Rev Hugh Perry

Readings

Proverbs 22: 1-2, 8-9, 22-23

This is a selection of short proverbs encouraging generosity to the poor and the quest for justice rather than wealth.  Maurice Andrew places this section as straddling the second and third collection of proverbs. The second section is short sentences often using antithetic parallelism (lines of similar length and rhythm but opposite meaning).  The third selection may have been used to educate young men entering service in the royal court and, unlike the third person style of the second section, the style now moves to a direct address to a second person.

Maurice notes that robbing the poor because they are poor sounds very like revising the finances of a country by reducing the benefits of those with the fewest resources. ^[1]

Proverbs are exactly that, short wisdom sayings that do not fully explore issues as a story might so are therefore dangerous as proof texts.  They are wisdom of a community and can warn us of recurring injustice and stupidity.

Mark7: 24-37

This reading from Mark contains an exorcism by remote control and a healing.  The woman with the possessed daughter, not only is a foreigner but, intrudes on Jesus’ private space.  Jesus’ response is not only a very human response but a cultural response.  He was interrupted in his ‘time off’ and Jews did not associate with foreigners.  In contrast to the Jesus of John’s Gospel we see in this episode a very human Jesus growing in divine awareness through his dialogue with the woman.  This is the not the only story in the gospels where Jesus changes his mind and it is a woman who led him to do so. ^[2]

In the next story Jesus heals by physical means, putting his finger in the man’s ear, spitting and touching the man’s tongue.  This, according to Hooker, was typical of healers of the time and place so Jesus is practicing as a regular healer of the day.^[3]

What both Borg and Hooker point out is the significance of the summary in verse 37 ‘he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’  This is typical of Mark’s irony where those who should be speaking and listening like the Pharisees don’t but the physically deaf and mute do.

Sermon

This morning, we read from the book of proverbs which, along with Job, Ecclesiastes, and the wisdom psalms. is considered part of the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible.  One of the recent lectionary readings was about God granting wisdom to Solomon.  But acquiring wisdom is incremental and is not usually uploaded from the cloud.  It comes in programme updates over time.  Likewise, communities acquire wisdom over generations.

Such wisdom is often recorded as wisdom literature but, as the rest of the Hebrew Bible tells us, the stories of a people’s journey both record wisdom and tell how the wisdom was acquired.

Our Gospel reading contains an incident where Jesus acquires an incremental dose of wisdom from a foreign woman and another instance where, through Jesus, the blind and the deaf can see and hear but the rich and powerful are both deaf and blind. A situation not unknown in our world.

The meeting with the woman of Syrophoenician origin appears to be one of the incremental spring times of Jesus’ journey to divinity and September is officially the beginning of our Spring and a reminder of the call for new beginnings in our own life.

There is in fact a growing green consciousness in our community that, in turn, leads to concern about the damage caused by introduced species.

Phoenix palms used to be very popular in people’s front lawns.  So much so that people would come with cranes in the middle of the night and steal them.  However, it has been discovered that they thrive in the northern forests and crowd out the native nikau palms. So now it is illegal to sell them, and people need to pay to have them removed.

The stoats and weasels people imported to control the rabbits found it easier to kill native birds, and I recently spotted a neighbour’s cat leap up, over a metre, straight off the ground at our bird feeder.  It landed straight back on its feet and ran off with tail feathers protruding from its mouth.  Hamish Kerr might have a gold medal for high jumping, but he has nothing on the grey ghost of a cat from two houses down the street.

Thinking about these struggles with our environment I am reminded of a biologist friend who told me that the most invasive species in Aotearoa is people.  Wave upon wave of people have colonised these pristine islands and each group have done their share of damage.  Each and every fresh set of colonisers have changed the landscape to survive, and each change has had unfortunate side effects.

What my friend didn’t mention was that each group felt, and continues to feel, more entitled, safer and more self-righteous amongst people they see as their own people, rather than those who came before them. Continue reading Sunday 8th September →