faith amidst hate?

SERMON PREACHED at EVENSONG

St PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, DUNEDIN

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (March 17^th) 2019

READINGS:

• Jeremiah 22: 1-9, 13-17
• Psalm 135
• Luke 14: 27-33

In the various apocalyptic writings of Christian and Jewish faith lurid images of destruction occur over and again. In a cynical post-Enlightenment world we tend to dismiss them, relegate them to idiot fringes. Many religious leaders generate destruction by abusing apocalyptic writings, propping up cynical self-interests and power structures. Apocalyptic is a articular genre, designed to bring hope to those who are suffering. Denude it of its coordinates of suffering and it can become one more page of hatred, like the supremacist narratives of hate that turned into the slaughter of fifty people in Christchurch his past week. Destruction. Hate. These are weapons of evil. The actual purpose of biblical apocalyptic was very different, no matter how it has come to be abused.

Biblical (and other) narratives of apocalyptic were designed to critique evil. They critiqued narratives of hate, narratives that demonise otherness, narratives of xenophobia. But they have been distorted by religious leaders in every given time in which Christian and other religious leaders and practitioners have become a full of their own exceptionalism and self-importance. In Christchurch we saw religionless hatred dressed up in a manifesto of supremacy. It is no different.

Hatred is hatred, and it is our task to ensure hatred and its reverberating “no” is not the final word. Our task is to proclaim active, outspoken love, to whisper God’s mysterious “yes.”

Hatred is hatred. Even before the unspeakable atrocities of the Al Noor mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre, hatred and abuse were dominating news cycles. Across the ditch Australian Cardinal Pell is beginning a gaol term from which, however lenient some think it, he may never emerge alive (if probable appeals are unsuccessful). Royal Commissions on both sides of the Tasman have been, are or will be exposing heart-chilling betrayal and predation within religious organizations.

Sure: it is not only religious bodies and narratives that have betrayed the vulnerable. Michael Jackson is a tragic reminder that money blinds even parental eyes. Roman Polanski, Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Bill Cosby, a roll call of abuse, remind us that many corridors have housed and protected evil. Debra Lafave, if we Google her, reminds us that predation is about power not gender.  And now forty-nine people are dead in Christchurch; hatred is hatred, and all acts of sexual abuse and xenophobic terrorism are attempts to eradicate the lights of love and hope about which we too languidly sing and pray.

Lists of perfidy should never have included ostensible bearers of Christ. Yet Christian structures of power and authority, Catholic, Anglican, Protestant and Pentecostal alike, have been for centuries formidable Petrie dishes of predation. We have at best merely mumbled in the face of evil.

Lent is a fine time to repent and change and act in the name of Jesus, the Christ who lived and died to dismantle power and hate.

Jesus stood deliberately in the footsteps of Jeremiah. Jeremiah, the iconoclastic prophet who turned his rage on the politico-religious leadership of his day. Jeremiah, who like Jesus after him put into the mouth of his God and ours fearsome words that we gloss so easily: “I swear that I will make you a desert, an uninhabited city.” Today they are words spoken to the global north, or as we used to call it, “first” or “western” world. We the community of the homeless messiah have aided and abetted narratives of corruption, abuse, and death. We as pray-ers and singers, as Christ-bearers of varied beliefs do not escape the prophet’s brutal gaze.

Jeremiah turned on the self-consciously holier-than-thou practitioners, the elite religious castes of his day and spat his rancid words: “In the prophets I saw a disgusting thing …”.

In the case of Pell and others the same religious leaders who have noisily barred those seeking love and companionship from the experiences of inclusion in the Christ community have themselves perpetrated sexual abuse, and our structures protected the perpetrators. In the case of Al Noor and Linwood we have not spoken out to counter waves of hatred directed at our Muslim sisters and brothers. Our silence chastises us.  Jeremiah’s finger is pointed fearlessly, timelessly and especially at our religious bodies today. We have harboured predators, and have remained silent in the face of hate.

There is no room for complacency, as the Royal Commission will soon remind us in the case of the predation, and Al Noor and Linwood tells us in the face of hatred.

At which point there appears very little attraction to persevere with a faith, let alone an institution, that has nurtured so dark a hypocrisy. Where is God, when evil has been so deep? This Lent perhaps more than any other I find my replies to that question, called in academic circles the “theodicy question,” are stuttered. George Pell … Brenton Tarrant … Where is hope?

And yet … and yet … “Oh love that will not let me go …”

I stumble on.

Jesus’ speaks to us even as our institutions rightly crumble and the shibboleths, the false gods that TS Eliot called “the old certainties” collapse. Unless we heed the bare, raw, frightening yet eventually comfort-filled words of Jeremiah and Jesus we will not eradicate abuse, predation or xenophobia.

The cross: take it up. Raw, bloodied, unimaginably stripped of pretention, romance, power, or prestige. Take it up, says Jesus, and stumble with me. In following his broken, powerless footsteps we find love that conquers: O love that will not let me go. We find hate-conquering resurrection belief though it seems like nonsense to ears that will not hear, hearts that will not feel, eyes that will not see beyond the limits of the rational. In the powerless broken footsteps of Jesus we find the way to hope that whispers that neither George Pell nor Michael Jackson, Brenton Tarrant nor Anders Breivik, Osama bin Laden or Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi have the final word on life and death.

Take up a cross, Jesus said, with the aid of him who has been there, staggered with it, and there breathed judgement and hope into sin and suffering. Take it up, but unlike the predators who have abused it, used it, (in some case literally) as a weapon of victimization, stay with its renunciation of power. Only then and there do we find the healing resurrection touch of the Easter God.