Hope, Patience and Justice

Isaiah 35.1-10; Magnificat; James 5.7-10

The letter of James, which we read just now, says:

Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. 

This morning I want to speak a little about what it might mean to be patient as we wait for the coming of the Lord.  For quite clearly, the Lord has not yet come. Not in his fulness, not to transform the world and human community into the image of God’s lovingkindness. For if the Lord had already come in that way, we would not need to pray our prayers of intercession. We would not need to sing the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, as we do this morning and at evening prayer.  The despots would already have been removed from their thrones and the poor raised up. The rich would already have been sent away empty, and the hungry filled with good things. The swords would already have been beaten into ploughshares, and we would be at peace.

That this is not the case means, quite simply, that the messiah has not yet come. On that, and many other things, Jews and Christians are agreed.  So, what are we to do in the meantime?  What are we to do as we wait for the crops of justice to grow, as both Isaiah and James imagine? What are we to do whilst we wait for our hope to be realised?

Well, according to St James, there are two things we can do.  

The first, he says, is to stop grumbling against one another: to stop judging one another.  For, that is one of our finer skills as Christian people. Do we not look across the desk or the table or stare into our screens that those we disapprove of, and do we not ruminate upon the ways in which those people are unworthy, somehow, of love or affection? For all the problems in the world come from other people, do they not? Surely Jean-Paul Sartre was right when he said that ‘hell is other people’!  If only they were not around, we could fix things! If only they were not around, the world could be put to rights! We imagine, do we not, that when Christ returns it is they who will get their comeuppance, whilst we, the truly good and righteous people, will be received into the divine halls? Or perhaps it is only me who thinks that way. Perhaps it is only me who needs to hear the divine command ‘judge not, lest you be judged’.  But more of that later.

The second thing James says that we can do whilst waiting for Christ is to suffer patiently like the prophets. Which is something of an oxymoron. At least it appears to be. For the prophets, on my reading, were rarely patient. Indeed, one might more accurately describe them as paradigm examples of the impatient! They were impatient about the abuse of power, they were impatient about hypocritical religious types, they were impatient for the liberation of the poor and the raising up of the marginalised. And they expressed their impatience and frustration loudly, and in the places where they were most likely to cop a beating for their trouble. So, what’s patient about that?  A fair question, I reckon!

The kind of patience we are called to exercise as Christians is not, in fact, a ‘quietist’ kind of patience, patience understood as a meek and mild acceptance of all the wrongs in the world, as if there is nothing we can do to change things.  For, if the harvest of justice is to arrive, we are called to be farmers and horticulturalists, that is, people who not only wait for the seed to grow, but also work hard to prepare the soil, and plan meticulously to ensure that the most optimal growing conditions are in place. I have never met a husband of the land – least of all amongst mob – who sits back and does nothing when there are hungry mouths to feed.  For us, the care and nurture of the land remains a daily responsibility. For, to our way of looking at things, if we do not tend the land with loving care then we should not be surprised or angry if the land fails to be fruitful.  If the land is to be fruitful, it should be tended. Carefully, and with unhurried patience. 

So it is with the friends of God and the prophets of this current age.  If justice is to arrive, we must work at it patiently. If Christ is to arrive, then we must sow the seeds of justice with sobriety and regular, even ritual, attention.  Which is precisely what Christ did when he came around the first time. He went amongst the villages of Galilee giving sight to the blind, mobility to the lame, hearing to the deaf and belonging to the poor and excluded. All of which can be understood as a sowing of seed, a preparing of the ground. Because not all were healed, not all found themselves welcomed back into community. Not all were raised to life.  What was done was a sign and a promise of what is yet to come: justice and healing for all.  But now it is our turn. It is the special calling of the church to become these signs anew, in our community and in our politics.  It is we who are called to tend the land and sow the seed.  It is for God to make the seed grow and bring the harvest to fulfillment. But we each have our part in preparing the way.

That’s all well and good. But still I am troubled by a question, a question that hides between the two instructions James has left us, a question that hovers between the injunctions to ‘stop judging’ and ‘suffer patiently like the prophets’.  And it’s this: how can we name what has gone wrong, and work towards a more just alternative, if we are never allowed to judge other human beings? Is it not human beings who commit the crimes? Is it not human beings who make the policies that result in persecution, harm, and even death for vulnerable populations? Is it not human beings who exploit the earth and render it uninhabitable in so many places?  How, then, can we be prophets who cry out for justice if we can never judge our fellows for their crimes?

You will perhaps understand how I might struggle with this question as a trawloolway man, an Aboriginal person, a member of that people against whom much wrong has been done, and continues to be done.

Well, the way I see it (and I’m happy to be corrected) is that we are called to ‘hate sins, but to love humankind’ as St Augustine put it in one of his letters. We can work against what people do to harm the earth and each other, in other words, but this does not require us to condemn the people who do it to hellfire and damnation. The scandal of the the gospel is that no-one is beyond the love and mercy of God. All are loved, even if what they do is evil. And that goes as much for Hitler, and Pol Pot, as it does for the thousands of good churchmen who massacred our people. We must work as hard as we can to discern how evil is present, and to limit the effects of that evil in our hearts and in our world. But we simply do not have the authority to pass final judgement on any human being, least of all ourselves.  That is something for God alone. So we should leave those matters to God. We are not called to respond to hate with hate, but to love our neighbours as Christ has loved us.

So, allow me to summarise what James encourages us to do whilst we wait for Christ to arrive. Don’t judge or condemn anyone, lest you yourself are condemned. And work for justice with the patience, and love, and consistency of the prophets. If we do these things, we will have done our part. The rest is for God, and for the Christ who will come to recast the cosmos in the image and likeness of divine love.

