SERMON PREACHED
AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS N.T.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18th 2011
(FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT)
Readings: 2 Samuel 7.1-11, 16
Psalm 89.1-4, 19-27
Romans 16.25-27
Luke 1.26-38
There is in some circles of Christianity a type of nudge, nudge, wink, wink approach to key moments and passages in the story of the people of God. More perhaps than any other this applies to the stories of the conception and the resurrection of Jesus. It is as if there is in some circles a psychological need to distance interpretation from the naïve openness, the innocent readiness to believe, that we perhaps all exhibited as children, but are embarrassed about as adults.
This is no new thing, reaching back to the post-enlightment period of the nineteenth century, as scientific method was applied to the doctrines and texts of faith. Sometimes the methodology was applied well, breaking down the elitist self-interest of some clergy who wielded biblical and doctrinal knowledge as an iron rod, keeping hoi polloi firmly in their place. Sometimes though it was applied inappropriately – a little like the famous passage that reduces the act of osculation – kissing – to a biological description of the muscular contortions and fluid exchanges involved. The love story that scripture should be was reduced to a mechanic’s handbook – which it was never intended to be – and then sneeringly dismissed as errant nonsense.
Ironically the same era gave birth to what we call fundamentalism, the literal or perhaps literalistic interpretation of the text. This too, like a doctor reading Robert Burns’ ‘my love is like a red, red rose’ in order to make a diagnosis of her condition, is a misreading of the ancients’ texts. And while it can sound as if I’m bleating on behalf of the only person in step, it is imperative that we find approaches to scripture that avoid these two misguided extremes. The Spirit is too energized to limit us to any one interpretation, particularly of so vast as text as the conception and resurrection stories, but there are boundaries of common sense, and too much Christian wordage passes beyond them.
The shock horror school of interpretation of the birth narratives bases its approach largely on two recognitions: in the first place that Mark, the earliest gospel account to be written, did not incorporate a birth story, and in the second that stories of virgin birth of extraordinary people were a kind of point of religious pride around the known world of Luke and Matthew’s time. With that two-pronged informational overload they surmise that they have heralded the death-knell of simple Christian interpretation – often trumpeting their superior knowledge with more glee than the late Christopher Hitchens. Unfortunately they forget that first century Christians were not all dimwits: the issues surrounding Luke and Matthew’s tellings were as complex to first century believers as they are to twenty-first century believers.
First century believers, however, did not expect Luke or Matthew to be providing a blow by blow narrative of the DNA transmission of Jesus of Nazareth. They knew that they were being told a simple truth: that in the hands of the God who flung stars across the heavens the conception of a child within the womb of an obedient servant is not arduous. The subsequent complexities of divine and human nature, and of the presence of timelessness and time in the DNA of that child, these were more complex. But these were issues to ponder over for subsequent millennia: for now it was enough to remind the communities of belief and non-belief that the Creator of the spheres is pretty much a can-do sort of God.
Luke’s and Matthew’s audiences knew, too that they were being referred back to other stories and moments in faith-history, particularly the Book of Judges. They knew that they were being told a story of God’s ability and readiness to work miracles in the lives of those who open themselves up to divine possibility. They knew they were being told a story of God’s preference for the uncluttered and unpretentious. They could even see in the subtle contrasts between Elizabeth’s and Mary’s encounter with the will of God that the latter showed an even greater ability to be a channel of the purposes of God.
A channel of the purposes of God but, despite the misapplication by history of some of the language of this and other scriptures, Mary is no meek-and-mild pushover. The language of a woman ‘overshadowed by the power of the almighty’ can be disturbing when read through the filters of modern awareness of the abuse of women in homes and churches throughout history – and it is right to pose those questions. But like questions of the DNA of Jesus, they are not questions that the text is setting out to address – in any case a glance at the feisty Magnificat of Mary that we read last week should make it fairly clear that God has not chosen a wallflower to be the home of the Incarnation.
These are stories about the ability and possibility of God. But they are stories, too, about the ability and possibility of those who open themselves up to the challenges of God – ironically Mark poses similar questions right at the original ending of his gospel-telling, as frightened women become the source of all resurrection knowledge, but we can explore that moment at another time.
Luke, though, wants us to know that Mary, mother of Jesus (mother of God as she is rightly known in the patristic traditions, for Jesus is nothing if not God), is the example par excellence of risk-taking in the service of the gospel. By seizing a unique moment in history this vulnerable, soon to be outcast, soon to be refugee woman becomes the home of God and the incubator, as it were, of salvation. A woman known personally to the earliest tellers of the gospel-story becomes a paradigm of our own responsibilities to serve God. Her experience of course is unique, but we all have within us the opportunities to seize the day of God’s call to proclaim hope and justice and compassionate love, we all have within us the opportunity to serve or thwart the gospel.
TLBWY
Friday, 16 December 2011
Saturday, 26 November 2011
Second Coming? Yeah Right!
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF St FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27th 2011
(FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT)
Readings:
Isaiah 64.1-9
Psalm 80.1-7, 17-19
1 Corinthians 1.1-9
Mark 13.24-37
There are times in the journey of scriptural interpretation when we have to set aside the rational, logical brain – to the extent that we have one! – and allow ourselves to be, as two Isaiahs and a Jeremiah saw so clearly, clay in the hands of the potter. It isn’t altogether easy, though as I have often said in previous faith communities, it is easier for someone like myself, who had apparently slipped away to the toilet when scientific brains were handed out, than it is for those who have a scientific mind. Nevertheless, there are respected and highly intelligent scientists and philosophers who are able to ensure that they know the limitations of human enquiry, know that there is a moment in which we can surrender to the ‘too big’ and ‘beyond our ken’ vastness of God and acknowledge that ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’ (to borrow Anselm’s phrase) is greater than the human mind. This, incidentally, is not to lapse into fundamentalism, a surprisingly modern, more or less late nineteenth century form of biblical interpretation that imposes a literalist interpretation on the text – the Hebrew and early Christian minds were always far larger than that.
Nevertheless, in the 21st century it is hard not to be slightly swayed by the reasonable scientific suggestion that, given the current evidence, the Christian doctrine of a second coming of Christ is somewhat spurious. Some scholars argue that even as early as the time in which Paul writing his letters, the decade from the late 50s to early 60s of the first century, the Christian community was altering its expectation of the imminent return of the Messiah. Certainly in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians all systems appear to be go: describing the role of the faith community Paul reminds them ‘you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven’ (1 Thess. 1. 9b-10a), and when Paul prays for his Thessalonian audience, ‘may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints’ (1 Thess. 3.13), he does so believing that this coming is imminent: ‘the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever’(1 Thess. 4.16b-17). Do we have to say of Paul that he would have received a nasty shock some years later when he was executed by the Romans, his Lord still seemingly absent, in visual terms?
Perhaps, but I am not convinced. The Book of Revelation, a little later than Paul, hangs tenaciously to the expectation of the Second Coming or Parousia. The gospel records and Acts do likewise. Like many doctrines of New Testament theology it would have been far easier to jettison this belief in order to sidestep the mocking antagonism of the critics and enemies of Christianity. Yet those early Christians were prepared to hold to it, even as, one by one, the eye witnesses of Jesus died out, and the first generations of Christians followed them. Certainly, later, as Christianity became a significant and later still the dominant paradigm in society, interest in the Second Coming dwindled. But, from time to time, as Christianity stagnated, the expectation was reawakened (not always to the good!), and, in each era, it has been as hard to believe and as risible as it is in our own. Do we dare to jettison this belief in our century?
In geological terms we know now we live on an ancient planet, circling a sun that will one day grow old and die. It may be that this is all that is meant when we speak of the second coming – that, long after our species has surrendered to its own exploitation of the planet, and long after new cycles of warming and cooling have restructured this blue globe, after new tectonic shifts have rearranged our continents far beyond our present imaginings, then life will simply peter away, and the final surviving species will dissipate into nothingness.
