Before that bite ...

YEAR 12 BREAKFAST (28.02.13), KORMILDA COLLEGE
A THOUGHT OR THREE BEFORE YOUR WEETBIX

I was recently told that I don’t make enough of the opportunities I am given, when you students or even the staff are a captive audience, to force the message of Christianity down your throat. In fact I find the notions of a captive audience or of force-feeding – whether of caged animals or of impelled human beings – abominable. I have much self-consciousness about the role of a chaplain in students’ lives: the god-botherer is about as popular as a dentist, and to most of us both more avoidable and more risible (and if that last word is unfamiliar then it’s time your vocab reached further).

In fact I think I, in the first place, over-estimate the degree to which Christianity and its representatives are disliked, and in the second place probably share many of the points of concern of the disparagers. The failings of Christianity and its representatives – or of any religion and its representatives – are legion. So too are the failings of banks (squeezing every last cent from customers to please shareholders), armies (torture, rape and pillage in the name or peace-making), sports clubs (cultures or drug abuse), even boyfriends and girlfriends (betrayal, misunderstanding, emotional yo-yo-ism). On the whole though, we put up, benevolently or less so, with banks, armies, footy clubs and boyfriends or girlfriends. Believe me: as a religious insider I resent the failings of my institution (the Church) and the Religion it represents (Christianity) as much if not more than most here, though I have perhaps more dedication to the founder and foundation of my faith than some.

So – since it’s the twenty-first century and since at least the nineteenth century this option has been more user-friendly and un-prickly – perhaps I can speak of spirituality? And if I could define that loose and fluffy term, perhaps I can define it as living with an awareness of life-beyond-self. We may focus our spirituality on hugging crystals, on embracing non-self, on adoring saints, on serving the State, in creating a better world for our children – at this point I can say “whatever.” At this point I can just commend – given the opportunities in life you and I have been given – at the very least living for others, making that which is not you more important than merely living for self (deconstructing the infamous ad that referred to “the most important person in the world: you”).

In this spirituality – for now – I do not exclude what I would call “apneumatology”, the belief in a greater-than-self that does not include unscientific and irrational belief in “spirit”, or pneuma. It is worth noting though that the Greek and Hebrew words that are translated “spirit” – not only in the Judaeo-Christian tradition – are simply words for wind, breath, air, and few of us would deny their existence. As someone who has sat often with people as they die I know only too well the difference, sometimes barely discernible, between breath and no-breath, between being alive and being no longer alive, being dead. But let’s just stick with the religious sense: I respect greatly those of you who so not believe in “spirit”, and live in a purely and wonderfully mechanistic universe.

I suggest though, that for all of us life lived solely for self, life lived without living for others, is life mutated, truncated, cheated and abused. Life lived to the full is life that reaches out and embraces and enhances the lives of others. I would even suggest that our lives are a bit like the ubiquitous onion: the further we reach out from our centre, the more we allow our lives to reach from self to family to friends to peers to strangers and even to enemies, the more we are becoming fully human. I suspect we all fall short on that trajectory somewhere, but the truly great people reach right to the very edge of the onion-layers, living to benefit the lives of absolute strangers, even enemies. The Bhagavad-Gita tells the story of a previous life of the Buddha, where, confronted by a tigress too weak to feed her children, he sacrificed his own life so the mother and cubs could draw strength from his blood. To life for others, I suggest, is to truly live. Jesus of course also said something like that, and his followers – like me – believe that he embodies that in his every living and dying moment, even if we fall well and truly short.

Turn to our preferred media though, and role models of such a life are woefully short. Psy’s “Gangnam Style”, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunctions, Anne Hathaway’s breasts, Ben Barba’s personal problems: all these will generate far more interest than anything remotely encouraging living for others, and it was ever thus. But do we need to live that way, obsessed with self and obsessed with fame? Can we rise above it and live for others (which is not to say, incidentally, that one or all of Psy (or Park Jae-sang), Janet Jackson, Anne Hathaway or Ben Barba don’t live to benefit others – just that it’s not what they are in our consciousness for). We have few role models that inspire us to reach through the onion skins of our existence and live for others, though arguably Angelina Jolie may be a significant exception (as, equally arguably, the Princess of Wales may have been for another generation).