Garry Deverell

3rd Sunday of Advent, 2022

St Paul's Cathedral, Naarm/Melbourne

Not the Messiah, People!

 Isaiah 61.1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126; 1 Thessalonians 5.16-24; John 1.6-8, 19-28

Well, greetings everyone. Thanks for having me back. It’s an unusual thing, people having me back to preach more than once. It’s possible, of course, that you may have forgotten just how excruciating my preaching can be.  If that’s the case, don’t worry. I’m here to remind you!

You laugh, but I’m only partly joking. My homily will, I promise, be an immense non-event for many of you. For what do folks reasonably expect from a preacher when they get along to church?  Words of wisdom for a topsy-turvy age? Sorry, if I ever knew how to dance wisdom’s tune, I’ve now forgotten the steps. Words of comfort for a hurting world? Nope, fresh out of those too. I have no idea what to do with my own hurt, let alone anyone else’s. Practical solutions for practical problems? Nuh, I’m famous for my lack of practical know-how.  One reviewer of my most recent book said: ‘Dr Deverell is very good at lamenting the problem, but offers very little by way of practical solutions.’ So, here we are. Two paragraphs in and things are looking pretty grim already.

Still, I have one competent-preacher trick to keep your attention. Name-dropping. When Nathan and I were discussing my visit during the week . . .   Sorry, just messing with you. I really meant to drop the name of that other famous Baptist. John. John the Baptist.  I have great affection for John, even though I’m an Anglican. Why? Because he, too, was a lamentable preacher.

According to the account we have from the other John, John the Evangelist, when some faculty members were sent from the Jerusalem theological college to ask who John was, he replied ‘I’m not the messiah’.  I’m Not The Messiah. Which is another way of saying, ‘Nuh, not wise. Struggling to see a big picture in all of this. Nuh, not a healer of hurts.  Not a doctor or psychologist, people. Nuh, no practical solutions to our social and political problems. Not a canny politician.’ Nope. Not the Messiah. Not the bloke with the answers. No-one’s saviour. Not me. Nuh.

Now, it is extraordinary to me that the Jerusalem theologians didn’t leave it at that and walk away. I mean, John had told them clearly that he was nobody special and that there was nothing to see here. But hey! They’re theologians! Not particularly bright! So they asked him two more questions about his identity: ‘Are you Elijah?’, ‘Are you the prophet?’ Remember, people, that these were crazy times. The Romans had occupied the countryside and folk were desperate for a saviour.  So people speculated about the coming of a messiah, a saviour anointed by God, who would rescue God’s people from their oppressors. There were rumours that a prophet, a great preacher, would arise to announce the messiah’s imminent arrival, and it was possible that this preacher would be Elijah, one of the greatest, returned from the dead. Perhaps John was that prophet? Perhaps John was Elijah? 

Well, ‘No. I am not.’ That was John’s categorical reply. And I don’t think he was lying. Because liars, in my experience, tend to present themselves as saviours. Like Trump telling his supporters, in 2016, that he would ‘drain’ the Washington ‘swamp’ of its political corruption when his real plan was to corrupt it even more. Or Peter Dutton promising, this week, to save us from terrorists by granting himself the power to detain people without judicial review, when his actual plan is to discourage dissent by creating a legal apparatus to gag journalists and whistle-blowers. John the Baptist wasn’t like the Donald. Neither was he like Dutton. He didn’t lie by presenting himself as a saviour.  Instead, he was up-front and disarmingly truthful: ‘I am not Elijah, I am not the prophet, I am not the messiah.’ (Sings ‘It ain’t me babe, no no no, it ain’t me babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for babe’). Sorry, I digress.

Apparently John’s going all Bob Dylan just made the theologians even more curious. ‘Ok then,' they said. 'If you’re not Elijah, not the prophet, not the messiah, who are you? Give us an answer for those who sent us. For you wash people's sins away in the river, which looks like the kind of thing the prophet who announces the messiah would do.’ To which John memorably replied, and I quote:

I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord,' as the prophet Isaiah said . . . I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.

Ooh. Now this is getting interesting. ‘I am a voice crying out in the wilderness’.  What does that mean? Can’t claim to know precisely, but that ‘voice’ reminds me of a couple of phrases in the 2017s ‘Statement from the Heart’, promulgated by a broad coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders. Amongst other things, the Statement calls for the ‘establishment of a First Nations Voice’ to be ‘enshrined in the Constitution.’ This ‘Voice’, the statement goes on to say, would be there to ensure that in our relationships with settler communities are built upon truth rather than lies. Truth. Truth about what has happened in this land. The invasions, the stealing of lands, the massacres, the removal of children from their parents, the exiling of elders, the slavery, the stolen wages, the destruction of language and culture. The truth. A voice to ensure that the truth is told. A voice crying in the wilderness. The wilderness of lies and denial. The wilderness of Australia today.

Perhaps the voice of John the Baptist is like the voice proposed by the Statement from the Heart, which makes no promises about a saviour but, more modestly, expresses a hope that the truth will be told; that someone, anyone, will become a voice of truth. For whilst lies and denials cover everything in darkness, truth uncovers things, reveals things, bathes them in light. Remember what the evangelist says of John at the beginning of his gospel?

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.