Maybe – and the doctrine of the Second Coming says that is okay too. For it says, primarily (as we remember in the rites of Easter), that the Alpha is the Omega: that the author of creation’s beginning will be the author of its endings. But the Doctrine of the Second Coming says more than merely that, for it says that not only the life of the universe, cosmological history, but the life of the sparrow and the life of you and the life of me is held in the tender, redeeming, hope-bringing hands of God. It is for that reason that Paul could write so confidently ‘may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints’. The details of what John of the Apocalypse calls ‘the new heavens and the new earth’ are in the hands of God – but that is the point: they are in the hands of God. They are in the hands of God: Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. And in the hands of God: judge.
Much contemporary theology – and even more contemporary a-theology – is keen to do away with the doctrine of judgement. We do so at great peril. Not that I want people to listen to hell fire and damnation sermons or want to attempt to frighten people into the clutches of faith. Apart from anything else, it is clear that those so-called evangelistic techniques are counter-productive in our current, nonchalant world. Judgement? Who cares?
For us the answer must be:‘we do’. There is an onus on us to live as a people under judgement. The tragic trail of sexual abuse in the church – though no worse than in some other institutions – is a sign of amnesia in some individuals as they forgot the doctrine of judgement, and predatory and exploitative sexual gratification became a greater creed. I suspect a Jesus saying about millstones, necks and oceans has much to say about the perpetrators of such evil. But for those of us who are not perpetrating such evil there is still always the need for long, hard self-scrutiny. Advent – and later, Lent – provide opportunity for just that. I do not understand the mechanics of the end of time, nor the mechanics of the Second Coming. But I try to remind myself that I stand in the shadow of that event, and try with the help of God to live a life at the closure of which I may be gently led into the unfathomable mysteries of God’s for-ever.
For that reason, more than 25 centuries after he wrote the words, I can add my amen to Isaiah’s plaintive prayer:
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity. Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider: we are all your people.
Amen.
THE CHURCH OF St FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27th 2011
(FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT)
Readings:
Isaiah 64.1-9
Psalm 80.1-7, 17-19
1 Corinthians 1.1-9
Mark 13.24-37
There are times in the journey of scriptural interpretation when we have to set aside the rational, logical brain – to the extent that we have one! – and allow ourselves to be, as two Isaiahs and a Jeremiah saw so clearly, clay in the hands of the potter. It isn’t altogether easy, though as I have often said in previous faith communities, it is easier for someone like myself, who had apparently slipped away to the toilet when scientific brains were handed out, than it is for those who have a scientific mind. Nevertheless, there are respected and highly intelligent scientists and philosophers who are able to ensure that they know the limitations of human enquiry, know that there is a moment in which we can surrender to the ‘too big’ and ‘beyond our ken’ vastness of God and acknowledge that ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’ (to borrow Anselm’s phrase) is greater than the human mind. This, incidentally, is not to lapse into fundamentalism, a surprisingly modern, more or less late nineteenth century form of biblical interpretation that imposes a literalist interpretation on the text – the Hebrew and early Christian minds were always far larger than that.
Nevertheless, in the 21st century it is hard not to be slightly swayed by the reasonable scientific suggestion that, given the current evidence, the Christian doctrine of a second coming of Christ is somewhat spurious. Some scholars argue that even as early as the time in which Paul writing his letters, the decade from the late 50s to early 60s of the first century, the Christian community was altering its expectation of the imminent return of the Messiah. Certainly in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians all systems appear to be go: describing the role of the faith community Paul reminds them ‘you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven’ (1 Thess. 1. 9b-10a), and when Paul prays for his Thessalonian audience, ‘may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints’ (1 Thess. 3.13), he does so believing that this coming is imminent: ‘the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever’(1 Thess. 4.16b-17). Do we have to say of Paul that he would have received a nasty shock some years later when he was executed by the Romans, his Lord still seemingly absent, in visual terms?
Perhaps, but I am not convinced. The Book of Revelation, a little later than Paul, hangs tenaciously to the expectation of the Second Coming or Parousia. The gospel records and Acts do likewise. Like many doctrines of New Testament theology it would have been far easier to jettison this belief in order to sidestep the mocking antagonism of the critics and enemies of Christianity. Yet those early Christians were prepared to hold to it, even as, one by one, the eye witnesses of Jesus died out, and the first generations of Christians followed them. Certainly, later, as Christianity became a significant and later still the dominant paradigm in society, interest in the Second Coming dwindled. But, from time to time, as Christianity stagnated, the expectation was reawakened (not always to the good!), and, in each era, it has been as hard to believe and as risible as it is in our own. Do we dare to jettison this belief in our century?
In geological terms we know now we live on an ancient planet, circling a sun that will one day grow old and die. It may be that this is all that is meant when we speak of the second coming – that, long after our species has surrendered to its own exploitation of the planet, and long after new cycles of warming and cooling have restructured this blue globe, after new tectonic shifts have rearranged our continents far beyond our present imaginings, then life will simply peter away, and the final surviving species will dissipate into nothingness.
Maybe – and the doctrine of the Second Coming says that is okay too. For it says, primarily (as we remember in the rites of Easter), that the Alpha is the Omega: that the author of creation’s beginning will be the author of its endings. But the Doctrine of the Second Coming says more than merely that, for it says that not only the life of the universe, cosmological history, but the life of the sparrow and the life of you and the life of me is held in the tender, redeeming, hope-bringing hands of God. It is for that reason that Paul could write so confidently ‘may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints’. The details of what John of the Apocalypse calls ‘the new heavens and the new earth’ are in the hands of God – but that is the point: they are in the hands of God. They are in the hands of God: Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. And in the hands of God: judge.
Much contemporary theology – and even more contemporary a-theology – is keen to do away with the doctrine of judgement. We do so at great peril. Not that I want people to listen to hell fire and damnation sermons or want to attempt to frighten people into the clutches of faith. Apart from anything else, it is clear that those so-called evangelistic techniques are counter-productive in our current, nonchalant world. Judgement? Who cares?
For us the answer must be:‘we do’. There is an onus on us to live as a people under judgement. The tragic trail of sexual abuse in the church – though no worse than in some other institutions – is a sign of amnesia in some individuals as they forgot the doctrine of judgement, and predatory and exploitative sexual gratification became a greater creed. I suspect a Jesus saying about millstones, necks and oceans has much to say about the perpetrators of such evil. But for those of us who are not perpetrating such evil there is still always the need for long, hard self-scrutiny. Advent – and later, Lent – provide opportunity for just that. I do not understand the mechanics of the end of time, nor the mechanics of the Second Coming. But I try to remind myself that I stand in the shadow of that event, and try with the help of God to live a life at the closure of which I may be gently led into the unfathomable mysteries of God’s for-ever.
For that reason, more than 25 centuries after he wrote the words, I can add my amen to Isaiah’s plaintive prayer:
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity. Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider: we are all your people.
Amen.
Monday, 7 November 2011
God's Garden
SERMON PREACHED
AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6th 2011
PENTECOST 21 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 32: (CARE FOR CREATION SUNDAY)
Readings: Joshua 24.1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78.1-7
1 Thessalonians 4.9-18
Matthew 25.1-13
By way of apology I should outline my caution towards so-called special Sundays. A little like the ‘Year Of’ pronouncements that emanate, I suspect, from a small office in the labyrinthine corridors of the United Nations – with its religious ‘Year Of’ counterpart in the smaller but equally labyrinthine corridors of the World Council of Churches – these declarations can become a hailstorm of cataclysmic proportions, spitting passionate and often worthy concerns at us faster than the speed of light and initiating 'awareness faitgue', let alone compassion fatigue . It seems to me on any one day we can, if not exhausted, find ourselves in the Decade of Evangelism, the Year of the Child, the Year of Being Nice to Endangered Species, the Year of Looking Out For Nasty Weeds, The Month of Being Kind to Grandmothers, The Month of Protecting Endangered Rock Oysters, the Day of Remembering Dolphins and the Day of Making Sure You Are Proud of Your Prayer Book, Hymn Book and Pew, all unawares. I’m a kind of Church Year and lectionary junky, not because I’m some sort of bombastic Anglo-Catholic (though I might be), but because I believe these are the best tools available to ensure that neither worship nor preaching becomes a cyclical focus on the Michael Godfrey personal obsession collection. By preaching and praying the liturgical calendar, imperfect though it may be, we are taken out of cosy comfort zones and forced to encounter the often discomforting regions of the scriptures of our faith. We are not forced into a form of dead mechanicalism, but we are steered away from smorgasbord faith, popular in some churches (evangelical and liberal alike), where we pick and choose the flavours that we like.
