SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, MARCH 4th 2012
(SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT)
Readings:
Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22.24-32
Romans 4.13-25
Mark 8.31-38
When I first went off to theological college in Melbourne I was soon made aware that in the history of biblical theology the letter of St Paul to the Romans was the engine room. Truth to be told, coming from a sort of low church charismatic background I wasn’t particularly aware of theological engine rooms – my tradition preferred collections of texts far removed from their biblical, let alone their historical context, bandied about either in wars of condemnation of those outside the community of faith, or in mutual admiration exchanges within the community of faith. I doubt it had ever occurred to me that biblical texts had a historical context, and, while I had from time to time engaged in ‘studies’ of a biblical book even that was only in order to improve our arsenals of love or hate.
To be fair I’m being unfair, but only by exaggeration, not utter misrepresentation. But as I set about my first year of theological studies – one of the most bewildering years of my life – I was quickly given the impression in all three disciplines (actually I couldn’t tell the difference between them at that stage, not being the sharpest sandwich in the chandelier) of church history, systematic theology and biblical studies – that the letter to the Romans was the engine room of faith.
And to be honest I’ve never got it. I love Paul, and have spent not only many doctoral years but many more preaching years wrestling with his texts. I have found plenty to admire in his calm and dispassionate Letter to Head Office, as I have sometimes come to think of it, but on the whole have found myself far more inspired by his racy, livid, passionate or loving letters to the churches that he founded, especially the letters to Corinth. So when I find a passage like that read to us a few minutes ago I think ‘yup, that’s nice, fairly clear, let’s move on’. Abraham believed against all odds, Abraham had faith, so should we, let’s move on.
For Augustine, for Luther, for Karl Barth the emphasis on faith alone was a staggering
revelation: we cannot earn our way to God.
Augustine, Luther and Barth were all reacting against religious cultures which in various ways had begun to teach other than the obvious. Luther had observed a misguided but monopolous (another invented word) Roman Catholic Church selling indulgences to enhance salvation. While some Pentecostal preachers have locked themselves in expensive prayer towers demanding money (a prayer tower now, ironically, sold to Roman Catholics) very few people these days are trying to grease the palm of God or God’s Church in order ‘to get to heaven before they close the door’ (as Dylan put it).
And yes, when Barth was a young man the national churches of Germany, England and elsewhere were giving the impression that God was a national god, and that salvation was all about being respectively English enough or German enough or Russian enough to earn God’s favour. But on the whole, outside some complex aberrations again usually in fundamentalist churches, I know of few sermons extolling that kind of nationalistic theology. No: the Corinthian correspondence and its emphasis on the exclusive claims of the cross of Jesus Christ: that has always been – at least since my first year in theological college – the heart of my missiological war chest.
Christ, and him crucified, as Paul puts it. All other sermonising, and indeed all other justice-proclaiming, love-rumouring action in God’s world, is icing on the soteriological (salvational) cake. Christ, and him crucified, is the basis of faith. I have long joined those who argue that we are, as it were, ‘saved’, ‘redeemed’ not primarily by our faith in Christ but by the prior faith and faithfulness of Christ as he made his way to Good Friday and to Easter. ('But that's just stupid', asseverated one of my Moore College trained colleagues, demonstrating that stable's readiness to engage with rational thought and edifying conversation). The construction in Greek is the same: 'faith in', 'faith of'. I see our faith as a response to his faith, our love as response to his love, our hope as response to his hope, and all these as a response to the prior grace that is made known to us in Jesus the Christ. Christ, and him crucified: this is the basis of faith, of works, of all of life on the Way of the Cross to which he calls us.
In Jesus the Christ and in no other. This is not in a one sense an exclusive claim that says God cannot be at work in the lives of adherents of other faiths or none – that by and large is none of my business. It is to say that for us who have been touched by Jesus, touched in scripture, touched in sacrament, touched in fellowship, touched in prayer and worship, there is no other way. Jesus makes exclusive claims on your life and on mine: I came preaching Christ and him crucified. This is why Mark – who was probably influenced by Paul, reminds us of Jesus’ stern rebuke to Peter. Get behind me Satan: get behind me anyone, anything who would try to distract me from the walk to Jerusalem and the shocking events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, Jerusalem and the equally shocking but hope-bringing, darkness conquering event of Easter Day.
For us as Christ-bearers there is a challenge not to relativize Jesus away until he becomes no more than a useful avatar of niceness. Strangely that was what Karl Barth above all saw, but Luther and Augustine, in more complex ways too. There are many useful avatars of niceness: yours will differ to mine, but mine include John Donne, William Wordsworth, Mohammed, Gautama Buddha, Kevin Rudd, Jose Ramos-Horta and Moses – to name just random some. None of these is the eternal, exclusive, death-transcending Incarnation of God’s redeeming love. That is Jesus the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus of the Cross and Empty Tomb. To him and his exclusive demands we are called again this and each day of our living journey. Anything else, anyone else making prior claim on our lives is a Satan to whom (unless we are Martin Luther, who preferred to throw inkpots) we demand ‘get behind me’, get away, get lost.
TLBWY
Friday, 16 March 2012
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
exit, trial and return
SERMON PREACHED
AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT) SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26th 2012
(FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT)
Readings:
Genesis 9.8-17
Psalm 25.1-10
1 Peter 3.18-22
Mark 1.9-15
Mark spends very little time telling us details of the phase in Jesus’ life that we have come to know as ‘the temptations’. Consistent with his characteristic urgency, he sends Jesus into the wilderness, has him in some way ‘tempted’ (I prefer the word ‘tried’) and then returns him to us and to our world. We must not read Mark through the subsequent eyes of Matthew and Luke: this brief exit, trial and return is all we need to know. Other characters in the two sentence drama are Satan, wild animals, and angels. Luke and Matthew’s profound and symbolic expansions we will explore in future years. For now we have Jesus, a trial in harsh straits, success, and return.
In ancient stories the hero is often tested. To say this is not to say that Mark was making up a story, as some biblical theologians tend to imply. Rather it is to say that as they told the Jesus story the evangelists utilised the most powerful images available to them. If Jesus is to be understood as the hero of all heroes, the man who is beyond humanity yet utterly immersed in humanity, then hero narratives of trial and triumph are a fairly useful means to get a point across. Was Jesus tempted, tried, trialled? Undoubtedly. To undertake the public ministry he undertook, even without its dark implications of forth¬coming agony and death, must have been a constant trial and temptation to give up, to return to the quiet solitude of the carpenter’s shop. ‘Can we start again, please’, sings the lovelost Mary in Superstar, but it may well have been Jesus who again and again wrestled with those words: can I start over? I was quite good at woodwork – can I go back to the workshop?
Indeed most heroes of humanity must have wrestled with demons of temptation. A Martin Luther King, in all that I have read of him, was constantly tormented by demons inviting him to return to the quiet life. So too a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Nelson Mandela, no doubt a Rowan Williams (who I am quite happy to name in the same sentence): in fact, on a smaller scale I am certain many of us can think of better things to do on a Sunday morning than to drag ourselves along to worship a God who surely can be worshipped just as well at home. In fact why do we – why don’t we stay home? Oh for a dollar or ten for every person who assures me you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian. Never mind that that is a whole other, fatuous argument! To know Christ is, in most circumstances, to want to worship him within that flawed body of his, the community of faith. But that to some extent is another story.
