Jesus as crucified bride?

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
(Northern Territory, Australia)
Sunday, September 23rd, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 25 / SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)

Readings:    Proverbs 31.10-31
        Psalm 1
        James 3.1-12
        Mark 9.30-37

Mark used locations to underline the events of Jesus’ life that he was narrating. The work of the incarnation would be at its most intense, if we can put it that way, in the unexpected and uninviting places. It is no accident that the words of the angel spoken to the women at the tomb tells them to tell Peter and the disciples that the risen Lord is going ahead of them to Galilee (16.7, also 14.28) , the place from whence he came in 1.9, the place that has been open to his message all along. Galilee is not Vaucluse, Toorak, or Cottlesloe – respective by state the wealthiest postcodes in Australia (2010 census; actually Edgecliff was wealthier but I’ve never heard of it). Nor was Galilee a Nhulunbuy, which surprised me by having the highest level of wealth per postcode in the Territory (though the journalist inexplicably referred to it as a ‘suburb’). Nor, to be fair, was Galilee a Callaghan, in Newcastle, which came out in that census as Australia’s poorest postcode, but which was probably skewed by being centred on students and the University of Newcastle. No – and we need to be careful in making comparisons. The Brotherhood of St Laurence long ago made it clear that wealth is not necessarily or even not much about income. Wealth is about networks.

So Galilee was a place of fractured infrastructure, a place of pride, no doubt, to the locals, but pretty much of scorn to outsiders. John 7 reflects the kind of scorn in which Galilee was held – nothing good was going to come from there, and it certainly wasn’t the sort of place a nice god should hang out.  Ironically it is the type of place our psalmist, in Pslam One, might have us avoid, the place that seems to be the place of the ungodly. The Territory has by far the highest rate of crime in Australia – we can be fairly sure that if Australia were awaiting a messiah the populace would not be looking to Pine Creek, Yuendemu or Pigeon Hole for the arrival of God’s chosen one.

Jesus makes his way across this troubled territory, to Capernaum, to deliver his most poignant teaching. For the second time he tells them that the Incarnation, the unveiling of the heart of God will take place not in glory, but in the lowest degradation known to humanity. There have been worse ways, arguably, to die than crucifixion, but few images have held more terror for a populace than the cross, in all its obscene Imperial brutality. Here Jesus doesn’t mention the cross, but he shifts his audience’s focus – or attempts to – from the places nice gods hang out to the places of powerlessness and vulnerability.

The Nineteenth Century romanticised the child as an image of innocence, and that interpretation of this passage dominated readings of this passage for a century and a half since. It was wrong. In some circles it is still used to attempt to suggest we should have an intellectual naïvety in our approach to faith. This is nonsense, at least as an interpretation of this text. This is an image of utter vulnerability: a girl child in China, prone to secret abortion or perinatal execution might be a symbol closer to the one Jesus is adopting here. An Afghani child bride in a Taliban community, exposed to the most demonic forms of misogyny and violence might be closer to the image Jesus is portraying here. A woman in our own society, trapped in hellholes of domestic abuse – or the child of abusive parents or victim of a powerful paedophile – might be closer to the image Jesus is generating here. Each would cry out for a touch of love, what Jesus calls a ‘welcome’, rather than the brutal exploitation and defencelessness that was their and is their daily grind.

In this moment Jesus effectively lays down two unexpected gauntlets. He makes it clear that vulnerability, defencelessness and even shame is the place where the heart of God is revealed – shame in the sense of the utter nakedness of the cross that will soon be, in Mark’s narrative, the place where the messianic secret is finally over and the unstoppable  extent of God’s love is made known. But he makes something else clear, too: he makes it clear that it is the yardstick  by which we stand judged. Have we touched, transformed, ameliorated the plight of those who are today in all their pain and brokenness the location of God’s self-revelation?  Have we touched the lives of the children behind razor wire, the children in communities of abuse, the children in the world’s refugee camps? Have I? And even if we can say yes – and I would imagine many of you are doing far more than I am – nevertheless can any of us say we are doing enough, fiscally, politically, missiologically? Indeed, as James, ostensibly the brother of Jesus puts it in the verse immediately after our epistle reading, ‘Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom’. We can feel terribly warm and fuzzy about our cosy relationship with Jesus, but our cosiness does little for those who are daily dying the death of Jesus.

Which leaves us, for now, just three learning points: can we accept God’s forgiveness for our failure to be vulnerable? Can we accept God’s forgiveness for our failure to transform the lives of the vulnerable?  Can we allow the Spirit to transform us so that we can better find the heart of Jesus in the often unattractive lives of the broken? The Way of the Cross leads through Galilee. But that is the place in which Jesus promises, always, to go ahead of us. May we have the strength, in him, to follow him.


