Learning to Lament

It's better than being six foot above contradiction.

I've been in some of those portraits as well.

Can you hear me down the back?

Up hi.

I'm struggling a bit in my body right this moment.

So I said to my daughter, Grace, and adrenaline will get me through this morning.

And I at a last minute I absented myself from invitation from Levi, and I didn't want to do it again this morning.

So kitiatwa.

Glory to God.

Peace on earth and goodwill to you all.

So the earth's the Lord's and everything in it belongs to him.

The heavens belong to God.

But the earth he has given to us.

Nareda kahirato kinga manafenu kikorne.

Namatawaka.

Tiarawa.

Matatua.

Takitimu waku.

Kotena tamahi kiarato kiakoto.

Ki natarangi natirangi nui.

Mangatipuking manwataha hoki.

Kotena tamihiarato kiakoto.

King a mata waka.

Iwaganuya tato, so the other wakka amongst us.

Kotena tamihi, uh kiyakoto.

Kahuriatuki na tangata tititi hooki.

So my people of the treaty, I look to you and acknowledge you this morning.

Manga howefa.

Those of you from the four winds, from overseas perhaps Kotenatomihi uh koto.

Kiyakwe and Nadia.

Hewa poti.

Hewa poti etan aira.

Sakahuriyatu kihakwe.

Hemiyatu kiyakwe.

Kitofana hookie.

So I'm just acknowledging Nadia in the midst of her her family's um pain and bereavement at at this time with the loss of her mum.

Father, we're just really grateful um for this gathering today.

No my hari my fakato my tonu kiwanguyatata.

So just continue amongst us, I ask.

Amen.

So I brought my extended family with me this morning, this afternoon.

It's my wife Jenny from Saskatchewan, late of uh Pangaro for the last 40 odd years, and my daughter and my Moko, Naomi out the back, and Akaripa, and Rokura, who was three months ago born in the back of the car on the way to the Bethlehem Birth uh birthing centre.

So uh just such a treasure for us, changed our lives.

Uh Kia te rangate moto pohri kyo, uh kia kyamate.

Thank you for your invitation.

And um I know so many of you here actually, as I look out, it's yeah.

Pi, it's awesome.

So, you know, it just makes me feel uh being a part and being a part of home and being in here.

And uh I appreciate all the struggles that you're having and wanting to be relevant and and all of that.

Um sometimes I think we overcomplicate things, yeah.

Uh you know the the Eucharist um it's been done for millennia and it's a po.

It's just it's a poe, it's a mystery.

Uh and we just need to make it a poe and and let it speak to us, you know, in a way that's that speaks to us here, but we're not reinventing the wheel.

Yeah, so yeah, there's a lot to talk about there.

I know exactly your struggles.

So um Bilama Vision or Lord Alamus to Minister Waking and sleeping.

So I was raised in the Tron and um so uh some people say just get over it, but I can't.

But you know, down the road from where I was born, there was one of my favorite um Porapiti, one of my favorite prophets, King Itafia.

Of course, I never knew anything about Tafia when I was growing up.

But Tafiao, he said this particular tongue and it's written on it rangaredi on uh on a po there.

Um Kita Kore tefakati kitenga kangaro te iwi.

Kitakore tefakakitenga, kangaro te'iwi.

Without a vision the people perish.

Hoyan no, not many people probably know in Waikato Tainui that he was borrowing this from Solomon.

But it's a verse or a piece of wisdom of Fakatoki, if you like, that I think is often misunderstood and misquoted.

And uh let me just unpick it a little bit.

It's often used as a it's often used as an exhortation to get a vision for your life.

You know, get a vision and and and and you'll do fine.

But actually, it's much deeper than that.

The way to find out its meaning you turn to 1 Samuel 3.1, and you'll see there that um the boy Samuel ministered before the Lord under Eli.

And in those days the word of the Lord was rare.

There were not many prophetic visions, hazon.

