Lent and racism

It's Lent in the Christian churches, a time to reflect, become aware, and repent of our bad behaviour. To repent means to stop the bad behaviour and put in place systems and practices designed to prevent such behaviour from occuring again. Repentance also means doing what you can to restore and repair the broken relationships your bad bahaviour has left in its wake. Including, of course, making just reparation.

Repentance is not primarily a practice for individuals. It is a practice for institutions, corporations and communities.

At the corporate level, I would call on the churches to repent of their racist behaviour towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, racist behaviour that includes:

• Blak-cladding, that is, making your institution look mob-friendly on the outside, whilst remaining thoroughly racist on the inside. Examples of black-cladding in churches include adorning rooms, buildings, regions and projects with blakfella tropes, hanging Indigenous art, and holding multiple 'welcome' and 'acknowledgement' of country ceremonies. None of these things are bad in themselves. They become bad when they are designed to hide the fact that the organisation continues to discriminate against blakfellas: our bodies, our knowledges, and our cultures.

• Expecting blak people to work for casual rates, or for free. The vast majority of blak people who work for churches do not enjoy permanent, secure, employment in jobs that are ongoing. Most of us work for the church as volunteers or casuals, even if we are ordained and/or have recognised qualifications in theology and ministry. Why? Because we, and what we have to offer, are simply not valued. Not enough to employ us, anyway. If there is a whitefella or someone from a more recent immigrant group going for a proper job, it is they who will most likely get it. For mob are, quite literally, the last and the least in the church's colonial economy.

• expecting underpaid or volunteer blak people (out of the goodness of our hearts) to do the anti-racism work for the whole organisation. For racism is not something that dominant cultures (read 'white' cultures) give much thought to. And certainly not something they allocate time, energy or money to. For, by definition, racism does not affect dominant cultures. 'If it is not happening to me, then it is not happening'. Thus, when blak people complain about being ignored or mistreated, the default response is 'well, you do something about it'. Which is to entirely mis/place where the responsibility lies. It is to burden victim-survivors with the task of expiating the pertpetrator's sin.

• marginalising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges. Although blak people have a long experience with this country, an experience which gives us a unique and expert perspective on how to live the life of the spirit well in this place, that is apparently of little or no consequence for the dominant culture. The churches and their instutions continue to ignore and supress the fact of our spiritual seniority in this country and worship, instead, at the feet of Europe and North America. You cannot study blak knowledges at the churchly institutions where whitefellas study. You will rarely encounter blak teachers, preachers or liturgists, except for those who are brought in for one-off, entirely token, bits and pieces. Because what is important is whitefella knowledge. Everything else, especially the knowledge of mob, is entirely surplus to requirements.

All of these corporate behaviours do enormous damage to the bodies and spirits of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We are forever wounded. We hurt. We languish. Our health suffers. For each day we must rise to the struggle to be ourselves, even in this, our own country.

The remedies for these damaging behaviours are obvious, are they not? Change the heart, not just the outward appearance. Value blak people and what we can contribute. Employ and learn from us. Care for us. Work with us. Allow us be who we are in God. Just as Jesus would.

Garry Worete Deverell

Lent 2025

Lent and Social Class

Too often the colonial churches—of which the Anglican Church is the paradigm example—preach a message that is addressed only to its middle- and professional-class members. Week after week I listen to sermons that do not seem to be addressed to me, or to many of my friends and colleagues. Over the years, this has meant that many of my friends and colleagues have simply left the church because they feel invisible.

The messages associated with Lent, the season we begin on Ash Wednesday, is no exception.

The monotonous middle-class refrain, ‘What will I give up for Lent?’, for example, is not a terribly helpful question if you happen to live in a world where there are few choices and little left to give up. Historically, Lent has often been used as a weapon against the most marginal and vulnerable people in our churches and societies. ‘Be content with what you have. Refrain from anger at your circumstances. Be hopeful. Trust in God’, etcetera, etcetera.

This is to entirely misunderstand the audience Jesus was addressing when he said ‘If you want to follow me, you must deny yourself, take us your cross, and follow me’. According to the synoptic gospels, this was addressed not to the poor, the marginalised, or the vulnerable, but to his inner circle of disciples, largely derived from the thriving merchant classes.

See, the poor already deny themselves to feed their children. The marginalised already have a cross, the cross they are nailed to outside the city in which the socially and economically ‘blessed’ live. And the vulnerable have lost so much that hope almost seems like heresy. Lent for the vulnerable is not about giving up anything. It is about pressing through despair to embrace, however tentatively, the possibility that life can get better. And that is the hardest discipline of all.

Once in a while it would be good to hear a message from the colonial churches that acknowledges that the marginalised are among us and part of us, not simply the ‘others’, the objects of churchly pity and charity. Just occasionally it would be good for the ppor and the broken to feel seen and heard, even if the churches really have no clue about how to help. 

Having no clue, after all, is part of the truth we are called to embrace as Christians, is it not? Before God we have no clue. None of us. We are all of us, princes of the church or objects of its thin version of charity, utterly and desperately in need of divine mercy. Lent is supposed to strip us all back to this. Our need of God, our need to be baptised, immersed, in God’s mercy. 

But Lent can only do that if the church will stop with its narcissistic obsessions and actually look and listen for what is happening to the last and least amongst us. To the stripping of all dignity by a cruel and heartless society. To the stealing of homes, habitats, and children. To the destruction of economic activity and the killing of those of us taken in custody by the ‘justice’ system. Only by seeing this, and really hearing what the vulnerable and excluded are saying, can we hope to meet the God we all need. The one who was crucified outside the city and rendered Godless because of his commitment to truthful witness. The one who rose from death to give his kingdom to the poor.

Garry Worete Deverell

Lent, 2022

The snake and the Christ: defamiliarising the biblical text

 Texts: Numbers 21.4-9; John 3.14-21

I begin by acknowledging that we worship this morning on the unceded country of the Eora federation. I give thanks for the ancestors who formed this country and the elders who have nurtured it for 5000 generations. I look forward to the day when there may be a more just settlement for all Indigenous peoples.

Today we encounter the Hebrew story of the serpents in the wilderness. So, trigger warning right at the top: this homily discusses snakes! Which few of us are entirely fond of because in these parts, on this continent, most of our snakes are venomous. Their bite can kill you. And so, we are justly and understandably afraid of them.

That the people of Israel, who were winding their way from Egypt to Canaan, were also afraid of them, is made pretty clear from the story we read. When Yahweh their God sends ‘fiery’ snakes amongst the people as punishment for their complaining, they are terrified and beg Moses, their leader, to intercede for them. Moses does, as he has done on many other occasions, and Yahweh relents. Sort of. The snakes continue to afflict the people. But Moses fashions a bronze serpent and places it on a pole. All who look at it, all who fix it in their gaze, are promised life and healing.

This is a puzzling story, to say the least. From the perspective of moderns—most, if not all, of us in this church today—there are many, many questions. What kind of god would meet a complaint about hunger and thirst with a punishment like this? Only a nasty and vengeful god, surely? And why are the snakes ‘fiery’? What on earth does that mean? Also, if their god wanted to provide a way of salvation for the people, why did he not just remove the snakes? What’s all this about fashioning some kind of talisman, some kind of idol, and placing it on a pole for the people to gaze at? Seems kinda weird for a monotheistic religion, hey? In this connection, it is interesting to note that the snake of bronze was apparently kept in Israel for many hundreds of years after this incident. And that it was eventually destroyed by King Hezekiah because the people regarded it as a heathen god and burned incense to it (2 Kings 18.4).

So many questions. How does one even begin to process them?

Perhaps like this. In the Mesopotamian world from which these old, old stories apparently emerge, snakes were seen as magical, even semi-divine, figures because they possessed both the power of life and the power of death. Their power for death is obvious from both our story and from our own experience. But think about the power of the snake for life. This comes from the fact that almost all species of snakes shed their skin as they grow. To the ancient human observer, this looked like a magical transformation, a rebirth from death. What other creature is able to die and be reborn? Many ancient far-Western cultures, including the Canaanite societies from which the story we are reading today partly emerged, therefore saw the snake as a creature that was able to kill, certainly, but also to grant life and healing to the sick. 

