God's besiegers from a distant land?

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE

FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 

(12th September) 2004

Readings:  

Jeremiah 4.11-12, 22-28

Psalm 14

1 Timothy 1.1-2, 12-19a

Luke 15.1-10

Jeremiah the prophet was such an unflinching and outspoken character that his name, twenty-five centuries after his death, came to be used as a nickname for a party-pooper or spoilsport, a Jeremiah. Yet this use of his name was not altogether fair; he is a party-pooper only when the party involves neglect of the relationship between God and the people of God, and neglect of the standards of compassion and justice demanded by God in return for the privileges God had provided. In other words, Jeremiah is the conscience of a nation (much as Sir William Deane was in this country a few years back (whether or not that was his role).

One way in which Jeremiah ensured his own unpopularity and loneliness was by suggesting that the calamities that befell Judah and Jerusalem were the will and intention of God. One could imagine that it would not be a way to win popularity in contemporary Australia or the United States that the horrors currently befalling the West (and we could include Russia in that category) were the will of God. The Americans are a religiously conscious nation, for better or for worse, whereas in Australia generally we are not, for better or for worse. In either case, the message that suffering is the will of God would be a passport to ostracism and hatred.

Yet it was the message of Jeremiah:

Tell the nations, “Here they are!”

Proclaim against Jerusalem,

“Besiegers come from a distant land;

they shout against the cities of Judah.

They have closed in around her like watchers of a field,

because she has rebelled against me,

says the Lord.

Your ways and your doings

have brought this upon you.

This is your doom; how bitter it is!

It has reached your very heart.”

Jeremiah is suggesting that the enemies of God’s people are the instruments (but never the friends) of God. Isaiah is to go further, describing Cyrus, conqueror of Israel, as his chosen servant (Is. 45.1). The implications of such a claim are phenomenal: “Osama, my servant” would ring in our ears with the same cacophonous alarm. There is no room here for the inevitable horror that we all feel at the high human cost of bombings in New York, Washington, Denpasar, Madrid, Jakarta, or, most horrific of all since 9/11, Beslan.[1] The scriptures of the Hebrew prophets do not generally wrestle with the great philosophical questions as to how God allows horror and tragedy, but demand that the people of God learn from the tragedies that have befallen them.

How great a contrast this punitive God is with the gentle Jesus-as-shepherd of the Lukan parable or of the Fourth Gospel’s “I am” saying, “I am the good Shepherd.” With the Europeanization of the gospel, the rugged danger of the shepherd’s life has been watered down to images of gentle Southdown lambs and green pastures, rather than the rugged Palestinian sheep and ravishing wildlife of the original context. However even if this error is corrected the image of the shepherd God seems far removed from the furious and betrayed God of Jeremiah. So much so that one early church father, subsequently condemned as a heretic, sought to excise the Hebrew scriptures from the bible.

How wise it was that he, the heretic Marcion, was found to be wrong! for while we all to a person feel more comfortable with images of the compassionate God-in-Christ seeking lost sheep, it remains critical that we do not reduce God to domesticity and nicety. The God who flings the fires of stars across the heavens is not a god to be tamed to Europeanized domesticity. The God of the ugliness of Good Friday is not a god unable to bear the scars of Beslan or 9/11, however brutal they may be.

As the critics of Marcion rightly saw, we are not called to choose between Jeremiah’s God and the God revealed in Jesus Christ as an either/or. Even within the life of the one we have come to know as Good Shepherd Christ there is the discomforting image of a bull whip taken at the very least to the tables of the money changers in the Temple. This is no domesticated God revealed in the man Jesus. Yet it is the tender God already known in the Hebrew Scriptures from the Genesis story of the expulsion from Eden, the God who expels yet personally clothes the miscreant proto-humans.

In the end the witness of Hebrew and Greek scriptures are alike. God the compassionate reserves the right to be God the furious: “I am who I am” says YHWH in answer to the domesticating question “who are you.” I will be who I will be.

Anger in the scriptures is always directed at socio-religious hypocrisy, hypocrisy which may include cosy attempts to domesticate the Lord of heaven and earth. Yet in the life-revelation of Jesus of Nazareth the emphasis shifts fractionally. God is revealed not as domesticated, nor certainly as the good-time warm-fuzzy god of so much contemporary preaching, but as a God prepared to taken into God-self the unimaginable horror of the Cross, unimaginable horror of Beslan, of 9/11, of whatever else lies ahead, and whisper resurrection into its ugly scenes.

