Killing the Indigenous: reflections on baptism in Warwick Thornton's 'The New Boy'

‘The New Boy’ is a 2023 film by Kaytetye man Warwick Thornton which explores the collision between white Catholic and Aboriginal spirituality. It does this through an exploration of various baptismal motifs such as that of a new birth and body, along with death and resurrection. In short, a captured Aboriginal boy seeks to incorporate Catholicism into his own spirituality, but is eventually, himself, incorporated by white Catholicism.

The ‘New Boy’ (Aswan Reid) is captured by police and brought to a remote orphanage run by nuns. He doesn’t speak English and is largely silent throughout the film. He refuses to wear a shirt and eat with cutlery. He hugs trees. He plays with baby snakes. These function as signs of his difference and his resistance to being incorporated in the white Catholic community.

The orphanage is run by Sr Eileen (Cate Blanchett), who assumed leadership extra-canonically when the parish priest died a year earlier. Sr Eileen is a complex character. Powerful yet vulnerable. Spiritually earnest and zealous for the boys’ education yet given to systematic lying and alcoholism. She symbolises a form of white Catholic feminism, assuming the authority of a white male priest yet without the protection of the white male church.

Sr Eileen’s subordinates are Sr Mum (Deborah Mailman) and George (Wayne Blair). Both ‘incorporated’ Aboriginal people who nevertheless keep up their resistance in small ways. Sr Mum is the cook and domestic servant. She apparently became a nun when her own children were taken from her. She is kind to the New Boy. George is a farm labourer who is glad to have work a long way from the centre of white society. He puts the children of the monastery to work but is disinclined to participate in church services. He is gruff and cold, but clearly cares.

The New Boy’s otherness is also seen in his ‘clever’ powers. He has a light with him, by which he heals a boy bitten by a snake and saves the life of another boy burned in fire. George recognises that the boy is ‘clever’, a practitioner of Aboriginal magic, and worries that word will get out and their remote peace will be destroyed. Sr Eileen seeks to interpret the New Boy’s healing powers as signs of saintliness.  It is her way of seeking to incorporate the boy into the white Catholic body.

The New Boy’s best attempt to incorporate Catholicism into his own spiritual frame comes when a large crucifix, made of wood, arrives at the monastery. Seeing the crucifix as a suffering being somehow connected to trees, the New Boy seeks to heal its wounds by taking some baby snakes and placing them before the crucifix. In many Aboriginal cultures, snakes are powerful ancestral beings able to heal and bring life to the dead. The snakes are killed by the worshippers, but one is made alive again by the New Boy and effects a transaction by which the wounds of the tree/Christ are connected to self-inflicted wounds on the hands of the New Boy.

Perhaps because there are not enough snakes involved in the magical exchange, the living being is not healed and the New Boy becomes unwell from his wounds. Sr Eileen interprets his wounds as stigmata and prays for his recovery. When the New Boy is well enough to walk again, Sr Eileen baptises him in the church and his wounds are apparently healed with baptismal water. The New Boy notices that the crucifix no longer communicates with him as a living being. And when he seeks to summon his light later the same day, it is extinguished. The New Boy begins to wear a shirt and, having lost his ‘spark’, apparently submits to white Catholic ways. Having sought to incorporate the white Catholic imagination into his own, he finds that it is he who is incorporated.

     Theological Reflection

At the heart of the film is a confrontation between two ways of imagining the world, each seeking to absorb or incorporate the other. Will native Aboriginal ways prevail, or the coloniality of the white Catholic body?

Historically, the white Catholic body prevailed. In this frame, the New Boy can be seen as an ‘innocent’, a saint, sent by God to bring hope and healing to this small, struggling, Christian orphanage. He is a Christ figure whose eventual baptism fulfills all righteousness and incorporates him fully into the body of the church. I am, however, part of a very small group of Aboriginal thinkers who are seeking to subvert this colonial logic in the field of theology by seeking to re-read white Christian interpretations within the more ancient frame of Aboriginal spirituality.

From this point of view, the crucifixion of Christ is not about God sending a messiah to save the world. It is about the suffering of country, and of Aboriginal community and culture, under colonial power.  For us, there is no ‘divinity’ other than ‘the dreaming’ and its embodiment in the cosmic community of country and kin.

In this perspective, the resurrection of Christ is not an intervention, extra nos, from a God beyond, but the innate capacity of country and kin to renew themselves, to be reborn from the compost of old bio-matter. This means a ritual washing in water is not, primarily,‘baptism’as an incorporation in the white Christian community. Water symbolises, for us, the lifeblood of country, distributed to the whole body of the land via the ‘veins’ of creeks, rivers and other waterways. For us, water rites dramatize a participation in the dying and rising of country itself, including country’s capacity to resist the power of coloniality for stealing, killing and destruction.

This capacity is beautifully illustrated in Glenn Loughrey’s painting ‘From the Depths, Life Rises’, where the colonial imagination is represented by squares, much like fields cultivated in the European manner. At one point there is a circle within a circle. This represents the capacity of country, and of mob, to resist the colonial imagination.

On this anniversary of the failed referendum, I simply note that this theological work is necessary because Australia remains a colony in which First Peoples, our culture and our spirituality, are still regarded as little more than a footnote in the 'great' theological narratives from Europe that have made modern Australia what it is.

Garry Worete Deverell

A short paper given at the Talanoa Oceania conference held at United Theological College, Paramatta, on April 5, 2024.

Matthew's baptism of Jesus

Isaiah 42.1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10.34-43; Matthew 3.13-17

Every culture and people have their foundational stories, stories which are able to tell us who we are, where we belong, and what our purpose in life might be.  For Christians, one of those foundational stories in that of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan river.  It is foundational because it is a story not only about who God is, but it is also about who we are as people who ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.  If we listen carefully, it is a story that can also provide invaluable guidance about where we belong in the world, and what we are to do with our lives.  It certainly did that for the early Christian communities.  So . . . listen carefully!

