement tolls. There were of course other factors: The Haitian earthquake hit in mid-afternoon, the Chilean one in the middle of the night; The Haitian earthquake was only 13 km deep, the Chilean one was 35 km deep. Comparisons are difficult. Indeed, in a sense, even numerical comparisons are meaningless: a life lost is a life lost, and the biblical reflection ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father’ should remind us all that a single death is a point of grief to the Creator. Nevertheless the sheer magnitude of Haiti’s loss is mind blowing, and it could have been so much smaller had not corruption and economic woes already crippled the nation.

Needless to say televangelist Pat Robinson has made further ludicrous and evil claims following the Chilean earthquake. The Haitian earthquake was a result, he claimed of that nation’s pact with the devil. Chile’s earthquake, he has said, is an expression of God’s wrath because Chile has nationalised its resources – a step towards the communism so hated by Robinson’s ilk. Thank God, not for Pat Robinson, but for impish but prophetic Whoopi Goldberg, who simply and publicly responded “Pat Robinson, you are wrong!”

The greatest destruction of Christianity’s credibility is not the devil without, but the devil within. The obscenities regularly spewed by Robinson and his ilk make mockery of the Christ who weeps over a sinful city (in last week’s gospel), and who asks his God and Father to forgive his enemies as they crucify him. If we in any circumstance begin to utter spewings of hate, then we have swum to the dark side. Where we are wronged let us instead spew love, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

Tectonic plates will shift again, and many or few will die. But the love and reconciliation of God is greater than sin, greater than death: may those killed in Haiti and Chile rest in the arms of God, and those whose lives are shattered find grace, peace, justice and hope.

Michael Godfrey

In a blog posted by Sojourners

magazine, writer Julie Clawson observes,

"Lent isn’t about denial; it is about transformation. It is the season in which we prepare to encounter Christ’s sacrifice by endeavoring to become more Christ-like ourselves. Transformation is about letting ourselves be filled with God’s presence so that we can be shaped by God’s grace."

Clawson is a ‘stay at home mum’, formerly a children's ministry director and a co-pastor from Austin, Texas. She has emphasized in her bloggings and other writings the small things that we can do to change the world. By these small things we can proclaim the often unseen values of God’s rule of justice and love.

Neither you nor I are likely to gain the ear of even of a John Key, let alone a Barack Obama, a Vladimir Putin or a Hu Jintao. Even if we were to do so it is unlikely they would or could change the world. As Obama is brutally aware every day, the forces of the international and global wills are greater even than the President of the USA.

What we can do is practise the values of God in our infinitesimally small realms. Lent is a time to re-grasp those small life changes: to walk more when we duck out to the shops or head to church. To decline the plastic bags thrust under our noses at the supermarket or corner store; to buy Trade Aid products. If we do undertake a time of self-denial, we traditionally give some or all of the cash-flow saved to a godly cause: to missions, to an aid agency, or to some beneficial agency within the wider community, Christ-based (e.g. Tear Fund or C.M.S.) or otherwise (Cancer Society, SPCA).

What you do is entirely up to you. But let this Lent be a time of recommitment and reconnection in your life. The disciplines you undertake are not designed to win brownie points with God – such an idea is a contradiction of the gospel! They will however serve to re-focus your vision on the God of the Cross and the values at God’s heart.

Michael

FROM YOUR PRIEST

17 FEB 2010

There are some, believe it or not, who love meetings. Others, like me, would refer to live on a desert island, and believe meeting procedure is a Work of the Devil™. Probably the truth is somewhere in between, and while it’s bad theology, it’s probably a reasonably human response to say that meetings are a necessary evil. I’m sure there are better ways to do business procedure, but I’m yet to convince anyone or be convinced of any process that is that “more excellent way”. I don’t claim to be good at it, but after 20 odd (very odd!) years I’m slowly learning meeting protocol. Fortunately meeting protocol is not a prerequisite to the encounter with the grace of God that is the primary task of the faith community (though sometimes one might wonder).

So thank you to those who took part in Tuesday’s marathon. I don’t pretend it was pleasant. It was a marathon, and there were some strong feelings that were expressed. Let me say that I far more respect the honesty of those who speak their minds than those who snipesotto voce either behind the scenes or at a meeting but loud enough to be heard yet without formally speaking. Both are an occupational hazard in the life of the church. Only speaking out, procedurally and embraced by edifying Christ-love, can ever be a sign of the reign of God.

So I would like to thank all who took part, positively and openly, in a long and a difficult meeting. We are a faith community on the move. There are many changes afoot that won’t please everyone, your vicar included. I too must roll with the punches when the purposes of God are not a clone of my plans!

As 2010 steps into gear we will have some exciting and constructive times together. We have a new vestry, with that glorious and God-breathed mix of new and old perspectives and skills. Vicars don’t get to choose their teams, and thank God for that! I am proud of those who have served, and those who have let their name go forward to serve now, as the leadership team for our faith community. Please pray for us all as we work together to breathe and breed God-dreams in 2010.

Michael Godfrey

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Sunday 7th Feb. 2010

There has been encouraging response to our 20/10 appeal for a Children’s Worker. But haven’t we been down this track before? Where are these young families?Hard questions are a good response to a proposal. As long ago (at least) as the 2002 Parish Consultation a priority was to provide ‘a director of Christian Education and Nurture Ministries … especially among children and young people’. That was a key part of my job description; to ‘introduce new worshipping families and establish Sunday School’. This initiative continues my aim to meet that expectation.

Ruth Wright put hard yards into a similar position over the past few years. Ruth’s efforts then, and her continued efforts with Mainly Music now, have been Herculean. She has provided ministry not only to the young families of Christ Church but to the entire former Parish of Whanga rei. There are direct links between Ruth’s efforts (with further interim effort from Jan Love during 2009), and this initiative. These links flow through ‘mainly music’, Godly Play and the Catechumenate of the Good Shepherd. They flow between the families touched the Christmas Crib services masterminded first by Anne van Gend, then by Angela McGregor, and most recently by Emily Goldie, Mary Mouat and Emma Parry. Yes, we have been down the track before, thank God.

As to where the young families are, there are two answers. Several worship with us. Some have come and then succumbed to the population drain to Auckland. But our Sunday Schools include a dozen or fifteen children: not enough fish to sink the boats, but an increase, in per centage terms, on the zero-ish of three years ago.

The young families are also “out there”. Like the fish of the gospel reading, we need the energy of God to reach them. Some 300-400 people gathered at each of our Christmas Crib Services. The employment of a Children Worker will not suddenly place all those bottoms on our pews. But it is a wonderful opportunity to meet a community need as parents seek a narrative of faith for their young families.

Next week Emma Parry, who helped mastermind the 2009 Crib Service, will join our faith community and ministry team. It has been necessary to keep the momentum of the Crib Service going, and not necessary to look beyond Emma’s proven skills. At the AGM, as agreed by the out-going vestry, Andrew Goldie and I will present the expectations that we have of this appointment. We will propose Emma as the person available to take on this task, with a motion that she be commissioned, with an appropriate honorarium. We will happily field any questions at the AGM.Please pray for our children’s ministry and for Emma as she prepares to step into it.Michael Godfrey