SERMON PREACHED
at the CHURCH of St JOHN, WAIKOUAITI
Ordinary Sunday 19 (11th August) 2019
READINGS:
Isaiah 1.1, 10-20
Psalm 50. 1-8, 22-23
Hebrews 11. 1-3, 8-16
Luke 12. 32-40
In the
lead up to the First World War, that tragically “great” war that was to end all
wars, Christianity had been largely been reduced to bling. The European gospel
was reduced to what many optimistic theologians, with no self-consciousness or
sense of irony, had boiled down to a message of “the fatherhood of God and
the brotherhood of man.” Boiled down to a mostly polite gospel of
“Europeanness.” And manliness.
The
nineteenth century theologians were of course blind to the complexities of
gender inclusive language. There are plenty of sociological ironies implicit
even in that blindness, but there were other, deeper ironies, too, hidden in
their pronouncements.
Did the
historical Jesus really come amongst
his people to love and die, causing a ruckus along the way, to proclaim no more
than “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man”? Was such a message
really ever going to upset either the Romans – what St Paul would later
shorthand as the “Greeks” – or the Jews? Was that worth crucifying someone for?
Or, if we adhere to the belief that Jesus was in some complex and unfathomable
way the revelation of God’s self, was that such an exciting revelation? “The
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”
As an
aside, I would add that we jettison belief in the centrality of Jesus at great
peril. That too was a preferred tack of nineteenth century liberal
Christianity, the Christianity that failed to stop great wars. But “the
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man?” That is no gospel.
In many contexts political leaders will, when expedient, find some way of
swinging the word “God” from the rafters to produce a cosy feel-good glow. Trump
is a master of the art. Boris Johnson does not need to be, though he manipulates
the remnant of the Englishman God’s xenophobic hatred of outsiders. Australia’s
Scott Morrison is happy to enlist God to his side. Bob Dylan saw the risks
powerfully in his scathing poem “With God on our Side”: “You never ask
questions / When God’s on your side.”
God is reduced to a convenient plaything, wheeled out in times of battle or
nationalistic fervour. I was at a sesquicentennial liturgy at my old school a
few years back. As I emerged from the marquis in which the liturgy was staged,
one of my old confreres emerged near tears. It was, he murmured, so beautiful,
to sing the old hymns again. The old hymns we sang included “I Vow to The My
Country,” with its soulful placing of nation before god at least
poetically, and “And Did Those Feet,” in which Blake emerges from his fog
of magic mushrooms to reassure himself that Jesus and his stepdad meandered
around the hills of England, presumably during a sabbatical from carpentry.
Or at
least it seems that way, and to most who have sung those hymns over the
centuries any deeper analysis to find the God of the Cross of Jesus is simply
superfluous.
The triumphant nationalistic god who led his troops in war was a
brutal imposter. His foot- and finger-prints still cover much of who we try to
be and what we try to do as followers of Jesus Christ today. The collapse of
the church’s presence and role in society has been the death throes of those
triumphant, nationalistic gods who once were marching as to war. The move of
our Triune God’s Spirit in recent years has been to throw us back on the
bedrock of the God of the Cross, the God who suffers in human suffering, the
God who refuses those political machinations or the glorious techno-show liturgies of faux-faith. These are
exposed as the work of the Satan in the Temptation narratives.
The move of God’s Spirit in recent years has been to draw us into
intimacy with the one addressed in what Henry Burton called “the fervent breath of prayer”: fervent prayers whispered from breaking,
vulnerable human hearts. The move of God’s Spirit in recent years has been to
remind us, by dismantling so many of our false expectations, that it is
precisely “hands that flung stars into space” that are “to cruel nails
surrendered,” as Kendrick puts it.
In the bitter irony of a crucified God, and there alone, God
births the blessings of eternity in human lives. This is not an “out there
beyond reach” god, not a traipsing around on national flags god, but
God who draws into the deepest experiences of human torment and death – every
torment and death – and there begins the work of resurrection.
So the God of the Cross, the God of our readings, turns away from religious arrogances that look for god or play with gods in wrong places.
The God of Jesus Christ turns away from us when we rely on our
prestige or our past or our investments or any other false god to keep our
churches going. The God of Jesus Christ turns away when we offer
what Isaiah calls “the multitude of your sacrifices” without first offering our
vulnerability and our brokenness and our absolute need for God in our lives,
individually and corporately.
None of us quite live up to that. We are, thank God,
followers of the merciful and forgiving God, revealed in the life of Jesus, revealed
in Jesus’ own attitude to obtuse and recalcitrant and basically rather dumb
disciples. The God of, and who is revealed in, Jesus Christ asks us for
readiness, alertness, openness to all God’s doings in history and in our lives.
The God of Jesus Christ asks us to measure our lives by the yardstick of Jesus’
own compassion-wielding and justice-seeking life and teachings. None of us live
up to that. As Mary Magdalene memorably sings in Superstar, we are prompted to call out again and again (as we do in
liturgy, at the Confession), “can we start again, please?”
At a time when narratives of hate and exclusion are becoming the
war cries of international leaders, often tragically aided and abetted by those
who call themselves “Christian,” we are called to assess ourselves. Are we
triumphantly proclaiming a god who will fulfil our pet agendas, protect our pet
interests and structures, maintain imagined racial and economic and religious purity, come at our beck and call to do our political
bidding, trampling on human lives to do so?
We can fairly safely bet that if
this is the case then we are not proclaiming the broken yet risen God of the
Cross of Jesus Christ. And if that is the case then we are called to fall back
metaphorically or literally on our knees to start again in our relationship
with God. The collapse of civilizations and ecosystems and economies around us
may be dire warning that this is (though not for the first time, albeit perhaps
for the most severe time) our eleventh hour. “Be ready,” says Jesus, though we
never are. And for that again and again we implore the healing mercy of the God
who never ceases to whisper, “come, follow me,” and holds our hands as we do.
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