Dancing with cadavers?

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, JANUARY 29th 2012
(FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)

Readings: 

Deuteronomy 18.15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8.1-13
Mark 1.21-28

A church community that jettisons the scriptures of faith as the primary reference point for all that it does and says in the service of God is a church that has ceased to be church. Admittedly, in the context of Sunday liturgy, the cerebral action of breaking opening the word must be held in equal tension with the non-cerebral action of celebrating sacrament – to jettison either is to risk the integrity of faith. Donald Coggan made this wonderfully clear by referring to ‘the sacrament of the Word’: both word and sacrament, scripture and liturgy are ‘Word’, are sacred text: we dare not jettison either. So how do we deal with a text – indeed why should we bother with a text – in which Paul appears to be blithering on about some first century issue specific to an ancient Mediterranean city? Do we or should we really care whether we eat meat sacrificed to idols? It is hardly an issue we face each day, or even ever face, surely, except perhaps if we eat at a Hare Krishna restaurant.

There has been since the fourth century an approach to scripture called midrash. Midrash should never be a means to recreate scripture or faith in our own image, knocking off its hard edges to dumb it down or to make it palatable. Some well-known Christian quasi- or pseudo-scholars and quasi- or pseudo-apologists have made a name (and a mint) for themselves by specialising in this kind of charlatanism. No: scripture stands judgement over us, not vice versa (though of course we will disagree in the interpretation of individual texts, particularly when we come to those thorny questions of human sexuality. That is why we need the clumsy, frustrating collective processes of synodical government to frustrate yet guide our growth in God). Basically though, midrash has much to offer, especially when we find Paul addressing questions of Corinthian diet. It gives us an opportunity to engage in sacred play with the text, where the emphasis is equally shared between ‘play’ and ‘sacred’, not skewed too far towards either pole.

So what do we do when Paul addresses a question from first century Corinth of seemingly little application to us? Some of the Corinthian Christians had written to Paul asking, inter alia, about the practice of eating food previously sacrificed to idols in various temples. We might too easily utter a very 21st Century ‘meh’ here: so what? But as rich and poor Christians gathered these were issues of justice: the poor could barely afford meat at the best of times, and any meat at all was a privilege. In a ‘bring your own’ context they were being shamed: look at the meat I am providing. Yours sucks.

It is likely the issue put to Paul was more complex still. If the Thessalonian context is anything to go by, some of the braver Christians were prepared to die for the practice of their beliefs. In Thessalonica they were probably barred from trading unless they swore allegiance to the gods of Rome. Thessalonica was different to Corinth, but Paul was impressed by the Thessalonians’ bravery: they would die rather than eat second-hand, idol-offered food. By contrast the Corinthians – or some of them – were sneering: look, we are in Christ, we can do anything we like. Earlier he has addressed the question of a believer so convinced of his own perfection-in-Christ that he has outdone even secular Corinthian moral laxity by shacking up with his mother-in-law. Timid believers were scandalised: is this the way of the cross, to do anything we like when we like, to be even more decadent than the idol-worshippers? Can we who are ‘in Christ’ do anything we like? Paul’s response is unambiguous: ‘by no means’. The behaviour of some predators within the Christian communities suggests that some things never change, and much community wrath was rightly poured on the Church and its leadership as our dirty washing was aired.

The church of the 21st century – and this is no new thing – has found another sophisticated way to eat meat offered to idols. There is amongst some circles of scholarship and other church leadership an attitude aired that sounds something like ‘of course if some people want to believe in a literal resurrection (or virgin birth, or second coming, whatever) then that’s fine, but we know better’. Every faction of the contemporary Christian community has its slogans: ‘if you don’t speak in tongues you are not a Christian’, ‘if you are gay you can’t be a Christian’, ‘if you don’t experience “blessed assurance” of salvation you are not a Christian’, ‘if you ordain women’ you are not a Christian, ‘if you don’t wear designer labels you are not a Christian’, if you breastfeed or have a noisy child in church then you are not a Christian’ … or, paradoxically, ‘if you believe that resurrection stuff then you aren’t a Christian’. The message is often subliminal, but it is the same message: ‘if you don’t eat meat offered to idols then you are clearly not confident enough in faith to be numbered with us’.