But why are the snakes ‘fiery’? The Hebrew root of the word translated like this is ‘seraph’, which is also the root of ‘seraphim’, mysterious winged creatures who occasionally appear in the First Testament as messengers of Yahweh, or symbols of Yahweh’s divine glory (cf. Isaiah 6). What is common to both is the notion of light or fire. Many snakes, like the seraphim, have scales that catch the light and create colourful displays. They shimmer with light, with glory. In ancient cultures, this property of light was seen as divine, reflecting the capacity of divinity to push back the darkness, which invariably contained evil and chaos.  There is a sense in which our story therefore preserves that ancient Mesopotamian understanding. The snakes somehow participate in the capacity of divinity to push back the chaos, the darkness of life and fill it with life and with healing.

It is interesting to me that these ancient, far-Western, stories about the divinity of snakes are quite similar, in many ways, to the even more ancient snake dreamings of Aboriginal nations here in Gondwana. In the dreaming of the Yolgnu people from north-eastern Arnhem land, for example, the snake is Yurlungurr, the most important of the creator-ancestors who formed the landscape and gave the law. Yurlungurr is associated with the rainbow because his scales are lavishly shimmering and coloured; but also with water, because you can always find the snake near a water-hole in the bush; waterholes which, in the evaporating mists of early morning, also form rainbows. Yurlungurr is the one who is said to have emerged from deep beneath the earth and formed the grooves in the landscape which became rivers.

Think, for a moment, about the symbols in play here. The snake who shimmers like divine light as he pushes back the darkness and creates a space for life to emerge. The snake who, like water, has the power to both sustain life and to take it away. The snake who is divine, a creator ancestor, whose venom can both kill and—if combined with the properties of certain berries—can also provide the basis for an anti-venom which will save your life.

What I would like to suggest to you this morning is that these stories—both local and far-Western—preserve a certain wisdom about the divine nature of country itself. Wherever we look in country, whether it be in the life-cycle of snakes or in the power of water or even in the cycles of light and dark that make up a day, you will see the divine power to give life and to take it, the power even to create life from death. Think of the capacity of fire to crack open dead seeds or the power of plants to draw on composting bio-mass for new growth.

If you read the biblical story of the fiery snakes in the wilderness through this lens, the personal vengefulness of the Hebrew god might just fade into the background somewhat. And you will see, instead, this more ancient understanding of the divine: that power which is able to create new life from death, and heal through illness, and push back the chaos of darkness with divine light.

For that is what my trawloolway sensibility picks up, also, in the homily from Jesus in John’s gospel, chapter 3. Note that in John’s gospel, the cross of Jesus always communicates a dual power that is consistent with the power of the fiery serpent. It is both death and the very first moment of resurrection. Even as the Son of Humanity is killed by the Romans on the cross, he is also ‘lifted up’ or glorified as a divine figure who has the power to be reborn. Just as the image of a fiery snake was lifted up on a pole on Canaanite country, so the divine Son of Humanity is lifted up on a cross, that everyone who looks to him, who trusts in his magical and transformative ways, may have the kind of life that is able to persevere even beyond death. For, in this same passage, Christ is seen as the one who can drive back the darkness in people’s lives, the one who can bring truth instead of lies, the one who, by his sacrifice on the cross, communicates the love of the divine not just for people, but the whole world, the whole cosmos, that realm that we Aboriginal people call ‘country’. 

So how to we deal with these ‘texts of terror’, these images of personal divine vengeance that we find in the Hebrew bible?  By stepping back a little to see the bigger picture, the more profound and ancient wisdom, that lies at the root of the story. A wisdom that speaks of the divine capacity of country to persevere through death to life. A divine power to which we can be party as well, if we will simply trust in country’s ways and give ourselves over to the truth that we find there. For there is more than one sacred text, you know. The sacred texts of the bible, both First and Second Testaments, are relatively new to the scene. The more ancient text is country itself, of which William Wordsworth wrote in his poem, 'The Tables Turned':

One impulse from a vernal wood
may teach us more of man,
of moral evil and of good,
than all the sages can. 

Those English romantics were on to something, actually. In the wake of the industrial revolution in Europe they saw that people were losing their relationship with the wisdom of the earth and of country. A wisdom which teaches us of life and death, even of good and of evil, a wisdom that is destroyed just that little bit more as each tree is cut down and each species of animal made extinct for the sake of the ever-expanding empire of human beings.

When the European colonists came to this country, the unceded country of Gadi and Kami peoples, they brought that same instinct to kill and destroy as the Hebrew people brought to Canaanite land. For the lectionary text from Numbers neglects to mention what immediately preceeds this story of the fiery snakes. In Numbers 21.1-3 we read of a prayer of the Israelites to Yahweh which promises that they will utterly destroy the habitation of the Canaanites if Yahweh will agree to give them their land. And that is what happened, mostly. The land took a beating, and most of the Canaanites were killed or enslaved. Yet they persevered through it all because both country and its people possess the power of life through death, and healing through suffering.  As the Canaanites survived, so do we, the Aboriginal peoples of this land. For we also share in the divine power of country to live, even though we die many thousands of times over.

The good news of the gospel is that life perseveres. That life perseveres even beyond our stupidity and our appetite from self-destruction. For God has made it so. And God’s story is written everywhere: in country itself, but also in stories from the Hebrew and Christian traditions. Stories we have read today. Let us hear and rejoice. For though it might often feel as though our world is utterly lost in violence, self-destruction and darkness, this is not at all the last word on the matter. For all is not lost. Not at all. Life perseveres. God perseveres. And so, therefore, can we.

Garry Deverell

First preached for Lent 4, 2024, at Hope Uniting Church, Maroubra

Lent and reconciliation

Jeremiah 2.1-13; Psalm 26; Mark 14.1-25

As a child I was very talkative. At the edge of the vast estates of barley, wheat and potatoes which dominated the landscape where we lived, were small stands of native bush: atop hills, on the steep slopes of mountains and along creeks. Whenever the opportunity arose, this is where I would wander. And as I wandered, I would talk. Not with myself (though many might see it that way) but with the trees and the ferns, the crows and the hawks, the wallabies and the potaroos, even the rocks and the waterfalls, that I passed on my way. I would greet them all cheerfully and enquire about what kind of day each was having. I would pause to watch and to listen a while, finally wishing each well and offering a prayer or an incantation seeking their good and their well-being. Sometimes I would tell them about me, my troubles, my hopes, my bewilderments. And I would hear their voices speaking back to me. Not in English, mind. Whatever the language, however, I understood. I heard wisdom. I heard care. I heard guidance. And, after a little while, I would return to my family, my school, and all the complex negotiations of civilised life, somehow calmed and refreshed.

As a teenager, another conversation-partner was added. The bible. I became fascinated with its characters and voices, as many and as varied as I knew in the bush, though considerably more violent. Here were people I recognised. People who suffered great injustice, whose hopes and dreams were shattered. People who coveted all that belonged to another. People who stole, raped, murdered, and committed genocide in order to obtain what belonged to another. People who were afraid, but who were able to overcome their fears through faith in God. People who were able to change their hearts and their behaviour because they believed in the mercy of God. People who carried great wounds and flaws, and yet were chosen to become God’s emissaries. These days I marvel that a book as violent and as tragic a testament to our inhumanity towards one another as ever was written, could simultaneously bear a message from and about a God of love.  But it does. On every page. For what the bible finally proclaims, surely, is just this: first, that we are loved by God, even as we fail, consistently and repeatedly, to love each other; and, second, that because God has not given up on us, it is possible not only to recognise and learn such love, and also to abide in its mysterious power more deeply and consistently. 