That whinge aside, however, I am on this occasion allowing a degree of special focus in our thoughts, for Care of and Hope for what I call ‘God’s Garden’, Creation, is a fundamental mission of the Christian Community. For many years now the Anglican Consultative Council has recognized and affirmed five marks of mission:
• to proclaim the Good News of the Reign of God
• to teach, baptize and nurture new believers,
• to respond to human need by loving service,
• to seek to transform unjust structures of society, and
• to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
The fifth – (which reads like a sentence put together by a working party!) – was a late addition to the first four, arriving on the scene in 1990. Nevertheless it is an important acknowledgement that Creation is an act of God’s sharing love, that the nurture of Creation is a commission given to humanity in the creation stories, and that the lives of many of our sisters and brothers in the human race lie perilously balanced as we often selfishly devour and destroy the resources of God’s earth.
There is then a sense that all our interpretation and application of scripture at all times must incorporate a degree of concern for the garden God has entrusted to us. It would be false to pretend it was overt all the time – as it would be false to pretend that every scripture selection commissions us to evangelize or to strive for justice – but it is there. And serendipitously, it is there by implication today, as our readings towards the close of the liturgical year begin to pick up the crescendo of apocalyptic expectation. It is even present in Paul’s impassioned and moving address to the Thessalonians, which, while hardly a Green Party Manifesto, commissions his audience to live their lives in such a way of love that they benefit and enhance the lives of those around them: ‘live quietly, … mind your own affairs, … work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one’. Paul was far from considering ecological issues, but if we are to read Paul in the 21st century we must ask whether our western lifestyles really demonstrate propriety towards others. Many analysts suggest that the fury that runs through the veins of El Qaida is nurtured at least in part by the bitter gaps in economic status between the West (or, as it is now inexplicably called, ‘the global north’) and the Muslim world, as we gobble up resources that could fuel and feed and clothe all seven billion in the world. It is simplistic, but it is a partial truth.
Sadly, as the Christian community read its apocalyptic texts, as I have mentioned now many times, it read them from a listening or reading site vastly different to that in which they were written. Those of us engaging in the Advent studies will be reminded of this yet again during December. Too often, though, Christians, especially those with an apocalyptic or millenarianist bent, have used expectation of a glorious Second Coming as an excuse to disregard or, more shamefully still, to hasten the desecration of the earth: an ecclesiatical 'bring it on' so that a selfish elect can skiddle to 'glory'. That parody of Christ-mission has understandably led socially compassionate Christianity-averse writers such as Seattle songwriter Charlie Murphy to remind us bitterly ‘the earth is a witch and we still burn her’.
To ignore our responsibility to nature is to drive a wedge between the miracle of our origins, in which God commands us to ‘husband’ creation, and the expectation of Christ’s return. To drive a wedge in such a way is blithely to forget the doctrine of judgement, and to forget those parables in which Jesus warns us that will be asked to account for the gifts we have had entrusted to us. It is to forget, too, that while we often emphasize the ‘friendship’ of Jesus, parables such as that of the ten maidens are texts that remind us of our obligation constantly to evaluate and re-evaluate our lives in the light of the glare of Christ: where were you when I was naked or hungry or thirsty in the global south or in the nations disappearing beneath rising sea-waters?
I do not believe we are called to follow any political party line in approach to these questions. I do believe, though, that we are called over and again to re-focus our lives to ensure that we nurture and care for the gifts that God has given us, and use them constantly in ways which glorify God. We are called to ensure that our lifestyles are not destroying God’s earth, and where they are, or where they are denying the livelihood and the very existence of our fellow humans and other species, to seek forgiveness, make alteration, and in that way ensure that our candles burn with eagerness as the bridegroom arrives.
May God help us so to do.
TLBWY
AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6th 2011
PENTECOST 21 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 32: (CARE FOR CREATION SUNDAY)
Readings: Joshua 24.1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78.1-7
1 Thessalonians 4.9-18
Matthew 25.1-13
By way of apology I should outline my caution towards so-called special Sundays. A little like the ‘Year Of’ pronouncements that emanate, I suspect, from a small office in the labyrinthine corridors of the United Nations – with its religious ‘Year Of’ counterpart in the smaller but equally labyrinthine corridors of the World Council of Churches – these declarations can become a hailstorm of cataclysmic proportions, spitting passionate and often worthy concerns at us faster than the speed of light and initiating 'awareness faitgue', let alone compassion fatigue . It seems to me on any one day we can, if not exhausted, find ourselves in the Decade of Evangelism, the Year of the Child, the Year of Being Nice to Endangered Species, the Year of Looking Out For Nasty Weeds, The Month of Being Kind to Grandmothers, The Month of Protecting Endangered Rock Oysters, the Day of Remembering Dolphins and the Day of Making Sure You Are Proud of Your Prayer Book, Hymn Book and Pew, all unawares. I’m a kind of Church Year and lectionary junky, not because I’m some sort of bombastic Anglo-Catholic (though I might be), but because I believe these are the best tools available to ensure that neither worship nor preaching becomes a cyclical focus on the Michael Godfrey personal obsession collection. By preaching and praying the liturgical calendar, imperfect though it may be, we are taken out of cosy comfort zones and forced to encounter the often discomforting regions of the scriptures of our faith. We are not forced into a form of dead mechanicalism, but we are steered away from smorgasbord faith, popular in some churches (evangelical and liberal alike), where we pick and choose the flavours that we like.
That whinge aside, however, I am on this occasion allowing a degree of special focus in our thoughts, for Care of and Hope for what I call ‘God’s Garden’, Creation, is a fundamental mission of the Christian Community. For many years now the Anglican Consultative Council has recognized and affirmed five marks of mission:
• to proclaim the Good News of the Reign of God
• to teach, baptize and nurture new believers,
• to respond to human need by loving service,
• to seek to transform unjust structures of society, and
• to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
The fifth – (which reads like a sentence put together by a working party!) – was a late addition to the first four, arriving on the scene in 1990. Nevertheless it is an important acknowledgement that Creation is an act of God’s sharing love, that the nurture of Creation is a commission given to humanity in the creation stories, and that the lives of many of our sisters and brothers in the human race lie perilously balanced as we often selfishly devour and destroy the resources of God’s earth.
There is then a sense that all our interpretation and application of scripture at all times must incorporate a degree of concern for the garden God has entrusted to us. It would be false to pretend it was overt all the time – as it would be false to pretend that every scripture selection commissions us to evangelize or to strive for justice – but it is there. And serendipitously, it is there by implication today, as our readings towards the close of the liturgical year begin to pick up the crescendo of apocalyptic expectation. It is even present in Paul’s impassioned and moving address to the Thessalonians, which, while hardly a Green Party Manifesto, commissions his audience to live their lives in such a way of love that they benefit and enhance the lives of those around them: ‘live quietly, … mind your own affairs, … work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one’. Paul was far from considering ecological issues, but if we are to read Paul in the 21st century we must ask whether our western lifestyles really demonstrate propriety towards others. Many analysts suggest that the fury that runs through the veins of El Qaida is nurtured at least in part by the bitter gaps in economic status between the West (or, as it is now inexplicably called, ‘the global north’) and the Muslim world, as we gobble up resources that could fuel and feed and clothe all seven billion in the world. It is simplistic, but it is a partial truth.
Sadly, as the Christian community read its apocalyptic texts, as I have mentioned now many times, it read them from a listening or reading site vastly different to that in which they were written. Those of us engaging in the Advent studies will be reminded of this yet again during December. Too often, though, Christians, especially those with an apocalyptic or millenarianist bent, have used expectation of a glorious Second Coming as an excuse to disregard or, more shamefully still, to hasten the desecration of the earth: an ecclesiatical 'bring it on' so that a selfish elect can skiddle to 'glory'. That parody of Christ-mission has understandably led socially compassionate Christianity-averse writers such as Seattle songwriter Charlie Murphy to remind us bitterly ‘the earth is a witch and we still burn her’.