TLBWY

Rahab the Prostitute, Steve Biko, and the works of the Spirirt

SERMON PREACHED AT 
St FRANCIS’ CHURCH, BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, September 16th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 24 / SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)


Readings:    Wisdom of Solomon 7.26 – 8.1
        Psalm 19
        James 2.18-26
        Mark 8.27-38

I have been re-reading, in recent weeks, a masterful history of the development of ideas in the Reformation era. I believe that this is one of the most painful eras in Christian history The proliferation of Christian denominations and cults that has splintered outwards ever since is simply a tragic scar on the credibility of our gospel witness. Without going into a history lesson, yes there were some matters that that the Catholic Church had corrupted into a sorry distortion of gospel truth. Unfortunately, though, the Reformers were soon doing as much if not more damage to the proclamation of the gospel. Within ten or fifteen years of Luther’s original acts of rebellion many within Roman Catholicism were fighting from within to reform its excesses, while holding on to the unity that has never again been attained. Oh that we could set back the clock so that we could retain the integrity that some of the catholic reformers sought. I thjink of barel;y known figures today, such as wise reforming moderates, the likes of a Jean Charlier de Gerson or the later Girolamo Seripando, struggling to maintain theological integrity within Catholicism without resorting to schism, and dying, like Jesus, with no hint whether their struggle would bear fruit. These, along with the better know Desiderius Erasmus, brutally treated by Luther, are the ones who strike me as the heroes of faith-integrity in the Reformation era. All ultimately were on the losing side, as better known names such as Luther, Calvin and even Henry VIII drove a wedge into the heart of the Christian unity for which, John tells us, Jesus prayed in the garden. It was a tragic time, and it is not surprising that many felt the end of the world was nigh.

I make no secret then of my wish that it had never happened. While historical accident led me to Anglicanism, I stand firmly in the shoes of movements within Anglicanism that claim constantly its Catholic heritage, and, while the more extreme English Reformers might turn in their grave, I believe the Oxford Movement within the Anglicanism of the nineteenth century was one of our finest moments and greatest gifts. I thank God for the centrality of the eucharist that was a direct result of that movement, bringing this feast of Jesus back to the centre of most Anglican Christian experience. Other side-effects were reclamation of the importance of the epistles of James and even the deutero-canonical Wisdom of Solomon, deeply resented by the Reformers because they did not suit their decentralization of the institutions of faith.

The Reformers’ personal piety emphasis opened the floodgates that led to the ‘me and my mate Jesus’ spirituality that has so dominated Protestantism ever since. It was the Reformers, not the Catholics that yearned to throw out these tricky books, because they did not suit them, despite their claims as Reformers to emphasize the centrality of Scripture. And no wonder they wanted to cast these books to outer darkness … the epistle of James made it through their misguided censorship in the end because they believed it to have been written by the brother of Jesus. There are all sorts of ironies in the Reformers’ reluctant acceptance of the book, and indeed of their entire relationship to the question of ‘canon’, but perhaps that thought must await another time and place. In the end, thank God it got through, and thank God that, with the Book of Wisdom, it can play a part in the liturgies of the twenty first century.

Because, in this century, it is not a pious ‘me and my personal saviour’ spirituality that will touch lives with the redeeming love of Jesus, but a love that binds up the broken hearted, proclaims liberty to the oppressed (not least those currently being sent to the government’s latest draconian refugee ‘solution’), proclaims sight to the blind. ‘Was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road’, wrote James, to the horror of Martin Luther who, for all his strengths, was determined to make salvation a pietistic, personal matter. How can people see Jesus when we represent a church so wrapped up in personal salvation and piety that we show no compassion for the broken, or when our own obsession with eternal life (whatever that is) drowns out concern for those whose present life is a living hell? It’s not altogether an either/or, I confess, but as I listen to the heartcries of those around me there is no doubt that many people reject Jesus – it seems – because of the self-obsession of his most vocal followers.

