Sermons from Others

A SERMON PREACHED BY ANNE VAN GEND AT HOLY TRINITY CATHEDRAL ON THE OCCASION OF AN ORDINATION.

One of the delights and frustrations of teaching or preaching is that you never know which of the fine pearls of wisdom you're throwing out are going to be taken up by listeners – or what even finer pearls they're going to thank you for saying that you have no recollection of at all. My Hebrew teacher was a short, broad, German-American who in earlier days had moonlighted as a wrestler. When he taught, you learned. For a year I was his only senior student, and he would spend hours a week trying to turn those black squiggles into a thing of enlightenment for me. Years on now, they're returned to being mostly black squiggles, but one thing I remember clearly. I was thanking him for giving me all this time, and he gently picked up the bible between his hands and said, 'Listen. If I could spend all day doing nothing but studying this book, I would go to bed at night and I would say Thankyou Jesus.”

So much of what we study before we're ordained disappears fairly rapidly through lack of use, but the one thing we do keep grappling with when all remembrance of church history dates or 6-syllable theological terms has vaporised, is the Bible. Earlier this year I heard an interview with an American theologian, biblical scholar and writer-of-many-commentaries, Luke Timothy Johnson. He'd started adulthood as a Catholic monk but committed matrimony and is now a lecturer and writer. In the interview he compared his present use of Scripture with the kind of full-immersion experience he had with it as a monk, when it was read and sung and recited and listened to in a regular daily rhythm, permeating all life. He said it was the difference between dissecting a cadaver and dancing with your beloved.

Both are, of course, good things. I'm all for dissecting cadavers when the results are more and better-equipped doctors, advances in healing practices, scientific discoveries and breakthroughs. And I'm all for dancing. Like so many things in the Christian life, the trick is perhaps to remember to do both.

Take this amazing and very familiar reading from Isaiah for starters. Unless we've dissected it to a point it's nothing more than a truly bizarre, hallucinogenic string of images. And depending on the dissecting instruments you use, you can find all sorts of interesting things. You can explore historically and find interesting facts such as that seraphim were generally fiery serpents, ferocious and feared inhabitants of the desert - and that here, winged with six wings, you have the closest thing to a dragon you could imagine. You can explore with inter-textual tools and find that prophetic calls followed a similar pattern: an encounter with God, a commission, and a ritual act or a symbol given to signify the particular call - which sounds remarkably like what we're doing here today. You can explore through the lens of what we continue to learn about ancient Hebrew beliefs and practices, and find that the Holy of Holies was no less than a slice of heaven: God's dwelling place, and that the temple itself was, in microcosm, creation. That which was enacted in encounters and rituals and song within the temple was mysteriously enacted in the world.

Or, to bring it down to earth with another example, a friend recently took a farmer's eye to our first reading and commented that unless the sheep get out of their fold into the paddocks on a regular basis, the fold will very quickly stink. Maybe a useful image to take into ministry with us.

A Rabbi, discussing the verse in Jeremiah which talks of a stone being shattered into innumerable pieces, said that that stone was the holy writings: that any word of Scripture, when hit correctly, can produce innumerable and endless depths of meaning. There is no end to the riches that can be discovered as we delve and dig and slice deeper and deeper into the Scriptures.

But what did Johnson mean about the dancing? To define his meaning would be to kill it. Yet there are suggestions there of leaving analysis behind at times in order to move simply and appreciatively with this beloved; or to let the rhythms and melodies carry us; or to use heart and imagination as well as minds, or to be carried in and by the story rather than sit back and look at it. On one level this is obvious - but there is a very real danger that both our sense of dancing, and , most importantly, the sense of belovedness can quietly disappear over time if the joy of calling becomes the routine of a job - or if the desire to be with this beloved becomes solely an exercise in dissecting it.

For there are elements of the experience of movement and music blending and carrying us that can only retain their life if they are allowed to stay undefined and undissected. It's one of the gifts of this nebulous thing that is so often feared in the church, “post-modernism”, that people are once again accepting that a true understanding of something can not always be reduced to logical or clinical formulae. Somewhere – unfortunately I have been unable to find it – there is a glorious quasi-scientific, and certainly mechanistic description of the process of osculation. The descriptions include optimum trajectory, duration, implementation of force, and implications for chemical interchange. All these descriptions make a mockery of the human experience they really narrate, because osculation is, of course, the very un-rational and irrational human act of kissing.