For that was what was happening. It was insulting at two levels: the rich who could afford untainted meat were cheapening themselves and their responsibilities as Christian hosts by offering only second-hand meat to the lower-class Corinthian Christians. At the same time the faithful but poorer Christians, like the Thessalonian Christians who Paul so admired, were refusing to be compromised by eating the second-hand meat. ‘Poor simple folk – they don’t really understand’ – the same attitude expressed by some who sneer at those who have a literal understanding of the resurrection (as I do). They were shouldered to the outer, there left to sink or swim.

Do these questions apply to us? Some years ago I attended a conference of the Society of Biblical Literature. I was staggered at the contrast between scholars who demonstrated their academic prowess by effectively sneering at and over the texts of faith, and those who saw these sacred texts as wells of faith and knowledge directing believers deeper into the heart of the triune God. Roman Catholic Scholar Luke Timothy Johnson speaks of the difference between dissecting a cadaver and dancing with his beloved.* Each involves a body. The choice is ours: do we worship and behave in order to build up, or to tear down the body of Christ?

Do we dissect cadavers or do we dance with our beloved? This applies not only in preaching and study but in the whole of our faith practice: do we generate a practiced air of superiority that knows it all, has no need of explanations, and scorns those less advanced than ourselves, or do we see the face of Christ in the most tentative of faith-explorers? Do we admire our own sophistication and security, building temples to our own arrogance, or do we know that we too fall and always will fall far short of the glory of God, and need the infusion of God’s grace each step of our journey. Paul knew only too well his weakness – and left the arrogant Corinthian strong to stew in their own spiritual juices - or dancing with their dessicated cadavers of spiritual arrogance. That is why he goes on famously to say he become all things to all people: ‘To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some’.

TLBWY

* Tippet, Krista. On Being. "Luke Timothy Johnson and Bernadette Brooten: Deciphering the Da Vinci Code." June 1, 2006. Transcript online at http://www.onbeing.org/program/deceiphering-da-vinci-code/transcript/821

Voices in the night?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS, NORTHERN TERRITORY
SUNDAY, JANUARY 15th 2012
(SECOND SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY)

Readings:     1 Samuel 3.1-10
                      Psalm 139.1-5, 12-18
                     1 Corinthians 6.12-20
                      John 1.43-51

Amongst the caricatures levelled at Christianity is one commonly directed at the experience of ‘call’. By and large this is because we take a literal approach to passages in our scripture that were originally designed to be a stylised narrative, a representative story intended to describe in general terms the ways in which God might touch and direct fallible human lives. In most of what might be the ‘call narratives’ there is an unexpected and often unmerited approach from God, a demurrer from the one whose life is about to be changed, and a final reluctant acceptance of the task ahead. It might be described as an ‘Oi … Who me? Yes you ... Couldn't be me … Yes you … Oh, okay then, with your help’ story. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies when it comes to caricatures of our faith and practice, but both the caricaturists and those who use the terminology blindly are misusing the scriptures.

Which is not to say God might not conceivably reveal divine purpose and divine will through what we might call supernatural means: that’s up to God, but it is far from my experience, and should be treated as a rare exception, not a rule. On the whole we are better off looking for the signs and directives of God in the overall patterns of our lives, rather than in the unnecessary celestial dramatics. The expectation that we will experience voices in the night like that of the Old Testament prophetic call scenes is an expectation that fuels the conversation of many in our psych wards: there are enough mental illness issues in our community without our adding fuel to dangerous fires.

A call of any sort is likely to be neither more nor less than accumulated shared conversations with others within the body of Christ, discerning and ascertaining where our gifts and strengths might lead us. A person with a Dylanesque voice like a truckload of gravel or the musical ear of a newt is unlikely to be invited by God to lead the singing ministry of a church. A person who is unable to be a critical and compassionate listener, or who is devoid of people skills or public-speaking skills, is unlikely to be experiencing a call to the liturgical and pastoral ministries of priesthood. A person who is numerologically incompetent or dysnumeric like myself is unlikely to be called to the role of treasurer in the body of Christ or indeed in any other organization. God may be a God of surprises but not of idiocies.

What the ‘call narratives’ of our scriptures present is a stylized presentation of the impact of God’s working on a human life. But these are human lives attuned to the possibilities of God. This kind of a statement gives some Protestant interpreters the screaming heebies: is the grace of God dependant on human labour? No – but ‘no’ only in the context of the saving action of Christ on the Cross. The assumption that we can sit on human backsides or dance around having a frivolous time for Jesus, as is the practice in some quarters, and then expect to be useful in the purposes and plans of God is a spiritual obscenity. Each of the call narratives of Old and New Testament is the narrative of God’s approach to a person familiar and disciplined in practicing the presence of God. Each is a story of God’s extra-ordinary encounter with a person who has attuned their life to such an extent that God can lead them into new futures of service.

