Dancing with cadavers

Some of us in Darwin were privileged last Wednesday to sit at the feet, as it were, of an outstanding communicator and biblical scholar (the two don’t always go hand in hand). To my shame I hadn’t heard of Paula Gooder when + Greg told me a year or so ago that she was coming. Since placing the final full stop on my doctoral dissertation two years ago I have lost touch with the constellations of scholars out there, and while Paula was publishing well before I finished she somehow slipped under my radar. She won’t do so now, and I shall add happily to her 50p of royalties.

She held in wondrous balance that ability to engage with and critique the texts of our faith (what Anne, borrowing from L.T. Johnson, refers to as dissecting the cadaver) with the reverence and joy that comes from knowing that these are the texts in which our encounter with the risen, living Christ begins (or, if not begins, for that beginning can be in liturgy and fellowship, then continues and is anchored). Dr Gooder wove introductions to the inordinately difficult realm of biblical-critical methodology with faith-radiating encounters with the Christ in the text, and did so in such a way that as far as I could see all present, across the conservative-liberal spectrum of  faith, and across a vast range of academic interest and experience, were engaged and energised. She danced with her beloved, to cite Anne’s L.T. Johnson reference again, rather than merely dissecting a cadaver.

I hope and pray that this inspirational lecturer, whose impact in and on the English Anglican Church is quite considerable, continues to maintain the energy and integrity she demonstrated here, and that something of her enthusiastic reverence for the texts of our faith continues to rub off on those of us called to teach and live the faith of Jesus Christ.

(Unfortunately, on the next day I managed a linguistic mishap, that Paula characteristically dubbed phraseological dyslexia, as I spoke of the enjoyment of 'dancing with cadavers' ... perhaps given Paula's love of 1 Corinthians 15, we might agree that this is an image of serendipitous insight!)

έ̉ν Χριστω̣̃ – (Fr)  Michael

Exit, Rich Dude

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF ST FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
Sunday, October 14th, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 28)

Readings:    Job 23.1-9, 16-17
        Psalm 22.1-16
        Hebrews 4.12-16
        Mark 10.17-31

Too often in conversations and even in sermons I have heard expositions on the Rich Young Man’s encounter with Jesus that take the form of ‘isn’t it sad that he didn’t rise to the call, but isn’t it great that we did?’ Sometimes there is a sort of browbeating included, a bit of tut-tutting about rich people or people who are obsessed with financial advancement – after all this is the same Jesus who said terrible things about those who store treasure on earth – but on the whole that is the end of the level of textual analysis that is made. As I said in addressing the powerless child a week ago, such a superficial analysis really skirts around the deep and disturbing challenge of the way of the Cross. This approach, when presented with the famous “Then who can be saved?” tends to take a sort of cosy comfort in the answer of Jesus, “for God all things are possible.” The equally famous ‘there but by the grace of God go I’ is shared around conspiratorially, and the conversationalists or members of the congregation go away deeply comforted and self-satisfied.

There is a degree of parody here, but only a degree. There is a degree of truth in the ‘there but by the grace of God go I’ response, but only a degree. There is comfort in the gospel, always, but of course never self-satisfaction, and that is almost certainly where we end up going wrong. None of us, not one, shares the righteousness of Job, yet we all too often behave as if our immense satisfaction with our hard-won standing with God was our own doing, a kind of right, though we may protest loudly about our un-meriting nature, and even seek to demonstrate that we are even more un-meriting than the person next to us. I suspect the Protestant doctrine of ‘assurance of salvation’ or ‘blessed assurance’, a somewhat suspect mis-reaction to some of the extremes of Medieval Catholic doctrine, has much to answer for. In fact I suspect that all Christians need to listen carefully to the polemical but wise Tridentine statement

If any one saith, that he will for certain, of an absolute and infallible certainty, have that great gift of perseverance unto the end, unless he have learned this by special revelation; let him be anathema

We need to listen to that if only because there is a whole spectrum of Christianity whose membership live in a state of cosy complacency about the state of God’s world, while rejoicing in the knowledge that they will spend something called ‘eternity’ frolicking on the clouds with harps. We could learn much from Ernst Käsemann, who observed:  It ought to disquiet us when Christianity has nothing more to offer here than the fulfilment of pious or carnal longings for the conquest of the grave.[1] This in part has led to the image of the West as selfish and disinterested in the suffering of God’s earth, and no matter how hard some mission agencies work to ameliorate the plight of the poor of God’s earth, that image is deeply entrenched in our history. It is not I might add, merely a Protestant nor a Catholic nor an Anglican problem: it is a problem of communities and individuals who have forgotten the stern nature of the judgement of God and decided it applies to everyone but them.