The first thing that Matthew tells us that Jesus came from all the way from Galilee to be baptised by John in the Jordan.  That’s quite a long way and, if you happen to be a young man seeking your fortune in the big wide world, in entirely the wrong direction!  For John was baptising people not in the middle of the city, where people gathered to work and do their business, but in the desert wilderness—way, way off the beaten track.  For John was preaching a baptism of repentance, calling people to reflect upon their lives and ask the question “Is what I’m doing with my life really enriching, satisfying, what I am put on this earth to do?  Or am I just doing it because everyone else is, or because I am afraid of something, or for some other reason I don’t quite understand?”  In John’s eyes, the Jewish people, particularly the most wealthy and successful, had forgotten about the call of their God to live lives characterised by justice, compassion and prayer.  And so he beckoned them out into the wilderness, to a place where the normal trappings of life were no longer there to support and ensnare.  He beckoned them to a place rich with meaning in Jewish faith, a place which marks the passage of a people who had been slaves in Egypt to their freedom in the land of promise.  “Be baptised in the Jordan,” he told them.  “Like the people who crossed this river in ancient times, you cross this river also.  Repent!  Put off your life of slavery to economic and social demands.  Wash away your sins and rise from the waters to pursue the life of freedom that God will give you!”

So, when Jesus comes to John it is not by accident.  It’s not that he was wandering in the desert one day, like some tourist in modern-day Palestine, and happened across a bizarre ceremony that would be kinda fun to have a go at.  No, Jesus comes to John with a deeply held belief and purpose:  that God had called him to leave behind all that was expected of him by his community, that is, to be the head of his household and chief provider for his mother, his brothers, and his sisters.  Jesus believed that God had called him to claim an entirely different identity and mission, a vocation that could only, perhaps, be finally discovered and embraced through this watery ritual of death and rebirth.

For that is what baptism meant for the Jews of the first century.  The word “baptism” literally means “to be immersed in water”, and the ceremony first came to prominence in the century before Christ as a way for Gentiles, non-Jews that is, to embrace the Jewish faith and community.  After a long period of preparation in which the candidates learned both the wisdom of the Jews in law and prophets and the ethical demands of the Jewish life, they would be taken to a body of water and washed thoroughly—yes, even immersed in that body of water.  Thus the name:  “baptism”.  The symbol is not perhaps so obvious to us these days, especially to those of us who have witnessed hundreds of infant christenings over the years.  Stripped naked and immersed in water, the candidates were killing off their former way of life by a symbolic drowning.  They were also washing away their sins so that God might lead them in a new, and very different, way of life.  What John does, then, is take an established Jewish ritual for the initiation of Gentiles into Judaism and applies it to lapsed or lost Jews, Jews who had forgotten what it meant to trust and obey the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

One should understand that, in the ancient world, water was not so benign as we regard it today—flowing purely and freely from our taps as it does.  In the ancient world, water very often symbolised chaos and evil.  In water, people lost their lives.  On the waves of the sea, many ancient people drowned.  With the flooding of the rivers, they lost their harvests.  In the ancient world, people knew that water was both necessary to life but also the bringer of death.  “Fear death by water” said the Buddha in T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Wasteland.  What that meant for Eliot, as it means for us, is that the waters of baptism should not be regarded as tame, given only to feed and sustain life as we know it.  The waters of baptism are dangerous:  they are designed to take our lives away.  Without doing so, they cannot give us a new life.  There is a terrific byzantine icon of Jesus baptism in which you can see, under his feet, the terrifying figure of Leviathan, an ancient symbol of water’s power to kill and destroy.  In order to be baptised, Jesus had to be willing to submit himself to the power of Leviathan.  For that is the only way to overcome Leviathan’s power.  Perhaps we moderns only get in touch with something of that ancient sensibility when a tsunami comes along.

So, all of these meanings hover in air and stir in the water as Jesus comes to be baptised by John.  That is why John at first refuses to baptise Jesus, according to Matthew.  For Matthew’s community, you see, which knew these meanings very well indeed, Jesus is not a person who needed to be baptised.  He is not a sinner who had lost his way and therefore needed to be cleansed and renewed in the water.  “That may be true,” says Matthew in reply, “but baptism symbolises other things as well:  not just the putting away of a life of sin but, more positively, the embrace of an identity and vocation from God.  This is why Jesus asks John to baptise him—in order to symbolise and fulfil all that God rightly asks of him.”  

And so Jesus is baptised.  Note the tense and the mood of that verb.  Jesus does not baptise himself.  Baptism is not something that he, or anyone else, can do for themselves.  It is something that another gives or bestows upon us.  The primary agent in baptism is God.  It is God who baptises, it is God who gives us the grace and the power to put aside the life of sin and embrace the life of faith.  It is God who acts in baptism, even though he does so through the agency of his servant.  For Jesus that servant was John.  For us, it is the church.  What this means, of course, is that salvation is not something we can accomplish for ourselves.  In the Christian view of the world it is simply not possible, by virtue of one’s own ingenuity and power, to be liberated.  In Christian understanding, even the will to be liberated is a gift from God.  Therefore, it is only by virtue of God’s love and grace that we can ever be saved.  

Yet, for all that, a well-informed human will and intention must be present, as it was for Jesus.  Without such will, there is no sacrament.  That is why the church can never baptise a person for whom there is neither faith in God, nor the will to follow God’s way.  What does that mean for infant baptism?  Simply this:  that we must stop baptising children where the primary caregivers have little-to-no informed intention of living a genuinely Christian life, immersed in the church and loyal to the promises made.  The word sacrament means, in fact, “promise”.  In the sacrament of baptism, we hear the love and promises of God.  But we also enact our own promises, promises to turn away from evil and embrace the life of Christ not only in word, but in deed also.  If we or our primary caregivers can neither understand nor make those promises, then the church has no business in baptising us.  To do so would be to mock the promises of God!

But what does God promise us in baptism?  Here we can learn from the baptism of Jesus once more.  As he emerges from the waters of death, Matthew tells us that Jesus saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon his ‘like a dove.’  This event is rich with resonance from Jewish history and theology.  It first recalls the messianic passage we read from Isaiah, where the servant of the Lord is given the Spirit in order to perform a particular task and mission in the world:  to accomplish justice for the oppressed, to open the eyes of the blind, to be a light for the nations, and to release the captives from prison.  In his baptism, Jesus therefore learns his task in the world:  to be God’s light and hope, and the promise of justice, for all who suffer.  This image of the Spirit descending like a dove reinforces that identity.  In the story of Noah, the dove comes as the waters of the flood recede, a sign that God’s new world is beginning to emerge.  So it is for Jesus, and for all who are baptised.  The Spirit is a sign or guarantee that there is life after disaster and death, that no matter how much we lose in baptism we shall be given, by that same action, blessings and riches beyond measure.  The dove:  a sign of God’s love after the deluge is over.

