Nostradamus and wibbly wobbly words

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FOURTH SUNDAY OF EPIPHANY
(1st FEBRUARY) 2015
       
 Readings:   Deuteronomy 18:15-20
                    Psalm 111
                    1 Corinthians 8:1-13
                    Mark 1:21-28

More years ago than I dare to remember I was talking about prophets in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Someone raised the question as to whether prophets spoke today, and began to answer his own question, suggesting that Nostradamus was the last prophet.

I’d never even heard of Nostradamus. I went to the university library, but it had not heard of him, either. Eventually I found some of his writings. They were profound sayings open to endless interpretations (like clouds in the sky):

The young lion will overcome the older one,
On the field of combat in a single battle;
He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,
Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.

They remain popular, cosy, unthreatening. Realistically this typical example was so meaningless it could be applied to countless scenes, though it has generally been applied to the joust between Henry of France and the younger Comte de Montgomery. Things ended badly for Henry: he died as a result of injuries to the eye.

Nostradamus was a soothsayer, not a prophet in the Judaeo-Christian sense. As time passed, I refined my response to the question: do prophets spoke today? They do, but they speak a searing word of justice into the midst of injustice, reconciliation amidst revenge, compassion amidst greed. The future is God’s and God’s alone. So I think of Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, James K. Baxter, Desmond Tutu, Malala Yousafzai: many of you will have heard me on these and other names before. Some stand within the faith traditions of Jesus, others do not: the Spirit of God is not limited to institutions.

It is no accident that the Hebrew lawmakers spoke out against soothsayers: those who offer false narratives are very different to the great men and women of justice who speak with God’s voice of justice and compassion. Jesus warned: “On judgement day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name’” (Mt 7:22). In Matthew’s account those who practice charlatanism in the name of faith get short shrift indeed. There are many examples, and we will all be aware of damage done in and to the name of Christ.

Jules Gomes, Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral, observes, “As you read the prophets you will discover that biblical faith is not compliance but defiance; it is not passivity but protest. ‘It is protest against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be,’ says Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks.”[1] Prophesy, biblically, is not soothsaying, but searing analysis of the present in the light of God and God’s future judgement.

Paul gets prophesy. He gets that if the Christ community is to speak with an authentic voice in the corrupt communities that surround it then its members must look to the integrity of their own lives. Paul was vehemently opposing inauthenticity, every form of hypocrisy and abuse, in the Corinthian Christian community.

We need to get away from the habit of simply translating his words through 2000 years to the present, need to dig deeper and find out why he was speaking to each situation. If he makes a pronouncement about meat offered to idols then it is not our task blithely to pronounce that no meat that we eat has been used in such a way, and then eat nonchalantly, but to ask deeper questions of our food. Does genetic modification of crops threaten the well-being of future generations, thus becoming an idol to current gods of commerce? Are we breathing new life and meaning into Rachel Carson’s prophetic 1960s stance against pesticides in Silent Spring now applicable to genetic engineering? Are we consuming more than we need? Are we keeping the poor, present and future, trapped in hunger? Prophesy is “protest against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be,” says Rabbi Sachs.

When Paul speaks of being “puffed up” he is playing with words. He is using the Greek word for “enthusiasm.” It is where we become puffed up, filled with the wind of our own self-importance rather than the wind of God’s Spirit, that we become the foci of Paul’s wrath. If we are arrogant, full of our own cultural or aesthetic self-importance, using our privilege to oppress others, then we become the proud and the arrogant who are the recipients of Paul’s prophetic fury. When the Corinthians ate meat they did so in elitist riot, keeping the underclass believers in their place. The poor could not afford meat except the second hand meat previously offered to idols, and so were kept from the Eucharistic feast. What are we doing to keep others from the Eucharistic feast? The issue of meat is an issue of justice: what are we doing to ensure that our place of worship and encounter with Christ is open to the strugglers and the illiterate and the unsophisticated and the tone-deaf and the underclasses? Where do we stand under Paul’s prophetic glare?

