Dancing with cadavers?

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, JANUARY 29th 2012
(FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)

Readings: 

Deuteronomy 18.15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8.1-13
Mark 1.21-28

A church community that jettisons the scriptures of faith as the primary reference point for all that it does and says in the service of God is a church that has ceased to be church. Admittedly, in the context of Sunday liturgy, the cerebral action of breaking opening the word must be held in equal tension with the non-cerebral action of celebrating sacrament – to jettison either is to risk the integrity of faith. Donald Coggan made this wonderfully clear by referring to ‘the sacrament of the Word’: both word and sacrament, scripture and liturgy are ‘Word’, are sacred text: we dare not jettison either. So how do we deal with a text – indeed why should we bother with a text – in which Paul appears to be blithering on about some first century issue specific to an ancient Mediterranean city? Do we or should we really care whether we eat meat sacrificed to idols? It is hardly an issue we face each day, or even ever face, surely, except perhaps if we eat at a Hare Krishna restaurant.

There has been since the fourth century an approach to scripture called midrash. Midrash should never be a means to recreate scripture or faith in our own image, knocking off its hard edges to dumb it down or to make it palatable. Some well-known Christian quasi- or pseudo-scholars and quasi- or pseudo-apologists have made a name (and a mint) for themselves by specialising in this kind of charlatanism. No: scripture stands judgement over us, not vice versa (though of course we will disagree in the interpretation of individual texts, particularly when we come to those thorny questions of human sexuality. That is why we need the clumsy, frustrating collective processes of synodical government to frustrate yet guide our growth in God). Basically though, midrash has much to offer, especially when we find Paul addressing questions of Corinthian diet. It gives us an opportunity to engage in sacred play with the text, where the emphasis is equally shared between ‘play’ and ‘sacred’, not skewed too far towards either pole.

So what do we do when Paul addresses a question from first century Corinth of seemingly little application to us? Some of the Corinthian Christians had written to Paul asking, inter alia, about the practice of eating food previously sacrificed to idols in various temples. We might too easily utter a very 21st Century ‘meh’ here: so what? But as rich and poor Christians gathered these were issues of justice: the poor could barely afford meat at the best of times, and any meat at all was a privilege. In a ‘bring your own’ context they were being shamed: look at the meat I am providing. Yours sucks.

It is likely the issue put to Paul was more complex still. If the Thessalonian context is anything to go by, some of the braver Christians were prepared to die for the practice of their beliefs. In Thessalonica they were probably barred from trading unless they swore allegiance to the gods of Rome. Thessalonica was different to Corinth, but Paul was impressed by the Thessalonians’ bravery: they would die rather than eat second-hand, idol-offered food. By contrast the Corinthians – or some of them – were sneering: look, we are in Christ, we can do anything we like. Earlier he has addressed the question of a believer so convinced of his own perfection-in-Christ that he has outdone even secular Corinthian moral laxity by shacking up with his mother-in-law. Timid believers were scandalised: is this the way of the cross, to do anything we like when we like, to be even more decadent than the idol-worshippers? Can we who are ‘in Christ’ do anything we like? Paul’s response is unambiguous: ‘by no means’. The behaviour of some predators within the Christian communities suggests that some things never change, and much community wrath was rightly poured on the Church and its leadership as our dirty washing was aired.

The church of the 21st century – and this is no new thing – has found another sophisticated way to eat meat offered to idols. There is amongst some circles of scholarship and other church leadership an attitude aired that sounds something like ‘of course if some people want to believe in a literal resurrection (or virgin birth, or second coming, whatever) then that’s fine, but we know better’. Every faction of the contemporary Christian community has its slogans: ‘if you don’t speak in tongues you are not a Christian’, ‘if you are gay you can’t be a Christian’, ‘if you don’t experience “blessed assurance” of salvation you are not a Christian’, ‘if you ordain women’ you are not a Christian, ‘if you don’t wear designer labels you are not a Christian’, if you breastfeed or have a noisy child in church then you are not a Christian’ … or, paradoxically, ‘if you believe that resurrection stuff then you aren’t a Christian’. The message is often subliminal, but it is the same message: ‘if you don’t eat meat offered to idols then you are clearly not confident enough in faith to be numbered with us’.