To ignore our responsibility to nature is to drive a wedge between the miracle of our origins, in which God commands us to ‘husband’ creation, and the expectation of Christ’s return. To drive a wedge in such a way is blithely to forget the doctrine of judgement, and to forget those parables in which Jesus warns us that will be asked to account for the gifts we have had entrusted to us. It is to forget, too, that while we often emphasize the ‘friendship’ of Jesus, parables such as that of the ten maidens are texts that remind us of our obligation constantly to evaluate and re-evaluate our lives in the light of the glare of Christ: where were you when I was naked or hungry or thirsty in the global south or in the nations disappearing beneath rising sea-waters?
I do not believe we are called to follow any political party line in approach to these questions. I do believe, though, that we are called over and again to re-focus our lives to ensure that we nurture and care for the gifts that God has given us, and use them constantly in ways which glorify God. We are called to ensure that our lifestyles are not destroying God’s earth, and where they are, or where they are denying the livelihood and the very existence of our fellow humans and other species, to seek forgiveness, make alteration, and in that way ensure that our candles burn with eagerness as the bridegroom arrives.
May God help us so to do.
TLBWY
Thursday, 3 November 2011
Pie in the sky?
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF ST FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23rd 2011
(PENTECOST 20 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 30)
Readings: Deuteronomy 34.1-12
Psalm 90.1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2.1-13
Matthew 22.34-36
Paul’s remarkable letter-writing ministry began, as far as we know, when he wrote to the Thessalonians. As he moved around the Roman Empire, proclaiming the gospel that he fervently believed had been entrusted to him, to which he had been commissioned primarily by his encounter with the risen Lord, Paul left behind him faith communities that were forced to find their way on their own. He had no choice: it was his belief that he was called to move on and on – in the end he never reached his final destination, which was the area we now call Spain and Portugal – covering enormous distances and undertaking great risks to serve his Lord. The cost of his wandering, peripatetic ministry was that the communities he founded and nurtured in faith had to learn to fend for themselves. Like a parent, he had to set them free to fly solo.
Paul’s was a pastoral heart, and he never ceased to care for his people: as news reached him of trials that were being experienced by his beloved Thessalonians he turns to quill and papyrus to stand in as a substitute for his own comforting and encouraging presence. In an age of easy email it is hard for us to imagine the thrill his letters – at least those to Philippi and Thessalonica – would have brought to their recipients.
Thessalonica, though not one of the major cities of the Roman Empire, was no backwater, either. It was a city whose inhabitants were keen to stay onside with the leadership of the Roman Empire, and the presence of a new upstart religion in its midst was bound to be a course of concern to many in positions of power. Slowly the Christians found themselves first ostracized, alienated and shunned in the markets and other social circles, and then persecuted for their faith in Jesus. It was becoming increasingly difficult to remain optimistic, as many were barred from purchasing food in the local markets, and as normal community infrastructures were being denied them. Some Thessalonian Christians were dying – not necessarily as a direct result of the persecution, though that was no doubt a factor – and life was increasingly difficult.
This then is the dire context Paul addresses – with in part a heavy heart – as he writes to the Christians whose suffering is a direct result of his own ministry and evangelism. He seeks to encourage them by reminding them of the joy they experienced as he worked, preached and pastored amongst them, reminding them of the first flushes of divine energy they experienced as they surrendered their lives to the risen Lord.
Paul asks the Thessalonians to reconnect with their previous joy: when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word. But as he writes the Thessalonians he uses another technique, too, a kind of pre-membering, looking forward to the experience of the fullness of the Kingdom, the completion of God’s work in the realm that is yet to come. It is a primary technique of the style of thought that we call apocalyptic, a vision forward, cynically able to be dismissed as ‘pie in the sky’, yet in reality able to transform the hearts and minds of believers for more than two millennia. In particular we can recall the way in which hope of a better existence kept the Afro-American slave communities alive through decades of abuse and neglect.
The hope of heaven, as we might call it, is a powerful medicine, even if it can be criticised by some as keeping the downtrodden in their place. Paul makes clear though that he sought always to share not just words but his very life as a sign of the compassionate love of God: So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us. It is perhaps because of the quality of Paul’s love that we still have and read his letters today. It is this kind of life-transforming quality of love that Jesus is referring to as he speaks of love of God and neighbour. But central to all he writes to the Thessalonians is a word of hope: God is in control. Martin Luther would one day capture Paul’s hope in his own remarkable and most famous words:
Despite all foes, the Word shall stand
against all their endeavour;
God’s gifts and Spirit, close at hand,
shall be with us for ever.
What can it mean for us? Few of us have suffered or will suffer much for our faith, and pray God we won’t have to. Paul urged the Thessalonians and other Christian communities that they would not be tested beyond their ability to endure, but it is clear that some at Thessalonica had undergone considerable trial. Paul was pitting the claims of his God against the claims of Caesar, and there was always potential for that battle to end in tears. For us life is more simple. Nevertheless there are times we need to stand up for values that our wider society has forgotten. There’s a tacky-but-true bumper sticker that says ‘if you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?’ There’s no doubt that for the Thessalonian Christians the answer was ‘yes’; the challenge you and I face is to ensure that this would be the case for us as well, as we strive on in our witness to the God who comes. This will involve proclamation of a word of hope – a dimension some theologies dismantle, as well as a word of compassionate love and justice. This is the commission we share.
TLBWY
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23rd 2011
(PENTECOST 20 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 30)
Readings: Deuteronomy 34.1-12
Psalm 90.1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2.1-13
Matthew 22.34-36
Paul’s remarkable letter-writing ministry began, as far as we know, when he wrote to the Thessalonians. As he moved around the Roman Empire, proclaiming the gospel that he fervently believed had been entrusted to him, to which he had been commissioned primarily by his encounter with the risen Lord, Paul left behind him faith communities that were forced to find their way on their own. He had no choice: it was his belief that he was called to move on and on – in the end he never reached his final destination, which was the area we now call Spain and Portugal – covering enormous distances and undertaking great risks to serve his Lord. The cost of his wandering, peripatetic ministry was that the communities he founded and nurtured in faith had to learn to fend for themselves. Like a parent, he had to set them free to fly solo.
Paul’s was a pastoral heart, and he never ceased to care for his people: as news reached him of trials that were being experienced by his beloved Thessalonians he turns to quill and papyrus to stand in as a substitute for his own comforting and encouraging presence. In an age of easy email it is hard for us to imagine the thrill his letters – at least those to Philippi and Thessalonica – would have brought to their recipients.
Thessalonica, though not one of the major cities of the Roman Empire, was no backwater, either. It was a city whose inhabitants were keen to stay onside with the leadership of the Roman Empire, and the presence of a new upstart religion in its midst was bound to be a course of concern to many in positions of power. Slowly the Christians found themselves first ostracized, alienated and shunned in the markets and other social circles, and then persecuted for their faith in Jesus. It was becoming increasingly difficult to remain optimistic, as many were barred from purchasing food in the local markets, and as normal community infrastructures were being denied them. Some Thessalonian Christians were dying – not necessarily as a direct result of the persecution, though that was no doubt a factor – and life was increasingly difficult.
This then is the dire context Paul addresses – with in part a heavy heart – as he writes to the Christians whose suffering is a direct result of his own ministry and evangelism. He seeks to encourage them by reminding them of the joy they experienced as he worked, preached and pastored amongst them, reminding them of the first flushes of divine energy they experienced as they surrendered their lives to the risen Lord.
Paul asks the Thessalonians to reconnect with their previous joy: when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word. But as he writes the Thessalonians he uses another technique, too, a kind of pre-membering, looking forward to the experience of the fullness of the Kingdom, the completion of God’s work in the realm that is yet to come. It is a primary technique of the style of thought that we call apocalyptic, a vision forward, cynically able to be dismissed as ‘pie in the sky’, yet in reality able to transform the hearts and minds of believers for more than two millennia. In particular we can recall the way in which hope of a better existence kept the Afro-American slave communities alive through decades of abuse and neglect.
