God does not carry a flag

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,
FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT
(March 10^th) 2024

 

READINGS

Numbers 21: 4-9

Psalm 107:1-8

John 3: 14-21

 

In a number of editions of the bible the probable sayings of Jesus are  marked in red. By doing this edir=tors in once sesese helpful, in that they, with some guesswork, separate Jesus from the editors of his and narrators of his life. The process was somewhat spurious, but it can help us generate the remarkable vision of Jesus from the increasingly restrctibe frames of his followers. That was not the intention of the editors!

But if we reconize that there are both Jesus satings the narators' saying in the text then it can soon be seen that the overall emphasis of Jesus is that of welcome and embrace, rather than rejection and exclusion that has so often been the narrative of Christians.

As it happens it is that insight at least in part that gave rise to one of the more significant theological works of recent decades, when Croation theologian Miroslav Volf wrote his influential volume Exclusion and Embrace. Volf studied under my own favourite theologian, Jürgen Moltmann. I tell you all this not to show off but to put this family as it were of interpreters into a context.

Moltmann and Volf alike were exposed to human darkness. Moltmann was a prisoner of the allies during World War 2, although his reflections were primarily borne not of his experiences as a prisoner but on his recognition of the ways in which his people, especially the German Christian people, failed to see the evil growing in their midst. Volf similarly saw the brutality of Serbo-Croatian racial conflict, and the ethnic cleansing, that, like that of Hitler's pogrom, wreaked havoc and slaughter across his native lands of the former Yugoslavia.

Any theology, indeed any faith, that wrestles with brutality and evil and darkness of this depth is never going to be superficial. Speach of the light of Christ coming into the world after the slaughter of thousands, is obscene. Or it is unless it drives deep into the questions of where God is in times of deepest darkness, and unless it is backed up by prophetic action and attitude.

No comfortable or superficial answer will suffice, and a nine minute reflection in the context of a Eucharist in a comfortable country will not scratch the surface of the surface. 

So I can do little more than to drop hints borrowed from both Moltmann and Volf, though I am an inadequate and superficial reader of both. But in the face of bitter division in the cultures of the europeanized world, the internal conflict growing in the United States, the brutal conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the seemingly endless bitter hatred between Israel and its neighbours, we cannot remain complacent. We cannot speak glibly of a light that shines in darkness.

Moltmann’s unforgettable emphasis when reading the gospels was that the work of the Incarnation, the drawing of God into the heart and breath of humankind, that the extent of that work is clear only when Jesus himself, when God’s own self cries out in absolute Godforsakenness in the darkness of Good Friday.

We will to some extent explore the depth of that cry, the depth of that descent into human hell in the liturgies of Holy Week. We are not there yet. Nevertheless, for those of us who have been exposed to the Christian journey of faith we know it’s coming.

In the light of this descent into the depths of human darkness Moltmann emphasised that there is no place where Christlight does not shine. Lest that be some sort of cosy Linus blanket for us, he emphasised too that there must be no place, no difficulty, into which we should hesitate in bearing Christ light. 

I speak as one who lives a cosy life. I try however to grapple with and respond to the facts that Christ is present in deepest darkest hell holes such as Gaza, or the eastern borders of Ukraine. Present too in the loneliness of victims of police brutality. That brutality that is often championed by those crying out with plastic hypocrisy, "Lord, Lord," or who speak out of obscene Christian nationalism. God does not carry a flag. 

If Christianity in any form does not speak out in the face of brutality and oppression then it is, to borrow a German word, ersatz Christianity, a French word, faux Christianity, or arguably an English word, counterfeit Christianity.

Volf saw this too. As he looked at Christian communities dwelling in the comfort zones of the West he recognised that the popular face of Christianity was one that tended to exclusion, to pushing away the vulnerable, victimised,  oppressed, broken peoples of God’s earth. He saw the persecution and near-genocide of ethnic minorities of the former Yugoslavia. He dared Christians, and continues to do so, to speak out dangerously where there is hatred. To do so whether that hatred be in the name of ethnic otherness, faith-otherness, gender or sexuality otherness, or any other form of darkness.

When Jesus spoke of the Son of Man being lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness, he was speaking of his own vocation to go into the deepest darkest places of human experience. Not for Jesus the cosy complacency of religious surety – which is incidentally the reason I hesitate ever to include “Blessed Assurance” in my hymn lists, however devoted its author and singers mean to be.

No. Jesus was not comfortable with the comfort zones of believers. Jesus was adamant that the Way of the Cross takes us into the darkest ills of human experience.

Given the vicissitudes of birthplace and parentage it is unlikely I and possibly you will follow Jesus into those darkest places. Some of us may experience the personal hells of bereavement, betrayal, loneliness or just common human doubt. It is hard to measure the intensity of hell. But we are the ones who must stand under the judgement that Jesus speaks of,  if we choose to prefer complacency and selfishness to the tough claims of the way of the cross. We are called to open our lives up to embrace, and not exclude, those on the fringes of our s
ociety or of world politics.

Few of us will have to be terribly brave in our lives, and often we will fail, but the story of the New Testament and indeed of the whole biblical record is the story of those who fail yet feel the nudge of God, allow themselves to be picked up, and stumble on again.

On this Lenten journey, as life stands at the moment, few of us are in the places of darkness addressed by a Moltmann or a Volf or a Jesus as he confronted the depths of religious hypocrisy. But we are called to open ourselves up to that possibility, and to the demand of the cross that we live lives of authenticity, of compassion for the suffering and excluded, of embrace to the lonely. And lest I fall into the very cosy complacency of which I speak I too am reminded that I preach not to you but to me and you and us alike.