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
Saturday, 24 September 2011
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Inconvenient Grace
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18th 2011
(PENTECOST 14 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 25)
Readings: Exodus 16.2-15
Ps 105.1-6, 37-45
Philippians 1.21-30
Matthew 20.1-16
It often amuses me that we listen to a parable, a powerfully vivid word picture of the itinerant poet-preacher Jesus (who is of course so much more, but of that another time), agree that it is one of those Jesus-passages that are timeless and need little or no explanation to translate it into our own culture, and then spend some twenty minutes enlarging upon it, explicating it and perhaps even tragically diluting it for our own time and culture. There are of course one or two of the words pictures painted by Jesus that can benefit from a little bit of explanation to give them applicable meaning in our very different culture, but on the whole they are few and far between. Forget trades-union, but simply know that we are hearing a story about the right of God to do whatever God chooses, and that we are simply not in the driver’s seat of cosmic or salvation history. I suggest that, despite the track record of history, which has spent enormous amounts of ink and hot air telling God who should be a participant in the New Heavens and Earth of apocalyptic longing, the choice is probably God’s, and we – even the most proscriptive of us, may be in for a few surprises as we wake up in the celestial dormitory.
In fact I suspect we should spend a lot less time than Christians traditionally have in the border maintenance of deciding who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’. I have my own beliefs that there probably isn’t an in or an out, but I shall leave that particular heresy for another time and another place. We might however just note in passing that a parable about the kingdom of God that is all about the inclusion of newcomers and outsiders may have something very serious to say about how we as a Christ-community should responds to the plight of those feeing international atrocities and landing on our shores. Not, I might add, questions about ‘the national interest’ or even about ‘due process’, but about the values of a compassionate and welcoming Christ who touches and transforms the lives of those most on – or beyond – the margins of society. But the parables of Jesus are oten about grace and compassion, after all!
The great and passionate ambassador of Christ, Paul of Tarsus, is an entirely different kettle of something fishy. Too often we read the incomprehensible letters of Paul – and have done for two thousand years – improbably divorced from their context, intoning solemnly in some way or other that they are ‘the word of the Lord’, nod knowingly, perhaps extrapolating one or two displaced truths, and move on. In doing so we lose the topicality of Paul, and ironically in doing that we often lose all hope of applying to our own world the Spirit wisdom that informed him. Even so simple a phrase as ‘To me, living is Christ and dying is gain’ can be rattled off glibly, and we can nod sagely, but what was Paul on about?
In a sense the answer is simple. To one who absolutely believes, as he writes elsewhere, that it is no longer Paul who lives, who matters, but Christ who lives within him, it is simple: Christ, like a benevolent but nevertheless predatory wasp devours his caterpillar of a life, to become his everything. Paul’s practice of the presence of God-in-Christ is – he prays (I suspect) – so complete that death and life alike are inseparably caught up in Easter hope. In fact, as these are amongst the last words that Paul wrote, written at a time when it must have been growing increasingly apparent to him that his life was on tenterhooks and likely to turn to custard (if I may mix my metaphors!), these were brave words. To live or to die, either way, my life is so immersed in the Easter event that Christ’s resurrection DNA is already pulsing unstoppably in my veins. It is a hope that we can only pray that we can grow into – and often the answer to that prayer comes only, as it did for Paul, by considerably suffering and considerable discipline, self-discipline and what we might call divine disciplining, the vicissitudes of a God-given life.
I for one do not have a shadow form of Paul’s faith. Ask Anne and those closest to me – I whinge at the hint of social or physical or mental discomfort. But the life of Christ-immersion is not about arrival, paradoxically, but about being on the journey. The late-comers to the vineyard were considerably less practiced in the art of withstanding trials and tribulations than the morning-starters. Grace is a funny thing like that: we may grumble that some Jonny-come-lately is dwelling in the next bed in the celestial dormitory, someone we think is too gay or too Pentecostal or too Buddhist or too atheistic to be in our selection of ‘the saved’ but it simply isn’t up to us. What is up to us – and no one said it was easy, and I for one will fail minute by minute – is to see Christ and the wholeness of God’s love growing in the flesh and blood and life story of each person who I meet: that way we can by the grace of God become a people of grace.
TLBWY
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18th 2011
(PENTECOST 14 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 25)
Readings: Exodus 16.2-15
Ps 105.1-6, 37-45
Philippians 1.21-30
Matthew 20.1-16
It often amuses me that we listen to a parable, a powerfully vivid word picture of the itinerant poet-preacher Jesus (who is of course so much more, but of that another time), agree that it is one of those Jesus-passages that are timeless and need little or no explanation to translate it into our own culture, and then spend some twenty minutes enlarging upon it, explicating it and perhaps even tragically diluting it for our own time and culture. There are of course one or two of the words pictures painted by Jesus that can benefit from a little bit of explanation to give them applicable meaning in our very different culture, but on the whole they are few and far between. Forget trades-union, but simply know that we are hearing a story about the right of God to do whatever God chooses, and that we are simply not in the driver’s seat of cosmic or salvation history. I suggest that, despite the track record of history, which has spent enormous amounts of ink and hot air telling God who should be a participant in the New Heavens and Earth of apocalyptic longing, the choice is probably God’s, and we – even the most proscriptive of us, may be in for a few surprises as we wake up in the celestial dormitory.
In fact I suspect we should spend a lot less time than Christians traditionally have in the border maintenance of deciding who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’. I have my own beliefs that there probably isn’t an in or an out, but I shall leave that particular heresy for another time and another place. We might however just note in passing that a parable about the kingdom of God that is all about the inclusion of newcomers and outsiders may have something very serious to say about how we as a Christ-community should responds to the plight of those feeing international atrocities and landing on our shores. Not, I might add, questions about ‘the national interest’ or even about ‘due process’, but about the values of a compassionate and welcoming Christ who touches and transforms the lives of those most on – or beyond – the margins of society. But the parables of Jesus are oten about grace and compassion, after all!
The great and passionate ambassador of Christ, Paul of Tarsus, is an entirely different kettle of something fishy. Too often we read the incomprehensible letters of Paul – and have done for two thousand years – improbably divorced from their context, intoning solemnly in some way or other that they are ‘the word of the Lord’, nod knowingly, perhaps extrapolating one or two displaced truths, and move on. In doing so we lose the topicality of Paul, and ironically in doing that we often lose all hope of applying to our own world the Spirit wisdom that informed him. Even so simple a phrase as ‘To me, living is Christ and dying is gain’ can be rattled off glibly, and we can nod sagely, but what was Paul on about?
In a sense the answer is simple. To one who absolutely believes, as he writes elsewhere, that it is no longer Paul who lives, who matters, but Christ who lives within him, it is simple: Christ, like a benevolent but nevertheless predatory wasp devours his caterpillar of a life, to become his everything. Paul’s practice of the presence of God-in-Christ is – he prays (I suspect) – so complete that death and life alike are inseparably caught up in Easter hope. In fact, as these are amongst the last words that Paul wrote, written at a time when it must have been growing increasingly apparent to him that his life was on tenterhooks and likely to turn to custard (if I may mix my metaphors!), these were brave words. To live or to die, either way, my life is so immersed in the Easter event that Christ’s resurrection DNA is already pulsing unstoppably in my veins. It is a hope that we can only pray that we can grow into – and often the answer to that prayer comes only, as it did for Paul, by considerably suffering and considerable discipline, self-discipline and what we might call divine disciplining, the vicissitudes of a God-given life.