This then is the God we are called to choose and serve in humbleness, but never in domestic complacency.

TLBWY

[1] The Beslan School Siege, started 1st Septemnber 2004.

Hatred: not God's landscape

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, MITCHELL
FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (5th September) 2004



Readings:

Jeremiah 18.1-11    
Psalm 139
Philemon 1-25
Luke 14.25-35

From the 1920s to the 1960s Swiss protestant theologian Karl Barth dominated the face of theological conversation. Enormously learned, he wrote phenomenal numbers of words, theological tomes, essays and sermons, striving to reclaim Christianity from the liberalism by which it had been dominated in the nineteenth century.

In the nineteenth century the gospel had in many, perhaps most quarters, been reduced to little more than a message about being nice.  “Australia is not a very Christian landscape,” says one of the characters in a Peter Carey novel, capturing well the nineteenth century belief that Christianity was somehow about manicured green lawns and hedgerows, gaiters and lace bodices. The essence of Christianity had been reduced, observed Barth, to “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” with, as one or two theologians noted, a clear understanding that “man” meant the male half of the species.

Such a faith had nothing to say once WW1 ripped across the face of Europe. How was it possible to speak any more of a Christian culture when Christians had torn each other apart in the prolonged and bloody horrors of the European trenches? Barth recognized that the gospel of Jesus Christ was not some polite message about public niceties, but the vastly unsettling message that God had entered history in the bloodied form of Jesus on the Cross, and transformed the darkness of every Good Friday, every death or defeat in to the glory of Resurrection.

Barth also recognized that the biblical stories are of a God who remains beyond human manipulation. The events of Good Friday and Easter, by which resurrection hope is breathed into every human tragedy, are the initiative of God, not of men and women. We did not and cannot coerce God into saving us from our human plight. By the same token we cannot argue with the decisions of God.

Barth died in the 1960s, as the sexual and social revolutions were taking the western world by storm. Though he is a mammoth mark in the landscape of the 20th Century, he is by and large vastly unpopular in the 21st. His emphasis on the unquestionable nature of God rests uneasily in a world that is taught to question anything and everything. Yet his is the world of Jeremiah: the pot is not in a position to negotiate with the potter.

It may well be that Jeremiah has a powerful message for us in the 21st century. It seems – partly no doubt because of an instantaneous media – that the world we live in is a deeply troubling place. Politicians certainly play on it, believing no doubt that theirs alone is the plan that will make the world a safer and more economically prosperous place in which to live. Yet our world is not really a more frightening place than that of Jeremiah. His was a world in which life was at least as cheap as it appears to have become in the eyes of some international terrorist organizations. Yet despite the horrors around him, Jeremiah was prepared to believe in a God who was in control, a God who would be and do as God alone would choose to be and do.

In the years since the 1960s, it has become fashionable to argue, berate and even redesign God into a more comfortable image. Certainly, faced with the horrors of hostage taking in southern Russia in the last few days[1] it is hard not to feel anger or frustration at a god who seemingly stands back allowing children to be terrorized and executed by militants.

The God of Jeremiah is an absolute God; this was the god reclaimed by Karl Barth. This does not leave us an excuse to be complacent; we must do all in our human power to speak out and seek to stop atrocities here and abroad, and to bring compassion and relief wherever atrocities have occurred. We need to learn to dig deep in our pockets where aid is needed, as it will surely be by the families shattered by this latest Russian tragedy. This is at least in part what Jesus means when he commands that we should surrender all that we have in the service of the gospel, for what we are lucky enough to own is in any case not ours but God’s. But we need also to continue to make the leap of faith, to believe that even despite the unspeakable horrors that go on around s in the world, God is, and God is breathing hope into humanity’s deepest despairs.

