EASTER 3 2016

This sermon was preached yesterday after many false starts.

I have a confession to make and that is I hate fishing! Or perhaps I should reframe that and say that I really hate the messiness of fishing. I don’t mind sitting on some little jetty somewhere while the water laps at my feet looking out on beautiful scenery not thinking about much. Just so long as I don’t have to bait a hook or catch a fish for that matter. I can’t stand watching the poor things flapping around in a bucket with the flaps getting slower and slower. And cleaning them is disgusting and finding bait is such a waste of time. The commercial stuff just falls off the hook. The only thing I can manage is a lure and fish are smart enough not to fall for that. The whole thing requires a great deal more patients then I ever have. I would much rather be surfing any day! I guess my inability to catch fish - the real reason for loathing fishing – had to do with the fact that none of my mates when I was young were into fishing – or if they were they certainly didn’t share their secrets with me.

There was one dream I had or perhaps still have and that is to go out fishing at dawn on a summer morning. I would just like to catch a couple of fish, bring them home and cook them for breakfast. I don’t think that this dream has anything to do with the image of John 21. Perhaps the notion of cooking something fresh from the sea is somehow an innate desire. Anyway I have never been able to get up at dawn on a summer morning so the idea of fresh fish for breakfast will probably never be realised.

Now the story of this fishing expedition in John 21 is, if you will excuse the pun, just a little bit fishy. I think it is not about fishing at all but is rather about redemption through encounter with the risen Lord. Chapter 21 is in itself problematical. You remember that the Gospel reading last week ended with the words ‘Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”  Now that sounds like the conclusion to the Gospel doesn’t it. There really isn’t any need to add anything else. The Gospel is done, at that point. But instead of ending at that point the Gospel writer goes on to add a whole new chapter. It reminds me a lot of when I am writing a sermon and am not sure how to bring it to an end. It is then that the sermon writing dictum comes into my brain FINNISH WHEN YOU ARE FINNISHED.  Maybe we think that the Gospel writer should have stuck to that principal here.

What we recall, however, is that there was probably not just one writer at work on this Gospel but a whole school of authors each bringing their different perspectives over time. We see this not just here but also in the fact that there are probably two farewell discourses in the upper room side by side. If you look at the very end of chapter 14 you will see that clearly.

But whatever the case may be Chapter 21 does stand on its merits. There is nothing like it as a post resurrection story anywhere else in the gospels. It is a brilliant vibrant story that has a place in the whole It works so well as a post resurrection story bringing everything to a conclusion. So it is not just a case of the Gospel writer not knowing where to stop.

So this is the story of an encounter, or perhaps a number of encounters with the risen Lord. Let’s just take a look at these and see what we can make of them. The first and most obvious is the story of the redemption and rehabilitation of Peter. It is a beautiful story with its threefold questioning and admonition of Peter:- feed my lambs; tend my sheep; feed my sheep. It is a bit funny that this little story should come at this point. The Gospel was written at the very end of the 1st century maybe 45 years after the martyrdom of Peter, probably in Rome. It is a strange thing. We would have expected, following the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, that Peter, the designated leader of the disciples would have become the natural leader of the early church in Jerusalem. But no. The leadership of the Jerusalem church, the first Bishop of Jerusalem was James, Jesus brother. Perhaps Peter went on to become the first Bishop of Antioch and according to tradition the first Bishop of Rome. We really don’t know why any of these events occurred. But I do wonder whether Peter’s denial of Jesus on three occasions during the trial was such a heinous sin that it put him out of the leadership of the early church for a time. That is of course speculation. But clearly the writer of John’s Gospel saw it as necessary for Peter to be rehabilitated to his position of leadership through this encounter with the risen Lord. Three denials, three declarations of love, three admonitions to pastor the flock. It is pretty neat really. But it is more than that. For it tells us that no sin, no sinner, cannot be redeemed through encounter with the risen Lord – no matter how heinous the sin.

