thoughts on prayer

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE

EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (25th July 2004) 2004

Readings:

Hosea 1.2-10

Psalm 85

Colossians  2.6-15

Luke 11.1-13

A week ago Anne challenged us to spend three minutes a day in prayer. It is easy to hear such a challenge, easy to mean well at the time, but our lives of faith are such that it is likely that few of us, if any met the challenge. I don’t even mean this judgementally. If I did I would have to admit, if I have any conscience at all, that I too fall short in my life of prayer. For that reason alone I am not tempted to do a hands up if you failed Anne’s challenge. My hand, too would be up, for in the maelstrom of every life there can be no doubt that God is often squeezed out. It is as well that in the liturgy in which we connect with God Sunday by Sunday we are trained to say sorry, to seek God’s forgiveness where we sin in ignorance, weakness or deliberate fault, in co-mission or in o-mission. I make no claim to perfection in faith.

A week ago, we contracted also to pray for Fiona’s father. Perhaps there too we fell short of our intentions, though perhaps with an awareness of a concrete need more of us passed the test of integrity. Again, there will be no ‘hands up if’, for we do not need our noses rubbing in our failings. Yet it would do no harm to remind ourselves that our undertakings of faith are serious matters, and that we do need to learn increasing discipline in our walk of faith, our practice of the presence of God.

We need to learn the habit of prayer, in all its many forms. There is the sense in which we seek to make our whole life a practice of prayer: ‘make my life a prayer to you’ sang Keith Green. But our life is more likely to become a prayer as we are immersed in the practices of prayer.

These are many and varied. Prayer can be, at its least, no more than a bullet rattled off Godwards in a passing moment. These are the moments in which we remember a situation in passing: So and so has asked us to pray for him or her and as we head out to the washing line we are momentarily reminded to mouth a quick ‘Lord, bless or heal or be with so and so in his/her time of need.’ We could do worse, and if we are to be honest there is much prayer that takes this form. But it is hardly the language of an enduring and stable love life, and enduring and deepening relationship between beloved life-partners. When our married conversations become no more than ‘nice dinner, thanks’, then we are hardly living out our marriage vows to have or to hold, but merely to co-exist in a state of coincidence. Our lives pf prayer can reach the same stagnation. Nice day, God. Remember mum. See ya. A focussed and intentional quiet time or use of the daily office is more likely to build a strong and growthful relationship with the God we claim to love.

The prayer Jesus teaches his church is a more disciplined and demanding effort. It too can become no more than a vain repetition, to talisman to be rattled off to make a day go well. This was not the intention of Jesus. This is a carefully crafted prayer that should not only be repeated in its form as we have in Matthew and Luke’s gospel accounts, but should also be the basis of most if not all prayer. It is a carefully crafted prayer, a template for focussed approach to the creator.

The Lord’s Prayer is addressed to God in a tone of respect, its phraseology located in the distance yet recognizing the accessibility of God – our God. This is God, our God, accessible yet beyond us ‘in the heavenlies,’ the unreachable-but-by-grace places.

The Lord’s Prayer is addressed to God in a tone of praise. It is not a tone of mere flattery or obsequiousness but a tone recognizing the distance between divine perfection and our too flawed humanness.

The Lord’s Prayer is addressed to God in a tone of petition. It is ‘other-centred’, praying for a Reign yet to come. This prayer is not for our benefit alone but to the benefit of all creation: come lord, come, come and wind up into your eternal self all of creation.

The Lord’s Prayer is also addressed to God in a tone of petition that is self-centred; give us bread of heaven today, give us bread of heaven tomorrow? The Greek tense is uncertain but this may be as much a plea for the food of the eschatological banquet as tucker for the day at hand. Either way it is a gently and appropriately self-focussed petition.