For that was what was happening. It was insulting at two levels: the rich who could afford untainted meat were cheapening themselves and their responsibilities as Christian hosts by offering only second-hand meat to the lower-class Corinthian Christians. At the same time the faithful but poorer Christians, like the Thessalonian Christians who Paul so admired, were refusing to be compromised by eating the second-hand meat. ‘Poor simple folk – they don’t really understand’ – the same attitude expressed by some who sneer at those who have a literal understanding of the resurrection (as I do). They were shouldered to the outer, there left to sink or swim.

Do these questions apply to us? Some years ago I attended a conference of the Society of Biblical Literature. I was staggered at the contrast between scholars who demonstrated their academic prowess by effectively sneering at and over the texts of faith, and those who saw these sacred texts as wells of faith and knowledge directing believers deeper into the heart of the triune God. Roman Catholic Scholar Luke Timothy Johnson speaks of the difference between dissecting a cadaver and dancing with his beloved.* Each involves a body. The choice is ours: do we worship and behave in order to build up, or to tear down the body of Christ?

Do we dissect cadavers or do we dance with our beloved? This applies not only in preaching and study but in the whole of our faith practice: do we generate a practiced air of superiority that knows it all, has no need of explanations, and scorns those less advanced than ourselves, or do we see the face of Christ in the most tentative of faith-explorers? Do we admire our own sophistication and security, building temples to our own arrogance, or do we know that we too fall and always will fall far short of the glory of God, and need the infusion of God’s grace each step of our journey. Paul knew only too well his weakness – and left the arrogant Corinthian strong to stew in their own spiritual juices - or dancing with their dessicated cadavers of spiritual arrogance. That is why he goes on famously to say he become all things to all people: ‘To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some’.

TLBWY

* Tippet, Krista. On Being. "Luke Timothy Johnson and Bernadette Brooten: Deciphering the Da Vinci Code." June 1, 2006. Transcript online at http://www.onbeing.org/program/deceiphering-da-vinci-code/transcript/821

Voices in the night?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS, NORTHERN TERRITORY
SUNDAY, JANUARY 15th 2012
(SECOND SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)

Readings:     1 Samuel 3.1-10
                      Psalm 139.1-5, 12-18
                     1 Corinthians 6.12-20
                      John 1.43-51

Amongst the caricatures levelled at Christianity is one commonly directed at the experience of ‘call’. By and large this is because we take a literal approach to passages in our scripture that were originally designed to be a stylised narrative, a representative story intended to describe in general terms the ways in which God might touch and direct fallible human lives. In most of what might be the ‘call narratives’ there is an unexpected and often unmerited approach from God, a demurrer from the one whose life is about to be changed, and a final reluctant acceptance of the task ahead. It might be described as an ‘Oi … Who me? Yes you ... Couldn't be me … Yes you … Oh, okay then, with your help’ story. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies when it comes to caricatures of our faith and practice, but both the caricaturists and those who use the terminology blindly are misusing the scriptures.

Which is not to say God might not conceivably reveal divine purpose and divine will through what we might call supernatural means: that’s up to God, but it is far from my experience, and should be treated as a rare exception, not a rule. On the whole we are better off looking for the signs and directives of God in the overall patterns of our lives, rather than in the unnecessary celestial dramatics. The expectation that we will experience voices in the night like that of the Old Testament prophetic call scenes is an expectation that fuels the conversation of many in our psych wards: there are enough mental illness issues in our community without our adding fuel to dangerous fires.