The psalm perhaps tells us. The doctrine of the “fear of God” is unpopular. We remake God as a plaything in the image of our own preferences. To do so is dangerous. Today we commission Sam as an intern, the beginnings of a new journey, but by our baptism we are in any case all commissioned. If we carry out our commission of faith haphazardly or nonchalantly or arrogantly then we play nothing more than the Nostradamus game, sending neat but empty syllables into the ether of time and space.

Mark tells us of the early public observations of Jesus: “they were amazed, for he taught as one having authority.” We might today say “mana”: that wonderful word from the depths of Polynesian languages, including Māori, that speaks not of some pretentious badge or title but of deep, deep authenticity. It is to that that the readings command us today. May we too address with integrity the unclean spirits, the social and economic and ecological and psychological and spiritual oppressions that permeate every nook and cranny of the world into which God commands us to go, proclaim, baptize.

Amen.




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[1] Gomes, “Prophets of Justice vs. Profits of Injustice.”  www.liverpoolcathedral.org.uk/642/ajax.aspx/download/209

Sulking Jonah, prickly Paul ... paradigms of faith?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
THIRD SUNDAY OF EPIPHANY

       

Readings:        Jonah 3:1-5, 10

                        Psalm 62:5-12
                        1 Corinthians 7:29-31
                        Mark 1:14-20

If you are familiar with the lectionary cycles will be aware that this day is the celebration of the Conversion of St Paul. I would love to claim that my failure to observe that great feast, bring together two of my favourite topics, conversion and St Paul, was because I was surrendering so great a liturgical and homiletic opportunity to a greater cause. Sadly it is not so – I simply failed to notice the feast on my calendar, so we journey on through the Sundays of or after (depending on what school you went to) Epiphany. My apologies to St Paul!

As it happens it’s not a bad set of readings with which to be faced when poised on the cusp of beginning an antipodean year. Yes, we all know that the church year begins at Advent, but realistically in the antipodes nothing begins before the end of January, so realistically we are beginning once more to dip our toes in the waters of faith-action. And we are confronted with a diversity of readings that reminds us how difficult, how challenging and yet rewarding it can be to be a People of the Book.

For that is what we are. It is as it happens what our Muslim cousins in faith call us, but it is what we are. We as liturgical Christians are all the more a people of the book, for we carefully ensure that our worship as well as our teaching is anchored in the written word. We are a people of the book. We jettison in particular the book that is our scriptures at great peril, for they are of the very essence of who we are, shaping, feeding, forming us. But what does a diverse collection of readings like these that we face today say to us? How do we read this book, these books (for the bible is many very different books) that we are dared and challenged and called to read?

The book we call Jonah, after its main character, is amongst other things, a glorious satire. Perhaps I am a particularly poor Christ-follower, but I see something of myself in the blundering prophet Jonah – not I hasten to add, that I have ever managed to convince an entire city to repent, not even had an entire city’s attention. Jonah gets so many things wrong: Apart from anything else he forgets to tell the people of the great city, an ancient equivalent of Tokyo or New York, that the message he brings is a message from God. He blunders along, annoying people, getting swallowed up and vomited out by fish, getting things right and more often getting them wrong, and suddenly despite his blunderings an entire metropolis gets a message from God. When they repent Jonah gets a fit of the sulks: like too many of us he was voyeuristically awaiting the moment when the judges kicked Nineveh out of the shared house, kicked Nineveh out of the chef’s kitchen, kicked Nineveh out of the prize-money. But the judge doesn’t, and Nineveh gets and responds to the message, and Jonah gets the sulks when his fun is spoiled. It would be as if I had spent my ministry striving for the inclusion of young people in the Church, but were to get the sulks because my new bishop is far younger than I am – or having fought for the ordination of women or gays were to sulk because women or gays are at last gaining rightful roles of leadership in the church. Jonah is a satire that makes us laugh at ourselves: do we want young people in “our” cathedral church? They may do things differently!

The psalms, by and large, are the love poetry of faith – even if one contains the chilling heartcry about the execution of an enemy’s children. The psalm on this occasion is a celebration of God’s faithfulness, of God as the source of meaning and succour to the psalmist’s life. There are perhaps times we can relate to this and times we cannot, yet this is precisely the strength of these 150 or so liturgical poems, running the gamut of human emotions and human relationships to the possibilities of God. They run even to the possibilities of no-God, and to the hatred of enemies, and if we think we are too pious to reach the former or the latter heart-cry then it may just be that we know ourselves too little, are deluded about our humanness.