The Lord’s Prayer is addressed to God in a tone of challenge, challenging not God but as we speak it: forgive as we are forgiving, forgive us to the extent that we are forgiving. Dare we pray thus, making our being forgiven dependent on our offering forgiveness? Yet Christian doctrine hints that we do not stand alone in this, that by the help of the Spirit of God we too can learn to be forgiving as the Christ, with whom the Spirit invades us was forgiving even of his executioners.

The Lord’s Prayer is addressed to God in a tone of challenge, not a bad way but in a manner that God has given us permission to use. Luke’s exclusive story of the importunate widow gives us permission to pester God as we pray for those we love, for those who suffer, and as we continue to see no answers to pester all the more.

The Lord’s Prayer is addressed to God and challenges us to believe in answers. The analysis of countless thinkers before us is timeless, however trite it may seem: the answer to our petition may be yes, or no, or wait. However trite that response and analysis may be we must spend a lifetime growing into its wisdom.

And always, The Lord’s Prayer challenge us to offer ourselves, our souls and bodies as we say liturgically, to be an answer to our own prayer. Can I expect an answer to prayers for those who suffer when I and my lifestyle impose suffering on those around me? The implications of this dimension are myriad, endless, and take a lifetime of self-offering to be realised.

Finally, The Lord’s Prayer is addressed to God in a tone of doxology, of praise and adoration, that takes us back to an ‘Otherwards,’ outwards, away from ourselves focus. By immersing ourselves in life with that focus we may at last become the Christ-bearers we are called to be, living for others as or Messiah did and does.

TLBWY

Spirit of the Lord ... proclaim

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE

and at St Luke’s, Augathella

FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (4^th July) 2004

Readings: 

2 Kings 2.5.1-14

Psalm 30
Gal. 6.1-18
Luke 10.1-24

Once again, as we continue our journey through Luke, we find a story that is peculiar to him. Why does Luke tell us this story? Mark and Matthew tell us of a sending of the twelve disciples, with instructions similar to those given to Luke’s seventy, but the differences outweigh the similarities.

Perhaps as he told this story, Luke recalled the story from the book of Numbers. So the Lord said to Moses, “Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them; bring them to the tent of meeting, and have them take their place there with you. I will come down and talk with you there; and I will take some of the spirit that is on you and put it on them; and they shall bear the burden of the people along with you so that you will not bear it all by yourself (Num. 11.16-25). Certainly Luke does not use numerical indicators lightly, and the number “70” would have reminded him of this anointing of the eldership of Israel.

It is equally possible he had in mind another passage, Genesis 10, where, in the Hebrew text, seventy nations or tribes are described as descending from Noah, after the flood. To Luke these nations were all the nations of the world. He tells the Jesus story always with the subsequent events, the Acts of the Apostles, in mind: from the time of the empowerment of the disciples at Pentecost, the word of the gospel reaches out to the ends of the earth, the seventy nations.

It is in the upper room of Pentecost that meaning is given to the teachings on mission given by Jesus. There the voices of the world, disunited by God at Babel at the beginnings of time, are able to speak as one once more. But there is a proviso to the unity: they speak with one voice (not by accident the name of our hymn book) only when they proclaim the deeds of Jesus, the revelation of the purposes of God. The seventy missionaries of the Lukan Jesus are at least in part us, commissioned to rewrite God’s actions at Babel by proclaiming, in action and if necessary in word, God’s transformative justice and compassionate love and demanding judgement throughout space and time.

There is also a tone of urgency in this sending of the seventy. The language is what scholars call “eschatological” a commissioning to be carried out in the shadow of the “eschaton,” the last things of God. The Church has veered between over-emphasis and under-emphasis on this shadow throughout its history. There have been times when the eschaton was no more than the utter enslavement of the earth and its species. There have been times when believers have danced and pranced around and cheerfully taught terrors, or even run out into the desert to watch the crisis unfold.

Neither is a correct response, for we are called to live each day, as each century, under the shadow of the coming judgement. As Luke’s Jesus speaks to his seventy missionaries they are reminded of the urgency, to travel light, to expect the harvest. Do we prioritize, with urgency, the telling of the Jesus story in word and compassionate actions? Do I? Do you? “We have sinned in what we have done, and in what we have not done.”