Or is it? I may not, as a follower of Christ, find myself wrestling with the big decisions faced by a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or a Nelson Mandela, and I very much doubt that my Christlight would shine brightly enough to withstand the trials that they faced. Paul assured the Philippians they would not face trials too great for them to endure (with God’s help), and in a passage a little before our Petrine passage today the author of Peter urges his audience to ‘rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials’. Over and again, some 30 times, Paul or his descendants in faith urge their audiences to undergo inevitable trials as corollary of faith, so that the New Zealand Prayer Book is absolutely correct when in one of its Great Prayers of Thanksgiving, the one we borrowed on Ash Wednesday, it reminds us that we are ‘called to suffer’.
Which is why, if our faith is lolling around in a comfort zone, it may well mean that we are not where we should be on the Way of the Cross. Admittedly as a western Christian community, collectively, our trials are less likely to be trials of victimization and persecution: ours are, and have been for a decade and a half now, more likely to be trials of marginalization and ‘pillorization’, if I may coin a word. We are more likely, so far, to be mocked out of the corridors of power in our society than to be executed. We are, nevertheless, beginning to join Jesus in a journey into a wilderness, with wild animals, with Satan, and yet with angels.
Our response as the body of Christ seems to be a floppy vacillation between the temptation to turn Christianity into a Hollywood spectacle, singing flaccid love songs to Jesus and asking him to ensure our personal prosperity and well-being, on the one hand, or on the other to relativize Jesus to such an extent that he appears no different to Gautama Buddha, Kevin Rudd, or the fairy under the prickly pear. Either way – and there are many variations of a theme of flaccidity – we are not withstanding the temptations or trials (the Greek word is the same) – into which the Spirit is leading us in the twenty-first century. We prefer, it seems, our pancakes to our ashes.
Lent is an opportunity to look deeply and critically within. If we are to take seriously our vocation to be Christ-bearers in the twenty-first century then we need to check whether our place of encounter with Jesus is the armchair of faith or the brutal, discomforting scandal of a crucified God. Almost every New Testament writer told their audience that the journey with Christ would be one of trials and temptations: it may be that our greatest temptation is to relativize our Saviour to such an extent that he’s no longer worth getting out of bed to worship. It may be that our greatest temptation is to turn our faith into a cosy club of like-minded people. There are countless ways, some dramatic, and some prosaic, that we will encounter Satan in our wilderness, but it is only when we cry out to the Christ who has been there that we will find him leading us out of darkness into Easter light.
First, though, we must enter our Lenten journey. To that end I repeat the invitation I made on Ash Wednesday:
Brothers and sisters in Christ: since early days Christians have observed with great devotion the time of our Lord’s passion and resurrection. It became the custom of the Church to prepare for this by a season of penitence and fasting.
At first this season of Lent was observed by those who were preparing for Baptism at Easter and by those who were to be restored to the Church’s fellowship from which they had been separated through sin. In course of time the Church came to recognize that, by a careful keeping of these days, all Christians might take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel, and so grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord.
I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.
FRED’S PASS (NT) SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26th 2012
(FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT)
Readings:
Genesis 9.8-17
Psalm 25.1-10
1 Peter 3.18-22
Mark 1.9-15
Mark spends very little time telling us details of the phase in Jesus’ life that we have come to know as ‘the temptations’. Consistent with his characteristic urgency, he sends Jesus into the wilderness, has him in some way ‘tempted’ (I prefer the word ‘tried’) and then returns him to us and to our world. We must not read Mark through the subsequent eyes of Matthew and Luke: this brief exit, trial and return is all we need to know. Other characters in the two sentence drama are Satan, wild animals, and angels. Luke and Matthew’s profound and symbolic expansions we will explore in future years. For now we have Jesus, a trial in harsh straits, success, and return.
In ancient stories the hero is often tested. To say this is not to say that Mark was making up a story, as some biblical theologians tend to imply. Rather it is to say that as they told the Jesus story the evangelists utilised the most powerful images available to them. If Jesus is to be understood as the hero of all heroes, the man who is beyond humanity yet utterly immersed in humanity, then hero narratives of trial and triumph are a fairly useful means to get a point across. Was Jesus tempted, tried, trialled? Undoubtedly. To undertake the public ministry he undertook, even without its dark implications of forth¬coming agony and death, must have been a constant trial and temptation to give up, to return to the quiet solitude of the carpenter’s shop. ‘Can we start again, please’, sings the lovelost Mary in Superstar, but it may well have been Jesus who again and again wrestled with those words: can I start over? I was quite good at woodwork – can I go back to the workshop?
Indeed most heroes of humanity must have wrestled with demons of temptation. A Martin Luther King, in all that I have read of him, was constantly tormented by demons inviting him to return to the quiet life. So too a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Nelson Mandela, no doubt a Rowan Williams (who I am quite happy to name in the same sentence): in fact, on a smaller scale I am certain many of us can think of better things to do on a Sunday morning than to drag ourselves along to worship a God who surely can be worshipped just as well at home. In fact why do we – why don’t we stay home? Oh for a dollar or ten for every person who assures me you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian. Never mind that that is a whole other, fatuous argument! To know Christ is, in most circumstances, to want to worship him within that flawed body of his, the community of faith. But that to some extent is another story.
Or is it? I may not, as a follower of Christ, find myself wrestling with the big decisions faced by a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or a Nelson Mandela, and I very much doubt that my Christlight would shine brightly enough to withstand the trials that they faced. Paul assured the Philippians they would not face trials too great for them to endure (with God’s help), and in a passage a little before our Petrine passage today the author of Peter urges his audience to ‘rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials’. Over and again, some 30 times, Paul or his descendants in faith urge their audiences to undergo inevitable trials as corollary of faith, so that the New Zealand Prayer Book is absolutely correct when in one of its Great Prayers of Thanksgiving, the one we borrowed on Ash Wednesday, it reminds us that we are ‘called to suffer’.
Which is why, if our faith is lolling around in a comfort zone, it may well mean that we are not where we should be on the Way of the Cross. Admittedly as a western Christian community, collectively, our trials are less likely to be trials of victimization and persecution: ours are, and have been for a decade and a half now, more likely to be trials of marginalization and ‘pillorization’, if I may coin a word. We are more likely, so far, to be mocked out of the corridors of power in our society than to be executed. We are, nevertheless, beginning to join Jesus in a journey into a wilderness, with wild animals, with Satan, and yet with angels.
Our response as the body of Christ seems to be a floppy vacillation between the temptation to turn Christianity into a Hollywood spectacle, singing flaccid love songs to Jesus and asking him to ensure our personal prosperity and well-being, on the one hand, or on the other to relativize Jesus to such an extent that he appears no different to Gautama Buddha, Kevin Rudd, or the fairy under the prickly pear. Either way – and there are many variations of a theme of flaccidity – we are not withstanding the temptations or trials (the Greek word is the same) – into which the Spirit is leading us in the twenty-first century. We prefer, it seems, our pancakes to our ashes.
