SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
(Northern Territory, Australia)
Sunday, September 23rd, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 25 / SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: Proverbs 31.10-31
Psalm 1
James 3.1-12
Mark 9.30-37
Mark used locations to underline the events of Jesus’ life that he was narrating. The work of the incarnation would be at its most intense, if we can put it that way, in the unexpected and uninviting places. It is no accident that the words of the angel spoken to the women at the tomb tells them to tell Peter and the disciples that the risen Lord is going ahead of them to Galilee (16.7, also 14.28) , the place from whence he came in 1.9, the place that has been open to his message all along. Galilee is not Vaucluse, Toorak, or Cottlesloe – respective by state the wealthiest postcodes in Australia (2010 census; actually Edgecliff was wealthier but I’ve never heard of it). Nor was Galilee a Nhulunbuy, which surprised me by having the highest level of wealth per postcode in the Territory (though the journalist inexplicably referred to it as a ‘suburb’). Nor, to be fair, was Galilee a Callaghan, in Newcastle, which came out in that census as Australia’s poorest postcode, but which was probably skewed by being centred on students and the University of Newcastle. No – and we need to be careful in making comparisons. The Brotherhood of St Laurence long ago made it clear that wealth is not necessarily or even not much about income. Wealth is about networks.
So Galilee was a place of fractured infrastructure, a place of pride, no doubt, to the locals, but pretty much of scorn to outsiders. John 7 reflects the kind of scorn in which Galilee was held – nothing good was going to come from there, and it certainly wasn’t the sort of place a nice god should hang out. Ironically it is the type of place our psalmist, in Pslam One, might have us avoid, the place that seems to be the place of the ungodly. The Territory has by far the highest rate of crime in Australia – we can be fairly sure that if Australia were awaiting a messiah the populace would not be looking to Pine Creek, Yuendemu or Pigeon Hole for the arrival of God’s chosen one.
Jesus makes his way across this troubled territory, to Capernaum, to deliver his most poignant teaching. For the second time he tells them that the Incarnation, the unveiling of the heart of God will take place not in glory, but in the lowest degradation known to humanity. There have been worse ways, arguably, to die than crucifixion, but few images have held more terror for a populace than the cross, in all its obscene Imperial brutality. Here Jesus doesn’t mention the cross, but he shifts his audience’s focus – or attempts to – from the places nice gods hang out to the places of powerlessness and vulnerability.
The Nineteenth Century romanticised the child as an image of innocence, and that interpretation of this passage dominated readings of this passage for a century and a half since. It was wrong. In some circles it is still used to attempt to suggest we should have an intellectual naïvety in our approach to faith. This is nonsense, at least as an interpretation of this text. This is an image of utter vulnerability: a girl child in China, prone to secret abortion or perinatal execution might be a symbol closer to the one Jesus is adopting here. An Afghani child bride in a Taliban community, exposed to the most demonic forms of misogyny and violence might be closer to the image Jesus is portraying here. A woman in our own society, trapped in hellholes of domestic abuse – or the child of abusive parents or victim of a powerful paedophile – might be closer to the image Jesus is generating here. Each would cry out for a touch of love, what Jesus calls a ‘welcome’, rather than the brutal exploitation and defencelessness that was their and is their daily grind.
In this moment Jesus effectively lays down two unexpected gauntlets. He makes it clear that vulnerability, defencelessness and even shame is the place where the heart of God is revealed – shame in the sense of the utter nakedness of the cross that will soon be, in Mark’s narrative, the place where the messianic secret is finally over and the unstoppable extent of God’s love is made known. But he makes something else clear, too: he makes it clear that it is the yardstick by which we stand judged. Have we touched, transformed, ameliorated the plight of those who are today in all their pain and brokenness the location of God’s self-revelation? Have we touched the lives of the children behind razor wire, the children in communities of abuse, the children in the world’s refugee camps? Have I? And even if we can say yes – and I would imagine many of you are doing far more than I am – nevertheless can any of us say we are doing enough, fiscally, politically, missiologically? Indeed, as James, ostensibly the brother of Jesus puts it in the verse immediately after our epistle reading, ‘Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom’. We can feel terribly warm and fuzzy about our cosy relationship with Jesus, but our cosiness does little for those who are daily dying the death of Jesus.
Which leaves us, for now, just three learning points: can we accept God’s forgiveness for our failure to be vulnerable? Can we accept God’s forgiveness for our failure to transform the lives of the vulnerable? Can we allow the Spirit to transform us so that we can better find the heart of Jesus in the often unattractive lives of the broken? The Way of the Cross leads through Galilee. But that is the place in which Jesus promises, always, to go ahead of us. May we have the strength, in him, to follow him.
TLBWY
Saturday, 22 September 2012
Saturday, 15 September 2012
Rahab the Prostitute, Steve Biko, and the works of the Spirirt
SERMON PREACHED AT
St FRANCIS’ CHURCH, BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, September 16th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 24 / SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: Wisdom of Solomon 7.26 – 8.1
Psalm 19
James 2.18-26
Mark 8.27-38
I have been re-reading, in recent weeks, a masterful history of the development of ideas in the Reformation era. I believe that this is one of the most painful eras in Christian history The proliferation of Christian denominations and cults that has splintered outwards ever since is simply a tragic scar on the credibility of our gospel witness. Without going into a history lesson, yes there were some matters that that the Catholic Church had corrupted into a sorry distortion of gospel truth. Unfortunately, though, the Reformers were soon doing as much if not more damage to the proclamation of the gospel. Within ten or fifteen years of Luther’s original acts of rebellion many within Roman Catholicism were fighting from within to reform its excesses, while holding on to the unity that has never again been attained. Oh that we could set back the clock so that we could retain the integrity that some of the catholic reformers sought. I thjink of barel;y known figures today, such as wise reforming moderates, the likes of a Jean Charlier de Gerson or the later Girolamo Seripando, struggling to maintain theological integrity within Catholicism without resorting to schism, and dying, like Jesus, with no hint whether their struggle would bear fruit. These, along with the better know Desiderius Erasmus, brutally treated by Luther, are the ones who strike me as the heroes of faith-integrity in the Reformation era. All ultimately were on the losing side, as better known names such as Luther, Calvin and even Henry VIII drove a wedge into the heart of the Christian unity for which, John tells us, Jesus prayed in the garden. It was a tragic time, and it is not surprising that many felt the end of the world was nigh.
I make no secret then of my wish that it had never happened. While historical accident led me to Anglicanism, I stand firmly in the shoes of movements within Anglicanism that claim constantly its Catholic heritage, and, while the more extreme English Reformers might turn in their grave, I believe the Oxford Movement within the Anglicanism of the nineteenth century was one of our finest moments and greatest gifts. I thank God for the centrality of the eucharist that was a direct result of that movement, bringing this feast of Jesus back to the centre of most Anglican Christian experience. Other side-effects were reclamation of the importance of the epistles of James and even the deutero-canonical Wisdom of Solomon, deeply resented by the Reformers because they did not suit their decentralization of the institutions of faith.