I for one do not have a shadow form of Paul’s faith. Ask Anne and those closest to me – I whinge at the hint of social or physical or mental discomfort. But the life of Christ-immersion is not about arrival, paradoxically, but about being on the journey. The late-comers to the vineyard were considerably less practiced in the art of withstanding trials and tribulations than the morning-starters. Grace is a funny thing like that: we may grumble that some Jonny-come-lately is dwelling in the next bed in the celestial dormitory, someone we think is too gay or too Pentecostal or too Buddhist or too atheistic to be in our selection of ‘the saved’ but it simply isn’t up to us. What is up to us – and no one said it was easy, and I for one will fail minute by minute – is to see Christ and the wholeness of God’s love growing in the flesh and blood and life story of each person who I meet: that way we can by the grace of God become a people of grace.
TLBWY
Saturday, 10 September 2011
Whakapapa and the Magisterium
SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11th 2011
(PENTECOST 13 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 24)
Readings: Exodus 14.19-31
Ps 114
Romans 14.1-14
Matthew 18.21-35
While there are schools of biblical interpretation that seem determined to demonstrate that almost all that we have that purports to be the sayings of Jesus are fabrications and creative imaginings of the post-Easter Christian community, I beg to differ. I am no scholar of oral tradition but I cannot be anything but aware of the remarkable ability of traditional and even to some extent modern rural communities to tell and retell stories in a form very close if not identical to the original. In our Territorian context where we can hardly but be aware of the power of dream-time legend we can, while acknowledging that it is likely that there have been some revisions and accruals over tens of thousands of years, nevertheless be fairly sure that the legends that are feeding indigenous communities today, legends that were all but lost in post-colonial myopia, are once more vehicles of ancient wisdoms about survival in and co-existence with this harsh red land on which we live. We might say the same of many ancient and indigenous mythologies, and as a Christian community we must never be afraid to listen and to learn from the ancients. We might learn, too, from the gracious spirit of forgiveness that many ancient peoples have exercised towards their colonisers: learn from but not exploit their forgiveness. We learn our lives from our stories, our narratives, whether they be stories of conquest or forgiveness. We practice what we narrate.
Jesus was a rural story-teller. At this point I do not want to engage in what else he was – the Son of God, the ‘revelation of the heart of God’ as I somewhat laboriously refer to him from time to time. He was those – and as such I want to set him apart from other great figures of wisdom like Confucius, Zoroaster, Plato – but just for a moment I want to acknowledge his ordinary yet extraordinary oratorical powers. As Middle Eastern scholar Kenneth Bailey spent a lifetime pointing out, this was a rural, itinerant speaker (I hate the word ‘preacher!) – who had an uncanny ability to pluck from around him simple and to his audience unambivalent imagery that would serve as a vehicle to convey the great message of the reign of God. By and large the sayings and images of Jesus need little enlargement, and interpretation of his tale of a forgiven and yet unforgiving servant is not restricted to rocket scientists or even biblical theologians: those who have known forgiveness better practice forgiveness, or it’ll bite them where it hurts.
Or something like that. We learn our lives from our stories.
I have mentioned in passing that biblical interpretation has often fallen into the hands of the institutionalised Church, the magisterium, and lost thereby its ability to pronounce compassion and justice to those most hungering for the transforming touch of God. In recent decades we have been pushed to the margins of society, and, while that hurts, it has done us no harm as we are forced once more to rely on the integrity of our message in order to be heard. Whether we have yet learned that lesson is another matter. Now though we must proclaim our message – our story – from a position of powerlessness. This surely is reminiscent of the powerlessness of the Crucified God, the Christ of the Cross who proclaims those ultimate words of forgiveness: ‘father, forgive them, for they know not …’. For as long as we were in the corridors of power we developed unhealthy amnesia, forgetting like a recalcitrant Narnia-child the power of divine love-touch. We heard stories of the overthrow of the Pharaoh, but heard them not from the naked powerlessness of the crucified Christ but from the shoes of authority, and we told anyone who would listen that they had to learn our ways (and adopt our amnesia), accepting all that we imposed on them. But the Spirit of God is bigger than the magisterium, the institutionalised church, and we are losing our social power so we can relearn God’s meek power.
When history is written by the victor it becomes a dangerous weapon, and we become trained in horrible response. Perspective is everything: we don’t need to be card-carrying supremacists to be deeply unsettled by the reminder that what we learned to call ‘settlement’ in this and other similar countries was soon to be known as ‘invasion’ by those who were there before us. We needed to hear that heart-cry if we were to discover again the Christ of the Cross and his gospel of forgiveness. We needed to hear again our need to be forgiven – to take our hands off the throat of the servant who were throttling for a few measly denarii. To say this, incidentally, is nothing to do with something called ‘political correctness’. I have no idea what political correctness is – it tends to be a pejorative term that we use to avoid compassion and justice to those in pain. I do know though that our scriptures show a bias to the poor, to the have-nots, and that the ‘haves’ face removal from their thrones.
But this can all be terribly big-stage, and few of us dwell on the big stage. Does it apply to our smaller stages, the stages of our small lives? Can we apply Jesus-compassion and cycle-breaking forgiveness within our smaller ambits – and does it matter? Forgiveness is one of our most unpopular doctrines, and rarest practices. We prefer tenacious anger – we only have to witness the lynch mobs that form when a paedophile is arrested – or even released from gaol – to know that long retention of memories is far preferred in society to forgiveness. This is not to suggest that we should smack heinous offenders over the wrist with a wet feather – the judge in Jesus story does not do that. It is to suggest, though, that it is harder to practice forgiveness than to practice the hate-breeding cycles of vengeance. We, as Christ-bearers, are challenged to practice forgiveness.
No one claims that is easy, whether the demand be in the context of personal or global atrocity. Ultimately every atrocity is personal, and the full weight even of a 9/11, or a Koota Beach is most meaningful when we encounter the personalised grief of the victims’ families. We might well ask the question though, ten years after 9/11: where is Christ in the events of this day ten years ago? Is he in the storm-trooping of Afghanistan or, worse, Iraq? Or is he there in the brave struggles of those who want Ground Zero, the Pentagon and Shanksville Pennsylvania to be shrines to forgiveness, to peace studies, and to reconciliation between Christians, Jews and Muslims (all of whom lost their lives that day). Do we effect reconciliation and hope with revenge, or, for example, in the brave attempt to feed and educate Muslim youth so that hatred of the west can be their creed no longer?
Forgiveness is possible. It is desperately necessary. We are challenged by the ancient prayer of Jesus – forgive us, as we forgive others. May we learn by the grace and with the help of God to grow into the second part of that petition: by the grace of God may we become a people who model grace and forgiveness in our own lives: seventy time seven is shorthand for infinity.