When Paul turns to questions of sexuality he raises the ire particularly of liberal Christianity in the twenty-first century (though I don’t think there are any even of the most libertine commentators who would condone the sorts of practices being undertaken by some of the Corinthian Christians). But in so-called ‘liberal’ circles it is as unpopular to draw a line in the sand with regards to sexual practice and morality as it is to suggest in evangelical circles that there may be many outside the community of Christ who are amongst the eternally blesséd, or in Americo-fundamentalist circles that there may be a dimension of social responsibility attached to the gospel. The fact is that there is a call to personal holiness and integrity in the call to follow Jesus, and that, while many of us may fall short, there is no room for a laissez faire approach to what we do with our male or female bodies when we are bearers of Christ. In the Corinthian context, in the Nimbin of the first century, this was particularly apparent, but it is a timeless truth: we cannot be attuned to the will and purposes of God if we are not attuned to the integrity of our own lives and our own sexual mores.

There is – of course – a call to compassionate social action, too. We cannot claim to be Christ-bearers of integrity if we close our eyes to the brutal disparities between the global rich and the global poor, or even the Australian rich and Australian poor. We cannot claim to be Christ-bearers of integrity if we close our eyes to the fact that there are obscene structures in place that ensure the richest on the earth minimize their taxes and live long while the poorest on the earth are condemned to die abysmally young without even earning enough to pay taxes. Jesus challenges us to address these issues as much as he challenges us to address the issues of our own private integrity. We must do both if we are to live lives of readiness to hear the voice of God.

For most of us the stage on which we live out our faith will be a small one. But the principle remains: do we live a life of sufficient integrity to hear the challenges and directions of the God of Samuel, Nathanael, Andrew, James and John, Mary, Peter or Paul?

TLBWY

Nice God, Wrong Place

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, JANUARY 8th 2012
(BAPTISM OF CHRIST)

Readings:  Genesis 1.1-5
                   Psalm 29
                   Acts 19.1-7
                   Mark 1.4-11

If you were to journey within your Tardis to the time when the first witnesses to the resurrection began to tell their evangel you would discover very quickly the truth of Paul’s ringing dis-endorsement. With deep feeling he describes the gospel as a ‘stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Cor. 1:23). Despite our western obsession with comfort, security, church growth and that demon ‘relevance’ – which I flagged on Christmas Day as an obscene distraction from the gospel main-game – there is no such self-absorption in the first century. The early Christians had experienced, first hand or in the words and worship of their faith-neighbours, a life changing experience: the resurrection of the one they came to call the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. At the heart of the message that had changed and was changing their life was the incomprehensible news that a crucified criminal was God, and that in his unexpected victory over death hope for all humanity was born.

If Paul described this as ‘stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ it was because it was. No Jewish person was readily going to accept the idea of a crucified Messiah. Paul’s Deuteronomy-based midrash in Galatians on cross-as-tree, on which, if a person were hanged, they would be cursed (Gal 3.13) were at one level a little tenuous. probably a shorthand version of a sermon he had preached (perhaps more than once!) during his Galatian sojourn. But there is no doubt that the naked shame and bodily impurity of a crucified criminal was not the place a Jewish person would hang out looking for a Messiah. To a Greek – that is to say any Roman Empire non-Jew – the problem was similar: gods might conceivably hang out in human form but were not subject to laws of suffering and death. 'What’s a nice God like yours doing hanging out on a cross' was a likely Jewish or Gentile response to the unattractive gospel of Jesus Christ.

The complexities of the humanity and divinity of Jesus the Christ were worked out in the era after our scriptures were collected and sealed as canon, though it is clear enough that the earliest Christians were scratching around to find words and images that conveyed their experience that this was the case: the crucified human criminal was divine. As they gathered in worship they knew that the one who the disciples had known personally was powerfully with them – released in space and even through time by the events we know as resurrection and ascension. They knew, too, that the whole of his life had meaning – including some of the events that puzzled them. There may be some of those we don’t know about – his life of love, his favourite foods, his skills or otherwise at carpentry. There are other awkward events that they do reflect on: what was a nice God doing receiving a rite of ‘baptism for the forgiveness of sins’?