The Reformers’ personal piety emphasis opened the floodgates that led to the ‘me and my mate Jesus’ spirituality that has so dominated Protestantism ever since. It was the Reformers, not the Catholics that yearned to throw out these tricky books, because they did not suit them, despite their claims as Reformers to emphasize the centrality of Scripture. And no wonder they wanted to cast these books to outer darkness … the epistle of James made it through their misguided censorship in the end because they believed it to have been written by the brother of Jesus. There are all sorts of ironies in the Reformers’ reluctant acceptance of the book, and indeed of their entire relationship to the question of ‘canon’, but perhaps that thought must await another time and place. In the end, thank God it got through, and thank God that, with the Book of Wisdom, it can play a part in the liturgies of the twenty first century.
Because, in this century, it is not a pious ‘me and my personal saviour’ spirituality that will touch lives with the redeeming love of Jesus, but a love that binds up the broken hearted, proclaims liberty to the oppressed (not least those currently being sent to the government’s latest draconian refugee ‘solution’), proclaims sight to the blind. ‘Was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road’, wrote James, to the horror of Martin Luther who, for all his strengths, was determined to make salvation a pietistic, personal matter. How can people see Jesus when we represent a church so wrapped up in personal salvation and piety that we show no compassion for the broken, or when our own obsession with eternal life (whatever that is) drowns out concern for those whose present life is a living hell? It’s not altogether an either/or, I confess, but as I listen to the heartcries of those around me there is no doubt that many people reject Jesus – it seems – because of the self-obsession of his most vocal followers.
Which leads me to the Wisdom of Solomon. The Anglican founders marginalised this book as one to be used ‘for example of life and instruction of manners’, and not for the establishment of doctrine. I accept that while I deplore it, but the line becomes blurred at this point. How can we not see the great wisdom of God and the works of the Spirit of God in holy men and women far outside the confines and boundaries of Christianity? Confronted by a Fred Hollows, an Aung San Suu Kyi, a Steve Biko or a Mahatma Ghandi who cannot see the work of the Spirit of God? Flawed, indeed, but what great saint was not? We might add others: Allen R Schindler, a gay sailor beaten to death by fellow marines in a Nagasaki toilet, or Vincent Lingiari, the aboriginal activist who fought for the rights of Aboriginal workers at Wave Hill. Flawed, but individuals through whom the one I would call the Spirit of God was powerfully at work for justice and compassion: the Spirit who is ‘a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness’.
It may come as a surprise in many circles, but Jesus did not say ‘those who want to follow me, confess me as Lord and rejoice in their own personal salvation’, but ‘if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’. We would be on dangerous ground if we limited the work of the Spirit of God to the often too-cosy in-crowd of Christian believers: ‘not all who cry ‘Lord, Lord’, said Jesus. He rebukes his number one follower, Peter, for failing to see the phenomenal reach, even to degradation and death far beyond the confines of religion, that is the way of the Cross. God will not be confined to the neat and tidy expectations of our comfort zones, but is the one who breaks boundaries and is revealed wherever there is justice, compassion, and the values of immeasurable, life-surrendering love. The onus is on us as a Christian community to look deeply at ourselves to find out whether we are, truly, on the side of that love.
TLBWY
St FRANCIS’ CHURCH, BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, September 16th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 24 / SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: Wisdom of Solomon 7.26 – 8.1
Psalm 19
James 2.18-26
Mark 8.27-38
I have been re-reading, in recent weeks, a masterful history of the development of ideas in the Reformation era. I believe that this is one of the most painful eras in Christian history The proliferation of Christian denominations and cults that has splintered outwards ever since is simply a tragic scar on the credibility of our gospel witness. Without going into a history lesson, yes there were some matters that that the Catholic Church had corrupted into a sorry distortion of gospel truth. Unfortunately, though, the Reformers were soon doing as much if not more damage to the proclamation of the gospel. Within ten or fifteen years of Luther’s original acts of rebellion many within Roman Catholicism were fighting from within to reform its excesses, while holding on to the unity that has never again been attained. Oh that we could set back the clock so that we could retain the integrity that some of the catholic reformers sought. I thjink of barel;y known figures today, such as wise reforming moderates, the likes of a Jean Charlier de Gerson or the later Girolamo Seripando, struggling to maintain theological integrity within Catholicism without resorting to schism, and dying, like Jesus, with no hint whether their struggle would bear fruit. These, along with the better know Desiderius Erasmus, brutally treated by Luther, are the ones who strike me as the heroes of faith-integrity in the Reformation era. All ultimately were on the losing side, as better known names such as Luther, Calvin and even Henry VIII drove a wedge into the heart of the Christian unity for which, John tells us, Jesus prayed in the garden. It was a tragic time, and it is not surprising that many felt the end of the world was nigh.
I make no secret then of my wish that it had never happened. While historical accident led me to Anglicanism, I stand firmly in the shoes of movements within Anglicanism that claim constantly its Catholic heritage, and, while the more extreme English Reformers might turn in their grave, I believe the Oxford Movement within the Anglicanism of the nineteenth century was one of our finest moments and greatest gifts. I thank God for the centrality of the eucharist that was a direct result of that movement, bringing this feast of Jesus back to the centre of most Anglican Christian experience. Other side-effects were reclamation of the importance of the epistles of James and even the deutero-canonical Wisdom of Solomon, deeply resented by the Reformers because they did not suit their decentralization of the institutions of faith.
The Reformers’ personal piety emphasis opened the floodgates that led to the ‘me and my mate Jesus’ spirituality that has so dominated Protestantism ever since. It was the Reformers, not the Catholics that yearned to throw out these tricky books, because they did not suit them, despite their claims as Reformers to emphasize the centrality of Scripture. And no wonder they wanted to cast these books to outer darkness … the epistle of James made it through their misguided censorship in the end because they believed it to have been written by the brother of Jesus. There are all sorts of ironies in the Reformers’ reluctant acceptance of the book, and indeed of their entire relationship to the question of ‘canon’, but perhaps that thought must await another time and place. In the end, thank God it got through, and thank God that, with the Book of Wisdom, it can play a part in the liturgies of the twenty first century.
Because, in this century, it is not a pious ‘me and my personal saviour’ spirituality that will touch lives with the redeeming love of Jesus, but a love that binds up the broken hearted, proclaims liberty to the oppressed (not least those currently being sent to the government’s latest draconian refugee ‘solution’), proclaims sight to the blind. ‘Was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road’, wrote James, to the horror of Martin Luther who, for all his strengths, was determined to make salvation a pietistic, personal matter. How can people see Jesus when we represent a church so wrapped up in personal salvation and piety that we show no compassion for the broken, or when our own obsession with eternal life (whatever that is) drowns out concern for those whose present life is a living hell? It’s not altogether an either/or, I confess, but as I listen to the heartcries of those around me there is no doubt that many people reject Jesus – it seems – because of the self-obsession of his most vocal followers.