Lent is an opportunity to look deeply and critically within. If we are to take seriously our vocation to be Christ-bearers in the twenty-first century then we need to check whether our place of encounter with Jesus is the armchair of faith or the brutal, discomforting scandal of a crucified God. Almost every New Testament writer told their audience that the journey with Christ would be one of trials and temptations: it may be that our greatest temptation is to relativize our Saviour to such an extent that he’s no longer worth getting out of bed to worship. It may be that our greatest temptation is to turn our faith into a cosy club of like-minded people. There are countless ways, some dramatic, and some prosaic, that we will encounter Satan in our wilderness, but it is only when we cry out to the Christ who has been there that we will find him leading us out of darkness into Easter light.
First, though, we must enter our Lenten journey. To that end I repeat the invitation I made on Ash Wednesday:
Brothers and sisters in Christ: since early days Christians have observed with great devotion the time of our Lord’s passion and resurrection. It became the custom of the Church to prepare for this by a season of penitence and fasting.
At first this season of Lent was observed by those who were preparing for Baptism at Easter and by those who were to be restored to the Church’s fellowship from which they had been separated through sin. In course of time the Church came to recognize that, by a careful keeping of these days, all Christians might take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel, and so grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord.
I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.
Saturday, 3 March 2012
The Scandal of Particularity
SERMON PREACHED
AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19th 2012
(SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY ~ TRANSFIGURATION)
Readings:
2 Kings 2.1-12
Psalm 50.1-6
2 Corinthians 4.3-12
Mark 9.2-9
Although I did not grow up in the circles of Christian youth and its culture of youth camps – I thought Christianity was for the fond and silly! – I later came to learn of the great culture of romantic attachments that formed at such camps. I learned too of the parallel wisdom that relationships begun in the melting pot of camp life – the hurly burly of life on the spiritual mountain top – could often come a cropper when faced with the humdrum realities of everyday life. Even as an adult – given that Anne and I met at a Canberra conference, the grown-up version of a camp – I knew it was wise to exercise a rhetoric of suspicion before accepting the wisdom of long term planning for a relation begun on the mountain top. In our case we had little choice: I lived in Adelaide and Anne in Brisbane. Canberra was a safe place to meet, I guess.
Underlying that camp-ethos is the recognition that the mountaintop is not the place to establish the deep foundations of (relatively) stable relationship. The artificialities of the camp may be the place where love is born, but it most reach deeper into normalities if it is to be what the New Testament writers might call an ‘abiding love’. To some extent – perhaps a major extent – this applies no less to our relationship with Jesus. The excitement of conversion experience, for those who have entered faith by that door (and in fact that must be all of us, for even slow growth into faith is conversion!) – wears of, and the drudgery of human existence continues most of the time. George Herbert, of course, implored that God might make ‘drudgery divine’, but even that did not imply that life’s every moment could be a pinnacle experience. ‘Come down Oh love divine’, we sing, not ‘beam me up, Scotty’. God in Christ and Christ in his Spirit enters human existence, in all its banality, rather than scooping us up into the hype and adrenaline of peak experience (even if some styles of Christian teaching and worship suggest otherwise). Jesus and his chosen inner few experience a mountain top experience, but they must come down.
I am incidentally uninterested in arguments that arise between more or less liberal and more or less conservative (the labels are meaningless) interpreters at this point. Did Jesus, with Peter, James and John, experience something inexplicable and otherworldly on a Palestinian mountain? Or does Mark generate a symbolic narrative, almost a parable, to demonstrate both the incomprehension of the inner sanctum and the need to come down from the heights and turn, as Luke puts it, ‘resolutely’ to Jerusalem. As it happens I see no reason to doubt Mark’s story, but the point remains the same twofold point: we cannot live lives of faith in the unreality of pinnacle experience, and we cannot experience the height and depth and breadth of divine redemptive love until we have seen its fullness revealed in the depths of Good Friday despair. Anything less than turning resolutely to Jerusalem and crucifixion is ersatz, phoney redemption, a good-time God who remains removed from the depth of human realities of loneliness, despair, hopelessness. Anything less than turning resolutely to Jerusalem and crucifixion is unable even to redeem the main malaises of the West (or global north as we now inexplicably call it), the malaises of boredom and listlessness, what the French philosophers call ennui. Jesus turns away from the mountain not only to redeem ‘the refugees on the unarmed road of flight’, but all the ‘countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse’, even you and me.
But Mark places the story in such an inconvenient spot. Moments before Jesus has uttered those peculiar and awkward words Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
These are awkward words on at least two bases. Was Jesus wrong in his expectation that some around him would ‘see the kingdom of God … come with power’? Biblical scholars bend over backwards to try and sort that one out, using more methods than I would dare to list in a brief Sunday morning sermon. Was the Transfiguration that follows ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? Was he referring to the Resurrection – is that ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? Was he referring to the forthcoming ‘birth of the Church’, which we will acknowledge at far-off Pentecost, as ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? God knows I hope not, though I do believe that, in all its failings, the church is a hint of the Kingdom yet to come. Was Jesus simply wrong – in which case why does Mark bother to tell us what he said? They are difficult questions, and sometimes we need to sit with them to find an even remotely satisfactory answer. I personally thing we are being pointed to the depth of Good Friday – and its Easter authentication – and these are the themes we will journey through this Lent.
The other words are awkward, too. Scholars call it the ‘scandal of particularity’: Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father. Isn’t Jesus just another embodiment, another avatar of the possibilities of human love and justice lived to the full? While I do not believe that non-believers are destined to some fiery hell or even non-existence I think that as a Christ-proclaiming community, coming down from our mounts of transfiguration, we must always embrace that scandal of particularity. Jesus may be an inconvenience at time, and it would be so much easier, as many if not most of my more liberal friends do, to lump him together with all those other good men and women: Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Ché Guevara, Aung Sung Suu Chi, whatever, whoever. But in the end I think not: as we with Jesus turn to Holy Week and Jerusalem, a Lent-time away, we with Jesus turn to Holy Week and Jerusalem. It is with the particular, scandalous man of the gospels that we come down from the mountain and set our feet through Lent and Holy Week to Easter hope for all.
TLBWY
FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19th 2012
(SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY ~ TRANSFIGURATION)
Readings:
2 Kings 2.1-12
Psalm 50.1-6
2 Corinthians 4.3-12
Mark 9.2-9
Although I did not grow up in the circles of Christian youth and its culture of youth camps – I thought Christianity was for the fond and silly! – I later came to learn of the great culture of romantic attachments that formed at such camps. I learned too of the parallel wisdom that relationships begun in the melting pot of camp life – the hurly burly of life on the spiritual mountain top – could often come a cropper when faced with the humdrum realities of everyday life. Even as an adult – given that Anne and I met at a Canberra conference, the grown-up version of a camp – I knew it was wise to exercise a rhetoric of suspicion before accepting the wisdom of long term planning for a relation begun on the mountain top. In our case we had little choice: I lived in Adelaide and Anne in Brisbane. Canberra was a safe place to meet, I guess.
Underlying that camp-ethos is the recognition that the mountaintop is not the place to establish the deep foundations of (relatively) stable relationship. The artificialities of the camp may be the place where love is born, but it most reach deeper into normalities if it is to be what the New Testament writers might call an ‘abiding love’. To some extent – perhaps a major extent – this applies no less to our relationship with Jesus. The excitement of conversion experience, for those who have entered faith by that door (and in fact that must be all of us, for even slow growth into faith is conversion!) – wears of, and the drudgery of human existence continues most of the time. George Herbert, of course, implored that God might make ‘drudgery divine’, but even that did not imply that life’s every moment could be a pinnacle experience. ‘Come down Oh love divine’, we sing, not ‘beam me up, Scotty’. God in Christ and Christ in his Spirit enters human existence, in all its banality, rather than scooping us up into the hype and adrenaline of peak experience (even if some styles of Christian teaching and worship suggest otherwise). Jesus and his chosen inner few experience a mountain top experience, but they must come down.