TLBWY
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11th 2011
(PENTECOST 13 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 24)
Readings: Exodus 14.19-31
Ps 114
Romans 14.1-14
Matthew 18.21-35
While there are schools of biblical interpretation that seem determined to demonstrate that almost all that we have that purports to be the sayings of Jesus are fabrications and creative imaginings of the post-Easter Christian community, I beg to differ. I am no scholar of oral tradition but I cannot be anything but aware of the remarkable ability of traditional and even to some extent modern rural communities to tell and retell stories in a form very close if not identical to the original. In our Territorian context where we can hardly but be aware of the power of dream-time legend we can, while acknowledging that it is likely that there have been some revisions and accruals over tens of thousands of years, nevertheless be fairly sure that the legends that are feeding indigenous communities today, legends that were all but lost in post-colonial myopia, are once more vehicles of ancient wisdoms about survival in and co-existence with this harsh red land on which we live. We might say the same of many ancient and indigenous mythologies, and as a Christian community we must never be afraid to listen and to learn from the ancients. We might learn, too, from the gracious spirit of forgiveness that many ancient peoples have exercised towards their colonisers: learn from but not exploit their forgiveness. We learn our lives from our stories, our narratives, whether they be stories of conquest or forgiveness. We practice what we narrate.
Jesus was a rural story-teller. At this point I do not want to engage in what else he was – the Son of God, the ‘revelation of the heart of God’ as I somewhat laboriously refer to him from time to time. He was those – and as such I want to set him apart from other great figures of wisdom like Confucius, Zoroaster, Plato – but just for a moment I want to acknowledge his ordinary yet extraordinary oratorical powers. As Middle Eastern scholar Kenneth Bailey spent a lifetime pointing out, this was a rural, itinerant speaker (I hate the word ‘preacher!) – who had an uncanny ability to pluck from around him simple and to his audience unambivalent imagery that would serve as a vehicle to convey the great message of the reign of God. By and large the sayings and images of Jesus need little enlargement, and interpretation of his tale of a forgiven and yet unforgiving servant is not restricted to rocket scientists or even biblical theologians: those who have known forgiveness better practice forgiveness, or it’ll bite them where it hurts.
Or something like that. We learn our lives from our stories.
I have mentioned in passing that biblical interpretation has often fallen into the hands of the institutionalised Church, the magisterium, and lost thereby its ability to pronounce compassion and justice to those most hungering for the transforming touch of God. In recent decades we have been pushed to the margins of society, and, while that hurts, it has done us no harm as we are forced once more to rely on the integrity of our message in order to be heard. Whether we have yet learned that lesson is another matter. Now though we must proclaim our message – our story – from a position of powerlessness. This surely is reminiscent of the powerlessness of the Crucified God, the Christ of the Cross who proclaims those ultimate words of forgiveness: ‘father, forgive them, for they know not …’. For as long as we were in the corridors of power we developed unhealthy amnesia, forgetting like a recalcitrant Narnia-child the power of divine love-touch. We heard stories of the overthrow of the Pharaoh, but heard them not from the naked powerlessness of the crucified Christ but from the shoes of authority, and we told anyone who would listen that they had to learn our ways (and adopt our amnesia), accepting all that we imposed on them. But the Spirit of God is bigger than the magisterium, the institutionalised church, and we are losing our social power so we can relearn God’s meek power.
When history is written by the victor it becomes a dangerous weapon, and we become trained in horrible response. Perspective is everything: we don’t need to be card-carrying supremacists to be deeply unsettled by the reminder that what we learned to call ‘settlement’ in this and other similar countries was soon to be known as ‘invasion’ by those who were there before us. We needed to hear that heart-cry if we were to discover again the Christ of the Cross and his gospel of forgiveness. We needed to hear again our need to be forgiven – to take our hands off the throat of the servant who were throttling for a few measly denarii. To say this, incidentally, is nothing to do with something called ‘political correctness’. I have no idea what political correctness is – it tends to be a pejorative term that we use to avoid compassion and justice to those in pain. I do know though that our scriptures show a bias to the poor, to the have-nots, and that the ‘haves’ face removal from their thrones.
But this can all be terribly big-stage, and few of us dwell on the big stage. Does it apply to our smaller stages, the stages of our small lives? Can we apply Jesus-compassion and cycle-breaking forgiveness within our smaller ambits – and does it matter? Forgiveness is one of our most unpopular doctrines, and rarest practices. We prefer tenacious anger – we only have to witness the lynch mobs that form when a paedophile is arrested – or even released from gaol – to know that long retention of memories is far preferred in society to forgiveness. This is not to suggest that we should smack heinous offenders over the wrist with a wet feather – the judge in Jesus story does not do that. It is to suggest, though, that it is harder to practice forgiveness than to practice the hate-breeding cycles of vengeance. We, as Christ-bearers, are challenged to practice forgiveness.
No one claims that is easy, whether the demand be in the context of personal or global atrocity. Ultimately every atrocity is personal, and the full weight even of a 9/11, or a Koota Beach is most meaningful when we encounter the personalised grief of the victims’ families. We might well ask the question though, ten years after 9/11: where is Christ in the events of this day ten years ago? Is he in the storm-trooping of Afghanistan or, worse, Iraq? Or is he there in the brave struggles of those who want Ground Zero, the Pentagon and Shanksville Pennsylvania to be shrines to forgiveness, to peace studies, and to reconciliation between Christians, Jews and Muslims (all of whom lost their lives that day). Do we effect reconciliation and hope with revenge, or, for example, in the brave attempt to feed and educate Muslim youth so that hatred of the west can be their creed no longer?
Forgiveness is possible. It is desperately necessary. We are challenged by the ancient prayer of Jesus – forgive us, as we forgive others. May we learn by the grace and with the help of God to grow into the second part of that petition: by the grace of God may we become a people who model grace and forgiveness in our own lives: seventy time seven is shorthand for infinity.
TLBWY
Friday, 2 September 2011
The Alfafa and the Blood
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4th 2011
(PENTECOST 12 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 23)
Readings: Exodus 12.1-14
Ps 149
Romans 13.1-10
Matthew 18.1-20
The Christian use of the word ‘blood’ must strike any who encounter it from outside the Christian culture as very strange. As we turn to the powerfully formative Exodus reading today, we find blood appearing as a central symbol. In the New Testament of Christian faith we find Jesus demanding that his followers devour his body and his blood – a statement that led early and subsequent critics of Christianity to accuse us of committing cannibalism in our secret rites. We readily – in some traditions more so than others – sing songs about our being ‘washed in the blood’, an image that would or should be enough to send our non and post-Christian neighbours reaching for a puke bucket. I will shortly invite you forward to eat the body and blood of Christ. They are images that should send shudders down our spine – I remember vividly an elderly lady to whom I used to take communion when I was a curate at Bentleigh, interrupting me during the traditional ‘prayer of humble access’. As we solemnly intoned the words ‘so to eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood …’, she remonstrated: 'they're not very nice words, are they?' They are chilling words, but what do they mean?
Paradoxically I have no intention of giving you in one sermon a direct answer. I hope over the weeks and months and years to come to drop hints of what it might mean to use the discomforting, unsettling language of our faith – language that we must never jettison. If nothing else we should simply notice that the formative events of our faith are often deeply disturbing – yet in these events of chilling human experience, God is particularly present. Whether, in the brutal language of the Exodus, God is present for the Egyptians is another matter – that too is one we will take months and years to unpack.