How do you solve a problem like Maria, sings the mother superior. How do you solve a problem like Paul? For too long Christians have delved into the writings of Paul and found there either eternal if selective rules for all times, all peoples, all situations: “wives submit …”, or decided that he is so irrelevant that we never need break open his words again. How brutal a distortion either of those extremes is! Yet always we must ask who Paul was writing to, what situation he was addressing, what was the culture and circumstances surrounding those to whom he wrote his belly-fired, passionate letters of instruction. The Corinthian Christians were playing games with religion, using the Jesus-message as a tool of self-satisfaction and of the oppression of others. Christians have often returned to this abuse. How dare they?  Paul challenges them and us to live each day as if the eternal judge were about to tap us on the shoulder. Of course we fall short of such a demand: he tells us that elsewhere. As he warns his correspondents not to dwell in prolonged mourning he is not writing a twenty-first letter of psychological advise: mourning takes as long as mourning takers, even to the closure of our lives. But he is asking us to know that it is the risen, bigger than death Christ who is beckoning, coaxing us through the darkness into renewed light, first temporary, then eternal.

Or, indeed, as Mark tells us, the Christ who beckons us to stumble on in his still warm footprints. The call of the disciples is the call of fallible, broken, rather Jonah like human beings like me or you or Paul – so perhaps we have ended up with the conversion of Paul after all! The call of the disciples or the call of Paul or the call of you or the call of me is the call to stumble on, embracing the future as God’s future, despite all its unknowns. It is not a bad reminder as we stumble into the realities of 2015.

The Lord be with you.

 

 

God of an aching Paris?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
BAPTISM OF CHRIST (11^th  JANUARY) 2015


　　　　　　　
Readings: Genesis 1:1-5
    　　 　Psalm 29
                 Acts 19:1-7                 Mark 1:4-11

When the authors of Genesis and its two great creation stories set about telling their tales they did so not as a scientific explanation but as a theological explanation. In two different ways they wanted to speak of a God who breathed all that is known into existence, yet who still cares for and suffers with creation in its own on-going dramas. More than that, they wanted to speak of the paradox of a God who creates from without yet remains within, remains involved in creation in its personal and cosmic struggles. The second author even depicts God walking and working in and within the garden of the created universe, listening, punishing, caring, and remaining, ever-always.

When Mark sets out to tell the story of the one who he had come to know as the very heart of God – perhaps as one influenced by Hebrew thought he might dare to say the very entrails of God – when he tells the story of Jesus he begins with the strange and unavoidable historical observation that Jesus was baptised in the Jordan by his cousin John, baptised in a baptism for the remission of sin. It’s a tricky tale, because Christians came to know Jesus as sinless, and a nice deity should not be grovelling around in a river full of human sin. In fact the whole narrative of baptism shared by all four gospel writers raises that terrible question: what is a nice God like you doing in a grotty place like this? It is, ironically, the same question the authors of Genesis were addressing, but times had changed, and Jesus had happened.

Eastern orthodox depictions of the baptism of Jesus often show debris in the river beneath his feet. It is the detritus of human sin, left behind him. Some modern icons have used the modern detritus of a dying planet: batteries, tyres, broken glass, condoms and syringes. It is the same issue: what is a nice God doing in a place like this – and for that matter, what is a nasty notion like a condom doing in a sermon like this?

But if God is a rarefied and nice God then God is not in Paris when bullying and powerfully non-Islamic thugs shoot a Muslim policeman and assorted champions of free-speech. If God is a rarefied and nice God then God is not on our beaches and our roads when our loved ones die in far too great a number. If God is a rarefied and nice God then God has nothing to say in tragedy, and the death of a loved one echoes through the universe with a resounding "no", a resounding "my God my God why have you forsaken me", which is a highly theologised way of saying my God my God why do you not exist, why is the universe an empty and meaningless place?

When champions of freedom are shot in a Paris office no one should dance in the streets yelling platitudes about resurrection and eternity and justice. That was never the way that the gospel writers and Genesis writers were proclaiming. But slowly, by the authenticity of their lives and the integrity of their witness their story did begin to seep out into the Babylonian and later the Roman Empire: thuggery is not the end.