I am incidentally uninterested in arguments that arise between more or less liberal and more or less conservative (the labels are meaningless) interpreters at this point. Did Jesus, with Peter, James and John, experience something inexplicable and otherworldly on a Palestinian mountain? Or does Mark generate a symbolic narrative, almost a parable, to demonstrate both the incomprehension of the inner sanctum and the need to come down from the heights and turn, as Luke puts it, ‘resolutely’ to Jerusalem. As it happens I see no reason to doubt Mark’s story, but the point remains the same twofold point: we cannot live lives of faith in the unreality of pinnacle experience, and we cannot experience the height and depth and breadth of divine redemptive love until we have seen its fullness revealed in the depths of Good Friday despair. Anything less than turning resolutely to Jerusalem and crucifixion is ersatz, phoney redemption, a good-time God who remains removed from the depth of human realities of loneliness, despair, hopelessness. Anything less than turning resolutely to Jerusalem and crucifixion is unable even to redeem the main malaises of the West (or global north as we now inexplicably call it), the malaises of boredom and listlessness, what the French philosophers call ennui. Jesus turns away from the mountain not only to redeem ‘the refugees on the unarmed road of flight’, but all the ‘countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse’, even you and me.
But Mark places the story in such an inconvenient spot. Moments before Jesus has uttered those peculiar and awkward words Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
These are awkward words on at least two bases. Was Jesus wrong in his expectation that some around him would ‘see the kingdom of God … come with power’? Biblical scholars bend over backwards to try and sort that one out, using more methods than I would dare to list in a brief Sunday morning sermon. Was the Transfiguration that follows ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? Was he referring to the Resurrection – is that ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? Was he referring to the forthcoming ‘birth of the Church’, which we will acknowledge at far-off Pentecost, as ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? God knows I hope not, though I do believe that, in all its failings, the church is a hint of the Kingdom yet to come. Was Jesus simply wrong – in which case why does Mark bother to tell us what he said? They are difficult questions, and sometimes we need to sit with them to find an even remotely satisfactory answer. I personally thing we are being pointed to the depth of Good Friday – and its Easter authentication – and these are the themes we will journey through this Lent.
The other words are awkward, too. Scholars call it the ‘scandal of particularity’: Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father. Isn’t Jesus just another embodiment, another avatar of the possibilities of human love and justice lived to the full? While I do not believe that non-believers are destined to some fiery hell or even non-existence I think that as a Christ-proclaiming community, coming down from our mounts of transfiguration, we must always embrace that scandal of particularity. Jesus may be an inconvenience at time, and it would be so much easier, as many if not most of my more liberal friends do, to lump him together with all those other good men and women: Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Ché Guevara, Aung Sung Suu Chi, whatever, whoever. But in the end I think not: as we with Jesus turn to Holy Week and Jerusalem, a Lent-time away, we with Jesus turn to Holy Week and Jerusalem. It is with the particular, scandalous man of the gospels that we come down from the mountain and set our feet through Lent and Holy Week to Easter hope for all.
TLBWY
Saturday, 18 February 2012
Dreamland
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF St FRANCIS,
BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12th 2012
(SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)
Readings:
2 Kings 5.1-14
Psalm 30
1 Corinthians 9.24-27
Mark 1.40-45
Translators can have a remarkable influence on any passage we read. A man comes to Jesus, suffering perhaps from leprosy as such, or perhaps from any of the states that drove people to and beyond the outer edges of society and were simply lumped together under the catch-all label ‘leprosy’. A man came to Jesus from the outer fringes of society, and Jesus was, depending on the translator, moved with compassion (moved to the bowels), or deeply angered. Perhaps there’s little difference, but on the whole one translation tends to favour gentle human action, the other great and programmatic systems that launch an offensive on the corruptions of society.
We manse-dwellers, or perhaps just this one, see it increasingly rarely in our experience as the church is pushed to the amnesia segmernt of society's memory: ‘a man came to the rectory door’ … perhaps some rectories or vicarages attract more through traffic than others. When Anne was curate in Kempsey in NSW her unit, marked for all to see with a huge cross, was directly opposite the railway station. Kempsey was conveniently half way from Sydney to Brisbane. A ticket purchased by Queensland or New South Wales police or other agencies could ensure a troublesome person was despatched a reasonable distance from the heart of metropolitan Sydney or Brisbane: Kempsey could deal with them. They often arrived hungry and drunk, expecting a hand-out of food or, better still, cash from a door with a cross on it. Anne lived alone with a big, faithful, black and very growly German Shepherd cross. Food perhaps: cash no. But is a plateful of sandwiches to a dumped vagrant the same as a healing touch for a leper? “A man came to the rectory door”: did I or Anne give him a fish or a stone?
The truth is I don’t know. I have helped many individuals and families over the years, as Anne has, with food. Occasionally I did help with non-cash financial solutions. I remember only too well helping a desperate Murri woman escape from a hell-hole of domestic violence on NSW’s north coast, helping by arranging train fares to Cairns where she and her children could start a new life. Did they? She spent her last night on the Coast embroiled in love with the man who had beaten her so badly. Was this a healing touch for a leper – or was I stung by a fluent liar? I will never know. The leper wasn’t lying to Jesus, but I am not Jesus, and in any case, leprosy is not always as obvious today as it was in the first century. Is loneliness leprosy? Is HIV/Aids leprosy? Is domestic violence leprosy? Is mental illness leprosy? Who are our lepers?
Jesus touched and healed. He traversed the barriers that ensure a desperate man was inescapably trapped in loneliness and despair. When we do try to touch and transform lives we often find the owners of the lives prickly and ungrateful. That at least hasn’t changed: this man ignored the one request Jesus made of him (‘tell no-one’). On another occasion when Jesus healed ten lepers only one bothered to return to say thank you. In any case, perhaps all were later in the Good Friday crowd, crying ‘crucify him’, as Jesus was tried by corrupt and biased human courts, as love always will be. Perhaps like Naaman they wanted something more spectacular than a mere river to dip in. I work more on the principle that hopefully as I stumble through life offering a smile here and a sandwich there then perhaps there might be the occasional life touched with Christlight, perhaps even nudged towards a journey of faith and faith-filled transformation. Perhaps the young children of the Murri woman I sent to Cairns have seized the new opportunities life gave them, topped their years’ grades, entered into university or a trade which may never have otherwise opened up to them. I doubt it, but I like to dream.
Perhaps that’s all we can do. Years ago Keith Green (I think it was) sang ‘make my life a prayer to you’. I live surrounded by organizations that do marvellous tasks of touching lepers – of transforming unjust structures in society, rocking the consciences of the powerful players of Canberra or Darwin – but I have little to offer them. I set about dreaming the dreams of God, blundering along hoping that in the grace and purposes of God a life or two is touched with Christlight: ‘I will hold my Christlight to you, in the night time of your fear’, as kiwi songwriter Richard Gillard wrote in “The Servant Song”. Often I forget to do even that – sometimes the batteries of my Christlight run flat. But, while I am no athlete, I stumble on in attempt to complete the race, finish the fight, whatever the metaphor might be, and hope that in the grace of God the leprosy of a human life or two is touched.
