Barking for Jesus

FROM THE PEW SHEET

My brief experience of Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity as an undergraduate taught me much. The great and unforgivable sin of Mk 3 and Mt 12 was often defined as ‘quenching the Spirit’: that to speak ill of anything defined as a spiritual gift in the church would be to be pushed beyond the parameters of salvation for ever. This was errant nonsense, but it was powerful errant nonsense, particularly useful as a tool by which to maintain order in a church tightly controlled by one or two megalomaniacal control freaks. I left those church circles, but I hope I have retained some of what I learned there.

I hope I have retained my sense of the immediacy and ‘livingness’ of God. For years I moved into a far more cerebral and rite-based faith. I have no regrets, funnily enough about that, either. When Jesus spoke of ways we should love God he included ‘mind’ with ‘heart’: the anti-intellectualism of my charismatic beginnings was neither better nor worse than the paranoid suspicion of emotions that I experienced over my next half decade or more. I found some control freaks in those circles, too: the types that would scowl into non-existence some poor soul who genuflected at the wrong time, or who would glare to a cinder a child in church. In Adelaide I was once told that the strength of one church at which I was a Sunday locum was that there were no children there. I laughed aloud — until I realised that the speaker, a warden, was deadly serious.

Ideally I would love to find a balance. I never again want to hear the silliness that I encountered in another church, where a group of women were crawling around, led by the Holy Spirit to bark for Jesus, probably a useful gestalt but little to do with the Jesus of the Cross. Perhaps my stopping that practice as ‘spiritual nonsense’ was ‘quenching the Spirit’ in the eyes of some. But for all that spiritually silliness, when that group learned to discern the difference between psychobabblingl nonsense and genuine openness to an immediate and active God they became a real engine-room in the life of the faith community. Somewhere in that balance is a message for us all.

Suck it up, divorcee

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, October 7^th, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 27/NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)

Readings:
Job 1.1, 2.1-10
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1.1-4, 2.5-12
Mark 10.2-16

Every now and again the lectionary’s cycles throw together such a disconnected collection of readings that it’s hard to believe we stand in one heritage at all. It’s a useful reminder that our scriptures are a glorious collection of the Godward thoughts of those who like us strive godwardly through a darkened glass, drawing on wisdom that the Church with time came to recognize as Spirit-filled, yet incomplete, disparate, as all life and all thought this side of the eschaton will be. I will not pretend to draw together strands from Mark, Job, Hebrews and the most excruciatingly self-righteous of the psalms and pretend they share great themes of faith!

The scriptures, even the gospel-readings for which we stand as a mark of respect for the Christ who becomes Incarnate in our midst, are flawed, no matter what the more extreme Protestants may tell us. Yet they are in-filled with divine Spirit in a way no others are: we trivialize them at risk – every preacher should walk in fear between those temptations. The Bible is not the Incarnation, as the bibliolatrists suggest. Nor is it merely some old book or collection of books as relativists suggest. We must approach the text in fear and trembling: this is one of the great loci of the encounter with the Risen Lord. And when Mark records Jesus issuing what appear to be some stern words, words by which I for one, and who knows how many others in this gathering, stand challenged if not condemned, we should be cautious indeed. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. There’s not a lot of wriggle-room there.

On the other hand nor is there wriggle-room when Paul and others demand that women wear their hair long but covered (1 Cor. 11.6, apparently so not as to disturb the angels – 1 Cor.11.10) and not braided (1 Pet. 3.3) .There is no wriggle room when women are told they must not wear ‘gold, pearls, or expensive clothes’ (1 Tim. 2.9 - I will ask the wardens to check later!), or when the scriptures condemn men with long hair (1 Cor. 11.14, suggesting, if most Christian iconography is accurate, that Jesus was condemned as a sinner not only for ‘hanging on a tree’ - and I don't know if any of you have seen puictures of the new Bishop of Wellington!). Nor is there wriggle room when Paul sternly demands that Christians do not bring law suits before civil courts (1 Cor. 6). There were all sorts of fiscal justice elements underlying that issue, but it is an injunction that is often ignored by the very church institutions who claim to be bible-believing.

