Get out of your chair and weep

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 22
(1^st SEPTEMBER) 2013

 

Readings:        Jeremiah 2.4-13

                        Psalm 81.1, 10-16
                        Hebrews 13.1-8, 15-16
                        Luke 14. 1-14

 

There was in the second century of Christianity a remarkable tussle between what would eventually emerge as Christian orthodoxy and the teachings of a bishop, later excom­municated, named Marcion of Sinope. Marcion was the ultimate expression of what we call supercessionist or replacement theology, which teaches that the relationship between God and the Hebrew people has been utterly succeeded by the relationship between God and the Christ-following community. Marcion taught defiantly that the Hebrew Scriptures were to be jettisoned – along with, as it happens, a fair chunk of the New Testament. I suspect there’s an awful lot of Marcion in Anglicanism – and while he would have the advantage of making our liturgies shorter I believe the early fathers were absolutely right to throw out his teachings.

We throw out the prophets at great peril. But we need to ensure that we read them intelligently: they are speaking God’s timeless truths to God’s people, to the people that claim to be in any way followers of God, beholden to God, redeemed by God, servants of God. As I have suggested before, too often pseudo- or quasi-Christian preachers have treated them as if they have some cryptic message to the secular nations in which we live, but except insofar as both our would-be leaders are Christian believers I suspect that God is not greatly concerned with party politics. I suspect the noise of the western world’s greed has long since deafened us to the cajoling of the prophets, and I doubt we’ll hear their voice too clearly until our infrastructure completely collapses in its bitter silent spring.

Nevertheless, if we claim to worship and serve the God of both Testaments we throw out the stern admonitions of the prophets at great peril. Jeremiah is no bundle of laughs, and if we can read him without acute discomfort then we are clearly cauterizing the nerve endings of our faith. Christianity was never intended to be a form of entertainment: indeed when the unknown author of Hebrews describes his writing as “a word of exhortation” (in the sentences following today’s excerpt) he is making clear that his concerns are deadly serious: Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. I have a sneaking suspicion Messrs Rudd and Abbott – Kevin Abbott and Tony Rudd as we have taken to calling them – may choose not to read that passage today!It is dangerous to ignore this passage and others like it.

It is dangerous to disregard the message that occurs a myriad of myriad times throughout the scriptures that tells us that the God of Jesus Christ identifies with the vulnerable and the hurting. The bible is a deeply unsettling collection of works and it should and hopefully does make us squirm: I am constantly reminded that our relationship with the God we worship is not a cosy mateship but a journey that begins on our knees (preferably literally as well as metaphorically).

So it is no coincidence or side-issue that the words of Jesus, while often extending an invitation to us, do not leave us in a place of cheerful self-satisfaction. Whose are the seats we claim at the metaphorical table? As an institution Christianity for centuries claimed the seats of honour, expecting to be a leader in the community – and by the grace of God we still have some, if diminishing, voice in society. But to claim that place we have to dig increasingly deep into our integrity – and to have integrity we have to dig increasingly deep into our dependence on God.

If there were a message emerging for us in the current decades it is that we have grasped, seized the wrong places at the table, and that the broken and hurting and spat-upon are being offered those places in our stead. It is I think no coincidence that Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, and even more significantly the Pope, have been making reconciliatory statements to the gay community in recent months: while not necessarily becoming a neon pathway to all comers, all lifestyles, or an “anything goes” Christian journey I think we have to admit that our fears and our prejudices and even our hypocrisies have often led us deeply, deeply astray.

As a Christian community we no longer have big sticks to wave. We can only seek God’s cleansing spirit to heal and remould us in Christlike image, day by day.  “Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me”, we often sang: it is a dangerous prayer but it is a prayer that should not be too far from our 21^st Century lips. We can no longer wield big sticks, but I believe in the brokenness that the institutional church is experiencing we may be experiencing God’s greatest gift. We are being led back to lives of compassion and lives of prayer the likes of which I suspect we have not really experienced since biblical times. We are seeing our institutions crumble, but we are not seeing God turn away from the People of God: we are seeing God summoning us to be what we should be. We are seeing God calling us to be a servant people, a welcoming and a hospitable people.