God (though even that word may be damaged seemingly beyond repair) still opens those divine entrails to the pain of the universe, still feels that pain, and is still drawing that universe to an as yet incomprehensible and invisible end in which death and injustice are not the final word. The Genesis writer was trying to tell us that the Source of all existence has not deserted existence, and still draws that first day existence through its pain to a final and future glorious Seventh Day. The authors of the gospels were trying to tell us, against all odds, that the cry of death on a cross or in an upstairs Paris office is not the final word, but another tragic parenthesis on the way to what the hymnist calls "that yet more glorious day." The Baptism of Christ, like the entrance of God into Existence, is neither more nor less than the very Source of existence hitching creation in all its ambiguity onto a trailer that ultimately leads to eternal life and light, in all its incomprehensibility.

The Lord be with you (TLBWY)


 

　

singing a love song

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FIRST SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS (28^th December) 2014

       
Readings:        Isaiah 61.10 – 62.3

                        Psalm 148

                        Galatians 4.4-7

                        Luke 2.22-40

 

In the endless world of the interweb, from Facebook to Twitter to the myriad other chatfests in which humanity indulges, there is an endless continuance of pixel-wastage on the meaning and the events and the actuality or fabrication of the Incarnation, the Bethlehem story presumably familiar to most of us.

There are as ever those who wish to defend every last detail of the biblical narrative as absolute and irrefutable fact. There are as ever those who wish to mock every last detail as some sort of sewerage polluting the minds of the gullible with vacuous and exploitative nonsense. There are myriad positions in-between, and, if we take the whole of humanity into account a myriad of perspective even beyond these bookends: myriads who to varying degrees know little or nothing about the Christian stories of the coming of the Christ child.

Every attempt to extract some sort of quantifiable truth from the scriptures of faith will end in tears. The reading of scripture in a post-enlightenment age, when empirical data is prized beyond all else, is hazardous. We are here no more engaged in a quantifiable process than we are when we kiss a loved one, savour a culinary delight, or bathe ourselves in the magnificence of a balmy sunset. The readings of our faith are generally either the love-poetry of faith or the encouragement and direction-giving of faith. Just as a road sign advising of a sharp turn ahead gives a broad stylised image of a sharp turn, so the scriptures of faith have broad and often stylised insights into the relationship between believers and the paths we are led to tread.

So, as the great Isaiah reassures his people that the hard times are, at least for the fore-knowable future, over, he caresses them with songs of love. This is not accidentally the language of bridegroom and bride, garlands and jewellery, for this is the language of that which cannot be expressed in words. Some of you will be aware of the expressions of pain that are coming from Christians and others exiled in terror from northern Iraq and Syria in recent weeks. Some of you may have seen the tears of the Bishop of Mosul as he related the sad tale of his proud people, a people who have celebrated the great feasts of their Christian faith in their lands for 1500 years. They have done so despite the invasions of the Tatars, of Mongols under Genghis and later Hulagu Khan, of the Ottomans and the British and the Russians and the Americans. They have done so alongside Jews and Muslims, yet for the first time in 1500 years they have under Da’esh (so-called and mis-nomered “ISIL”) been forced from the churches and their prayers.

The language of Isaiah is the language that refugees such as these might pour out if they were to be told that their lands had been rendered safe and they could return without threat or danger. This language of Isaiah is the language of ecstasy, as the refugees in the Australian razor wired refugee hell-holes might use if they were told that Australian and New Zealand governments had decided to welcome them with open arms, of if they were told their homelands of Afghanistan or Sri Lanka or Syria or Sudan were safe to return to at last. This is the language of ecstasy.

So too is the language that the psalmist generates. It is the language of love pouring forth from poets or a poet who has encountered the power of the presence of God in both the festivals of faith and the ordinariness of everyday life, and who has experienced the highs and the lows of the human journey and interpreted them as being all within the embrace of his or her God. A few poems before our psalm today the psalmist cries out with one of the most heartfelt and all-but unreadable sentences of the entire scriptures of our faith, yet here he or she is crying out in paroxysms of ecstasy, voicing the praises of all creation as we might if we were returned from exile or if a lost child were returned to us safely or if our diagnosis of terminal cancer had turned out to be an administrative error and we were now given the all-clear.