 So, two conversation partners, two sources of wisdom for the living of life as a trawloolway man who is also a Christian. The one located in a sacred book, a book brought to this country by the coloniser, and the other located in a sacred landscape, a landscape that is alive with the presence of ancestor-spirits who can be spoken to, and who can speak.  Both book and country, in their own ways, are sacred texts. Both, being full of divine spirit, may be consulted for wisdom and guidance, if you know how. If I have a lament, this night, it is not (as some of you may perhaps expect) that the coloniser has attended carefully to the sacred book, and not enough to sacred country. No, my lament is a tad more comprehensive than that. That the coloniser has paid little attention to either.

 Here I want to draw your attention to the second chapter of Jeremiah which says, in part:

Thus says the Lord:
I remember the devotion of your youth,
   your love as a bride,
how you followed me in the wilderness,
   in a land not sown.

What wrong did your ancestors find in me
   that they went far from me,
   and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?
I brought you into a plentiful land
   to eat its fruits and its good things.
But when you entered you defiled my land,
   and made my heritage an abomination.
The priests did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’
Those who handle the law did not know me;
   the rulers transgressed against me.

Be appalled, O heavens, at this,
   be shocked, be utterly desolate,
says the Lord,
   for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living water,
   and dug out cisterns for themselves,
   cracked cisterns
that can hold no water.

This oracle, first uttered in the presence of the last king of Judah, is uncannily prescient about where we find ourselves, right now, as a nation and as a church. It is true, is it not, that we have forgotten the ancient ways, the ways here described as a covenant, a marriage, a communion with the divine in the wild places, a country not sown or intensively cultivated by the invader. Is it not true, as the prophet says, that upon entering this country the colonists saw the land not as a cathedral in which God might be known and worshipped, but rather as a commodity to be exploited in exchange for wealth and influence? Did not the colonists clear the land of its owners and managers, its first peoples, in a manner that fundamentally fractured the terms of God’s law and covenant? Did they not covet what belonged to their neighbours, did they not steal and rape and murder in order to obtain what they desired? Does not that theft, rape and murder still continue to this day? Is not the lament of those of us who have survived that genocide also the lament of the land itself, and the ancestor-spirits who dwell therein, and of God’s own self? Are we not the voice of the crucified one who is, at one and the same time, both Christ and country?

By commodifying this country and removing those whom the divine Spirit placed here to manage and cultivate its fruitfulness, colonists have polluted the sacred stream God provided for all of us as a gift, the stream of sacred lore designed to sustain us in life over many hundreds of millennia. Instead we have dug cisterns for ourselves, cisterns so badly designed that they can barely hold water: practices and structures and policies which have brought us to point of ecological emergency, and to the certainly, certainly I say, of a fundamental implosion in the biological operating-system of our planet.  Unless. Unless we repent of our sin. Unless we turn again to the God whose wisdom and way may be discerned in both sacred text and sacred country.

In the world of politics and public policy, this means removing the puppets of capitalism from government and replacing them with people who are willing to listen to the still, small, voice of the divine Spirit. In our church it means jettisoning all that remains of that possessive, status-hungry, exclusionary impulse in every state-sanctioned church and replacing it with the disciplines of listening, hospitality, and prophecy. For unless the voices we generally exclude, ignore and belittle are welcomed to the table, then we shall be as guilty of killing the prophets and dancing on their graves as the kings of Israel and the priests of its temple. And we shall pay for it in the end by finding ourselves at the wrong end of the Magnificat: scattered to the bottom of the food-chain, rendered empty, nothing.

All of which is to offer an invitation for you all in this season of Lent. See, I place before you the way that leads to death and the way that leads to life. If you die to your self-importance, and the self-importance of the colonial imagination, you will be empty enough for God to fill you with life.  But if you hang on to such things, you will find that you are already dead. And your deadness will continue to infect the systems and networks of which you are part, both publicly and privately. As the spiral of Lent into Easter is properly a return to the waters of baptism, to receive there, through repentance and the death of self, the risen life of Christ; so may it also be, for you, a turning to the rivers and creeks of country, through which that same God’s speaks a word of grace that will renew not only your own life, but the life of the whole planetary eco-system.

Garry Deverell

1st Sunday of Lent 2021, Christ Church South Yarra

On deferring Easter and diving more deeply into Lenten quarantine

As I write the COVID-19 virus is transmitting itself from person to person at an exponential rate. Much of the trasmission is happening 'under the radar' as people who do not know they have the virus pass it on to others. Governments are desperately seeking to contain the virus by enacting strict 'social distancing' rules and closing down venues where people might gather.  This means that many businesses are severely curtainling their activities and their workforces. Perhaps a million people have already lost their jobs, mostly those who were employed as casuals or 'gig' workers. The effects on the economy are already profound, with steep losses on stock markets not seen since the Great Depression. But the effect on social cohesion and mental health is likely to be even more profound. For we are social animals. Even those of us who are 'introverted' on personality scales will struggle to keep our 'positive' on as we are prevented from social intercourse except via video-streaming app or phone. (Many of the poor, of course, do not have even those means of communication). Every anthropologist will tell you that humans need more than digital reproductions of another's image or sound. We need physical contact - intimate touches, hugs, whispers, non-verbal cues, olfactory interactions - in order to feel that we are part of the tribe, that we belong, that we are safe, secure and loved. If the virus continues to divide us, the already-serious rates of mental illness in post-industrial societies like ours are likely to reach pandemic proportions outstripping the reach of the virus itself.

The church is not, of course, immune from any of this. Because of our foundational ethic to love one's neighbour as oneself we can see the sense in protecting the vulnerable through spacial distancing. We can see the sense in closing down public gatherings. We can see the sense in passing on public health messages about hygiene.  And, of course, we are seeking to mitigate the social-psychological affects of these lockdowns by connecting our people into pastoral care matrices and making resources available through various media to encourage prayer, worship and a continuing connection to the sacred story in which we find our communal sense of vocation.  None of this makes us immune, however, to feelings of bewildernment, hopelessness and even despair. Many in our communities will struggle terribly in the days to come.

Many of my collegues - both clergy and academic theologians - have been seeking to locate this current existential within the explanatory narratives of Christian faith, both biblical and liturgical. Some are saying that the lockdown of churches places us in something approximating the exile of Israel and Judah's aristocratic classes to Assyria and Babylon, respectively. We are at home, but we are not at home. Because we cannot meet and encourage each other, because many of the liturgical and missional imperatives we are accustomed to pursuing without inhibition have been forbidden, we find ourselves alientated from the symbolic sources of our communal identity and purpose. We are like the Jerusalemites who found themselves in a strange land where 'singing the Lord's song' seemed almost impossible (Psalm 137).  The irony here, of course, is that those who could not sing the Lord's song were actually singing the Lord's song. They were remembering their narrative genealogies and looking to them for guidance. As are our churches right now, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis.

Before we travel too far down this rabbit-hole, it is important to note that the people of Israel and Judah were taken into exile very much against their collective will. A foreign power swept in from the north, a power with a superior army, and these small federations of God's people were simply overcome. That is not what is happening to our churches in the midst of this pandemic. For the most part, churches are cooperating with goverments because they want to, because their leaders are convinced that the public health measures represent the right - even the 'Christian' - thing to do. Are we, then, in a new form of 'exile'? In some ways, perhaps yes. In most ways, I suspect no.  In saying that, I fully confess that I am weary of the many other ways in which the churches invoke the exile whenever they are feeling 'got at' by their critics. I am rarely convinced by arguments that the church is being persecuted in the post-industrial West. We are being ignored and misunderstood. We are being dressed down for our many sins against the vulnerable, certainly, but that is far from the state-sactioned discrimination that Indigenous people, for example, continue to endure.