We could of course begin to play a game of pitting Paul’s words against those of Jesus, or Peter’s or James’ against Paul’s against Jesus, but then, if we are doing that, we are generating the dangerous game of creating a canon within the canon. No person can stand before God claiming they have the authority to do that. In any case, can any of us claim to have lived up to the stern commands of Jesus that Anne addressed last week, to pluck out our eyes and carve off our sin-filled hands?

So the dangers of scripture are at least two fold. One danger is to give the words of scripture a timeless authority they were never designed to have, the bibliolatrous option. The other is to trivialize them as an old book, to say they have no claim on us at all. Is what they say about sin, about integrity and justice just an old and so two thousand years ago tale? Was Jesus’ teaching on divorce to be taken as if it were eternal-Torah (as Paul saw Torah), as letter not spirit, as condemning the divorced to the outer echelons of Christianity for all time? For that matter what about his teachings about children? For years we cheerfully added our amen to the words of Jesus about children as icons of faith, but glared at them if they dared to breathe, much less speak, in church.

Is there a rule of thumb? I will of course always say context is everything – and say too that narrative context, the place in which the author placed a scene in his narrative of faith, is every bit as important as the context in which the events occurred. Is Jesus, who had some stern things to say about burdens and millstones and self-righteous wearers of phylacteries really saying ‘no way, never, forget it, suck it up princess, suffer’ to those who are trapped in marriages that are insufferable hellholes? Is he telling those who have emerged from cess pits of abuse that they can never again experience married love? One might ask the same about the imposition of laws that deny homosexual people the experience of edifying love, based on a verse here and a verse there. God forbid a long-haired man or a pearl-wearing woman enter a church!

Let’s not throw the book away. I make no secret of my deep sorrow at those who so denude our scriptures of meaning that they are no more significant for us than the Buddhist Scriptures, Holy Qur'an, the  Book of Mormon, Wordsworth’s poetry, or the Agony Aunt column of a women’s magazine. When in liturgy I solemnly intone ‘for the word of the Lord’ I am not trivialising the scriptures of our faith. When the scriptures speak of justice and righteousness and resurrection and eternity I do not trivialize these proclamations. These, though, are the great ur-themes of faith: is there an ur-theme of faith present as Jesus addresses divorce or the rights of children?

Indeed there is. For here Jesus is voicing the wrath of God and the judgement of God at institutions that disempower and destroy human lives. This is not a benevolent conversation about ordinary marriage and divorce – the Pharisees and scribes have already demonstrated by their knowledge of Deuteronomy that they are not interested really in the Old Testament Torah, but are intent on trapping the Jesus who is interested in spirit, not letter of Torah. This is a life-and-death risk conversation about the abusive and exploitative attitudes of the family of Herod, instruments of the Imperium of Rome, of the Caesars who manipulated women and marriage in the interests of power only: this is not about Mr and Mrs Smith whose love ran cold, but about the Mephistophelian Herods and Caesars who have kept women powerless, as instruments of their exploitative greed. John the Baptist was executed for answering this question dangerously: so too will Jesus be, as it is added to the evidence of his insubordination, his disrespect for a corrupt state.

So let us get away from the demonic text wars so beloved in some quarters; wars that pit a text about Corinthian or Roman rent boys against the longings of gay people for edifying love. Texts that tell women to remain silent in church, or not to wear pearls, or how to wear their hair, because of the peculiarities of a context that a biblical author was once addressing. Let us get away from text wars that use these references to silence or oppress women for all time. Let us get away – or perhaps not! – from texts that tell us not to go to court (one text I believe we have cynically failed to uphold, to the benefit not of the gospel but of lawyers).

A woman in a hell hole of abuse, or a man in a hell hole of lovelessness is not condemned for ever to singleness – though nor is marriage the only possible state of human enrichment, and nor is it either to be entered or exited lightly. A gay person is not condemned forever to singleness – though sexuality is not the sole realm of human fulfilment, and no gay person should enter life-long commitment trivially. In both cases celibacy is one, but not the only possible alternative option.