TLBWY
BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12th 2012
(SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)
Readings:
2 Kings 5.1-14
Psalm 30
1 Corinthians 9.24-27
Mark 1.40-45
Translators can have a remarkable influence on any passage we read. A man comes to Jesus, suffering perhaps from leprosy as such, or perhaps from any of the states that drove people to and beyond the outer edges of society and were simply lumped together under the catch-all label ‘leprosy’. A man came to Jesus from the outer fringes of society, and Jesus was, depending on the translator, moved with compassion (moved to the bowels), or deeply angered. Perhaps there’s little difference, but on the whole one translation tends to favour gentle human action, the other great and programmatic systems that launch an offensive on the corruptions of society.
We manse-dwellers, or perhaps just this one, see it increasingly rarely in our experience as the church is pushed to the amnesia segmernt of society's memory: ‘a man came to the rectory door’ … perhaps some rectories or vicarages attract more through traffic than others. When Anne was curate in Kempsey in NSW her unit, marked for all to see with a huge cross, was directly opposite the railway station. Kempsey was conveniently half way from Sydney to Brisbane. A ticket purchased by Queensland or New South Wales police or other agencies could ensure a troublesome person was despatched a reasonable distance from the heart of metropolitan Sydney or Brisbane: Kempsey could deal with them. They often arrived hungry and drunk, expecting a hand-out of food or, better still, cash from a door with a cross on it. Anne lived alone with a big, faithful, black and very growly German Shepherd cross. Food perhaps: cash no. But is a plateful of sandwiches to a dumped vagrant the same as a healing touch for a leper? “A man came to the rectory door”: did I or Anne give him a fish or a stone?
The truth is I don’t know. I have helped many individuals and families over the years, as Anne has, with food. Occasionally I did help with non-cash financial solutions. I remember only too well helping a desperate Murri woman escape from a hell-hole of domestic violence on NSW’s north coast, helping by arranging train fares to Cairns where she and her children could start a new life. Did they? She spent her last night on the Coast embroiled in love with the man who had beaten her so badly. Was this a healing touch for a leper – or was I stung by a fluent liar? I will never know. The leper wasn’t lying to Jesus, but I am not Jesus, and in any case, leprosy is not always as obvious today as it was in the first century. Is loneliness leprosy? Is HIV/Aids leprosy? Is domestic violence leprosy? Is mental illness leprosy? Who are our lepers?
Jesus touched and healed. He traversed the barriers that ensure a desperate man was inescapably trapped in loneliness and despair. When we do try to touch and transform lives we often find the owners of the lives prickly and ungrateful. That at least hasn’t changed: this man ignored the one request Jesus made of him (‘tell no-one’). On another occasion when Jesus healed ten lepers only one bothered to return to say thank you. In any case, perhaps all were later in the Good Friday crowd, crying ‘crucify him’, as Jesus was tried by corrupt and biased human courts, as love always will be. Perhaps like Naaman they wanted something more spectacular than a mere river to dip in. I work more on the principle that hopefully as I stumble through life offering a smile here and a sandwich there then perhaps there might be the occasional life touched with Christlight, perhaps even nudged towards a journey of faith and faith-filled transformation. Perhaps the young children of the Murri woman I sent to Cairns have seized the new opportunities life gave them, topped their years’ grades, entered into university or a trade which may never have otherwise opened up to them. I doubt it, but I like to dream.
Perhaps that’s all we can do. Years ago Keith Green (I think it was) sang ‘make my life a prayer to you’. I live surrounded by organizations that do marvellous tasks of touching lepers – of transforming unjust structures in society, rocking the consciences of the powerful players of Canberra or Darwin – but I have little to offer them. I set about dreaming the dreams of God, blundering along hoping that in the grace and purposes of God a life or two is touched with Christlight: ‘I will hold my Christlight to you, in the night time of your fear’, as kiwi songwriter Richard Gillard wrote in “The Servant Song”. Often I forget to do even that – sometimes the batteries of my Christlight run flat. But, while I am no athlete, I stumble on in attempt to complete the race, finish the fight, whatever the metaphor might be, and hope that in the grace of God the leprosy of a human life or two is touched.
TLBWY
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Seized by an Imperative
SERMON PREACHED
AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5th 2012
(FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)
Readings:
Isaiah 40.21-31 Psalm 147.1-11
1 Corinthians 9.16-23
Mark 1.29-39
I have been in my reading of books and web-conversations in recent weeks increasingly reminded of the difference between faith and intellectual exploration. I mentioned last week my experience at a high-browed biblical studies conference, the difference Luke Timothy Johnson described as that between dissecting a cadaver and dancing with one’s beloved. Perhaps it is easier for me than it is for many: as a convert Christian I am always able to remember the contrast between an empty universe and the universe that I now inhabit, and have inhabited for thirty years or more, flung across the sky by a creating, redeeming, life-giving God. I was never able to rationalise my way into faith – a handful of people have, but only a handful. There have been many times (as I will also often mention) that I have had to keep my belief in the category of five impossible things before breakfast. Still: the God of my conversion encounter has never let me go.
It is not therefore coincidental that I find in the Apostle Paul something of a hero of faith. Spiritually seized and held captive by the risen Lord Jesus, he knew that living and proclaiming the gospel was not a choice, but an imperative. Again and again he reminds us that, like every good Jew, he has not grounds for boasting. Somewhat facetiously he paints his fellow Jews in a torrid light as a self-satisfied and over-confident mob, but in reality (and this statement throws my friends in the Diocese of Sydney into apoplectic seizures) no Jew thought he or she could observe the law in totality, gaining by that observance an earned entry to the favour of God. But leaving aside Moore College and its hang-ups about what is called the ‘new perspective’ on Paul and the Law, the simple fact is there can never be an entry point into the love and the eternities of God without God’s prior, gracious action. There can be no grounds for boasting, because God, not me, is the initiator of faith.
Having been seized by that grace an imperative is placed upon us. ‘Go … proclaim’, says Jesus, to himself and to his disciples. Of course this does not mean that tomorrow we will rush to the selection channels of the Australian Board of Mission or Church Missionary Society – after coming to faith I worshipped for many years in a parish where to do less than to be serving overseas with CMS was to be by far a lesser Christian (that included the mere second best of ordained ministry, unless it was overseas. Perhaps – though hardly CMS – I did learn something, for I have spent most of the 30 years since then overseas, even if overseas is no further than Australia!). I digress! ‘Go, proclaim’. The verbs used are called imperatives. These are not options, but orders. This life invaded by God is no longer mine, but Christ’s. Paul, in fact, has a theology of salvation not unlike the invasion of the body snatchers: he means it absolutely when he says, and constantly alludes to the idea, that ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’.
Wordsworth’s phrase ‘surprised by joy’ was borrowed by C.S. Lewis to speak of his own conversion – his in fact was one of the rare more intellectual journeys, though that too had to end in a leap of faith into the arms of the risen Christ, and the Triune God who cannot be ascertained by nous alone. Lesslie Newbigin, who I refer to in the pew sheet, is alluding to this pre-rationality of the encounter with Christ when he emphasizes over again that the encounter with Jesus begins not in the intellectual machinations of either fundamentalism or post-modern liberalism, but in obedience to the command of Jesus ‘follow’. Jesus of course intertwines the command ‘follow’ with the command ‘go, proclaim’, because the doctrine of the Spirit is one that says wherever we go proclaiming, the footsteps of the fast God are there already: I am going before you into Galilee.