Others are turning to the liturgical narratives of Lent and Holy Week for a sense of location, and for good reason. I have heard colleagues speak about being in a 'long Lent' in which we shall not, perhaps, be existentially ready for a fulsome celebration of Easter until the statistical 'curve' on viral transmission has well-and-truly turned. I have spoken that way myself on social media and in local pastoral letters. It is instructive to note that there is a long-standing relationship between Lent and the notion of quarantine (Latin: forty days) as both a spiritual retreat in a place of wilderness and a paring-back of life in order that life might flourish again. Jim Crace's astonishing novel, Quarantine, is as fine a meditation upon this connection as I have read.

Others have located themselves and their communities more specifically still: at Good Friday or Holy Saturday, in the place of Jesus' torture and death, and/or his descent into hell. And there is no doubt that some people, especially those most vulnerable to the full devastation of the virus, might claim an experience that can genuinely sustain that comparison. For most of us, I feel, the analogy is a bit of a stretch. In any case, what people seem to be reaching for here is a sense that the ecclesial lock-down reminds us of the narratives of dislocation and disillusion that overcame both Jesus and the disciples in (some aspects of) the gospel narratives concerning the final week of Jesus' life.  And certainly, there are connections to be made, if you happen to possess what Roman Catholic theologian David Tracy called an 'analogical imagination'.

If we consider some of the key narratives presented us by the Revised Common Lectionary for Lent and Holy Week in Year A, we can note a number of analogies with our current existential. On Ash Wednesday we read of a terrible 'day of the Lord':

a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come (Joel 2.2).

The army Joel apparently speaks of is an overwhelming military force. But many in our community, from the Prime Minister down, have spoken about the COVID-19 virus as a 'hidden enemy' against which we must do battle lest we, too, are overwhelmed. The passage from Joel goes on to call for a 'return' to the Lord with with 'fasting, with weeping, and with mourning' (2.12) out of a recognition that the people of God have themselves contributed to what is about to happen to them. They have abandoned the covenantal relationship with God and the swarming armies from the north form part of the consequence for having done so.

Some have speculated that pandemics such as the one we are living through at present are in some way a consequence for our species' lack of attention to sound environmental management. John Vidal, in The Guardian, writes that 'a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19'. As human beings press further and further into rainforests and other places of extraordinary biodiversity, we are being exposed to zoonotic diseases carried by animals that human beings have had little contact with before. Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at University College London, studies how changes in land use contribute to the risk. 'We are researching how species in degraded habitats are likely to carry more viruses which can infect humans,' she says. 'Simpler systems get an amplification effect. Destroy landscapes, and the species you are left with are the ones humans get the diseases from.' (The Guardian, March 18 2020). In addition, a large body of research has shown that pandemics often begin in places of poverty and hit those living with poverty hardest. Ben Oppenheim and Gavin Yamey of the Brookings Institute note that poverty is often the reason why people press into rainforests to harvest disease-carrying animals; that malnutrition and existing chronic conditions make people far more susceptible to catching new diseases; and that a lack of medical resources in poor-to-middle-income regions means that new diseases will transmit themselves more quickly and efficiently ('Pandemics and the Poor', brookings.edu). Scientists are confirming, it seems, that we are perhaps reaping what we have sown. Our lack of attention to the covenantal commands to steward the land and to care for the poor are making life difficult even for those of us who respresent the global rich. Perhaps a 'return' to these concerns, a return to the Lord with weeping and mourning and repentant hearts is precisely what is required.  Perhaps we should stop destroying the biosphere on which our lives depend. Perhaps we should start listening to Indigenous wisdom about managing our lands and waterways. Perhaps we should stop exploiting the global south's resources and impoverishing those who produce our consumer goods. Perhaps loving our neighbours as we love ourselves would actually make a huge difference. Who knew?

The lections that follow in the Lenten sequence might all be characterised as commentaries upon the difference between redeemed and unredeemed desire which, precisely because the COVID-19 has our communities questioning who they when they cannot do what they desire, have the potential to generate yet more analogical bridges into the viral existential. 

The Lent 1 lections critique various kinds of will-to-power, whether they be the yearning for God-like knowledge (Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7), a pretending towards self-righteousness (Psalm 32) or our complex fantasies about transcending creaturely finitude (Matthew 4.1-11). The COVID-19 virus, if nothing else, is surely teaching us about the very real limits of our human knowlege and power!  The Lent 2 lections propose a freedom that comes from faith in God's good election. Abraham trusts God's gracious promise, and this is credited to him as righteousness (Gen 12.1-4a; Romans 4.1-5, 13-17). Nicodemus is counselled by Jesus to be 'born from above', to be drowned in water and the Spirit and start life anew as if everything he has learned is wrong, except what the Spirit will then teach him (John 3.1-17).  When our 'normal' way of life is proving indequate even to human survival, let alone thriving, this story invites us to fall on our knees and look for the Spirit who alone has the power to re-boot the system in ways that will make for a more profound human flourishing. 

The Lent 3 lections discuss redeemed and unredeemed desire through the metaphor of water. The wandering Israelites thirst for water and grumble when it is not provided on demand (Exodus 17.1-7). The woman who comes to draw water at the well learns of a 'living water' that Jesus can provide, a water that is able to quench our many desires and wants in a way that ordinary (dead?) water never can. Switching to a food metahor, the narrative then describes precisely what this 'living' food (or water) might be: 'My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work'. (John 4.5-42). The Samaritan women, and all who hear the story through the evangelist, are invited to participate in Jesus obedience, to fix our hearts and minds only on what God asks us to do. For only if we empty ourselves of all pretence to self-knowledge, self-righteousness, self-generation are we empty enough to receive the gracious action of God in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is poured out for us (Romans 5.1-11). God is then able to do the good in and through our newly-formed desire.  Can this 'living water', this 'food' that Christ gives be read as a kind of anti-viral, or perhaps a new kind of virus which has the potential to shut down and remake our human systems from the ground up? Is it like the messianic 'one' in the Matrix movies who is able to re-set our contaminated human matrices so that they are more godly in their aspirations?  Read this way, the COVID-19 virus might be both an angel of death and an angel of light at the same time. Like the French word poison, which can mean both 'poison' and 'medicine', perhaps the virus is like a cleanser which exposes what is wrong in order to make room for what is right.

The Lent 4 lections play with images of perception, with light and dark. The dark is a state of blindness, a blindness which can be brought on, somewhat paradoxically, by the brightness and attractiveness of exernal apperances. Samuel is told by the Lord not to look at the beauty or stature of the men who might be king of Israel, but at the godliness of their hearts (1 Sam 16.1-13). Indeed, and to flip the metaphor over, one can have the brightness of God's company and comfort even when you are walking through a very dark valley (Psalm 23). The long excursis in John 9.1-41 explores these themes with a poetic density rarely matched since. A man born blind is healed by Jesus so that he can see. Paradoxically, however, he remains blind with regard to who Jesus is, and how Jesus saves the world, until the point when he hears Jesus name himself 'Son of Man' and responds by declaring 'I believe'. The Jewish interlocutors, though they can literally see, are declared 'blind' by Jesus because they refuse to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. The passage concludes with these words:

I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind." Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, "Surely we are not blind, are we?" Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see,' your sin remains.

Here again people of faith are asked to confess their blindness in order to really see, to renounce their faith in the commonplace and the obvious in order to make room for faith in God. Perhaps, in the midst of the COVID-19 crises, we are being called to account in exactly the same way Jesus' interlocutors in John's gospel are being called to account. Perhaps our faith in ourselves and our righteousness before God is being questioned. Perhaps our habitual complacency with regard to the covenantal responsibility to care for the earth and for the poor is being brought out of the dark and into the light? Perhaps our consumerist habits, and our scandalous comfort with capitalist notions of trickle-down wealth, are being exposed for the lies that they are? 

For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light-for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them (Ephesians 5.8-11).

I consider it the height of irony that when the rich are finally exposed to something that might actually hurt them, their stable of politicians is suddenly willing to introduce all the socialist policies that councils of social services and welfare agencies have been calling for in earnest since the late 1980s. A universal living wage, even if you are jobless.  Programmes to guarantee that folk have a roof over their heads. Massive funding boosts for essential services. Profound levels of support for small business and a return to the local manufacturing of essential goods. Perhaps the threat of a virus that can kill us all is what it takes to teach the rich the lesson of human solidarity: that we thrive together or we die together.