Indeed the psalm that we read today effectively safeguards us from the risk of God-forsakenness. The psalm speaks of a God who lovingly knits us together, who knows therefore our deepest terrors and the deepest terrors of all human beings, even the children of Beslan. Though it must remain beyond our comprehension, the psalmist speaks of a God who knows even their deepest fears. The resurrection hope of Christianity speaks of a God who breathes light into even the deepest darknesses of Beslan, into even the tragic deaths of children.[2] It is that God we must struggle to rediscover and reprioritize in our daily lives.[3]

TLBWY


[1] The Beslan school siege began on Setember 1st, 2004.
[2] At least 330 people were killed, including 186 children.
[3] As  I post this it is the fifth anniversary of  the slaughter perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. Our prayers go out for those whose lives will never be the same.

love in a vineyard

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE
ELEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (15th August) 2004


Readings: 
Isaiah 5.1-7    
Psalm 80.1-2, 8-19
Hebrews 11.29-12.2
Luke 12.49-59

Early in the writings of Isaiah we find this beautiful stand-alone poem of the vineyard. It’s message, an extended metaphor or word-picture, is abundantly clear: the beautifully tilled vineyard that yields only sour and wizened grapes is an image hard to forget.

Like the greatest images of the bible (the parables of Jesus for example) this poem unlocks a timeless and multi-applicable truth. It can, as the poet intended, be a lament for the Israel that has forgotten its standards of justice and compassion, standards to which it was called, standards that were supposed to make it stand as a beacon amongst the foreign and so-called godless nations. It can stand as a parable of humanity: the theoretical crown of creation that with all its gifts and all its intelligence has not learned to live in peace and harmony either with creation or with itself. It can stand as a parable of the Christian community, founded centuries after the song’s first airing, that considers itself to be the bearer of new insights into and new access to the gracious and forbearing, forgiving love of God, but which still fails to live up to the high demands of the way of humbleness, the way of the Cross to which it is – we are – called.

The prophet of the poem sings on behalf of his beloved, the creator and redeemer God. The tenderness of his love for God could be the entire message of the poem. To what extent do we manage to connect with our Creator and redeemer with such tender­ness that we can call God our beloved? Do we share the intimacy with our God that we share with those most beloved who we have known in the most love-soaked days of our existence? For most of us the answer is probably “no” – the silent love of God allows us too often to push our godward thoughts and feelings to the fringes of our existence.

Yet the voice of the poem is stood on its head. The tenderness of the prophet for his God is undeniable, and out of that tenderness he fathoms the tenderness of God for the vineyard People of God. One might well look at the bitter hardness of the modern state of Israel, or the bitter hardness of the western nations that speak peace only out of the barrels of a military arsenal, to recognize the pain of the vineyard’s owner. How the God of this poem longs for tenderness, but finds only bitterness! How the God of this poem longs for a Christian world that sees the broken nations of the earth not as threats but as opportunities to exercise stringless compassionate aid! How the 21st century might be a different landscape if the wealthy nations of the west had listened to the cries of the homeless and the starving in nations that are now turning by the bucket load to embrace militant Islam!

How we on a micro-scale could have demonstrated the magnificence of Christian love had we seen refugees these past several years not as a threat to our too-important borders but as an opportunity to exercise God’s unavoidable volition to love and to care! Or had we worked at the forefront of attempts to broker understanding between ethnic groups or between town and country in our own land!

The poet delivers a harsh threat to the people who are the vineyard. Tragic though the events of the world have been since September 11th 2001, I cannot help wondering if they are not, like the destruction of the two great temples of Israel’s history, harsh warning to the people of the once-Christian west that we are beyond the eleventh hour in which to show care and compassion. Was the hedge of a complacent West torn down like that of Isaiah’s vineyard on September 11th 2001?

You and I won’t change the world. Nor is that our calling. Our calling is to change our world – perhaps even to adopt that wonderfully quirky new agey gismo-motto “practice acts of senseless beauty and random kindness.” Can the grapes of our vineyard be sweetened? Can we touch a life around us with an act of Christlike compassion this day?

TLBWY

forgivenness ... shuddup Isaiah?

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE

TENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (8th August) 2004*

Readings:     

Isaiah 1.1, 10-20
Psalm 50.1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11.1-3, 8-16
Luke 12.32-40

The prophet Isaiah – the first of two or three or even more who wrote by that name over a period of 150 years or more – watched with sorrow and frustration a people who he loved turning from the God he and they were called to serve. His sayings weave together pain and passion in the service of God, drawing the Hebrews back to the spiritual at-one-ness he – and his God – longed for.