It's the same word hazon that was used uh in that uh Proverbs 29, 18 that Tafiel quotes from.

So what uh Tafel rightly is saying, uh I'm not sure how much Tafiel understood it, he certainly lived it, but he's saying without prophetic vision, so that's vision that comes down out of heaven, it's not manufactured you know from our own get a life together, it's actually something that is a gift to us.

And it's saying that actually, people, all people need this word coming down out of heaven.

And I love your atmosphere here.

Uh it's conducive uh to exercise and soften your hearts and and and your meditation that that you are geared towards that listening.

The church is God's primary prophetic presence in the land.

And Joshua Heschel, who was uh probably one of the most authoritative people on the Hebrew prophets, said it's not what man does with his concern, but it's rather what he does with God's concern.

So really it's not about us, it's about him and it's about how we interpret and receive his concern and what we do with it.

So, if the church is the primary prophetic custodian, as it were, and I need to put a very strong uh addendum here.

The church is not the only means by which God speaks on the earth.

If you look at um Hebrews 1, you'll see there that God says he's spoken and he speaks in a multiple of ways.

And that's something for us as a church that we probably need to get a handle on, because we think that only Waidu A Tapu only speaks, you know, like in these four worlds, but creation speaks every day.

Day after day, Paul's four speech.

There's prophetic voices all up and down the land, because God will use a donkey, donkey if he needs to to get his voice through.

But essentially, his best plan is for us, ordinary people like you and me, that we just simply hear God and and speak it out, or we hear God even better and just do it.

That's prophetic interpretation.

So, if we're the primary prophetic kaitiaki, what's our main job?

Our main job really is simply to hear and discern the voice of the Lord.

Easier said than done, remembering, as I said, that God speaks in a variety of ways.

Let me give you one example in my own personal life, and there's been many.

I enrolled in a in a thing called Tatohuk Baitahi before some of you were born.

Uh it's a la it's an immersion um language course at the University of Waikato.

There's only a few of us in there, quite a few from Montacana actually were on that course.

And I was the only Parkha, so this was around, I don't know, maybe 2003, something like that.

I was the only parkhour in that, and uh so every time at lunch we'd go into a room and we'd have our have our kai together.

And I think um what happened was that uh they forgot that I was in the room after a while.

Right.

And so what I began to hear was to do stuff, stuff that was different than what I hear represented by in those days the public representation of Māori.

You know, like they're good blokes, you know, they play men guitar, got an awesome sense of humor.

Etumia to me.

And I began to hear what I call the mumai that's in the land.

The pain, the hurt.

And these are from guys who were just crane drivers or built, you know, builders.

They weren't, they weren't what you call, you know, they weren't uh the Hadaweta family, these were just ordinary guys from Matakana or or wherever talking about this deep, deep pain.

And fortunately or unfortunately for my wife, um, I heard that pain and it sort of changed my life in terms of the structure of my study, uh, consequently in the research that I did.

One of the que of that uh time said to me, uh Nahuya Dixon, some of you might know, she said, You need to do some research on what your missionaries did to my people.

So, oh you know, that's another story.

So down that long track.

So, but I believe it was the voice of God.

Like you could go to a movie and and and with your spirit tuned, you hear, you hear something, right?

Because you know his voice.

So we live and we proclaim the message, and if we need to use words, as uh CC Francis Lavisisi said.

So big question at the moment is um, you know, we meant to preach the gospel to Rongopai, and my big question is what is to Rongapai?

I don't know that we've actually at the moment really got a full handle on the extent and the depth and the and the beauty and the power and of the cosmological reach.

Excuse me, using a big word, but the the the the the redemptive reach of all of creation for the gospel.

So we're asking the Lord, I am and a few others, um, you know, what's the Lord saying at the moment?

So a good friend of mine, Jay Rucher and I, we were invited to to be with some bishops down in uh Anglican bishops down in Wellington, and they gave the raco to us and said, Okay, you know, what's the Lord saying?