The bonus, the fringe benefits of the journey are those hinted at by Isaiah and the psalmist. perhaps you recall the opening scenes of the early 1980s movie Chariots of Fire. As the one time missionary Eric Liddell was laid to rest the famous words of Isaiah were recited – in glorious King James solemnity:
There is both a this worldly and an other-worldly dimension to Isaiah’s famous words of hope. There is a sense in which service of the gospel provides if not constant then occasional or perhaps frequent renewal and rejuvenation – some health studies have confirmed that there are health benefits to faith, and throughout my ministry I have been over and again gobsmacked by the energy and enthusiasm of many octogenarian and nonagenarian servants of Christ – not least some here. On the other hand I was ordained by, and as some of you will know, related by marriage to, a bishop who died at fifty-three, prematurely dead not least because of his fanatical workaholism. We need to be realistic in our service of the gospel, for even Jesus at least tried to withdraw from the crowds that longed for light.
In the end we return to the pie in the sky that will so often be at the heart of – though pray God not the motivation for – our gospel service. We do have a vision, however absurd, that reaches beyond death, through judgement, and into the blessedness of eternity, for us, for those we love and pray for. Anything less than that, however noble and even gospel-inspired, is less than gospel. We go, proclaim, and finally in God’s time, enter a dimension we cannot begin to comprehend. ‘They that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint’.
TLBWY
FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5th 2012
(FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)
Readings:
Isaiah 40.21-31 Psalm 147.1-11
1 Corinthians 9.16-23
Mark 1.29-39
I have been in my reading of books and web-conversations in recent weeks increasingly reminded of the difference between faith and intellectual exploration. I mentioned last week my experience at a high-browed biblical studies conference, the difference Luke Timothy Johnson described as that between dissecting a cadaver and dancing with one’s beloved. Perhaps it is easier for me than it is for many: as a convert Christian I am always able to remember the contrast between an empty universe and the universe that I now inhabit, and have inhabited for thirty years or more, flung across the sky by a creating, redeeming, life-giving God. I was never able to rationalise my way into faith – a handful of people have, but only a handful. There have been many times (as I will also often mention) that I have had to keep my belief in the category of five impossible things before breakfast. Still: the God of my conversion encounter has never let me go.
It is not therefore coincidental that I find in the Apostle Paul something of a hero of faith. Spiritually seized and held captive by the risen Lord Jesus, he knew that living and proclaiming the gospel was not a choice, but an imperative. Again and again he reminds us that, like every good Jew, he has not grounds for boasting. Somewhat facetiously he paints his fellow Jews in a torrid light as a self-satisfied and over-confident mob, but in reality (and this statement throws my friends in the Diocese of Sydney into apoplectic seizures) no Jew thought he or she could observe the law in totality, gaining by that observance an earned entry to the favour of God. But leaving aside Moore College and its hang-ups about what is called the ‘new perspective’ on Paul and the Law, the simple fact is there can never be an entry point into the love and the eternities of God without God’s prior, gracious action. There can be no grounds for boasting, because God, not me, is the initiator of faith.
Having been seized by that grace an imperative is placed upon us. ‘Go … proclaim’, says Jesus, to himself and to his disciples. Of course this does not mean that tomorrow we will rush to the selection channels of the Australian Board of Mission or Church Missionary Society – after coming to faith I worshipped for many years in a parish where to do less than to be serving overseas with CMS was to be by far a lesser Christian (that included the mere second best of ordained ministry, unless it was overseas. Perhaps – though hardly CMS – I did learn something, for I have spent most of the 30 years since then overseas, even if overseas is no further than Australia!). I digress! ‘Go, proclaim’. The verbs used are called imperatives. These are not options, but orders. This life invaded by God is no longer mine, but Christ’s. Paul, in fact, has a theology of salvation not unlike the invasion of the body snatchers: he means it absolutely when he says, and constantly alludes to the idea, that ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’.
Wordsworth’s phrase ‘surprised by joy’ was borrowed by C.S. Lewis to speak of his own conversion – his in fact was one of the rare more intellectual journeys, though that too had to end in a leap of faith into the arms of the risen Christ, and the Triune God who cannot be ascertained by nous alone. Lesslie Newbigin, who I refer to in the pew sheet, is alluding to this pre-rationality of the encounter with Christ when he emphasizes over again that the encounter with Jesus begins not in the intellectual machinations of either fundamentalism or post-modern liberalism, but in obedience to the command of Jesus ‘follow’. Jesus of course intertwines the command ‘follow’ with the command ‘go, proclaim’, because the doctrine of the Spirit is one that says wherever we go proclaiming, the footsteps of the fast God are there already: I am going before you into Galilee.
The bonus, the fringe benefits of the journey are those hinted at by Isaiah and the psalmist. perhaps you recall the opening scenes of the early 1980s movie Chariots of Fire. As the one time missionary Eric Liddell was laid to rest the famous words of Isaiah were recited – in glorious King James solemnity:
He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.
There is both a this worldly and an other-worldly dimension to Isaiah’s famous words of hope. There is a sense in which service of the gospel provides if not constant then occasional or perhaps frequent renewal and rejuvenation – some health studies have confirmed that there are health benefits to faith, and throughout my ministry I have been over and again gobsmacked by the energy and enthusiasm of many octogenarian and nonagenarian servants of Christ – not least some here. On the other hand I was ordained by, and as some of you will know, related by marriage to, a bishop who died at fifty-three, prematurely dead not least because of his fanatical workaholism. We need to be realistic in our service of the gospel, for even Jesus at least tried to withdraw from the crowds that longed for light.
In the end we return to the pie in the sky that will so often be at the heart of – though pray God not the motivation for – our gospel service. We do have a vision, however absurd, that reaches beyond death, through judgement, and into the blessedness of eternity, for us, for those we love and pray for. Anything less than that, however noble and even gospel-inspired, is less than gospel. We go, proclaim, and finally in God’s time, enter a dimension we cannot begin to comprehend. ‘They that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint’.
TLBWY
Saturday, 28 January 2012
Dancing with cadavers?
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, JANUARY 29th 2012
(FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)
Readings:
Deuteronomy 18.15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8.1-13
Mark 1.21-28
TLBWY
* Tippet, Krista. On Being. "Luke Timothy Johnson and Bernadette Brooten: Deciphering the Da Vinci Code." June 1, 2006. Transcript online at http://www.onbeing.org/program/deceiphering-da-vinci-code/transcript/821
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, JANUARY 29th 2012
(FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)
Readings:
Deuteronomy 18.15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8.1-13
Mark 1.21-28
A church community that jettisons the scriptures of faith as the primary reference point for all that it does and says in the service of God is a church that has ceased to be church. Admittedly, in the context of Sunday liturgy, the cerebral action of breaking opening the word must be held in equal tension with the non-cerebral action of celebrating sacrament – to jettison either is to risk the integrity of faith. Donald Coggan made this wonderfully clear by referring to ‘the sacrament of the Word’: both word and sacrament, scripture and liturgy are ‘Word’, are sacred text: we dare not jettison either.