If I were to dig into my kite [basket] of role models I suggest four names immediately: Aung San Suu Kyi, Fred Hollows, Aye Net and Malala Yousafzai. There is a deliberate random nature to these. None, to the best of my knowledge, share my faith, because I do not want to give the impression that only a Desmond Tutu or a Mother Theresa is somehow legitimized as a bearer of justice and compassion. Only one is a male, and he, although not in the normal sense of the phrase, is a dead White Male – and a Marxist to boot (though Wikipedia describes him as a “self-named anarcho-syndicalist” – and a onetime seminarian. I have little doubt he achieved far greater impact on the world that I call God’s world by leaving seminary and perhaps faith behind him. The other two are hardly household names: Aye Net, of whom I had not heard until this week, is a Burmese activist stepping into the shoes of Aung San Suu Kyi in what SBS News called a “David and Goliath battle over one of the world's largest copper deposits”, standing up to a government determined to desecrate village lifestyles and natural environments in the search for profit. Malala Yousafzai is the young Pakistani Muslim girl who took a Taliban bullet for the crime of fighting for the rights of Muslim girls to receive an education. Other names come to mind: Benny Wenda, Gabrielle Giffords, Donald Mackay, Maximillian Kolbe: these are not household names, but each has lived and some died reaching out beyond the onion skins of their immediate lives to touch and transform for the better the lives of those around and beyond them.

Therein dwells the challenge for us. We have an opportunity because we have an education. Will we seize life’s gifts to live only for us and those we love, or will we reach beyond our skin of the onion to, as Jesus put it transform the unjust and painfilled world we live in?

Death of God?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY (10th February) 2013

Readings:      Isaiah 6.1-8
                      Psalm 138
                      1 Corinthians 15.1-11
                      Luke 5.1-11

It can be (and has been) said that there is a fundamental selfishness that dwells at the heart of Christianity. This selfishness is sometimes said not to dwell for example, at the heart of Buddhism, in which the human soul journeys on to the discovery of its own unimportance and ultimate non-existence. Nor does it stand at the heart of the best forms of atheism: by this I do not mean the atheist-chic­ posturing of those determined to slaughter faith as a minor social inconvenience, a calling to account of those who do not want to be held accountable. I mean those for whom the dreams of a benevolent God have died, and who soldier on doing their best in a universe that has no friends. These are brave souls, and dwell I believe at their best very close to the God I believe in and they don’t. I think always of the late Fred Hollows, though if you Google “altruistic atheists” you will find delightful tales of those who wish, for whatever reason, aim to execute God but continue at varying degrees of personal cost to emulate the very best of human goodness in a universe without God. I admire them, and know that often they will do far more good in this world than I will – Fred Hollows certainly did.

I think too of figures such as the Jewish Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, for whom the possibility of a God all but died with Wiesel’s friends and family in the gas chambers of the  execution camps. It was Wiesel who narrated the terrifying scene of the execution of a child on the gallows: as the child hanged slowly dying a voice cried out “‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows...’” For a Jew there is no execution of God Incarnate, as there is for Christianity, and the search for meaning to the word “God” has led Wiesel to spend a lifetime placing God on trial for his desertion or even persecution of the Chosen people. For a Christian, at least one taking seriously the presence of divinity on the Cross of Golgotha, it is possible to say that even God has entered into meaninglessness ... and yet risen again into meaning.

In reality it is probably true to say that Wiesel struggled through immeasurable pain to find in the end a God beyond human questioning, a God who may even need human absolution for the obscenities of creation, fall and suffering. The credibility of Wiesel’s struggle is unparalleled, and his tenacity in holding to at least some belief in the continued possibility of God despite the horrors that he witnessed is tribute to the indefatigable determination of the sparks of hope in a human heart. For many, though, all hope died in the concentration camps – and I do not only mean for those who died. For many who lived, all hope died, and who can blame the owners of those hearts?