Fortunately, Jay's pretty bold and he just picked it up, the raco up straight away, and I was happy just to sit in behind him.

Actually, and he said, you know, he said, I think it's a time of lament.

And he says, but are we really lamenting?

Something dropped into my into my spirit when I heard that, and I said to myself, self-conversation, yeah, actually, so many of us, we're not lamenting, we're opining.

That means we just have opinions.

Look, there's a responsibility I'm gonna put on us today that's saying, just look, it's fine, you know, you you have your mates and you have a have some opinions about, you know, who's gonna win the game tonight or whatever, I don't know.

But you know, there's actually a higher calling.

Jesus said he only did that which he saw the Father doing.

So there's a there's a place for the church and its prophetic presence to be representing the voice of God in the land.

And of course, not only the voice of God, but the way that we live our lives in the land.

Romans 8 22 says, we know that the whole of creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

What does that mean in short?

It means that all of creation is lamenting.

All of creation is broken and is involved in a tangy right now for the sons of God to be revealed.

So that's another corridor, but it's for something out there.

So the present state is a state of tangi for creation.

Ecclesiastes 3 says there is a time and a purpose and a season for everything under heaven.

And I know that you guys are grappling with some stuff because you want to be relevant and you want to you etc.

It's not a quick fix.

There's some real deep major adjustments that we need to make.

Let me maybe respond to that.

So but first of all, what is a lament?

Maybe that's not a word that some of you are very familiar with.

It's just really it's a posture of of sadness and it's a posture of grieving.

So we have this, it is a strange mixture of things because we can actually have a posture of grieving and a posture of joy at the same time.

Now that's all complicated, and it'd be nice to talk some more about that, but I wanting to bring out this the reality that that the base reality of the present creation is one of lament.

And that's something for us to be able to grapple with and get a hold of and understand it.

And if we I think if we if we are able to receive that as a reality or as a po, and I I often use this po, like you know, as I said before, the Eucharist is one of our Po.

It changes the way, particularly of our instant quick fix, church growth, uh cover over lightly, whatever, whatever, whatever.

But it's actually what Jesus went to the cross for.

And it has a present talking, it's a present saying.

So what am I lamenting for?

Okay, rubber meets the road.

Mr.

Smart Pants, what are you lamenting for?

Well, I learned to lament when our 18-year-old son was killed at an avalanche in the South Island.

I learned to sit on a mourning bench.

So I've been lamenting now for 20 odd years about that.

And Jeannie responded to a young man who asked, What does heaven look like to you?

And she said, I want to see when I see my son, that's what heaven looks like.

Even when you see your mum, that's a revelation.

That's a manifestation of the manifestation of the kingdom that's come and resides amongst us.

This temple, this holy temple of God.

So I learned something about it.

I lament for this broken creation, this Orokohanga.

The lament for the floods and the earthquakes and the greed and the rapes, all of these things, the present realities.

This is this is something that God wants us to join with him in lamenting.

The human condition, as I mentioned before, the wars and the rapes, the human condition.

Like there's plenty to be encouraged about, but let's not fool ourselves.

That is not to be ignored.

And it was enough that our God would come and take on the very likeness of humanity and became in the likeness of a servant and offered himself freely up to the cross.

What else do I lament for?

I actually probably my main lament at the moment is the condition of my own soul.

The selfish condition of my own soul.

I went to a a women's conference some years ago and I I was dominated by women, wasn't women, women.

This wonderful uh uh lady got up one time and she was working with the um prostitutes and um and child, you know, what do you call them, sex slaves in Thailand.

And she got up and she made a statement, she said, when I stop thinking about myself for a minute, I think about these poor in Thailand, and that has stuck with me.

So, EPA, I'm guilty of that.

And I'm learning to acknowledge that and to live with you around that and as a reality.