Which leads me to the Wisdom of Solomon. The Anglican founders marginalised this book as one to be used ‘for example of life and instruction of manners’, and not for the establishment of doctrine. I accept that while I deplore it, but the line becomes blurred at this point. How can we not see the great wisdom of God and the works of the Spirit of God in holy men and women far outside the confines and boundaries of Christianity? Confronted by a Fred Hollows, an Aung San Suu Kyi, a Steve Biko or a Mahatma Ghandi who cannot see the work of the Spirit of God? Flawed, indeed, but what great saint was not? We might add others: Allen R Schindler, a gay sailor beaten to death by fellow marines in a Nagasaki toilet, or Vincent Lingiari, the aboriginal activist who fought for the rights of Aboriginal workers at Wave Hill. Flawed, but individuals through whom the one I would call the Spirit of God was powerfully at work for justice and compassion: the Spirit who is ‘a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness’.
It may come as a surprise in many circles, but Jesus did not say ‘those who want to follow me, confess me as Lord and rejoice in their own personal salvation’, but ‘if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’. We would be on dangerous ground if we limited the work of the Spirit of God to the often too-cosy in-crowd of Christian believers: ‘not all who cry ‘Lord, Lord’, said Jesus. He rebukes his number one follower, Peter, for failing to see the phenomenal reach, even to degradation and death far beyond the confines of religion, that is the way of the Cross. God will not be confined to the neat and tidy expectations of our comfort zones, but is the one who breaks boundaries and is revealed wherever there is justice, compassion, and the values of immeasurable, life-surrendering love. The onus is on us as a Christian community to look deeply at ourselves to find out whether we are, truly, on the side of that love.
TLBWY
Saturday, 8 September 2012
Faith: straight-jacket or liberator?
SERMON PREACHED AT
CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL, DARWIN
SUNDAY, September 9th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 23 / SIXTEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: Proverbs 22.1-2, 8-9, 22-23
Psalm 125
James 2.1-10, 14-17
Mark 7.24-37
TLBWY
CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL, DARWIN
SUNDAY, September 9th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 23 / SIXTEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: Proverbs 22.1-2, 8-9, 22-23
Psalm 125
James 2.1-10, 14-17
Mark 7.24-37
Since the rise of feminist theology there has a tendency to see the encounter between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman as a victory of femaledom over a masculine saviour, with a sort of subtext that points out enthusiastically that the Incarnation needed an encounter with the feminine in order to be truly enlightened. It is in a liberation sense a very satisfying reading of the text, and one that is designed to rock maledom back on the haunches of its often myopic hermeneutic endeavour. To some extent such a reading is valid: Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza was right to remind the oestrogen-challenged amongst us that ours was not the copyright of interpretation, and to remind us that the survival of women’s stories in the scriptures of a patriarchal community is powerful testimony to the place women had in the events depicted by the biblical writers.
But we need to be careful if we allow this corrective to spill over into a sense that God particularly needs anyone. It may surprise my ego, it may surprise yours – though you may be more humble than I am! – that God does not need my insight, or the dean’s or the bishop’s or the Pope’s or Mother Theresa’s or Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s or anyone’s to pluck the chords of the universe. The connection we have to God is a part of the one-sided equation of grace, and, while we might with Abraham or the Syrophoenician woman argue with God from time to time, might even appear to win occasional negotiations, we need to know our place in the great equations of eternity’s history. Humankind has not achieved great performance indicators in the running its affairs, let alone those of the universe.
Nevertheless, this is an encounter between a feisty woman – every bit as feisty as Abraham – and the one in whom we find the fullness of divinity revealed, in whom the author of Colossians says ‘all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’, no push-over. Jesus reveals all the limitations of being human: tired, even irascible, he has fled the ethnic and geographical boundaries of his people, in an attempt to find refuge. This is not the first time his healing compassion and love touches and transforms the life of a non-Jew – the demoniac from the Decapolis is unlikely to have been a Jew – but it is a remarkable occasion. He engages crossly with the woman – there was a form of interpretation popular 50 years ago that maintained that he was only pretending to be cross, but I hardly find that satisfying! – but the desperation of her plight, at least as much as the powerful logic of her argument, wins him over. It is a momentous shift in Jesus self-understanding – the shift that some interpreters try to protect Jesus from. The utterly human Jesus encounters a pointer to a new way by which to understand his mission.
In this, surely, Jesus is an embodiment of all that his subsequent ‘body’, the Church, must also do and be? Those interpreters who seek to protect Jesus from a shift in understanding are often attempting to protect divinity from change, even protecting the Church from mutability, from changeability. It is a wonderful argument whether the perfection of divinity can change, and one that belongs over some good red wine amongst good friends, but it is in the end meaningless. What is critical is that our understanding of divinity can and must change – to some extent the miracle is that Mark allowed himself to record an event that so clearly raised these questions. Can God change? Can Jesus change? Can we change? Are we able to measure our mission according to outside forces?’
The answer of the story is: yes. There are some non-negotiables here: Jesus does not change from being the self-revelation of the just and compassionate heart of God into a capricious clown, or change from (admittedly tired) compassion into being a perpetrator of wanton destructiveness. He neither withers the woman with a divine thunderbolt, nor suddenly changes the kernel of his mission. The measure of missiological integrity is not mutability, change for the sake of change, but rather consistency: change for the sake of pointing deeper into the heart of a God who is only slowly coming within the sphere of our myopic sight. A woman’s feisty desperation touches and transforms the divine heart of the Incarnate Son because that heart is beating in unison with the compassionate heart of the Creator.
At this point we might say then, quite simply, that God does not change, but our own limited understanding of God can and must constantly change.
There are though boundaries to change and its directions. I value deeply the three-legged stool of Anglicanism that sees scripture, tradition and reason exercising their control over our mission and interpretation. I prefer to see them, to be sure, as a flexible tripod, with the occasional lengthening of one leg over the others as the surface of experience changes, but a tripod nevertheless. The Spirit of God will constantly funnel God’s intentions through – if I may slaughter a metaphor – those legs, and those legs will not always neatly fit within the expectations of being Church. So, faced with new understandings of sexuality in the human person, for example, we must not simply rely on a knee-jerk bondage to one of the three legs (tradition, I suspect, rather than scripture, which has been dubiously interpreted by those frightened by redefinitions of marriage). Instead we must look for the harmonies of God’s Spirit-wind beyond our narrow boundaries of expectation. It is, surely, love, fidelity, mutuality, rather than the shape or reproductive functionality of human bodies that should guide our understanding of the will and purpose of God? Surely an edifying, enriching mutual love between two committed partners regardless of gender is far more attuned to the God who is love and justice than a brutal power imbalance enshrined in liturgy and adopted often unwillingly by the more vulnerable partner?
I can in so short a time only float these ideas, with the reminder that the winds of change often blow beyond the dusty corridors of expectation, that the work of the Spirit of God is often visible in the community before the Church. Besides, I know the Dean more than merely floats the ideas! Perhaps this moment in the life of Jesus was an embodiment of the principle that the followers of Jesus must be open to the voice of God from beyond the walled gardens of our expectations. If it’s good enough for Jesus, in other words, it’s good enough for me. Referring to another passage, but with reference to this one too, Walter Brueggemann writes:
It is in healing leprosy that Jesus contradicts the norms of society concerning clean and unclean. And in causing that rethinking of clean and unclean Jesus was in fact calling into question all the moral distinctions upon which society was based
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 101-102.