By and large, as liberation theology for all its faults nevertheless inescapably taught us, God is most present in the life-stories of the oppressed. The Exodus is not written from the perspective of the Pharaoh, or we would read a very different story. The New Testament story is not written from the perspective of powerful dominators of society, but from those shivering in the metaphorical catacombs of Christian fear. It is when we became the dominant paradigm of society, arguably from the fifth century onwards, that we began to unlearn the powerful subversive voices of the gospel, and hear instead voices that kept slaves in their chains, women and children in their hellholes of domestic abuse, and refugees dumped in processing centres, preferably far from sight. It was when we became the dominant force in society that we turned away from some of the powerfully subversive gospel messages about casting down the mighty from thrones, feeding the hungry, and empowering women and children; we clutched instead to out of context readings in which Paul appears to tell us at all times to submit to the authority of the land: whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.
Is such a saying binding for all time? As it happens Moses and Aaron didn’t think so, but perhaps we should leave them and their subversion of authority for another time. But does Paul mean that when we are confronted by a Gillard government touting a so-called ‘Malaysian Solution’, or a Howard government touting a so-called ‘Pacific Solution’ to the question of boat-people we should quietly acquiesce? Should we not instead begin to hear alarm bells ringing when we hear tell of human beings being ‘processed’, wherever that processing takes place, like the cattle whose processing was halted, however controversially, because of inappropriate procedures? And should we not hear alarm bells ringing still louder when either side of politics begins using the word ‘solution’, with all its chilling echoes of Hitler’s Germany and his Final Solution? And, for that matter, surely one of the great criticisms of most of the Christian communities in Hitler’s Germany was that, obedient to a misplaced Pauline passage, they closed their eyes as the brownshirts came in the night and took Jewish neighbours away?
The late but wonderful Dean of Southwark in London said controversially that we should have a licence to read the bible. While he was possibly setting the Reformation back 500 years, he had a point. Paul’s words, here and elsewhere, about submission to any form of authority do not apply when the authorities become wielders of demonic power. When Jews are trucked away in the night, or refugees processed off shore, or David Hicks and others are incarcerated in contexts where standard US and International laws do not apply – processed with the acquiescence of the coalition of the willing – then the bearers of Christ are not called to sit in meepy submission to authority. When women are being beaten or children exploited in hell holes of abuse, the bearers of Christ are not called to sit in meepy silence, citing Pauline passages about husbands’ and parents’ and teachers’ authority. Paul was writing, like the author of the Exodus narration, from a position of powerlessness. We are no longer – for now – in his shoes.
We are called to evangelise by being a counterculture of compassion, what Alan Walker called ‘a contrast society of Jesus’. This will mean that when we see our often Muslim cousins incarcerated behind razor wire we must speak to them and for them. We must speak not of queue-jumpers, the popular phrase used in the politics of hate, but of women, men and vulnerable children made in the image of God. ‘Love’, says Paul, ‘does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law’. We know who Jesus would have said today was our neighbour. It is ironic that it is the Greens of politics, most of whom do not share our faith, who are constantly reminding us of the compassion of Jesus towards the outsider (though they, too, sometimes forget some of the other most vulnerable members of our society, as they turn collective backs on the fate of unborn children).
If there is perhaps a meaning of ‘blood’ that can connect with our world it may well be related to the ‘life-force’ beloved of crystal-hugging (alfalfa chompin’, muslin-wearing’...) new agers. From them too we might need to learn something. As we gather as a Christ community Sunday by Sunday – and hopefully at other times too – we are challenged by God’s traditions to be a people of conspicuous compassion and care, a life force mid-wifing God’s eternal reign of justice and compassion. So may God help us to be.
TLBWY
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4th 2011
(PENTECOST 12 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 23)
Readings: Exodus 12.1-14
Ps 149
Romans 13.1-10
Matthew 18.1-20
The Christian use of the word ‘blood’ must strike any who encounter it from outside the Christian culture as very strange. As we turn to the powerfully formative Exodus reading today, we find blood appearing as a central symbol. In the New Testament of Christian faith we find Jesus demanding that his followers devour his body and his blood – a statement that led early and subsequent critics of Christianity to accuse us of committing cannibalism in our secret rites. We readily – in some traditions more so than others – sing songs about our being ‘washed in the blood’, an image that would or should be enough to send our non and post-Christian neighbours reaching for a puke bucket. I will shortly invite you forward to eat the body and blood of Christ. They are images that should send shudders down our spine – I remember vividly an elderly lady to whom I used to take communion when I was a curate at Bentleigh, interrupting me during the traditional ‘prayer of humble access’. As we solemnly intoned the words ‘so to eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood …’, she remonstrated: 'they're not very nice words, are they?' They are chilling words, but what do they mean?
Paradoxically I have no intention of giving you in one sermon a direct answer. I hope over the weeks and months and years to come to drop hints of what it might mean to use the discomforting, unsettling language of our faith – language that we must never jettison. If nothing else we should simply notice that the formative events of our faith are often deeply disturbing – yet in these events of chilling human experience, God is particularly present. Whether, in the brutal language of the Exodus, God is present for the Egyptians is another matter – that too is one we will take months and years to unpack.
By and large, as liberation theology for all its faults nevertheless inescapably taught us, God is most present in the life-stories of the oppressed. The Exodus is not written from the perspective of the Pharaoh, or we would read a very different story. The New Testament story is not written from the perspective of powerful dominators of society, but from those shivering in the metaphorical catacombs of Christian fear. It is when we became the dominant paradigm of society, arguably from the fifth century onwards, that we began to unlearn the powerful subversive voices of the gospel, and hear instead voices that kept slaves in their chains, women and children in their hellholes of domestic abuse, and refugees dumped in processing centres, preferably far from sight. It was when we became the dominant force in society that we turned away from some of the powerfully subversive gospel messages about casting down the mighty from thrones, feeding the hungry, and empowering women and children; we clutched instead to out of context readings in which Paul appears to tell us at all times to submit to the authority of the land: whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.
Is such a saying binding for all time? As it happens Moses and Aaron didn’t think so, but perhaps we should leave them and their subversion of authority for another time. But does Paul mean that when we are confronted by a Gillard government touting a so-called ‘Malaysian Solution’, or a Howard government touting a so-called ‘Pacific Solution’ to the question of boat-people we should quietly acquiesce? Should we not instead begin to hear alarm bells ringing when we hear tell of human beings being ‘processed’, wherever that processing takes place, like the cattle whose processing was halted, however controversially, because of inappropriate procedures? And should we not hear alarm bells ringing still louder when either side of politics begins using the word ‘solution’, with all its chilling echoes of Hitler’s Germany and his Final Solution? And, for that matter, surely one of the great criticisms of most of the Christian communities in Hitler’s Germany was that, obedient to a misplaced Pauline passage, they closed their eyes as the brownshirts came in the night and took Jewish neighbours away?
The late but wonderful Dean of Southwark in London said controversially that we should have a licence to read the bible. While he was possibly setting the Reformation back 500 years, he had a point. Paul’s words, here and elsewhere, about submission to any form of authority do not apply when the authorities become wielders of demonic power. When Jews are trucked away in the night, or refugees processed off shore, or David Hicks and others are incarcerated in contexts where standard US and International laws do not apply – processed with the acquiescence of the coalition of the willing – then the bearers of Christ are not called to sit in meepy submission to authority. When women are being beaten or children exploited in hell holes of abuse, the bearers of Christ are not called to sit in meepy silence, citing Pauline passages about husbands’ and parents’ and teachers’ authority. Paul was writing, like the author of the Exodus narration, from a position of powerlessness. We are no longer – for now – in his shoes.