The hope of heaven, as we might call it, is a powerful medicine, even if it can be criticised by some as keeping the downtrodden in their place. Paul makes clear though that he sought always to share not just words but his very life as a sign of the compassionate love of God: So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us. It is perhaps because of the quality of Paul’s love that we still have and read his letters today. It is this kind of life-transforming quality of love that Jesus is referring to as he speaks of love of God and neighbour. But central to all he writes to the Thessalonians is a word of hope: God is in control. Martin Luther would one day capture Paul’s hope in his own remarkable and most famous words:
Despite all foes, the Word shall stand
against all their endeavour;
God’s gifts and Spirit, close at hand,
shall be with us for ever.
What can it mean for us? Few of us have suffered or will suffer much for our faith, and pray God we won’t have to. Paul urged the Thessalonians and other Christian communities that they would not be tested beyond their ability to endure, but it is clear that some at Thessalonica had undergone considerable trial. Paul was pitting the claims of his God against the claims of Caesar, and there was always potential for that battle to end in tears. For us life is more simple. Nevertheless there are times we need to stand up for values that our wider society has forgotten. There’s a tacky-but-true bumper sticker that says ‘if you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?’ There’s no doubt that for the Thessalonian Christians the answer was ‘yes’; the challenge you and I face is to ensure that this would be the case for us as well, as we strive on in our witness to the God who comes. This will involve proclamation of a word of hope – a dimension some theologies dismantle, as well as a word of compassionate love and justice. This is the commission we share.
TLBWY
Sunday, 23 October 2011
Render unto Caesar? Refugees and Sacred Cows.
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS, NT
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16th 2011
(PENTECOST 18 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 29)
Readings: Exodus 33.12-23
Psalm 99
1 Thessalonians 1.1-10
Matthew 22.15-33
To comprehend our communion with God we need to know the back-story, in Māori the whakapapa, of our faith. We are in the spiritual loins of our forebears as they are called into ‘peoplehood’ by a compassionate God. We are in the spiritual loins of our forebears as they are called to be God’s chosen people, led out of the sweat-yards of the Nile delta (where tragically our sisters and brothers in faith are once more in great danger: thank God for those of our Muslim cousins who have stood in solidarity with their suffering and vulnerable Christian neighbours). The people of Israel had previously been little more than a no-people, a rootless and wandering Middle Eastern tribe, descendants of patriarchs touched and blessed by God, but a people without direction. We are called by God never to forget that we, spiritually speaking, were once refugees: we were boat people even if our ocean was a desert. We were fleeing from oppression.
These are the people whose heart-cry God heard as they slaved for Pharaoh in Egypt. God heard them and had compassion not because they were a holy or nice or righteous people. God heard their heart-cries because they were a suffering people. The cries of suffering people have first-class access to the heart of the Creator. Our suffering, refugee ancestors were led by God from Egypt, perhaps in waves, or perhaps in one great and miraculous migration, escaping slavery, but soon turning on the hand that saved and fed them, soon whinging about the flavour of the manna. Rather than offering lives of thanksgiving to a saving God, they built a golden calf, generating an alternative deity: God, you may recall, was not amused. We must always recall the extent to which the story of the recalcitrant people of God has repeated itself – the degree to which for example the new people of God, the Christian community, soon forgot and still forgets its call to compassion and justice, and refuses to hear the voice of those who Frantz Fanon called ‘the wretched of the earth’.
It is worth pausing to reflect on our own golden calves. As a new religion Christianity displayed at its best considerable integrity until the fourth century, establishing itself as a religion of conspicuous love and justice, bravery and compassion. Later we tended to forget our vocation to the way of the cross, and at our worst began to proclaim the way of the sword instead. At our worst we have done that ever since – or at least until recent decades when we lost, thank God, our institutionalised supremacy (outside the US Empire).
We were not, thank God, always at our worst, despite our frequent mistakes, and more than all Muslims are terrorists – as the brave Muslim protectors are reminding us in Egypt. Few would forget, once they heard the story, the bravery of the Northern Territory, Arnhem Land missionaries who stood in the way of the guns of those European Australians who would shoot indigenous people as a form of entertainment. These missionaries were not operating out of a theology of the sword, but a theology of the cross. Still: Our Anglican denominations, perhaps even our own faith community, certainly ourselves as individuals, have had moments when we have allowed shibboleths to usurp the place of God in our priority. We have, like Moses’ recalcitrant people, come very close to becoming the no-people, the no-person we were in the loins of our ancestors.
God is a God of grace, and, although his rescued chosen people are soon a stiff-necked people, God does not reject them. Over and again that is the story of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is the story even of our Christian Testament, the story of our Christian history, and the story of our own lives. God maintains a presence with the people of God, tainted as our history may be; Moses continues to be God’s chosen instrument as the wayward people are led to their undeserved destiny.
When Matthew depicts the Pharisees’ approach to Jesus ‘to trap him’ he makes clear that they have lost all respect. We who are believers have the hindsight advantage of knowing the identity of Jesus as Lord (either in terms of the textual narrative, or in our own lives, or both). There is little doubt though that Matthew is depicting the Pharisees as a people who have lost respect for all that is wise and holy, not just Jesus. The come to trap Jesus, not to engage in conversation with him. They come armed with obsequious phrases. They come to sneer: it is not a good way to gain insight or wisdom (though we as Christ-bearers have often adopted a similar attitude when we have encountered ancient cultures previously unknown to us, and sneered at their presumed unsophistication).
Matthew’s Pharisees encounter something greater than they can comprehend. The God of Jesus Christ is not a player of games, and despite hundreds of years of misinterpretation – misinterpretation that was caused by Christian interpreters losing the perspective of the cross and interpreting from the perspective of the sword – Jesus does not here give the Emperor of Rome a ringing endorsement. The tone is far more one of ‘render as much as you like to Caesar, but God will always be God’. Wherever claims to divinity are made – whether in the form of a golden calf or the form of an emperor who proclaims himself divine – God’s voice of justice will eventually speak out, and false deities will crumble.
These days, as we of the community of Jesus are increasingly marginalized, the voice of God will be an ever more subtle revelation, an ever more counter-cultural revelation of divine will. Prime Ministers and Political parties may have their own golden calves, and little time for any consideration of matters of faith, justice, or God at all, yet even so sometimes God’s compassionate voice will speak. While it’s too early to crow, the events surrounding the rejection of off-shore bases for the so-called ‘processing’ of asylum seekers suggest that even in contemporary Australia in all its disinterest in Christianity the voice of the compassionate God can still be heard. This is so, it seems, despite valiant attempts by Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard to out-tough each other, to out-Hanson each other in the name of a Golden Calf named National Interest. Whatever the national interest – the head of Caesar, the sacred cow – might be, the interests of God are always love and compassionate justice. Refugees, like the Hebrews in Egypt, will find a home. The onus will be on us to be the face of Christ in the home they have found. In every possible way.
TLBWY
FRED’S PASS, NT
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16th 2011
(PENTECOST 18 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 29)
Readings: Exodus 33.12-23
Psalm 99
1 Thessalonians 1.1-10
Matthew 22.15-33
To comprehend our communion with God we need to know the back-story, in Māori the whakapapa, of our faith. We are in the spiritual loins of our forebears as they are called into ‘peoplehood’ by a compassionate God. We are in the spiritual loins of our forebears as they are called to be God’s chosen people, led out of the sweat-yards of the Nile delta (where tragically our sisters and brothers in faith are once more in great danger: thank God for those of our Muslim cousins who have stood in solidarity with their suffering and vulnerable Christian neighbours). The people of Israel had previously been little more than a no-people, a rootless and wandering Middle Eastern tribe, descendants of patriarchs touched and blessed by God, but a people without direction. We are called by God never to forget that we, spiritually speaking, were once refugees: we were boat people even if our ocean was a desert. We were fleeing from oppression.