If we are to look for the ur-narrative, let us ask that glorious clichéd question, what would Jesus do? His ur-narrative here is about empowering the disempowered, protecting the unprotected, and breathing resurrection hope into the darkest hellholes of powerlessness – the place where, he will remind us horrifyingly on Good Friday, the encounter with God begins. Jesus is not saying divorce is always wrong or never right, but is in his ur-narrative telling us that exploitation and oppression and the cynical using of other human beings is never, ever right. The exploitation and oppression of children, utterly without rights in first century Israel, is never ever right. The exploitation of rent boys or child prostitutes, as we have seen so disturbingly in news out of Sydney this week, is never ever right.

Paradoxically, it is only when we become so devoid of pretensions to power that we truly become like a child, and are rendered fit to enter the eternities of God. For many of us, I fear, that will only be in that moment when we truly turn to the God of judgement and say at last, no longer through a darkened glass but face to face, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner”.

Oink, Oink

FROM THE PEW SHEET

I am not old enough to recall where I was when J.F.K. was shot, though I remember Robert Kennedy's assassination well enough, five years later. My parents were great oooers and ahhers as they listened—yes, listened—to the news, always the BBC World Service, each night. Robert Kennedy did not warrant as many oohs and ahhs as Winston Churchill did, three years earlier. He was 95, but the parental oohs and ahhs were those of  someone for whom a dream had prematurely died. I remember only a hunched old man with a cigar.

The first US President of whom I was aware was Nixon. he struck me as phenomenally ugly and not very important. I was, mercifully, at boarding school by the time Watergate reverberated around the world, and was probably more concerned that my rubbery, flavourless porridge was cold, again. Apart from anything else I resented the USA: they had at some stage separated themselves from the glorious march of pink across the maps of the world, and though they allegedly spoke my language they did so abysmally. Nixon especially. His resignation speech sounded to me like a gorilla gargling. (Speaking of gorillas, I was always a little puzzled to hear on the news that gorillas were fighting in Angola, Vietnam and elsewhere. Prickly primates!)

To be honest I still have little understanding of US politics. I do have a strong preference for one candidate over the other, although I know, too, that no candidate, however much I admire him or her, will ever bring home the bacon of my justice-dreams. Nevertheless, like most people in the western world, I am trapped in a frenzy of media infotainment, and I like, after all, to hope. Every now and again, though, I ask myself how many starving children in the world might be fed if both candidates agreed to have sponsorship free, low budget, no advertising, no massive extravaganza campaigns. Just names and policies on a piece of paper or a recording for the illiterate, and put it out there for the people to decide. Was that a pig flying past?

Jesus as crucified bride?

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
(Northern Territory, Australia)
Sunday, September 23rd, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 25 / SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)

Readings:    Proverbs 31.10-31
        Psalm 1
        James 3.1-12
        Mark 9.30-37

Mark used locations to underline the events of Jesus’ life that he was narrating. The work of the incarnation would be at its most intense, if we can put it that way, in the unexpected and uninviting places. It is no accident that the words of the angel spoken to the women at the tomb tells them to tell Peter and the disciples that the risen Lord is going ahead of them to Galilee (16.7, also 14.28) , the place from whence he came in 1.9, the place that has been open to his message all along. Galilee is not Vaucluse, Toorak, or Cottlesloe – respective by state the wealthiest postcodes in Australia (2010 census; actually Edgecliff was wealthier but I’ve never heard of it). Nor was Galilee a Nhulunbuy, which surprised me by having the highest level of wealth per postcode in the Territory (though the journalist inexplicably referred to it as a ‘suburb’). Nor, to be fair, was Galilee a Callaghan, in Newcastle, which came out in that census as Australia’s poorest postcode, but which was probably skewed by being centred on students and the University of Newcastle. No – and we need to be careful in making comparisons. The Brotherhood of St Laurence long ago made it clear that wealth is not necessarily or even not much about income. Wealth is about networks.

So Galilee was a place of fractured infrastructure, a place of pride, no doubt, to the locals, but pretty much of scorn to outsiders. John 7 reflects the kind of scorn in which Galilee was held – nothing good was going to come from there, and it certainly wasn’t the sort of place a nice god should hang out.  Ironically it is the type of place our psalmist, in Pslam One, might have us avoid, the place that seems to be the place of the ungodly. The Territory has by far the highest rate of crime in Australia – we can be fairly sure that if Australia were awaiting a messiah the populace would not be looking to Pine Creek, Yuendemu or Pigeon Hole for the arrival of God’s chosen one.

