Texts: Exodus 17.1-7;
Psalm 78. 1-16; Philippians 2.1-13; Matthew 21.23-32
Last week the Uniting Church Synod of
Victoria and Tasmania
There is a permanent temptation in a
church like ours to make decisions as though we were the Labour Party. Increasingly, the church is organising itself
into factions— ‘liberals’, ‘progressives’, ‘neo-orthodox’, ‘evangelicals’—and
strong groups have formed to actively lobby the councils of the church on a
range of issues. The most organised
groups are the ‘Reforming Alliance’ and ‘The Progressive Christian Movement’
but there are others. In my opinion, the
church climate has become so factionalised, that it is now
almost impossible to turn up to a Synod or Presbytery meeting to participate, simply,
as a Christian and member of the Uniting Church who wants to discern the will
of Christ in company with others. For
now you will find yourself pigeon-holed before you even get there. Several times in the years since I began
attending the church’s councils I have seen people assume that I will support
or oppose such and such a proposal because I belong to a group that it
variously called ‘the theological fascists’ or the ‘intellectual mafia’. No such group exists, as far as I can tell,
and if it does, I’ve never been invited to one of its meetings! But the very fact that a person can be so
easily dismissed represents a very troubling tendency in the church, a trend in
which people decide not to listen to other people on the basis of a whole lot
of convenient assumptions about what those other people are likely to believe
or do, assumptions that function only to reinforce the ill-conceived prejudice
of one’s own position. It is the kind of
thing that has, frankly, made me very wary of attending the church’s councils
at all.
Now, one only has to read the New
Testament to discover that this situation is not a new one for the church to
find itself in. The church has
apparently been sinning in this way since the beginning! The letter of Paul to the Philippians is a
case in point. Why would Paul need to
exhort the Philippians to be ‘of one mind and heart, in full accord’ unless
that were not the case? The church at
Philippi was clearly as factionalised as the Uniting Church
What Paul recommends is what I, also,
would recommend to my church this morning.
That the way to a unity of mind and purpose in the church has nothing to
do with what you desire or what I desire, but with what God
desires. Listen to what Paul says:
Let the same mind be in your community as was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was God did not consider equality with God a thing to be exploited, but emptied himself instead, taking the form of a slave and being found in human likeness. In that way he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
I could talk about the meanings of this
passage all day, but for now I would like you to note two things only. First, that Paul offers up Jesus as a model
for what and how we should desire as a church.
What we should desire is not
our own vision of the world, but God’s vision of the world. And how
we should desire it is by emptying ourselves of our own desire. Emptying ourselves. It sounds Buddhist to many modern ears, but
it is not. In Buddhism you empty yourself
of desire in order to desire either nothing at all, or, as Slavoj Zizek has convincingly
argued, to allow your powerful neighbour to make use of you for their own
manipulative purposes. In Christianity,
by contrast, our desires are put aside in order to make room for the desire of
God, who is pure and unadulterated love.
The second thing I would have you note
is a consequence of the first. That
unity of heart and mind in the Christian community can never be achieved apart
from a serious and widespread willingness to listen and look for the desire of
God in the story of Jesus of Nazareth. It
sounds obvious when you put it like that, doesn’t it? But the point is far from obvious to so many
of our church councils. In part this is
so because of sheer laziness and inertia.
Many of us know and believe that the contemplation of Christ’s story is
the beginning of everything that has any consequence, that we can never hope to
act in the world as God would act unless we contemplate Christ’s story with
regularity and devotion. Yet many of us also
crowd out this devotion by our devotion to other things. Thus, Christ’s way and will has not had
opportunity to sink its roots deep down into our hearts. So much so, that when we come to the point of
meeting in community to discern the mind of Christ, we rarely know enough of
Christ to make genuinely Christian decisions! But inertia and laziness is not
the whole story. The other reason why we
are not inclined to contemplate Christ’s story as the source of our knowledge
of God is because most of us (whether ‘liberals’ or ‘evangelicals’) have been
formed by the culture of ‘modernity’, a culture in which the point of religious
faith is certainly not to conform ourselves to the will of God revealed in Christ,
but rather to make God’s ways ‘fit’ our own ways, to assume that God must make
sense according to what we already think we know about how the world works. I am glad that this culture is crumbling, but
its influence is still very powerful in the church. A church that wants God to fit its own agenda
is unlikely, it seems to me, to spend a great deal of time contemplating the
life of Christ.
So what’s to be done? If Christian unity, a oneness of heart and
mind, is a consequence of this contemplatio
Christi alone, then clearly we
should spend more time doing that, and at the most fundamental levels of the
church. We should encourage one another
to read the Scriptures and believe in them.
We should meet together, in pairs and groups, to discuss the Scriptures
and to wait upon the Spirit of Christ in prayer. We should put aside the novels, the magazines,
the sociology and the television for a bit, and read a bit of Christian
theology. We should put aside even the
works of goodness and charity for a while each week. Not because Christ is not present and active
in all of these things, but because we shall not be able to recognise how Christ works through all the
business of life unless we get to know him in the shape of our gospel
tradition. The point of the Christian
love of neighbour, you see, is not to become a doormat for someone else’s
desire. It is not to serve the other
slavishly, at the expense of one’s own desire alone. It is, rather, to serve God first. To recognise that what is best for my
neighbour is what God desires for
them. Which, in turn, requires that both
of us, if we are Christian, contemplate the word of God in Christ
together. Only then shall we be able to
serve each other truly.
This is true not only for Synods and
Assemblies, but also for congregations and small faith communities.
I leave these thoughts with you for your consideration. Test what I say against the story of Christ,
and if I am wrong, please tell me.
Because I too, would rather do Christ’s will than my own.
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