More to be pitied than all people?

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, November 18th, 2012 (ORDINARY SUNDAY 33)

Readings:      1 Samuel 1.4-20

                      Psalm: Song of Hannah

                      Hebrews 10.12-14, 19-25

                      Mark 13.1-11

As they emerged from the mishmash of tribal groups that wandered the eastern Mediterranean – the hotspot even now descending into yet another bloodbath – the Hebrew people gradually came to know themselves as a distinctive people, a people called to be worshippers of a single Creator God, a people called to serve and even covenant with that one God rather than to hedge the bets of the many gods available. At best the Hebrew people of God knew this to be a wonderful privilege. There were to be honest other times – not least the holocaust of the twentieth century of our era – when it was a terrible and seemingly godforsaken time of vulnerability and brokenness.

We must make no mistake: Jesus uniquely was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, though it is his follower Paul who later uses that phrase. Jesus was a follower of the Torah of his people to such an extent that he embodied Torah-Law, to such an extent that he challenged the established practitioners and corrupters of that Torah-Law, to such an extent that their knowledge of the vast gap between their claims of Torah-fulfilment and his practice of Torah-embodiment meant that religious and civic leadership joined in an evil symbiotic relationship of wanting him dead. As an Easter people of God we will say that his death was not the end of the story: that he transcended his own death, and that he-in-us will and does transcend the frailty of our own deaths, too, transforming our mortality into immortality, even though we cannot but fail to understand that. For those pastors, priests and theologians who do not acknowledge the resurrection hope as central to our faith I say I fully understand that far too much Christian speech is about the afterlife, and it is meritorious to focus instead on this worldly issues, but at the same time Paul was absolutely right: if we have nothing to say in the face of that last great injustice death, then our faith is mere pathos, our god smaller than death, and we are more to be pitied than all people.

Jesus however invited his followers into what we have often come to call a ‘new and living way’, a new and dynamic relationship with the death conquering God. Incorporated into this is the belief that our life is in a very real sense no longer ours, that we are answerable to the unseen Creator God who called the Hebrews out of nothingness, and to that extent and indeed much more we are called to be a visible counter-culture. We are called not to be perfect – which is just as well – but to know ourselves to be under scrutiny. The implications of this for churches facing a Royal Commission is profound: we most be open to scrutinty both human and divine. We are called to enter into a relationship with the Creator that was previously unavailable, inaccessible to the Hebrew people. Jesus himself makes bizarre claims about his own self as Temple because he becomes the new location of human access to God. Jesus, though, following the events his followers came to name as resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, is no longer limited in space and time. As an aside it is worth noting that our every prayer should be suffixed with a formula that reminds us that all our prayers must and can only be made ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’ – the sloppiness of much contemporary conversation with God suggest that we have become nonchalant and lackadaisical in our relationship with the Creator, Redeemer and Giver of Life.

In the event we call Pentecost – though John and Luke tell the story in very different ways (the church year follows Luke) – the role of Jesus as new Temple is extended throughout space and time. The author of the book we know as Hebrews knew that well, portraying Christ as the priest who, in Hebrew thought, enters the Holy of Holies once a year, but who now becomes for us effectively a conduit into the eternities of God. He emphasizes also that this is a High Priest who has walked the walk of our own existence, even as we know from the gospel records to the point of crying out ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me’, the pain-filled words of the psalmist and of every person who has cried out at the loss of God and God-hope. For that reason, too, I believe every person for whom we hope and pray can be caught up into resurrection hope, though perhaps we can leave that thought for another day. But, just as Jesus has become the embodiment of a new way to God, so we are called and, where we allow it, empowered by the Spirit to embody that way of hope for those we are called into contact with in our fallible human journeys. We are called to be advertisements and contacts with God for the too busy, the too cynical, the too hurt to believe. In all our fallibility – and for most of us that’s a lot – we are called to be pathways to the knowledge of God (or more accurately, pathways to the knowledge of Jesus who is the pathway to the knowledge of God). We are called to be Samuels, reminders of God’s love in the world.