There are other dangers for humans in putting too much faith in our dissecting skills. We may become so involved in discovering how life functions that we forget to feel awe at the mystery of life itself. We may, when dissecting a web of life such as the ecosystem of a country (or the world), grow arrogant and believe that by understanding the component parts we understand the whole better than we do and can thus add and take away from it with immunity. The damage that has been done over the years as a result of that attitude may never be undone.

Perhaps too much faith in the power of dissection has affected the church as well.

I'm about to paint a caricature now, as always happens when we start labelling things. Nevertheless, the point of caricatures is to make obvious something that may not otherwise be easily seen. When it comes to approaching our scriptures, it appears that there are three extreme strands within the worldwide church, attached to three points of a triangle, each pulling outward and trying to elongate the shape that is the bulk of the church. Two of these reduce all the mysteries of faith to our heads, while one disregards our heads altogether. The last is the extreme end of the spirituality movement which has possibly developed in reaction to the cerebral nature of the other two. There the mind, reason, historicity, or physicality are relatively unimportant. The other two are the extreme conservatives and extreme liberals, both of whom, comically, agree on one fundamental principle: that unless faith conforms with and can be contained within the capacity of our skulls, something must be changed. So the extreme conservative wing adjust science to fit the scriptures, and the extreme liberal wing adjust the scriptures to fit science. Radically different results, yet predicated on the same basic principle.

Those are the extremes, and the bulk of us are somewhere in the body of the triangle. Yet we are aware of the tensions; we are aware of the conflict, and it shapes powerfully how we approach the Scriptures. Somehow we need to reclaim that we are a faith of history, yes, but also mystery, of God-with-us and

God-beyond-naming, of ways of thinking which have always been rooted in our day and yet counter-cultural, of the reality of the unseen, of a God who is the creator, not the slave, of the world; of a God who turns death itself illogically, wonderfully, mysteriously, physically back on itself.

And it is this God who has called us, names us, brought us here. So, finally, let's go back to Isaiah a different way. Let's enter into it, using all we have learned from dissection, yes, but letting the mystery sit.

What a story it is to enter into. It's more like a key scene in a sci-fi or fantasy film than anything else... Imagine it that way for a moment.

The setting is a huge, glorious, exotic building - some resemblance to this one, really - and as the scene opens Isaiah finds himself there in a state where everything that is normally invisible is present and visible around him. There is a being so beyond-words enormous that the hem of his robe is billowing through the building, probably blowing against and around the one man standing there. Above him fiery serpents with wings shoot past and circle around, crying out in whatever voice you can imagine dragons to have .. the altar is alight with burning coals.... then everything begins to shake, statues fall from the walls, smoke fills what's left of the air around the flowing robe, and glory from the Being flows out in a golden light to the world beyond. And Isaiah cries out - maybe yells in terror - or else whispers, overawed - aware suddenly of his uncleanness like a disease spreading from his lips to fill him. At the sound of his cry, one dragon comes straight towards him, carrying a bright, glowing coal, the heat hitting him before it even touches... and the dragon brushes it against his mouth. The pain sears through the disease, burning, yet cleansing, leaving him standing there raw but whole.

Then, the voice of the mighty one comes...."Who will go?"

And you reply, "Here I am."

For in fact this is no fantasy. It is no more fantastic than our own belief that we

have been named and called by God. The altar alight with coals holds no greater, burning mystery than the altar alight with Jesus' presence. Week by week we join the seraphim and the hosts of heaven in bowing before God and calling, "Holy, holy, holy", even if our eyes cannot see them. God's presence is veiled, but if we don't believe it is as real as it was to Isaiah, we are wasting our time.

And the task we are given is a quest as great as that of any book or film hero or heroine. Yes, it will feel mundane at times, yet we mustn't be ashamed of fighting that - of resisting the cynicism and pure pragmatism that permeates so much of our church. Our battle is not only with budgets and vestries; our quest is not only to fill our pews and lift our statistics. We are set on our quest by the God of Isaiah's vision with a message of the veil between the Holy of Holies and the world being torn apart; of God breaking into his creation and our lives in Jesus, of love beyond our imagining.Our guide book is, as we would expect, both indescribably important and cryptic at times, mysterious often, frustratingly unable to be pinned down - but that is because we are part of a story of mystery, of the unexpected, of that which we could never have predicted nor ever fully understood. Yet there is no greater story of which to be part.

This page has been set up to publish either the sermons of those visiting Christ Church and those of Christ Church preaching in other places

Enjoy!