We’d best not believe with Marcion in a supercessionist theology, or we may just find it is us who have been superseded. There is an ancient and obsolete word that I like to use: ensample. It pretty much means “example”, but perhaps we can imbue it with more weight than its more common, modern counterpart. By the grace of God and only by the grace of God we can and will one day again be ensample to a community embedded in meanness and hatred: when we remember that we were once journeyers in the wilderness, when we remember that we were once lost, when we remember that without God we are mere dross, then we can be the ensample God calls us and helps us to be, and we may once more be invited to sit at table.

 TLBWY

Somersaults in the aisles of eternity?

Occasionally it is necessary shamelessly to steal from others: the following is one of those observations that probably leaves many people wishing they had made it first, not least me. Under the heading “10 Ways We Water Down the Gospel (let’s admit, we all do it)” Benjamin Corey observes the following:

• 1.       We water down the Gospel when we invite people to trust Jesus for the afterlife… but not this life.
• 2.       We water down the gospel when we exclusively use the concept of “penal substitution” to explain the Gospel.
• 3.       We water down the gospel when we over emphasis sins rarely mentioned in scripture, while conveniently neglecting the ones that are talked about constantly.
• 4.       We water down the gospel when we explain away the whole nonviolent love of enemies part.
• 5.       We water down the Gospel when we eliminate the centrality of social justice.
• 6.       We water down the gospel when we tell people it’s clear and simple.
• 7.       We water down the gospel when we exclude people.
• 8.       We water down the gospel when we make it sound like following Jesus is easy (Spoiler Alert ... it’s not!).
• 9.       We water down the gospel when we make it about changing someone else, instead of first changing ourselves.
• 10.   We water down the Gospel when we attempt to live it out in isolation, instead of in the context of community.

If you want to see Corey’s explanation of these points visit his blog, at

 http://www.formerlyfundie.com/watering-down-the-gospel/

It is far more comfortable to revel in a so-called gospel whose focus is no more than the individual’s eternal destiny, than to engage with a gospel that engages us in the whole-of-life challenge of justice, and to which questions of the “hereafter” are an adjunct.

As it happens, after 35 years’ reflection on all this faith stuff, I suspect the “eternal” dimensions of faith are a key component, a logical corollary to the Easter event. They are the logical outcome, if you like, of God in the Jesus event speaking a word of hope that transcends all injustice, even the injustices of bereavement and loss.  There was a brief time when I took the “my salvation = eternal life for me” angle as the core message of the gospel. There was a longer period when I dismissed any sense of personal continuation after death altogether. Eventually I emerged into a perspective that says, “Sure, death is not the final word, or God would be smaller, less powerful than death. But there’s a whole heap of sorting out we need to do before we turn somersaults in the aisles of eternity.” It is to this sorting out that Corey is pointing us. God is not my cosy mate, and “salvation” is not in my hip pocket.

Corey reminds us, sternly, that when we turn the gospel into a private eternity-insurance policy we have somewhat missed the point of Jesus.

Feed on me?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 21
(25^th AUGUST) 2013

 

Readings:        1 Kings 8.22-30, 41-32
                        Psalm 84
                        Ephesians 6.10-20
                        John 6.56-69

 There was a trend amongst biblical scholars in the mid-twentieth century to ensure that all biblical texts neatly fitted their preconceived notions of what the bible should say. To be honest there is a degree to which we will always read scriptures out of our own prejudices, which I precisely why we need to read interpretations and applications from around the world and across the socio-economic trajectories of faith communities. There are boundaries to interpretation – Jesus was not a pink fluffy duck from Alaska – but far less rigorist and tidy barriers than we sometimes like to think.

