I will give you as a light to the nations

Isaiah 49. 1-7; Psalm 40. 1-11; John 1. 29-42

The call of God comes to those who have lost hope, and to those who have wasted their labour for nothing and for vanity.  So says the book of the prophet Isaiah.  In the 49^th chapter Yahweh addresses the prophet, calling him personally to take up the lapsed vocation of the people of Israel as a whole, to be the servant of God and a light for the world.  As is so often the case with such a call, the prophet’s immediate response is to keenly feel his inadequacy for the task.  Like the rest of his people, the prophet languishes in Babylonian exile, beaten, disheartened and despairing.  Despairing not only because Jerusalem is no more, but more profoundly because of a growing conviction that it was Israel’s sin which had led to her downfall, that it was her inattention to the ways of God which finally felled her, like dry rot will fall even the most glorious of trees.  The prophet names the truth for what it is.  ‘All we have ever done,’ he says, ‘is work for vanity and nothingness’. 

Vanity and nothingness.  Now there’s two words which I reckon characterise our own age.  Vanity: a turning in on oneself, a forgetting of the other who is my neighbour, and therefore my responsibility.  Isaiah tells us that the leaders of Judah immediately prior to the Babylonian war were vain people, so focussed on accumulating wealth and prestige for themselves that they turned aside from their covenant responsibilities to care for the orphan, the widow, and the alien.  Our own government is abdicating its responsibilities in a startlingly similar vein.  ‘Do more with less,’ authorities tell our public hospitals, schools and welfare providers, at the same time cutting the tax bill of those who can most afford to share.  Where the God of Isaiah says, ‘This is the fasting I desire . . .  is it not to share your bread with the hungry and to welcome the homeless poor into your house’ (58. 7), our government consistently says: ‘Go away, you needy, you shall find no help or refuge here’. 

And what of the nothingness that characterizes our generation?  Nothingness, nihilism: a fascination with all that is without reality or substance.  One only needs to turn on the television for evidence.  The advertisers tell us that what really matters is style, fashion, texture.  Buy a bigger house, not because you need one, but because it is fashionable.  Buy a flashy car, not because you need one, but because your old one is no longer in style.  Buy the look and texture of a gym or surgically-sculpted body, not the character or struggles of a real person, a real soul, whose experiences are forever etched upon the surface of our bodies.  And what of those of us who cannot afford these constantly changing innovations?  Well, God help us, as they say.  God help us.  Ironically enough, it seems that it is only God who can help those of us consigned to the economic scrap-heaps.  Or those of us who wake up to the fact that that fashion is nothing: semblance without substance, surface without depth, texture without soul.

Only God can help those who come face to face with the nothingness of their lives, because God is one who from time immemorial chooses not the great, or the confident, or the smart or the fashionable, but the small one, the despairing one, the one who knows his or her life is refuse and rubbish.  Listen to what the prophet hears from God at the very moment of his despair, of his nothingness:

The Lord called me from before I was born . . .  he made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me, he made me a polished arrow which he hid away in his quiver.  ‘It is too small a thing that you should be my servant,’ says the Lord, ‘to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth’. 

Now, listen to me.  Because there is something really important in this for us all.  Are you a person who feels like most of what you do is vanity and nothingness?  Are you?  Are you one who feels defeated by life, but you go on because you don’t know what else to do?  Are you one who feels that despite the best of intentions in days gone by, intentions to love and serve God and God’s ways with all your heart and soul and strength, that somehow you got lost along the way?  The rot set in and now you don’t know what to do, or which way is up?  Hey!  I know the feeling, I really do know the feeling!  If that’s you, then listen, ‘cause there’s some good news here.  God chose you before you were born to be God’s servant.  Not just within the privacy of your own morality.  And not just in the church, the visible company of God’s people. But in the public world, the world of your labour and your government and your community.  The very world which seems so dark and gloomy these days.  God has called you to be a light for the nations.  You.  Not somebody else.  You.