Generally we refer to the sinless nature of Christ – a reference driven as much by theology as by biography. Jesus in life and death was soon identified in various senses as a sacrificial lamb, and the influential sacrificial practices of the Hebrew people demanded the purity – effectively sinlessness – of the victim. Whether Jesus did naughty things or not (and we might wonder at his lurking around in the temple for an extra day!), his transformation of human sin is such that he came to be described as sinless. Whether he did naughty things or not, whether he thought naughty thoughts or not, Christians soon saw Jesus as the means by which God entered into and redeemed sinful human nature.

The events of Jesus' self-exposure to human sin and suffering were not inconsistent with what we might dare to call the ‘history of God’. God – (if we accept that God exists, and since we’re in church here I assume most of us do) – is the God of surprises. The very act of creation, in its immeasurable timelessness, is an unnecessary and wanton act of love. God, in what we might call triune community, triune perfection, has no need to share time, space and eternity with any other being. There is a Greek word dei, which, though no doubt present in every language, is neat and tidy in Greek. We translate it with constructions like the clause ‘it was necessary that’. But nothing is necessary, nothing is binding upon God. It is not necessary for God to create an other with whom to share divininty, divine joy, divine eternity. Yet God is love, and love chooses to share.

Love makes us vulnerable. Simon and Garfunkel reminded of that in the '60s: 'if I'd never loved I never would have cried'. If we love we are likely to weep. If we love we are likely to feel moments of intense pain as well as unquantifiable joy. God does not need to weep, yet in opening the heart of God’s existence up to an other, in flinging creation across nothingness, in peopling at least one planet with fallible humans made in the divine image, God is opening the heart of God to suffering and pain. God does not need pain, but it is the risk of love to choose pain, to chhose to touch and transform the lives of others.

God does not need to suffer. Yet the God who flings stars across the empty vault of heaven will and has chosen and will always choose to suffer in order to redeem. The baptism of Christ prefigures, foreshadows the later entrance of God-in-Christ into the very deepest depths of human degradation. This is not a ‘had to’ but a ‘will always’: the love of God will search (and I would add eternally search) for the lost sheep and enter into suffering to bring that sheep home. It is that which Jesus enacts as he enters into the waters of human sin: it is that which he will later complete when he enters into and transforms the murk of human death. This does not protect us from suffering, from sin, from death, but transforms our darkest moments into the light of resurrection and eternity.

The baptism of Jesus in the Jordan is the prefigurement of all that he will go on to achieve and make available eternally to us. The baptism of Christ in the Jordan, where in orthodox art he is often depicted as leaving behind the grot of human existence, is the prefigurement of death, descent, and resurrection.

TLBWY

Mary: Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink

SERMON PREACHED
AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS N.T.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18th 2011
(FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT)

Readings:        2 Samuel 7.1-11, 16
                        Psalm 89.1-4, 19-27
                        Romans 16.25-27
                        Luke 1.26-38

There is in some circles of Christianity a type of nudge, nudge, wink, wink approach to key moments and passages in the story of the people of God. More perhaps than any other this applies to the stories of the conception and the resurrection of Jesus. It is as if there is in some circles a psychological need to distance interpretation from the naïve openness, the innocent readiness to believe, that we perhaps all exhibited as children, but are embarrassed about as adults.

This is no new thing, reaching back to the post-enlightment period of the nineteenth century, as scientific method was applied to the doctrines and texts of faith. Sometimes the methodology was applied well, breaking down the elitist self-interest of some clergy who wielded biblical and doctrinal knowledge as an iron rod, keeping hoi polloi firmly in their place. Sometimes though it was applied inappropriately – a little like the famous passage that reduces the act of osculation – kissing – to a biological description of the muscular contortions and fluid exchanges involved. The love story that scripture should be was reduced to a mechanic’s handbook – which it was never intended to be – and then sneeringly dismissed as errant nonsense.

Ironically the same era gave birth to what we call fundamentalism, the literal or perhaps literalistic interpretation of the text. This too, like a doctor reading Robert Burns’ ‘my love is like a red, red rose’ in order to make a diagnosis of her condition, is a misreading of the ancients’ texts. And while it can sound as if I’m bleating on behalf of the only person in step, it is imperative that we find approaches to scripture that avoid these two misguided extremes. The Spirit is too energized to limit us to any one interpretation, particularly of so vast as text as the conception and resurrection stories, but there are boundaries of common sense, and too much Christian wordage passes beyond them.