And then there is the voice from heaven:  “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”  Here Jesus finds out who he is.  It is likely that Jesus suspected something for much of his life, but now all his imaginings and intimations come together.  For here God owns Jesus as his son and messiah, the one by whom salvation will come not only to the Jews, but also to the Gentiles.  Remember that the most crucial component of this identity, in Christian understanding, is that of suffering.  Christ will not be the Son of God, and will not bring salvation to the world, unless he suffers and dies.  This understanding is confirmed, in Matthew’s narrative, by Jesus use of the ‘sign of Jonah’ in chapter 12.  There some teachers come to Jesus and ask him for a sign that he is indeed the messiah sent by God.  Jesus replies that no sign will be given them except the sign of the prophet Jonah, who spent three days in the belly of a sea monster, deep in the ocean.  “So shall it be for the Son of Man,” says Jesus, “who shall spend three days buried in the heart of the earth”.  Matthew wants us to understand that Jesus baptism anoints him to be the messiah, certainly, but a peculiar kind of messiah: a messiah who must suffer and die in order to accomplish his work.  The imagery of baptism is unmistakable.  Here baptism becomes a figure for his death and his resurrection:  buried in the water, risen to life on the third day.

Now, I said at the beginning that this story of Jesus baptism is not only about God and Jesus, but also about all who ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.  We’ve seen something of that as we’ve gone along.  But let me now conclude by making some things explicit which have perhaps been hidden in the detail up until now.  The baptism of Jesus became, in early Christian theology, the paradigm or model for what it meant to ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.  ‘Belief’ you see, is neither intellectual assent on its own, nor a group of habitual bodily practices on their own.  Belief is ‘faith’, a decisive unity of intellectual and bodily action which has its object and inspiration within the thought and action of another, an ‘other’ in whom one’s very self is taken apart and re-constructed.  Christians are made into Christians by becoming immersed in the symbolic world of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that is figured in baptism, and precisely by that immersion, are transformed into people whose seek to imitate Christ is every way.  What we therefore learn from Jesus’ baptism is what it ‘belief in Jesus Christ’ actually looks like in a particular life:

1. a leaving of the well-worn expectations and loyalties of our society in favour of a life of faith dedicated to God;
2. a dying to sin, and the lostness of our culture, in order to rise to a new life, a life of grace and peace given us by God; in this we participate in Christ’s saving death and resurrection—‘the sign of Jonah’;
3. the conferral and gift of a new identity.  In our baptism, God owns us as his sons and his daughters.  Jesus was the first, in other words, of many siblings.  The whole company of these siblings is called ‘the church’.
4. a commissioning for mission, for now we are anointed with the Spirit so that we can share with Jesus his vocation as messiah.  In the baptismal liturgy we declare God’s promise that we are now, as a baptised people, the body of Christ, in whom the Spirit of Christ dwells.  All of us, whether we are ‘ordained’ or not, are therefore called to be lights for the nations and to work for the freedom of everyone from whatever it is that keeps them in chains.

The story of the baptism is therefore foundational for the identity and vocation not only of Jesus, but of ourselves as well.  As many as are baptised into Christ have died with Christ.  By participating in the baptism of his death and resurrection we, each of us, are given a new, messianic, mission and vocation.  As Christ gave himself for the sake of the world, so now we—as his body, the church—are called to join with him in loving the world, for the glory of God.  That is what it means, therefore, to ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.

I am myself

Texts: Acts 3.12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3.1-7; Luke 24.36-48 

When, in Luke’s version of the story, the risen Jesus first appears to his closest friends and companions, they are not entirely convinced that he is Jesus, the man they had known and loved. At first they think he is a ghost, some kind of other-worldly apparition who has come to harm them. They start to believe only after Jesus has said, ‘Look, I am not a ghost, I am myself’ and invited them to touch the wounds in his hands and his feet. A few moments later he eats some fish in the presence, again to show that he is himself, ‘in the flesh’ as it were. This story, and the one before it about the encounter on the road to Emmaus, have always intrigued me. Not because of their apparently miraculous elements (I have never really struggled with the idea that the God who created the universe can also alter its rules) but because they model for us that rather paradoxical process by which Christian selves become yet more themselves by dying to themselves. So, that is what I should like to talk about this morning: becoming who you are by letting go of who you are in order to become a new self that is like the risen Christ.

According to Luke’s story, Jesus was not always himself. Which is not to say that he was not recognisable as himself. His name was Jesus, he was a son to his mother and a brother to his siblings. He grew up in Nazareth and learned a trade, which he then used to support his family. Everyone who knew him over a period of years could have identified him as himself, even if they had not seen him for some time. Even after his baptism by John in the Jordan, even after Jesus left his home town in pursuit of a new and dangerous vocation, Jesus was recognisably Jesus. And yet. And yet Jesus had not yet become entirely himself. Even at the point of his death on the cross, Jesus was not yet what God had promised he would be. He was not yet the risen one, who could shake off the power of sin, evil and death. He was not yet the new kind of human being that the disciples encounter in our story: a flesh and blood person who could nevertheless appear and disappear as though he were no longer subject to the limitations of time and space. For much of Luke’s story, then, Jesus is not yet himself in the sense of having become who God had destined him to be.

Crucially, in the story, Jesus is only able to become truly himself by letting go of a whole heap of cherished dreams about his future, some originating in his own imagination, and some in the imagination of others. His mother, being a Jewish mother, probably hoped that Jesus would become a successful merchant or, even better, perhaps a lawyer or rabbi. She, and he, had to let go off such dreams. His friends and companions hoped that Jesus would become a political leader, a leader who could oust the Romans and restore the fortunes of Israel. They, and he, had to let go of that plan. And from the story of the garden of Gethsemane, we can surmise that Jesus himself would really have preferred to live rather than to die, to retire quietly to some regional small business perhaps, rather than to suffer the wrath of the Jewish Council. Yet, in the end, he makes a crucial decision which makes all the difference. ‘Not my will, but yours be done’ he says. He says that to God, his Father. And by that decision he lets go of his own hopes and dreams in favour of his Father’s hopes and dreams, which ultimately enables God to complete the process of his becoming. By this death, Jesus becomes the Christ, the one anointed by God to bring a new kind of life in the world, a life so new that most of us still have trouble coming to terms with what it all means.