John’s baptism was meant to be a testimony to the light, to the truth. It had to do with repentance, a washing away of all the shitty lies we tell ourselves. Especially the lie that we ourselves are the light, the source of our own salvation, or that a charismatic man of passion like John is the light, or that your favourite church or preacher is the light.  Newsflash people. John was no saviour! He bore witness to the saviour. He pointed away from himself toward the saviour. For the light was the messiah who was yet to come. It was Jesus, who came and lived amongst us, who taught us his ways, who was murdered by the state and exulted to the right hand of God. Who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and whose reign of justice and peace will have no end. It is he who is the true speaker of the words Isaiah records: 

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
to provide for those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

One of the church’s most terrible mistakes was to take this passage to itself, as though it were we, the church, who take on the mantle of the messiah. We do not, not even as the ‘body’ or ‘temple’ of Christ in whom Jesus’ Spirit has come to dwell.  For the best way to ‘be’ the body of Christ is, somewhat paradoxically, to point away from ourselves to the Jesus who is not yet here, to the mystical, cosmic, body that has not yet entirely arrived. To be like John the Baptist. To tell the truth that we are nothing special, that our answers to the great questions are at best educated guesses, and that our ‘good deeds’ are worth little more than the thong of Jesus' sandal, so regularly do they fall short of the mark. But then we are called to look toward the horizon, toward the light that is coming into the world entirely of its own accord. And to encourage others to do the same, to follow our gaze, and to wait with eager expectation for the one who, alone, has the power to do some decent saving.

All of which is to say: If you’re looking for wisdom, look for it in Jesus. If you are hurting and in need of healing, look for the salve that is Jesus. If you need practical solutions to difficult problems, look for them in Jesus. Because your preachers and the churches that ordain them, we aren't really up to it. We can't be relied upon to know what we are doing. The most honest of us know that it is so, and cast ourselves upon the grace of God as our only chance for redemption. But some of us are also canny enough to point to Jesus, the first and only source of all such grace. Like a beggar telling other beggars where to find bread when you have none of our own. As every Baptist worthy of that name should.

Garry Deverell

This homily was preached at South Yarra Community Baptist Church on the 3rd Sunday of Advent 2020.

A voice cries out

Texts: Isaiah 40.1-11; Psalm 85. 1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3.8-15a; Mark 1.1-8

Let me begin with a story, a might of been, with regard to that voice crying out in the Judean desert. Down amongst the ruins that used to be Jerusalem, a voice cried out:

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.
Make straight in the desert a highway for our God . . .
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

The voice drifted on the morning breeze to where Joseph and Baruch were cooking their breakfast on a nearby hill.  ‘What highway’s he on about?’ said Joseph to Baruch.  ‘The highway of the Lord’, said the other.  ‘Apparently God is going to restore our fortunes.  He’s going to come roaring down this new highway they’re making, rebuild the city, and set up court in the temple as if he were Moses himself!’   ‘Somehow I doubt it!’, said Joseph, and their laughter pealed across the valley. 

But after the silence had taken hold once more, Baruch said:  ‘Still, that’d be nice, wouldn’t it.  A king in Zion who’d give blokes like you and me a go.  I’m blowed if I’m going to slave my guts out to keep these new bloody nobles in their palaces!’ 

Joseph chewed his tripe thoughtfully.  ‘Time for a year of . . .  ah, what did they call it?  . . .  Jubilee, that’s it.  Time for Jubilee, when all that’s been lost or screwed up get put back to rights.  You know, it was the grandsires of these new bloody nobles that confiscated our clan-land back in the time of Uzziah’.  And then his eyes filled with tears.  ‘I’d swear my troth to a Jubilee King.  Bloody oath I would.  Bloody oath’.  The cry of an eagle lifted their eyes to the sun, while, in the valley below, a shepherd led his sheep through the ruins.

________________________________

‘So who is this Baptist fellow, anyway?’ asked Simon.  ‘A hermit’, said Uriah.  ‘He comes from a good family, by all accounts.  His father was a temple bureaucrat and he was being groomed for the priesthood.  But right in the middle of his training he had a bit of a turn and bolted for the desert!  Apparently he spent some time with that monkish crowd out near the dead sea.  What are they called?’   ‘The Essenes’, answered Simon.  ‘Yeah.  They’re pretty strange, by all accounts, waiting for their beloved Messiah to come!  My uncle Max (you know, the psychiatrist who trained in Rome) reckons that these separatist groups don’t have the ego-strength to mix it in the real world.  So they run away to the desert, where they can set up their own little fantasy.  Makes life simpler, I’m sure.  But it’s such a cop-out.  They could never cope with the real world that you and I know about, that’s pretty clear!’.

Uriah took a drag on his cigar and ordered another caráf of red.  ‘I went out for a look the other day’, he said, casually.  Simon nearly choked on his café-latté.  ‘You went out for a look?  My God, man, what possessed you to do something like that?  Surely you’re not having a mid-life crisis!  Not at the tender age of 35!’.  His laughter filled the restaurant, but Uriah didn’t join in.  Flushing, he stared into his drink.  Simon stopped laughing.  ‘I’m not sure why I went, exactly’, said Uriah, looking up and out, as if towards an empty sky.  Then he turned to look his companion in the eye.  ‘Listen, Simon.  This is going to sound weird, but . . .  I’m feeling a little jaded right now.  This ‘real world’ we live in, you and I, isn’t feeling like much fun at the moment.  What’s real about being part of the Jerusalem middle-class?  Most Jews live in landless poverty!  What’s real about doing legal work for the Romans? They’re the occupying power, for Moses’ sake!  I feel like I’m betraying my own people, stomping on their heads just to get a leg up!  Add to that the fact of my disaster of a marriage!  I work so hard that I hardly ever see my kids, and I really don’t know who Priscilla is these days, or what she gets up to  . . .’