These are the people whose heart-cry God heard as they slaved for Pharaoh in Egypt. God heard them and had compassion not because they were a holy or nice or righteous people. God heard their heart-cries because they were a suffering people. The cries of suffering people have first-class access to the heart of the Creator. Our suffering, refugee ancestors were led by God from Egypt, perhaps in waves, or perhaps in one great and miraculous migration, escaping slavery, but soon turning on the hand that saved and fed them, soon whinging about the flavour of the manna. Rather than offering lives of thanksgiving to a saving God, they built a golden calf, generating an alternative deity: God, you may recall, was not amused. We must always recall the extent to which the story of the recalcitrant people of God has repeated itself – the degree to which for example the new people of God, the Christian community, soon forgot and still forgets its call to compassion and justice, and refuses to hear the voice of those who Frantz Fanon called ‘the wretched of the earth’.
It is worth pausing to reflect on our own golden calves. As a new religion Christianity displayed at its best considerable integrity until the fourth century, establishing itself as a religion of conspicuous love and justice, bravery and compassion. Later we tended to forget our vocation to the way of the cross, and at our worst began to proclaim the way of the sword instead. At our worst we have done that ever since – or at least until recent decades when we lost, thank God, our institutionalised supremacy (outside the US Empire).
We were not, thank God, always at our worst, despite our frequent mistakes, and more than all Muslims are terrorists – as the brave Muslim protectors are reminding us in Egypt. Few would forget, once they heard the story, the bravery of the Northern Territory, Arnhem Land missionaries who stood in the way of the guns of those European Australians who would shoot indigenous people as a form of entertainment. These missionaries were not operating out of a theology of the sword, but a theology of the cross. Still: Our Anglican denominations, perhaps even our own faith community, certainly ourselves as individuals, have had moments when we have allowed shibboleths to usurp the place of God in our priority. We have, like Moses’ recalcitrant people, come very close to becoming the no-people, the no-person we were in the loins of our ancestors.
God is a God of grace, and, although his rescued chosen people are soon a stiff-necked people, God does not reject them. Over and again that is the story of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is the story even of our Christian Testament, the story of our Christian history, and the story of our own lives. God maintains a presence with the people of God, tainted as our history may be; Moses continues to be God’s chosen instrument as the wayward people are led to their undeserved destiny.
When Matthew depicts the Pharisees’ approach to Jesus ‘to trap him’ he makes clear that they have lost all respect. We who are believers have the hindsight advantage of knowing the identity of Jesus as Lord (either in terms of the textual narrative, or in our own lives, or both). There is little doubt though that Matthew is depicting the Pharisees as a people who have lost respect for all that is wise and holy, not just Jesus. The come to trap Jesus, not to engage in conversation with him. They come armed with obsequious phrases. They come to sneer: it is not a good way to gain insight or wisdom (though we as Christ-bearers have often adopted a similar attitude when we have encountered ancient cultures previously unknown to us, and sneered at their presumed unsophistication).
Matthew’s Pharisees encounter something greater than they can comprehend. The God of Jesus Christ is not a player of games, and despite hundreds of years of misinterpretation – misinterpretation that was caused by Christian interpreters losing the perspective of the cross and interpreting from the perspective of the sword – Jesus does not here give the Emperor of Rome a ringing endorsement. The tone is far more one of ‘render as much as you like to Caesar, but God will always be God’. Wherever claims to divinity are made – whether in the form of a golden calf or the form of an emperor who proclaims himself divine – God’s voice of justice will eventually speak out, and false deities will crumble.
These days, as we of the community of Jesus are increasingly marginalized, the voice of God will be an ever more subtle revelation, an ever more counter-cultural revelation of divine will. Prime Ministers and Political parties may have their own golden calves, and little time for any consideration of matters of faith, justice, or God at all, yet even so sometimes God’s compassionate voice will speak. While it’s too early to crow, the events surrounding the rejection of off-shore bases for the so-called ‘processing’ of asylum seekers suggest that even in contemporary Australia in all its disinterest in Christianity the voice of the compassionate God can still be heard. This is so, it seems, despite valiant attempts by Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard to out-tough each other, to out-Hanson each other in the name of a Golden Calf named National Interest. Whatever the national interest – the head of Caesar, the sacred cow – might be, the interests of God are always love and compassionate justice. Refugees, like the Hebrews in Egypt, will find a home. The onus will be on us to be the face of Christ in the home they have found. In every possible way.
TLBWY
Friday, 7 October 2011
Inclusion or Disgrace?
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9th 2011
(PENTECOST 17 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 28)
Readings: Exodus 32.1-14
Ps 106.1-6, 20-24
Philippians 4.1-9
Matthew 22.1-14
If we were to take but one message away from the Year of Matthew, year after year, (or third year after third year!) it would be the need to recognize that the context in which a biblical text is written is always an inescapably powerful weight resting around the shoulders of the text and its interpreters. Approaches to the scriptures that see them as effectively dictated from on high may well provide a great sense of satisfaction to the reader, to any person in the in-crowd, but they will not proclaim the grace-filled, welcoming and embracing Reign of God, the central message that we are commissioned by Jesus to proclaim. An outstanding contemporary Serbo-Croatian theologian, Miroslav Volf, has written a book called Exclusion and Embrace, in which he argues that a church that does not embrace inclusion even at the cost of reconciliation with bitter enemies (he is, remember, a Balkan Christian who saw the brutality of Slobodan Milosevic and his allies) is failing to embrace the Great Commission of Jesus.
To be a church of welcome in our post-modern world is to be a church that listens to the ways our words may fall on the ears of those who are hurting most in our communities and societies. We may, thank God, no longer be the powerful player that we once were in the western world – governments fail to quake in their boots when an Anglican or other Christian leader makes a pronouncement these days – but we are nevertheless a people of privilege. We are the wealthy of God’s earth, and most of us live lives of considerable comfort. Matthew was writing the gospel for a community who were unsure whether they would see their next meal, let alone where it would come from. Matthew’s telling of the Jesus is a gospel of hope for a frightened people. We are generally not a frightened people – though moments of trial in our lives may frighten us, and can open our ears to hear as Matthew’s people once heard.
You may have seen the chilling and multi Academy Award winning 1997 Italian movie film Life is Beautiful , directed and starred in by Roberto Benigni. In it the lead character, played by Benigni, creates a narrative alternative to reality in a concentration camp in order to protect his pre-school son from the Nazis. It is a chilling film, one I hope never to see again, yet undoubtedly one of the most powerful films I have ever seen. The point here, though, is that Benigni’s character creates a narrative in which the four year old boy believes he is in a game in which the child who remains hidden the longest will win a German tank. By this Benigni’s character conceals the boy from the Nazis, and although his own life is taken in the closing moments of Nazi control of the camp, the boy’s life is saved.
While we rightly look on Hitler’s Third Reich as one of western history’s darkest hours, we need from time to time to recall that the earliest Christians underwent their periods of abject fear and persecution, and that the most exclusive of the Christian writings - not least the Book of Revelation that some of us will soon be studying together – were written in such a context. As with Benigni’s tale, Matthew tells the story of Jesus in such a way as to offer hope – the hope of redemption and of divine retribution – to Christ-followers living in fear for their lives.
We could of course use this analysis to dismiss the hope-filled writings of our scriptures as pie-in-the-sky. It needs to be said that these narratives would not have transformed frightened believers into willing witnesses and even martyrs were it not for their over-powering experience of the presence of the victorious risen Christ who came to them in worship, in scripture and in fellowship. I fear too many of our most liberal analysts of the scriptures forget this, turning resurrection stories into a motion passed by a committee of story-tellers. It was not so, but rather the life-transforming experience of those who first and subsequently encountered the risen Lord.
At the same time though we must remember that as they began to tell the Jesus story they began to be victimised. Again, as I’ve said a few times recently, we lost the impetus of the Jesus story when we became the dominant religious paradigm, and used the story to keep the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate. Eventually, tragically, in recent decades we have been exposed as having blundered into an arguably worse morass, enabling a church culture that allowed and then set about protecting perpetrators of gross betrayals of human decency, let alone of the gospel. In recent decades we have come once more to be a minority in society, to be back where some of the first Christians were – though perhaps not a persecuted minority like Matthew’s people. Nevertheless, as a marginalised and sometimes parodied people of Jesus we are cast back on the mettle of our own integrity, cast back for example to the place where Paul’s Philippians were (twenty years perhaps before Matthew) as they struggled to be Christ-bearers in a world that was largely scornful of their new religious movement.