But that is how it is for all of us, as well. We shall never be truly ourselves until we are able to let go of ourselves—the usual hopes and dreams planted in us by family, friends, and culture—grasping, instead, the self that God wills and promises for us, the self that is Christ. The Christ-self, as the First Letter of John tells us, is ‘righteous’. Not ‘righteous’ in the sense of a self-interested hiding away from the rest of the world or a sitting in judgement upon it. No, the Christ-self is righteous in the sense that Jesus was ‘righteous’—an engaged embodiment of the mercy of God, a tough kind of love that is centred on other people and refuses to simply abandon them to the powers of death, despair or banality. According to John, we shall never be entirely ourselves until we are like the risen Christ, the new human being, the revelation of what God intends for humanity in general. ‘When he appears,’ says John’ we shall be like him’. This is God’s promise, but like all God’s promises, it is not a promise that can be fulfilled apart from the choices we make. God created us for freedom. To become who we are, we must choose the path that Christ would choose.

Ego eimi autos . . . I am myself. That is what the risen Christ said to his disciples. And we shall only be able to say that ourselves if we are prepared to do what Jesus did, to take our baptism into his death seriously as a very real dying and a rising. We shall be ourselves when, by faith, we have allowed Christ to take away the fear of what others may think, and the desire to conform to all that is conventional or common-sense. We shall be ourselves when we are prepared to risk both security and sense for the sake of a gospel of outrageous love. We shall be ourselves when we stop believing that there is nothing we can do to transform this crazy world of economic and scientific rationalism. We shall be ourselves when prayer has become a more familiar habit that watching TV or surfing the internet. We shall be ourselves when we are able to attend to the needs of others (‘needs’, note that, not ‘wants’), even if that means putting aside what we think we might need for ourselves. We shall be ourselves when we are able to surrender ourselves to Christ and say ‘not my will, but yours’. Now, I am very aware of not yet being myself. And you, I know, are aware of it too. But in faith I believe that Christ will complete the work that he began when I was baptised. He will do it for you to. If only you, and I, will surrender. If only you, and I, will let go.

This homily was first preached at St Luke's Uniting Church, Mt Waverley.

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.

A Still-born Hope? Asylum-seekers in Australia

Texts: Genesis 7:11-17, 21-23; 8.1, 6-19; Romans 6.3-11; Mark 4.35-41

Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge and honour the Yallukit-Willam people, who have cared for the land on which this church was build for time immemorial. 

In the Jewish and Christian imagination, life is about the long and difficult pilgrimage of God’s people from a place of isolation, fear, despair and bondage to a place of community, love, hope and freedom.  The pilgrimage is long and difficult not because of God, but because of us.  We make it long and difficult by our ongoing attachment to the things and the behaviours which comprise the walls of our many prisons. If we were to finally let go of such ‘treasures’ and accept Christ’s free offering of forgiveness and peace, then things would change very quickly.  But, in point of fact, we don’t let go easily.  Because we actually love our chains – even to the point of worshipping them - and because we are therefore loath to take them off, we find the way to liberation very difficult. And this is true whether we are talking primarily about individuals or societies, about personal spiritual travail or the struggle of tribes and nations to become more just and humane.

In Holy Scripture, this long and difficult pilgrimage from death to life, from bondage to freedom, is most often symbolised as a difficult passage, either across or through a large body of water.  In the story of Noah, for example, God responds to the irredeemable wickedness of the world by hatching a Genesis project.  God takes the very best of this world – Noah’s family and breeding pairs of every species of animal - places them all in a boat, and floats it through the awful crisis of storm and flood that destroys the world utterly.  When the boat finally alights on dry land following the flood, its inhabitants spill forth to become the basis for a new world, a new humanity, and therefore the possibility of becoming a better –more just and peaceful - society.  From evil and despair, through water, to a founded hope for life and peace.

That pattern is repeated in the story of the Exodus of God’s people from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the land of Canaan.  Under Pharaoh, God’s people a severely mistreated. They are slaves, and therefore have no control, whatsoever, over their own destinies.  Their bodies and souls are nothing but the playthings of power.  But Yahweh sees their suffering and sends his prophets Miriam and Moses to arrange their escape.  Through the waters of the Red Sea as they run from Pharaoh, and through the waters of the Jordan River as they finally enter Canaan, the Hebrews are slowly transformed from a people without hope or identity to a people who have both a destiny and a future.  From evil and despair, through water, to a founded hope for life and peace.

There is a boat story in Mark’s gospel as well, and it draws heavily on the Noah and Exodus narratives.  Here Jesus is with his disciples on a boat in the middle of the sea of Galilee.  They are on route from safe, familiar, territory, to the region of the Gerasenes where they will encounter a demon named ‘Legion’. All about them is a wild storm which makes the sea ferocious.  Now, we can glean from Mark’s larger story that this small tableau symbolises the vulnerability of Mark’s small church as it seeks to carry its gospel of peace and liberation into the midst of a hostile and militant Roman Empire.  When Jesus stands up to rebuke the storm, when he cries out ‘Peace! Be Still!’ Mark is therefore telling his church that they can survive their ordeal if they look to Jesus, if they can trust in the grace of his presence in their midst, and follow with perseverance his way of suffering love.  In the midst of evil and despair, through water, they will find their way - with Jesus - to a place of life and peace.

The church has drawn on these very stories, from its very beginning, to symbolise the pilgrimage from death to life that is conversion.  Not surprisingly, the ritual of conversion is a washing in water.  In baptism we die to the basic principles of this world. We are drowned to all that is evil and unjust and cruel and selfish in the world.  With Christ we are buried in the waters, entombed in their icy depths. Yet, through the power of God’s love, we are raised from that place with Christ, raised to live a new life, with new hopes, and with faith in the new way of love God has shown us in Christ.  The ancient pattern is therefore repeated again in this fundamental rite of Christian discipleship: from evil and despair, through water, to a founded hope for life and peace in the company of our saviour Christ.

Now, what if we were to map this Christian pattern of pilgrimage and conversion onto the long and difficult journeys made by asylum seekers? What if we were to see in their incredible journeys across land and sea something of the same desperate hope that motivates Jews and Christians to flee from all that is evil and seek, instead, the peace and joy that God has promised? What if we were to interpret their voyages by boat, especially, in the light of Christian baptism? What if asylum seekers who get on leaky boats are not, in fact, demons come to threaten our peace, but simply people – people like us – who are actually fleeing the terrible demons that rule their places of origin in order to find - on the other side of dangerous and uncertain waters, a new life, a founded hope, a place where neighbours can live in peace? 