Do I digress? I began by speaking of the selfishness that is often seen to dwell at the centre of Christian faith. So much Christianity is lived at the “I am saved and therefore I will go to heaven” level of belief. Perhaps almost all Christianity is lived at that level – except by those theologians who have for whatever reason done away with the hope of resurrection either of Jesus or of we lesser human beings. Though I did that, too, for a while, but only in an ivory tower: now I cannot believe in a gospel that finishes with my death or the death of someone who I love. When I stand at the grave of a child I want to know that God’s ability is bigger than death’s ability. A God whose love is severed by death is not much of a God, and I would join the atheists if that were all Jesus offered.

But if my adherence to faith is no more than an insurance certificate for my own post-death existence, perhaps a dose of religious anaesthesia to overcome my own fears of suffering or death or non-existence, then my faith is fairly pathetic. Pathos is okay, to a point: we’re all trapped in vulnerability and angst. But do we stay there, out four score years and ten? When I was a child I thought as a child, says St Paul, not long before our passage. But later in 1 Corinthians 15, in a poetic tour de force to which this passage is a prelude, while Paul dwells on some sort of personal resurrection, his greater concern is far more. It is about accepting the call, accepted by Isaiah, accepted last week by Jeremiah, accepted by Simon Peter and the other disciples, accepted by Paul, and presumably at some stage by you and by me, but accepting that call as an invitation not to live for self, but to live for others. It was that dimension that was absent in the lives of the Corinthians. It is that dimension that is often missing in my own life, and perhaps in yours. That is why we say “sorry” to God again and again, and plead the grace of improvement in our small lives.

Enough, for now: we journey towards Lent, the big forty-day-sorry-saying. Perhaps it’s merely a practice for that moment Paul wrote of last week, when we see God no longer through a darkened glass but face to face. Certainly, whatever our experience of “call” – not a word I like because of its implications of voices in the night, but one I shall have to use nevertheless – despite maybe our experience of “nudge”, we are enmeshed with the doubters and the triers and the honest struggling rejecters in a journey towards the eternities of God. What that means I do not know, but I know it means I am called to do my best to live my life – with altruistic atheists and Buddhists and all the other seekers after meaning and truth and goodness – not for self but for others. To that journey we are called and on that journey we will struggle and from that journey we will enter into the magnificence of God’s future – a future not just ours but for all God’s creation

TLBWY

JFK, Lady Di, and a Cranky Apostle

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY (3rd February) 2013

Readings:

Jeremiah 1.4-10
Psalm 71.1-6
1 Corinthians 13
Luke 4.21-30

What a surfeit of readings! Every now and again the lectionary throws us a vast feast of pivotal moments in scripture: the call of Jeremiah, which, along with the call of Isaiah and other prophets stands as a prototype of the touch of God’s hand on all our lives. The Psalm, which along with Psalm 139, reminds of the depth of God’s knowledge of every fibre of our being. The attempted assassination of Jesus which reminds us that, long before the events of the Passion, his prophetic proclamation of truth and justice was leading him into conflict with corrupt authorities, secular and would-be sacred alike.

I cannot pretend to blend the readings into the theme of perseverance in faith – or perhaps I can, but only in passing. And, as a lover of Paul’s faith and theology I can hardly go past his
Hymn to Love. While this passage doesn’t quite drive to the heart of his soteriology (theory of salvation) it drives to the heart of his expectation of the lives of those who profess to follow Jesus, those who profess the Lordship of Jesus. If I have not love then I am no more than a clanging gong or a noisy cymbal. We need to hold this powerful attestation in tension with two other great Pauline statements: ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’, and ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’. The last two at least provide an escape clause when we are confronted with the task of preaching on love, painfully aware of our own human inadequacies. I will fall short, but by the grace of God may I be a vessel of God's love.