You see this call of God is not only for apparently special people called prophets.  The people of faith have only ever decided who the prophets and saints are years and years after they did what they did.  Prophets tend not to think of themselves as prophets at the time when they get the call and do their stuff.  So if you think you’re not prophet material right now, look out, because that’s exactly what all the great prophets thought too.  And the call of God is especially not a call only for the Son of God, the Christ, whom the Gospel of John names as not just a light, but the light of the whole world, the one who has come to take away the sin of the world.  Why?  Because the New Testament makes it clear that when Jesus fills your life with light, then you are at that same moment called to do everything in your power to bring others into the orbit of Christ’s influence.  Just like Andrew, in the gospel reading, who sees the light in Jesus and then invites his brother, Simon, to meet him as well.

Of course, no such thing is possible unless one is first able to accept that great impossibility which all prophets face at the first:  the impossibility of God’s love and grace in choosing those whom the world calls foolish to shame those whom it calls wise.  In other words, becoming a light for the nations is only possible because of what we Christians call grace—the unmerited attention and favour, indeed the love, of God.  The impossible life of peace, joy, and a service centred in the neighbour, only becomes possible because God makes it possible.  The life of vanity and nothingness is left behind only because God says ‘yes’ to the visions God places in our hearts, ‘yes’ to who we are - not in ourselves - but in Christ.  

So there’s no point in making a project of one’s life, imagining that if we were only to become more dedicated, more intensely focussed on getting our acts together, that we would come up to scratch.  It’s never worked for me.  It’s only during those periods when I’ve actually taken my eyes off myself, the obsession with my own subjectivity and ‘success’, that I’ve ever really changed.  That’s why I could never be a Buddhist.  Paul Williams, a Buddhist and teacher of Buddhism at Bristol University for 30 years, recently became a Christian.  Why?  He says that in the end, Buddhism is about the self changing the self.  It is about the power of subjectivity.  But he could finally see no hope in that project, because the self seems condemned to futility, finally and ultimately incapable of reaching its own aspirations.  ‘I need,’ he says, ‘the grace of God in Christ’, that power from the outside, from God, which makes in me what I am unable to make for myself. 

The hope for me, and for us all, is in this gracious call and election by God, a call which comes freely, and at the precise moment of our deepest despair.  Now, it is quite possible that God has been calling to you lately.  Yes, you.  Calling you beyond your self and the anxieties which attend all that, calling you to lift your eyes and see the plans that God has in store for you.  In the gospel story, Jesus says to all who will listen, “Come and see, come and discover the way I live.”  In order to become who you are, in other words, you have to leave yourself behind and learn how to live like Christ.  So, if you have heard the call recently, I encourage you to stop running from God, to turn around, and to start listening to God.  “Come and see,” God says, “come and see how life may be different.” 

Obeying this call is not something you can do within the privacy of your own subjectivity and thinking.  Christianity is an irreducibly communal and material religion, which, in this instance, means that none of us can know Christ’s way of life apart from learning about these things from the church, and especially from its ministers and elders.   The church, you see, is the body of Christ; his Spirit is at work there to call and to baptise, to so immerse us in the life, death and resurrection of Christ so that we can die to ourselves and live for God.  In the end, then, there can be no getting around the church, for all its sin and failure.   So . . .  if the voice of God has seemed faint recently, maybe this is down to one thing:  you’ve been looking for God somewhere other than the church—its teaching, its symbolism, and its practices.  How will you learn to recognise God in all the business of life, unless you learn what God is like from the church?  When Christ says “come and see,” what he means is this:  “come to worship, come to bible-study, come to prayer, come to mission.  It is there that I live, so it is there that you will learn my ways and so become light for the world.”  This is the call.  How will you respond?

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Community Baptist Church in January 2005.

The kingdom of God is near!

Texts:  Jonah 3.1-5, 10; Psalm 62.5-12; 1 Corinthians 7.29-31; Mark 1.14-20 

After John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the good news and saying ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.’ 

These words represent Mark’s summary of Jesus’ ministry.  They are his shorthand way of summing up the whole of Jesus’ purpose and ministry in that obscure 1^st century province of Rome known as Galilee.  This morning I should like to dwell for a moment on how these words might change things.  How did they change the world of Jesus’ first hearers?  How did they change the world of Mark, as he repeats them to his small, fragile, congregation around the time when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans?  And finally, how might these words change things even for us today?