If we reframed their journeys thus, it would be no longer be acceptable to write so-called ‘boat-people’ off as ‘economic migrants’.  It would no longer be acceptable to tell them to ‘go back to where they came from’.  It would no longer be acceptable to imprison them for years at a time, heaping our own tortures on top of the traumas they have already experienced.  It would no longer be acceptable to build walls around our huge and wealthy continent and say ‘keep out’, ‘there is no room at this inn’.  Why? Because, as the book of Deuteronomy (10.19) so simply puts it:  ‘Show great love for the alien. For you were aliens in the land of Egypt.’  As Christians and Jews we are all boat-people, led by God from places of evil and despair, through water, to a founded hope for life and peace in the company of God’s redeemed people.  We are boat-people in a personal and psychological sense, and we are boat-people in the more communal sense. For most of our ancestors came here from across the seas seeking some kind of baptismal hope for a new and better land, for a place and a community of resurrection from the dead.  Who can deny it? We therefore have a responsibility, as people who are being loved and rescued by God, to love and rescue asylum-seekers. We cannot allow such hopes for life, life in all its promised fullness, to be still-born. It is as simple, my friends, as that.

Now, I am a person who has a better claim to this country than most. I am a direct descendent of Manalargenna, last chieftain of the Trawoolway clan whose traditional lands are in north-east Tasmania.  My family has lived in that part of the world for at least 25 thousand years, and for many thousands before that here on the bigger island.  But this I say to anyone who has come to these shores seeking refuge, asylum from the storm.  You are welcome here!  You are welcome! From the evil and despair of whence you came, through water, to a founded hope for life and peace in the company of God’s people, you are welcome!  And I promise you this. That I will do everything in my power to persuade our government to make you welcome also.  

This homily was preached at a service of lament with asylum-seekers at Williamstown Uniting Church in September 2013.

The Vindication of the Martyrs

Psalm 23; Revelation 7.9-17; John 10.22-30

A moment ago we heard from the Book of Revelation.  In the scene presented to us, the writer imagines that heaven is like a vast temple or throne-room.  The one on the throne is never named or described in any detail, but we are left in no doubt that it is the God of Israel, Moses and Elijah, the God and Father of our Lord Christ.  Immediately before the throne is one who looks like a Lamb who has been slain.  It is Christ, the paschal lamb who was slain to atone for the sins of the world.  Interestingly, in the Book of Revelation, the one on the throne can never be seen or addressed apart from a seeing and addressing of the Lamb.  One can never see the deity on the throne directly; every view is obscured by the Lamb.  This is very clever theology.  God may only be known by what God reveals of Godself in the face, form and voice of the Lamb.  The Lamb is God, that is, he is all we may know of God.  There is a resonance here with that phrase from Jesus in the Gospel of John:  “The Father and I are one.”  But that is not what I want to dwell on this evening.

Shift your gaze to the scene before the Lamb.  A great multitude is gathered, so large that not even a Channel 7 film crew would feel confident in proposing a figure.  The multitude is composed of people from every nation, ethnicity and language under heaven.  They are robed in white and they have palm branches in their hands.  And what are they there for?  What is their intention and purpose?  Simply this: to offer a sacrifice of praise to the one on the throne and to the Lamb.  In this they are joined by angels, elders, and four living creatures.  The angels represent the hosts of heaven, the elders the people of Israel, and the creatures the whole creation of birds, animals and reptiles.  What we witness here, then, is the worship our own gathering aims to imitate, albeit dimly, as in a glass darkly: the worship, honour and praise that shall one day be offered to God by humans, beasts, and the whole creation:

Amen!  Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgivingand honour and power and mightbe to our God forever and ever!  Amen!

But let us return our gaze, once more, to the multitude arrayed in white.  Who are they, and how did they come to be there?  Well, conveniently enough for us, one of the Elders in the scene addresses exactly that question to the writer of Scripture:  “who are they, and where did they come from?”  It is, of course, a rhetorical question, and the writer barely has time to open his mouth before the Elder replies:  “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal, the time of trial; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.  For this reason, they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night.”  He says are few more things as well, but I’ll come to that later.

There’s just one thing I’d like you to note from these words.  This multitude, those chosen by God for salvation, are in fact a group of martyrs.  The phrase “they have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb” is not there simply for decoration.  It means, quite literally, that these people have lived their lives in imitation of Christ.  By dying with Christ, by following his way even unto death, they succeeded in casting aside the evils of the world, the flesh, and the devil.  So now they are washed clean, raised to resurrection life with Jesus.  The Lamb was slain to atone for their sins, and these are they who left those sins behind by dying a death like his own.

Now, of course, there are martyrs and there are martyrs.  We happen to live in a world in which it is still very, very likely that you will be murdered because of your faith in Christ.  According to the American-based organisation, International Christian Concern, it is currently very dangerous to actually practise Christian faith (as opposed to having some private opinions about God) in the following parts of the world: Ambon and Aceh in Indonesia, Mindanao in the Philippines, China, Palestine, Nigeria, Pakistan, some parts of India, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Egypt and Morocco.  And I’m sure that’s not the whole story.  In places like this, faith is indeed costly.  You can lose your job or your home because you attend a church.  And you can lose your very life if you decide to oppose the social or economic policies of the government or the military in the name of Christ.  For Christians from these parts of the world, martyrdom is a daily possibility.  You could really be put to death after the manner of the saviour.

But then there is the martyrdom to which I believe WE are called, ‘we’, that is, who live in the democratic West.  According to the Book of Revelation, it is ONLY the martyrs who make is to heaven to be with God.  All of us are called to martyrdom in one way or another.  So how do we, here in the West, die after the manner of Christ, how do we forfeit our lives for the sake God?  Well, this is not a trick question.  The answer is pretty straight-forward really.  Being a martyr in the West is exactly the same as being a martyr in those countries where Christians are openly persecuted.  For the Christian is one who, by definition, has ‘unplugged’ from the Matrix, the basic principles and powers of the world, in order to live life by a different code and agenda—the code and agenda of Christ.  Every Christian who is literally martyred in Mindanao or Pakistan does so because they are already, in a sense, dead.  Baptism is the Christian’s funeral.  In baptism we die to all the powers and influences that colonise us—from the ‘terror’ rhetoric of governments to the consumer religion of television—and rise to share in the freedom of God’s radically new society.  Christ died because he believed the world should be different than it is, because he was motivated by a vision of God’s coming justice.  In baptism, the Christian renounces what Christ renounced and embraces what Christ embraced.  Anyone who does this, whether the consequence be a literal death or not, is a martyr to Christ’s cause.  The root meaning of the word ‘martyr’ is witness.  Anyone who dies with Christ in baptism witnesses to Christ’s way.  Whether one literally lives or dies thereafter is very much up to the community in which one happens to live.