Simon’s face has turned pale.  ‘Mate’ he said. ‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing.  Listen, life might not be all it’s cracked up to be at times.  But this is how it is!  This is reality!  This is reál-politics!  God Almighty!  What did that preacher say out there anyway?’   

‘”Prepare the way of the Lord”,’ said Uriah. ‘”Prepare the way of the Lord” . . .  that’s what he said.  He was baptising people in the river to wash their crappy lives away.  And he spoke of a Great One to come who would baptise not with water, but with the Holy Spirit.’  

Suddenly the space around the two men was different.  Something shifted, the world changed.  Even the sunset and the evening breeze seemed to speak in a different voice.  For a moment, Simon was caught there.  From a place deep in his people’s history he heard the mad voices of nomads, prophets and saints, crying out with anguish and longing for a world made new.  And for a moment, just a moment, he joined them in their longing.  But he shook himself free from the reverie, and rose from the table.  ‘Uriah’, he said, ‘you’re losing it mate’.  And away he walked.  Back to the real world.  The world of cafés and credit and weekends at the beach-house.

_____________________________________

When you come to worship, why do you come?  Is it to escape from the real world, to run away from the awfulness of life?  Or is it the opposite.  Did you come, perchance, to enter, albeit for a moment, a world which is somehow more real, a world that takes your reality seriously, and addresses you where you are afraid, and hurting, and in need of healing?

If this Advent season is about anything it’s about taking the voices that cry in the wilderness seriously, the mad voices of nomads, Indigenes and saints, the voices that tell the truth.  And what is the truth?  Simply this: that the “real” world is a fake; that capitalism and the mad rush to accumulate and consume is killing us all, body, mind, and spirit; that entertainment and celebrity are stealing away our capacity to lives our own lives.  Ha!   I remember a schizophrenic friend being afraid to turn on the television.  “When I do,” he said, “the demons suck my spirit away.”  I thought he was dangerously unstable at the time.  But now I’m not so sure.  Now I reckon he was on to something.

The voice that cries in the wilderness tells another truth too.  “Things can be different,” it says, “Thing can be different than they are today.  Why?  Because the glory of God is coming!  It is on its way, and it is nearly here.”  You see, what John the Baptist promised people out there in the desert was not just change, but metamorphosis.  What’s the difference, I hear you ask?  Well, let me put it like this.  Change is when you swap from Pears shampoo to Decoré.  Change is when you sell up in Balwyn and move to Canterbury.  Change is watching “Sixty Minutes” instead of “Today Tonight”.  But metamorphosis?  Metamorphosis is when a Tootsie family in Rwanda is able to invite their son’s Hutu killers to dinner.  Metamorphosis is when Senator Macarius of Rome becomes a hermit monk, and plaits ropes for a living in the Egyptian desert.  Metamorphosis is when the colonist reliquishes power to the point of making treaty with the colonised.

To be metamorphosed.  In the Greek of the gospel the word is metanoia, and it is expressed and performed in the practise of baptism.  In the early days of the faith, when the church seemed to have more enthusiasm for change than we do today, baptism was taken very, very seriously indeed.  For baptism was not just a ceremony of change designed to welcome people into a church they can neither comprehend nor belong to.  Rather, it was a powerful sacrament of metamorphosis, a piece of method theatre in which the candidate bound themselves so intimately to Christ that everything they had been before they heard his call was literally cast aside in order to make room for the new life which Christ had promised them by his love and his grace.  In approaching the waters, the candidate would remove their clothes.  Then they would descend, naked, into the waters, where the priest would pronounce the sacred words.  Then, when they emerged, the choirs would sing and they would put on the new garb of white, which symbolised the glory of Christ.  No longer would they live from their own powers.  From now on, they were dead, marked with the scars of the crucified Christ.  The life they now lived in the body would be that of the Son of God, who loved them, and gave his life for them.  Here there was no gap between ceremony and life.  Life became baptism, and baptism became the life in Christ.

In baptism we pledge ourselves to Christ, to become his slaves, to give ourselves into his hands completely.  But in doing so we in respond to a love and promise that always already precedes our decisions:   Christ’s promise to always be there, on the other side of the waters, there to raise us from the depths, and array us in the splendour of the redeemed.  The promise assures us that our time of penance is ended, that it is God, himself, to now comes to work the forgiveness, freedom and deliverance we so long for.   Without this promise, all of our being sorry and all of our determination to change makes for nothing.

In this we find out what Advent really means, as the season of promise par excellence:  that within and beyond the appalling squalor of our greedy, consumption-driven lives; within and beyond our self-hatred and despair; within and beyond the awful inhumanity of our politics; within and beyond all this, Christ arrives.  Christ arrives with love enough, with peace enough, with hope enough to make things very, very, very different.

Glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so now and for ever, world without end.  Amen.

Garry Deverell

Signs of revolution

Isaiah 35.1-10; Luke 1.47-55; Matthew 11.2-11

For Matthew’s gospel, John the Baptist has a special place amongst the prophets of Yahweh.  He is the one who goes before the Christ of Israel, to announce his coming and prepare the way.  Yet even John, when he is imprisoned by King Herod for criticizing his regime, is capable of doubt about Jesus’ true identity.  He sends his disciples to ask Jesus a question:  ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?’  The answer John receives from Jesus recalls the prophecy of Isaiah that we read just now, a prophecy that imagines how things might change when God’s salvation has arrived in the world.   Let me quote:

Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those who are fearful of heart, 
“Be strong, do not fear!  Here is your God! . . .”

The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

Waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert wastes.

         (Is 35.5-6)

Hear, then, the parallels in Jesus’ answer to John in Matthew’s gospel: 

Go and tell John what you hear and see:  the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.  Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.