A call of any sort is likely to be neither more nor less than accumulated shared conversations with others within the body of Christ, discerning and ascertaining where our gifts and strengths might lead us. A person with a Dylanesque voice like a truckload of gravel or the musical ear of a newt is unlikely to be invited by God to lead the singing ministry of a church. A person who is unable to be a critical and compassionate listener, or who is devoid of people skills or public-speaking skills, is unlikely to be experiencing a call to the liturgical and pastoral ministries of priesthood. A person who is numerologically incompetent or dysnumeric like myself is unlikely to be called to the role of treasurer in the body of Christ or indeed in any other organization. God may be a God of surprises but not of idiocies.

What the ‘call narratives’ of our scriptures present is a stylized presentation of the impact of God’s working on a human life. But these are human lives attuned to the possibilities of God. This kind of a statement gives some Protestant interpreters the screaming heebies: is the grace of God dependant on human labour? No – but ‘no’ only in the context of the saving action of Christ on the Cross. The assumption that we can sit on human backsides or dance around having a frivolous time for Jesus, as is the practice in some quarters, and then expect to be useful in the purposes and plans of God is a spiritual obscenity. Each of the call narratives of Old and New Testament is the narrative of God’s approach to a person familiar and disciplined in practicing the presence of God. Each is a story of God’s extra-ordinary encounter with a person who has attuned their life to such an extent that God can lead them into new futures of service.

When Paul turns to questions of sexuality he raises the ire particularly of liberal Christianity in the twenty-first century (though I don’t think there are any even of the most libertine commentators who would condone the sorts of practices being undertaken by some of the Corinthian Christians). But in so-called ‘liberal’ circles it is as unpopular to draw a line in the sand with regards to sexual practice and morality as it is to suggest in evangelical circles that there may be many outside the community of Christ who are amongst the eternally blesséd, or in Americo-fundamentalist circles that there may be a dimension of social responsibility attached to the gospel. The fact is that there is a call to personal holiness and integrity in the call to follow Jesus, and that, while many of us may fall short, there is no room for a laissez faire approach to what we do with our male or female bodies when we are bearers of Christ. In the Corinthian context, in the Nimbin of the first century, this was particularly apparent, but it is a timeless truth: we cannot be attuned to the will and purposes of God if we are not attuned to the integrity of our own lives and our own sexual mores.

There is – of course – a call to compassionate social action, too. We cannot claim to be Christ-bearers of integrity if we close our eyes to the brutal disparities between the global rich and the global poor, or even the Australian rich and Australian poor. We cannot claim to be Christ-bearers of integrity if we close our eyes to the fact that there are obscene structures in place that ensure the richest on the earth minimize their taxes and live long while the poorest on the earth are condemned to die abysmally young without even earning enough to pay taxes. Jesus challenges us to address these issues as much as he challenges us to address the issues of our own private integrity. We must do both if we are to live lives of readiness to hear the voice of God.

For most of us the stage on which we live out our faith will be a small one. But the principle remains: do we live a life of sufficient integrity to hear the challenges and directions of the God of Samuel, Nathanael, Andrew, James and John, Mary, Peter or Paul?

TLBWY

Nice God, Wrong Place

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, JANUARY 8th 2012
(BAPTISM OF CHRIST)

Readings:  Genesis 1.1-5
                   Psalm 29
                   Acts 19.1-7
                   Mark 1.4-11

If you were to journey within your Tardis to the time when the first witnesses to the resurrection began to tell their evangel you would discover very quickly the truth of Paul’s ringing dis-endorsement. With deep feeling he describes the gospel as a ‘stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Cor. 1:23). Despite our western obsession with comfort, security, church growth and that demon ‘relevance’ – which I flagged on Christmas Day as an obscene distraction from the gospel main-game – there is no such self-absorption in the first century. The early Christians had experienced, first hand or in the words and worship of their faith-neighbours, a life changing experience: the resurrection of the one they came to call the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. At the heart of the message that had changed and was changing their life was the incomprehensible news that a crucified criminal was God, and that in his unexpected victory over death hope for all humanity was born.