As it happens these come each from a different letter of Paul, each from a different context, each addressing a community with different presenting issues. We can be only too painfully aware that the community in Corinth had ceased to be a community of love – indeed a journey through the several parts, the several letters that we know as First and Second Corinthians takes us deeper and deeper into the Corinthians’ failure to exemplify even the rudiments of love to Paul and to the faith he lived and died for. The Corinthians, forerunners of much contemporary Christianity (perhaps much Christianity from go to whoa), had turned the way of the Cross into a form of entertainment, and were defending their own particular entertainment interests. They were as a consequence of this, wracked by schisms and interest groups. They were not a walking advertisement of the Way of Jesus Christ, and Paul was increasingly outraged.

Yet in his anger he turned not to destructive fury but a celebration of the greatest Christian challenge, the challenge to exemplify love. Scholars are divided as to whether he actually wrote I Cor 13, or was citing a hymn beloved of the Corinthians congregation. I see no reason to suppose Paul didn’t write it, but think scholars are right to believe that it was a hymn of creed that was at the heart of Corinthian congregational life. If it wasn’t then, it soon was, for, although the close of 2 Corinthians suggests that Paul was losing the battle for the hearts of the Corinthian Christians, the fact we still have this magnificent passage, and the fact that there are subtle allusions to it in the Book of revelation suggest that ultimately, perhaps after he had died, Paul’s passion won the day.
Which brings me to Diana, Princess of Wales. Just as for a previous generation the death of J. F. Kennedy was a defining moment, for many of my generation the death of the Princess of Wales was a defining moment, and many of us can say where we were when we heard of it (I was in Unley, Adelaide, coming home from church). Attempts to portray one as a great national leader and the other as a flawed product of women’s mags and paparazzi are doomed to failure. All have sinned and fallen short: both were human beings with great heart and vision and with great flaws.

But I will never forget Tony Blair’s recitation of 1 Corinthians 13 at Diana’s funeral a few days later. It was dramatic – even more than Diana’s brother’s vitriolic but strangely poignant speech. It was in a sense a little optimistic: Diana was not the epitome of human love. But nor am I and nor are you, and nor can any of us even begin to be unless we are invaded by the Spirit of Christ, and even then – and this sentence gats longer and longer – we will be flawed and fallible shadows of all that we are called to be. But that is our call, the heights to which we are called to aspire, of which we are bound to fall short, yet to which in the end , perhaps in a heavens and earth not yet seen, we will be transformed. It is after all in the same letter that Paul speaks of transformation from mortality to immortality, and, implicit in that, is the transformation from fallibility to an as yet unimaginable perfectedness.

But let us not run ahead of ourselves. In the meantime, like Jeremiah, we are the unworthy servants of a call in which we shall again and again fall short. Yet the God who knows our innermost being does continue, where we allow it, to transform us. We are called to surrender again and again, to receive Christ’s redeeming love again and again, to open ourselves up to transformation again and again. It is to that journey we recommit each time we make Eucharist together.

TLBWY

Corporate Sin

(From the Pew Sheet)

The international outcry surrounding the ‘pranking’ of the  London hospital where the Duchess of Gloucester was undergoing treatment has been one of those events in which massive and to some extent righteous indignation has colluded with a myriad other sentiments, not least opportunistic anti-Australianism, to generate a tsunami of media and political response.

By now presenters Mel Greig and Michael Christian are mere collateral in the frenzy. That’s probably sensible: they were doing their job, and while they have done what Lenny (in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men) called ‘a bad thing’ they are really no more than pawns in someone else’s obscene game. In the current bloodlust I doubt the frenzifiers will be content until one or both of them are imprisoned or, worse, takes their own life. That cycle of revenge must be broken.

As always when we look at the cycles of sin, in this case the sin that led to nurse Jacintha Saldanha tragic death, the tendrils work their way beyond the frontline. The chains of command and management of 2DayFM and its parent company, who should have intervened before Greig and Christian aired their prank, are certainly culpable. If Greig and Christian  didn’t consult then management are still at fault for permitting such a culture to evolve.