We may conclude, then, that for both Isaiah and Matthew the advent of the messiah is attended by graphic and visible signs.  The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead are raised, the outcasts are brought into the community once more, and the poor hear good news.

It is important that we understand these signs in their theological as well as their literal sense.  There can be no doubt that Jesus was a faith healer.  He did cure specific medical ailments, and he did raise the dead to life.  Even the most sceptical historians have found it difficult to explain away the sheer abundance of the evidence on this point.  Still, if we are Christians, we must understand that the healings are not just healings, and the raisings are not just raisings.  They are not, in other words, to be understood simply as facts amongst other facts; they are not to be read simply as history.  For the miracles of Jesus have a theological meaning as well.  Theologically, they are to be read as advance announcements or signs of a religious, social, and political revolution, a revolution initiated by God in the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, but not yet completed in its fullness.

I talk of revolution because the coming of Jesus has changed, indeed transformed, far more than the medical fortunes of those individuals he happened to meet in Galilee more than two thousand years ago.  The coming of Jesus has changed everything, from the way we imagine God, to the way we value our fellow human beings, to the way we construct our law and government.  We Westerners so easily forget how deeply our values and our whole way of life have been influenced by Christ and the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  We forget that the discourse of human rights is grounded in the narratives of Christ’s hospitality towards the excluded and marginalised members of this own society.  We forget that feminism found its genesis in the way that Christ formed relationships with women.  We forget that the greatest books and poems of the Western tradition may be read as conversations with the Bible.  We forget that liberation movements, from the abolition of slavery in the Americas to the more recent revolutions in South America and South Africa, have looked to Jesus for inspiration and encouragement.  We forget that many of the modern medical miracles we take for granted are grounded in the research of Christian doctors working in missionary situations.  If there were time, we could talk, also, about the theological origins of the Rule of Law, the Welfare State, the University, the School and the Hospital.  In these, and in a thousand other ways, the coming of Jesus has changed the world.  In these, and a thousand other ways, the love of God in Christ has so changed our humanity that we have been enabled to change the world after Christ’s example.  In so many ways, Christ’s people have been salt and light for a dark and sterile world.

Let us not be content with all of this, however.  For Christ’s revolution is far from complete.  The messianic kingdom has clearly not yet arrived in its fullness.  If you don’t believe me, just look around this country we’re making.  Instead of helping the poor, we lock them up – whether the poor be asylum seekers, the mentally ill, or Aboriginal people.  For these are the people who overwhelmingly populate our detention centres and prisons, each of them all but crushed under the weight of grief, abuse or criminal neglect. I could speak of other national tragedies this morning—like the massive cuts the government has made to foreign aid programmes, or the steady rise in rural and suburban poverty, or the epidemic of depression and anxiety that is sweeping through our young people.  But I shall not.  Instead I would simply remind you that Advent faith is not only about remembering the way in which Christ came to us the first time around.  It is about looking for the signs of that arrival in our own place and time.  Most of all, it is about making ourselves available to God as the church, the body of Christ, so that Christ’s revolution might again become present to the world through the faithful deeds of love and care we offer to our neighbours in response to the grace we have experienced in Jesus Christ. 

I know that many of us care for others deeply.  We work as volunteers with the sick, the disabled, the despairing and the voiceless.  Or we work with the poor and the helpless in our paid employment.  Many of us are generous with our surplus money and goods, living simply so that others may simply live.  But others of us are like so many other Australians.  We look only to feather our own nests, and those of our families.  If that is so, then Christ would confront us this morning with the call to revolution.  “Be converted,” he would say, “be really converted!  Let my Spirit into your cold heart so that the seeds of love may be sown.”  For that is what God’s revolution is essentially about:  love.  God’s love for a lost and broken world; the touchability of that love in the life, suffering and death of Christ; and the power of love to change things, one small corner of the world at a time, through the power of Christ’s resurrection.  If Christ is raised, you see, then the powers of evil and decay we named this morning shall not have the last word.  The last word will be love.  This I believe, and for this I pray daily.  So God help all of us to look for the signs of Christ’s coming, and to become such signs ourselves.

This homily was first preached at St Luke's Uniting Church, Mount Waverley, in December 2004.

Advent. It sure isn't Christmas!

Advent is the first season of the Church’s year. It encompasses the four Sundays prior to sundown on Christmas Eve, when the shorter Christmas-Epiphany period begins. The word ‘Advent’ literally means coming, which also reveals the main theological theme of the season: that time in which the Church looks, with great anticipation, for the coming of Jesus into the world. 'Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly!' is the oft-repeated prayer.

The ‘coming’ we reflect on in Advent is not, in fact, primarily that first coming of Christ as a baby in Bethlehem, but the subsequent coming of Christ 'at the end of the ages', when God will apparently put right everything that is wrong, and the poor and faithful will finally inherit new heavens and a new earth. The Scriptures read during this period talk of the hope of all God’s people for peace and justice in the world. They speak also of a messiah who will inaugurate this age by taking up the ancient throne of David. Startling cosmic images are used to speak of what things will be like when the messiah arrives: wolves lying down with lambs and children playing safely over the nests of snakes (Isaiah 11.1-10) are just two examples.