We have a choice: do we hear the appeal of those who want to feel and experience the loving, redeeming word of Christ, or do we constantly push them out beyond the boundaries, to the Tyres and Sidons of our world by hanging tenaciously to the legalism of our past, firing misdirected biblical texts and unexplored phobias at outsiders in order to keep them in their place and out of ours?
TLBWY
Tuesday, 4 September 2012
Infotainment and the stuttered gospel
You may have gathered by now that I am an irredeemable SBS or, occasionally, ABC TV news viewer. I have long been suspicious of media owned by private individuals, and, since reading the late Neil Postman’s ground-breaking study Amusing Ourselves to Death a quarter of a century ago I have been very sceptical of the ability of ratings-hungry and privately owned entertainment media (channels 7, 9 & 10) to address anything remotely discomforting in the infotainment episodes they pass off as news and current affairs bulletins. Call me a snob, but when a company’s income is dependent on ratings, and ratings are dependent on an audience’s good feelings (warm fuzzies), I doubt they’ll address genuinely challenging, discomforting issues.
But, as usual, I digress. These days I get most of my news from Al Jazeera and SBS. Not even ABC (who have slowly compromised in obedience to their owner, the government's need for ratings!). Over and again, night after night — on the nights I get to watch the news — I am confronted by the world’s injustices. In particular at present I watch the news out of Syria, and despair. Who is telling the truth? How can I know? If the Spring Revolution of Egypt is any indication atrocity and evil will only give way to more atrocity and more evil (if you recall my Advent studies on Revelation this is no new theme). I feel helpless, confused, and helpless again.
I often do. There is, as ‘the preacher’ (or Qoheleth) of Ecclesiastes reminds us, nothing new under the sun. Call me a wuss but as I am confronted by the enormities and the injustices and the sheer insurmountable hurdles of collective human and of individual fallibility I am thrown more and more back into the slender hope of a Saviour. Not, as many Christians believe, a saviour of ‘the saved’, but a Saviour of the World. What that means I do not understand, but in my preaching and in my living I will hope to continue to stutter that possibility. It’s bigger than my small understanding, and so more and more I will fall back on the simple, incoherent Christian hope: come Lord Jesus (maranatha) and that first Christian creed, stuttered against all odds, ‘Jesus is Lord’.
But, as usual, I digress. These days I get most of my news from Al Jazeera and SBS. Not even ABC (who have slowly compromised in obedience to their owner, the government's need for ratings!). Over and again, night after night — on the nights I get to watch the news — I am confronted by the world’s injustices. In particular at present I watch the news out of Syria, and despair. Who is telling the truth? How can I know? If the Spring Revolution of Egypt is any indication atrocity and evil will only give way to more atrocity and more evil (if you recall my Advent studies on Revelation this is no new theme). I feel helpless, confused, and helpless again.
I often do. There is, as ‘the preacher’ (or Qoheleth) of Ecclesiastes reminds us, nothing new under the sun. Call me a wuss but as I am confronted by the enormities and the injustices and the sheer insurmountable hurdles of collective human and of individual fallibility I am thrown more and more back into the slender hope of a Saviour. Not, as many Christians believe, a saviour of ‘the saved’, but a Saviour of the World. What that means I do not understand, but in my preaching and in my living I will hope to continue to stutter that possibility. It’s bigger than my small understanding, and so more and more I will fall back on the simple, incoherent Christian hope: come Lord Jesus (maranatha) and that first Christian creed, stuttered against all odds, ‘Jesus is Lord’.
Friday, 31 August 2012
Eros and the God of Love
SERMON PREACHED AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, September 2nd 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 22 / FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST)
Readings: Song of Songs 2.8-13
Psalm 45.1-2, 6-9
James 1.17-27
Mark 7.1-8, 14-23
Amongst my many mid-life crises – a description that is increasingly over optimistic as I slide into what I fear is Shakespeare’s fifth out of seven ages of human life! – was one brought about during my first post-grad degree, when I had cause to read a book by a man called Alexander Irwin. The book had much within it with which I was impressed, much at which I was somewhat horrified. But that wasn’t the point: the point was that the learnèd author was younger than I was. Actually I had a similar crisis a few years earlier when Kylie Minogue hit the airwaves, but that’s another story altogether. The real story is that Irwin was the first author to alert me to the sense of the erotic in the human relationship with God, with the divine.
Eros, the ancients’ god of sexuality, has tended to receive bad press within the Christian community. Not least, in recent decades, this was driven by C.S. Lewis, who in his The Four Loves treats Eros in some depth, but is often misrepresented by people who haven’t read him as disparaging (‘dissing’) this form of love. He doesn’t, but at the same time he recognizes its limitations and potentials for abuse. I have no argument with that, and my author Alexander Irwin is not engaging, in any case, with Lewis, but with a very different philosopher/theologian, Paul Tillich.
Paul Tillich, who had an enormous influence on twentieth century theology, needn’t altogether detain us here, except in so far as he introduced the language of eros into the descriptions of the relationship between humans and the divine. Tillich, it must be acknowledged, allegedly had a few problems of his own with regards to the erotic, but that for now is another story. What does matter was that he took something of which Christians have often, at least since St Augustine, been afraid, and tried to draw it into the mainstream of Christian discourse. Which is the point of Alexander Irwin’s book (Eros Toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic) even as it gave me my nineteenth nervous breakdown, midlife crisis, or whatever it was.
In fact if we reach into the writings of the mediaeval and earlier mystics we will find that the language of the erotic often tinges writings about the life of prayer and devotion into which holy men and women of God entered through prayer and extraordinary discipline. The Reformers cast out many babies with the bathwater of reformation: a quick tour of England’s ruins soon reveals the extent of Henry VIII’s and Thomas Cromwell’s obscene orgy of destruction. Like the Taliban destroying statues of the Buddha they rode roughshod over human spirituality, destroying both the corrupt and the godly in their demonic pogrom. That, sadly, is a flaw deep in the DNA of Protestantism, and one we must admit with shame, if that is, we see ourselves as Protestant.
But in the wonderful life of prayer of those whose writings - and even architecture - survived there is a longing for the knowledge and experience of God that has probably only ever been matched, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, by the author of the Song of Songs. That book, from which we read today, was of course ‘spiritualised’ by Christian writers, removing its essential energies so that it became a weak parody of itself. It is a writing about longing and love, of bride and groom and all that courses through human veins and arteries when we are – or were, when we were younger – captivated by the darts of the erotic. It is not about the love of Christ for his Church.
Except that it can be. It isn’t, but it is. The love of Christ for his Church, and for you and for me, and the love that we can experience for the risen Christ in moments of immeasurable devotion, that love has all the uncontrolled idiocy of the erotic but so, so much more. That was, I believe, the point that Tillich was attempting to make.