Jesus makes his way across this troubled territory, to Capernaum, to deliver his most poignant teaching. For the second time he tells them that the Incarnation, the unveiling of the heart of God will take place not in glory, but in the lowest degradation known to humanity. There have been worse ways, arguably, to die than crucifixion, but few images have held more terror for a populace than the cross, in all its obscene Imperial brutality. Here Jesus doesn’t mention the cross, but he shifts his audience’s focus – or attempts to – from the places nice gods hang out to the places of powerlessness and vulnerability.

The Nineteenth Century romanticised the child as an image of innocence, and that interpretation of this passage dominated readings of this passage for a century and a half since. It was wrong. In some circles it is still used to attempt to suggest we should have an intellectual naïvety in our approach to faith. This is nonsense, at least as an interpretation of this text. This is an image of utter vulnerability: a girl child in China, prone to secret abortion or perinatal execution might be a symbol closer to the one Jesus is adopting here. An Afghani child bride in a Taliban community, exposed to the most demonic forms of misogyny and violence might be closer to the image Jesus is portraying here. A woman in our own society, trapped in hellholes of domestic abuse – or the child of abusive parents or victim of a powerful paedophile – might be closer to the image Jesus is generating here. Each would cry out for a touch of love, what Jesus calls a ‘welcome’, rather than the brutal exploitation and defencelessness that was their and is their daily grind.

In this moment Jesus effectively lays down two unexpected gauntlets. He makes it clear that vulnerability, defencelessness and even shame is the place where the heart of God is revealed – shame in the sense of the utter nakedness of the cross that will soon be, in Mark’s narrative, the place where the messianic secret is finally over and the unstoppable  extent of God’s love is made known. But he makes something else clear, too: he makes it clear that it is the yardstick  by which we stand judged. Have we touched, transformed, ameliorated the plight of those who are today in all their pain and brokenness the location of God’s self-revelation?  Have we touched the lives of the children behind razor wire, the children in communities of abuse, the children in the world’s refugee camps? Have I? And even if we can say yes – and I would imagine many of you are doing far more than I am – nevertheless can any of us say we are doing enough, fiscally, politically, missiologically? Indeed, as James, ostensibly the brother of Jesus puts it in the verse immediately after our epistle reading, ‘Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom’. We can feel terribly warm and fuzzy about our cosy relationship with Jesus, but our cosiness does little for those who are daily dying the death of Jesus.

Which leaves us, for now, just three learning points: can we accept God’s forgiveness for our failure to be vulnerable? Can we accept God’s forgiveness for our failure to transform the lives of the vulnerable?  Can we allow the Spirit to transform us so that we can better find the heart of Jesus in the often unattractive lives of the broken? The Way of the Cross leads through Galilee. But that is the place in which Jesus promises, always, to go ahead of us. May we have the strength, in him, to follow him.


TLBWY

Rahab the Prostitute, Steve Biko, and the works of the Spirirt

SERMON PREACHED AT 
St FRANCIS’ CHURCH, BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, September 16th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 24 / SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)


Readings:    Wisdom of Solomon 7.26 – 8.1
        Psalm 19
        James 2.18-26
        Mark 8.27-38

I have been re-reading, in recent weeks, a masterful history of the development of ideas in the Reformation era. I believe that this is one of the most painful eras in Christian history The proliferation of Christian denominations and cults that has splintered outwards ever since is simply a tragic scar on the credibility of our gospel witness. Without going into a history lesson, yes there were some matters that that the Catholic Church had corrupted into a sorry distortion of gospel truth. Unfortunately, though, the Reformers were soon doing as much if not more damage to the proclamation of the gospel. Within ten or fifteen years of Luther’s original acts of rebellion many within Roman Catholicism were fighting from within to reform its excesses, while holding on to the unity that has never again been attained. Oh that we could set back the clock so that we could retain the integrity that some of the catholic reformers sought. I thjink of barel;y known figures today, such as wise reforming moderates, the likes of a Jean Charlier de Gerson or the later Girolamo Seripando, struggling to maintain theological integrity within Catholicism without resorting to schism, and dying, like Jesus, with no hint whether their struggle would bear fruit. These, along with the better know Desiderius Erasmus, brutally treated by Luther, are the ones who strike me as the heroes of faith-integrity in the Reformation era. All ultimately were on the losing side, as better known names such as Luther, Calvin and even Henry VIII drove a wedge into the heart of the Christian unity for which, John tells us, Jesus prayed in the garden. It was a tragic time, and it is not surprising that many felt the end of the world was nigh.