The shock horror school of interpretation of the birth narratives bases its approach largely on two recognitions: in the first place that Mark, the earliest gospel account to be written, did not incorporate a birth story, and in the second that stories of virgin birth of extraordinary people were a kind of point of religious pride around the known world of Luke and Matthew’s time. With that two-pronged informational overload they surmise that they have heralded the death-knell of simple Christian interpretation – often trumpeting their superior knowledge with more glee than the late Christopher Hitchens. Unfortunately they forget that first century Christians were not all dimwits: the issues surrounding Luke and Matthew’s tellings were as complex to first century believers as they are to twenty-first century believers.

First century believers, however, did not expect Luke or Matthew to be providing a blow by blow narrative of the DNA transmission of Jesus of Nazareth. They knew that they were being told a simple truth: that in the hands of the God who flung stars across the heavens the conception of a child within the womb of an obedient servant is not arduous. The subsequent complexities of divine and human nature, and of the presence of timelessness and time in the DNA of that child, these were more complex. But these were issues to ponder over for subsequent millennia: for now it was enough to remind the communities of belief and non-belief that the Creator of the spheres is pretty much a can-do sort of God.

Luke’s and Matthew’s audiences knew, too that they were being referred back to other stories and moments in faith-history, particularly the Book of Judges. They knew that they were being told a story of God’s ability and readiness to work miracles in the lives of those who open themselves up to divine possibility. They knew they were being told a story of God’s preference for the uncluttered and unpretentious. They could even see in the subtle contrasts between Elizabeth’s and Mary’s encounter with the will of God that the latter showed an even greater ability to be a channel of the purposes of God.

A channel of the purposes of God but, despite the misapplication by history of some of the language of this and other scriptures, Mary is no meek-and-mild pushover. The language of a woman ‘overshadowed by the power of the almighty’ can be disturbing when read through the filters of modern awareness of the abuse of women in homes and churches throughout history – and it is right to pose those questions. But like questions of the DNA of Jesus, they are not questions that the text is setting out to address – in any case a glance at the feisty Magnificat of Mary that we read last week should make it fairly clear that God has not chosen a wallflower to be the home of the Incarnation.

These are stories about the ability and possibility of God. But they are stories, too, about the ability and possibility of those who open themselves up to the challenges of God – ironically Mark poses similar questions right at the original ending of his gospel-telling, as frightened women become the source of all resurrection knowledge, but we can explore that moment at another time.

Luke, though, wants us to know that Mary, mother of Jesus (mother of God as she is rightly known in the patristic traditions, for Jesus is nothing if not God), is the example par excellence of risk-taking in the service of the gospel. By seizing a unique moment in history this vulnerable, soon to be outcast, soon to be refugee woman becomes the home of God and the incubator, as it were, of salvation. A woman known personally to the earliest tellers of the gospel-story becomes a paradigm of our own responsibilities to serve God. Her experience of course is unique, but we all have within us the opportunities to seize the day of God’s call to proclaim hope and justice and compassionate love, we all have within us the opportunity to serve or thwart the gospel.

TLBWY

Second Coming? Yeah Right!

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF St FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27^th 2011
(FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT)

Readings:       

Isaiah 64.1-9 
Psalm 80.1-7, 17-19
1 Corinthians 1.1-9
Mark 13.24-37  

There are times in the journey of scriptural interpretation when we have to set aside the rational, logical brain – to the extent that we have one! – and allow ourselves to be, as two Isaiahs and a Jeremiah saw so clearly, clay in the hands of the potter. It isn’t altogether easy, though as I have often said in previous faith communities, it is easier for someone like myself, who had apparently slipped away to the toilet when scientific brains were handed out, than it is for those who have a scientific mind. Nevertheless, there are respected and highly intelligent scientists and philosophers who are able to ensure that they know the limitations of human enquiry, know that there is a moment in which we can surrender to the ‘too big’ and ‘beyond our ken’ vastness of God and acknowledge that ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’ (to borrow Anselm’s phrase) is greater than the human mind. This, incidentally, is not to lapse into fundamentalism, a surprisingly modern, more or less late nineteenth century form of biblical interpretation that imposes a literalist interpretation on the text – the Hebrew and early Christian minds were always far larger than that.