Yet Jesus offers no theology of retribution. The calling of God’s destruction on those who fail to demonstrate response to the gospel is anti-Christian. Where the missioner is received with Christlike peace, or with compassionate love, there the blessing of God dwells. But where the missioner is rejected, she or he is simply to move on, with a minimum of action, shaking dust from their feet. The wrath of God is expressed not in hellfire, though many preachers would have it that way, but in the disassociation, disconnection, of not knowing God. 

Jesus goes on to pronounce woes on the unrepentant cities, Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum. “Deeds of power” had taken place in these communities. They had received the opportunities open to us as we encounter the gospel, but they demonstrated only cosy nonchalance. Here, rather than in the dust-shaking of the earlier segment, is the warning to the complacent western church: “woe to you, for you have had two thousand years in which to demonstrate compassion, justice, and the love of Christ, and yet you have demonstrated only a lust for power, a greed for wealth, and an obsession with imposing your will on the world around you. Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Mecca and in Beijing they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.”

Ultimately blessings are spoken, too, on those faithful who return, symbolically from all the earth’s communities, and bear witness to the powerful impact that Christ’s healing compassion has on communities they’ve entered: “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” Here the compassionate face of God-in-Christ is seen once more, the one to whom the broken woman or the grieving father or the paralytic reaches out in desperation and hears those oft-repeated words, “Go, your faith has healed you. Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” The demons of divorce from God and Godly compassion are exorcised, and the opening vision of Luke’s vision is being fulfilled: ^

 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

TLBWy

A powerless god?

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE

and at All Souls’, Morven

FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (27^th June) 2004

Readings:  

2 Kings 2.1-2, 6-14

Psalm 77.1-2, 11-20

Gal. 5.1, 13-25
Luke 9.51-62

If we were, as Luke intended, reading his Jesus-story at a sitting, end-to-end, we would when we came to today’s passage notice a sudden shift in direction. A handful of verses before, Jesus with Peter, James and John have been together with the “re-visioned” Moses and Elijah, on the Mount of Transfiguration. In the interim, in Luke’s hands a timeless few verses, Jesus has exorcised a demon-possessed boy, foretold his own suffering and death, and reminded the disciples that the greatest to which they must aspire is the greatness of a powerless child: “Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me; for the least among all of you is the greatest.”

Now Luke indicates to his audience that there is to be a shift in direction. The disciples have not understood the Transfiguration. The disciples have not understood that the way to God is not through greatness but through powerlessness. The disciples have sought to restrict the works of God, complaining when they find an outsider casting out demons in the name of Jesus. The disciples have not, as Jesus pointedly puts it, allowed “these words to sink into [their] ears.” And so Jesus resolutely sets his face towards Jerusalem, for there is now no other way.

This is not a geographical description of the journey that Jesus now takes. In fact his course meanders around many places that would not establish a resolute course from Samaria, where our story has him, to Jerusalem. But Luke likes to use “journeying” as a metaphor, not so much a picture of human life as we tend in our era to use it, (though that too) but as a metaphor for the travel of the gospel. In Luke’s first volume it is critical, as well as historical, that the central events of salvation history take place in and from Jerusalem. In his second volume, as he seeks to demonstrate God’s control over all of history, he wants to demonstrate that events are centred on the centre of the known political world, Rome. Just as Jesus sets his face resolutely for Jerusalem, so Paul is later to be unstoppable in his journey to Rome.

So Luke adds to his Markan material a number of narrative moments that depict the journey of Jesus towards Jerusalem, towards the fulcrum of salvation history. Deliberately he makes echoes of the other great Jewish story of salvation, the stories of Deuteronomy, as the people of Israel journey towards the salvation offered to them by God.