Even there though, as Paul knew only too well from his struggles particularly with the Corinthian and to a lesser extent the Galatian people, there was room for destabilisation of the Jesus community. Philippians is, along with 1 Thessalonians, Paul’s most loving letter, but it is not without its cautions. Euodia and Syntyche, perhaps amongst the founding mothers of the Philippian Jesus community, are beginning to show signs of slipping into a power struggle, that most human yet most demonic of destructive force in church communities. Unlike the Galatians or the heinous Corinthians, the Philippians have not surrendered to the dark side, but the possibility is there, and Paul does all he can to nip it in the bud: I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche, to be of the same mind in the Lord. They have, Paul indicates, done much for the gospel, but this can be undone.
We need to know that too, for our world is in that respect unchanged from theirs: there can be no place for power struggles in the servant people of God. Paul – genuinely believing his own Galatian adage ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’, offers his own life as an example (few of us would be so brave!). Paul has just written I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death that somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead; now he adds whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things … it is these things that have been for years now the sole grace-filled focus of his life. That is our challenge too, as we seek to become a grace-filled, inclusive people of God, graced guests at the Feast of God, a people of inclusion and embrace.
TLBWY
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9th 2011
(PENTECOST 17 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 28)
Readings: Exodus 32.1-14
Ps 106.1-6, 20-24
Philippians 4.1-9
Matthew 22.1-14
If we were to take but one message away from the Year of Matthew, year after year, (or third year after third year!) it would be the need to recognize that the context in which a biblical text is written is always an inescapably powerful weight resting around the shoulders of the text and its interpreters. Approaches to the scriptures that see them as effectively dictated from on high may well provide a great sense of satisfaction to the reader, to any person in the in-crowd, but they will not proclaim the grace-filled, welcoming and embracing Reign of God, the central message that we are commissioned by Jesus to proclaim. An outstanding contemporary Serbo-Croatian theologian, Miroslav Volf, has written a book called Exclusion and Embrace, in which he argues that a church that does not embrace inclusion even at the cost of reconciliation with bitter enemies (he is, remember, a Balkan Christian who saw the brutality of Slobodan Milosevic and his allies) is failing to embrace the Great Commission of Jesus.
To be a church of welcome in our post-modern world is to be a church that listens to the ways our words may fall on the ears of those who are hurting most in our communities and societies. We may, thank God, no longer be the powerful player that we once were in the western world – governments fail to quake in their boots when an Anglican or other Christian leader makes a pronouncement these days – but we are nevertheless a people of privilege. We are the wealthy of God’s earth, and most of us live lives of considerable comfort. Matthew was writing the gospel for a community who were unsure whether they would see their next meal, let alone where it would come from. Matthew’s telling of the Jesus is a gospel of hope for a frightened people. We are generally not a frightened people – though moments of trial in our lives may frighten us, and can open our ears to hear as Matthew’s people once heard.
You may have seen the chilling and multi Academy Award winning 1997 Italian movie film Life is Beautiful , directed and starred in by Roberto Benigni. In it the lead character, played by Benigni, creates a narrative alternative to reality in a concentration camp in order to protect his pre-school son from the Nazis. It is a chilling film, one I hope never to see again, yet undoubtedly one of the most powerful films I have ever seen. The point here, though, is that Benigni’s character creates a narrative in which the four year old boy believes he is in a game in which the child who remains hidden the longest will win a German tank. By this Benigni’s character conceals the boy from the Nazis, and although his own life is taken in the closing moments of Nazi control of the camp, the boy’s life is saved.
While we rightly look on Hitler’s Third Reich as one of western history’s darkest hours, we need from time to time to recall that the earliest Christians underwent their periods of abject fear and persecution, and that the most exclusive of the Christian writings - not least the Book of Revelation that some of us will soon be studying together – were written in such a context. As with Benigni’s tale, Matthew tells the story of Jesus in such a way as to offer hope – the hope of redemption and of divine retribution – to Christ-followers living in fear for their lives.
We could of course use this analysis to dismiss the hope-filled writings of our scriptures as pie-in-the-sky. It needs to be said that these narratives would not have transformed frightened believers into willing witnesses and even martyrs were it not for their over-powering experience of the presence of the victorious risen Christ who came to them in worship, in scripture and in fellowship. I fear too many of our most liberal analysts of the scriptures forget this, turning resurrection stories into a motion passed by a committee of story-tellers. It was not so, but rather the life-transforming experience of those who first and subsequently encountered the risen Lord.
At the same time though we must remember that as they began to tell the Jesus story they began to be victimised. Again, as I’ve said a few times recently, we lost the impetus of the Jesus story when we became the dominant religious paradigm, and used the story to keep the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate. Eventually, tragically, in recent decades we have been exposed as having blundered into an arguably worse morass, enabling a church culture that allowed and then set about protecting perpetrators of gross betrayals of human decency, let alone of the gospel. In recent decades we have come once more to be a minority in society, to be back where some of the first Christians were – though perhaps not a persecuted minority like Matthew’s people. Nevertheless, as a marginalised and sometimes parodied people of Jesus we are cast back on the mettle of our own integrity, cast back for example to the place where Paul’s Philippians were (twenty years perhaps before Matthew) as they struggled to be Christ-bearers in a world that was largely scornful of their new religious movement.
Even there though, as Paul knew only too well from his struggles particularly with the Corinthian and to a lesser extent the Galatian people, there was room for destabilisation of the Jesus community. Philippians is, along with 1 Thessalonians, Paul’s most loving letter, but it is not without its cautions. Euodia and Syntyche, perhaps amongst the founding mothers of the Philippian Jesus community, are beginning to show signs of slipping into a power struggle, that most human yet most demonic of destructive force in church communities. Unlike the Galatians or the heinous Corinthians, the Philippians have not surrendered to the dark side, but the possibility is there, and Paul does all he can to nip it in the bud: I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche, to be of the same mind in the Lord. They have, Paul indicates, done much for the gospel, but this can be undone.
We need to know that too, for our world is in that respect unchanged from theirs: there can be no place for power struggles in the servant people of God. Paul – genuinely believing his own Galatian adage ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’, offers his own life as an example (few of us would be so brave!). Paul has just written I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death that somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead; now he adds whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things … it is these things that have been for years now the sole grace-filled focus of his life. That is our challenge too, as we seek to become a grace-filled, inclusive people of God, graced guests at the Feast of God, a people of inclusion and embrace.
TLBWY
Saturday, 24 September 2011
A Tale of Two Siblings
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF St FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25th 2011
(PENTECOST 15 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 26)
Readings: Exodus 17.1-7
Ps 78.1-4, 11-16
Philippians 2.1-13
Matthew 21.23-32
The late Colin Slee, until his recent untimely death the Dean of Southwark Cathedral in London, was known for pushing a complacent Christian community outside the boundaries of its cosy-zones. One powerful example of this, with considerable relevance to a reading of today’s gospel passage, was when Slee pronounced that Christians – perhaps he said preaching Christians – need a licence to read the bible.
Such a claim of course sends evangelical and reformed Christians scurrying to their reliquaries to clutch relics of Martin Luther, but Slee has a powerful point. The bible – apart from being one of the most abused collections of writings in human history – is potentially as toxic a resource pool as any mining company’s arsenic wash-pools.
Perhaps the most potentially toxic of writings, with their other worldly worldview and disinterest in the fate of those beyond the chosen or redeemed, are the ‘apocalyptic writings’. Unfortunately, and we need to remember this every third year, Matthew is the most apocalyptic-influenced of the gospel-tellings, and, tucked away in our tiny sample of Matthew’s good news, is an example of a Jesus saying, retold by Matthew, which has had horrendously noxious implications for some of society’s victims ever since Matthew made its way to the front of the New Testament.