Now, in that perspective, the resurrection we celebrate in this season of Pascha takes on a very specific meaning.  For the persecuted Christians of the late first century, the Christians for whom the books of John and Revelation were written, resurrection was primarily about vindication, the vindication of what we might call the “lost cause” of peace with justice.  To their eyes, the resurrection of Jesus was not simply a miracle, a display of divine magic to wow anyone who might be watching on television.  It was God’s vindication of Jesus’ cause, God’s stamp of approval on the life he lived for the sake of the poor, the oppressed, the marginalised and the wretched.  When Jesus was crucified it appeared, of course, that Jesus had been abandoned, that God was on the side of the Romans and their aristocratic Jewish collaborators.  But his resurrection burst forth like a neon-sign in the fog, a sign which declared that Jesus’ cause was God’s cause, that Jesus’ values were God’s values, that Jesus’ people were God’s people.

It is on that basis, and that basis only, that any of us could dare to die with Christ, to live and die with him in the service of the forgotten and forsaken.  For if Christ is risen, then his cause in just.  It is God’s cause, and so we can count on God to vindicate all that we do in imitation of Christ, even if the powers that be make life very difficult (even impossible) for us.  Even when we walk through the valley of the shadow, we need not despair.  For the Lamb that was slain is risen to be our shepherd, the one who knows what we feel and seeks to befriend and protect us in the night-time our fears.  Because he is risen, we are assured that God will never loose us from God’s grip.  He will hold us tight to Christ, so that even if we die with him, we shall also live with him. 

All of us, then, are called to be martyrs.  To worship Christ and his ways even unto the ridicule of our friends, even unto the loosing of jobs and homes and reputations, even unto death.  But God promises that if we do so, that if we will only let go of such things, we shall experience a freedom and a joy we never imagined was possible.  The joy of the redeemed who, even though they die, yet they live—and far more abundantly than even the Murdochs or the Packers.

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church on the fourth Sunday of Easter 2004.

Called to Ministry

Texts: Acts 9.1-20; Psalm 30; Revelation 5.11-14; John 21.1-19

Today we take some time to reflect upon the implications of being called to minister in Christ's church.

According to the readings we heard just now, the call to ministry comes directly from the risen Jesus himself and, somewhat counter-intuitively, it comes to those who least deserve it!  Note, however, that while the call to ministry comes with bucket-loads of grace, the stringency of its demands on the one called are not thereby diminished.  Ministry asks that we lay everything at Christ's feet - possessions, plans, ego, work - everything!  Ministry is therefore very, very costly.  The reward, however - in keeping with God’s disproportionate measure of grace - is an extraordinarily new quality of life, life lived in colour rather than in the black and white.  All of this can be summarised in a short phrase from the Acts reading:  'being filled with the Holy Spirit'.  When the Spirit of Christ fills us up, the mundane becomes extraordinary, the profane becomes sacred, the activities of mere flesh and blood become the fulfilment of God's dream that the whole creation might be renewed in peace and love.  When the Spirit comes, she equips us to serve that dream after the way of Christ our Lord. . . . .    But I’m already moving too quickly.  Let us return to the beginning.

The call to ministry comes from the risen Christ himself.  Simon Peter hears the call in the midst of a meal of bread and fish on the shores of Lake Galilee.  The host is a stranger who turns out to be Jesus.  Peter is asked, three times, to nurture and teach Christ's church.  Saul of Tarsus hears the call as he rides between Jerusalem and Damascus.  The risen Christ appears to him in a blinding light.  He is told to go into the city and wait for further instructions.  After three days (that repeat and mirror Christ’s time in the tomb) he is baptised, the scales fall from his eyes, and he receives a commission to preach Christ's message to both Jew and Gentile.  My own call to ministry came through an encounter with the Christ of the Gospels.  As a thirteen year old, I was already weary of what the usual path in life seemed to offer.  Alongside my usual diet of science fiction, I began to read the gospels.  One evening I read the following in Matthew's sermon on the Mount:  'Seek first God's kingdom and his justice, and all of your hungers will be taken care of' (Matt 6.33).  Right then and there the written words came alive in a way which made my spine tingle.  I felt a presence in the room which seemed to be ADDRESSING me.  I said 'OK Jesus, I'll take you at your word.  I'm hungry for something greater.  Let's see if you can deliver the goods'.  All these years later I can report that while I'm still hungry, the goods are being delivered everyday, very often against the odds!

The call to serve Christ also comes to those who least deserve it.  Simon Peter had abandoned Jesus in the moment of his greatest need.  Luke tells us that while Jesus was being taken away to be tortured, Peter denied that he knew Jesus not once, but three times.  Yet it is this same Simon Peter whom the now risen Jesus calls to lead the fledgling church at Jerusalem.  In a striking reversal of the three-fold denial, Jesus invites Peter to affirm his love for Jesus three times.  And with each affirmation, Peter receives the commission to feed Christ's sheep.  There is a grace in this three-fold restoration which speaks of the resurrection itself.  Whatever we have done to trample God underfoot, whatever we might have contributed to the dying of life’s light, God’s grace is more than sufficient to forgive, to heal, and to breathe the life of the Christ who defeated death itself into our feeble frames!

Saul, too, is called out of disgrace into ministry.  A chief persecutor of the first generation of Christian disciples, he is nevertheless chosen by Jesus to be a travelling missionary, carrying the word of life to the furthest reaches of the ancient Roman world.  His encounter with Christ makes him blind, and he remains in that netherworld of darkness for three days.  When Ananias comes to baptise him, Saul puts away his old self, the self that was God’s enemy.  He nails it to the cross with Christ.  In the power of Christ’s resurrection, he rises to take a new name – Paul – and become, in time, the architect of Christianity as we know it.  Witness, again, the power of the call of Christ to forgive, to heal, and to set even the most vehement sceptic on the path of ministry.