Of the marvelous lections for Lent 5, which reflect more directly on matters of life and death, I will say very little except by way of a poem sent me by a friend, and written to interpret the existential in which we find ourselves explicitly within the frame of John's gospel, chapter 11:

now,
it is no longer
an exegetical puzzle
to be solved in our study;
it is no longer a pericope
with which to wrestle;
it is no longer a (really)
long reading to get through;
it is no longer a story
we blow the dust off every three years.
now,
it is our story;
now
it is about us;
now
it is us inside that
dank, dark tomb:
stinking of fear,
wrapped in the bands
of loneliness;
blinded by the handkerchief
of weary worry.
now,
we hope,
we pray,
we yearn,
we listen
for just a footstep,
just a tear dropping on the ground,
just a whisper of Jesus
pacing before the stone,
growling in his spirit
in anger and frustration,
before he cries out,
in hope and joy and life,
"come out!"
now,
we are not casual bystanders;
now
we are Lazarus
waiting . . .
                                                (c) 2020 Thom M. Shuman

'Can these bones live?' asks the Lord of Ezekiel the prophet. The bones of economic systems which leave the poor on a scrap heap; the bones of ecological practices which exploit our rivers, waterways, oceans and lands until they have no life left in them; the bones of our education systems, which strip away the capacity for wisdom and replace it with technocratic forms of knowledge which leave us dry and gasping and empty; the bones of a church which has lost its way by preying on the weak and the vulnerable, by losing its prophetic voice, and by its nostalgic yearings for a rapprochement with the State and with power?  Ultimately God would have us long not for a resucitation of these deadly ways of life, but for a nailing of such idols to the cross with Jesus so that there can be a new beginning, a 'new experience with experience' as Jungel would say. We do not need a tweaking of what we have already had, in the mode of Nietzsche's 'eternal return of the same'. What we need is resurrection. The arrival of the really and genuinely new: a flash that is able to clear our eyes and make us see what we have never seen before. Resurrection is not something we can make. It is only something that we can receive. By dying to all our self-sponsored performances of faith. By trusting in Christ. By falling to our knees with him and saying 'Not my will, but yours'.

The corona virus has forced us to consider the possibility of a longer, more profound Lenten quarantine. Many of our church leaders are rushing around more busily than ever, as if by their increased activity they might become the messianic answer we long for, as if they might thereby 'induce' the new birth of Easter through the deployment of condensed ceremonial into people's homes via streaming technologies.  While such deployments are clearly well-intentioned, they are really most unlikely to address the sheer depth of our now-more-exposed-than-ever spiritual poverty and loneliness.  Lent has always been a time for hearing and owning the truth, for the confession of sins and the exorcism of false spirit - first for catechumens who might embrace the faith at Easter baptisms, but then, also, for all Christians to walk that way again through the act of sponsorship and solidarity. The existential into which the virus has thrust us is therefore an opportunity for a more thorough-going Lent, a Lent in which our privations are more real than imagined and therefore more profoundly effective as a school of faith. If we embrace the possibility before us, we might learn again to live as creatures of God rather than of the market. We might learn to be still and listen for God's voice, the voice that can give life to the dead, rather than to rush around with strategies ingeniously designed to avoid that encounter. We might learn to be humble again, to renounce our schemes for propping up the crumbling edifice of church and society, and look anew for the God who can animate even the poorest of soil with spirit. We might learn, again, a poverty which is able to renounce all that we think we know, all that we think we must cling to, in order to learn again the way of the suffering Christ.

If we rush, too quickly, to Easter, we might miss these opportunities, these riches. And our celebrations of Easter would, perhaps, feel even more false than usual.  As a catholic Christian, who believes very much in the spiritual profundity of the church year, I would normally be on the side of those who argue against any departure from the usual flow of the seasons or of the lectionary. But we are now presented with a once-in-a-century crisis and opportunity. If there is ever to be a time when we might defer our celebrations of Easter, this is most likely it.

What I am suggesting, more concretely, is an extension of Lent through engaging, for example, a more thorough examination of the pre-exilic and exilic prophetic narratives, especially Jeremiah, First Isaiah, Lamentations, Joel, Amos, Micah and Zephaniah. Each of these reflect upon the ways in which national life in Israel and Judah had seriously departed from the covenantal settlements contained in the Torah. These reflections might be accompanied by gospel narratives taken from the lections for ordinary time, which explore the concrete demands of living a life of faith, and with a more thorough reading of the Pauline books of 1 and 2 Corinthians, which reflect at length of what can go wrong in the church's relationship with the dominant social and political culture.  The books of Daniel and Revelation, with their apocalyptic reflections on faithfulness in a time of Empire, might also be thrown into the mix.

The readings and reflections of Holy Week (along with whatever ceremonial is possible) might be reserved, therefore, for the week immediately prior to the Sunday when churches can safely gather again for the first time following the ban on public worship.  This Sunday, whenever it might come, might then be wholeheartedly celebrated as the arrival of Easter, and the full ceremonial of the entire Easter season might follow, right through to Pentecost.  Can you imagine what that would be like, after all the privation, after all the spacial distancing, after all that living of a more circumscribed life? It would be brimming over with joy, the joy that comes with the arrival of the dawn after a long, dark, night of the soul. Can you see the anticipation on the faces of those who gather to process the new fire into the darkened church? Can you see their smiles as the exultet is sung and the resurrection is proclaimed in a sudden blaze of light? Can you see their laughter at the startling preaching of Chrysostom's Easter sermon? Can you imagine that laughter erupting again, spontaneously, at the renewal of baptismal vows and the asperges with water? Can you hear the chatter and imagine the hugs and kisses of renunion at the greeting of peace? Can you imagine the smiles of satisfaction and gratefulness as the sacrament is placed in human hands for the first time in many, many months? And the champagne, and the cake, and the general merriment afterward?  It would be an Easter like none other in living memory. It would be the Easter you can have if you've rediscovered Lent. Really rediscovered it. Like finding a treasure so incomparable in a field that you are willing to sell everything you have to obtain it.

Now, there is nothing more certain than my losing this particular argument on the grounds of historical precedent in time of plague, or else the necessity and duty of conservatism when discussing liturgical change. Some might argue, pragmatically, that there is no prospect in contemporary times of our calling an ecumencial council with sufficient authority to change the rules. Still, there is occasionally some truth in small voices that speak to almost no-one out there on the edge of the wilderness . . .

Garry Worete Deverell

Lent 2020

The Hidden Light

1 Samuel 16. 1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5. 8-14; John 9. 1-41 

I suppose a number of you have seen a shadow-play. The shadow-play takes place in the darkness. There’s this big screen with a fire lit behind it, and the audience watches as the puppeteers tell their story by casting silhouetted shadows on the screen. Because the characters are all in shadow, you can’t see their faces or the features of their dress, and there are no colours apart from black or white. Because of this, anyone who is watching must use their imaginations to fill in the gaps, to give form and emotional detail to the character’s faces as they make their journey’s through the highs and lows of the tale as it unfolds. Now, the story we read from John’s gospel just now works a bit like a shadow-play. The writer delivers his story not with colourful figures rich in detail, but with characters barely drawn, silhouettes in light and dark. And the reader, or the hearer in this case, is invited to read between the lines, to exercise discernment about the degree to which the story’s truth is visible for all to see, or secretly hidden in the shadows.

At first glance, what we have here is a simple miracle story about a Jewish man, born blind, whose sight is wondrously restored by Jesus on the Sabbath day and therefore cast out of the synagogue for his trouble. Eventually he becomes a Christian, a believer in Jesus. But look again. Is that all there is to this story?