We have however tended to exercise no more than a flaccid parody of that love. One poet wrote in rather unchurchy terms of what one vandal once did to a statue of Venus: perhaps all we can say in church is that the vandal removed that statue’s potential for fathering baby statues.* We have done it often, in our preaching and teaching, too often portraying our God as a miserable celestial wowser forcing eternal miseries on his – his – subjects. That is not the God of the Songs of Songs – though there is no doubt that the deification of sexuality is a dangerous misdirection of energy, too.
Too often we major in the minors, fixating on easily identifiable errors in human lives, rather than flaming the spark of God’s image in struggling human beings. This of course effects not only questions of sexuality: anxious to override excesses of the mediaeval catholic church the Reformers did all they could to destroy many of its good points, too. Luther was so determined to emphasise, rightly, his gospel of grace that he, wrongly, sought to drive a bitter wedge between faith and so-called ‘works’ and between grace and works in the life of the believer – he even expressed the wish that the book we know as James be excised from the canon of faith.
How dare he? The books of scripture slowly came together in what we have come to know as the bible, slowly came together in a remarkable working of the Divine Spirit, slowly came together and were agreed on by the magisterium that Luther and other reformers hated, but by whose decisions they were, ironically bound in their obsession with scripture. It wasn’t written in scripture which books were scripture – but I digress! As a result of their obsession we often lost sight of the need to outwork our faith in works of what used to be called ‘charity’, to demonstrate as the first Christians did that the love of Jesus, in all its cruciform shape, is a practical love that empowers the disempowered, feeds the hungry, caresses the soul of the refugee even when wider society dismisses him or her as a queue-jumper and locks them behind razor wire.
Which ironically, or providentially, brings us at last to the acerbic words of Jesus, directed at religious hypocrites in every age, at those who lay burdens on the shoulders of the struggling in every age, of those who create prerequisites to the encounter with God’s love in every age. The acerbic words of Jesus that tell us that when we say people have to be more heterosexual or more middleclass or more Europeanised or more literary to encounter our God that it is we, not they who stand judged and condemned: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ Too often, instead of using the potentials of the world around us as signposts to the magnificence of God we use them as weapons with which to hurt and condemn. Too often we make our Jesus not into the attractive, erotically magnetic figure that he is, but into a stern invisible friend, who judges only to condemn, not beckons to redeem.
We must not drive a wedge between sexuality and access to the divine giftings of eternity, any more than we should drive a wedge between faith and works, grace and works, love and works. Faith, hope, love: all these and more are the outworking of our experience of the God who calls us: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”. We should be responsible celebrators of the giftedness of human life, not the destroyers of happiness we often seem to be. The mediaeval mystics were attracted through prayer and liturgy to encounter the divine with every pore of their erotic being. We have too often turned God into the subject of a scientific formula: telling them to say the sinner’s prayer, as Dylan parodies in his masterful “If You Ever Go To Houston”, so that all is suddenly, magically, eternally well when we do. We have emasculated not only eros, the God of love, but have de-energized the author of love. By seeing, or sounding as if we see, the world and all that is in it as defiled and defiling we have set ourselves against the potential of God. The challenge is to become so saturated in God-awareness through our own lives of prayer and liturgy that the powerful erotic beacon of the Creator shines through us, through our worship, through our acts of compassion and draws those around us back into the embrace of eternity.
TLBWY
*The statue of a Greek god lay on the floor
With his prick and balls knocked off by a chisel.
'Alison,' I said, 'they've buggered the god of death,
They've cut the balls off the god of love.
How can their art survive?'
James K Baxter, "Ode to Auckland" (18 October, 1972). In James K Baxter Collected Poems (Wellington, NZ: Oxford University Press, 1979), 598.
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, September 2nd 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 22 / FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST)
Readings: Song of Songs 2.8-13
Psalm 45.1-2, 6-9
James 1.17-27
Mark 7.1-8, 14-23
Amongst my many mid-life crises – a description that is increasingly over optimistic as I slide into what I fear is Shakespeare’s fifth out of seven ages of human life! – was one brought about during my first post-grad degree, when I had cause to read a book by a man called Alexander Irwin. The book had much within it with which I was impressed, much at which I was somewhat horrified. But that wasn’t the point: the point was that the learnèd author was younger than I was. Actually I had a similar crisis a few years earlier when Kylie Minogue hit the airwaves, but that’s another story altogether. The real story is that Irwin was the first author to alert me to the sense of the erotic in the human relationship with God, with the divine.
Eros, the ancients’ god of sexuality, has tended to receive bad press within the Christian community. Not least, in recent decades, this was driven by C.S. Lewis, who in his The Four Loves treats Eros in some depth, but is often misrepresented by people who haven’t read him as disparaging (‘dissing’) this form of love. He doesn’t, but at the same time he recognizes its limitations and potentials for abuse. I have no argument with that, and my author Alexander Irwin is not engaging, in any case, with Lewis, but with a very different philosopher/theologian, Paul Tillich.
Paul Tillich, who had an enormous influence on twentieth century theology, needn’t altogether detain us here, except in so far as he introduced the language of eros into the descriptions of the relationship between humans and the divine. Tillich, it must be acknowledged, allegedly had a few problems of his own with regards to the erotic, but that for now is another story. What does matter was that he took something of which Christians have often, at least since St Augustine, been afraid, and tried to draw it into the mainstream of Christian discourse. Which is the point of Alexander Irwin’s book (Eros Toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic) even as it gave me my nineteenth nervous breakdown, midlife crisis, or whatever it was.
In fact if we reach into the writings of the mediaeval and earlier mystics we will find that the language of the erotic often tinges writings about the life of prayer and devotion into which holy men and women of God entered through prayer and extraordinary discipline. The Reformers cast out many babies with the bathwater of reformation: a quick tour of England’s ruins soon reveals the extent of Henry VIII’s and Thomas Cromwell’s obscene orgy of destruction. Like the Taliban destroying statues of the Buddha they rode roughshod over human spirituality, destroying both the corrupt and the godly in their demonic pogrom. That, sadly, is a flaw deep in the DNA of Protestantism, and one we must admit with shame, if that is, we see ourselves as Protestant.
But in the wonderful life of prayer of those whose writings - and even architecture - survived there is a longing for the knowledge and experience of God that has probably only ever been matched, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, by the author of the Song of Songs. That book, from which we read today, was of course ‘spiritualised’ by Christian writers, removing its essential energies so that it became a weak parody of itself. It is a writing about longing and love, of bride and groom and all that courses through human veins and arteries when we are – or were, when we were younger – captivated by the darts of the erotic. It is not about the love of Christ for his Church.
Except that it can be. It isn’t, but it is. The love of Christ for his Church, and for you and for me, and the love that we can experience for the risen Christ in moments of immeasurable devotion, that love has all the uncontrolled idiocy of the erotic but so, so much more. That was, I believe, the point that Tillich was attempting to make.