I make no secret then of my wish that it had never happened. While historical accident led me to Anglicanism, I stand firmly in the shoes of movements within Anglicanism that claim constantly its Catholic heritage, and, while the more extreme English Reformers might turn in their grave, I believe the Oxford Movement within the Anglicanism of the nineteenth century was one of our finest moments and greatest gifts. I thank God for the centrality of the eucharist that was a direct result of that movement, bringing this feast of Jesus back to the centre of most Anglican Christian experience. Other side-effects were reclamation of the importance of the epistles of James and even the deutero-canonical Wisdom of Solomon, deeply resented by the Reformers because they did not suit their decentralization of the institutions of faith.

The Reformers’ personal piety emphasis opened the floodgates that led to the ‘me and my mate Jesus’ spirituality that has so dominated Protestantism ever since. It was the Reformers, not the Catholics that yearned to throw out these tricky books, because they did not suit them, despite their claims as Reformers to emphasize the centrality of Scripture. And no wonder they wanted to cast these books to outer darkness … the epistle of James made it through their misguided censorship in the end because they believed it to have been written by the brother of Jesus. There are all sorts of ironies in the Reformers’ reluctant acceptance of the book, and indeed of their entire relationship to the question of ‘canon’, but perhaps that thought must await another time and place. In the end, thank God it got through, and thank God that, with the Book of Wisdom, it can play a part in the liturgies of the twenty first century.

Because, in this century, it is not a pious ‘me and my personal saviour’ spirituality that will touch lives with the redeeming love of Jesus, but a love that binds up the broken hearted, proclaims liberty to the oppressed (not least those currently being sent to the government’s latest draconian refugee ‘solution’), proclaims sight to the blind. ‘Was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road’, wrote James, to the horror of Martin Luther who, for all his strengths, was determined to make salvation a pietistic, personal matter. How can people see Jesus when we represent a church so wrapped up in personal salvation and piety that we show no compassion for the broken, or when our own obsession with eternal life (whatever that is) drowns out concern for those whose present life is a living hell? It’s not altogether an either/or, I confess, but as I listen to the heartcries of those around me there is no doubt that many people reject Jesus – it seems – because of the self-obsession of his most vocal followers.

Which leads me to the Wisdom of Solomon. The Anglican founders marginalised this book as one to be used ‘for example of life and instruction of manners’, and not for the establishment of doctrine. I accept that while I deplore it, but the line becomes blurred at this point. How can we not see the great wisdom of God and the works of the Spirit of God in holy men and women far outside the confines and boundaries of Christianity? Confronted by a Fred Hollows, an Aung San Suu Kyi, a Steve Biko or a Mahatma Ghandi who cannot see the work of the Spirit of God? Flawed, indeed, but what great saint was not? We might add others: Allen R Schindler, a gay sailor beaten to death by fellow marines in a Nagasaki toilet, or Vincent Lingiari, the aboriginal activist who fought for the rights of Aboriginal workers at Wave Hill. Flawed, but individuals through whom the one I would call the Spirit of God was powerfully at work for justice and compassion: the Spirit who is ‘a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God,  and an image of his goodness’.