We are called to evangelise by being a counterculture of compassion, what Alan Walker called ‘a contrast society of Jesus’. This will mean that when we see our often Muslim cousins incarcerated behind razor wire we must speak to them and for them. We must speak not of queue-jumpers, the popular phrase used in the politics of hate, but of women, men and vulnerable children made in the image of God. ‘Love’, says Paul, ‘does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law’. We know who Jesus would have said today was our neighbour. It is ironic that it is the Greens of politics, most of whom do not share our faith, who are constantly reminding us of the compassion of Jesus towards the outsider (though they, too, sometimes forget some of the other most vulnerable members of our society, as they turn collective backs on the fate of unborn children).
If there is perhaps a meaning of ‘blood’ that can connect with our world it may well be related to the ‘life-force’ beloved of crystal-hugging (alfalfa chompin’, muslin-wearing’...) new agers. From them too we might need to learn something. As we gather as a Christ community Sunday by Sunday – and hopefully at other times too – we are challenged by God’s traditions to be a people of conspicuous compassion and care, a life force mid-wifing God’s eternal reign of justice and compassion. So may God help us to be.
TLBWY
Friday, 26 August 2011
Knitting for the Fast God
SERMON PREACHED AT St. FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, AUGUST 28th 2011
(PENTECOST 11 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 22)
Readings: Exodus 3.1-15
Ps 105.1-6, 23-26
Romans 12.9-21
Matthew 16.21-28
The welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas speaks in his poetry of God as a ‘fast God’, always moving ahead of us and leaving warm footprints as we arrive. It is a powerful image of the God of Judaeo-Christian thought, the one on whose face we can never look and live, but of whom, in the understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures, the servant Moses was once privileged to see, as it were, the back disappearing from sight. In Christian doctrine we have an alternative privilege, of course: we have the eye-witness reports of those who saw and dwelt with the face of Jesus, who they came to know as the ‘all that is needed to be known’ of God. But he, too, has passed beyond our sight, is just around the corner, leaving warm footprints as we arrive. For all who have lived in the two thousand years since the ascension there is just – just! – the experience of the presence of Christ made known to us by the Spirit, the unseen Christ who dwells in our midst in word, sacrament and the fellowship of Christian living.
There is much silliness spoken in the name of God. There is much carry-on that pertains to be God-sent but is in reality no more than collective euphoria – in itself not harmful, but certainly not the gospel of a suffering, justice-living Messiah. God, if I am going to be consistent with my own thoughts, is not limited to my small ideas of where a God should dwell, and may even turn up in the ecstatic experiences of Pentecostalism, but the litmus test of an experience and its godliness is the degree to which it points to the God whose disappearing face is revealed throughout the scriptures. I once inherited a group of well-meaning women who had been powerfully liberated by the experience of crawling around and barking, dog-like, for Jesus. While I’m sure the experience was one of bonding, and probably most memorable, I am even more sure that it had nothing to do with the God of the Cross.
Nevertheless, God turns up in unexpected places. Often for me that turning up is in nature, sometimes of course it is in Christian liturgy (I remember for example an experience of Taizé worship in Alice Springs, and the same again on Cottesloe beach at Perth), sometimes it is in gatherings of the religionless or of those of religions (not just denominations) that are not mine. I hosted on a few occasions in New Zealand non-religious (or not specifically religious) memorial services for those affected by HIV-AIDS, and could not but be aware of the presence of a compassionate, caring and justice seeking God as hurting and loving people gathered together in common purpose. The God of the burning bush will not be restricted, but will turn up wherever it seems meet to God so to do.
Having turned up in unexpected places, God will not readily be restricted. The process of ‘naming’ is one that imposes identity and control on the recipient of the name. God will not allow Moses the privilege of knowing or granting the divine name, not because God is a God who rejoices in some sort of occult mystery, but because God will not be limited by the myopia of human vision, will not dwell in human boxes. While Christianity may belong to God, God does not belong to Christianity: God will not be a part of charlatan religion, Christian or otherwise, and by the same token God will not be barred from the lives of those whose faith, of whatever flavour, is deeply immersed in justice, love and compassion, for these are the givings of God.
For us as a committed people of God, though, there is a responsibility to ‘remember’ God as we gather together in worship, focussed on God’s presence. We glibly use the word ‘remember’ in our liturgies, and it has been the cause of some bitter arguments between Christians, particularly in the context of the eucharistic liturgy – arguments in particular about the presence or absence of God in the elements of bread and wine. The arguments are specious, based on misconceptions and misunderstandings of the Hebraisms that informed the words of Jesus in the upper room. The celebration of a God whose acts and words are ‘membered together once more’, made present again in our sacred repetition of those acts, such celebration is a powerful force for transformative good in our collective and individual lives, a powerful tool by which our lives may be transformed into Christlikeness which is godliness. Lives transformed that way begin to rumour the hope of heaven, and that is our calling.
So we must find ways in which to rumour and even exemplify the just and compassionate heart of God. When our societies proclaim lust for exclusion and revenge – and we do – then we must above all proclaim a gospel of inclusion and cycle-breaking justice – both of which dwell at the heart of our radical but unpopular experience of grace. Peter looks for a Jesus who will dwell in the attractive and popular places, but Jesus calls him Satan, the opposer of God. On issues of environment, sexuality, medical and social ethics, economic justice, race relations – in all these melting pots of our involvement in the world we are challenged not to look for a place of comfort but a place that maximises our ability to proclaim a God for the hurting and the lonely and the unsure, a God who will sometimes emerge from unexpectedly burning bushes, a God who will unexpectedly welcome strangers that we would rather send away. Discerning God’s purpose in such a way, incidentally, will never follow party politics, though democracy and its parties have a place.
Six days after this encounter with Jesus Peter attempts to place Jesus in a cosy box on a mountaintop: God though will not rest comfortably in the cosiness of our expectations. Our yardsticks of Christ-bearing are not always unambivalent. Faced with a rapidly changing society we will often find it easier to hide than to face the ambiguities of God in a burning bush. We will often want to name God so we can keep him under our control, keep him neat and tidy and in the image that we have always found comforting, even keep him as a him. Sometimes though the fast God is far ahead of us, and as the Spirit moves ahead of us in society we can only play catch-up. Hard and ambivalent though it is, as the world struggles to give birth to its own future, we are called to find the compassionate and just action – to reach out and touch the broken and the spat upon that society relegates to its fringes. Who are they? That’s a question into which God leads us daily.
TLBWY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 28th 2011
(PENTECOST 11 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 22)
Readings: Exodus 3.1-15
Ps 105.1-6, 23-26
Romans 12.9-21
Matthew 16.21-28
The welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas speaks in his poetry of God as a ‘fast God’, always moving ahead of us and leaving warm footprints as we arrive. It is a powerful image of the God of Judaeo-Christian thought, the one on whose face we can never look and live, but of whom, in the understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures, the servant Moses was once privileged to see, as it were, the back disappearing from sight. In Christian doctrine we have an alternative privilege, of course: we have the eye-witness reports of those who saw and dwelt with the face of Jesus, who they came to know as the ‘all that is needed to be known’ of God. But he, too, has passed beyond our sight, is just around the corner, leaving warm footprints as we arrive. For all who have lived in the two thousand years since the ascension there is just – just! – the experience of the presence of Christ made known to us by the Spirit, the unseen Christ who dwells in our midst in word, sacrament and the fellowship of Christian living.