Which is really the problem of the young man who approaches Jesus. It should not be forgotten that in Mark’s hands he is following a series of characters whose approach to Jesus is not one of respectful engagement by which to grow closer to God, but whose approach to Jesus is in order to entrap Jesus. This man does not seem to be entrapping Jesus, but he is obsequious in his approach, and his question is utterly self-centred. Jesus is not particularly interested, it seems, in accommodating this man’s game-playing, and the conversation soon has the man heading away, saddened, and no doubt keen to be amongst those calling for the blood of Jesus in his final week of suffering. So much so-called evangelism, ironically, is of the ‘where will you spend eternity’ approach: on the whole Jesus is very little concerned with eternity and individuals’ enjoyment of it, but with food for the hungry and clothes for the naked. His question to would-be followers is not ‘how many people did you convert’, ‘but did you feed, clothe, liberate those in need’.

Yet of course I have to acknowledge that I stand condemned by the demands of this encounter. We of the global North, or the West as we used to be called, should almost all slink away, saddened, with the Rich Young Man. I know my sin: I know my cavalier attitude to international greed, to the selfish lifestyle that sees the gaps between the haves and the have-nots growing if not exponentially then at least tragically. I know that it is into the gaps of life-expectancy and financial opportunity that extremists of Islam and other religious cultures have leapt. I know that I have crept around, secure and arrogant in the cosiness of my encounter with the redeeming Christ, and have done only miniscule amounts in the genuine service of the gospel of feeding hungry, clothing naked, and proclaiming Jubilee. I will again and again seek God’s forgiveness, but one day perhaps, as God the God of judgement watches, I may have to seek the forgiveness, too, of those whose food I ate and whose life-opportunity I consumed.

At the beginning of Luke’s account of the gospel we hear the all-unsettling Song of Mary, the Magnificat, that sees the world through God’s eyes and is deeply threatening to those of us who, simply because we dwell with the tiny percentage of the world’s population with food on the table and money in our accounts, stand if not condemned at least torn down by God’s perspective. As Jesus in Mark’s account first takes abused and vulnerable women, then a powerless child, and finally a Rich Young Man into the centre of Jesus’ ministry he is revealing his own understanding of the Magnificat lenses through which Jesus judges and will judge the world. These should be unsettling passages that at the very least disturb our complacency and challenge our cosy reliance on some blessed assurance based on the happy experiences we have with Jesus.

In the end, I suppose we can fall back on that grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that Paul offers even his starkest enemies in the service of the gospel. But the stories of abused women, powerless children, and an obsequious and complacent Rich Young Man in Mark’s gospel account should at the very least remind all of us that we very truly better mean the sorry-words we say when we tell God that we have sinned in thought, word and deed.

Only when we have grasped the magnitude of that culpability can we reach out and say once more, Lord Have mercy on me, a sinner, and say it not just once but over and again until we see him no longer through a darkened glass but face to face.

TLBWY

[1] Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom , 67.

Barking for Jesus

FROM THE PEW SHEET

My brief experience of Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity as an undergraduate taught me much. The great and unforgivable sin of Mk 3 and Mt 12 was often defined as ‘quenching the Spirit’: that to speak ill of anything defined as a spiritual gift in the church would be to be pushed beyond the parameters of salvation for ever. This was errant nonsense, but it was powerful errant nonsense, particularly useful as a tool by which to maintain order in a church tightly controlled by one or two megalomaniacal control freaks. I left those church circles, but I hope I have retained some of what I learned there.

I hope I have retained my sense of the immediacy and ‘livingness’ of God. For years I moved into a far more cerebral and rite-based faith. I have no regrets, funnily enough about that, either. When Jesus spoke of ways we should love God he included ‘mind’ with ‘heart’: the anti-intellectualism of my charismatic beginnings was neither better nor worse than the paranoid suspicion of emotions that I experienced over my next half decade or more. I found some control freaks in those circles, too: the types that would scowl into non-existence some poor soul who genuflected at the wrong time, or who would glare to a cinder a child in church. In Adelaide I was once told that the strength of one church at which I was a Sunday locum was that there were no children there. I laughed aloud — until I realised that the speaker, a warden, was deadly serious.

Ideally I would love to find a balance. I never again want to hear the silliness that I encountered in another church, where a group of women were crawling around, led by the Holy Spirit to bark for Jesus, probably a useful gestalt but little to do with the Jesus of the Cross. Perhaps my stopping that practice as ‘spiritual nonsense’ was ‘quenching the Spirit’ in the eyes of some. But for all that spiritually silliness, when that group learned to discern the difference between psychobabblingl nonsense and genuine openness to an immediate and active God they became a real engine-room in the life of the faith community. Somewhere in that balance is a message for us all.