It may come as a surprise in many circles, but Jesus did not say ‘those who want to follow me, confess me as Lord and rejoice in their own personal salvation’, but ‘if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’. We would be on dangerous ground if we limited the work of the Spirit of God to the often too-cosy in-crowd of Christian believers: ‘not all who cry ‘Lord, Lord’, said Jesus. He rebukes his number one follower, Peter, for failing to see the phenomenal reach, even to degradation and death far beyond the confines of religion, that is the way of the Cross. God will not be confined to the neat and tidy expectations of our comfort zones, but is the one who breaks boundaries and is revealed wherever there is justice, compassion, and the values of immeasurable, life-surrendering love. The onus is on us as a Christian community to look deeply at ourselves to find out whether we are, truly, on the side of that love.


TLBWY

Faith: straight-jacket or liberator?

SERMON PREACHED AT
CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL, DARWIN
SUNDAY, September 9th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 23 / SIXTEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)

Readings:    Proverbs 22.1-2, 8-9, 22-23
        Psalm 125
        James 2.1-10, 14-17
        Mark 7.24-37

Since the rise of feminist theology there has a tendency to see the encounter between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman as a victory of femaledom over a masculine saviour, with a sort of subtext that points out enthusiastically that the Incarnation needed an encounter with the feminine in order to be truly enlightened. It is in a liberation sense a very satisfying reading of the text, and one that is designed to rock maledom back on the haunches of its often myopic hermeneutic endeavour. To some extent such a reading is valid: Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza was right to remind the oestrogen-challenged amongst us that ours was not the copyright of interpretation, and to remind us that the survival of women’s stories in the scriptures of a patriarchal community is powerful testimony to the place women had in the events depicted by the biblical writers.

But we need to be careful if we allow this corrective to spill over into a sense that God particularly needs anyone. It may surprise my ego, it may surprise yours – though you may be more humble than I am! – that God does not need my insight, or the dean’s or the bishop’s or the Pope’s or Mother Theresa’s or Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s or anyone’s to pluck the chords of the universe. The connection we have to God is a part of the one-sided equation of grace, and, while we might with Abraham or the Syrophoenician woman argue with God from time to time, might even appear to win occasional negotiations, we need to know our place in the great equations of eternity’s history. Humankind has not achieved great performance indicators in the running its affairs, let alone those of the universe.

Nevertheless, this is an encounter between a feisty woman – every bit as feisty as Abraham – and the one in whom we find the fullness of divinity revealed, in whom the author of Colossians says ‘all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’, no push-over. Jesus reveals all the limitations of being human: tired, even irascible, he has fled the ethnic and geographical boundaries of his people, in an attempt to find refuge. This is not the first time his healing compassion and love touches and transforms the life of a non-Jew – the demoniac from the Decapolis is unlikely to have been a Jew – but it is a remarkable occasion. He engages crossly with the woman – there was a form of interpretation popular 50 years ago that maintained that he was only pretending to be cross, but I hardly find that satisfying! – but the desperation of her plight, at least as much as the powerful logic of her argument, wins him over. It is a momentous shift in Jesus self-understanding – the shift that some interpreters try to protect Jesus from. The utterly human Jesus encounters a pointer to a new way by which to understand his mission.

In this, surely, Jesus is an embodiment of all that his subsequent ‘body’, the Church, must also do and be? Those interpreters who seek to protect Jesus from a shift in understanding are often attempting to protect divinity from change, even protecting the Church from mutability, from changeability. It is a wonderful argument whether the perfection of divinity can change, and one that belongs over some good red wine amongst good friends, but it is in the end meaningless. What is critical is that our understanding of divinity can and must change – to some extent the miracle is that Mark allowed himself to record an event that so clearly raised these questions. Can God change? Can Jesus change? Can we change? Are we able to measure our mission according to outside forces?’

The answer of the story is: yes. There are some non-negotiables here: Jesus does not change from being the self-revelation of the just and compassionate heart of God into a capricious clown, or change from (admittedly tired) compassion into being a perpetrator of wanton destructiveness. He neither withers the woman with a divine thunderbolt, nor suddenly changes the kernel of his mission. The measure of missiological integrity is not mutability, change for the sake of change, but rather consistency: change for the sake of pointing deeper into the heart of a God who is only slowly coming within the sphere of our myopic sight. A woman’s feisty desperation touches and transforms the divine heart of the Incarnate Son because that heart is beating in unison with the compassionate heart of the Creator.

At this point we might say then, quite simply, that God does not change, but our own limited understanding of God can and must constantly change.