Nevertheless, in the 21^st century it is hard not to be slightly swayed by the reasonable scientific suggestion that, given the current evidence, the Christian doctrine of a second coming of Christ is somewhat spurious. Some scholars argue that even as early as the time in which Paul writing his letters, the decade from the late 50s to early 60s of the first century, the Christian community was altering its expectation of the imminent return of the Messiah. Certainly in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians all systems appear to be go: describing the role of the faith community Paul reminds them ‘you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven’ (1 Thess. 1. 9b-10a), and when Paul prays for his Thessalonian audience, ‘may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints’ (1 Thess. 3.13), he does so believing that this coming is imminent: ‘the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever’(1 Thess. 4.16b-17). Do we have to say of Paul that he would have received a nasty shock some years later when he was executed by the Romans, his Lord still seemingly absent, in visual terms?

Perhaps, but I am not convinced. The Book of Revelation, a little later than Paul, hangs tenaciously to the expectation of the Second Coming or Parousia. The gospel records and Acts do likewise. Like many doctrines of New Testament theology it would have been far easier to jettison this belief in order to sidestep the mocking antagonism of the critics and enemies of Christianity. Yet those early Christians were prepared to hold to it, even as, one by one, the eye witnesses of Jesus died out, and the first generations of Christians followed them. Certainly, later, as Christianity became a significant and later still the dominant paradigm in society, interest in the Second Coming dwindled. But, from time to time, as Christianity stagnated, the expectation was reawakened (not always to the good!), and, in each era, it has been as hard to believe and as risible as it is in our own. Do we dare to jettison this belief in our century?

In geological terms we know now we live on an ancient planet, circling a sun that will one day grow old and die. It may be that this is all that is meant when we speak of the second coming – that, long after our species has surrendered to its own exploitation of the planet, and long after new cycles of warming and cooling have restructured this blue globe, after new tectonic shifts have rearranged our continents far beyond our present imaginings, then life will simply peter away, and the final surviving species will dissipate into nothingness.

Maybe – and the doctrine of the Second Coming says that is okay too. For it says, primarily (as we remember in the rites of Easter), that the Alpha is the Omega: that the author of creation’s beginning will be the author of its endings. But the Doctrine of the Second Coming says more than merely that, for it says that not only the life of the universe, cosmological history, but the life of the sparrow and the life of you and the life of me is held in the tender, redeeming, hope-bringing hands of God. It is for that reason that Paul could write so confidently ‘may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints’. The details of what John of the Apocalypse calls ‘the new heavens and the new earth’ are in the hands of God – but that is the point: they are in the hands of God. They are in the hands of God: Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. And in the hands of God: judge.

Much contemporary theology – and even more contemporary a-theology – is keen to do away with the doctrine of judgement. We do so at great peril. Not that I want people to listen to hell fire and damnation sermons or want to attempt to frighten people into the clutches of faith. Apart from anything else, it is clear that those so-called evangelistic techniques are counter-productive in our current, nonchalant world. Judgement? Who cares?

For us the answer must be:‘we do’. There is an onus on us to live as a people under judgement. The tragic trail of sexual abuse in the church – though no worse than in some other institutions – is a sign of amnesia in some individuals as they forgot the doctrine of judgement, and predatory and exploitative sexual gratification became a greater creed. I suspect a Jesus saying about millstones, necks and oceans has much to say about the perpetrators of such evil. But for those of us who are not perpetrating such evil there is still always the need for long, hard self-scrutiny. Advent – and later, Lent – provide opportunity for just that. I do not understand the mechanics of the end of time, nor the mechanics of the Second Coming. But I try to remind myself that I stand in the shadow of that event, and try with the help of God to live a life at the closure of which I may be gently led into the unfathomable mysteries of God’s for-ever.

For that reason, more than 25 centuries after he wrote the words, I can add my amen to Isaiah’s plaintive prayer:  

We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity. Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider: we are all your people.  

Amen.

God's Garden

SERMON PREACHED
AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6th 2011
PENTECOST 21 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 32: (CARE FOR CREATION SUNDAY)

Readings: Joshua 24.1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78.1-7
1 Thessalonians 4.9-18 
Matthew 25.1-13