We have however tended to exercise no more than a flaccid parody of that love. One poet wrote in rather unchurchy terms of what one vandal once did to a statue of Venus: perhaps all we can say in church is that the vandal removed that statue’s potential for fathering baby statues.* We have done it often, in our preaching and teaching, too often portraying our God as a miserable celestial wowser forcing eternal miseries on his – his – subjects. That is not the God of the Songs of Songs – though there is no doubt that the deification of sexuality is a dangerous misdirection of energy, too.
Too often we major in the minors, fixating on easily identifiable errors in human lives, rather than flaming the spark of God’s image in struggling human beings. This of course effects not only questions of sexuality: anxious to override excesses of the mediaeval catholic church the Reformers did all they could to destroy many of its good points, too. Luther was so determined to emphasise, rightly, his gospel of grace that he, wrongly, sought to drive a bitter wedge between faith and so-called ‘works’ and between grace and works in the life of the believer – he even expressed the wish that the book we know as James be excised from the canon of faith.
How dare he? The books of scripture slowly came together in what we have come to know as the bible, slowly came together in a remarkable working of the Divine Spirit, slowly came together and were agreed on by the magisterium that Luther and other reformers hated, but by whose decisions they were, ironically bound in their obsession with scripture. It wasn’t written in scripture which books were scripture – but I digress! As a result of their obsession we often lost sight of the need to outwork our faith in works of what used to be called ‘charity’, to demonstrate as the first Christians did that the love of Jesus, in all its cruciform shape, is a practical love that empowers the disempowered, feeds the hungry, caresses the soul of the refugee even when wider society dismisses him or her as a queue-jumper and locks them behind razor wire.
Which ironically, or providentially, brings us at last to the acerbic words of Jesus, directed at religious hypocrites in every age, at those who lay burdens on the shoulders of the struggling in every age, of those who create prerequisites to the encounter with God’s love in every age. The acerbic words of Jesus that tell us that when we say people have to be more heterosexual or more middleclass or more Europeanised or more literary to encounter our God that it is we, not they who stand judged and condemned: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ Too often, instead of using the potentials of the world around us as signposts to the magnificence of God we use them as weapons with which to hurt and condemn. Too often we make our Jesus not into the attractive, erotically magnetic figure that he is, but into a stern invisible friend, who judges only to condemn, not beckons to redeem.
We must not drive a wedge between sexuality and access to the divine giftings of eternity, any more than we should drive a wedge between faith and works, grace and works, love and works. Faith, hope, love: all these and more are the outworking of our experience of the God who calls us: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”. We should be responsible celebrators of the giftedness of human life, not the destroyers of happiness we often seem to be. The mediaeval mystics were attracted through prayer and liturgy to encounter the divine with every pore of their erotic being. We have too often turned God into the subject of a scientific formula: telling them to say the sinner’s prayer, as Dylan parodies in his masterful “If You Ever Go To Houston”, so that all is suddenly, magically, eternally well when we do. We have emasculated not only eros, the God of love, but have de-energized the author of love. By seeing, or sounding as if we see, the world and all that is in it as defiled and defiling we have set ourselves against the potential of God. The challenge is to become so saturated in God-awareness through our own lives of prayer and liturgy that the powerful erotic beacon of the Creator shines through us, through our worship, through our acts of compassion and draws those around us back into the embrace of eternity.
TLBWY
*The statue of a Greek god lay on the floor
With his prick and balls knocked off by a chisel.
'Alison,' I said, 'they've buggered the god of death,
They've cut the balls off the god of love.
How can their art survive?'
James K Baxter, "Ode to Auckland" (18 October, 1972). In James K Baxter Collected Poems (Wellington, NZ: Oxford University Press, 1979), 598.
Saturday, 4 August 2012
good news for the not good enough
SERMON PREACHED AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, August 5th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 18 / TENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: 2 Samuel 11.26 -12.13a
Psalm 51.1-12
Ephesians 4.1-16
John 6.24-35
It’s probably safe to tell the story, more than 5000 kilometres from its place of origin, of the clergyman in a far-off parish who decided in a dramatic manner to confess his conspicuous sins in the context of parish liturgy. It was evensong, back in the days before video killed the radio star, television killed the pulpit star, and Facebook killed the lot, placing our inner angst at the centre of the omniverse (though that is a different sermon altogether!). In a dramatic sermon the good archdeacon – and no, I am not creating any precedents or parallels here! – decided it was time metaphorically and spiritually to bare his all, and to go at least some way towards bearing his all sartorially at the same time. And so, having in his sermon dramatically confessed that he was having an affair with a parishioner, he removed his liturgical garments and exited the church with a flourish, never, literally, to return.
It was an ugly moment in the life of the faith community, and one from which it struggled to recover for many years. It was, needless to say, a devastating moment in the life of the archdeacon’s marriage and family, details of which I am not privy to. It was in many ways a human tragedy that, at a whole heap of levels need never have happened. It was a story that gave Anglican Christianity a bad name in a small provincial town – and let’s face it, we, like all the Christian denominations, have had our fair share of moments by which we have given ourselves a bad name. This was at least one of the lesser ones, for all the devastation that was caused by his public pronouncement of fallibility and sin it was far less so than the shenanigans that continue to emerge not only from churches, but from all the caring professions as the sad tales of victims of abuse emerge into the daylight.
The histrionics that accompanied the failed archdeacon’s self-exposing confession were probably both redemptive and destructive, and no doubt intrinsic to his own particular personality type and psychological needs. He left the embrace of the church altogether, and I know nothing of the fate of others trapped in his errors. Society in any case demands retribution, and the complex issues of errant sexuality expose hypocrisies in Church and Society alike. Serial monogamy, which is what affairs often represent, is de rigueur in contemporary society (as reflected in the nonsense sold as magazines), and we might well want to flag a more decent standard. Predation, on the other hand, is forgivable by almost no-one but God, and we must feel the pain when our own offend so deeply against common decency.
Forgivable by almost no-one but God: yet the story of David which we have been following now for some weeks takes us, as Anne reminded us last week, deep into the heart of human failure. David was adulterous, murderous, and a predatory abuser of power. He was neither the first nor the last, yet he remains in Jewish and Christian history one of the great heroes of faith. Psalm 51 may or may not really have been written by David – I see no reason why not, though many scholars doubt it – but the point is that it takes us deep, deep into the heart of human failure. Have I ever failed in my life? Have you? I’m not going to engage in the histrionics of the archdeacon of many years and many decades ago, and nor should you, but the engagement of a journey into the heart of God begins with the recognition of our failure. Am I good enough to be a priest? No. Am I good enough to be a Christian? No. But, as the gospels remind us as they outline the abysmal failings of Peter and the apostles, nor is anyone. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news of and for the not good enough – it is no accident that the Cross, our central symbol, is a symbol of cataclysmic failure (albeit, I would argue, not the failure of Jesus the Christ, but your failure and mine to see and know Jesus as the Christ). It is no accident that Psalm 51 was rapidly associated with the pain and suffering of the Christ on the Cross, who, while we call him sinless, nevertheless entered into the deepest depths of darkness.