There is much silliness spoken in the name of God. There is much carry-on that pertains to be God-sent but is in reality no more than collective euphoria – in itself not harmful, but certainly not the gospel of a suffering, justice-living Messiah. God, if I am going to be consistent with my own thoughts, is not limited to my small ideas of where a God should dwell, and may even turn up in the ecstatic experiences of Pentecostalism, but the litmus test of an experience and its godliness is the degree to which it points to the God whose disappearing face is revealed throughout the scriptures. I once inherited a group of well-meaning women who had been powerfully liberated by the experience of crawling around and barking, dog-like, for Jesus. While I’m sure the experience was one of bonding, and probably most memorable, I am even more sure that it had nothing to do with the God of the Cross.
Nevertheless, God turns up in unexpected places. Often for me that turning up is in nature, sometimes of course it is in Christian liturgy (I remember for example an experience of Taizé worship in Alice Springs, and the same again on Cottesloe beach at Perth), sometimes it is in gatherings of the religionless or of those of religions (not just denominations) that are not mine. I hosted on a few occasions in New Zealand non-religious (or not specifically religious) memorial services for those affected by HIV-AIDS, and could not but be aware of the presence of a compassionate, caring and justice seeking God as hurting and loving people gathered together in common purpose. The God of the burning bush will not be restricted, but will turn up wherever it seems meet to God so to do.
Having turned up in unexpected places, God will not readily be restricted. The process of ‘naming’ is one that imposes identity and control on the recipient of the name. God will not allow Moses the privilege of knowing or granting the divine name, not because God is a God who rejoices in some sort of occult mystery, but because God will not be limited by the myopia of human vision, will not dwell in human boxes. While Christianity may belong to God, God does not belong to Christianity: God will not be a part of charlatan religion, Christian or otherwise, and by the same token God will not be barred from the lives of those whose faith, of whatever flavour, is deeply immersed in justice, love and compassion, for these are the givings of God.
For us as a committed people of God, though, there is a responsibility to ‘remember’ God as we gather together in worship, focussed on God’s presence. We glibly use the word ‘remember’ in our liturgies, and it has been the cause of some bitter arguments between Christians, particularly in the context of the eucharistic liturgy – arguments in particular about the presence or absence of God in the elements of bread and wine. The arguments are specious, based on misconceptions and misunderstandings of the Hebraisms that informed the words of Jesus in the upper room. The celebration of a God whose acts and words are ‘membered together once more’, made present again in our sacred repetition of those acts, such celebration is a powerful force for transformative good in our collective and individual lives, a powerful tool by which our lives may be transformed into Christlikeness which is godliness. Lives transformed that way begin to rumour the hope of heaven, and that is our calling.
So we must find ways in which to rumour and even exemplify the just and compassionate heart of God. When our societies proclaim lust for exclusion and revenge – and we do – then we must above all proclaim a gospel of inclusion and cycle-breaking justice – both of which dwell at the heart of our radical but unpopular experience of grace. Peter looks for a Jesus who will dwell in the attractive and popular places, but Jesus calls him Satan, the opposer of God. On issues of environment, sexuality, medical and social ethics, economic justice, race relations – in all these melting pots of our involvement in the world we are challenged not to look for a place of comfort but a place that maximises our ability to proclaim a God for the hurting and the lonely and the unsure, a God who will sometimes emerge from unexpectedly burning bushes, a God who will unexpectedly welcome strangers that we would rather send away. Discerning God’s purpose in such a way, incidentally, will never follow party politics, though democracy and its parties have a place.
Six days after this encounter with Jesus Peter attempts to place Jesus in a cosy box on a mountaintop: God though will not rest comfortably in the cosiness of our expectations. Our yardsticks of Christ-bearing are not always unambivalent. Faced with a rapidly changing society we will often find it easier to hide than to face the ambiguities of God in a burning bush. We will often want to name God so we can keep him under our control, keep him neat and tidy and in the image that we have always found comforting, even keep him as a him. Sometimes though the fast God is far ahead of us, and as the Spirit moves ahead of us in society we can only play catch-up. Hard and ambivalent though it is, as the world struggles to give birth to its own future, we are called to find the compassionate and just action – to reach out and touch the broken and the spat upon that society relegates to its fringes. Who are they? That’s a question into which God leads us daily.
TLBWY
Saturday, 30 July 2011
On Being the Tenth Leper
SERMON PREACHED AT CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS, NT
SUNDAY, JULY 31st 2011
(PENTECOST 7 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 18)
Readings: Genesis 32.22-31
Ps 17.1-7, 16
Romans 9.1-16
Matthew 14.13-21
I mentioned two weeks ago (and am not expecting you to remember!) that the word ‘calling’ in its theological and liturgical sense, in its preaching sense, is always a word laden with meaning. The same must now be said for its near-synonym, the theologically laden word ‘naming’. Throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptural records the verb ‘to name’ and the process of naming is riddled with divine intention and divine meaning. This has never changed, as we name our children, and perhaps in other contexts too: our churches, our schools, our businesses, even to a lesser extent our pets – are given labels that are saturated with our hopes and expectations, as well as with our own story and life-map.
Even today, if we name our child ‘Jjjayck’, spelling it ‘with three Js and a Y (the Y is silent)’, we make a statement. We make a statement about our individuality, about the child’s individuality, or perhaps about our post-modern nonchalance towards rules and social norms of any form, including those of education and grammar. (I should add that I personally resent the rugby league player Micheal Luck, whose name is deliberately or accidentally but nevertheless legally spelt the way Michael should not be spelt!). Naming is an act of control, however vacuous, exercised over the lives of those subject to us; some children will later opt to change their names, in adulthood, an act of gentle rebellion against something in the dreams and expectations of their parents.
When the narrator of the story of Jacob’s wrestling match creates his tale he plays games with us, his audience. We unfortunately hear the story, most of us, with not only our own life-time or partial life-time of familiarity with the tale and its ending but with perhaps three thousand years of telling and re-telling. That is one of the reasons that there is so much room for creative negotiation with the text, finding the meaning and nuance between the words: in much Jewish reading of scripture the meaning is found not in the words but in the blank, interactive spaces between the words and letters, or even within the shapes of the words and letters. There are boundaries to interpretation, but they are fluid, allowing for change and growth in the Spirit of God. So we are not told that Jacob is wrestling with an angel, only that he is wrestling with a stranger (and every stranger might, after all, be an angel, as the author of Hebrews intriguingly reminds us [Heb. 13.2]). There comes a moment, though, when Jacob unwittingly oversteps his boundaries, inquiring of the stranger a name, an identity, and, in this context, a hard-won familiarity. God, as Moses discovered, does not give out the divine name, does not surrender identity to we who are ultimately mere created beings. We are not God’s boss, no matter how much some forms of Christianity or perhaps even pseudo-Christianity give the impression of turning God into a form of entertainment.