That nebulous creature that Phillip Adams calls ‘dear listener’ is perhaps the most culpable of all. How dare we become a culture that thinks it’s okay to invade the privacy of a 14 year old girl, as 2DayFM  did some months ago, to ascertain the secrets of her sex life? How dare we become a culture that thinks it’s funny to con private or public individuals merely for the sake of entertainment (and, let it be said, the ABC’s The Chasers falls into the same category)? Is exposure of an individual by lies and chicanery for the purposes of entertainment a decent act? A society that thinks that it is okay to laugh at deception is a society that is losing its soul. Jacintha Saldanha  and her family have paid the price.

έ̉ν Χριστω̣̃ – (Fr)  Michael

'only look on us as found in Him’

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, December 9th, 2012 (SECOND SUNDAY of ADVENT)

Readings:       Micah 3.1-18
                        Song of Zechariah
                        Philippians 1.3-11
                        Luke 3.1-16

It is probably worth recalling from time to time that there are a myriad ways to read the scriptures, and of course a myriad-myriad readings or interpretations that result. Context, as I often say, is everything, but even the contexts are myriad: there are the contexts in which the recorded events took place, the context in which they were recorded, the contexts in which they became ‘scripture’, and various variations on a theme of the context in which we read them. We are reading them in church, in a more or less isolated semi-tropical western city, in the twenty-first century. Few of us are young, few of us are anything but Anglo-Saxon; we read the scriptures not as negro slaves of the 1800s or as Asian women or as – yet – those persecuted for believing. That time I think will come, but it is not so yet. It may or may not be in our life-time.

The scene we have just read is one of several in the New Testament that indicate that, as the Jesus community spread out into the Roman Empire, it came into contact with a rival community loyal to the memory and mission of John the Baptist. There were indeed other claimants to religious Messiah-dom or similar, as we learn in the Book of Acts, but that need not detain us here. What may be useful to notice is that the Christians, followers of an executed leader, rubbed shoulders with the followers of another executed leader, the Christians’ leaders kinsman. Eventually those who sort to perpetrate the Baptist's message appear either to have given up or, more probably, were absorbed benevolently into the Christian community as the resurrection claims and worship experience of the Christians claimed a more impressive handhold on the hearts of those who were, with credibility, following John’s merely political and religious calls to reform. Gradually, in times of persecution and oppression, the powerful Spirit-enabled  experience of the presence of the Risen Lord encountered in fellowship and worship inspired the Baptist’s followers to adopt him not as Messiah but as forerunner to the Messiah: I must decrease, he must increase (as the fourth gospel puts it).

I personally find this a useful reminder of the powerful impact the spiritual experiences of worship had on the early Christians, and of the centrality of the claims to resurrection hope, bodily resurrection hope, that were at the centre of the early Christians’ message. We surrender them as I have said and will say many times, at peril of death to our faith.

Yet also at the heart of Christianity in its infancy was the palpable expectation of the imminent return of Jesus, striding as it were across the clouds to wind up history and take his followers to their eternal home. As I have suggested in my pew sheet musings, I have a more de-mythologised and possibly even agnostic approach to the question of the parousia, the Second Coming. If that appears that I have an inconsistent approach to the themes of scripture I can only plead a precedent in and amongst the early Christians, who were as early as the third decade of Christianity beginning to revise their expectations of Jesus’ return. I prefer to speak in terms of God’s embrace, as I said last week, of history, not merely that ‘God has the whole world in his hands’ but that all cosmic history is within the embrace of God. It seems to me that the scriptural pictures of a sudden end must be given some cognizance, but that we must also recognize in the language of parousia our own preparedness to meet the Creator as Judge, our own preparedness to stand in the searching light of Christ, knowing that we have not been good enough, knowing that we have much sorry-saying to do (which we pre-enact in our liturgical and private confessions). We need to plead that God will look, as the all but unsurpassed William Bright hymn puts it, ‘not on our misusings of his grace, our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim’ but ‘only look on us as found in Him’, as found in the crucified redeemer.

