god on our side?

 

SERMON PREACHED IN THE TRINITY CHAPEL, PARKVILLE, VICTORIA

9^th JULY, 1984

 

[possibly the first sermon I ever preached, part of the homiletics formation programme at Trinity theological school]

 

Romans 8:31-end

It is not my intention here to launch into a learned exegesis of Pauline thought, or to present a well-researched paper on the soteriology of the Tentmaker of Tarsus. For what it’s worth, Bishop John Robinson describes this as the culmination of “perhaps the greatest chapter in the New Testament,” on which “all commentary is bathos.” Far be it from me to disagree.

In 1963, an angry and confused young man in New York wrote a poem that was to become one of the anthems of the folk protest movement in the United States throughout the 1960s. In it he attacks not the God of the Christians, but the mockery we have made of that God, the effigy we have raised up in Yahweh’s place as a screen to mask our seemingly insatiable search for power. 

Incisively that angry young man alluded to those words of Saint Paul that are our reading tonight:

FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS I HAVE NOT REPRODUCED THE LYRICS.

THEY ARE TO BE FOUND HERE 

Blasphemy? Or is the God we advertise by our words and actions – or lack of them – the type of God who applauds the double standards and hunger for power of a Judas Iscariot? Judas Iscariot betrayed our Lord with a symbol of peace and love, whilst in fact seeking power and – perhaps – wealth.

Perhaps we too betray Christ with a kiss? we don’t need. to be church historians to recognise the duplicity of our representations of Christ. We greet our Lord in love, yet have used him throughout history as a battering ram by which to inflict our will and our culture on unfortunate and unwilling peoples.

What, then, are we affirming when, with the apostle, we claim God is “for us,” all that we have “God on our side”? If God was not on the side of Judas Iscariot, then we must assume that he was on the side of the Victim of the betrayer’s actions. The Oppressed One, our Lord. And we don’t need to be liberation theologians to recognise the recurrent biblical motif of God’s love and concern for victims of injustice.

God does not change his mind – that reminder too is a recurrent biblical motif – so today we can assume that God still loves the poor and oppressed, whether they be heroes of our faith (or of other faiths) behind the Iron Curtain, or the ghetto dwellers neglected by the Reagan administration, the Bantustan dwellers oppressed by the South African regime, the Aboriginal People  divorced from their homelands in Australia, womankind alienated by patriarchal language and power structures, homosexuals condemned to misunderstanding and victimisation by the enforcement of macho norms … the list goes on. These are those whose side God is on.

The Labor government in various states in Australia is withdrawing privileged status from religious institutions … should we moan and fight to maintain our luxuries, or should we instead thank God that we are at last to come face to face with the implications of a post-Christian era? That our idiosyncratic structures are to tumble about our ears in the same way that “cultural Christianity” has tumbled in the face of two world wars? The decline of cultural Christianity has gone a long way towards shattering the myth that God is “for” or “on the side of” cultural, and predominantly bourgeois, patriarchal, and Caucasian Christianity, and for that we should give thanks.

Saint Paul talks about God being “for us.” But do we allow him to be for us, when we defend our obscure and elitist institutions? Can we be allies of God when we too often reduce our ministry to a numbers game, as parish level of “bums on seats,” ostensibly in the interests of extending the Kingdom, but more realistically in the interests of maintaining the vicar’s stipend, keeping leaks from the roof, or restoring a parish organ? Perhaps, in a post-Christian era, we have to look more closely at the possibilities of worker priests (of more than one sex}, self-sufficient parish communities, and home churches, before, with Saint Paul, we can truly claim that God is for us.

If we can overcome our crippling disabilities, disabilities of wealth, power, and patriarchalism, then we will once more be able to “thank God in all circumstances.” Particularly we might do so in the second chance he has allowed us in the secularisation of society, and in the resultant loss of ecclesiastical privilege. Then, once more, we will, as humble men and women reliant solely on the grace of our God, rejoice in the knowledge that if God is for us, “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the president nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

YOU MAY LIKE TO REVISIT THE FINAL VERSE IN DYLAN'S ANTHEM ... I DID