So in the mid twentieth century scholars divided along party lines. Liberal protestant scholars said that there was a strong eucharistic theme in the Jesus-language of eating flesh and drinking blood, but that the passages were added to the text later. Conservative Protestant scholars said that this was bollocks, and there was no eucharistic reference at all. Catholic scholars said this was all bollocks and of course there was and always had been a eucharistic reference because that’s exactly what Jesus intended. I confess I scraped through my first year at theological college by saying “A said … B said … C said …”, then more or less closing my eyes and dropping a pin to decide who I would agree with. Somehow I scraped through.

But are we here pointed towards the centrality of the eucharist to Christian faith? As Jesus speaks of his flesh and blood are we meant to make links to eucharistic feeding, the feeding we will share in the communion shortly? I do not think we can drive a wedge between this saying and Jesus’ intentions: over and again he made links between the meaning of his life and the knowledge that that life, that eternal life would be made manifest in the Christian liturgical rites of bread and wine. The “how” of those rites had nothing to do with later mediaeval arguments about the nature of the wine and the bread: they are based on the fundamental Jewish (and, incidentally, so far as I can see, Indigenous Australian) belief that past events are absolutely made present in subsequent actions that re-present them. In the Passover rites of the Upper Room the Hebrews’ miraculous escape from Egypt was made present once again. In the rites of Jesus’ last Supper past events of Passover and future events of his own passing over from life to death to life were made present, and he here commands his followers to make the events present by gathering and feeding on him over and again.

By which in part he meant eucharistic feeding. But I think there is an equally important ingredient of doing the works of Jesus, becoming the hands and feet of Jesus in God’s world. And for that matter, if I were tied up and tickled till I submitted, I suspect I would be forced to admit that the doing of justice is a far more important means by which, as it were, to “feed” on the life energies of Jesus. I make little secret of my belief that eucharist is the means par excellence by which we encounter the fullness of the meaning of Jesus, the fullness of God, but, if I may echo Paul, “if we have not love”, is all the eucharistic encounter in the universe worth a brass razoo? Are we not, if I may distort words considerably, not also called to be eucharist, to be the body and blood and incarnation of Jesus in the world around us?

This may indeed be why the disciples who were Jesus’ first audience were heavy-hearted. I doubt any of us can live up to this demand – and indeed Paul’s understanding of the matter is that none of us can. But we can open ourselves up again and again to the strengthening touch of God’s redemptive, renewing Spirit, who does have a habit of making perhaps not a silk purse but something somewhat improved out of the sow’s ears of our lives.

But what should we make of the “one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father” of the latter part of this Jesus saying? Are those outside the eucharistic fellowship somehow therefore to be seen as reprobate and beyond the reach of divine grace? That is certainly the premise on which much evangelistic and missionary endeavour has been built. I am less likely to see things in this way. If we are the hands and feet and body and blood of Jesus in the community then we must be energised and visible in our presence in the community, involved as a people of God even if sometimes, as we speak for the standards of God, we are far from flavour of the month (or any other period of time). As I suggested last week, in a time when our leading politicians appear to be devoid of any moral bearing on what may well be the number one ethical question of our time, perhaps we should be – like some of our brothers and sisters – conspicuous by our compassion and subversion. I admit however that ways to do so have slipped through my fingers by and large these past two years, and the question remains in my too hard basket.

I digress. Or do I? It seems to me that as Jesus challenges us to eat his flesh and drink his blood he is challenging us to be all that we can do to be his redemptive presence in our community. I happen to believe that the liturgical rites that he may or may not be as it were pre-alluding to are a source of strengthening, reinforcing us in the mission to be the hands and feet we are called to be. Perhaps the twentieth century biblical scholars could not see the wood for the trees: we all read the bible out of our own shoes, but we are all called to be the presence of God in the world. We can do that effectively only if and as we immerse ourselves in the disciplines of faith, of prayer, of fellowship, of study and of sacramental engagement, to name just some, to which he calls us. He is calling us to a whole-of-being commitment to which, ironically, we can only aspire with his help.

TLBWY

a piece of shameless self-promotion!

https://wipfandstock.com/store/Babylons_Cap_Reflections_on_the_Book_of_Revelation

Hopefully a sort of meaningful analysis of one or Christianity's stranger texts. Please consider purchasing (I gain about $0.93 per volume sold!). But I promise it's not too boring.