We are called also to be Hannahs. Hannah, in a prototype of the song that will be sung by Mary at the beginning of her calling, sees the world through the eyes of God. How blest are those behind razor wire, or hunger striking in Nauru, as they believe in hope for their children. How blest are those in the impoverished hospital wards of Africa, the women and children dying of HIV Aids, their husbands long gone one way or another. How blest are those trapped in cycles of unemployment and unemployability, those failed by education systems unsuited to their needs and stories. How blessed are those who mourn: ‘you raise up the poor from the deep, and lift the needy from the ash heap’ (1 Sam 2.8). Although it is hard, we are called to touch the untouchables (some of us will recall the Baptist missionary Graham Staines who died with his sons in India for doing precisely that) and to love the unlovable: no-one pretends that is easy, but it is your vocation and mine.

We are called also, though, to see through the limitations of time and glimpse the eternities of God. When we stand at the graves of those we love – as many of you have and all of us will – we are called to glimpse the hope of eternity. When I deliver the last rites to the dying I whisper the strange words ‘we all go down to the dust and weeping at the grave we make our song, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia’.  They are strange words, but they make sense only if, in the journey of death we see the glimpse of eternal life, and in the gentle (or let’s be honest, with Dylan Thomas, sometimes ungentle) beckoning of God we glimpse a dynamic and inviting eternity of life. Jesus, the Temple, invites us through the conduit that is his body, through the veil, through trials and persecutions and sufferings and death, into the birth of eternity. That is the journey in which you and I share, and on which we can whisper words of justice and of resurrection-hope for those who hurt around us.

TLBWY

Judged by a dead woman

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, November 11th, 2012 (ORDINARY SUNDAY 32)

Readings:    Ruth 3.1-5, 13-17
        Psalm 127
        Hebrews 9.23-28
        Mark 12.38-44

As I have indicated in my notes* on the second of our Markan scenes, the glimpse of the widow at the Temple treasury (probably a first century equivalent of an auto-teller / handy-bank / hole in the wall, set up to receive but not to issue cash) should not be romanticised. It often was in my boarding school chapel experience (my only childhood exposure to the texts of Christianity), and this was probably not atypical of the teaching of the churches in the mid-twentieth century. It is too easy to read the scene through western eyes, expecting that God will, perhaps in the person of Jesus, somehow miraculously intervene in this poor woman’s plight, patting her on the back for her self-sacrificing generosity, and sending her home with a shopping trolley full of groceries as a reward. To understand the desperate nature of such a woman’s plight we need instead to picture the women we seen in media footage from refugee camps in, for example, Sudan or Somalia, their wasted breasts too impoverished to provide the nurture their near-dead child so desperately needs, their gnarled hands and bodies suggesting seventy years of life experience rather than often no more than the twenty that is the chronological truth.

There are questions we cannot ask of this text – Jesus so far as we can see does nothing to intervene in the plight of the woman. She becomes a powerful symbol of the corruption and evil of a state – in this case the Roman Empire, though the previous scene has some disturbing things to say about religious leaders, too – that leaves its most vulnerable members to die. The intertwining of religious and civil leadership in Mark’s telling of the Jesus story should warn us against any attempt to become too cosy in finger-pointing at the state: in Vladimir Putin’s Russia it would appear church and state are once more cosily in bed. While that is not the case here there are often dark mutterings when church leaders speak too noisily about issues such as migration or poverty, and I suspect we compromise ourselves even in the 21st century far more than radical interpreters of the gospel would like us to. In particular we compromise ourselves when we reduce the gospel to a cosy programme of personal salvation.

Our woman, then, is a victim of greed, corruption and self-interest, and the indictment Jesus delivers to a society that deprioritises basic human needs – today we would say human rights – is, the scene suggests, a society that has lost any ability to echo or foreshadow the values of God’s reign. This woman – already cast to the outer of society by a social structure that saw women to have value only insofar as they produced children – this woman will die, and, assuming this was an actual scene in the life of Jesus, almost certainly did die soon after these events.