So,  let’s first ask how the coming of Jesus into Galilee changed things.  That things did change, and pretty radically, is clear from the passage we read about the calling of the first disciples.  There must have been something very compelling about this young Rabbi, Jesus, something very compelling indeed!  For it was a very big deal in that time, and in that society, for young men in the prime of their working lives to leave the family business and follow a religious teacher about the countryside.  When Simon and Andrew, and James and John, leave their boats and their nets they also leave what most of their contemporaries would have regarded as their most basic obligation in life—to care for their families and assure their survival in the world.  So even though there was a precedent, in Jewish faith and story, for people to do such things, by the time of Jesus such actions were regarded as irresponsible and even immoral.  So, things changed immediately for these families when Jesus came by.  ‘Follow me,’ he said to their menfolk.  That they did so would have had an immediate impact, socially and economically. 

But we must ask ‘Why?  Why would these men in the prime of their working lives risk both their fortunes and the disapproval of their peers like that?’  According to Mark, it had rather a lot to do with who Jesus was, and the message he brought with him.  From the beginning of his gospel, Mark leaves us in no doubt that Jesus in the Messiah, the one anointed by God to set Israel free from its bondage to decay.  He comes, then, as the bearer of good news and the advance glory of the kingdom of God.  Jesus, according to Mark, is a sign in dark times that God has heard the cries of his people’s distress, and will soon put right all that has gone wrong in the world.  All that follows in the gospel confirms this reading.  By his healings, his exorcisms, by the miraculous feedings and his sacrificial death for the sins of the people, and finally by his resurrection, Jesus shows everyone that God has indeed come near to save them.  Jesus himself is that nearness.  He is the human face of God, God with his people in the form of his Son. 

So that is why the fisherman abandon themselves, all that they are worth, to follow him.  That is why they repent of the way of life they had lived up until they met Jesus; that is why they believe in the good news that he bears; that is why they leave their nets and follow him, all the way to Jerusalem and the tragedy that unfolds there.  Because in Jesus they see that God is both near them and for them, turning the world upside down for the sake of the poor, the downtrodden and for all who had become lost in the lust for wealth and power.  In Jesus they saw a light to illumine a very cruel and dark world.

And yet, as Mark is recounting all this for his congregation, the world does not feel like it has changed much at all.  In fact, for Mark’s congregation, it is difficult to see that the coming of Jesus has made any difference whatsoever.  For they are a small and fragile group of Jewish Christians who fled from Jerusalem when it was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70.  It is likely that they lost their homes and their livelihoods.  It is also likely that many of their number were killed.  So now, as Mark tells his story, they are overcome with grief for what has been lost, and are full of uncertainty about the future.  Where, they ask, is Jesus now?  For there is little sign of his presence and power anywhere.

Mark’s gospel can be seen as an extended sermon, a sermon in the form of a story of narrative, which has been specifically designed to answer his community’s questions and suggest a way forward.  In answer to the question ‘Why has God suffered us to lose so much by the hand of our enemies?’ Mark answers:  ‘You are followers of Jesus.  Jesus did not shrink even from death at the hands of his enemies.  You have lost almost everything, some even their lives, but you have not lost all.  You have not lost God, the only source of life and health and happiness.’  For Mark answered the related question of where Christ had gone in this way:  ‘In Jesus the reign of God came near, but it has not yet arrived.  Yet, we carry the promise of that coming with us—in the memory of Christ and his teaching, in the values we live by in our community, and in the ritual of the Eucharist, by which we believe Christ continues to feed us for the pilgrimage of faith.  So let us recall, dear brothers and sisters, that while Christ has not yet come in all the fullness of his kingdom, he has yet given us a portion of his Spirit to sustain us.  Christ is with us, then.  But not in a form that we can possess and manipulate for our own pragmatic ends.  He is with us as his resurrected self:  the promise of a future that is gift, not possession.’  And finally, in answer, to the question about what they should do now, Mark says this:  ‘My beloved people, let us go to Galilee where Christ once walked amongst us.  Let us establish ourselves there as refugees and start to rebuild our lives.  But let us do so after the pattern of the community that Christ formed with his disciples.  Let us believe that the risen Christ will do so again, let us ask him to so form our community in the values of the kingdom that we, ourselves, will become a light for the world, even as Jesus was.  So then, let us become Christ’s body, in whom the very Spirit of Christ is at work.  Let us make repentance, faith and the following of Christ our life’s work and vocation.’  With these, any many other words, Mark encouraged his fragile community.