Our faith-lives must be lives of integrity. There’s a sense in which that begins when we can enter into the human depths of Psalm 51, and its reflections on the depths of the darkness of King David. It is there we meet the Christ: where we admit our fallibility, moral, social, intellectual, even athletic (as I reminded the people of Kormilda last week), and allow the invasion of Christ into our lives to be a greater, higher, more demanding truth, it is there that the journey into God begins.
As it happens that will never make us flavour of the month. While the broken human must pay society’s dues for crime and sin, nevertheless, we must never forget that the arms of Christ reach even into betrayal, murder and abuse. It is there that David becomes an icon of faith. It is there, in our failings, which are, pray God, less spectacular, that we can again and again reach the Christ who beckons us into the for-evers of God, there that we begin the work that Jesus calls ‘believing in him’. Even without histrionics: just, pray God, with integrity.
TLBWY
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, August 5th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 18 / TENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: 2 Samuel 11.26 -12.13a
Psalm 51.1-12
Ephesians 4.1-16
John 6.24-35
It’s probably safe to tell the story, more than 5000 kilometres from its place of origin, of the clergyman in a far-off parish who decided in a dramatic manner to confess his conspicuous sins in the context of parish liturgy. It was evensong, back in the days before video killed the radio star, television killed the pulpit star, and Facebook killed the lot, placing our inner angst at the centre of the omniverse (though that is a different sermon altogether!). In a dramatic sermon the good archdeacon – and no, I am not creating any precedents or parallels here! – decided it was time metaphorically and spiritually to bare his all, and to go at least some way towards bearing his all sartorially at the same time. And so, having in his sermon dramatically confessed that he was having an affair with a parishioner, he removed his liturgical garments and exited the church with a flourish, never, literally, to return.
It was an ugly moment in the life of the faith community, and one from which it struggled to recover for many years. It was, needless to say, a devastating moment in the life of the archdeacon’s marriage and family, details of which I am not privy to. It was in many ways a human tragedy that, at a whole heap of levels need never have happened. It was a story that gave Anglican Christianity a bad name in a small provincial town – and let’s face it, we, like all the Christian denominations, have had our fair share of moments by which we have given ourselves a bad name. This was at least one of the lesser ones, for all the devastation that was caused by his public pronouncement of fallibility and sin it was far less so than the shenanigans that continue to emerge not only from churches, but from all the caring professions as the sad tales of victims of abuse emerge into the daylight.
The histrionics that accompanied the failed archdeacon’s self-exposing confession were probably both redemptive and destructive, and no doubt intrinsic to his own particular personality type and psychological needs. He left the embrace of the church altogether, and I know nothing of the fate of others trapped in his errors. Society in any case demands retribution, and the complex issues of errant sexuality expose hypocrisies in Church and Society alike. Serial monogamy, which is what affairs often represent, is de rigueur in contemporary society (as reflected in the nonsense sold as magazines), and we might well want to flag a more decent standard. Predation, on the other hand, is forgivable by almost no-one but God, and we must feel the pain when our own offend so deeply against common decency.
Forgivable by almost no-one but God: yet the story of David which we have been following now for some weeks takes us, as Anne reminded us last week, deep into the heart of human failure. David was adulterous, murderous, and a predatory abuser of power. He was neither the first nor the last, yet he remains in Jewish and Christian history one of the great heroes of faith. Psalm 51 may or may not really have been written by David – I see no reason why not, though many scholars doubt it – but the point is that it takes us deep, deep into the heart of human failure. Have I ever failed in my life? Have you? I’m not going to engage in the histrionics of the archdeacon of many years and many decades ago, and nor should you, but the engagement of a journey into the heart of God begins with the recognition of our failure. Am I good enough to be a priest? No. Am I good enough to be a Christian? No. But, as the gospels remind us as they outline the abysmal failings of Peter and the apostles, nor is anyone. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news of and for the not good enough – it is no accident that the Cross, our central symbol, is a symbol of cataclysmic failure (albeit, I would argue, not the failure of Jesus the Christ, but your failure and mine to see and know Jesus as the Christ). It is no accident that Psalm 51 was rapidly associated with the pain and suffering of the Christ on the Cross, who, while we call him sinless, nevertheless entered into the deepest depths of darkness.
Our faith-lives must be lives of integrity. There’s a sense in which that begins when we can enter into the human depths of Psalm 51, and its reflections on the depths of the darkness of King David. It is there we meet the Christ: where we admit our fallibility, moral, social, intellectual, even athletic (as I reminded the people of Kormilda last week), and allow the invasion of Christ into our lives to be a greater, higher, more demanding truth, it is there that the journey into God begins.
As it happens that will never make us flavour of the month. While the broken human must pay society’s dues for crime and sin, nevertheless, we must never forget that the arms of Christ reach even into betrayal, murder and abuse. It is there that David becomes an icon of faith. It is there, in our failings, which are, pray God, less spectacular, that we can again and again reach the Christ who beckons us into the for-evers of God, there that we begin the work that Jesus calls ‘believing in him’. Even without histrionics: just, pray God, with integrity.
TLBWY
Walking Talking Temples
SERMON PREACHED AT THE
CHURCH OF St FRANCIS, BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, July 22nd 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 16 / EIGHTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: 2 Samuel 7.1-14a
Psalm 89.21-38
Ephesians 2.11-22
Mark 6.30-34, 53-56
To read the story of the Hebrew people and of their Temple, edited as the story was over hundreds of years, is to read the story of a people both open to the new and tenacious in their adherence to that which is valuable in their past. The tricky bit, of course, is to know what is worth holding to, and what is worthy only to be jettisoned. The great and sometimes bitter arguments of church history and theology are, I suggest (and suggest retrospectively, for hindsight is a wonderful thing!) the brutal outworkings of God’s Spirit, that unsettling, disturbing third Person of the Trinity. Which is always very easy to say after the event, but less easy when we are caught in the midst. When no less a figure than David has the bright idea of building a Temple for his God to dwell in, but is chastised by a God who will not – yet – be even symbolically restrained by walls, when no less a figure than David gets it radically wrong (as he so often did!) it should only serve to encourage us in our blunderings.
Of course if we were to step outside of today’s text we would know that the Temple continued and continues to have a troubled story. Visible only as ruins today, it has twice been built and twice destroyed. Some millennialist groups insist on seeing any completion of a Third temple as a prelude to the end of time. While that may be right – though I personally doubt it – I abhor, and so should we all – the fact that such a belief leads them to blind support of anything and everything the modern State of Israel does to oppress its admittedly recalcitrant neighbours, the Palestinian and other Arab States. Confronted by millennialist preaching that permits such atrocity (yet privately affirms that believing Jews are condemned to hell for their rejection of the messiah-hood of Jesus) we must ask over and again what would, what did Jesus do? Did he preach hate, or love, oppression or liberation, division or reconciliation?