Of course, the flip side of such strident hope is a very real sense that the messianic age has not arrived, is not (yet) entirely present. We do not hope for things that are already ours! This indicates a fundamental difference between Advent and the Christmas season which follows. Christ has come a first time, certainly, and it is the special function of the Christmas-Ephipany period to reflect this fact and tell that story. Yet the Christ who came two thousand years ago has still not arrived in a recognisable fullness. We know this because the universe does not yet experience the wholeness of his promised peace. It is dominated, rather, by sin, suffering and despair. These realities are frankly acknowledged during Advent, and worshippers are encouraged to repent of the part they play in making, and keeping, the world in its deplorable state. Thus Advent, like its twin season of Lent, invites Christians to consider the ways in which Christ has been rendered absent or irrelevant in both their own lives and that of the world. Advent, then, encourages worshippers to place their trust in a Christ who is still, in some sense, arriving or has not yet arrived.

To help Christians reflect on what the coming of Jesus might mean for us today, the Church makes use of a number of interesting symbols.

The Jesse Tree 

The Jesse Tree is named from Isaiah 11.1: "A shoot will spring forth from the stump of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots." It is a symbol of the faith and family of God from which Jesus came. Jesus is like a new branch springing from an old family and faith. We use the Jesse Tree to think about the importance of our forbears in teaching us to place our faith and hope in Christ.

In Australia, the Jesse Tree is often a eucalypt. Eucalypts are regenerated by fire; they have to be destroyed in order to be born anew. The biblical Branch is a sign of newness in the midst of destruction or discouragement. The idea of the new Branch from an old stump became a way to talk about the expected messiah (e.g., Jer 23.5) who would save Israel from all its troubles. The presence of the Jesse Tree in churches during Advent reminds worshippers that Jesus came to suffer the full consequences of our all-too-human sin and despair, but then to rise again as a sign of hope for all who would follow him.

Christians long for a fullsome reign of the messiah, and the kingdom of Peace that he will bring. So, while we celebrate the birth of the Branch, the new shoot from the stump of Jesse, we anticipate with hope a more complete Advent.

Wreath and Candles

At the front of many churches you will notice, during Advent, the presence of a circular wreath of green, with four candles about it. The wreath is a circle of evergreen branches that reminds us of God’s love. Like a circle, God’s love has no beginning or end. Like an evergreen tree, it is forever alive and growing. God’s love never fails.

The Advent candles are variously purple, white, and pink. Purple is the colour of kings, but it is also the colour of bruises. It reminds us that while Jesus may indeed be the royal Son of God, in fact he came to share our humanity, to suffer and die that a new kind of humanity might be born from his suffering. Purple is also the colour of Lent, the season in which we remember Christ’s journey to the cross and resurrection. It is used during Advent to remind us that God’s love is not insipid or sentimental, but costly and real. Something might also be made of the fact that, in many Australian Indigenous cultures, purple is the colour that accompanies the process of healing.

A pink or rose candle may be lit on the third or fourth Sunday of Advent as a symbol of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It was her special obedience to bear the Christ child who would live and die and be raised for us all. In more catholic traditions, the pink candle is invariably used on Gaudete ('Rejoice') Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, as something of a joyous break in what is otherwise a penetential season. Again, there is a connection here to the historically prior celebration of Lent, where Laetare (also meaning 'Rejoice') Sunday gives worshippers a break from penitential observance.

The white candle that stands at the centre of the wreath is known as the ‘Christ’ candle. It is lit on Christmas Eve to signify Christ’s arrival in our midst. It parallels and represents the lighting of the Paschal candle at the Vigil of Easter, a new light for a new world.

Nativity Scene

The traditional name for Christmas is the ‘Feast of the Nativity’. The word “Nativity” literally means to “become native” or to be born into a particular community and place. For Christians, the Feast of the Nativity celebrates the very human birth of the unique Son of God to Mary and Joseph of Nazareth.

During Advent, churches often anticipate the nativity of Christ by introducing parts of the traditional nativity ‘scene’ during the final two Sundays of Advent. Around the (still-empty) manger where the saviour was laid are placed his parents, a stable, animals and shepherds, as well as stars and angels. This scene can become a symbol of cosmic anticipation as the church, together with the whole creation, awaits the messiah’s arrival.

The ‘O’ Antiphons

A key component of the gathering rites during Advent worship are a series of responsive invocations known as the ‘O’ Antiphons. Each antiphon contains an invocation of Jesus, using one of his biblical titles: O Wisdom, O Lord etc., ending with O Emmanuel, meaning ‘God with us’. Each contains a tiny prayer for God's people, and the petition that Christ will come very soon. The ‘O’ Antiphons are very old, going back to the Vesper Prayers for Advent offered by the faithful in the eighth century Roman rite.

The antiphons represent a tiny theology textbook on who Christ is. O Wisdom reminds us that Christ is the Logos, the Word of God, through whom all things are created. O Adonai calls upon the Lord who spoke from the Burning Bush, telling Moses to lead his people to freedom. O Root of Jesse speaks of Christ born of the line of David; God, born into a human family. O Key of David refers to Christ who has the power to open all the prisons we may find ourselves in, and to lock away all things that hinder us in our journey to God. O Rising Dawn is the promise that even in our darkest times, Christ, the Light of the World, will shine forth. O King of the Nations looks forward to Christ's reign of justice and peace. O Emmanuel brings us to Bethlehem, to that moment in history when Christ became a human being, a native of the colonised lands of Judea.

The church uses the Antiphons throughout Advent, either as a spoken litany or by singing the well-known 9th century hymn “Come, O Come, Emmanuel”.

 
Conclusion

 
In our consumer-dominated Western culture, the reflective experience of Advent is very often lost, even in the church. We are all so very keen to get what we want, and to get it now. We want to celebrate Christmas as early as possible, especially that kind of Christmas which is all about the exchange of gifts and the telling of sentimental stories about middle-class values.