Paul’s story reminds me of a friend, a fellow named David, a minister of the gospel in the Churches of Christ.  One of the roughest characters you would ever meet.  An alcoholic and a junkie, a bikie who beat people up in pub brawls, a consummate abuser of relationships, he trashed three marriages.  But, by David’s own account, God took him by the scuff of the neck and said, and I quote, 'Come with me, Thompson'.  He's still a rough character.  He can still sink a lager or two.  But he's one of the most real and honest pastors of Christ I've ever met.  He knows how to listen, how to share your pain.  And people are healed and comforted because Jesus called Dave Thompson to ministry.  I tell that little story to make a single point.  God calls all of us to ministry, no matter what state we're in when the call comes.  Paul once wrote that ministry was like a glittering treasure which is carried around in jars of clay (2 Cor 4.7).   That means that even you and I, with all our secret fears, anxieties and sins, are still God's chosen vessels for this marvellous word of life.  So, my friends, we have no excuse.  If we are baptised, we are called to ministry.  It is as simple as that.

Finally, the life of ministry is characterised by a peculiar paradox.  On the one hand, we are to sacrifice everything we possess and everything we are for the sake of Christ.  Yet, by doing so, we are promised a life of joy, and riches beyond our wildest dreams.  When Jesus commissions Peter he warns that the freedom to which he has become accustomed will eventually be done away with.  He speaks of a time when people will bind him up and lead him away to be crucified.  Similarly, when Paul is commissioned by Ananias, the Lord says that Paul will suffer for Christ's name.  And we know from Paul's own letters, that he is eventually put under permanent house arrest in Rome because of his unwillingness to accord Caesar greater homage than Christ.  Such is the slavery and the sacrifice of those who are called to ministry.  The modern martyrs of El Salvador, Iraq, the Philippines and many other places, those who die because of their love of the poor in Christ's name, are a permanent challenge to us about the quality of our Christian discipleship.  They call to us from their graves saying 'are you really willing to follow Christ wherever he may lead you?'  I am constantly floored by Christ's words in Mark: ' Any who seek to follow me must take up their cross and follow in my steps.  For the one who would save their life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it' (8.34, 35).  These words sound like absolute foolishness according to the conventional wisdom, do they not?  The TV tells us to buy, to consume, to get richer, to make ourselves more beautiful etc., etc . . . But Christ tells us that gaining the world is the same as losing your soul, losing the sense of what life is about, losing life's joy and purpose.  But that's why the way of Christ, a way through suffering and sacrifice, is also the way to life.  Because it's only by resisting the conventional wisdom, it's only by swimming against the stream, that we'll find out what life is all about.  Luke says it like discovering that there's a land of light and colour out there when all your life you've known only the darkness of being blind.  It's like scales falling from your eyes to reveal the beauty of God's earth.

In closing I simply want to note that the call to Christ's ministry does not usually come as some kind of experience subsequent to our conversion.  Rather, it comes as part of the conversion experience itself.  Thus for Paul.  Thus for us.  To be converted, to be baptised, to be filled with the Spirit, to be commissioned for ministry - these are all experiences and decisions that belong together.  In your conversion and in your baptism, you were filled with the Spirit and equipped with everything you need to begin on way of discipleship, which is also the way of ministry.  Today the risen Christ says to all of us 'I love you.  I forgive you.  I have given you are ministry to perform in my name.  What are you doing about it?'

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church on the 3rd Sunday of Easter in 2001.

Transformed by Love

Texts: Isaiah 62.1-5; Psalm 36.5-10; John 2.1-11

The Psalm we read just now speaks about the ‘steadfast love of Yahweh.’  In Hebrew the term is chesed Yahweh, a deeply loyal kind of love which is able to persevere and endure even when the loved one chooses to spurn and trample the lover’s careful attentions underfoot.  It is important to note that the chesed Yahweh is a strictly divine kind of love.  The Psalmist never once uses the term to speak about the love of human beings, probably because he believes that human beings are incapable of performing such love.  To his mind, God alone is capable of chesed love, yet it is human beings who are most in need of its healing and transforming powers.   This because we tend, as human beings, to be so very inconstant in the covenants and promises we make—whether to God or to one another.  So this morning I would like us to contemplate chesed love for a little while, this strong and constant love that we all need so very much.  And I should like us to do so by fixing our attention on four evocative images, which the lections conveniently provide for us.

In the first image, the chesed love of God is likened to that of a mother bird who gathers her chicks under the shelter of her wings when a storm is at hand.  The Psalmist writes “How precious is your steadfast love, O God!  All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.”  What a wonderful picture!  The Psalmist, like many of us, is riding out some storms in his life.  He is being mocked for his religious faith, and there are apparently wicked people nearby who would very much like to remove him from the place and work to which God has appointed him.  He is afraid, and he feels alone, so he calls out to the one who has promised his protective presence and love, no matter what.  The Psalmist believes that God’s love for him is far more constant and reliable than the machinations of a royal court, where people are only valued insofar as they are politically useful.  So he cries out to God as the one who will shelter him from the cyclone of inconstancy to which he is being subjected.  He looks to God to be a kind of still-point for him, a loving gaze of reliable compassion at the eye of a very scary storm.

A second image comes from the same pen, in the same Psalm, where God’s chesed love is likened to the hospitality of a generous host.  Again, I quote.  “How precious is your steadfast love, O God!  [All people] feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.”  Here the refuge of God is not merely a tiny corner to hide from the wind, but God’s own homestead, a wide and spacious place of welcome and delightful refreshment, freely available to all who ask.  Of course, the Psalmist has a very specific place in mind, when he imagines God’s homestead.  It is the temple where he worships and prays each day.  For him, the temple is precisely that place in which he experiences God presence, a place of beauty and peace which continually draws him into God’s embrace.  There, in the sacred liturgy, God reaches out to feed him with sacred words that are sweeter than honey, and with the water of the sacred vessels, a veritable draught of Holy Spirit to sustain the worshippers.  We Christians have taken exactly this meal-imagery of Jewish worship into our own liturgy.  For us, Jesus is the great host who feeds us with himself in the bread, the water and the wine.  He is the bread of heaven and the cup of life, offered to sustain us on the long and weary journey towards healing.  For that reason, the desire of Christians for the eucharistic presence of Christ is not all that very different from the Jewish desire for Torah and for the ritual meals of the Synagogue.  For all of us desire the healing touch of God’s chesed love.  And for all of us, Jew or Christian, it is the story of God told in worship that is able to show us what that love is like.