When Luke notes Jesus’ determination, his “setting of face” for Jerusalem, he is deliberately echoing a passage in Isaiah. In Isaiah 50.7 the central character of Isaiah’s poetry, known as the “suffering Servant”, sets his face like a flint to his tormenters. Early Christians saw, as Jesus himself almost certainly saw, echoes of the suffering Servant in the ministry of Jesus. Jesus is called to suffer. The followers of Jesus are, as Paul notes in particular in writing to the Thessalonians, “called to suffer.”  He sets his face like a flint towards Jerusalem, and there can be little ambivalence about all that lies ahead of him there. This is the way of the Cross.

As such it is not the way of either power or ego. That power is not to be a part of Christian proclamation is clear from the start: the Cross in Luke’s hands is not a symbol not of Roman power but of God’s choice of powerlessness. Nor can it be a way of power games – such as the religious power game that entrapped Jews and Samaritans. As we know from the impossibly titled Parable of the Good Samaritan, there was no love between Jews and Samaritans; bitter doctrinal and historical differences surrounded them. There was no surprise in the Samaritans’ refusal to receive travellers heading towards Jerusalem. They were basically duty bound by the tenets of their faith to refuse hospitality to anyone who showed Jewish readiness to worship at the Temple. The hatred was intense, as we note elsewhere, in John’s gospel account, as Jesus engages in a conversation of cut and thrust with a Samaritan woman.

Significantly Samaria was soon to be a fertile ground for Christian evangelism, so that Luke notes carefully in his outline of the apostles’ task: “you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Samaria plays a major role in the spread of Christianity. And this could not have been the case had the very human but un-Christlike wishes of James and John been fulfilled: “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Such is not the way of the Cross, even if it is te way of the OT – and especially our first reading. Such is not way of Cross. Such is not way of cross-bearers/X-bearers. Revenge is a cycle that only breeds hatred and repetition of past hatreds. Only the words of reconciliation and forgiveness break the cycles and breathe the possibilities of God into situations of hatred.

Nor, as our final verses make clear, are security blankets, the comfort-hugging of the foxes in their lairs, nor procrastination of the father-burier (however understandable), nor idolizing the past by the backward looking ploughman: these are not the Way of the Cross. For the treasuring of past hurts, or the selection of comfort zones, or the down-prioritizing of the gospel, or the fossilization of ancient memories, these are all hindrances to the urgent task of Cross proclamation and resolute obedience to the will of the Father. From now on, Luke wants us to be sure; there can be no wavering on the Jerusalem journey. As the weeks go on we will hear much of the challenge of that journey.

TLBWY

Faith in or of Christ?

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE
and at All Souls’, Augathella
SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (13th June) 2004

Readings:      
1 Kings 21.1-21a
Psalm 5.1-7
Gal. 2.15-21

 

It could easily be lost in passing, but a furious debate goes on between those who specialize in the scholarly research into and reading of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, as to whether the phrase we have read as “justified by faith in Jesus Christ” should be read in that way or as “justified by the faith of Jesus Christ.” The two wordings are identical in Greek, and it is in reality impossible to decide which was Paul’s intention. Certainly in the history of reformation- or protestant-influenced interpretation it has been almost always read that we are justified by our faith in Jesus Christ. Yet in recent years there has been an increasing recognition that we can, against all Paul’s best intentions, turn faith itself into a work – that outcome which Paul most loathed – if we develop in some ways from these famous words of Paul the sense that we can in some way bolster up our faith until we too can move mountains. That if we really believe hard, then we can be in some way more justified, more close to God, more able to be the person God would have us be.

Such a reading is fundamentally unchristian, but many of us have heard it. If you really believed your children would be better behaved. If you really believed your disease would be healed. If you really believed then your children would share your faith, your church would grow, your finances would blossom. The variations are endless, and they are an endless spit in the face of Paul and all he saw that was the heart of the gospel.