Indeed we might even remember the New Testament teaching, alluded to in our Ephesians reading and powerfully stated in 1 Cor. 6, that it is the believer’s body, the believer’s ‘selfhood’ we might say, that becomes the dwelling place of the Shekinah, the holiness of God. This teaching may not have been entirely unique to the Christian community, but it was a powerful hallmark of the Christians’ self-understanding, and drove their attitudes to sexuality (reflected in Paul’s teaching on prostitution) in particular. Jesus himself had become the walking, talking locus of God – which is why Peter was not permitted to build tabernacles on the Mount of Transfiguration – and the New Testament People of God were, by the indwelling of the Spirit, likewise the dwelling place of God’s holiness, God’s shekinah. The implications of this for debates about sexuality in today’s context are complex, and more complex than they at first sight appear; there is no doubt this sense of personal in-dwelling of God’s holiness has shaped Christians’ attitudes to all aspects of what we might call ‘bodiliness’, also apparent in Paul’s slightly self-conscious diversion on the many members of one body in 1 Cor. 12.
If we though, are as it were mini-temples, what other implications are there for the way in which we live our lives? There is a sense in which we are called to live our lives as reminders to ourselves and those around us of the values of the eternities of God. At the very least this means we are called to raise ourselves above the ephemeral eternal present of the society around us. This isn’t easy: almost all the values of the market-place in which we live are based on ephemera. In the baptism service we are asked to turn to Christ and to ‘reject selfish living, and all that is false and unjust’. I doubt any of us can claim to have fulfilled that promise – one of the reasons I reject a ‘rigorist’ approach to baptising children. The shoes I wear were made in an Asian sweat shop, the fossil fuels I burn in my car are destroying God’s earth, the food thrown out at the end of each day in the cafés I frequent could feed a third world family. Have I rejected selfish living?
And yet the author of Ephesians calls us to be the peace of Christ. The liturgical sharing of the peace is no trivial moment: we are saying to one another may you be, and may I be an embodiment of God’s peace that is, as Paul put it, beyond human comprehension. Martin Luther King was not the first to remind God’s people that God’s peace is not a warm and fuzzy feeling, but the absence of all injustice: I for one am far from an embodiment or walking advertisement of the perfect justice and righteousness that Jesus embodied.
These are of course no more than meandering thoughts, random thoughts triggered by stories about temples, about dividing walls of injustice, about gaps between haves and have-nots materially and spiritually. I can ultimately look only at my own life and know that it – that I – fall far short of what Paul calls the glory of God, far short of the dwelling place of God’s shekinah, God’s holiness that I am called to be. Yet that is what God calls us to be – calls us to be, and despite our inadequacies, simply calls us as being. We are not yet what we are called to be, but we are called to become what we already are in Christ.
TLBWY
CHURCH OF St FRANCIS, BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, July 22nd 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 16 / EIGHTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: 2 Samuel 7.1-14a
Psalm 89.21-38
Ephesians 2.11-22
Mark 6.30-34, 53-56
To read the story of the Hebrew people and of their Temple, edited as the story was over hundreds of years, is to read the story of a people both open to the new and tenacious in their adherence to that which is valuable in their past. The tricky bit, of course, is to know what is worth holding to, and what is worthy only to be jettisoned. The great and sometimes bitter arguments of church history and theology are, I suggest (and suggest retrospectively, for hindsight is a wonderful thing!) the brutal outworkings of God’s Spirit, that unsettling, disturbing third Person of the Trinity. Which is always very easy to say after the event, but less easy when we are caught in the midst. When no less a figure than David has the bright idea of building a Temple for his God to dwell in, but is chastised by a God who will not – yet – be even symbolically restrained by walls, when no less a figure than David gets it radically wrong (as he so often did!) it should only serve to encourage us in our blunderings.
Of course if we were to step outside of today’s text we would know that the Temple continued and continues to have a troubled story. Visible only as ruins today, it has twice been built and twice destroyed. Some millennialist groups insist on seeing any completion of a Third temple as a prelude to the end of time. While that may be right – though I personally doubt it – I abhor, and so should we all – the fact that such a belief leads them to blind support of anything and everything the modern State of Israel does to oppress its admittedly recalcitrant neighbours, the Palestinian and other Arab States. Confronted by millennialist preaching that permits such atrocity (yet privately affirms that believing Jews are condemned to hell for their rejection of the messiah-hood of Jesus) we must ask over and again what would, what did Jesus do? Did he preach hate, or love, oppression or liberation, division or reconciliation?
Indeed we might even remember the New Testament teaching, alluded to in our Ephesians reading and powerfully stated in 1 Cor. 6, that it is the believer’s body, the believer’s ‘selfhood’ we might say, that becomes the dwelling place of the Shekinah, the holiness of God. This teaching may not have been entirely unique to the Christian community, but it was a powerful hallmark of the Christians’ self-understanding, and drove their attitudes to sexuality (reflected in Paul’s teaching on prostitution) in particular. Jesus himself had become the walking, talking locus of God – which is why Peter was not permitted to build tabernacles on the Mount of Transfiguration – and the New Testament People of God were, by the indwelling of the Spirit, likewise the dwelling place of God’s holiness, God’s shekinah. The implications of this for debates about sexuality in today’s context are complex, and more complex than they at first sight appear; there is no doubt this sense of personal in-dwelling of God’s holiness has shaped Christians’ attitudes to all aspects of what we might call ‘bodiliness’, also apparent in Paul’s slightly self-conscious diversion on the many members of one body in 1 Cor. 12.
If we though, are as it were mini-temples, what other implications are there for the way in which we live our lives? There is a sense in which we are called to live our lives as reminders to ourselves and those around us of the values of the eternities of God. At the very least this means we are called to raise ourselves above the ephemeral eternal present of the society around us. This isn’t easy: almost all the values of the market-place in which we live are based on ephemera. In the baptism service we are asked to turn to Christ and to ‘reject selfish living, and all that is false and unjust’. I doubt any of us can claim to have fulfilled that promise – one of the reasons I reject a ‘rigorist’ approach to baptising children. The shoes I wear were made in an Asian sweat shop, the fossil fuels I burn in my car are destroying God’s earth, the food thrown out at the end of each day in the cafés I frequent could feed a third world family. Have I rejected selfish living?
And yet the author of Ephesians calls us to be the peace of Christ. The liturgical sharing of the peace is no trivial moment: we are saying to one another may you be, and may I be an embodiment of God’s peace that is, as Paul put it, beyond human comprehension. Martin Luther King was not the first to remind God’s people that God’s peace is not a warm and fuzzy feeling, but the absence of all injustice: I for one am far from an embodiment or walking advertisement of the perfect justice and righteousness that Jesus embodied.
These are of course no more than meandering thoughts, random thoughts triggered by stories about temples, about dividing walls of injustice, about gaps between haves and have-nots materially and spiritually. I can ultimately look only at my own life and know that it – that I – fall far short of what Paul calls the glory of God, far short of the dwelling place of God’s shekinah, God’s holiness that I am called to be. Yet that is what God calls us to be – calls us to be, and despite our inadequacies, simply calls us as being. We are not yet what we are called to be, but we are called to become what we already are in Christ.
TLBWY
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