Advent, on the other hand, creates a space in which we are invited to reflect on the experience of not having what we desire or, more profoundly still, of relinquishing our own sense of what is desirable in favour of what the coming Christ might desire for us. Advent is an invitation to stop doing all the things that make our lives miserable – including consuming, being busy and stressed! – and to listen, instead, for the coming Word who alone can give us the power to become children of God. In my experience, one can only do that by choosing to limit one's exposure and participation in the Australian summer festival that is called ‘Christmas’, the Christmas that begins in November and has almost nothing to do with Christ.

I wish you all a holy Advent.

Garry Worete Deverell

Rejoice! A study in faith's absurdity

Texts:  Isaiah 11.1-10; Ps 72.1-7, 18-19; Rom 15.4-13; Matthew 3.1-12

 

Like most all of the lections we read during Advent, the Scriptures for today describe two kinds of reality.  First they describe the world as it is now, a world dominated by the rich, the unscrupulous and the powerful at the expense of the poor, the principled and the vulnerable.  Then they imagine or look forward to a day in which the tables are turned, a day when the poor, the vulnerable and the faithful will rejoice in God’s salvation, while their enemies are done away with forever.  In the Matthew reading, for example, John the Baptist announces God’s supreme displeasure at the behaviour of the Jewish elites who governed Judea in the first half of the 1^st century.  These royal and priestly classes had chosen to collaborate with the invading Romans in order to preserve their status and wealth, even though this meant turning a blind eye to the way in which the invaders exploited and robbed the ordinary folk of their very livelihoods.  John castigates them for their poisonous hypocrisy.  Like the prophet Isaiah before him, John warns that a ‘day of the Lord’ is at hand, a cataclysmic day in which all their faithless and self-serving ways would be exposed, while the faithful ones, those who suffer because of the sins of these elites, would be vindicated forever.  I quote: 

I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

Get the gist?  The day of the Lord is like a deluge of fire.  The faithful ones are like wheat, preserved from the fire and taken to God’s own heart.  But the deceitful ones, who only want to protect themselves, are like the worthless chaff that is thrown into the fire and burned.  The outcome of that purgatorial cleansing is beautifully described in the song of praise we heard from the vision of Isaiah.  There the prophet imagines a world in which the remnant of God’s people, the righteous and the weak, who survive the punishment of their oppressors, are gathered to God in such a way that their experience of misery and shame is transformed utterly.  The song imagines a future where the people of God will experience reconciliation with their enemies and with God, rejoicing in God’s gift of peace for all time to come:  ‘The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.’

It’s a wonderful vision.  So wonderful that I sometimes feel that it’s all too good to be true!  Of course, I have no difficultly with the part of the story that describes the evil and self-serving corruption of the elites.  Who could deny it?  At this time of year our political leaders come out with platitudes about peace on earth and the importance of defending human rights and democratic freedoms. Right now, at this moment, Nelson Mandela is being lauded as a champion of such Western values.  At the same time, both at home and abroad, political prisoners are being denied their democratic rights to legal representation and a fair trial. American drones are bombing large populations of non-combatant civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The folk who flee the brutal conflicts in Palestine, Iraq, Sri Lanka and Syria are being detained for up to five years while their cases are being examined.  And our domestic gaols are overwhelmingly populated by two groups of suffering people for whom the wider community seems not to care: Aboriginal people and the mentally ill.  These facts completely undermine the West’s apparent commitment to justice and human dignity.  In the face of such hypocrisy, I feel angry, I feel powerless, and eventually I succumb to what some have called “hope-fatigue.”  Bono – from the rock band U2 - said it all in his memorable song from 2001: 

 

Jesus won’t you take the time

to throw this drowning man a line

   “Peace on earth.”

I hear it every Christmastime

but hope and history just won’t rhyme,

so what’s it worth,

   this “peace on earth”?

The fact that Advent coincides with Australia’s summer festival doesn’t help the situation, for me.  As a child summer was the time when all our family friends went to the beach for a holiday.  In summer, we knew that we were poor and that neither our church nor our community really gave two hoots.  I still feel that.  It still hurts.  The feeling is compounded by all the rampant consumption that dominates our cultural landscape at this time of year.  Because of what I experienced as a child, I find it difficult to see anything in all of this consumption apart from a complete indifference to the suffering of other people.  In the Philippines, right now, there are kids starving because they don’t have enough to eat.  In Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Columbia, kids are being sold into sex-slavery so that the rest of their families will be able to stay alive.  Even here in Australia, there are thousands and thousands of families who find it difficult to put a roof over their heads or pay the grocery bill.  Yet, each summer, middle-class Australians escape to their second or third homes at the beach and indulge in an exchange of goods which is surplus, entirely surplus, to anything they might possibility need.  Again, I feel sick to the stomach.  I feel overwhelmed at the enormity of this indifference.  In the middle of all of this nausea I simply find it difficult to believe that a day of salvation is at hand.  Very difficult. 

Now, part of my anxiety about all of this is clearly emotional and psychological.  It is tied up with my experience of the world, and the narratives I create to account for that experience.  But part of the anxiety is also theological, and has more to do with a puzzle which the bible itself sets up, and puts into play.  Let me try and spell it out for you.  Here, this world:  evil, corrupt, rich getting richer, poor getting more miserable.  There, world to come:  peace, joy, no more bad guys, vindication for all who suffered at their hands.   Great distance from here to there.  How is the distance crossed?  How do we get from here to there?  On this particular point, the “how” bit, the bible doesn’t seem to be very clear, almost as though it doesn’t actually know how.  On my worst and most cynical days, this does not inspire confidence!