So was Paul referring to our faith in Christ or to the faith of Christ as being the basis of our journey into God? Certainly were it not for the faith of Jesus of Nazareth in the one he called Abba, and his obedience to his calling to the way of the Cross, we would be left Godforsaken, alienated from the home to which we are called and with no possibility of a passage back. It is by the faith and the fidelity of Jesus the Christ that our access to God is made possible, that we are “made righteous”, as the Greek word we translate as “justified” might equally be translated. It is by the faith of Christ that we are made to be at rights with the creator.

Yet there is also a degree to which our faith must respond, a degree to which we must breathe our “amen” to the opportunities made possible in Jesus. Do we want to be reconnected to the One who makes sense of existence? We can choose a no, or we can choose an amen – a yes, we which to be justified, made into right relationship with the one who awaits us, heals us, calls us.

The broken woman of Luke’s story (only Luke tells us this story in this form, though Matthew and Mark know of a similar situation) is drawn to Jesus of Nazareth by his obvious strength of compassion and justice. We might equally say she is drawn to Jesus by his holiness – I have spoken of him as the unravelling or the revelation of the heart of the Creator. In his actions, in his teaching, in his compassion she has seen the heart of the god for whom she longs, the giver of meaning to her broken and alienated existence. She has a sense of separation from what she wishes and senses she could be, and Jesus is the passport home.

Of course she knows her shortfallings. Those of us who have read the Philip Yancey book What’s so amazing about Grace? will recall the story of the prostitute who longs to find healing: why don’t you go to church, she is asked? Why would I, she answers: I already feel bad about myself, they’d just make me feel worse. It is a powerful indictment of the Christian community. We are not supposed to be a people who make those around us feel unworthy, but bearers of a message that in Christ we have been – Paul’s words – justified, made righteous, made worthy, made welcome in the presence of the healing cleansing, inviting Creator. We need from time to time to be made aware of our need of God, of our shortfallings, but not to dwell on them. We need a route home, to the place of our belonging. We need to hear the word of forgiveness: whether we leap across the chasm and miss the other side by a centimetre or a kilometre we all fall short – we need to have some assurance that at the closing of our days the words “come home, friend” await us. It is clear to Paul and Luke alike that those words await us only on the lips of Jesus the compassionate.

Forgiveness: as word reaches some of us of the forced resignation of Dr Ian George, Archbishop of Adelaide,[1] we could do worse than to remember that this is the most hated word in the Christian lexicon. We live is a society, it seems, that longs neither for forgiveness nor reconciliation, but for bloodlust and revenge. There is no suggestion in the story of the broken woman that Jesus offers a cheap pat on the back for the sinner – though enormous questions remain as to whether this so called sinner is more sinner or sinned against. Like all the women in the Jesus stories, there are strong indications that it is the stone-hurling men who have been in the first place, the abusers. While I would hate to push the comparison too far, we might remember that a media that sexualizes children in advertising, in programmes, in magazines and online, and politicians who fail to lift a finger at the devastation of children in refugee camps, are the same players who have cried for the blood of the archbishop of Adelaide.

We make no plea for cheap grace. If sins have been committed – sins of omission as well as sins of commission – then penalties should be paid. But Luke and Paul alike see clearly that there is no way any of us can claw our way across the chasm that divides us from perfection, from home, from God. The woman knows her brokenness. Ian George admits to his failings – though he will not be thanked for it. We can only start – each of us, each day, but quietly imploring of God that we too might know our need for help on the journey home.

TLBWY

 

 [1] Twelve years later I suspect I might be aware of parallels, albeit less significant, closer to home! 

Exposé of the exposé of the heart of God

SERMON PREACHED AT St AIDAN’S, CUNNAMULLA

SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (16^th May) 2004

Readings:       Acts 16.9-15

                        Psalm

                        Revelation 21.10, 22 – 22.5

                        John 14.23-29

As the public ministry of Jesus picked up momentum – (in John’s gospel version it was a ministry of only one year, not the synoptists’ three) he was clearly becoming aware that his work would need to be carried on without him. This is not to suggest that he had some crystal ball or even divine insight into the future, but rather that he knew by now the extent to which he was pricking the conscience of his own Hebrew people and the conscience of the Roman realm in which he lived and taught. Like a parent pining for the future of their child – (you may have seen the episode of All Saints in which a grandparent understandably frets at the pregnancy of his Downs Syndrome grandchild) – Jesus knows that his followers are capable of losing direction without his presence with them. They have been, God knows, obtuse enough even with him amongst them. But he is human, and to worry about life after we have died is fundamentally human.