So how do we deal with a text – indeed why should we bother with a text – in which Paul appears to be blithering on about some first century issue specific to an ancient Mediterranean city? Do we or should we really care whether we eat meat sacrificed to idols? It is hardly an issue we face each day, or even ever face, surely, except perhaps if we eat at a Hare Krishna restaurant.
There has been since the fourth century an approach to scripture called midrash. Midrash should never be a means to recreate scripture or faith in our own image, knocking off its hard edges to dumb it down or to make it palatable. Some well-known Christian quasi- or pseudo-scholars and quasi- or pseudo-apologists have made a name (and a mint) for themselves by specialising in this kind of charlatanism. No: scripture stands judgement over us, not vice versa (though of course we will disagree in the interpretation of individual texts, particularly when we come to those thorny questions of human sexuality. That is why we need the clumsy, frustrating collective processes of synodical government to frustrate yet guide our growth in God). Basically though, midrash has much to offer, especially when we find Paul addressing questions of Corinthian diet. It gives us an opportunity to engage in sacred play with the text, where the emphasis is equally shared between ‘play’ and ‘sacred’, not skewed too far towards either pole.
So what do we do when Paul addresses a question from first century Corinth of seemingly little application to us? Some of the Corinthian Christians had written to Paul asking, inter alia, about the practice of eating food previously sacrificed to idols in various temples. We might too easily utter a very 21st Century ‘meh’ here: so what? But as rich and poor Christians gathered these were issues of justice: the poor could barely afford meat at the best of times, and any meat at all was a privilege. In a ‘bring your own’ context they were being shamed: look at the meat I am providing. Yours sucks.
It is likely the issue put to Paul was more complex still. If the Thessalonian context is anything to go by, some of the braver Christians were prepared to die for the practice of their beliefs. In Thessalonica they were probably barred from trading unless they swore allegiance to the gods of Rome. Thessalonica was different to Corinth, but Paul was impressed by the Thessalonians’ bravery: they would die rather than eat second-hand, idol-offered food. By contrast the Corinthians – or some of them – were sneering: look, we are in Christ, we can do anything we like. Earlier he has addressed the question of a believer so convinced of his own perfection-in-Christ that he has outdone even secular Corinthian moral laxity by shacking up with his mother-in-law. Timid believers were scandalised: is this the way of the cross, to do anything we like when we like, to be even more decadent than the idol-worshippers? Can we who are ‘in Christ’ do anything we like? Paul’s response is unambiguous: ‘by no means’. The behaviour of some predators within the Christian communities suggests that some things never change, and much community wrath was rightly poured on the Church and its leadership as our dirty washing was aired.
The church of the 21st century – and this is no new thing – has found another sophisticated way to eat meat offered to idols. There is amongst some circles of scholarship and other church leadership an attitude aired that sounds something like ‘of course if some people want to believe in a literal resurrection (or virgin birth, or second coming, whatever) then that’s fine, but we know better’. Every faction of the contemporary Christian community has its slogans: ‘if you don’t speak in tongues you are not a Christian’, ‘if you are gay you can’t be a Christian’, ‘if you don’t experience “blessed assurance” of salvation you are not a Christian’, ‘if you ordain women’ you are not a Christian, ‘if you don’t wear designer labels you are not a Christian’, if you breastfeed or have a noisy child in church then you are not a Christian’ … or, paradoxically, ‘if you believe that resurrection stuff then you aren’t a Christian’. The message is often subliminal, but it is the same message: ‘if you don’t eat meat offered to idols then you are clearly not confident enough in faith to be numbered with us’.
For that was what was happening. It was insulting at two levels: the rich who could afford untainted meat were cheapening themselves and their responsibilities as Christian hosts by offering only second-hand meat to the lower-class Corinthian Christians. At the same time the faithful but poorer Christians, like the Thessalonian Christians who Paul so admired, were refusing to be compromised by eating the second-hand meat. ‘Poor simple folk – they don’t really understand’ – the same attitude expressed by some who sneer at those who have a literal understanding of the resurrection (as I do). They were shouldered to the outer, there left to sink or swim.
Do these questions apply to us? Some years ago I attended a conference of the Society of Biblical Literature. I was staggered at the contrast between scholars who demonstrated their academic prowess by effectively sneering at and over the texts of faith, and those who saw these sacred texts as wells of faith and knowledge directing believers deeper into the heart of the triune God. Roman Catholic Scholar Luke Timothy Johnson speaks of the difference between dissecting a cadaver and dancing with his beloved.* Each involves a body. The choice is ours: do we worship and behave in order to build up, or to tear down the body of Christ?
Do we dissect cadavers or do we dance with our beloved? This applies not only in preaching and study but in the whole of our faith practice: do we generate a practiced air of superiority that knows it all, has no need of explanations, and scorns those less advanced than ourselves, or do we see the face of Christ in the most tentative of faith-explorers? Do we admire our own sophistication and security, building temples to our own arrogance, or do we know that we too fall and always will fall far short of the glory of God, and need the infusion of God’s grace each step of our journey. Paul knew only too well his weakness – and left the arrogant Corinthian strong to stew in their own spiritual juices - or dancing with their dessicated cadavers of spiritual arrogance. That is why he goes on famously to say he become all things to all people: ‘To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some’.
TLBWY
* Tippet, Krista. On Being. "Luke Timothy Johnson and Bernadette Brooten: Deciphering the Da Vinci Code." June 1, 2006. Transcript online at http://www.onbeing.org/program/deceiphering-da-vinci-code/transcript/821
Sunday, 15 January 2012
Voices in the night?
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS, NORTHERN TERRITORY
SUNDAY, JANUARY 15th 2012
(SECOND SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)
Readings: 1 Samuel 3.1-10
Psalm 139.1-5, 12-18
1 Corinthians 6.12-20
John 1.43-51
Amongst the caricatures levelled at Christianity is one commonly directed at the experience of ‘call’. By and large this is because we take a literal approach to passages in our scripture that were originally designed to be a stylised narrative, a representative story intended to describe in general terms the ways in which God might touch and direct fallible human lives. In most of what might be the ‘call narratives’ there is an unexpected and often unmerited approach from God, a demurrer from the one whose life is about to be changed, and a final reluctant acceptance of the task ahead. It might be described as an ‘Oi … Who me? Yes you ... Couldn't be me … Yes you … Oh, okay then, with your help’ story. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies when it comes to caricatures of our faith and practice, but both the caricaturists and those who use the terminology blindly are misusing the scriptures.
Which is not to say God might not conceivably reveal divine purpose and divine will through what we might call supernatural means: that’s up to God, but it is far from my experience, and should be treated as a rare exception, not a rule. On the whole we are better off looking for the signs and directives of God in the overall patterns of our lives, rather than in the unnecessary celestial dramatics. The expectation that we will experience voices in the night like that of the Old Testament prophetic call scenes is an expectation that fuels the conversation of many in our psych wards: there are enough mental illness issues in our community without our adding fuel to dangerous fires.
A call of any sort is likely to be neither more nor less than accumulated shared conversations with others within the body of Christ, discerning and ascertaining where our gifts and strengths might lead us. A person with a Dylanesque voice like a truckload of gravel or the musical ear of a newt is unlikely to be invited by God to lead the singing ministry of a church. A person who is unable to be a critical and compassionate listener, or who is devoid of people skills or public-speaking skills, is unlikely to be experiencing a call to the liturgical and pastoral ministries of priesthood. A person who is numerologically incompetent or dysnumeric like myself is unlikely to be called to the role of treasurer in the body of Christ or indeed in any other organization. God may be a God of surprises but not of idiocies.