Suck it up, divorcee

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, October 7^th, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 27/NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)

Readings:
Job 1.1, 2.1-10
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1.1-4, 2.5-12
Mark 10.2-16

Every now and again the lectionary’s cycles throw together such a disconnected collection of readings that it’s hard to believe we stand in one heritage at all. It’s a useful reminder that our scriptures are a glorious collection of the Godward thoughts of those who like us strive godwardly through a darkened glass, drawing on wisdom that the Church with time came to recognize as Spirit-filled, yet incomplete, disparate, as all life and all thought this side of the eschaton will be. I will not pretend to draw together strands from Mark, Job, Hebrews and the most excruciatingly self-righteous of the psalms and pretend they share great themes of faith!

The scriptures, even the gospel-readings for which we stand as a mark of respect for the Christ who becomes Incarnate in our midst, are flawed, no matter what the more extreme Protestants may tell us. Yet they are in-filled with divine Spirit in a way no others are: we trivialize them at risk – every preacher should walk in fear between those temptations. The Bible is not the Incarnation, as the bibliolatrists suggest. Nor is it merely some old book or collection of books as relativists suggest. We must approach the text in fear and trembling: this is one of the great loci of the encounter with the Risen Lord. And when Mark records Jesus issuing what appear to be some stern words, words by which I for one, and who knows how many others in this gathering, stand challenged if not condemned, we should be cautious indeed. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. There’s not a lot of wriggle-room there.

On the other hand nor is there wriggle-room when Paul and others demand that women wear their hair long but covered (1 Cor. 11.6, apparently so not as to disturb the angels – 1 Cor.11.10) and not braided (1 Pet. 3.3) .There is no wriggle room when women are told they must not wear ‘gold, pearls, or expensive clothes’ (1 Tim. 2.9 - I will ask the wardens to check later!), or when the scriptures condemn men with long hair (1 Cor. 11.14, suggesting, if most Christian iconography is accurate, that Jesus was condemned as a sinner not only for ‘hanging on a tree’ - and I don't know if any of you have seen puictures of the new Bishop of Wellington!). Nor is there wriggle room when Paul sternly demands that Christians do not bring law suits before civil courts (1 Cor. 6). There were all sorts of fiscal justice elements underlying that issue, but it is an injunction that is often ignored by the very church institutions who claim to be bible-believing.

We could of course begin to play a game of pitting Paul’s words against those of Jesus, or Peter’s or James’ against Paul’s against Jesus, but then, if we are doing that, we are generating the dangerous game of creating a canon within the canon. No person can stand before God claiming they have the authority to do that. In any case, can any of us claim to have lived up to the stern commands of Jesus that Anne addressed last week, to pluck out our eyes and carve off our sin-filled hands?

So the dangers of scripture are at least two fold. One danger is to give the words of scripture a timeless authority they were never designed to have, the bibliolatrous option. The other is to trivialize them as an old book, to say they have no claim on us at all. Is what they say about sin, about integrity and justice just an old and so two thousand years ago tale? Was Jesus’ teaching on divorce to be taken as if it were eternal-Torah (as Paul saw Torah), as letter not spirit, as condemning the divorced to the outer echelons of Christianity for all time? For that matter what about his teachings about children? For years we cheerfully added our amen to the words of Jesus about children as icons of faith, but glared at them if they dared to breathe, much less speak, in church.

Is there a rule of thumb? I will of course always say context is everything – and say too that narrative context, the place in which the author placed a scene in his narrative of faith, is every bit as important as the context in which the events occurred. Is Jesus, who had some stern things to say about burdens and millstones and self-righteous wearers of phylacteries really saying ‘no way, never, forget it, suck it up princess, suffer’ to those who are trapped in marriages that are insufferable hellholes? Is he telling those who have emerged from cess pits of abuse that they can never again experience married love? One might ask the same about the imposition of laws that deny homosexual people the experience of edifying love, based on a verse here and a verse there. God forbid a long-haired man or a pearl-wearing woman enter a church!

Let’s not throw the book away. I make no secret of my deep sorrow at those who so denude our scriptures of meaning that they are no more significant for us than the Buddhist Scriptures, Holy Qur'an, the  Book of Mormon, Wordsworth’s poetry, or the Agony Aunt column of a women’s magazine. When in liturgy I solemnly intone ‘for the word of the Lord’ I am not trivialising the scriptures of our faith. When the scriptures speak of justice and righteousness and resurrection and eternity I do not trivialize these proclamations. These, though, are the great ur-themes of faith: is there an ur-theme of faith present as Jesus addresses divorce or the rights of children?