He was driven by the awareness that his people were drifting from the standards God expected of them. These standards were in a sense the basis of the preferential relationship the Hebrews enjoyed with the Creator. They stemmed from the relationship God had  in a sense inexplicably initiated with the Hebrews. Their community god was no less than the Creator of the universe – they had as they understood it been chosen and rescued from slavery by the Author of the heavens. This was a matter that Isaiah’s people were more or less nonchalantly happy about. Such a god was an okay thing, but don’t ask us to spend too much time or effort on following up on justice and compassion. God will look after us and that’s enough. So Isaiah emerges with a recurring theme: “You have rejected the Law and spurned the word of the holy one of Israel.”

Isaiah never turns his back on a sense that the people of God are richly graced people, whose city Jerusalem will stand as a sentinel in a changing world. At the same time he has no sympathy for those who allow complacency to become their watchword: they are watched by a God who protects them but who evaluates the quality of their love and justice. This God will punish but he will also redeem – echoes perhaps of the God who banishes the first couple from Eden yet kneels in the dirt to make their clothes.

Isaiah was concerned primarily with the types of justice issues that reveal the heart of the powerful – the wealthy merchants screwing the balance against the poor, the religious celebrants who provided vast and expensive spectacles but who fail to defend the orphan and the widow from exploitation and abuse. The words of Isaiah are timeless: the exposure of predators at work within the communities of faith has been a bitter blow to the witness of the Christian communities in recent years.

There is here a complex trap for the Christian community. We are called to be a cycle-breaking people of forgiveness. Isaiah 700 years before Christ has seen the possibility of reconciliation between humanity and God: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like  crimson, they shall become like wool. Jesus was to place the cycle-breaking acts of forgiveness at the heart of his gospel: how many times – as many as seven? Seventy times seven, replies Jesus.

A recent [2004] article in The Australian newspaper adopted a faintly mocking, surprised tone at the news that sexual offenders would be permitted back into the ranks of the faithful under new national guidelines. Despite the guidelines’ clear statement that such offenders would be under strict supervision and not be permitted positions of office, The Australian’s tone was scornful: if the Anglicans are serious about justice how could such re-involvement ever be allowed? And yet it must be so: however heinous a crime sexual abuse is, and it is amongst the most heinous of crimes, it cannot be considered to be beyond the reach of God’s forgiveness.* We must offer, it should be said, not the old mistakes of cheap grace, the old patterns of merely shifting offenders from place to place. Repentance is the necessary prelude to forgiveness, and the offender must put his or her life into the hands of authorities, receiving the punishment and the rehabilitation demanded. But the love of Christ even then does not exclude.

For we are called to be a people of hope – hope that includes above all the belief of reconciliation and reunion with the creating, loving God. This is the great hope of the document we call Hebrews, the hope of an eternal city just beyond our sight. On that basis we can live as a people of eager expectation – indeed we are called to do so to such an extent that it is allegiance to that City, and no human structure.

The road to that beyond-sight city passes through that which I refer to at funerals as “God’s loving care and judgement.” Like the people of Isaiah we are called to live out in the community lives of compassionate love. We are called to be in the habit of knowing God – even to be in the habit of being exited about God. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. We are called to practice the presence of God. In that way we are, as Jesus puts it, ready for the return of the bridegroom. And  ready then to pass through the semi-familiar and welcoming arms of Christ to the place we should call home.

TLBWY

*Note that this sermon was written in 2004. The so called “historic” events which led to my recent dismissal as Dean of Waiapu occurred more than a decade before that, and this sermon was in turn more than a decade prior to that dismissal, the grounds of which were not, in any case “sexual abuse” as discussed here. The legality of that dismissal is currently being considered by the appellate tribunal of The (Anglican) Church of New Zealand / Te Haahi o te Porowini o Niu Tireni (Aotearoa)  and as such is sub judice. That dismissal therefore is not the matter under discussion in this sermon. 

thoughts on imitating the outsider

(here temporarily breaking out of my series of retrospective sermons from 12+ years ago, back to the present ...)

SERMON PREACHED

at

TE POU HERENGA WAKA O TE WHAKAPONO

(SOUTH NAPIER)

15^TH ORDINARY SUNDAY

(July 10^th) 2016

Readings:

Amos 7:7-17

(Psalm 82)

Colossians 1:1-14

Luke 10:25-37

Kia tau ki a koutou,

                te atawhai me te rangimarie o te Atua

Tihe mauri ora!