But now we must turn to what difference all this might make to our own lives, our own world, if any.  For we are not fishermen by the sea of Galilee, and we are not (at least not in this particular congregation) a community of refugees.  Still, we are a Christian community.  By our baptism, the risen Christ melded us into himself, into his life, his death, and his resurrection, that we might no longer live the futile life of those who imagine they can live without God.  We are called to pursue, instead, the risen life of Christ, and to do it communally, in concert with the sisters and brothers God has given us in faith.  In this community at Boronia, we are called to be so possessed by the Spirit of Christ, so vulnerable to his work in us, that his life and vitality becomes evident to all, overflowing with compassion, giving and thanksgiving. We are called, in short, to become 'fishers of people', witnesses to the freedom Christ brings in our families and communities. So, you see, the call of Jesus to those first disciples was not only for them.  Nor was it only for Mark’s little community.  It is also for us.  We, too, are called by Jesus to repent, to believe in the good news of God’s deliverance, and to follow Christ in all his ways.

To repent means to let go of anything in your life that gets in the way of your devotion to Christ.  When Paul tells the Corinthians to live as though their present circumstances were of little account, he does so believing that their devotion to comfort and convenience is misguided.  He does so believing that their present circumstances are not absolute, are not God, and are therefore passing away into nothingness.  What matters, he says to them and to us, is the coming kingdom and its ways.  For it is the kingdom, and not our present comfort or convenience, that is permanent.  So live according to the kingdom and its values, live as though the kingdom was already here, in all its fullness.  Repent of all that prevents you from doing so, put it aside in favour of your faith in the coming kingdom, where the rich will no longer be rich and the poor will no longer be poor.  For the kingdom comes not to destroy us utterly, not to take away all that is of lasting value or significance.  On the contrary, the kingdom is the arrival of God’s deliverance.  It comes to restore our lost equilibrium and peace.  It comes to resuscitate our flagging spirits, sucked dry, as they are, by the vanity of the present world system. 

And if you are unsure about how to go about all this, if you feel so entangled in your present circumstances that you can see no way out, take heed of Christ’s call to the disciples, “Follow me.”  To follow Christ is to learn his story and his ways, and order your life to imitate or ‘echo’ his.  In the early church, people were taught how to do this when they were preparing for baptism.  Our own Uniting Church, however, has tended to assume that people will learn the way of Christ my osmosis, or by some mysterious appearing of such things in the brain.  No matter.  If you want to respond to Christ’s call, you can.  Christ calls you whether you are young or old, healthy or ill, bright or (how should I put it), a few pennies short of a full quid.  What is important in following him, you see, is not your own capacities, but his.  ‘When Christ calls us,’ wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘he calls us to die.’  To die to our own plans and to live by his; to die to our own powers, and live by his; to die to our own pattern of life, and live as though the free gift of the kingdom were all that really mattered.

And so I conclude where I always conclude.  What will you do with this call from Christ?  Will you respond with your whole heart and soul and strength, or will you hedge your bets? 

The call to prayer

Texts:  1 Sam 3.1-10; Psalm 139; 1 Corinthians 6.12-20; John 1.43-51

Although it is the year of Mark’s Gospel in the three-year cycle of the lectionary, between now and Easter we can expect to read quite a lot from the gospel of John.  The reason for this both historical and spiritual.  Historically, the period between Epiphany and Easter, including Lent, arose out of the 2nd century church’s approach to baptism.  In the early church it was predominantly adults who were baptised, and these adults were only called to baptism after a long period of study and spiritual practise known as the ‘catechumenate’.  The catechumenate was so named because of its root meaning in the Greek word ‘echo’, for the purpose of the catechumenate was to teach enquirers how to imitate or ‘echo’ the faith, hope and love of Jesus Christ.  The period between Epiphany and Easter became particularly important as the final stage in this pilgrimage of formation.  Here the catechumens would consolidate both their theology and their spiritual practise, with a particular focus on prayer and worship as the place where ‘right belief’ and ‘right practise’ communicated with each other.  The gospel of John was often used as the main textbook for this endeavour because of its strong insistence on the need for Christians to live in an intimate communion with God in Christ, a communion that I will today call ‘prayer’.  So let’s now turn to John’s writing to see what we may learn about these things.