The second is the strange story of the disciples going fishing. They were singularly unsuccessful until they encountered the risen Lord. This story has a parallel in Luke’s Gospel but there it is a story of the calling of the disciples and it is certainly nowhere else told in this interesting post-resurrection context. The disciples have worked hard all night and have failed to catch anything. Following the encounter with the Lord the net is full to overflowing. Some commentators comment that the disciples never have any success fishing without the intervention of Jesus. Perhaps there is a lesson there for me somewhere. The really interesting aspect of this little story though is that before they encounter the Lord they are fishing in the wrong place. After the intervention of the risen Lord they change direction and fish in the right place with amazing results. One wonders whether this is a story of the missionary initiatives of the early church – perhaps even the Johannine community. The Gospel is, after all, a history of that community as well as being the story of Jesus. Perhaps their early missionary initiatives were fruitless. Perhaps they were seeking converts from the gentile community at Ephesus when they should have worked with the Jewish community or the other way round It was only through encounter with the risen Lord that they got it right.

The third story is the story of that breakfast of fish and bread. There is a huge amount to unpack in this story contained in verses 9 to 14 but I just want to touch on the pre-resurrection, post-resurrection contrast. The pre-resurrection meal, the Last Supper, is in a secluded upstairs room and it is night. The post resurrection meal is in the light of morning in a public place. The Gospel for today is certainly underlining the impact of the disciples encounter with the risen Lord.

But we are not done yet. In fact the whole story of Chapter 21 verses 1 to 19 is a very moving account of what happens for the disciples and by abstraction what happens for us when we encounter the risen Christ. For this scene we are back, somewhat incongruously, by the Sea of Galilee where it all began. It is incongruous because all of the action until now over the recent Chapters has been taking place in Jerusalem many Kilometres away. Peter and 6 other disciples most of whom are named are there. Peter decided to go fishing and persuades his friends to go with him. Now this is really strange because, as far as we know, none of the disciples have been fishing at any time during the past three years. Why would they want to go fishing at this point in the story? It looks pretty much as if they want to go back to the beginning to, get back to normal – whatever normal may be – to  pretend that the whole Jesus thing didn’t happen.

It is like that great song from “Jesus Christ Superstar” “Could we start again, Please”. I don’t know whether Tim Rice had this scene in mind when he wrote the words – probably not. But it fits into this story so well:

I’ve been living to see you

Dying to see you, but it shouldn’t be like this

This is unexpected, what do I do now?

Could we start again please?

I’ve been very hopeful so far

Now for the first time I think we’re going wrong

Hurry up and tell me this is just a dream

Oh could we start again please?

I think you’ve made your point now

You’ve even gone a bit too far to get your message home

Before it gets too frightening we ought to call a halt   

So could we start again please?

Could we start again? The disciples hope so. So back they go to Galilee to their boats and their nets, hoping that this Jesus thing had just been a dream - this shot at heaven.

But it is too late for them and it is too late for us. The risen Christ confronts them on the beach just where they are and their whole world changes for ever. And the risen Christ confronts us too just where we are and our lives are changed for ever, every day. We leave our boats and our nets behind and obey his command, “Follow me”. Amen

    

   

Easter 2016

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise

Without delays,

Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise

With him mayest rise:

That, as his death calcined thee to dust,

His life may make thee gold and much more just. 

Awake, my lute and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The cross taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate that most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long:
Or since all music is but three parts vied
And Multiplied;
Oh let thy blessed Spirits bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

George Herbert 1593 - 1633

Easter Blessings to all.

