This week you are spared from reading another one of my sermons, but there is something my sermon prep for Sunday morning brought up which is quite interesting relative to last week's posting of my "Nicaea" sermon.
Comments to that sermon challenged the notion that everything about Trinitarian development in theology are good; and one comment highlighted the ground the church is yet to take up in becoming a truly "eco-church" or the church which connects with a forefront of younger generations' minds and hearts: saving our planet while we can. Thank you!
This afternoon as I write, President Trump has announced the US B-2 bombers have bombed targets in Iran, including the Fordow or "main" site re uraniuam enrichment. People seeking food in Gaza are still being killed. Iranian rockets fall on Israel, Israeli missiles fall on Iran. Ukraine remains a drone killing field. As we in Aotearoa New Zealand celebrate Matariki this weekend, we are painfully reminded that celebrating the return of Matariki - the return of some forms of light to lead us forward after the shortest day - is taking place in a world of darkness and pain.
The gospel reading for this morning, if celebrating Ordinary 12 rather than Te Pouhere [Constitution] Sunday, has been Luke 8:26-39, in its own particular way a story of darkness giving way to light, the man filled with demons becoming the man who is clothed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, in his right mind and eager to be with Jesus - a model disciple.
At the end of the story is this interesting anticipation of Trinitarian development, of the church wrestling with "who" Jesus is in relation to God and "who" God is in relation to Jesus ... and it is not from John's Gospel:
But Jesus sent him away, saying: "Go back home and tell what God has done for you."
The man went through the town, telling what Jesus had done for him.
Luke introduces us to the possibility of thinking that God is met in Jesus, in his teaching and in his powerful actions; and that when we meet Jesus, we encounter God.
1 comment:
Progressive Aotearoans have always opposed nuclear power, so the decommissioning of several reactors is cause for great joy, isn't it?
As a Neanderthal who has always believed in nuclear energy, I have long wondered where the electricity for a nation of 7 or 10 millions is going to come from. Burning coal? Or is the Green future to be cold in the dark?
As for "Matariki' (one of my favourite childhood memories in the deep south when we huddled together around the fire and told stories about the gods fighting and throwing eyes into the sky), I suggest a sermon on one of the several biblical texts to mention the Pleiades, e.g.Job 9.9, "He created the Bear (= the Plough or Big Dipper), Orion and the Pleiades and the constellations of the south.'. If the biblical teaching that the stars are, well, stars (God's creations according to Genesis 1, and not gods and powers that control our lives as astrologists ancient and modern believe) isn't good news, then maybe a return to nature religion and polytheism would help some. This was tried in northern Europe in the 1930s and it has many progressive advocates around the world - although I have never met anyone who actually believes that 'smoking ceremonies', invocations of Polynesian or Native American spirits etc actually achieve anything. But at least someone gets paid to do it.. Modern plolitically inspired neo-paganism is much too timid and sanitised and lacks the full-blooded enthusiasm of the Mayans and the Chemosh-loving Moabites (the kind that Ruth so ungratefullly turned her back on). Moloch is pretty popular today, though.
(The Pleiades or Seven Sisters were of course well known in ancient Greek mythology, anout 2000 years before New Zealand was first settled in the 13th century, as well as featuring in many other mythologies across the world. Since "pleiein' means to sail, the constellation was probably used for navigation.)
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
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