E te whanau a te Karaiti

E ngā tupuna o tēnei whare karakia

Haere, haere, haere!

Ko Ruapehu taku maunga

Ko Whanganui taku awa

Ko Rangitane taku waka

Ko Mitsubishi Triton taku waka

Ko Hehu Karaiti toku Rangatira!

Ko ngāti pakeha taku iwi

Ko Mikaere te ingoa

No reira

Tena kotou

Tena kotou

Tena tatau katoa

If the teachings of Jesus were reduced to just one or two best known stories, the Parable of the Good Samaritan (or as I would prefer to call it, the Parable of the Exemplary Outsider) would remain. As it happens, in the history of human religion this central teaching about mercy and compassion is not altogether unusual: the teachings of Jesus had his own style and context, but all the great faith-founders have preached compassion, mercy, justice. As Christians we might make other claims about the uniqueness of the life of Jesus, but we begin to slip into the role of the bad guys, the priest and the Levite in this parable, if we start making claims that ignore the sparks of God in other great prophets and faith leaders.

I happen to believe Jesus is unique, but not on the basis of his teachings. The earliest Christians, like those addressed in the letter to the Colossians, were suitably impressed by Jesus’ teachings, but they were far more wowed by their experience of the Risen Lord in their midst as they prayed, broke bread, explored the Hebrew Scriptures and generally worshipped together. So great is this sense that when the great apostles and pastors like Paul write to each other they encouraged each other again and again by rejoicing in that shared, irreversible, irreplaceable knowledge: ‘the Lord be with you’ … which actually should be translated ‘the Lord is with you’, to which the answer, even in times of great trial, risk, suffering was ‘yup, and with you too.’ We say it in slightly different ways when we worship but it’s there over and again in the pukapuka karakia (prayer book). Those first Christians knew that to follow Jesus would mean suffering, and knew too that the risen Lord would not desert them when it happened:

“May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.”

The strength those Christians experienced was based on their mutual encouragement, fellowship, and practice, like a sports team, of the experience of the Risen Christ. They came together at least weekly, perhaps more, to support one another, build one another up, and to be the hands and feet of God for each other and within the wider community, practicing (at least at their best) compassionate justice and love. They didn’t always get it right: Paul and his imitators often had to write stern corrective letters where members of the Jesus community had fallen short of the expectations they, on behalf of God, had of Jesus-people. Sometimes they had become too much like the priest and the Levite in the Parable we read, self-interested, rushed, maintaining purity rather than the radical forgiving hospitality and embrace that is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Sometimes they forgot the presence and compassionate yet stern glare of the God who judges, they turned people away, by word or by attitude, or hurried past those in physical or spiritual or emotional need, taking the other side of the road, or closing the doors of welcome.

Jesus empowers us to be compassionate, merciful and just. I believe God judges us on our failures to do just that – but at the same time, when we recognize this or any of our short-fallings, confess them to God, seek God’s healing strength, God picks us up, nudges us further down the walk of the Way of the Cross, the way of becoming Christlike, the way of redemption. Sometimes as individuals, and often as an institution, we forget our vocation to compassion and love: that’s why we say sorry to God every time we share Te Hakari Tapu (the holy feast), practicing, learning over and over again how we should relate to God our judge and redeemer. As we grow into those words and attitudes we will become less like the priest and the Levite, and more like the complete outsider who Jesus said was close indeed to the values of the Kingdom of God: "The one who showed him mercy." … "Go and do likewise." If we get that right, powerfully right, then we might just be the community of Christ, the community of welcome that we are called to be.

TLBWY

Bentleys and baptisms

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE

and at St Luke’s, Augathella

NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (1^st August) 2004

  

Readings:

Hosea 11.1-11

Psalm 107.1-9
Col. 3.1-11
Luke 12.13-21

Every time we gather, or on occasions when I join with a family in private, to baptise a child, we promise to “reject selfish living and all that is false and unjust.” Many of us feel a degree of sorrow that such a promise, along with those to “turn to Christ and reject all that is evil” and to “repent of my sins” are made glibly in baptismal gatherings. We perjure ourselves within a context of worship of the God we call Truth, uttering commitments we have no intention to keep. Many clergy have responded with harsh programmes of preparation for such rites. I haven’t, because I am aware at baptism after baptism that the congregation gathered also promise “to support these our brothers and sisters in their calling.” We to a person fall short of that serious undertaking, too.