Our psalm is the language of the un-languageable, not the language of the concise and the measurable that so many from both the camps of faith and the camps of anti-faith are seeking. This is the hope and happiness of faith restored: “my whole being shall exult.” This is the unutterable yet uttered squawk of adoration: “praise him, all of me, praise him all of you” (and the allusion to John Legend’s “All of me” is not accidental, for that too is a love song).

Even the prickly Paul breaks into the language of praise as he delivers his situational diatribes of instruction. As he writes through gritted teeth to the not very astute Galatian Christians he breaks for a moment into an outburst of praise to the God he loves and is even more loved by: “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” Again and again even Paul’s most volatile letters – and some are – are interrupted by the outpourings of faith-ecstasy, his first century version of “You’re my end and my beginning / Even when I lose I'm winning /  Cause I give you all of me / And you give me all of you …”. This does not warrant scientific analysis, for this is the language of love.

 

So too is the language that Matthew and in this case Luke attach to the birth of the one they knew as Saviour, Messiah, God made flesh. Whatever happened in and around the birth and childhood of Jesus their stories were stories of love, not science. Can history in any case ever be quantifiable and unprejudiced? There are other stories too, delightful, playful stories that did not make it into the canon of our scriptures, though they too can inspire and edify our faith. The fact is that these stories resonated with the power-experience that the first and subsequent followers of Jesus underwent, and indeed as we let ourselves be embraced by the all-powerful love of the Creator as revealed in Christ and Christ’s Spirit they can equally resonate with us, equally enthral and empower our lives and our footsteps. Simeon cries out  in the language of fulfilment: “Master, now you let your servant depart in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation.” This is the language of a life’s dream satisfied, realised, completed. Many of us will never experience such completion, though I suggest that the language of grace says to each of us that our lives, no matter how broken or incomplete, are made complete in the fulfilment of Christ. That fulfilment dwells at the heart of the news we call Good News.

 

So the invitation from these passages is to us all to open up once more our hearts to the warmth and playfulness of Christ, the justice seeking, life up-building Christ of manger, cross, empty tomb and eternal life packed away in the incomprehensible love-poetry of our faith.

 

TLBWY.

My Christmas Sermon!

It is my tradition to let others speak for me when we come to the highest and holiest days of the calendar - sorry if you expected my thoughts but how could I add to these!

My Christmas Sermon

Sorry too that I can't provide the text - purchase the book if you can!

Be born in us today

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT (21^st December) 2014

       
Readings:        2 Samuel 7: 1-11, 16

                        Psalm 89: 1-4, 19-26
                        Romans 16: 25-27
                        Luke 1:26-38

 

As some of you will know I was for a reasonably brief and surprisingly unhappy time in my life a programme maker with ABC Radio’s Religion Department in Adelaide. I’m sure much of the unhappiness of that period was of my own making, as I failed to come to terms with the task and the department, but for all that I was determined in the years that followed to ensure that in the darkness of that valley-journey there would be lessons learned and insights gained. For there to be otherwise would be to allow some breath of darkness to triumph over the light-bearing sense that God was at the helm, and I was determined at least to attempt to ensure that did not happen. As I crawled out of the period of darkness there seemed to be one overwhelming message scrawled on my consciousness: read the glimpse of the signs encountered there.

Now I don’t want to generate tedium by revisiting for you those years, but what had emerged was a deep sense of the growing marginalization of mainstream Christianity. My task had been to analyse and broadcast glimpses of all the spectrum of human religion, so it was not a specifically Christian task. I had slowly become aware, however, that while Islam and Judaism, Wicca and various re-emergent ancient religious were given great weight and respect, the mainstream of Christian thought was marginalised or mocked. Christianity, generally speaking, registered on the department’s broadcast scale when it was to be pilloried for wackiness, exposed for corruption, or explored in detail as a rapidly dying relic of ancient and torrid history. Attempts to broadcast meaningful and cutting edge Christian dialogue died on the cutting room floor.