Howls of rage

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 20
(18^th AUGUST) 2013

 

Readings:        Isaiah 5.1-7

                        Psalm 80.1-2, 8-19
                        Hebrews 11.29 – 12.2
                        Luke 12.49-59

This time last week I was in Melbourne, back in the cathedral in which I was ordained a quarter of a century ago. Hanging on the external wall of that cathedral is a seven metre banner, towering over Melbourne’s busiest intersection: “Let’s Fully Welcome Refugees.” It was hung last week, but was ordered long before Messrs Rudd and Abbott set about out-toughing each other over the question of refugees. As it happens inside the cathedral the words of the preacher, Professor Andrew McGowan, were hanging with equal poignancy, as he drew inescapable likenesses between the refugee status of the Holy Family following the birth of Jesus, and the continuing plight of those risking death to reach these shores.

Before we say any more, let me reiterate that, 1) it is not illegal to seek asylum, under international law, and 2) of the boat people who have reached Australian shores more than 90% have been found to be genuine refugees, and certainly not economic opportunists. These are facts that are conveniently dropping out of the discourse of our leaders, as they use blatant fear tactics and echo the worst of the Asian Invasion and White Australia rhetoric of bygone days in attempts to get elected. An outstanding cartoon at Crikey.com portrayed it well, with the two leaders declaring, amongst other inanities, “We are going to resettle all boat people on the planet Mercury. We are declaring war on Sri Lanka and Iran. We will move Australia to the other side of New Zealand and we are going to make everybody under 60 to join the army which will report to this pencil”.
[http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0134/9672/products/TheBastardOff_grande.jpg?252]

In my days as a Pentecostal Christian it was not uncommon to hear stirring prophesies, so-called, about the wrath of God that was being poured out upon the God-abandoning nations. Such rants usually focussed on sexual issues, and issued the threat of earthquakes, tsunamis or the like that would be visited by God upon peoples and societies daring to hold views other than the preachers’. It always occurred to me that it was a no-brainer to prophesy mighty earthquakes in the shaky isles in which I was living, but, be that as it may, these charlatan practices still continue. There will be, this very weekend, preachers declaring that the earthquakes currently shaking my home region of New Zealand are a direct result of that country’s liberalisation of marriage laws to include homosexual couples, while in the States each new hurricane or earthquake is accompanied by a howl of declarations that that these natural phenomena are a direct result of electing a black president, or permitting gays to serve in the armed forces, or the infamous Roe v Wade decision.

Yet the howl of rage that runs through the prophets – in today’s case the prophet Isaiah – has very little to do with the personal codes of holiness and inhibited sexuality so easily championed by the kind of preachers I am alluding to. While there are the occasional references to sexual mores in the Scriptures of our faith, there is almost infinitely more rage against leaders who exploit the vulnerable. Isaiah’s famous lament of the vineyard is among the most manifest: we can run from God’s wrath, but we cannot hide, Isaiah suggests:

                         I will tell you
                         what I will do to my vineyard.
                         I will remove its hedge,
                         and it shall be devoured;
                         I will break down its wall,
                         and it shall be trampled down.

Might it not be that these words are directed at us, as a nation or perhaps just as a people of God, precisely because at least since the time of Pauline Hanson we have allowed the politics of hatred and exclusion to dominate our discourse? We conveniently forget that, our aboriginal sisters and brothers aside, we are all immigrants (and they are too – though that is perhaps an impossible timespan to consider). This land with its wealth for toil and golden soil has always been a land, in all its harshness, in which fugitives and refugees, the hunted and the hated have built new lives of hope. We may build narratives of subversion around lawless larrikins like Ned Kelly, it seems, but only if the heroes of the narratives have white skin and blue eyes, and wear tin helmets, not burqas.