A third image is found in the reading from Isaiah.  There the chesed love of God is compared to that of a bridegroom who delights in his bride.  I quote:  “As a young man marries a young woman, so shall your Maker marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.”  Now, lest you get the impression that God’s love is only as good as the starry-eyed infatuation of the newly-married—which (let’s be honest) is largely blind, and lasts only for a short while—please take note of the context in which that image is invoked!  The wider passage speaks about God’s continuing concern and loyalty toward a people that has completely deserted God’s ways, becoming both morally and spiritually desolate in the process.   This is a lover who is able to delight in his bride even though he knows what she is really like, ‘warts and all,’ as they say.  God, we are told, is like the bridegroom in his delight towards the bride.  Yet he is very unlike the typical bridegroom in that he delights in his bride even as she runs after other lovers.

Now, there is good news here, is there not?  For we are not so very different from the chosen people of old.  We are people who swell with love and devotion for God when it suits us, when we want to fill our empty lives with a little spirituality and pretend we have risen above the mediocrity all around us.  But we are so easily distracted, so easily lured away from our devotion.  All it takes is the prospect of a little more cash, or a little romantic attention from an attractive somebody.  Sometimes all it takes for us to abandon God’s ways is the prospect of relaxing into some television.  This is who we are.  This is the pathos of our inconstancy.  Thank Christ, then, that God is not like us!  Thank Christ that God is chesed love, loyal and steadfast even where we ourselves fail.  For without that love, we would all fade into the nothingness and desolation of beings who have no anchor, no centre out of which to be anything at all.  We would exist only as clouds exist—accidently and ephemerally, for only a moment.  In the end, it is only God’s loving attention which holds us in being and gives us a future which is of more worth than that of a cloud’s.  In the end, we are what we are only because God holds and purposes us according to the horizon of his gift.  In God, we become who we are only as we receive ourselves from God.

Which brings me to the final image I wanted to speak about this morning:  God’s chesed love as the primal power of transformation or alchemy.  We read in Isaiah of a love which is realistic about who we are in our sin, and yet looks and hopes for our transformation into people of substance.  I quote.  “You shall receive a new name from the mouth of the Lord.  No longer shall you be called ‘Forsaken,’ and your land ‘Desolate’; instead, you will be called ‘My Delight’ and your land ‘Beloved’.”  There is an additional claim being made, here, for God’s love.  Not only does it continue to regard us with delight, even as we sin.  It is also able to change us, to change our deepest motivations and desires so that we begin, however slowly, to desire what God desires and become the people God desires that we be.  How does this happen, how is love able to change a human heart?  It is a mystery!  Yet I believe that the apostle John had an unusual insight into such things, and that the first hint of an answer may be found in his story of the wedding at Cana in Galilee.

Now, I’ll be up front with you.  For many years I really didn’t ‘get’ this story where Jesus turns the water into wine.  Even when I learned that the Gospel of John was built around seven ‘signs,’ of which this miracle was the first—even when I learned that the signs were supposed to tell us who Jesus really is—I still didn’t entirely get it.  I mean, turning water into wine.  What that’s all about?  How does it show us who Jesus is?  Doesn’t it show only that Jesus was a conjurer, a magician, an alchemist?  What have any of those things to do with the deeper theology of the Gospel—Jesus as the Word of God and the Bread of Life; Jesus as the great ‘I Am’ who repeats only that which he had already heard from his Father; Jesus, whose miserable, dark cross is the very place where the light and glory of God is made known?  But then it hit me.  The alchemist’s trick of turning water to wine is exactly the right thing for the Word of God to be doing.  For the message it conveys is one of transformation:  the Word of God crucified, a word and pledge of sacrificial love, is precisely that reality which is finally able to transform the sinful-ridden self into a self redeemed and made new.  For John has a very sacramental imagination.  The water is us, my friends.  We begin the transformation journey at the waters of our baptism, the most ordinary water in the world.  But when Christ dies for us, when he signs for us the chesed love of God through the sacrificial spilling of his blood, we become extraordinary, we rise from the waters to receive the eucharistic wine.   At that point, Christ himself becomes our life—our lifeblood, our joy, our future.  The water of our humanity is changed into the wine of Christ, as it were, that substance which we imbibe in order to envision a blessedness, and a cause for celebration, we could never have generated for ourselves.

Now, I know this reading makes for a rather radical re-reading of the significance of wine for Christians.  It has often been said amongst evangelicals that drinking wine is a sin primarily because it causes the drinker to lose control.  But that is exactly why wine is such a great symbol for the transformation which Christ would forge for us!  It is only in ceding control of our lives, it is only by giving ourselves over to the intoxicating effects of Christ on our hearts and minds, that we shall ever be transformed into his image and likeness.  For the chesed love of God transforms us by intoxication.  It reaches into the places where we are afraid and ashamed, and displaces those powers with something far more deeply interfused:  the certainty of a divine mercy which is outrageous in its audacity and totally unreasonable in the sheer size of its vision.  Let me read to you from another of John’s writings:  “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear . . .  we love because first loved us.” (1 Jn 4.18, 19).  How does God’s chesed love transform our desire?  By driving away the fear of karma that is harboured so deeply in our hearts—the fear that we shall have to reap what we sow.   It is the intoxicating joy of being forgiven that changes us into people who are able to forgive others.  If God is for us, who can stand against us?

So there you have it.  Four images of the steadfast chesed love of God.  God’s love is like a refuge from the storm and the hospitality of a generous host.  It is like the continuing delight of a bridegroom for his bride, even though the bridegroom has learned what the bride is really like through harsh experience!  Finally, the love of God is like the alchemical power of the miracle-worker.  It can transform even our fear and inconstancy into the power to love, forgive, and cherish.  Even to love, forgive and cherish ourselves.  Imagine that!  So as you receive this love from your host in the liturgy, in the form of sacred words and a sacred meal, be mindful of the enormous power of the gift you are being offered.  May God give you power to receive the gift with thankfulness, and faith enough to submit yourselves to the intoxicating joy it promises.

This sermon was first preached to a mission of the Tamil Church of Melbourne in 2005.