Which leads me to the Wisdom of Solomon. The Anglican founders marginalised this book as one to be used ‘for example of life and instruction of manners’, and not for the establishment of doctrine. I accept that while I deplore it, but the line becomes blurred at this point. How can we not see the great wisdom of God and the works of the Spirit of God in holy men and women far outside the confines and boundaries of Christianity? Confronted by a Fred Hollows, an Aung San Suu Kyi, a Steve Biko or a Mahatma Ghandi who cannot see the work of the Spirit of God? Flawed, indeed, but what great saint was not? We might add others: Allen R Schindler, a gay sailor beaten to death by fellow marines in a Nagasaki toilet, or Vincent Lingiari, the aboriginal activist who fought for the rights of Aboriginal workers at Wave Hill. Flawed, but individuals through whom the one I would call the Spirit of God was powerfully at work for justice and compassion: the Spirit who is ‘a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God,  and an image of his goodness’.

It may come as a surprise in many circles, but Jesus did not say ‘those who want to follow me, confess me as Lord and rejoice in their own personal salvation’, but ‘if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’. We would be on dangerous ground if we limited the work of the Spirit of God to the often too-cosy in-crowd of Christian believers: ‘not all who cry ‘Lord, Lord’, said Jesus. He rebukes his number one follower, Peter, for failing to see the phenomenal reach, even to degradation and death far beyond the confines of religion, that is the way of the Cross. God will not be confined to the neat and tidy expectations of our comfort zones, but is the one who breaks boundaries and is revealed wherever there is justice, compassion, and the values of immeasurable, life-surrendering love. The onus is on us as a Christian community to look deeply at ourselves to find out whether we are, truly, on the side of that love.


TLBWY

Faith: straight-jacket or liberator?

SERMON PREACHED AT
CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL, DARWIN
SUNDAY, September 9th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 23 / SIXTEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)

Readings:    Proverbs 22.1-2, 8-9, 22-23
        Psalm 125
        James 2.1-10, 14-17
        Mark 7.24-37

Since the rise of feminist theology there has a tendency to see the encounter between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman as a victory of femaledom over a masculine saviour, with a sort of subtext that points out enthusiastically that the Incarnation needed an encounter with the feminine in order to be truly enlightened. It is in a liberation sense a very satisfying reading of the text, and one that is designed to rock maledom back on the haunches of its often myopic hermeneutic endeavour. To some extent such a reading is valid: Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza was right to remind the oestrogen-challenged amongst us that ours was not the copyright of interpretation, and to remind us that the survival of women’s stories in the scriptures of a patriarchal community is powerful testimony to the place women had in the events depicted by the biblical writers.

But we need to be careful if we allow this corrective to spill over into a sense that God particularly needs anyone. It may surprise my ego, it may surprise yours – though you may be more humble than I am! – that God does not need my insight, or the dean’s or the bishop’s or the Pope’s or Mother Theresa’s or Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s or anyone’s to pluck the chords of the universe. The connection we have to God is a part of the one-sided equation of grace, and, while we might with Abraham or the Syrophoenician woman argue with God from time to time, might even appear to win occasional negotiations, we need to know our place in the great equations of eternity’s history. Humankind has not achieved great performance indicators in the running its affairs, let alone those of the universe.

Nevertheless, this is an encounter between a feisty woman – every bit as feisty as Abraham – and the one in whom we find the fullness of divinity revealed, in whom the author of Colossians says ‘all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’, no push-over. Jesus reveals all the limitations of being human: tired, even irascible, he has fled the ethnic and geographical boundaries of his people, in an attempt to find refuge. This is not the first time his healing compassion and love touches and transforms the life of a non-Jew – the demoniac from the Decapolis is unlikely to have been a Jew – but it is a remarkable occasion. He engages crossly with the woman – there was a form of interpretation popular 50 years ago that maintained that he was only pretending to be cross, but I hardly find that satisfying! – but the desperation of her plight, at least as much as the powerful logic of her argument, wins him over. It is a momentous shift in Jesus self-understanding – the shift that some interpreters try to protect Jesus from. The utterly human Jesus encounters a pointer to a new way by which to understand his mission.

In this, surely, Jesus is an embodiment of all that his subsequent ‘body’, the Church, must also do and be? Those interpreters who seek to protect Jesus from a shift in understanding are often attempting to protect divinity from change, even protecting the Church from mutability, from changeability. It is a wonderful argument whether the perfection of divinity can change, and one that belongs over some good red wine amongst good friends, but it is in the end meaningless. What is critical is that our understanding of divinity can and must change – to some extent the miracle is that Mark allowed himself to record an event that so clearly raised these questions. Can God change? Can Jesus change? Can we change? Are we able to measure our mission according to outside forces?’