 In the passage we read a moment ago, Jesus issues the well-known call to discipleship, ‘Follow me’.  The person invited, in this instance, is a fellow named Phillip, a colleague of Andrew and Peter, who were already followers of Jesus.  The text tells us very little about Phillip, except that, having heard the invitation, he goes straight away to pass on the invitation to his friend Nathaniel.  ‘Come Nathaniel,’ he says, ‘We have found the one that Moses and the prophets wrote about, Jesus Ben-Joseph, who comes from Nazareth’.  Nathaniel, a man ‘without deceit’ we are told, is properly wary of messianic claims (for there were many messianic pretenders in first-century Judah).  ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ he asks, with appropriate scepticism.  ‘Come and see for yourself,’ is Phillip’s reply.

Now, before we go on with the story, I want you to understand that John is not writing as a historian when he tells this story.  John isn’t particularly interested in historical details about when things happened or how.  John is writing, rather, as a theologian, which means that everything he reports as an ‘event’ or ‘happening’ signifies something other than it’s plain, everyday, meaning.  The word ‘see’, for example, does not (in John’s gospel) mean ‘seeing’ with your eyes.  It means wholehearted belief or trust.  We know this because of that wonderful dialogue between Jesus and the Jewish leaders in chapter 9, where Jesus accuses them of being spiritually blind.  That meaning is reinforced by Jesus’ words to Thomas in chapter 20.  ‘Blessed are those who have not seen [in the ordinary sense] and yet have come to believe.’  So, to make a long story rather shorter, when Phillip invites Nathaniel to ‘come and see for yourself,’ he is inviting him not simply to meet Jesus and watch what he does, but to go far beyond ordinary sight and believe.  ‘Come, learn to believe and trust Jesus as I do’, says Phillip.  That is the call to every inquirer into our faith, today as much as in the first and second centuries.

But now we get down to brass tacks.  How is it that we learn this faith?  How is it that we move from being interested but wary inquirers to people who believe and trust in Christ without reserve?  Well, let us return to the story.  When Jesus sees Nathaniel coming towards him, we are told, he cries out ‘Now here is an Israelite in which there is no deceit!’, or, to put that into a more contemporary idiom, ‘How wonderful to meet a man who doesn’t pretend to be something that he is not.  How wonderful to meet a man who tells the truth about himself, as well as others’.  Nathaniel is staggered, it seems, that Jesus knows what kind of man he is already, without the benefit of having conversed with him before.  ‘Where did you get to know me?’ he says.  Jesus’ answer is very enigmatic:  ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Phillip called you.’  This is John’s way of saying that Jesus knows the truth of who we are even before we experience the call to know the truth of who he is.  Having discovered that, Nathaniel then makes the most profound confession of faith in the whole of John’s gospel:  ‘Teacher, you are the Son of God!  You are the king of Israel!’  Now, my friends, note this please.  Nathaniel does not know who Jesus is simply because he has done his theological study.  He certainly has done his theological study, otherwise he would have neither the language nor conceptual base to name Jesus in the way he does.  Theological understanding is therefore very important.  Still, that is not, in the end, why Nathaniel comes to faith.  He comes to faith, we are told, because he comes to see that Jesus sees him . . .  or, if we take John’s own lexicon seriously, Nathaniel comes to faith because he suddenly knows and believes than Jesus already knows, and believes in, him.  ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree?’ is Jesus’ rhetorical response?  The answer, of course, is ‘yes’.  That is exactly why Nathaniel believes.