Most commentators will tell you that the story is ‘really’ about faith, that faith is here represented as a seeing, with lack of faith as its opposite, represented here as a kind of spiritual blindness. Note that when Jesus finds the young man after he has been cast from the synagogue, he asks him a question: “Do you believe in the Son of Humanity?” The fellow replies, “And who is he, sir, tell me so that I may believe in him.” Jesus replies, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” At that point, the young man cries out: “Lord, I believe” and worships him. This passage makes quite a solid link between seeing and believing. When the man ‘sees’ who Jesus is, suddenly he has faith in Jesus, the kind of faith which falls to its knees in worship. Seeing is firmly established as a metaphor for faith. And the case is apparently strengthened further in the commentary that follows, where Jesus says: “I came into the world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do not see may become blind”. In other words, Jesus comes to give faith to those without it, and to expose the lack of faith in those who pretend to have it. Faith is seeing, and lack of faith is blindness.

But hang on a minute. I’m not so sure that this traditionally correct approach is nuanced enough. Consider, if you will, the following questions. First, if faith is seeing, then why doesn’t John have the young man make his declaration of faith when first he is healed by Jesus? Why the long lag between seeing and believing? Second, and intimately related to this first question: if faith is seeing, then why does the young man not ‘see’ into the true identity of Jesus until right at the end of the story? When first asked who Jesus is by the Jews, the young man replies ‘He is a prophet,’ which is true, but only partly true. In the gospel of John, Jesus is pre-eminently not a only a prophet but the Christ, the Son of Humanity, the pre-existent Word of God made flesh. And later, when he is questioned more thoroughly, the young man declares that Jesus must have come from God, which is true, but again not true enough. In John’s gospel, Jesus not only comes from God, but is God: he has been as one with the Father from the beginning. And there is a further point which the traditional reading cannot account for. When the young man finally makes his confession of faith, it is not a ‘seeing’ which makes the difference, but a hearing. Jesus says to the man, “You have seen the Son of Humanity, I, the one speaking to you am he”. And it is then, and only then, that the man fall to his knees in worship. Did you catch that? The man had seen Jesus before, but it did not give him faith. Faith finally comes to him only in the wake of this self-revelatory speech of Jesus: “I am he”.

Now, why am I telling you all this? What does it matter if faith is a matter of seeing or a matter of hearing? What does it matter how faith comes, as long as it is faith? Well, it matters quite a lot actually. Because if faith comes by seeing, then it is not really faith. It is knowing. And knowing is the means by which we try to reduce God to our size and make of God some kind of idol that we can get our heads around. But a God we can get our heads around is not the Christian God, the God who made the heavens and the earth, the God of Jesus Christ. It is a God of our own making, a version of our dreams or fears, projected into the heavens and given the name ‘God’, a God we can control and domesticate. A tame God who never asks us to change.

The Gospel of John was actually written, in part, to combat that segment of church and society that had begun to associate sight, knowledge and faith in this idolatrous way. These people, who were later called Gnostics, believed that one could know God up close and personal, that one could have a personal hotline to Jesus and his power, that one could ascend to a direct knowledge of God through a secret path of wisdom which left behind the limitations and sufferings of the body and of ordinary life. To these beliefs and practices, John pronounced a resounding “NO!” No, he says, one may not escape the body and its sufferings, because even the divine one of God took on flesh and suffered like the rest of us. Indeed, John has the divinity or glory of God coming to light not in beatific visions or specialist knowledge, but in the disfiguration of a crucified man, raised above the earth. Jesus is indeed the light of the world for John, but this light lies hidden in the enigma of suffering and of signs that are difficult to interpret. So faith is certainly not about seeing and knowing. On the contrary, as Jesus says to the disciple Thomas, “Blessed are those who do not see, and yet come to believe” (20. 29).

If only these Gnostic ideas had died out with the Gnostics. But they have not. They are alive and well and living in your local branch of Christian fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is dangerous to genuine faith because it has no humility. It believes not only in right doctrine, and the ability to know without any form of doubt what right doctrine is. It believes in wrong doctrine, and the ability to locate it in others. It believes that there is a war going on between believers and unbelievers, and that it can calmly discern the difference between the two. And it believes, finally, that God is on its own side, but not on theirs. Fundamentalism is based on a faith which can see and know, rather than on a faith which believes and trusts in a God who withdraws from our eyes in the figure of the suffering one.

Note this too, that fundamentalism is alive and well not only within the churches, but also beyond the church in the general community. It surfaces, for example, in the certainty of people who approach the church for a ritual service, in baptisms, weddings and funerals. Many of these folk get quite upset when the church will not order these services according to the customer’s already-determined demands and purposes. Why? Because, in many cases, the “customer” is a fundamentalist of the neo-pagan variety, who cannot accept that the church has a calling and a duty to resist this new kind of cultural orthodoxy in the name of Christ.

To these modern Gnostics, who ask as the Pharisees did, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus replies, “If you were blind you would not have sin, but now that you say ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” You see, for Christians the point is not to be able to see, but to believe that God sees us, not to claim a certain, unassailable, knowledge or experience of God, but to trust that God knows us. The interesting thing about light, as the writer to the Ephesians notes, is that it exposes and makes visible everything in the world but itself. So if Christ is the light of the world, we can trust him to make visible our own paths through life, including the sin that so easily entangles. But we should not expect to see or experience Christ with any sense of certainty until that day when he is revealed in all his fullness. To stare into the sun is to be blinded. But blindness, for Christians, is not such a big deal. “Faith is the intimation of things not seen,” says the writer to the Hebrews (11.1). And Paul says something similar: “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5.7).

The life of faith turns out to be, then, not a full-colour motion picture for those who can see clearly, but a shadow play in which the fully sighted have no significant advantage over those who see not so well. The things of God are hidden in the enigmas of the world, in parables and signs which are difficult to interpret; and pre-eminently in the sufferings of Christ and those who suffer with him and for him by their baptism into his passion. Remember that the ‘healing’ our young man received was soon transmuted into persecution by those who refused to share his growing sense of faith.

So it is for all who are baptised into Christ’s ways. For that is the way of things in a world that prefers the light of the Television and the enlightenment of three-minute-interviews to the dark light of faith, hidden in the career of a suffering God. It is the world in which ministers of the gospel, no matter how hard we try to make ourselves understood, will only rarely be understood—because the people whom we address are blind to the God and gospel to which he is bearing witness. It is a world in which, as for the Jewish leaders in our story, the message of the gospel falls upon deaf ears because of this all-pervasive belief that God and the ways of faith are ours to possess and manipulate for the sake of our own consumer ends. In a world such as this, Christians are called not to know, but to be known, not to see, but to be seen by God, who gazes upon us with a love so wide and long and deep that it surpasses all our imaginings.

We lived in deeply uncertain times. The COVID-19 is only just beginning to bite, but it is being transmitted at an exponential rate consistent with a scenario in which our capacity to respond to all who are sick or dying will be quickly overwhelmed. What we ‘see’ and ‘know’ in this scenario is not at all comforting! Now is the time to actually activate our faith in a God who loves us. To look to Christ for a word of healing. For Christ has indeed promised to heal us, but not in the way a doctor might. The salve Christ offers is far more profound. Indeed, it is salv-ation. Salvation. A medicine that can revive and remake us even if we die. So do not fear. Do not fear even death. For the last enemy is death, and it has been overcome by Christ in his resurrection. Cling to him and you will be saved. Believe in him, and you will share his glory.

All glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so now, and forevermore.