I recall too, at each baptism, that I cannot claim to have upheld my promise to “reject selfish living and all that is false and unjust.” I am reminded each time I look into the eyes of a photo of a Sudanese child, or any of the other dying children of the world, that ours is a world based on Darwinianism gone mad. Our globalised world is based on survival of the fittest played out to its utmost degree, a survival struggle in which the rich nations get richer and the poor get poorer, and the rich within the rich nations get richer and the poor get poorer. That attitude, driven sadly by the once Christian nations of the West, fuelled the fires that produced el Qaeda and its cohorts. Strangely, this cruel form of Darwinianism is most strongly adhered to by those flat earth churches that reject Darwin’s theory of evolution, though that is a discussion for another time and place.

Our post-Christian European world is based on capitalism, a creed that decrees that the acquisition of wealth is the greatest purpose of being human. Our capitalist society is built on the same desire we claim to reject at baptismal ceremonies, the desire to have better than others have, better than we already have. The desire to have the coffee or the car or the clothing that advertisers tell us we don’t have and do need if we are to be more fulfilled than we currently are. The father of capitalism, Adam Smith, wrote “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but their self love.”[1] Capitalism means that the baker grows rich by feeding us, but he or she doesn’t need an ounce of compassion. If the Sudanese children are dying so what, says capitalism, because they can’t pay the butcher’s or the baker’s bills in any case.

Yet says our baptismal service, and our reading from Colossians, we the people of God, are called to be a different culture, a counter­culture: Put to death… whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). Put to death that part of ourselves that is sold products by the sight of Elle McPherson or our new Miss Universe: because that is what fornication in part is, says Jesus who warns us that we all sin if we cast a wayward eye. Put to death that part of ourselves that, as a nation, spends more than $2.2 billion per annum on pet products, $200 million more than we spend on foreign aid. For that is impurity. (That figure, incidentally, includes expenditure in some households on upmarket pet foods at over $100 per kilo).[2]

A still more obscene form of this is the aberrant Christian doctrine espoused by many Pentecostal churches, that the sign of our faithfulness to God will be the size of our hip pocket, the so-called prosperity doctrine. Buy a Bentley as a sign of God’s graciousness to you, and turn off your television, presumably, or watch rubbish news services, or in other ways deaden your conscience, as refugee camps of Eastern Chad swell with desperate women and children fleeing the killing fields of Sudan.

In our liturgical rites as Anglican Christians, we gather and confess our need for God’s forgiveness. We need (I speak to myself as much as to anyone here) to recall before God that our hearts are hardened by the scleroses of media: a coffee ad may well impact more on our consciousness than the need for compassionate aid. We need to confess that for ourselves, and, as a priestly people, to confess it on behalf of a world too busy or disinterested to have a conscience left over such matters. We need too to thank God where there are compassionate organizations, Christian and others, carrying out works of salvation and of justice and of love.

We need to prioritize. Do we care even for the work of the people of God at a local level? Do we care for the existence and the continuation of the church of God? Do we give as if our lives and the lives of others depend on it, or do we cast the equivalent of a meat pie or two cans of dog food in the offertory each week, month, or year?  The questions hurt, but we need to ask them, as we reorder our lives to prioritize God’s compassionate dreams.

Wealth or riches are not evil in themselves, but an opportunity to exercise that ancient principle of largesse. That principle we might say theologically was lost in Fall, in the greed of being fallen humankind. We might also say historically it has become even more lost since the greed-stricken ’80s and ’90s of last century.  Possessions are gaseous, spreading out to fill the space of our lifestyle and tempting us to leave no room for the needs of others.

We are challenged by the author of Colossians and by our baptismal vows to live a conspicuously different lifestyle. We are challenged by our baptismal vows and by the author of Colossians to create a counterculture of carelessness, not in the normal meaning of that word, but living without a care for material wealth and riches. We are called to live as a community whose only care is the advancement of the reign of God, advanced by acts of compassionate love, justice, by proclaiming the values of God revealed in Christ the Christ of the gospels. We are called to live out a counterculture by our standards of care.

Such is the challenge of the author of Colossians, such is the challenge of our baptism.

TLBWY

---

[1] Adam Smith Wealth of Nations (1776) bk 1 ch 2.

[2] Details from The Australia Institute report, 27.07.04.