I would then not want to lose (though I often do) the sense of urgency in biblical apocalyptic: ‘even now the axe is lying at the foot of the tree’. Nor, though, would I want to lose sight of the social justice dimension of apocalyptic: whoever has two coats must share’. As international soccer officials workout how to spend millions on goal detection technology for FIFA it is worth wondering how many meals that sort of money might purchase for those fleeing the hatreds of Syria. And less I let myself off the hook, I might recall that I have far more shirts, shoes, money than 95% of the world. Look not on our misusings of thy grace.

Yet the gospel is good news, not bad news. No we do not deserve the forgiveness of God, but as the gospel character put it, ‘only say the word, and I shall be healed’. We must not cheapen grace, yet grace is all surpassing, and there in the piercing judgement stare of the returning Christ, at the end of history or the end of our histories, there is a word of welcome: ‘come, eat with me’. Do I deserve it? No! Only sit in the car with me as someone drives at 67 kmh down the 100 kph sections of the Tiger Brennan Drive and you will discover, if you did not already know, that I am far from a fine model of all that I preach! I suspect though that most of us are not, and there is the reminder of our need for the pleading of Christ. We cannot abuse the forgiveness of God, nor can we live up to it.

In the end we can but plead again and again that we are transformed to be practisers of love. That is what Paul turns to over and again in his letters: Love. Embody love, practise live, be love. Love God, love neighbour, love self: we fall short of all three. For that very reason we must turn time and again to the coming Christ and seek his healing hand.

TLBWY

Combatting amnesia

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, December 2^nd, 2012 (FIRST SUNDAY of ADVENT)

Readings:      Jeremiah 33.14-16

                      Psalm 25.1-10

                      1 Thessalonians 3.9-13

                      Luke 21.25-38

Some nine or ten times in Luke’s gospel telling we find reference to signs. Bluntly there are in Luke’s scheme two types of sign: good signs and bad signs. Luke is not one for befuddling complexities: good signs come from God, bad signs are the speculative fantasies of human beings. At a time when the idiot fringes of the media are morbidly obsessed with the hitherto ignored Mayan Calendar, disregarding the explanations of Mayan observers, playing with the entertainment-hungry imagination of a bored public and counting down to yet another end of the world we stand reminded that there is nothing new under the sun. There will always be those who are gullible, believing that the ennui of life might be alleviated by some new celebrity scandal or the end of the world.

Jesus sets a different challenge. His challenge to those who would follow him is to read the times as the times that are embraced by God. When early on Easter morning we light the paschal calendar and the priest intones a prayer declaring all time to be God’s time, declaring that God is the Alpha and Omega in whom all time is embraced, we are entering deep into the world of Luke’s understanding. Jesus, as Luke tells the story, is uninterested in idle speculation – whether by those who purport to be his followers or those who are uninterested in the Way of Jesus Christ.

Luke – or indeed Jesus in his dinner discourse – uses a kind of creative or constructive nostalgia in order to generate a narrative of hope for the future. A people who forget their past, a people with amnesia, are a people who are losing their soul. At a time of persecution, such as that into which the western Church is probably currently sliding, the temptation is to be overladen with images of our failings. Because ­some church workers, clergy included, have betrayed the gospel with atrocities, predominately sexual and predatory, we are tempted to a form of amnesia that tells us that all bearers of the image or name of Christ are at worst predatory or at best dysfunctional human beings. This is only a shadow form of the suffering that has been undergone by Indigenous peoples in Australia and throughout the colonial world. Indigenous peoples have often experienced the absolute and systematic dismantling of their corporate story in the name of modernization and even, sometimes, evangelization. This is only a shadow form, too, of the suffering that has been experienced by many of our forebears in faith, and indeed is still being experienced by our sisters and brothers in Christ in some parts of the world today. Nevertheless it is a wakeup call for us all in the cosy West, and things will not get easier.

Jesus reminds those who gather with him at table of the story of God’s hand on the chosen people. Luke deliberately calls to mind these words, depicting the events of this meal not as a time of tension and betrayal – he does not even mention the presence of Judas at the table – but as a focussed attempt by Jesus to remind his guests at table of God’s firm hand on their remarkable history of saving exodus and continued survival against all odds.