Prepared for Lent 4 2020 on the First Sunday of the COVID-19 lockdown

Light for dark times

Texts:  2 Corinthians 4.3-6; Mark 9.2-9

Have you ever noticed how the gospel of Mark has no resurrection appearances?  Unlike the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, Mark doesn't deliver his readers a post-resurrection Jesus who appears to his disciples and gives them final instructions.  Instead, what you find there in chapter 16 is a group of the women turning up at the empty tomb where they discover, not a risen Jesus, but a nameless young bloke in an alb who tells them Jesus is risen.  So he's the one who gives them the instructions in this gospel, he, an intermediary or witness.  He tells the women to go and tell the other disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee.  And how do the women respond to the news?  Well, let me quote verse 8 of chapter 16, the last verse in Mark:

They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Now this is not exactly victorious, happy-ending stuff.  This is not a glorious ascension into heaven and a blessing of the faithful, like in Luke.  It's not a beachside scene where Peter is given the job of forming the church, like in John.  There's not even a dignified farewell and instructions for the ongoing mission, as in Matthew.  No, Mark has a distinctly unhappy and unresolved ending.  An ending where the risen Christ seems strangely absent, and the first witnesses of the resurrection are left fearful and bewildered.

Now, while the dreamer in me is forever drawn to the clear and incisive vision of John’s gospel, it is Mark's gospel that resonates most powerfully with my lived experience of being a disciple of Christ.  Why?  Because it doesn't deliver Jesus to me on a platter, all dolled up and unambiguously victorious in the face of life's complexity and difficulty.  No, in Mark's gospel, the glory of Jesus is a hidden glory, hidden beneath the stifling weight of the oh-so-human politics, religion and psychological trauma of Mark’s time.  Mark’s community was composed, you see, of a smallish bunch of Jewish Christians who had fled Jerusalem after its destruction in 70 AD.  They were a refugee community who felt like the whole world was falling down around them, and that the plans of God for Israel were pretty much over.  In the midst of their despair and poverty, the glorious presence of the risen Christ was really not particularly obvious.  Which is not to say that the risen Christ was not present for Mark and his community.  It’s just to say that Mark and his community had to work towards a theology of Christ’s presence that made sense in their unique and particular circumstances.

That's where this incredible story of the transfiguration comes in.  When Jesus is still alive, and still preaching and teaching in Galilee, Mark tells us that he took his best mates Peter, James and John—the inner circle of the disciples—up onto a mountain to be by themselves.  You can understand, I'm sure, the motivation here.  As Mark tells the story, Jesus has been tearing around Galilee for months, preaching and healing.  The crowds follow him everywhere.  Crucially, Jesus had already negotiated a number of run-ins with the ruling figures in Jerusalem, the scribes and the Sadducees.  He had offended their sense of religious propriety, and they had made it clear that if he continued upon the course he had set himself, he would end up in serious trouble.  Indeed, Mark tells us that immediately prior to this mountain trip, Jesus had told his disciples that they were all headed for Jerusalem, where he would be arrested and crucified.   After all that, I think you can see why Jesus would be wanting to get away from it all!  Also, if I were Jesus, I reckon I'd be having some doubts about my resolve.  I'd be wondering if I had the wherewithal to follow through on what I believed I had to do.  And I'd be wanting some space, and the companionship of some good friends, to help me come to terms with all of that.

So there they are, camped up in the mountains like so many before them.  Like Moses on Mount Horeb, who had run away from his enemies in Egypt.  Like Elijah on the run from political assassins.   And like these two great figures before him, Jesus has an encounter with God there that strengthened his resolve to fulfil the mission which God had given him.  Mark tells us that the long-gone Moses and Elijah came to talk with him.  Not metaphysically, you understand, but mystically. Jesus converses with Moses and Elijah in a moment of concentrated prayer, in the manner that we, also, may converse with the great scholars and mentors of the faith:  we may meet them, that is, in the God who binds us all together across space and time; we may hear their voice; we may attend to the way in which they have become icons of God’s way and will; we may watch for their faithful decisions, and learn a thing or two about the call of God within our own place and time. 

What Jesus learned, in prayer, for his own pilgrimage is communicated by what Mark then tells us through the device of a cloud and voice, a device well-known and understood by his Jewish community.  Just as Yahweh, a voice in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, had confirmed the identity and destiny of the people of Israel as they crossed the red sea and then journeyed toward the land of promise, now the cloud of God and the voice of God confirm and encourage Jesus in his messianic identity as the suffering son of God.  Indeed, in doing so, they repeat the message Jesus had already received at his baptism, a story already told by Mark at the very beginning of his gospel.  We conclude, therefore, that Jesus here receives a reminder and an encouragement from his Father.  To finish what he has begun.  To walk the way of the wilderness to his own land of promise, even as his ancestors have done.

Yet it is not only Jesus who receives encouragement and guidance.  Those who are listening to this story as preaching, the members of Mark’s community, are present in the story as the figures of the disciples, Peter, James and John.  Think, for a moment, about how the story unfolds from their point of view.  In following Jesus up the mountain, it has been made clear that they, too, are apprehensive about what the future may hold.  On the one hand, they are excited about the ministry of Jesus, his preaching and his healing.  They are filled with hope for what God may do with them and for their suffering people.  Yet they have also become quite disoriented by Jesus’ more recent talk about how the messiah must suffering and die.  What does it all mean?  Is God with them or not?  How could the death of Jesus accomplish anything useful at all?  Will God also abandon Jesus, in whose face they have discerned the very image of God on earth?  So, these are the questions that swim around their heads and hearts as Peter, James and John camp with Jesus on the mountaintop.  At that very moment, Mark tells us, Jesus was transfigured before them.  His clothes became shining white, whiter than any earthly bleach could ever make them, white as the glorious presence that had appeared to Israel, to Moses and to Elijah.  Only this time the glory emanated from Jesus himself.  The divine shekinah shines out through the suddenly translucent body of Jesus their friend.

What did Mark want his community to hear in this story?  And what would the Spirit want us to hear?  To return to where I began, this morning, I want you to note that the transfiguration is the closest Mark comes to telling a resurrection appearance story.  Only, unlike the resurrection stories that appear in the other gospels, this one (which precedes them all diachronically) is placed right in the middle of Jesus' ministry in Galilee, well before the crucifixion ever occurs.  It is a very, very brief revelation of divine glory, and of the resurrection life promised by God.  It is a foretaste, if you like, of the end of the drama in which we are all, as Christians, enrolled.  It assures us, as it assured Mark’s community, that God may indeed be found with Jesus, and that Jesus will see us through, even in the middle or midst of our pilgrimage, even when we are most knee-deep in the mire of our difficulties. 

Yet, and this is important, the story of the transfiguration does not deliver, for all that, the kind of certainties that many contemporary forms of faith would seek to deliver.  Certainties about being saved from poverty, illness or addiction, or from the real-politics that makes for war, genocide and the flight of refugees.  Note, in the story, that the revelation received does not transform the disciples into warriors of faith who can suddenly say, finally and definitively, who God is or what God is up to in the world.  They see and hear God, certainly.  They see God flash out at them in brilliant glory; yet it is the very brilliance of the revelation that guarantees that they will grasp very little of God’s detail, as it were.  They hear God’s voice from the cloud, certainly, but every Jew knows that clouds hide as least as much as they reveal.  The whole thing is over in a moment, leaving very important impressions, memories, hopes indeed. Yet, in the end, the disciples are given nothing other than these, nothing more substantial by which they might command or control the forces arraigned against them.  It is salutary to note that when Jesus leads the disciples down the mountain once more, the work of healing and preaching continues, and it is just as hard and thankless as before.

What is Mark telling us?  He is telling us this.  That the life of discipleship is not usually about the experience of triumph and victory and power; it is about God’s revaluation of these values, such that experiences of defeat, weakness and tribulation are nevertheless charged, in faith, with a persevering dynamism of divine care and love.  Neither is discipleship about having a clear and unambiguous relationship with God that arms us with power to finally transcend the forces arraigned against us, whether from within or without; it is about the hope that Christ will accomplish what we could never, in a million years, accomplish for ourselves.  What Mark tells his community through this story, therefore, is what he would also tell us this morning: that the life of discipleship is about getting on with life not triumphantly, but faithfully, through the often very hard yakka of caring and preaching in a world which the gods of our age have rendered blind and deaf and dumb.  And being sustained in that by the impressions, traces and hopes given us in the transfiguration, that is, by a capacity to see the divine Spirit quietly and constantly at work where others see only toil and trouble.