It is this tradition that informed the now less than popular theological insight of the theologian who most profoundly and I believe wisely informed the thought of the twentieth century. It was the timeless insight of Karl Barth that we are not ever in a position to question, much less control the thoughts of the Creator. We may have moments in which it appears to us that we wrestle with God, but on the whole we are not Jacob, and it is unlikely we will prevail. The passage in Jacob’s life in any case is a metaphor of his entire life to this point: Jacob the underhand, Jacob the deceitful, becomes in encounter with God Jacob the chosen bearer of God’s purposes and plans. He is re-named, ‘re-identitied’ accordingly (a name change that may have come as something of a surprise to his ‘two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children’!). Karl Barth’s reclaiming, in the twentieth century, of the absolute authority of God may not, in the twenty-first century, be popular, but it is a fundamentally biblical insight, and fundamental to the integrity of our faith: all things, we might echo Paul in saying, ‘depend not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy’.
If this is the case, are we left with nothing to say or believe when a self-righteous and deluded gunman takes bombs into the heart of his city to create a distraction, and then takes an arsenal of automatic weapons into the heart of a young people’s holiday camp? There is in fact very little anyone can say in the face of injustice and cruelty, whether of humans or of fate (and is there a difference)? When a tsunami shakes the life out of Japanese cities, or tectonic plates turn a New Zealand city into blancmange, or when a lonely gunman turns Port Arthur into a graveyard, then words are utterly inadequate. When aboriginal communities not only in Australia but in the Americas and the Pacific have been decimated and sometimes even eradicated by expansionist histories and collisions with modernity, there are no words to suffice, beyond genuine expressions of sorrow. This is so whether they be the words of an atheist or the words of a Christian, the words of a Richard Dawkins or the words of a Rowan Williams.
Our beliefs and actions though cannot be separated, and it is only to be hoped that in the face of tragedy we will work, always alongside those of other beliefs and no belief, to proclaim light in darkness and Easter in Good Friday. We can believe, too, that our God is big enough to work divine love and compassion through the hands of an atheistic Fred Nile or Stephen Hawkins or Richard Dawkins, whenever they too act with Christlike compassion (for sometimes they will), and do so as easily as God can work through Jacob’s deceitful hands or Paul’s feisty hands or your flawed hands or my flawed hands.
Where then does this leave us? When Jesus saw the suffering of his people, he withdrew. For those who are activists this may seem a strange strategy. At the very least it demonstrates the prioritizing of prayer over action – though not the substitution of prayer for action. It can remind us that we are called to be primarily a people of prayer. Like the tenth leper, who I mentioned two weeks ago (and again don’t yet expect you to remember!!) we are called to be a people who turn back and, in all circumstances, give thanks, in all circumstances acknowledge the presence of God, breathe God’s hope-filled energies into a context before we blaze in with strategies and ideologies.
By being a Eucharistic people, a people of prayer and of connection to God in bread and wine and water we become bearers of a great if unseen, intangible hope in a world in which hopelessness and despair often seem to be final. No one claims this is easy – nor even that the Christ community will be thanked for its words. Nevertheless that is our task, as it was the task of the first disciples, speaking words of resurrection hope in a culture of corruption. The great Feast of Pentecost and the season that follows it should remind us that we do not do this in our own strength, but in the strength of the one who named Israel.
TLBWY
FRED’S PASS, NT
SUNDAY, JULY 31st 2011
(PENTECOST 7 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 18)
Readings: Genesis 32.22-31
Ps 17.1-7, 16
Romans 9.1-16
Matthew 14.13-21
I mentioned two weeks ago (and am not expecting you to remember!) that the word ‘calling’ in its theological and liturgical sense, in its preaching sense, is always a word laden with meaning. The same must now be said for its near-synonym, the theologically laden word ‘naming’. Throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptural records the verb ‘to name’ and the process of naming is riddled with divine intention and divine meaning. This has never changed, as we name our children, and perhaps in other contexts too: our churches, our schools, our businesses, even to a lesser extent our pets – are given labels that are saturated with our hopes and expectations, as well as with our own story and life-map.
Even today, if we name our child ‘Jjjayck’, spelling it ‘with three Js and a Y (the Y is silent)’, we make a statement. We make a statement about our individuality, about the child’s individuality, or perhaps about our post-modern nonchalance towards rules and social norms of any form, including those of education and grammar. (I should add that I personally resent the rugby league player Micheal Luck, whose name is deliberately or accidentally but nevertheless legally spelt the way Michael should not be spelt!). Naming is an act of control, however vacuous, exercised over the lives of those subject to us; some children will later opt to change their names, in adulthood, an act of gentle rebellion against something in the dreams and expectations of their parents.
When the narrator of the story of Jacob’s wrestling match creates his tale he plays games with us, his audience. We unfortunately hear the story, most of us, with not only our own life-time or partial life-time of familiarity with the tale and its ending but with perhaps three thousand years of telling and re-telling. That is one of the reasons that there is so much room for creative negotiation with the text, finding the meaning and nuance between the words: in much Jewish reading of scripture the meaning is found not in the words but in the blank, interactive spaces between the words and letters, or even within the shapes of the words and letters. There are boundaries to interpretation, but they are fluid, allowing for change and growth in the Spirit of God. So we are not told that Jacob is wrestling with an angel, only that he is wrestling with a stranger (and every stranger might, after all, be an angel, as the author of Hebrews intriguingly reminds us [Heb. 13.2]). There comes a moment, though, when Jacob unwittingly oversteps his boundaries, inquiring of the stranger a name, an identity, and, in this context, a hard-won familiarity. God, as Moses discovered, does not give out the divine name, does not surrender identity to we who are ultimately mere created beings. We are not God’s boss, no matter how much some forms of Christianity or perhaps even pseudo-Christianity give the impression of turning God into a form of entertainment.
It is this tradition that informed the now less than popular theological insight of the theologian who most profoundly and I believe wisely informed the thought of the twentieth century. It was the timeless insight of Karl Barth that we are not ever in a position to question, much less control the thoughts of the Creator. We may have moments in which it appears to us that we wrestle with God, but on the whole we are not Jacob, and it is unlikely we will prevail. The passage in Jacob’s life in any case is a metaphor of his entire life to this point: Jacob the underhand, Jacob the deceitful, becomes in encounter with God Jacob the chosen bearer of God’s purposes and plans. He is re-named, ‘re-identitied’ accordingly (a name change that may have come as something of a surprise to his ‘two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children’!). Karl Barth’s reclaiming, in the twentieth century, of the absolute authority of God may not, in the twenty-first century, be popular, but it is a fundamentally biblical insight, and fundamental to the integrity of our faith: all things, we might echo Paul in saying, ‘depend not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy’.
If this is the case, are we left with nothing to say or believe when a self-righteous and deluded gunman takes bombs into the heart of his city to create a distraction, and then takes an arsenal of automatic weapons into the heart of a young people’s holiday camp? There is in fact very little anyone can say in the face of injustice and cruelty, whether of humans or of fate (and is there a difference)? When a tsunami shakes the life out of Japanese cities, or tectonic plates turn a New Zealand city into blancmange, or when a lonely gunman turns Port Arthur into a graveyard, then words are utterly inadequate. When aboriginal communities not only in Australia but in the Americas and the Pacific have been decimated and sometimes even eradicated by expansionist histories and collisions with modernity, there are no words to suffice, beyond genuine expressions of sorrow. This is so whether they be the words of an atheist or the words of a Christian, the words of a Richard Dawkins or the words of a Rowan Williams.
