The Waikato Cathedral of St Peter, 100th Patronal Festival.

June 19th, 2016.

Acts 12:1-11
Matt. 16.13-19

On Thursday of this week, I did something that I didn’t ever think I would do: I took the wheel of a Fonterra milk-tanker.  Before we all get carried away, I didn’t actually go anywhere!  The milk-tanker was in the Fonterra marquee at Fieldays.  I had a long conversation with the man on duty and found out some fascinating things.  Did you know that milk-tankers each travel on average 700km a day? That’s  quite a lot.  But I was most intrigued to hear that when a driver gets takes the wheel, they don’t know where they are going.  Their journey for the day is programmed into a GPS inside the cabin, and they follow it.  

I wonder how many of us start the day wondering where we are going?  I wonder how many of us at the end of day and look back with surprise?  Whether it be a conversation, a person met, an unexpected encounter; good news, bad news?  I suspect it was a bit like that for the disciples.

Given our own time zone, it was well into our Sunday last week when the horrifying news came through about the mass shooting in Orlando.  As I sat in the comfort and safety of my home checking the news mid-afternoon, I stared at my phone screen in disbelief.  The problem is that we are becoming so used to shootings, we are desensitised to their horror.  Which is possibly how I felt over the next few days.  That was until the British MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered on Wednesday.  

This time I woke up to the news on our Thursday morning, and I wept.  A woman, just a year younger than me, by all accounts a courageous and compassionate campaigner for social justice, an advocate for the last, lost and least, wife, mother of two young children, dead, just like that.  With every fibre of my being I shouted at God: why?

It’s the age-old question isn’t it?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  And I don’t have the answers.  In fact I think the best response is to stand in silent solidarity proclaiming in our hearts that there is a better way; that violence and evil have no place in a world of beauty and love.  I suspect that clergy the world over are today in their Sunday sermons trying to make sense of that which makes no sense.  So I suppose I confess to a good deal of inadequacy at this point.  

Our reading from Acts begins, ‘About that time King Herod laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church.’  James was killed, and Peter thrown into prison; but Peter gets out, because an angel helps him.  It’s interesting that Peter is told to fasten his belt and put on his sandals.  This is a prison break with some style, but the result is for Peter at least a renewed sense of his vocation; perhaps he thought back to Jesus’ words from our Gospel: ‘You are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my Church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.  I will give you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heave, and whatever you loose on earth, will be loosed in heaven.’  

But before we get distracted by images of fluffy clouds, and Peter standing at the Pearly gates, let’s remember that Jesus was talking about a new community that Peter would help to build, a community that certainly wasn’t perfect, a community that was made up of the least likely people, a community founded on love of neighbour, and even love of enemy.  There’s no denying it: the call upon our lives as Christians asks us to pray for the persecutors and to forgive those who perpetrate evil.  That is a really hard thing to do, but I suggest at least for now, that we cannot do that before we acknowledge that evil is real and hatred is real, and violence and death are real.  If you have stared into the face of evil then how much more must we recognise that love is a far more powerful force?

Questions of identity are important on the day of a patronal festival.  It’s significant that Matthew, arguably the most Jewish of the Gospel writers, adds the name ‘Jeremiah’ to the list of prophets whom Jesus is said to emulate.  The prophets of course stood up and spoke God’s word fearlessly against wicked and rebellious Kings.  Jesus, likewise, spoke God’s word against evil and injustice.   And a few verses later we have the first mention of the word ‘church’ – it is this new community, formed as the Body of Christ who are to be the fearless voice of God against violence, despair, persecution and injustice.  And I wonder then how well the church measures up to that responsibility?  

Perhaps the comment would be ‘good in parts, but could do better…’?

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about identity this past week, not least because at the end of this week, I will cast my vote about whether or not the UK should leave Europe.  It’s an odd sort of question to be asking when I am located so far away, and when my own perspective on the issue has been inevitably textured by things I have learnt here.  We live in a global context, a small world; at one touch of the screen we can be overwhelmed by tragedy on a distant shore.  But we are also called to be people of hope, and maybe just maybe to hold onto hope is the most important attribute we can display here in this Cathedral Church in its 100th year on this Pukerangiora Hill in Kirikiriroa.  

Faithful women and men have climbed this hill for hundreds of years, before this building came into being; God has been at work in this place for longer than any of us can imagine, and God will continue to work in this place long after our mortal journeys are completed.

Philip Larkin, a gritty north of England poet who spent a lot of his life in the city of Hull, almost a straight-line an hour east from Jo Cox’s parliamentary constituency of Batley.  One of his poems is called ‘The Mower’:

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed.  It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably.  Burial was no help.

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Amen.