Or perhaps I imagined that. Nevertheless it was in the midst of that impression-gaining that I seemed to detect (I won’t put it as stronger than that, for I claim no hot-line to God) a clear impression that we were entering into a time of radical marginalization. We were being pushed to the fringes of society, where we would remain as a specimen of ancient naiveté, a relic of past oppression, and fair game for portrayal as a quaint branch of human idiocy. Meanwhile the mainstream churches continued to act as though the water in the bath were not growing steadily hotter, as though we were still at the very centre and fabric of society, and that when we spoke society around us trembled. It didn’t.

It was all long ago and far away now, but I have seen nothing to suggest that, however many failings I had as a broadcaster the analysis God was bringing to me was not far off the mark. Interestingly at the time I read the comment of a young Welsh Bishop, Rowan Williams, who observed of the church “old styles come under increasing strain, new speech needs to be generated.” It seemed that regeneration was being forced upon us by God’s Spirit.

It was soon to be Rowan Williams again who emphasised that the Western Church should not dare to speak of persecution as if that was the name to put to its experience of being pushed to the margins. If we jump to the present we might prayerfully affirm that our sisters and brothers in other parts of the word are indeed – and always have been – experiencing genuine persecution for their faith. I have no idea if I could withstand the pressures they are experiencing, no idea if you would, no idea if we of the West would survive in faith. Williams was and is right: we are being marginalised, not persecuted. But we are being pushed by God’s Spirit far from the centre of society, pushed to the margins, and pushed there precisely because we had come, over centuries of complacency, to worship and serve not the justice-proclaiming God of the Cross but the Golden Calves of social status, aesthetic wonder and self-centred complacency. Just as David was threatening to do and Solomon later would we had built a comfortable place for God, and kept him, definitely him, on our payroll or, to mix a metaphor, in our pocket.

But like the people of Israel prior to the sacking of the first temple, we are being taken away by God’s Spirit, taken away from places where faith is cosy to places where faith is commitment against the dominant paradigm. We were and are being taken into a foreign land, a future that seems unclear, where comfort and security and infrastructure and complacency and arrogance, Sacred Calves all, are melted  away. I don’t know the shape of that foreign land as yet, for we are not yet wholly there, and may not be in our life time. I do know, though, that the cry of the psalmist is true: “My hand” says the God of David “shall always remain with him; my arm also shall strengthen him.” “My hand” says the God of the church, “shall always remain with you; my arm shall strengthen you.” But the core of the strengthening will not be golden calves of infrastructure and indulgence, but the powerful foundations of faith, worship, tradition, or of scripture, reason, and tradition as Hooker preferred to put it. It is to those we are being called to return, and the paraphernalia of religiosity is being sloughed from us.

As Advent ends I hope we have permitted the Spirit of God to touch something of the paraphernalia, the fluff in our faith lives. As we face an exciting because God-breathed future I hope we do so with a sense that there is new space for the God-child to be born there. I pray like Mary we can whisper “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Genuinely to do that is never easy, but it is what we will be inviting if we really mean what we sing in a few days’ time when we use Wesley’s words and pray-sing “Cast out our Sin and enter in, be born in us today.” May God go with us into the pangs of new birth.

 

Amen.

 

discomforting comfort, ye my people?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT (30^th November) 2014

           
Readings:      Isaiah 40:1-11

                       Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
                     2 Peter 3:8-15a
                     Mark 1:1-8

Outside academia it is little remarked that the author of the Second canonical Gospel, who we call Mark and who may have been an eyewitness of Jesus, a companion of Paul or even both, was one of few creative artists to invent a wholly new genre. As he penned his resounding words which depict a new beginning for humanity, he did so not with the expectation of admiration, but of conveying new hope. Quickly in his instinctive and urgent story-telling he diverts attention from himself (by the simple expedient of never permitting it), bypasses one of the great religious and cultural icons of his era (John the baptiser), and places attention squarely on Jesus.

He does so because Jesus is for him the issue. But he does so with words that for us are blunted by 2000 years of use and misuse and even abuse. In Greek: archē tou euangeliou yesu christou. The resonance and the danger and sheer subversive brilliance of his words are blunted by 2000 years of tradition. To Mark’s audience, these words meant “roll over, Caesar, a new boss is here.” These words were laughable. The so called new boss had been executed under Caesar’s delegated and disinterested authority two decades before. Only if light bulbs went on in the experience of the first hearers of Mark would these presumptuous words make sense. Only if the first hearers felt that their long-crucified messiah was indeed bigger than Caesar would these words achieve anything other than to have Mark despatched to a first century looney bin.