The answer of the story is: yes. There are some non-negotiables here: Jesus does not change from being the self-revelation of the just and compassionate heart of God into a capricious clown, or change from (admittedly tired) compassion into being a perpetrator of wanton destructiveness. He neither withers the woman with a divine thunderbolt, nor suddenly changes the kernel of his mission. The measure of missiological integrity is not mutability, change for the sake of change, but rather consistency: change for the sake of pointing deeper into the heart of a God who is only slowly coming within the sphere of our myopic sight. A woman’s feisty desperation touches and transforms the divine heart of the Incarnate Son because that heart is beating in unison with the compassionate heart of the Creator.

At this point we might say then, quite simply, that God does not change, but our own limited understanding of God can and must constantly change.

There are though boundaries to change and its directions. I value deeply the three-legged stool of Anglicanism that sees scripture, tradition and reason exercising their control over our mission and interpretation. I prefer to see them, to be sure, as a flexible tripod, with the occasional lengthening of one leg over the others as the surface of experience changes, but a tripod nevertheless. The Spirit of God will constantly funnel God’s intentions through – if I may slaughter a metaphor – those legs, and those legs will not always neatly fit within the expectations of being Church. So, faced with new understandings of sexuality in the human person, for example, we must not simply rely on a knee-jerk bondage to one of the three legs (tradition, I suspect, rather than scripture, which has been dubiously interpreted by those frightened by redefinitions of marriage). Instead we must look for the harmonies of God’s Spirit-wind beyond our narrow boundaries of expectation. It is, surely, love, fidelity, mutuality, rather than the shape or reproductive functionality of human bodies that should guide our understanding of the will and purpose of God? Surely an edifying, enriching mutual love between two committed partners regardless of gender is far more attuned to the God who is love and justice than a brutal power imbalance enshrined in liturgy and adopted often unwillingly by the more vulnerable partner?

I can in so short a time only float these ideas, with the reminder that the winds of change often blow beyond the dusty corridors of expectation, that the work of the Spirit of God is often visible in the community before the Church. Besides, I know the Dean more than merely floats the ideas! Perhaps this moment in the life of Jesus was an embodiment of the principle that the followers of Jesus must be open to the voice of God from beyond the walled gardens of our expectations. If it’s good enough for Jesus, in other words, it’s good enough for me. Referring to another passage, but with reference to this one too, Walter Brueggemann writes:

It is in healing leprosy that Jesus contradicts the norms of society concerning clean and unclean. And in causing that rethinking of clean and unclean Jesus was in fact calling into question all the moral distinctions upon which society was based

  Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 101-102.

We have a choice: do we hear the appeal of those who want to feel and experience the loving, redeeming word of Christ, or do we constantly push them out beyond the boundaries, to the Tyres and Sidons of our world by hanging tenaciously to the legalism of our past, firing misdirected biblical texts and unexplored phobias at outsiders in order to keep them in their place and out of ours?

TLBWY

Infotainment and the stuttered gospel

You may have gathered by now that I am an irredeemable SBS or, occasionally, ABC TV news viewer. I have long been suspicious of media owned by private individuals, and, since reading the late Neil Postman’s ground-breaking study Amusing Ourselves to Death  a quarter of a century ago I have been very sceptical of the ability of ratings-hungry and privately owned entertainment media (channels 7, 9 & 10) to address anything remotely discomforting in the infotainment episodes they pass off as news and current affairs bulletins. Call me a snob, but when a company’s income is dependent on ratings, and ratings are dependent on an audience’s good feelings (warm fuzzies), I doubt they’ll address genuinely challenging, discomforting issues.

But, as usual, I digress. These days I get most of my news from Al Jazeera and SBS. Not even ABC (who have slowly compromised in obedience to their owner, the government's need for ratings!). Over and again, night after night — on the nights I get to watch the news — I am confronted by the world’s injustices. In particular at present I watch the news out of Syria, and despair. Who is telling the truth? How can I know? If the Spring Revolution of Egypt is any indication atrocity and evil will only give way to more atrocity and more evil (if you recall my Advent studies on Revelation this is no new theme). I feel helpless, confused, and helpless again.

I often do. There is, as ‘the preacher’ (or Qoheleth) of Ecclesiastes reminds us, nothing new under the sun. Call me a wuss but as I am confronted by the enormities and the injustices and the sheer insurmountable  hurdles of collective human and of individual fallibility I am thrown more and more back into the slender hope of a Saviour. Not, as many Christians believe, a saviour of ‘the saved’, but a Saviour of the World. What that means I do not understand, but in my preaching and in my living I will hope to continue to stutter that possibility. It’s bigger than my small understanding, and so more and more I will fall back on the simple, incoherent Christian hope: come Lord Jesus (maranatha) and that first Christian creed, stuttered against all odds, ‘Jesus is Lord’.