Lent 2016

This is not a part of the series of blogs that I am writing for Holy Week. This is the result of a question that I psted on Facebook some weeks ago about how people related to Lent. The resulting sermon was preached at St John's on the 3rd Sunday in Lent. Many thanks to all who responded in any way.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been on a journey and I want to share the journey with you. It began, and maybe ended, with a paragraph from Bishop Richard Holloway’s Autobiography ‘Leaving Alexandria’.  In the early part of his ministry he received a scholarship which allowed him to travel from Scotland to the United States for a month on a study tour. He had 3 free days in New York and set out to see the city on foot. At one point, tucked away behind Broadway, he came across a small community of Ukrainian migrants. He recounts ‘Sitting in the middle of the square were scores of old Ukrainians, women in black dresses with scarves around their heads, and old men in black suits leaning on sticks. No one spoke. They sat there, out of place and out of time, in silence, waiting….. They themselves did not belong here. Exiled was the word, a word that always hurts me. Maybe the pain I found in the word had more to do with me than the Old Ukrainians. A fear of finding myself in the wrong place? Not quite. A fear of being cast out of a good place a place of abiding. Closer. Or maybe it was the prospective sorrow of the thought of dying in the wrong place.’ (End of quote)

We are all exiles. We are all in the wrong place and suffer the sense of separation from our true place, our home. This sense of separation is particularly poignant during Lent. Year after year we feel a greater sense of distance between who we are and who we are called to be as the people of God. Yet what we do, at this time, to attempt to traverse the canyon between who we are and who we want to be, to travel home, seems pitiful, trivial. We give up sugar in our tea and switch to sweetened coffee instead, we stop eating chocolate for a time, perhaps we join a stimulating study group for all the right reasons but then discover that the material on which it is based is woefully inadequate.

So I was drawn to thinking, is it all worthwhile, this annual indulgence in the trivial in a vain attempt to bridge this impossible gap? Should we just abandon the whole futile exercise? After all, it doesn’t even make a lot of sense here in the southern hemisphere where the seasons are all wrong.

But then something stopped me. What if, despite all my reservations, people, whether church attenders or otherwise, still valued these 40 days set apart by the church as a special time of reflection, as I do? Perhaps, I thought, I should know what I am talking about before lobbing hand grenades from the trenches at something that might still be seen as valuable. But how was I to discover public opinion on an esoteric and specialised subject as the community reaction to a specific church season. I realised that time was short and resources were meagre for any sophisticated broad-ranging statistically valid research. Beside which, I had never heard of anyone being crazy enough to hand over to the community the power to make a difference to the content of a sermon. And I had no idea about how to go about it.

When one is stuck with a problem, I have learned over the years that the solution often lies with the Grumpy Old Men. There are about 50 blokes on my distribution list coming from a wide variety of backgrounds and I knew that they would willingly join in my unusual task – or at least would not be offended by my unusual quest for information. They have come to expect the unusual from me. And they certainly came good. I sent them all an email which asked the simple question ‘What do you think Lent is about?’ My Social Surveys advisor who I consulted much later than I should have told me that this was a much too open ended question but it didn’t seem to matter and the response from them was much higher than I expected and their responses were outstanding – deeply thought through and personal. In addition, it generated some extraordinarily interesting and useful dialogue between us.

But that, in some ways, is a fairly undifferentiated group from whom to seek a response. Their responses were excellent but the community was not diverse enough. Then I remembered that our son Phil, a leading researcher in mental health, had, a few years ago, used Facebook as a mechanism to obtain responses to a high quality survey of mental health. He has done this again recently. Perhaps you participated in the earlier survey. I wondered what would happen if I posted the question that I put to the Grumpy Old Men on Facebook. For me, that was outrageously risky behaviour, especially when our daughter Alison coached me in the art of sharing the question publically when my normal fairly limited action on Facebook is to exchange posts with family and close friends. Of course, my question was much too open- ended to be a useful mechanism to collect statistically valid responses from a wide population. But that was not the point of the exercise.