There, for a moment, we will leave Mark. He stood in the line of a series of brave speakers who had dared to subvert dominant paradigms with their preposterous pronouncements. Five hundred years earlier a second Isaiah had stood in the dangerous shoes of prophesy and told his simultaneously complacent people that their God was re-establishing their comfort and hope. The words that Handel rendered so brilliantly in the Messiah were daring words, disturbing words, and surprisingly unwelcome words: “comfort ye my people.”

The infrastructure of the Hebrew peoples had been shattered, the world they knew destroyed when the Assyrian Empire had swallowed them and all their security a century before. But they had become contented in their exile, and Isaiah’s words were deeply ambivalent: did they want to go back to the old ways? As prophets today speak of downsizing our infrastructure we hear the same lament: you can’t put the clock back, can’t stop the rape of the earth that produces climate change, can’t redraw the arbitrary boundaries that fuelled nationalism, can’t put back in the ground the uranium that casts the shadow of nuclear winter across the globe. The Assyrian and subsequent gods were sexier than the God of the Hebrews: did they really want God’s comfort? Keep your comfort, Isaiah, keep your comfort and your God.

But Isaiah dared to dream a dream of a challenging, different and un-complacent reality. He dared to dream of a less sexy existence but one in which the Creator God brought a deeper narrative of meaning into human lives and deaths. Superficiality is fine, but when the twin towers of commerce are destroyed by terrorist action, or a tsunami destroys a quarter of a million lives in a single boxing day surge, or when another tsunami wipes out a nuclear power-station and renders the ocean toxic, or when airliners disappear without a trace, or cyclones and typhoons obliterate entire cities, or terrorists kidnap hundreds of schoolgirls, then superficialities dissolve and humans lapse into stunned impotence and rapid-onset amnesia. When our language no longer permits the harsh truth of death, and we just pass or pass on or pass over, then when the reality of our own or our loved ones’ vulnerability sinks in we have no words with which to embrace hope and comfort. Isaiah would have none of it: Comfort, comfort ye my people.

His comfort would embrace reality, embrace truth, embrace pain, and there find hope without any denial. Isaiah was mad. He dared to suggest that his people reconnect with their demanding God, rediscover that all people, even you and me, are grass, are perishable, and wither and die. He dared to suggest that only in the embrace of God, only in the harsh and demanding disciplines of God, the embrace of a demanding God, could meaning to life be found. Like all the biblical writers Isaiah dared to suggest that the emptiness and the pain and even the sense of abandonment that is a part of human journeying is not a place to be denied or repressed or partied away. It is instead a place where we encounter the God who, in the very depths of God’s self, also knows loneliness and abandonment and superfluity, and only there begins to breathe the miracle of new life. Isaiah dared to suggest that pain is the place where God dwells best, because God knows it best.

So the prophets waved no magic wand. But the people of God who have stood in their line, including the first Christians for whom Mark told his crazy tale of a new and death-transcending Caesar-Christ, discovered something in the rites and rituals of their faith. They discovered that as they came together and suffered together and bore one another’s often quite heavy burdens, they began to discover that hints of light conquered even their darkness, and hints of hope transcended even their despair. They discovered that Mark’s claim of a death transcending Christ-Caesar was not crazy after all, no matter what the Roman authorities tried to tell and do to them.

In Advent therefore we are challenged to journey on through the superficiality in our lives, the complacency and what Peter calls the spots and blemishes in our lives, and find a deeper, inextinguishable blaze. We are challenged to find that it is in raw honesty that there breaks a yet more glorious Day, as William How put it. We are challenged to serve a different paradigm to that which surrounds us, putting aside the superficial and the sexy and finding instead the deep and uncomfortable places of the comforting God. At the end of Mark’s good news frightened women dare to live and tell out the resurrection story, however silly and even inconvenient it seems. We are challenged to do likewise.

 

TLBWY