Luke depicts the events in this way precisely because the Christian community was, by the time he was recording these events, experiencing alienation and persecution. He wanted them to know clearly that they were now a people held in the hand of the saving redeeming, history-transforming God, that no matter what might befall them as individuals, that the redeeming hand of God was greater. As Luke builds his crescendo towards the events of Holy Week and Easter he wants us to know, if I may be anachronistic for a moment, the truth of Luther’s famous words, variously translated, but here rendered

… take they our life, goods, fame, child and wife,
Let these all be gone, they yet have nothing won;
The kingdom ours remaineth.

Faith in the resurrected Christ, it has to be emphasized, is not about the avoidance of our own suffering and death. We may suffer, and we will die – we will not even ‘pass away’ as our modern fluffy parlance prefers. We will die. There is (if I may digress momentarily) an irony that we now live in a world wherein we can put any four lettered word we like on the bumper of our car, but the verb ‘to die’ is verboten.

Luke’s Jesus – and therefore I suggest both the historical Luke and the historical Jesus – demands that his audience stands head held high no matter what befalls them. No one claims this is easy. The early Christians’ belief in the presence of the risen Christ in their lives and in their corporate life as community transformed contexts that could have been contexts of deepest despair into times of faith celebration and almost brutal optimism. I believe – and I don’t want to experience this – that this is a charism (a gift) that can and will come to believers in time of persecution, that it is, or rather it is, rather than some of the fluffy stuff we emphasize in times of comfort, that this is a gift of the Spirit to persevere against all odds, even when death appears to have the final word in my life or yours.  The God who led the people of Israel out of Egypt, and led them home again out of Babylon, will lead the new people of God safely out of the persecutions they are facing from the Roman overlords, from those who have destroyed the Temple, from those who are seeking to alienate the Christian community and ensure it has no lifelines. God will have, Jesus is subtly telling his guests, the final say, and the final say is not the ‘no’ of persecution but the ‘yes’ of easter and of the ‘new heavens and new earth’.

The audience of Jesus had to know the narratives to experience the encouragement. At the time of this discourse of Jesus they had yet to experience the remarkable resurrection event, but by the time Luke was telling the Jesus story the Christ-community were well-experienced in that presence of the Spirit that assured them of the resurrection presence of Christ. This is the narrative that encouraged the earliest Christians to face their own mortality with disdain. And this confidence comes only from the constant awareness and rehearsal of the presence of the risen, resurrected Christ in the midst of the Jesus community. It is to that narrative of hope against all hope that the risen Lord invites his people in every age and every circumstance.

TLBWY

More to be pitied than all people?

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, November 18th, 2012 (ORDINARY SUNDAY 33)

Readings:      1 Samuel 1.4-20

                      Psalm: Song of Hannah

                      Hebrews 10.12-14, 19-25

                      Mark 13.1-11

As they emerged from the mishmash of tribal groups that wandered the eastern Mediterranean – the hotspot even now descending into yet another bloodbath – the Hebrew people gradually came to know themselves as a distinctive people, a people called to be worshippers of a single Creator God, a people called to serve and even covenant with that one God rather than to hedge the bets of the many gods available. At best the Hebrew people of God knew this to be a wonderful privilege. There were to be honest other times – not least the holocaust of the twentieth century of our era – when it was a terrible and seemingly godforsaken time of vulnerability and brokenness.

We must make no mistake: Jesus uniquely was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, though it is his follower Paul who later uses that phrase. Jesus was a follower of the Torah of his people to such an extent that he embodied Torah-Law, to such an extent that he challenged the established practitioners and corrupters of that Torah-Law, to such an extent that their knowledge of the vast gap between their claims of Torah-fulfilment and his practice of Torah-embodiment meant that religious and civic leadership joined in an evil symbiotic relationship of wanting him dead. As an Easter people of God we will say that his death was not the end of the story: that he transcended his own death, and that he-in-us will and does transcend the frailty of our own deaths, too, transforming our mortality into immortality, even though we cannot but fail to understand that. For those pastors, priests and theologians who do not acknowledge the resurrection hope as central to our faith I say I fully understand that far too much Christian speech is about the afterlife, and it is meritorious to focus instead on this worldly issues, but at the same time Paul was absolutely right: if we have nothing to say in the face of that last great injustice death, then our faith is mere pathos, our god smaller than death, and we are more to be pitied than all people.