Our beliefs and actions though cannot be separated, and it is only to be hoped that in the face of tragedy we will work, always alongside those of other beliefs and no belief, to proclaim light in darkness and Easter in Good Friday. We can believe, too, that our God is big enough to work divine love and compassion through the hands of an atheistic Fred Nile or Stephen Hawkins or Richard Dawkins, whenever they too act with Christlike compassion (for sometimes they will), and do so as easily as God can work through Jacob’s deceitful hands or Paul’s feisty hands or your flawed hands or my flawed hands.
Where then does this leave us? When Jesus saw the suffering of his people, he withdrew. For those who are activists this may seem a strange strategy. At the very least it demonstrates the prioritizing of prayer over action – though not the substitution of prayer for action. It can remind us that we are called to be primarily a people of prayer. Like the tenth leper, who I mentioned two weeks ago (and again don’t yet expect you to remember!!) we are called to be a people who turn back and, in all circumstances, give thanks, in all circumstances acknowledge the presence of God, breathe God’s hope-filled energies into a context before we blaze in with strategies and ideologies.
By being a Eucharistic people, a people of prayer and of connection to God in bread and wine and water we become bearers of a great if unseen, intangible hope in a world in which hopelessness and despair often seem to be final. No one claims this is easy – nor even that the Christ community will be thanked for its words. Nevertheless that is our task, as it was the task of the first disciples, speaking words of resurrection hope in a culture of corruption. The great Feast of Pentecost and the season that follows it should remind us that we do not do this in our own strength, but in the strength of the one who named Israel.
TLBWY
Hell is for Christians Only
SERMON PREACHED AT St. FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, JULY 24th 2011
(PENTECOST 6 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 17)
FIRST SERMON AT St. FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
OF THE REV’D DR MICHAEL GODFREY
Readings: Genesis 29.15-28
Ps 105.1-11
Romans 8.26-39
Matthew 13.44-58
TLBWY
SUNDAY, JULY 24th 2011
(PENTECOST 6 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 17)
FIRST SERMON AT St. FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
OF THE REV’D DR MICHAEL GODFREY
Readings: Genesis 29.15-28
Ps 105.1-11
Romans 8.26-39
Matthew 13.44-58
I may as well let you into the deep dark secrets of your new priest’s life right from our first encounter! It’s around 14 years now since Anne and I bumped into each other in a Canberra car park. I was living and working in Adelaide at the time, while Anne was studying for her Masters in theology in Brisbane. As a result of our encounter in Canberra we began a long-distance and potentially slow-growing relationship – I can tell you that the distance from Adelaide to Brisbane is 3020 kms (not so great a distance to Territorians, but nevertheless a reasonable test of the flames of passion!). In an exchange of letters Anne suggested she might consider marriage in seven years – it was, I emphasize, Anne rather than her then still-alive father, who made the suggestion. My response is possibly not quite repeatable in a liturgical setting, but was a reasonably emphatic indication that I was not Jacob! We married a little under two years later.
I tell you the story not just out of nostalgia. Apart from anything else it reminds us how vastly different the culture is in which we practice our faith to that in which Jacob carried out his own struggle to be obedient to God. Anne was not property, to be bought from her father by seven years of sweat (much less fourteen years). We live and read our texts of faith in a world that has changed since the events they narrate, and we need to be cognizant of those changes every time we seek to interpret them and apply them in our lives. This leaves us balancing precariously on an interpretive knife-edge, and surely serves as a warning that it is only in fear and trembling that we dare to imply that one interpretation, or even one moral code, applies to all people for all time. Reading of the scriptures of our faith is a delicate negotiation and a delicate surrender of ourselves to the Spirit of God.
The cultural sensitivity with which we are called to approach our faith is a minefield. We can read the history of missions in Australia – not just the Territory by any means – or Africa or the Pacific, to name just three regions, to know that many mistakes have been made. We need to know, too, that many wonderful deeds have been done throughout history by those who were bearers of the gospel. There is a tendency in a post-Christendom world to hold the missionaries to account only for their mistakes, not to praise and rejoice with them for their great works of faith. Nevertheless, the tale of Jacob and Leah, and of Jacob and Rachel, is a cautionary one. Much has changed: what in the tale remains the same?
Ultimately our Genesis story is a tale of patience, fidelity and trust. It is the tale of Jacob’s trust both in God and in his own God-given dreams and longings. It is worthwhile to note that the cultural emphasis of Laban is not condemned. His pronouncement ‘This is not done in our country—giving the younger before the firstborn’ is not condemned, even when it is, to all intents and purposes, an act of betrayal. Jacob, the one-time cheat, is growing into a remarkable man. We might well learn about the need to respect the cultures and societies and sub-cultures and even perhaps ‘sub-societies’ into which we are called, and with which we are called to rub shoulders, before we speak words of condemnation that come too easily to our lips.
Though much of our language of the Spirit, what we call pneumatological language, is variously based on Luke’s and John’s gospel-accounts, it is important that we don’t allow ourselves to lose sight of Paul’s experience of the Spirit. The Spirit is to Paul the one who makes known and available to us the work of Christ, and who empowers us to proclaim the events of Christ to the world around us, who empowers us to participate in and benefit from the saving work of God in Christ, past and present. If we extrapolate from Paul’s new covenantal understanding of the Spirit back into the life of Jacob, then we might say that it is the Spirit who empowers Jacob to hold to his dreams against difficult if not impossible odds of pedantry and betrayal. In some churches the Spirit is transformed into a form of entertainment, turning human experience into silliness and triviality. To speak of the Spirit in such a way is to blaspheme: the task, as it were, of the Spirit, is to point to the Cross of Jesus Christ. It is this that Paul is referring to when he refers to the intercessions of the Spirit, helping us in our weakness. The Spirit may heal, the Spirit may intervene even miraculously in human lives where that intervention serves the purposes of the gospel, but the Spirit who ‘intercedes with sighs too deep for words’ is no entertaining plaything.
The Spirit will, however, strengthen us in our human weakness – strengthen us not in any superhuman, superpower form, but in the sense of holding us true to our abilities in the service of the gospel – holding us, as Jacob was held, true to the dreams of God. And where Jesus preaches so-called ‘kingdom-parables’ on the need to retain focus on the values of the reign of God, to retain focus on the priorities of the gospel, it is to the Spirit of God, or, in Trinitarian terms, the Spirit of Jesus that we turn in all our fallibility.
Fallibility will be, naturally, our hallmark. Over and again New Testament writers make it clear that perfection is beyond us – though another task, as it were, of the Spirit is to sandpaper away the rough edges of our fallibility, transforming us into the likeness of the one we serve. Fallibility and hypocrisy are of course vastly different animals. We begin and continue an authentic journey in the Spirit of Christ precisely when we acknowledge our weakness and our need for Christ, helping us to escape our volitions to sin and failure. We venture into hypocrisy when we begin to play games with God, transforming the Spirit into entertainment, or God into a plaything to serve our own self-aggrandizement and need for power or exaltation. At that moment we remove Jesus from the driver’s seat and find ourselves fingered by the warnings of hell fire and damnation, of gnashing teeth, and of the wonderful pithy insight I borrowed last week, from biblical commentator Marcus Barth, that ‘hell is for Christians only’.
For we who are Christ-bearers, then, there are severe yet welcoming warnings in the kingdom parables of Jesus: is he our focus and priority? Fortunately, when most of us in moments of honesty are forced to admit this may not be the case, there is the good news of grace, of the whispered ‘sorry’ that we offer to God, and the invasion of the praying Spirit who invades our life once more.
TLBWY
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