He also reveals a clear sense of the working of the Godhead. This in theological terms is not surprising; he is, even in the flesh, fundamentally a part of Godhead. If Jesus is the revelation of the heart and the purposes of God then he recognizes that in the purposes of God, God’s energy and purpose will go on. It will go on through and after his death and after the resurrection that will be the signature, the authentication of God of all that he is and all that he has done. He knows this not as a forlorn hope, and certainly not with the kind of desperate gloom of a Jeremiah, but as an essential certainty. If he is the exposé of the heart of God, then death cannot undo all that he has been. For if death does defeat him, if death undoes his exposé of the heart of God, then death is greater than God, God is less than death, and life is meaningless. Or, as Paul puts it, more are we to be pitied than all people.

Certainly by this stage there is something dark lurking around the periphery of his circle. Judas, as well as Jesus, is making his way towards Jerusalem. Jesus has every opportunity to know that the immediate future is ugly. But he knows too that the heart of God reaches beyond the immediate. According to eleventh century poet Dante, hell has written over its gates the words “abandon hope, all you who enter here.” To give up hope is to enter hell, and Jesus has no intention of leaving his disciples in the depth of any hell. So it is that he begins to tell them of the coming of what we might effectively (if heretically!) call his “other self,” the Paraclete that our translation calls the Comforter. This, Jesus wants his disciples to understand, is the one who will continue the work of exposing the heart of God. The Paraclete, though, who will liberate that exposé from a moment localised in space and time, pinned down in first century Palestine, to an eternity of moments throughout space and time, reaching to 21^st century Cunnamulla, reaching beyond his disciples’ moments and loci and beyond our moments and loci. The vision of Jesus is reaching from the already to the not yet and from space to spacelessness.

So Jesus promises peace, and the Paraclete as the bearer of that peace. There is peace and peace. I experience peace as I cross the God-breathed wide red and brown and occasionally green lands that make up this continent; as I drive to Quilpie or to Birds­ville (or more especially as I stop travelling and be still) I can experience a depth of peace that is beyond words and which hints at the magnificence of God. But such an experience is only a part of the peace of which Jesus speaks, and which, in John’s resurrection stories, he breathes into the lungs of the disciples.

For many years in the history of Christianity the words of peace that we will shortly share in liturgy, words which echo these words of Jesus spoken in our passage and in the resurrection story, were considered so special that they were heard only by the baptised, and baptism itself took place only after up to three years of preparation. The experience of such peace, sacred peace or shalom, was considered to be a foretaste of the coming kingdom of God. These words were considered to be comprehensible only by revelation, not by intellect or habit. The peace of God was and is God’s to give rather than ours to earn.

The shalom of God was more than mere stillness. More, however much I love it, than a landscape or oceanscape that takes breath away by its beauty. Nor in Hebrew thought was the presence of peace just the absence of war. It was the presence of justice, the presence of the God-enabled compassion and justice that seems at times to be so far away from the hearts of the world’s leaders and our leaders. The timelessness and eternity of space of Jesus’ thought was not the absence of walls but the presence of active concern to bring in and give hospitality to the stranger and the outsider. That way they too might know the touch of God so absent in our brutal policies of alienation and extermination. Inclusion and compassion and justice: these would be and can be the signs that the Paraclete of Jesus continues to draw near long after the events of Good Friday and Easter and Pentecost.