There are though boundaries to change and its directions. I value deeply the three-legged stool of Anglicanism that sees scripture, tradition and reason exercising their control over our mission and interpretation. I prefer to see them, to be sure, as a flexible tripod, with the occasional lengthening of one leg over the others as the surface of experience changes, but a tripod nevertheless. The Spirit of God will constantly funnel God’s intentions through – if I may slaughter a metaphor – those legs, and those legs will not always neatly fit within the expectations of being Church. So, faced with new understandings of sexuality in the human person, for example, we must not simply rely on a knee-jerk bondage to one of the three legs (tradition, I suspect, rather than scripture, which has been dubiously interpreted by those frightened by redefinitions of marriage). Instead we must look for the harmonies of God’s Spirit-wind beyond our narrow boundaries of expectation. It is, surely, love, fidelity, mutuality, rather than the shape or reproductive functionality of human bodies that should guide our understanding of the will and purpose of God? Surely an edifying, enriching mutual love between two committed partners regardless of gender is far more attuned to the God who is love and justice than a brutal power imbalance enshrined in liturgy and adopted often unwillingly by the more vulnerable partner?

I can in so short a time only float these ideas, with the reminder that the winds of change often blow beyond the dusty corridors of expectation, that the work of the Spirit of God is often visible in the community before the Church. Besides, I know the Dean more than merely floats the ideas! Perhaps this moment in the life of Jesus was an embodiment of the principle that the followers of Jesus must be open to the voice of God from beyond the walled gardens of our expectations. If it’s good enough for Jesus, in other words, it’s good enough for me. Referring to another passage, but with reference to this one too, Walter Brueggemann writes:

It is in healing leprosy that Jesus contradicts the norms of society concerning clean and unclean. And in causing that rethinking of clean and unclean Jesus was in fact calling into question all the moral distinctions upon which society was based

  Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 101-102.

We have a choice: do we hear the appeal of those who want to feel and experience the loving, redeeming word of Christ, or do we constantly push them out beyond the boundaries, to the Tyres and Sidons of our world by hanging tenaciously to the legalism of our past, firing misdirected biblical texts and unexplored phobias at outsiders in order to keep them in their place and out of ours?

TLBWY

Infotainment and the stuttered gospel

You may have gathered by now that I am an irredeemable SBS or, occasionally, ABC TV news viewer. I have long been suspicious of media owned by private individuals, and, since reading the late Neil Postman’s ground-breaking study Amusing Ourselves to Death  a quarter of a century ago I have been very sceptical of the ability of ratings-hungry and privately owned entertainment media (channels 7, 9 & 10) to address anything remotely discomforting in the infotainment episodes they pass off as news and current affairs bulletins. Call me a snob, but when a company’s income is dependent on ratings, and ratings are dependent on an audience’s good feelings (warm fuzzies), I doubt they’ll address genuinely challenging, discomforting issues.

But, as usual, I digress. These days I get most of my news from Al Jazeera and SBS. Not even ABC (who have slowly compromised in obedience to their owner, the government's need for ratings!). Over and again, night after night — on the nights I get to watch the news — I am confronted by the world’s injustices. In particular at present I watch the news out of Syria, and despair. Who is telling the truth? How can I know? If the Spring Revolution of Egypt is any indication atrocity and evil will only give way to more atrocity and more evil (if you recall my Advent studies on Revelation this is no new theme). I feel helpless, confused, and helpless again.

I often do. There is, as ‘the preacher’ (or Qoheleth) of Ecclesiastes reminds us, nothing new under the sun. Call me a wuss but as I am confronted by the enormities and the injustices and the sheer insurmountable  hurdles of collective human and of individual fallibility I am thrown more and more back into the slender hope of a Saviour. Not, as many Christians believe, a saviour of ‘the saved’, but a Saviour of the World. What that means I do not understand, but in my preaching and in my living I will hope to continue to stutter that possibility. It’s bigger than my small understanding, and so more and more I will fall back on the simple, incoherent Christian hope: come Lord Jesus (maranatha) and that first Christian creed, stuttered against all odds, ‘Jesus is Lord’.