Over the past week, my Facebook post has been shared far more widely than I ever expected and has been viewed by over a 1000 people I think. Unfortunately it is not possible to discover how many views there have been on Facebook unlike other Social Media platforms such as LinkedIn. I made it possible to respond publically by placing a comment on the Facebook post or privately by sending an email to an address specially set up for the purpose. Both response mechanisms were used. In the end there were not a large number of responses – I didn’t expect that there would be- but those I received were gold. And in the end, I realized that the number of responses to the question on Facebook didn’t really matter. What really mattered was that over 1000 people from around the world paused and thought about Lent. And for me, that was really something.

But there were results and they are worth sharing. Unfortunately I can’t quote from them all. But with a little bit of categorization I can quote enough so that you will get the flavour.

First, there were a small number of responses which were a little flippant and funny. One of those simply read, ‘Lent is the past tense of lend’. When I recovered from a combination of rolling my eyes and laughing, it made me wonder what this word ‘Lent’ means. It turns out that Lent is a shortened version of ‘Lenten’ which means ‘lengthening’. That refers to the fact that as winter changes to spring in the Northern Hemisphere the days begin to lengthen. As I mentioned earlier, that is not relevant to us in the Southern Hemisphere where autumn means our days begin to shorten. However as one of the respondents said ‘I think that Lent in late summer / early autumn always helps such contemplative thoughts’. For some of us, Lent works well where ever we are in the world.

There was a group of regular Church attenders for whom Lent doesn’t mean a great deal. That was because they came from a tradition that is more non-conformist in nature for whom Lent is not part of their religious culture. I suppose that that was my experience when I was growing up in the Methodist Church. One respondent wrote ‘we observe Easter but do not partake in Lenten studies. So lent is not significant to me.’

The largest group of respondents were those who attend church regularly and have what I would term a traditional view of Lent. A couple of quotes will suffice. ‘For me Lent is a time of preparation, appreciating again Jesus teaching on the way to Jerusalem. Anticipation of Holy Week and the grim certainty of the cross- with the glimmer of Easter to come’.

Another said ‘For me Lent is a period of preparation for the sadness and quiet of Good Friday, and then comes the relief and reassurance of finding that the Lord has risen from the Tomb. It is a way of asking us to show discipline; to show that we can give thought, consideration and helpfulness to others less fortunate then ourselves.’

Finally there was a small but interesting group of respondents who had been regular church attenders but no longer did so. I was very pleased to receive these responses. Here is just one of them. ‘So Lent was a pretty solemn time growing up in my family. Even though I am no longer religious I think that the themes of self-sacrifice and reflection about how we can lead a better life in serving others and the community as a whole are still very valid for someone leading a secular life. And the yearly passing of Lent reminds me to reflect on these themes.’

When I received this response from a total stranger it made me realize that this process had been incredibly valuable and I have been greatly humbled by all of the responses.

What do these responses have in common? What do we learn about the season of Lent from them? Most, not all, present a common theme. It is to do with the journey. It may simply be the journey through the forty days of Lent to the Cross and the resurrection of Jesus. Or it may be more complex like the journey back in time to a world of meaning which inspires a model of life for now. This sense of journey which is almost palpable during the season of Lent is one that we all share. Like the Ukrainians in Richard Holloway’s story we are all exiles seeking to return home. Our journey, though is not an earthly one and the home which we seek is a heavenly on. The season of Lent reminds us that we journey together towards meaning, towards truth, towards God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. May Jesus be near to you as you journey during Lent and always and be your guide to your heavenly home.

Tuesday in Holy Week (part 2)

This was not a Holy Communion service as are the other posts in this series but it is St John the Baptist Church Canberra where I have been on the staff for nearly ten years. Our history here goes back a long way. We were married here in 1969. I was confirmed here at the end of 1969 ( having first been confirmed in the Methodist Church in 1964). Our Children were all Baptised here and there have been lots of family connections with St John's over the years. It is a great community to be part of and I think that my ministry here has been quite successful.

On Tuesday evening we attended the Holy Week Concert byADHOC BAROQUE, a new group founded and directed by Peter Young an outstanding Musician and Choral Director in Canberra. The program was constructed around Pergolesi's Sabat mater.