The story of the transfiguration is, in Nicholas Lash's memorable phrase, an 'Easter in ordinary'.  It tells us that even the most difficult and dark places of the earth are nevertheless alive with the presence and activity of God.  With the eyes of faith, which are given the Church precisely in the revelatory story of Christ’s transfiguration, it is possible to see that God does not abandon us in our ignorance, in our mediocrity, or even in our poverty.  God is present here.  God is working there.  God is making the resurrection happen by even the smallest increments of loving invitation and of hope.  Even the smallest. 

Now I don't know about you, but for me this message of Mark's is very good news.  Because I don't find the Christian life to be particularly victorious.  And I've never met a God who wants to rescue me, magically, from every difficulty.  But Mark tells me that an authentic discipleship is about being prepared to follow Jesus to the cross, and find there that even the very worst that human beings can do to each other is not strong enough to overpower the love of God for this crazy old world.  Mark tells me that the liberating power of the risen Christ is available at any time, and in any place.  Not as apparently miraculous fireworks or the arrival of the marines.  But as the power to persevere in faith, hope and love because these, and only these, have the power not only to outlast evil, but to so absorb its power that it is no longer evil.  That is a sermon for another day.  But for now, know that this I hold in faith: when evil and death have withered away, faith, hope and love will still be there.

So here's a practical suggestion right at the end.  A suggestion for how you might find that that presence of Christ if it seems to not be there.  Get on with being a disciple.  Read the gospel of Mark.  Notice what Jesus does in his ministry in Galilee.  And do the same.  Repeat it otherwise in your own place and time.  Remember what the young bloke said at the tomb?  'He is not here, he is risen . . .  go and find him in Galilee'.  Which mean 'go and find him in the midst of being his disciple and sharing in his ministry, and the ordinary will be transfigured before you'. 

I’d like to close with a poem from Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, in a reflection on exactly these themes, says this:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:        

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.  

Í say móre: the just man justices;

Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—

Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

As Hopkins says:  Christ shines out in everyone and everything that is Christ-like in the world.  He worships his father through everything that the just do to worship him, which is to say, in everything that that seeks to repeat his words and his works for our own times and places.  In this is our hope and our glory.  Not in creating a justice and a peace from our own imaginations, but in the imaginative reception of what Christ would render unto his Father through a heart of faith—perhaps even your heart, perhaps even mine.

Garry J Deverell

Feast of the Transfiguration

Fear death by water

Genesis 9.8-17; Psalm 25.1-10; 1 Peter 3.18-22; Mark 1.9-15

In 1922 T.S. Eliot published what many still consider to be the most important poem of the 20th century. ‘The Waste Land’ presents itself as a series of scattered images of Europe in the wake of the First World War. Ranging from the author’s memories of childhood visits to Germany, through cockney conversations in a London pub and walks along the Thames, to fragmented recollections of classical stories from Rome and India, the poem depicts a world in which the ‘nymphs’ – that is, the coherence of things – ‘have departed.’  Nothing is left, says the voice of the poet, except ‘voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells’.  The poem is also about the author’s own ‘death’ – figuratively speaking – that is, his incapacity to make all these images of European meaning cohere in a way that can sustain his life.  ‘Fear death by water’ says a clairvoyant the poet consults early in the poem.  And by the end the poet is so desperately dry and thirsty in the wasteland of his imagining that he has actually begun to search for the water by which he is convinced he will die, yet it is unclear if the poet has found it, or no.

The images offered us by the first Sunday of Lent are not entirely unconnected to what Eliot saw and experienced in London at the end of World War 1.  The Noah story is about a similar cataclysm, a flood, which – like the First World War – completely did away with the world as it has previously been known. One day everyone was going about their business, sure of the foundations on which they walked and the meaningfulness of the directions in which their lives were taking them. But then, suddenly, rain began to fall. And – absurdly, irrationally, inexplicably to most - the rain didn’t stop.  Indeed, the rain kept falling until all life on earth – all except that preserved by God in the ark – was no longer alive, but dead.

And then there is the story of Jesus' baptism by John in the Jordan. If there was ever a time and a place in which the phrase ‘fear death by water’ rang with portending truth, it was the ancient Mediterranean where literally thousands of souls were sent to a watery grave by the wrath of the gods made manifest in ocean storms and the monster Leviathan who lived beneath the waves.  The rite of baptism deliberately invoked the universal fear of these apparently cosmic forces, that sense in which one could never be the master of one’s own destiny because the gods were always more powerful. Yet baptism sought, also, to both modify and transform that fear by invoking a phenomenon still very strange and foreign in the ancient world, the phenomenon of a God who seeks to influence the world solely by the grace of unconditional love.  

In the baptism of Jesus a peculiarly Jewish logic about the meaningfulness of things is therefore brought to both its zenith and conclusion. For the semitic peoples of the ancient world both shared and did not share in the pagan fear of catastrophe that obsessed their neighbours. Like their neighbours, they believed that the power of nature - the power of water, if you like - signified everything in the universe that could take one’s life away, everything that could render one’s plans and schemes both null and void, everything that could make a mockery of the notion that we are the masters of our own fate.  Unlike their pagan neighbours, however, who were constantly seeking to do deals with the gods to secure their protection against catastrophe, the Hebrew preachers believed that the power behind all power was essentially both good and gracious, and desired nothing other than the good of the people, and desired this good unconditionally.

The Hebrew stories about death by water were also, therefore, stories of LIFE by water. A flood comes to consume the earth and all its wickedness. Yet God preserves the seeds of a new world in an ark that floats upon the receding torrent for 40 days and 40 nights.  The angel of death is sent to destroy all the firstborn of Egypt. Yet God’s people are preserved by walking through the depths of the Red Sea and trecking, for 40 years, through the wilderness until they cross into the land of their freedom via the Jordan river.  Jesus’ life as a carpenter and compliant citizen of the Roman state is put to death in that same river by baptism that he might rise to live the life ordained for him by the God who claims him as his beloved Son.  He receives, at that moment, the Spirit of God, who immediately drives him into the wilderness so that he can really learn what it means to do away with one’s own dreams and embrace the dreams of God.  For 40 days and forty nights Jesus learns what it means to repent, to change one’s mind and heart, for the kingdom of God has indeed come near.

Friends, the 40 days and nights of Lent begin with these stories of death by water in order to set our course aright. 40 days and nights hence is the beginning of the paschal Triduum, the Great Three Days which commemorate the fulfillment of Jesus' own baptism: his death on the cross at the hands of evil powers, and his rising to life as a sign of God’s final triumph over such powers by the power of what we rightly call love.  We look forward to this time because in Jesus’ rising is the possibility of our own rising. In Jesus’ triumph is the possibility of our own triumph. In Jesus' victory is our own victory.  Easter is therefore our goal and our destination.  

Yet, and this is very important, these stories of death by water also remind us that there can be no rising without a dying; there can be no prize without a willingness to give up on the very notion of winning; there can be no victory without a submission to complete and utter loss.  For Lent is the process of getting to Easter by a dying to ourselves and a living to God. Lent is about confessing the truth about ourselves and our world, the truth of our utter helplessness to make for either sense or for good apart from a divinely given sensibility concerning the good.  Lent is about the art of repentance and surrender, of turning from what is evil and giving ourselves only to what is beautiful and noble and true. Lent is about forsaking the business of getting by and learning to walk in the byways of God. It is about crying through the night and welcoming the joy of dawn. Lent, in short, is designed to kill everything in us that keeps us in chains so that God can free us, can redesign us, and fill our ‘empty cisterns’ with a new resonance for salvation. And we speak of these things in image and metaphor precisely because they are far too important to leave to the prosaic, rational, flat language of the prevailing discourse.

I pray you all a blessed and holy Lent.  In the name of God . . .

This homily was first preached within the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist, North Melbourne.