Van Morrison, one of my favorite singers, said on my voice is back, I won't sing it to you, but when will I ever learn to live in God?

When will I ever learn?

He gave me everything that I need and more.

When will I ever learn?

Peter talks about the same thing.

He's given us everything we need for life and godliness.

But my life, as you asked my wife, is far from that.

Now I'm not, look, you know, don't overthink it.

I'm, you know.

I don't think I'm doing the great big naughty ones, but I'm doing a lot of little ones.

And I'm besotted with myself in that, and I say, Lord, deliver me from evil.

I'm lamenting the complex relations in my extended family.

And why we can't just constantly live in a state of peace and graciousness and love and honoring to one another.

The struggle that continues in that that my Mokapuna and all that would would would would be able to see this direct revelation of Agape that comes down out of heaven daily in my extended fano.

So I lament.

I lament for the condition of the church in this land.

I know you didn't expect this on a nice Sunday afternoon, but I lament for the church in this land.

I lament for our political leadership because we get the leaders that we deserve.

And I belament the betrayal of the covanata or the motu.

I lament the betrayal of the covenant of Tatidati or Waitangi that's in the land.

This inconvenient truth that the church needs to lament in its complicity in its betrayal, both historically and presently.

And that's for a talk for another day.

Now you see, lament actually is a lifestyle.

It's the unavoidable characteristic.

I've written this down.

The unavoidable characteristic of an obedient lifestyle in a broken world.

My heart, and I'm sure your heart, is desirous of being pliable in the hands of God and obedient to him.

But we come up against with that desire the brokenness of the world.

If you go along with it, the broken world, you won't be doing too much lament, you just eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow die.

But your desire to to be obedient and to follow Christ will hit you smack bang into the basic ethos of a broken world.

So it's unavoidable.

I cry daily almost, Father, if it were possible, take this cup from me.

But not my will, but thy will be done.

I call Jesus' cry and Gethsemane the paradigmic lament.

That's the lifestyle.

That's the lifestyle of a disciple, if it were possible, because there is some possibility, some stuff gets taken away, you know, but if that's the way that you've called me to walk, then let that be done.

So we have this honest cry to God daily.

I used to be someone I was talking to this young man about, I milked cows for 16 years, and for 16 years almost I cried out to God as the urine and the poo was coming down on top of me.

How long, Lord?

And if it had been up to me, I would have got out of it much quicker, but fortunately the patience and the wisdom of my wife kept me in the cow shed just long enough that the Lord provided.

How long, Lord?

That's the cry of the psalmist.

Submission and obedience.

It's an uncomfortable truth because we want the instant.

Now we're going to finish with a psalm, and I do need to say that I've only you can't tell the full truth about everything.

And I wanted to start at the beginning to say you can walk, a walk of lament, and a walk of joy at the same time.

So can you take that on board?

I've talked about lament today, but joy is not mutually exclusive.

You can imagine what Paul the apostle was in the in the prison in Philippi.

You know, there was a lament going on in his heart for being in that place, but also there was a joy that he could daily fuck a moi metikiti atua irungawa.

Nah.

So can you be with me in that?

That I'm not just wanting to put on you a condemnatory lifestyle of you know sadness.

Maybe if you're a Jeremiah though, then you know that might be you might not want to preclude what God could say to you.

Can we have up on the board have or have we got it up?

So we're gonna do a liturgical thing this this morning to finish up, and this is it's the song of lament, because some of you might not think that you even know what you know how to do lament, but you do because you're you're familiar with this with the scriptures.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna read out the first line, and uh can you see that there's an emboldened line that I want you guys as a congregation.

Um you good with that?

Okay.

Psalm 130.

Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord.

Let your ears be attentive.

If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, but with you there is forgiveness.

I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits.

I wait for the Lord.

Israel, Alistair, church, put your hope in the Lord.

He himself will redeem and rescue the world.

Nordita, ten lakoto, ten lakoto, ten lakoto katwa.