Now, let’s pause for a moment to register the significance of what we have discovered so far.  In answer to the question ‘how is it that we move from being inquirers into the faith to disciples that live the faith?’ John would say this, I think:  by prayer.  Yes, by prayer.  For prayer does not begin with our own faith, you know.  Prayer does not begin because we decide, some day, on the basis of some pre-existing understanding of God, that we believe that God is real.  Prayer does not begin, in other words, with a human search or longing for God.  On the contrary!  According to the story we have read just now, prayer begins with God’s knowing us, warts and all, and with God’s belief in us, or in what we could be if we would only own who we are in God’s sight, rather than in our own.  For Nathaniel, it seems to me, was certainly not a man without deceit when Christ hailed him by the river Jordan that day.  What Christ saw in him, however, was what God sees in all of us—the selves we may become if we die to ourselves and live in the power of Christ, if we cast of the old self in baptism, and rise with Jesus to take on the garment of his faith, hope and love.  Prayer begins, then, not with our own words, but with the Gods word and call to us:  I know you already, I know you by name.  Come with me and I shall make you new.

There is something else we should note about the beginning of prayer however, and it is this.  That the call and voice of God does not come to us apart from the form and timbre of human voices.  John’s gospel was written in part, to discredit such claims.  For his opponents, the Gnostics, believed that God was a disembodied spirit whose voice could be heard directly, as it were, like an echo in the human heart.  No! said John, by way of response.  The word of God has become flesh in Jesus.  His call will always, therefore, come to us via the mediation of the church, that is, in the tone and timbre of people of faith, who call to us with the very voice of Christ.  ‘Come and see’ they say to us, like Phillip in the story.  But this very human call is, in the grace of God, already the call of God which is the beginning of prayer.  That pattern is beautifully illustrated in the story of Samuel, where a strange voice calls Samuel’s name three times, but Samuel does not know it is the Lord until his mentor, the priest Eli, discerns that it is so.  What occurs, in other words, is this:  that the Spirit who calls to us cannot become a personal word of address apart from the faith and discernment of God’s people.  That is why, in the baptismal catechumenate, the inquirer learns to respond to God, to say “Here I am, I am who I am only as I am available for your purposes’ by first learning to discern God’s voice with the help of a mentor, godparent or sponsor, whom the church appoints to direct the candidate’s progress.

The call of Jesus to follow is therefore a call to prayer, first of all.  In prayer we learn to listen for God’s word of personal address, to God’s call on our lives.  In the language of prayer we learn to respond to God, to say with Moses and Samuel and Mary and Jesus, “Here I am . . .  I am who I am, only insofar as I respond to your call.’  That is why disciples of Jesus are still called to be people of prayer.  We cannot honestly claim to be Christians if we do not pray, if we do not give over a significant portion of our day, our week, and our year to a listening for God’s voice and call.  It grieves me that much of the Uniting Church seems to have forgotten this basic discipline, which ancient believers were taught from the very beginnings of their enquiry into faith.  ‘You will never learn to be a Christian, they told inquirers, unless you learn to listen for God in prayer.  Indeed, it is by such listening that you will learn to believe yourself.’

So I say to you today, with all earnestness.  If you do not pray, why not?  It is by prayer that you learn to be a Christian, and it is by prayer that you continue to be a Christian.  How can you know how to live the life of Christ in your own time, place and circumstances, unless you pray?  Praying in public worship is very important, because there you learn how to listen for God’s word with others, and to address God with the words of the church, which is Christ’s community.  Still, weekly prayer is not enough.  Unless such prayer is built into the pattern of our days and our years as well, we shall never learn what God requires of us when we are not at public worship.  By prayer God guides us into the particular path he has ordained for you, and you alone.

So, if you do not pray in this way, please don’t be daunted.  Unfortunately the church has not been good at teaching the basic disciplines of the faith for many years.  We are only just beginning to learn that many of the things we put aside in the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ are actually very important.  So, come, talk to a respected minister or to others in the church who have a daily practise of prayer.  We can show you how to listen for God.  It will change your life, turning it upside down at times.  But it will also sustain your life.  It will make you whole in the joy of Christ.  Come and see for yourself.