What is dwelling deep in the DNA of this series of scenes in Mark’s gospel-telling is an acidic critique of the abuse of power. The widow is the victim of those who construct self-serving structures in the fabric of society that ensure only men have rights, and that women’s only function is a procreative one. While we might pretend that this is so first century, we might also recall that it is only in the last month that a US politician claimed that women who conceive a child by rape should see that child as a gift of God. While I have worked pastorally with one woman who raised a child conceived by rape, I would never in a million years impose that decision on any victim of a violent crime. Similarly we have been watching only this past week as the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church effectively stall any attempt at instigating a Royal Commission into sexual abuse by clergy. The abuse of power by clergy or other pastoral and therapeutic workers who sexually or psychologically offend against those in their care, while not the elusive unforgivable sin, is nevertheless a brutal abuse of privilege, and any attempt by the institutional church to stymie investigations is a betrayal of the gospel.

Lest this be seen as an attack on our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic church, I remember only too well in my days in the ABC producing a documentary that investigated a brutal betrayal of a young woman within the Anglican Church in the Diocese of Sydney, and know of many other cases across the spectrum of churchmanship and theology. Where we have betrayed those in our care we must confess to our sins and accept the punishment that is appropriate.

When the gospels relate Jesus’ abhorrence of those who call themselves ‘father’ and 'parade phylacteries in the market-place', or as our reading today more generally puts it ‘like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces’ the critique is not of titles or clothing choices, liturgical or otherwise, but of oppressive and exploitative attitudes. The titles or clothes I use have nothing to do with my effectiveness as an ambassador of the vulnerable Christ – no more than do the choices you make. What does matter is the decisions you and I make about the ways in which we represent Jesus in the community into which God has called us: do we represent a grasping and dictatorial, oppressive God, or do we represent the welcoming and compassionate vulnerable God revealed in Christ of the Cross?

We can major in the minors, getting hung up on externals, or we can realise that the self-revelation of God that we are called to emulate starts not in a private hospital but a manger, and ends not in splendour but on a criminal’s cross.  The love of God is revealed in defencelessness and dare I say it even inefficiency, not in the magnificence of a carefully choreographed display of efficiency and power.

The impoverished woman of the temple almost certainly died in her poverty. We strip Christianity of its message and its meaning if we leave her there. If we leave her there with no more than the hope of social reconstruction and a better society one day then history suggests we are deluded. If we leave her there with just the hope of pie in the sky then we are open to charges of otherworldliness and  psychopathic disinterest in the plight of the pain-filled.

We must do better than that: this woman, or indeed all those left oppressed in the marketplace by the Scribes and the Pharisees of every century, including victims of those pretending to  proclaim the name of Jesus, look at us with the eyes and ears of judgement. What have I done to touch those around me with the message of Easter hope and restitution? What have I done to ameliorate the plight of those at the bottom of the heap? To be honest my answer is ‘precious little’. May God forgive me, and empower me and you to do more.


TLBWY

* NOTES ON THE GOSPEL READING: Mark 12.38-44

Let us not romanticize the woman placing her mite in the Treasury. This woman was cactus. There was no ambulance at the foot of the cliff, let alone safety net at the top. This observation on the part of Jesus is a telling indictment of a corrupt religious structure, and will be followed in the next scene by his promise to ‘tear down’ the whole corrupt edifice. The question we must ask, as our religious institutions teeter on the brink of financial collapse, is whether this too might be the work of the Spirit, stripping away our Linus blankets and throwing us back on the justice and compassion that is the heart of the gospel message

Possums in the headlights of history

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, November 4th, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 31)

Readings:    Ruth 1.1-18
        Psalm 146
        Hebrews 9.11-15
        Mark 12.13-17, 28-34

As we reach towards the end of the liturgical year and its sometimes slightly eccentric ordering of the gospels we find ourselves if not at the pointy end of Mark’s gospel – we were there before Easter – then certainly at the pointy end of his portrayal of the teaching or public ministry of Jesus. In the telling of the gospel story the disciples are increasingly obtuse and obdurate (or if you don’t like my little cascade of o-words, dull-witted and stubborn), increasingly not getting it. It’s probable that to some extent Mark wanted to convey an important message with this portrayal, related to the remarkable power that he engenders with his famous original ending, when he closes his narrative with the women standing, mesmerised at the tomb, possums in the headlights of history: ‘and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’ (16.8). Yup, and yet they overcame their human fear, and you and I heard the message, along with millions of others: he is not here, he is risen. The frightened women and the obtuse men … yet the message reached us, and God willing, may even, even in the 21st century, reach others through us. For it is not on our intelligence or our bravery on which the gospel depends, but on the Spirit of God.