Of course, the theologians have tried to fill in the gaps in the biblical witness.  Theologians like to do that.  The ‘evangelicals’ say that Jesus will return with a whole army of heaven and whip the nasty people’s backsides.  Then he’ll wave his kingly sceptre and the world will return to an Eden-like state in which we’ll all love each other the way that God loves us.  But this theory raises more questions than it solves.  Amongst other things, one must ask why Jesus would behave so very differently on his second visit than he did on his first.  The first time around he didn’t force anyone to do anything.  He invited, he loved, he argued forcefully, he exampled a different way to be.  But he didn’t compel anyone to do anything.  That would have been to override the human freedom we have, apparently so prized by God that he allows us to use that freedom to do evil.  Wouldn’t a powerful army of warrior-angels kind’ve undermine that whole God-is-love image, God as the supreme protector of our responsibility to choose?

“Damn right,” say the ‘liberal’ theologians, “let’s attend more closely to the story as it’s actually told.”  That God became a child, one of us.  He was born in our midst, full of grace and truth.  He went about the place healing, driving out our demons, and teaching us how to love one another.  But then the rich elites got hold of him.  They tortured him and nailed him to a cross.  Sure, there was a resurrection, but it’s all rather mysterious.  Now you see him, now you don’t.  He lives on in the world as a kind of memory or spirit of the good.  Perhaps this suggests that God is like our deepest and best self?  God changes the world only when we decide to change the world.  God prompts and pricks our conscience, but refuses to do anything other than what we choose to do for ourselves.  Giving our second coat to someone who needs it, to pick a relevant Scriptural example.  But again, I’m really not sure that this theory solves anything much.  It makes a mockery, for instance, of all those bible passages which insist that it is not we, ourselves, who make the world’s salvation, but God alone.  By grace, the action of God, are we saved through faith, and this is the gift of God, not of human works, lest any man should boast (Eph 2.8,9).  If the liberal theory were believed, then I would personally consider the whole hope-of-salvation thing to be no more than a cruel joke visited upon us by a God who raises our hopes and expectations, but never intends to meet them with anything real.

Well.  What’s to be done with all of this?  What am I to do with the anxiety of my lived experience?  What am I to do with the theological conundrum?  When in doubt, I have often considered it wise to take a break from all the anxiety and tell a story.  A story takes you out of yourself, and here’s a good one I came across one day.

The time has come for St. Peter's annual three-week vacation, and Jesus volunteers to fill in for him at the Pearly Gates. "It's no big deal," Peter explains.  "Sit at the registration desk, and ask each person a little about his or her life.  Then send them on to housekeeping to pick up their wings."

On the third day, Jesus looks up to see a bewildered old man standing in front of him. 

"I'm a simple carpenter," says the man.   "And once I had a son.  He was born in a very special way, and was unlike anyone else in this world.  He went through a great transformation even though he had holes in his hands and feet.  He was taken from me a long time ago, but his spirit lives on forever.  All over the world people tell his story."

By this time, Jesus is standing with his arms outstretched.  There are tears in his eyes, and he embraces the old man.

"Father," he cries out, "It's been so long!"

The old man squints, stares for a moment, and says, "Pinocchio?"

This story is not an ordinary story.  It is a joke.  A joke distinguishes itself from a story as such by introducing an unexpected element into what would otherwise be all very familiar.  In this story, we expected that the old man would squint and say “Jesus?”  We were set up for that by everything that went before—the religious setting, the details about the old man’s son.  But the story transcended its own boundaries and became a joke by taking us by surprise, by shocking us with the arrival of something entirely unforseen.  Parables are like that as well.  They subvert the rules of the game.  And the greatest parable of all is Jesus.

You see, John’s hearers expected that their messiah would come along to whip the Romans with superior military strength.  They were wrong.  And our own expectations, all these years later, are probably just as misguided.  Whether we are evangelicals who expect that Christ will change things one day by the might of his superior power, or whether we are liberals who expect that Christ is so much one of us that he is only able to help those who help themselves, we are probably all mistaken.  For the story of Christ is still in motion, and we are not privy to the punch-line.  In another part of Matthew’s gospel, a part we read last week, we are told only that we cannot know what is to happen, or how.  For the punch-line is God’s.  As Jesus shocked the Greeks with his human weakness, and scandalised the Jews by his failure and cross, so this fool from God will appear a second time.  And while we moderns may pretend to have followed the story so far, the joke, the punch-line, will surely leave us all so gob-smacked that the only response available to us will be to be astonished, to laugh, to rejoice. 

For that is what we humans do when we are genuinely surprised.  We absorb the shock, we adjust our imagination, and then we laugh!  Like Sarai at the announcement of her old-age pregnancy with Isaac.  Like the Baptist in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary came near with the Christ-child.  That is why Paul counsels the Romans to cease their sniping at each other and rejoice.  Stop trying to control the outcomes, stop trying to whip your opponents with their lack of understanding, he says.  Instead, surrender your concerns into God’s hands.  Relax into that surprising peace which surpasses all understanding.  The peace that is absurd.  The strange peace that we have cannot have manufactured for ourselves, because it defies every effort at human reasoning.

On my better days I see that Advent hope is a choice.  It’s about believing in the possibility of surprise.  It’s about believing that our tragic and repetitive history has an unforseen and unpredictable punch-line which will fly in the face of everything that either the evidence or our secular reason might cause us to expect.  And that’s the hope I encourage from you as well.  The hope of a Mary of Nazareth who, in that ancient time of Advent waiting, become a bearer of the impossible to a tired and un-surprisable world.  Rejoice, people of God!  For while the night may be filled with tears, joy shall indeed come with the morning.  How, I have no idea!  But I believe it shall come.

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church in December 2004.