It got to that position because of the large degree to which Matthew told the Jesus story within the context of the story of the Old Testament people of God. That chain of events is a continuum: Matthew made such strong links with the Hebrew as he turned to the language of apocalyptic, that relatively late strand of Jewish thought that is so full of vision and codified reference to political leaders, military dictators and oppressors who had made hell of the lives of Jewish people. He did so because Matthew’s own faith community was similarly experiencing persecution and oppression. Ironically this is now coming in part at the hands of the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem, as the wedge between Christians and Jews became wider and wider, and as the Jewish leadership were keen to make clear top the Roman authorities that Christians, including Matthew’s largely Jewish Christians, were not Jews.
Why does this matter? It matters because, when Jesus told the story, and when Matthew recorded Jesus telling the story, of a first son who initially refuses and then accepts the mandate of the father, and of a second son who initially accepts and then neglects the mandate of the father, it was quickly applied to a Jewish community that once served God and Torah, but neglected Jesus (the second son), and a Gentile community that once neglected God and Torah, but in the person of ‘tax collectors and the prostitutes’ changed its mind and received the (law-observant) gospel-message. In our scene it is the Jewish religious leadership that are challenging Jesus, who are his co-conversationalists, and who stand condemned by the exchange. In the hands of the history of later Christian leadership, however, the passage became one of many in which the Jews were condemned as executors of Jesus. Such condemnation, culminating in the atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich, but much foreshadowed in the anti-Semitism of all Europe in the pre-Hitler centuries, is a blood stain on the hands of the Christian community, and one for which we must always be humbled in our relationships with those of other faiths and none: we got this wrong.
Matthew, however, was telling this Jesus story in a different world. To his audience the saying of Jesus about two brothers was a reassurance that there was for them the assurance of grace, that God had received them, and that even though the power-players in the Jewish community were persecuting them, God was on the side of the persecuted, the new Jesus community. For us reading these Matthew stories interpretation is a delicate tight-rope walk. The simple message is timeless: that God does dwell with the people of God the Christ community, in those times of trial that we pray deliverance from in the great prayer of Jesus. At the same time we do need to remember and acknowledge that we live in a different world. In our history we have become the persecutors, the Jewish leaders trying to trap Jesus, rather than the broken and vulnerable, God-needing Jesus community, the son who gets it right. In our opening decades of the twenty-first century the pendulum is swinging again, and we are no longer a people of power – the interpretation of Matthew’s stories is in a sense far easier when we are a marginalised, if not yet victimised people of God.
We can be assured of the presence of God in our trials, though we might also always make sure that there are none who we victimize or oppress by our faith or even our lifestyles, seeking to set to right where we do wrong. Helpfully (and ironically, given, I suspect, the lack of love in Matthew’s mind for Paul and his law-free gospel), Paul’s great hymn of the self-emptying Christ may always serve as a litmus test of the appropriate nature, or otherwise, of our Christian living. Are we indeed emulating the Christ who, as Wesley put it after Paul, emptied himself of all but love, emptied himself particularly of power? Or are we like Christians of many centuries, wielding inappropriate power, oppressing others, and by that using the name of God in vain? For too long we oppressed in the name of Jesus, but in the 21st century we have new opportunity to be a servant community, rumouring resurrection by the quality of our lives, not the power of our society. We have opportunity at last to hear the words of Jesus spoken to a community whose sole weapon is that of Christ-pointing love. May God help us to be the son who gets it right!
TLBWY
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25th 2011
(PENTECOST 15 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 26)
Readings: Exodus 17.1-7
Ps 78.1-4, 11-16
Philippians 2.1-13
Matthew 21.23-32
The late Colin Slee, until his recent untimely death the Dean of Southwark Cathedral in London, was known for pushing a complacent Christian community outside the boundaries of its cosy-zones. One powerful example of this, with considerable relevance to a reading of today’s gospel passage, was when Slee pronounced that Christians – perhaps he said preaching Christians – need a licence to read the bible.
Such a claim of course sends evangelical and reformed Christians scurrying to their reliquaries to clutch relics of Martin Luther, but Slee has a powerful point. The bible – apart from being one of the most abused collections of writings in human history – is potentially as toxic a resource pool as any mining company’s arsenic wash-pools.
Perhaps the most potentially toxic of writings, with their other worldly worldview and disinterest in the fate of those beyond the chosen or redeemed, are the ‘apocalyptic writings’. Unfortunately, and we need to remember this every third year, Matthew is the most apocalyptic-influenced of the gospel-tellings, and, tucked away in our tiny sample of Matthew’s good news, is an example of a Jesus saying, retold by Matthew, which has had horrendously noxious implications for some of society’s victims ever since Matthew made its way to the front of the New Testament.
It got to that position because of the large degree to which Matthew told the Jesus story within the context of the story of the Old Testament people of God. That chain of events is a continuum: Matthew made such strong links with the Hebrew as he turned to the language of apocalyptic, that relatively late strand of Jewish thought that is so full of vision and codified reference to political leaders, military dictators and oppressors who had made hell of the lives of Jewish people. He did so because Matthew’s own faith community was similarly experiencing persecution and oppression. Ironically this is now coming in part at the hands of the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem, as the wedge between Christians and Jews became wider and wider, and as the Jewish leadership were keen to make clear top the Roman authorities that Christians, including Matthew’s largely Jewish Christians, were not Jews.
Why does this matter? It matters because, when Jesus told the story, and when Matthew recorded Jesus telling the story, of a first son who initially refuses and then accepts the mandate of the father, and of a second son who initially accepts and then neglects the mandate of the father, it was quickly applied to a Jewish community that once served God and Torah, but neglected Jesus (the second son), and a Gentile community that once neglected God and Torah, but in the person of ‘tax collectors and the prostitutes’ changed its mind and received the (law-observant) gospel-message. In our scene it is the Jewish religious leadership that are challenging Jesus, who are his co-conversationalists, and who stand condemned by the exchange. In the hands of the history of later Christian leadership, however, the passage became one of many in which the Jews were condemned as executors of Jesus. Such condemnation, culminating in the atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich, but much foreshadowed in the anti-Semitism of all Europe in the pre-Hitler centuries, is a blood stain on the hands of the Christian community, and one for which we must always be humbled in our relationships with those of other faiths and none: we got this wrong.
Matthew, however, was telling this Jesus story in a different world. To his audience the saying of Jesus about two brothers was a reassurance that there was for them the assurance of grace, that God had received them, and that even though the power-players in the Jewish community were persecuting them, God was on the side of the persecuted, the new Jesus community. For us reading these Matthew stories interpretation is a delicate tight-rope walk. The simple message is timeless: that God does dwell with the people of God the Christ community, in those times of trial that we pray deliverance from in the great prayer of Jesus. At the same time we do need to remember and acknowledge that we live in a different world. In our history we have become the persecutors, the Jewish leaders trying to trap Jesus, rather than the broken and vulnerable, God-needing Jesus community, the son who gets it right. In our opening decades of the twenty-first century the pendulum is swinging again, and we are no longer a people of power – the interpretation of Matthew’s stories is in a sense far easier when we are a marginalised, if not yet victimised people of God.
We can be assured of the presence of God in our trials, though we might also always make sure that there are none who we victimize or oppress by our faith or even our lifestyles, seeking to set to right where we do wrong. Helpfully (and ironically, given, I suspect, the lack of love in Matthew’s mind for Paul and his law-free gospel), Paul’s great hymn of the self-emptying Christ may always serve as a litmus test of the appropriate nature, or otherwise, of our Christian living. Are we indeed emulating the Christ who, as Wesley put it after Paul, emptied himself of all but love, emptied himself particularly of power? Or are we like Christians of many centuries, wielding inappropriate power, oppressing others, and by that using the name of God in vain? For too long we oppressed in the name of Jesus, but in the 21st century we have new opportunity to be a servant community, rumouring resurrection by the quality of our lives, not the power of our society. We have opportunity at last to hear the words of Jesus spoken to a community whose sole weapon is that of Christ-pointing love. May God help us to be the son who gets it right!
TLBWY
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