And it is we, however small we are, however without hope the task sometimes seems to be, who are called to be the bearers of that hope and comfort and justice and compassion (and to be receivers of it too) long after the events that Jesus was seeing and John narrating in our gospel story. As the early followers of Jesus addressed by John were persecuted by their neighbours and needed the reminder that the Spirit of Jesus, now liberated in space and time, dwelt with them, so now we experience the persecution of parody, disinterest, and the tyranny of distance[1]. We too are called to realize and make present and be ourselves comforted by the One who draws near to us, and through us and our compassionate love and justice draws near to those around us. Such is both our comfort and our commission.

TLBW

---

[1] Cunnamulla is an isolated community in the far south west of Queensland, 800 kilometres from Brisbane. It has experienced massive economic and well-being decline since the glory days of the sheep’s back in the 1950s. St Aidan’s church was built on the back of the sheep’s back and resultant optimism to seat 2-300: this sermon was preached to a congregation of a half dozen.

Fallujah - more than a decade ago

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE

FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (9th May) 2004

Readings:      

Acts 11.1-8

Revelation 21.1-6

John 13.31-35

As the gospel spread out into the Roman empire it generated both enormous interest and enormous response, as Luke constantly reminds us in Acts, and increasingly attracted antagonism. The Christians soon came to be seen no long as a wild and woolly Jewish sect, but as an intolerable and atheistic movement; it was seen to be atheistic because when pushed its adherents would not worship the gods of Rome. When troubled times, natural calamity such as storm, drought, fire or earthquake, struck Roman communities a scapegoat was quickly provided: the gods were angry because the Christians would not worship them. It was no easy or comfortable time to be a Christian.

It was inevitable, then, that the Christian community sought comfort. They were now hated, or at best scornfully tolerated, by Jews and Romans alike. In many places they were barred from trading rights, and forced to rely on others more fortunate than themselves within the faith community. “See how they love each other” was as much a curse as a remark of admiration. Some under pressure gave up their faith, as the conclusion of this chapter of Revelation (21) makes clear. Many more however did not.

In part this was because of writers such as John of Patmos. Like Mark and Daniel before him (and others whose writings have come to be known to us from outside the sources that we use in worship) he turned to the language of apocalyptic. He knew that his people were going to need inspiration if they were going to maintain their faith in times of trouble. He uses language of heaven and hell, of the saved and the damned, to inspire his community to stand firm through all that befell them. This was not language predicting the coming antichrist in centuries to come; this was the language that recognized that persecution is in itself the inevitable outcome of the refusal of the faithful to worship the gods of Rome.

Nor should we play lightly, as I have mentioned before, with the language of the apocalypse. Here is the vision to end all visions

I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

This was language designed to encourage the faithful. It was not, as it is now often used, to strike fear into the hearts of the outsiders, though they too might tremble at the suggestion of a God unfazed by the gods of Rome. This was not language designed to make 21st century Christians tremble at the imminent coming of Christ, but to make second century Christians stand tall in the face of the machinery of one of history’s most brutal empires. This does not tell us about George Bush and Osama bin Laden but about the Caesars and the Christians and the Jews.

But the message is timeless – and there is no doubt that it is timely. As images reach us of horrendous action on both sides of bitter hatreds unfolding in Iraq, even many of those who supported the coalition of the willing – and I am not one of them – are wondering what sort of demons are being unleashed in the sands of that far off nation.

Ultimately the vision of a new heaven and a new earth tells of a time when the puzzles of Patmos no less than those of Fallujah will be over. They tell of a time, to borrow Paul’s words, when Christ shall be all in all. They tell of a time when there will be no need for politicians to lie, nor need of interreligious hatred, when the mysteries of our faith will be unravelled and visible to all:

he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more;

mourning and crying and pain will be no more

for the first things have passed away.

This is the hope that some of us are called to continue to cling to now, as in every age, when the mysteries of politics and of hatreds and of prejudice become unimaginably entwined.  As we cling to the words of hope we are called out to speak for compassion and justice and Christlikeness – expecting to find it not in the face of politicians but in the face of God.

TLBWY