By way of apology I should outline my caution towards so-called special Sundays. A little like the ‘Year Of’ pronouncements that emanate, I suspect, from a small office in the labyrinthine corridors of the United Nations – with its religious ‘Year Of’ counterpart in the smaller but equally labyrinthine corridors of the World Council of Churches – these declarations can become a hailstorm of cataclysmic proportions, spitting passionate and often worthy concerns at us faster than the speed of light and initiating 'awareness faitgue', let alone compassion fatigue . It seems to me on any one day we can, if not exhausted, find ourselves in the Decade of Evangelism, the Year of the Child, the Year of Being Nice to Endangered Species, the Year of Looking Out For Nasty Weeds, The Month of Being Kind to Grandmothers, The Month of Protecting Endangered Rock Oysters, the Day of Remembering Dolphins and the Day of Making Sure You Are Proud of Your Prayer Book, Hymn Book and Pew, all unawares. I’m a kind of Church Year and lectionary junky, not because I’m some sort of bombastic Anglo-Catholic (though I might be), but because I believe these are the best tools available to ensure that neither worship nor preaching becomes a cyclical focus on the Michael Godfrey personal obsession collection. By preaching and praying the liturgical calendar, imperfect though it may be, we are taken out of cosy comfort zones and forced to encounter the often discomforting regions of the scriptures of our faith. We are not forced into a form of dead mechanicalism, but we are steered away from smorgasbord faith, popular in some churches (evangelical and liberal alike), where we pick and choose the flavours that we like.

That whinge aside, however, I am on this occasion allowing a degree of special focus in our thoughts, for Care of and Hope for what I call ‘God’s Garden’, Creation, is a fundamental mission of the Christian Community. For many years now the Anglican Consultative Council has recognized and affirmed five marks of mission:

• to proclaim the Good News of the Reign of God
• to teach, baptize and nurture new believers,
• to respond to human need by loving service,
• to seek to transform unjust structures of society, and
• to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.

The fifth – (which reads like a sentence put together by a working party!) – was a late addition to the first four, arriving on the scene in 1990. Nevertheless it is an important acknowledgement that Creation is an act of God’s sharing love, that the nurture of Creation is a commission given to humanity in the creation stories, and that the lives of many of our sisters and brothers in the human race lie perilously balanced as we often selfishly devour and destroy the resources of God’s earth.

There is then a sense that all our interpretation and application of scripture at all times must incorporate a degree of concern for the garden God has entrusted to us. It would be false to pretend it was overt all the time – as it would be false to pretend that every scripture selection commissions us to evangelize or to strive for justice – but it is there. And serendipitously, it is there by implication today, as our readings towards the close of the liturgical year begin to pick up the crescendo of apocalyptic expectation. It is even present in Paul’s impassioned and moving address to the Thessalonians, which, while hardly a Green Party Manifesto, commissions his audience to live their lives in such a way of love that they benefit and enhance the lives of those around them: ‘live quietly, … mind your own affairs, … work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one’. Paul was far from considering ecological issues, but if we are to read Paul in the 21st century we must ask whether our western lifestyles really demonstrate propriety towards others. Many analysts suggest that the fury that runs through the veins of El Qaida is nurtured at least in part by the bitter gaps in economic status between the West (or, as it is now inexplicably called, ‘the global north’) and the Muslim world, as we gobble up resources that could fuel and feed and clothe all seven billion in the world. It is simplistic, but it is a partial truth.

Sadly, as the Christian community read its apocalyptic texts, as I have mentioned now many times, it read them from a listening or reading site vastly different to that in which they were written. Those of us engaging in the Advent studies will be reminded of this yet again during December. Too often, though, Christians, especially those with an apocalyptic or millenarianist bent, have used expectation of a glorious Second Coming as an excuse to disregard or, more shamefully still, to hasten the desecration of the earth: an ecclesiatical 'bring it on' so that a selfish elect can skiddle to 'glory'. That parody of Christ-mission has understandably led socially compassionate Christianity-averse writers such as Seattle songwriter Charlie Murphy to remind us bitterly ‘the earth is a witch and we still burn her’.

To ignore our responsibility to nature is to drive a wedge between the miracle of our origins, in which God commands us to ‘husband’ creation, and the expectation of Christ’s return. To drive a wedge in such a way is blithely to forget the doctrine of judgement, and to forget those parables in which Jesus warns us that will be asked to account for the gifts we have had entrusted to us. It is to forget, too, that while we often emphasize the ‘friendship’ of Jesus, parables such as that of the ten maidens are texts that remind us of our obligation constantly to evaluate and re-evaluate our lives in the light of the glare of Christ: where were you when I was naked or hungry or thirsty in the global south or in the nations disappearing beneath rising sea-waters?

I do not believe we are called to follow any political party line in approach to these questions. I do believe, though, that we are called over and again to re-focus our lives to ensure that we nurture and care for the gifts that God has given us, and use them constantly in ways which glorify God. We are called to ensure that our lifestyles are not destroying God’s earth, and where they are, or where they are denying the livelihood and the very existence of our fellow humans and other species, to seek forgiveness, make alteration, and in that way ensure that our candles burn with eagerness as the bridegroom arrives.