Indeed there is. For here Jesus is voicing the wrath of God and the judgement of God at institutions that disempower and destroy human lives. This is not a benevolent conversation about ordinary marriage and divorce – the Pharisees and scribes have already demonstrated by their knowledge of Deuteronomy that they are not interested really in the Old Testament Torah, but are intent on trapping the Jesus who is interested in spirit, not letter of Torah. This is a life-and-death risk conversation about the abusive and exploitative attitudes of the family of Herod, instruments of the Imperium of Rome, of the Caesars who manipulated women and marriage in the interests of power only: this is not about Mr and Mrs Smith whose love ran cold, but about the Mephistophelian Herods and Caesars who have kept women powerless, as instruments of their exploitative greed. John the Baptist was executed for answering this question dangerously: so too will Jesus be, as it is added to the evidence of his insubordination, his disrespect for a corrupt state.

So let us get away from the demonic text wars so beloved in some quarters; wars that pit a text about Corinthian or Roman rent boys against the longings of gay people for edifying love. Texts that tell women to remain silent in church, or not to wear pearls, or how to wear their hair, because of the peculiarities of a context that a biblical author was once addressing. Let us get away from text wars that use these references to silence or oppress women for all time. Let us get away – or perhaps not! – from texts that tell us not to go to court (one text I believe we have cynically failed to uphold, to the benefit not of the gospel but of lawyers).

A woman in a hell hole of abuse, or a man in a hell hole of lovelessness is not condemned for ever to singleness – though nor is marriage the only possible state of human enrichment, and nor is it either to be entered or exited lightly. A gay person is not condemned forever to singleness – though sexuality is not the sole realm of human fulfilment, and no gay person should enter life-long commitment trivially. In both cases celibacy is one, but not the only possible alternative option.

If we are to look for the ur-narrative, let us ask that glorious clichéd question, what would Jesus do? His ur-narrative here is about empowering the disempowered, protecting the unprotected, and breathing resurrection hope into the darkest hellholes of powerlessness – the place where, he will remind us horrifyingly on Good Friday, the encounter with God begins. Jesus is not saying divorce is always wrong or never right, but is in his ur-narrative telling us that exploitation and oppression and the cynical using of other human beings is never, ever right. The exploitation and oppression of children, utterly without rights in first century Israel, is never ever right. The exploitation of rent boys or child prostitutes, as we have seen so disturbingly in news out of Sydney this week, is never ever right.

Paradoxically, it is only when we become so devoid of pretensions to power that we truly become like a child, and are rendered fit to enter the eternities of God. For many of us, I fear, that will only be in that moment when we truly turn to the God of judgement and say at last, no longer through a darkened glass but face to face, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner”.

Oink, Oink

FROM THE PEW SHEET

I am not old enough to recall where I was when J.F.K. was shot, though I remember Robert Kennedy's assassination well enough, five years later. My parents were great oooers and ahhers as they listened—yes, listened—to the news, always the BBC World Service, each night. Robert Kennedy did not warrant as many oohs and ahhs as Winston Churchill did, three years earlier. He was 95, but the parental oohs and ahhs were those of  someone for whom a dream had prematurely died. I remember only a hunched old man with a cigar.

The first US President of whom I was aware was Nixon. he struck me as phenomenally ugly and not very important. I was, mercifully, at boarding school by the time Watergate reverberated around the world, and was probably more concerned that my rubbery, flavourless porridge was cold, again. Apart from anything else I resented the USA: they had at some stage separated themselves from the glorious march of pink across the maps of the world, and though they allegedly spoke my language they did so abysmally. Nixon especially. His resignation speech sounded to me like a gorilla gargling. (Speaking of gorillas, I was always a little puzzled to hear on the news that gorillas were fighting in Angola, Vietnam and elsewhere. Prickly primates!)

To be honest I still have little understanding of US politics. I do have a strong preference for one candidate over the other, although I know, too, that no candidate, however much I admire him or her, will ever bring home the bacon of my justice-dreams. Nevertheless, like most people in the western world, I am trapped in a frenzy of media infotainment, and I like, after all, to hope. Every now and again, though, I ask myself how many starving children in the world might be fed if both candidates agreed to have sponsorship free, low budget, no advertising, no massive extravaganza campaigns. Just names and policies on a piece of paper or a recording for the illiterate, and put it out there for the people to decide. Was that a pig flying past?