Jesus however invited his followers into what we have often come to call a ‘new and living way’, a new and dynamic relationship with the death conquering God. Incorporated into this is the belief that our life is in a very real sense no longer ours, that we are answerable to the unseen Creator God who called the Hebrews out of nothingness, and to that extent and indeed much more we are called to be a visible counter-culture. We are called not to be perfect – which is just as well – but to know ourselves to be under scrutiny. The implications of this for churches facing a Royal Commission is profound: we most be open to scrutinty both human and divine. We are called to enter into a relationship with the Creator that was previously unavailable, inaccessible to the Hebrew people. Jesus himself makes bizarre claims about his own self as Temple because he becomes the new location of human access to God. Jesus, though, following the events his followers came to name as resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, is no longer limited in space and time. As an aside it is worth noting that our every prayer should be suffixed with a formula that reminds us that all our prayers must and can only be made ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’ – the sloppiness of much contemporary conversation with God suggest that we have become nonchalant and lackadaisical in our relationship with the Creator, Redeemer and Giver of Life.

In the event we call Pentecost – though John and Luke tell the story in very different ways (the church year follows Luke) – the role of Jesus as new Temple is extended throughout space and time. The author of the book we know as Hebrews knew that well, portraying Christ as the priest who, in Hebrew thought, enters the Holy of Holies once a year, but who now becomes for us effectively a conduit into the eternities of God. He emphasizes also that this is a High Priest who has walked the walk of our own existence, even as we know from the gospel records to the point of crying out ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me’, the pain-filled words of the psalmist and of every person who has cried out at the loss of God and God-hope. For that reason, too, I believe every person for whom we hope and pray can be caught up into resurrection hope, though perhaps we can leave that thought for another day. But, just as Jesus has become the embodiment of a new way to God, so we are called and, where we allow it, empowered by the Spirit to embody that way of hope for those we are called into contact with in our fallible human journeys. We are called to be advertisements and contacts with God for the too busy, the too cynical, the too hurt to believe. In all our fallibility – and for most of us that’s a lot – we are called to be pathways to the knowledge of God (or more accurately, pathways to the knowledge of Jesus who is the pathway to the knowledge of God). We are called to be Samuels, reminders of God’s love in the world.

We are called also to be Hannahs. Hannah, in a prototype of the song that will be sung by Mary at the beginning of her calling, sees the world through the eyes of God. How blest are those behind razor wire, or hunger striking in Nauru, as they believe in hope for their children. How blest are those in the impoverished hospital wards of Africa, the women and children dying of HIV Aids, their husbands long gone one way or another. How blest are those trapped in cycles of unemployment and unemployability, those failed by education systems unsuited to their needs and stories. How blessed are those who mourn: ‘you raise up the poor from the deep, and lift the needy from the ash heap’ (1 Sam 2.8). Although it is hard, we are called to touch the untouchables (some of us will recall the Baptist missionary Graham Staines who died with his sons in India for doing precisely that) and to love the unlovable: no-one pretends that is easy, but it is your vocation and mine.

We are called also, though, to see through the limitations of time and glimpse the eternities of God. When we stand at the graves of those we love – as many of you have and all of us will – we are called to glimpse the hope of eternity. When I deliver the last rites to the dying I whisper the strange words ‘we all go down to the dust and weeping at the grave we make our song, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia’.  They are strange words, but they make sense only if, in the journey of death we see the glimpse of eternal life, and in the gentle (or let’s be honest, with Dylan Thomas, sometimes ungentle) beckoning of God we glimpse a dynamic and inviting eternity of life. Jesus, the Temple, invites us through the conduit that is his body, through the veil, through trials and persecutions and sufferings and death, into the birth of eternity. That is the journey in which you and I share, and on which we can whisper words of justice and of resurrection-hope for those who hurt around us.

TLBWY