What the ‘call narratives’ of our scriptures present is a stylized presentation of the impact of God’s working on a human life. But these are human lives attuned to the possibilities of God. This kind of a statement gives some Protestant interpreters the screaming heebies: is the grace of God dependant on human labour? No – but ‘no’ only in the context of the saving action of Christ on the Cross. The assumption that we can sit on human backsides or dance around having a frivolous time for Jesus, as is the practice in some quarters, and then expect to be useful in the purposes and plans of God is a spiritual obscenity. Each of the call narratives of Old and New Testament is the narrative of God’s approach to a person familiar and disciplined in practicing the presence of God. Each is a story of God’s extra-ordinary encounter with a person who has attuned their life to such an extent that God can lead them into new futures of service.
When Paul turns to questions of sexuality he raises the ire particularly of liberal Christianity in the twenty-first century (though I don’t think there are any even of the most libertine commentators who would condone the sorts of practices being undertaken by some of the Corinthian Christians). But in so-called ‘liberal’ circles it is as unpopular to draw a line in the sand with regards to sexual practice and morality as it is to suggest in evangelical circles that there may be many outside the community of Christ who are amongst the eternally blesséd, or in Americo-fundamentalist circles that there may be a dimension of social responsibility attached to the gospel. The fact is that there is a call to personal holiness and integrity in the call to follow Jesus, and that, while many of us may fall short, there is no room for a laissez faire approach to what we do with our male or female bodies when we are bearers of Christ. In the Corinthian context, in the Nimbin of the first century, this was particularly apparent, but it is a timeless truth: we cannot be attuned to the will and purposes of God if we are not attuned to the integrity of our own lives and our own sexual mores.
There is – of course – a call to compassionate social action, too. We cannot claim to be Christ-bearers of integrity if we close our eyes to the brutal disparities between the global rich and the global poor, or even the Australian rich and Australian poor. We cannot claim to be Christ-bearers of integrity if we close our eyes to the fact that there are obscene structures in place that ensure the richest on the earth minimize their taxes and live long while the poorest on the earth are condemned to die abysmally young without even earning enough to pay taxes. Jesus challenges us to address these issues as much as he challenges us to address the issues of our own private integrity. We must do both if we are to live lives of readiness to hear the voice of God.
For most of us the stage on which we live out our faith will be a small one. But the principle remains: do we live a life of sufficient integrity to hear the challenges and directions of the God of Samuel, Nathanael, Andrew, James and John, Mary, Peter or Paul?
TLBWY
FRED’S PASS, NORTHERN TERRITORY
SUNDAY, JANUARY 15th 2012
(SECOND SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)
Readings: 1 Samuel 3.1-10
Psalm 139.1-5, 12-18
1 Corinthians 6.12-20
John 1.43-51
Amongst the caricatures levelled at Christianity is one commonly directed at the experience of ‘call’. By and large this is because we take a literal approach to passages in our scripture that were originally designed to be a stylised narrative, a representative story intended to describe in general terms the ways in which God might touch and direct fallible human lives. In most of what might be the ‘call narratives’ there is an unexpected and often unmerited approach from God, a demurrer from the one whose life is about to be changed, and a final reluctant acceptance of the task ahead. It might be described as an ‘Oi … Who me? Yes you ... Couldn't be me … Yes you … Oh, okay then, with your help’ story. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies when it comes to caricatures of our faith and practice, but both the caricaturists and those who use the terminology blindly are misusing the scriptures.
Which is not to say God might not conceivably reveal divine purpose and divine will through what we might call supernatural means: that’s up to God, but it is far from my experience, and should be treated as a rare exception, not a rule. On the whole we are better off looking for the signs and directives of God in the overall patterns of our lives, rather than in the unnecessary celestial dramatics. The expectation that we will experience voices in the night like that of the Old Testament prophetic call scenes is an expectation that fuels the conversation of many in our psych wards: there are enough mental illness issues in our community without our adding fuel to dangerous fires.
A call of any sort is likely to be neither more nor less than accumulated shared conversations with others within the body of Christ, discerning and ascertaining where our gifts and strengths might lead us. A person with a Dylanesque voice like a truckload of gravel or the musical ear of a newt is unlikely to be invited by God to lead the singing ministry of a church. A person who is unable to be a critical and compassionate listener, or who is devoid of people skills or public-speaking skills, is unlikely to be experiencing a call to the liturgical and pastoral ministries of priesthood. A person who is numerologically incompetent or dysnumeric like myself is unlikely to be called to the role of treasurer in the body of Christ or indeed in any other organization. God may be a God of surprises but not of idiocies.
What the ‘call narratives’ of our scriptures present is a stylized presentation of the impact of God’s working on a human life. But these are human lives attuned to the possibilities of God. This kind of a statement gives some Protestant interpreters the screaming heebies: is the grace of God dependant on human labour? No – but ‘no’ only in the context of the saving action of Christ on the Cross. The assumption that we can sit on human backsides or dance around having a frivolous time for Jesus, as is the practice in some quarters, and then expect to be useful in the purposes and plans of God is a spiritual obscenity. Each of the call narratives of Old and New Testament is the narrative of God’s approach to a person familiar and disciplined in practicing the presence of God. Each is a story of God’s extra-ordinary encounter with a person who has attuned their life to such an extent that God can lead them into new futures of service.
When Paul turns to questions of sexuality he raises the ire particularly of liberal Christianity in the twenty-first century (though I don’t think there are any even of the most libertine commentators who would condone the sorts of practices being undertaken by some of the Corinthian Christians). But in so-called ‘liberal’ circles it is as unpopular to draw a line in the sand with regards to sexual practice and morality as it is to suggest in evangelical circles that there may be many outside the community of Christ who are amongst the eternally blesséd, or in Americo-fundamentalist circles that there may be a dimension of social responsibility attached to the gospel. The fact is that there is a call to personal holiness and integrity in the call to follow Jesus, and that, while many of us may fall short, there is no room for a laissez faire approach to what we do with our male or female bodies when we are bearers of Christ. In the Corinthian context, in the Nimbin of the first century, this was particularly apparent, but it is a timeless truth: we cannot be attuned to the will and purposes of God if we are not attuned to the integrity of our own lives and our own sexual mores.
There is – of course – a call to compassionate social action, too. We cannot claim to be Christ-bearers of integrity if we close our eyes to the brutal disparities between the global rich and the global poor, or even the Australian rich and Australian poor. We cannot claim to be Christ-bearers of integrity if we close our eyes to the fact that there are obscene structures in place that ensure the richest on the earth minimize their taxes and live long while the poorest on the earth are condemned to die abysmally young without even earning enough to pay taxes. Jesus challenges us to address these issues as much as he challenges us to address the issues of our own private integrity. We must do both if we are to live lives of readiness to hear the voice of God.
For most of us the stage on which we live out our faith will be a small one. But the principle remains: do we live a life of sufficient integrity to hear the challenges and directions of the God of Samuel, Nathanael, Andrew, James and John, Mary, Peter or Paul?
TLBWY
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