As the leaders of our two major political forces jostle to find more and more frightening ways to exclude what Bruce Springsteen calls “the hungry and the hunted”, we are in fact seeing the wrath of God, not because we have liberal sexual mores, but because we have frightening unjust social mores. Analysts are reporting that this election, now the deck-chair shifting of Labor Leadership is over, is generating the greatest yawn in decades, and we can be assured that when, on September 8^th, we waken to the government we deserve, we will have strayed still further from the compassionate and welcoming love that should be the hallmark of a people made in the image of God.

I am not advocating open slather on the high seas: an open door to immigration stopped once the European expansionists had decided we had grabbed all we could for ourselves, and while our history is dark, there cannot really be an utterly open door. Fr Frank Brennan, in a stunning address at my alma mater this week past, observed  with characteristic sageness

If shock and awe measures are to be adopted by our elected leaders, they should put to rest their differences over means, and they should adopt shock and awe measures only once they have done their homework, minimising the prospect of damage and always maintaining responsibility for unaccompanied minors and other vulnerable persons who have reached Australia.

  [http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/08/16/3827366.htm]

I fear, whatever happens on September 7^th – and I have long since surrendered hope that any political party will embody decency – that we will have a government that symbolizes the fear and greed that are “a”, if not “the” dominant story of our time. We as a Christian community are, I believe, seeing the signs of the times. Prophets like Brennan or McGowan, or the banner-hangers of St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne aside, we are generally snoozing in our comfort zones – and I speak of myself as well. Liberal theologians do not often speak of the wrath of God, but I suspect we are seeing it emblazoned across our current era, as our churches close and dioceses shrink. Nevertheless, despite the pain that lay ahead, even the prophet Isaiah saw that the future is God’s, and that one day, long after the trampling of the hedges, a new time of God’s compassion would come. It will be so again – in God’s time. The bearers of hope may even wear burqas and be “of a middle eastern appearance”. Like Jesus.

 TLBWY

Queue jumpers and Jesus

THOUGHTS ON THE GOSPEL
 Luke 12.49-59

Jesus does not often engage in blatant apocalyptic language, but when he does so it does not exactly lack energy. When I was involved in Pentecostal churches this was a favourite passage, reassuring us believers that soon we would be raptured out of human trials, and our nasty neighbours would be left to be (for ever) consumed by fire. The whiny voice of Larry Norman singing a song based on a similar apocalyptic passage (“I wish we’d all been ready”) still sends shivers down my spine.

So it should: apocalyptic is designed to trigger a visceral reaction. You’ll have to read my book (free advertising: even as I type it is coming off the press in the USA*) for my readings of apocalyptic, but it was designed both to comfort and cajole. It was not designed to induce a yawn! But in this brief scene Jesus uses the classic apocalyptic motif of families turning on one another, as one goes towards and others go away from Christ. Are these condemnations of our non-believing siblings to an eternal hellfire? I think not. They are a realistic image though.

I often try to picture Christmas dinners around the Costello (remember Peter, Tim?) family table. Refugees? Boat people? Illegals? Queue jumpers? The Cathedral in which I was ordained, right in the heart of Melbourne, is currently sporting a massive banner: “Let’s fully welcome refugees”. One imagines Tim and Peter Costello agreeing to disagree on this. Sadly, Mr Rudd and Mr Abbott seem to agree to agree: send the alleged “queue jumpers” (er, what queue?) somewhere else. What would Jesus do?

I was in St Paul’s Cathedral last Sunday, as Professor Andrew McGowan delivered a stinging sermon on just this. I agree with McGowan: I sure as hell don’t think Jesus would send refugees to already stretched and sometimes violent communities. I agree too with Malcolm Fraser that even that threat will not deter those who have watched their sisters raped and their parents or children killed. “Fathers and sons will turn against one another, and mothers and daughters will do the same. Mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law will also turn against each other”. The Costellos probably know that already.

Some of you will fume at me for even writing this, but I don’t believe the gospel leaves us any choice: Jesus, once the queue-jumping refugee in Egypt, demands that gospel bearers open doors of love.

*Babylon's Cap. Now available through Customer Services, at Wipf and Stock
www.wipfandstock.com