So we are at the – or a – pointy end of Mark. The questioners are making no pretence of engaging with Jesus, now. Like Nicodemus, who in John’s gospel account comes to Jesus in the dead of night, the dead of darkness (but gets it oh so right by the end of the gospel-story) these interlocutors of Jesus are not in a frame of mind to ‘get it’. They want only to trap Jesus. Rather than looking at the testimony of his own life of love and justice and compassion they look at him only through the prism their own fears and hatreds, and will no longer hear his summons to love and resurrection hope. They come with questions, but these are hostile questions, and hostility is the opposite of openness to compassionate love.

Let us not pretend that Christians are not in some way prone to narrow minded hostility. I remember only too well the young convert that I once was, attending every visiting speaker’s seminar at my undergrad university, armed to the teeth with hostility and self-righteousness, determined to bring the speakers down so that those gathering to hear them would hear nothing but my version of the gospel. Thank God my arrogance was soon eroded, and rather than seeking to undermine those who came I learned, at least some of the time, to listen, to learn, to adapt and utilise the wisdom they often brought with them. One in particular, recently deceased Māori activist Hone Kaa, was to become one of the single most influential figures in the formation of my faith, once I had stopped futilely attempting to argue with him, and agreed instead to listen. He taught me much about the gospel and colonialism, and I will never regret it.

I suspect we have all seen it from time to time, and seen it, too, amongst those who purport to bear the name ‘Christian’. I have many times since my own belligerence was bashed out of me (metaphorically and verbally) by Hone Kaa seen similar Christians, attending a meeting only in order to spew their own preconceived formulae, and to attempt to silence those who hold opposing positions. To some extent politics will always be politics, but there is a difference between life-giving engagement and the narrow-minded and hostile debating that seeks only to trap others. It is possible to win a debate and miss the faith, and far too often it seems to me that the fruits of compassion and love are not in the arsenals of the clever people, but in the baskets of the gentle. This is hardly surprising of course, if we seek to follow the Jesus who said blessed are the meek, the humble, the peacemakers, and added, on another occasion, by their fruits shall you know them.

In the end I will tend to look at the love-quality of the people I encounter.  Love of course will not always be a mere warm fuzzy feeling, but entail too a dimension of justice-seeking struggle,  a striving to proclaim in action then word the characteristics of the reign of God embodied in the life and teachings of Jesus. I am utterly aware of my own inadequacies in that direction, but can pray that by the grace of God the rough edges of my inadequacies will continue to be chipped away. Around me I will see individuals, both within and beyond the apparent parameters of the Jesus community, who utterly reflect the compassionate and loving justice of God. I will see others, both within and beyond the apparent parameters of the Jesus community, that utterly fail to do so. I have met mean-spirited Christians and Christ-spirited atheists (though either might not thank me for the description), and know that the Spirit of God is at work far beyond the boundaries of my or the Church’s expectation.

To say this is both to state the obvious and paradoxically to sidestep myriad theological questions. So let it be. Once more as we are confronted by the bad guys in Mark’s gospel-account we must ensure that we are not amongst them, dictating terms to the divine, limiting the possibilities of God. The disciples are obtuse, we can acknowledge, but ultimately they are striving to serve God and God’s values, and ultimately, like the frightened women, we know they got it right. It is our task to ensure, in all our weakness, that we do too, surrendering ourselves to the transforming Spirit of God, surrendering to the texts of our faith, our liturgies, surrendering in prayer and worship. The God who is love will continue to transform willing human hearts into hearts of love. Our task is to ask God to transform us, too.

TLBWY