May God help us so to do.

TLBWY

Pie in the sky?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF ST FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23rd 2011
(PENTECOST 20 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 30)

Readings: Deuteronomy 34.1-12
                 Psalm 90.1-6, 13-17
                 1 Thessalonians 2.1-13
                 Matthew 22.34-36

Paul’s remarkable letter-writing ministry began, as far as we know, when he wrote to the Thessalonians. As he moved around the Roman Empire, proclaiming the gospel that he fervently believed had been entrusted to him, to which he had been commissioned primarily by his encounter with the risen Lord, Paul left behind him faith communities that were forced to find their way on their own. He had no choice: it was his belief that he was called to move on and on – in the end he never reached his final destination, which was the area we now call Spain and Portugal – covering enormous distances and undertaking great risks to serve his Lord. The cost of his wandering, peripatetic ministry was that the communities he founded and nurtured in faith had to learn to fend for themselves. Like a parent, he had to set them free to fly solo.

Paul’s was a pastoral heart, and he never ceased to care for his people: as news reached him of trials that were being experienced by his beloved Thessalonians he turns to quill and papyrus to stand in as a substitute for his own comforting and encouraging presence. In an age of easy email it is hard for us to imagine the thrill his letters – at least those to Philippi and Thessalonica – would have brought to their recipients.

Thessalonica, though not one of the major cities of the Roman Empire, was no backwater, either. It was a city whose inhabitants were keen to stay onside with the leadership of the Roman Empire, and the presence of a new upstart religion in its midst was bound to be a course of concern to many in positions of power. Slowly the Christians found themselves first ostracized, alienated and shunned in the markets and other social circles, and then persecuted for their faith in Jesus. It was becoming increasingly difficult to remain optimistic, as many were barred from purchasing food in the local markets, and as normal community infrastructures were being denied them. Some Thessalonian Christians were dying – not necessarily as a direct result of the persecution, though that was no doubt a factor – and life was increasingly difficult.

This then is the dire context Paul addresses – with in part a heavy heart – as he writes to the Christians whose suffering is a direct result of his own ministry and evangelism. He seeks to encourage them by reminding them of the joy they experienced as he worked, preached and pastored amongst them, reminding them of the first flushes of divine energy they experienced as they surrendered their lives to the risen Lord.

Paul asks the Thessalonians to reconnect with their previous joy: when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word. But as he writes the Thessalonians he uses another technique, too, a kind of pre-membering, looking forward to the experience of the fullness of the Kingdom, the completion of God’s work in the realm that is yet to come. It is a primary technique of the style of thought that we call apocalyptic, a vision forward, cynically able to be dismissed as ‘pie in the sky’, yet in reality able to transform the hearts and minds of believers for more than two millennia. In particular we can recall the way in which hope of a better existence kept the Afro-American slave communities alive through decades of abuse and neglect.

The hope of heaven, as we might call it, is a powerful medicine, even if it can be criticised by some as keeping the downtrodden in their place. Paul makes clear though that he sought always to share not just words but his very life as a sign of the compassionate love of God: So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us. It is perhaps because of the quality of Paul’s love that we still have and read his letters today. It is this kind of life-transforming quality of love that Jesus is referring to as he speaks of love of God and neighbour. But central to all he writes to the Thessalonians is a word of hope: God is in control. Martin Luther would one day capture Paul’s hope in his own remarkable and most famous words:

Despite all foes, the Word shall stand 
against all their endeavour; 
God’s gifts and Spirit, close at hand, 
shall be with us for ever.

What can it mean for us? Few of us have suffered or will suffer much for our faith, and pray God we won’t have to. Paul urged the Thessalonians and other Christian communities that they would not be tested beyond their ability to endure, but it is clear that some at Thessalonica had undergone considerable trial. Paul was pitting the claims of his God against the claims of Caesar, and there was always potential for that battle to end in tears. For us life is more simple. Nevertheless there are times we need to stand up for values that our wider society has forgotten. There’s a tacky-but-true bumper sticker that says ‘if you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?’ There’s no doubt that for the Thessalonian Christians the answer was ‘yes’; the challenge you and I face is to ensure that this would be the case for us as well, as we strive on in our witness to the God who comes. This will involve proclamation of a word of hope – a dimension some theologies dismantle, as well as a word of compassionate love and justice. This is the commission we share.

TLBWY