If Paul described this as ‘stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ it was because it was. No Jewish person was readily going to accept the idea of a crucified Messiah. Paul’s Deuteronomy-based midrash in Galatians on cross-as-tree, on which, if a person were hanged, they would be cursed (Gal 3.13) were at one level a little tenuous. probably a shorthand version of a sermon he had preached (perhaps more than once!) during his Galatian sojourn. But there is no doubt that the naked shame and bodily impurity of a crucified criminal was not the place a Jewish person would hang out looking for a Messiah. To a Greek – that is to say any Roman Empire non-Jew – the problem was similar: gods might conceivably hang out in human form but were not subject to laws of suffering and death. 'What’s a nice God like yours doing hanging out on a cross' was a likely Jewish or Gentile response to the unattractive gospel of Jesus Christ.

The complexities of the humanity and divinity of Jesus the Christ were worked out in the era after our scriptures were collected and sealed as canon, though it is clear enough that the earliest Christians were scratching around to find words and images that conveyed their experience that this was the case: the crucified human criminal was divine. As they gathered in worship they knew that the one who the disciples had known personally was powerfully with them – released in space and even through time by the events we know as resurrection and ascension. They knew, too, that the whole of his life had meaning – including some of the events that puzzled them. There may be some of those we don’t know about – his life of love, his favourite foods, his skills or otherwise at carpentry. There are other awkward events that they do reflect on: what was a nice God doing receiving a rite of ‘baptism for the forgiveness of sins’?

Generally we refer to the sinless nature of Christ – a reference driven as much by theology as by biography. Jesus in life and death was soon identified in various senses as a sacrificial lamb, and the influential sacrificial practices of the Hebrew people demanded the purity – effectively sinlessness – of the victim. Whether Jesus did naughty things or not (and we might wonder at his lurking around in the temple for an extra day!), his transformation of human sin is such that he came to be described as sinless. Whether he did naughty things or not, whether he thought naughty thoughts or not, Christians soon saw Jesus as the means by which God entered into and redeemed sinful human nature.

The events of Jesus' self-exposure to human sin and suffering were not inconsistent with what we might dare to call the ‘history of God’. God – (if we accept that God exists, and since we’re in church here I assume most of us do) – is the God of surprises. The very act of creation, in its immeasurable timelessness, is an unnecessary and wanton act of love. God, in what we might call triune community, triune perfection, has no need to share time, space and eternity with any other being. There is a Greek word dei, which, though no doubt present in every language, is neat and tidy in Greek. We translate it with constructions like the clause ‘it was necessary that’. But nothing is necessary, nothing is binding upon God. It is not necessary for God to create an other with whom to share divininty, divine joy, divine eternity. Yet God is love, and love chooses to share.

Love makes us vulnerable. Simon and Garfunkel reminded of that in the '60s: 'if I'd never loved I never would have cried'. If we love we are likely to weep. If we love we are likely to feel moments of intense pain as well as unquantifiable joy. God does not need to weep, yet in opening the heart of God’s existence up to an other, in flinging creation across nothingness, in peopling at least one planet with fallible humans made in the divine image, God is opening the heart of God to suffering and pain. God does not need pain, but it is the risk of love to choose pain, to chhose to touch and transform the lives of others.

God does not need to suffer. Yet the God who flings stars across the empty vault of heaven will and has chosen and will always choose to suffer in order to redeem. The baptism of Christ prefigures, foreshadows the later entrance of God-in-Christ into the very deepest depths of human degradation. This is not a ‘had to’ but a ‘will always’: the love of God will search (and I would add eternally search) for the lost sheep and enter into suffering to bring that sheep home. It is that which Jesus enacts as he enters into the waters of human sin: it is that which he will later complete when he enters into and transforms the murk of human death. This does not protect us from suffering, from sin, from death, but transforms our darkest moments into the light of resurrection and eternity.

The baptism of Jesus in the Jordan is the prefigurement of all that he will go on to achieve and make available eternally to us. The baptism of Christ in the Jordan, where in orthodox art he is often depicted as leaving behind the grot of human existence, is the prefigurement of death, descent, and resurrection.

TLBWY