The musicians and solists were of a very high standard and were beautifully integrated. It was a great way to bring the Tuesday in Holy Week to a conclusion.

Tuesday in Holy Week (Part 1)

Some time ago I discovered that the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture held a regular Holy Communion service on Tuesday mornings at 8:00 am in the Prayer Room. It was a bit tricky organising myself to be there on time especially as it is the same morning on which the Grumpy Old Men meet in a café close by. But I made it nicely on time despite the difficulty of the sun and the traffic.

This was the first time that I had seen the Prayer Room. It is a wonderful small space at the front of the ACCC Chapel just perfect for this service. I have not had a great deal of association with the ACCC in recent times but it is on the same site as St Mark's National Theological Centre and Library with which I have great associations going back over many years. When I started working in Canberra in 1969 I was in the Department of Immigration which was housed in one of the old wool shed buildings in Barton. St Mark's was right next door. In those days it was just the Library and it was wonderful. I remember, one day at that time it was wet and cold so at lunch time I wandered into the library. The then Librarian, the late Stan Davies had rigged up an amazing sound system around the building and that day he was blasting Handel through the system. It wasn't quite your ordinary Library but it was great.

I considered doing a ThL through St Mark's back then but life was pretty busy and I was fiddling around with  other study ideas anyway. On our return from England in 1982 I enrolled in a BD from Melbourne College of Divinity. So for the next 6 years I spent every moment I could either at St Mark's or Chifley Library at ANU which also had an outstanding collection of theological journals and books.

The ACCC Chapel was built on the site that was originally allocated for a National Cathedral along the lines of the Washington National Cathedral. That is a great building both on the outside:

And on the inside:

However, this was never going to be possible in the Australian Anglican context for lots of reasons so eventually an ecumenical centre for engagement with the community was devised and the Chapel where this service was held is central.

The service was a simple reflective Eucharist in the company of 4 others all of them long-time friends. It was just what I needed to start the day.

Monday in Holy Week

I was on my way to St Paul's Manuka for Holy Communion on the evening of the Monday in Holy Week when the thought suddenly hit me that I could write a bit about what I am up to this week. I haven't written a blog for a long time but now is the right time.

My first  service at St Paul's was on Good Friday 1967. It was in the days when St Paul's Choir was about the best in Australia. I had travelled down from Armidale with a group of friends who were attending a conference. It was about a 15 hour trip and I arrived a little tired and dishevelled. That didn't matter because of the person that I was visiting and together we went to this amazing service. I heard, for the first time the Passion of St John sung by this outstanding choir. It was an unforgettable experience.

For 9 months in 1982 we lived in London and most weeks went to St Mary-at-Finchley. This is where my journey towards ordination really began. St Mary's dates back to 1329. Until then, for some time we had been worshipping in a school hall. On our return to Canberra we decided to start attending St Paul's. The choir was still of a high standard and eventually all the children and I found our way into it. In 1985 I became the Parish's only Lay Reader. I officiated and preached at Evensong regularly as well as being the liturgical deacon and sub-deacon.

After my ordination in 1989 I spent the first of my two years as a Deacon at St Paul's. There are so many stories about my time as a Lay Reader and Deacon at St Paul's. It really was a remarkable journey for me among a community that was incredibly supportive.

At the end of that first year I moved on to All Soul's Chapman where I spent my second year as a Deacon and then was ordained as a Priest. Since then I have not been part of the life of St Paul's though I have done a few services there from time to time. Tonight's was the first service that I had attended just as a member of the congregation in a very long time. It was outstanding! The atmosphere was just right, added to I think by the collapse of a chair in the middle of the service! It just showed that nothing on earth is ever perfect. There was a really good and appropriate sermon - I particularly liked the story about the dying man and the chocolate chip biscuits!  (Don't ask me ask Archdeacon Brian).

Altogether an outstanding start to my Holy Week journey. I will keep you posted.