Colourful Dreamer

This sermon can be listened to here                    Gate Pa – Year C  2nd Sunday in Lent, 2022 Readings: Psalm                            Psalm: 27                                                First Reading                Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18                      Second Reading           Phil 3:17-4:1                           ...

What an interesting collection of readings this week. Take Genesis 15: 1-12, 17-18. A gruesome story that makes little sense to us. It is easy to get hung up on the brutality of the sacrifice and miss the significance of the moment. This is an ancient way of promising that what is being promised will happen, or the person promising will end up like the animals whose remains they walk between. Or in other words, God will be faithful to this covenant or God will die. God makes this promise even while Abram sleeps. God’s faithfulness does not depend on our response. God just is faithful. And God fulfilled the promise. Abram and Sarai did have a son, and through that son they had many descendants. God remained faithful to those many descendants. They were blessed, so that they might be a blessing for all creation and all life. For the gospel writers and for Paul, Jesus is how God fulfils the ultimate promise of this moment. Humanity would be restored, and creation renewed. Through Jesus,...

  It is hard to know what to write this week. Life has suddenly become very uncertain. It is hard to even know what church will look like. And in all that I am supposed to come up with a theme. Maybe the theme this week is learning to live in God in all this uncertainty. And we have two sources of help in this week’s readings. The first (Matthew 15: 10-28), is the Canaanite woman who out taught the Teacher. This story looks back to when Jesus taught about the abundance of God in feeding the 5000+. It begins with Jesus teaching his disciples that the important thing about actions is not whether we are obeying external rules for a perceived reward, but what they reveal about our hearts. Who we are is more important than what we do. And then Jesus goes into Gentile-land where he is confronted by one of the locals whose heart is full of faith. She is not a Jew. She does not behave properly. She is unclean. But she knows who Jesus is and needs his help. Out of her heart filled with pe...

It begins with Abram and Sarai being invited to leave everything behind. Everything that shaped who they were and their place in the world. Their maunga, awa, marae, iwi and hapu. They were invited to become the people through whom God would restore humanity and all creation to all that God had originally intended. Nicodemus is an inheritor of this identity. But over the centuries his people had forgotten, and it had become all about maintaining your place in the tribe, your privilege and power. Jesus invites Nicodemus to leave everything behind and join the people through whom God is restoring humanity and all creation to all that God intended. We too are inheritors of this identity. And like Nicodemus we too have forgotten who we are as people of God. We too are invited to leave our old ways of understanding ourselves and join the people through whom God is restoring humanity and all creation to all that God intended. This Lent, may we be granted the wisdom to change our prio...