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.

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.

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness - a response to my induction

Balkara Parish, Jan 30, 2013

Hello everyone. Thanks for your welcome, and especially your prayers, as I embark on this new part-time ministry within the Parish of Balkara in Oakleigh.

Apart from a few friends and colleagues who have come tonight to offer their support, not many of you know me at all well. It would perhaps be helpful, therefore, if I share with you something of what you can expect, and not expect, of your new minister: what you can rely on me for, and something of what you should not – under any circumstances - rely on me for.

First, you should not expect me to be a messiah-figure who will convince all your young people to return to church, solve your financial problems, and return the church to its former position as a place of power and influence in our society and culture.  I am not the messiah, you see.  And the reasons why the church is no longer at the centre of people’s lives are complex and long-standing. I cannot, and will not, resolve that situation any time soon - even though I understand the whys and wherefores of our situation better than most.  Sorry about that! You can reply on me, however, to be a voice crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord. Repent, and believe the good news!’  You can rely on me, in other words, to be a witness, a witness in the midst of this community to an ancient way and word that  - I believe with all my heart – indeed has the power to save us.  But I am not myself that power. And you enjoy the liberty, of course, to do as you please with the witness I bring. 

Second, you should not expect me to slavishly imitate the workaholism of Western capitalism, which values a person only if she or he can produce things – goods and services – that are valued by their social betters.  I cannot be relied on to work frenetically, or for more hours that you have employed me for, or when I am sick or my family is sick.  I won’t do it.  Because to do so would be to conform myself not to the gospel of grace – a grace in which we are loved and valued by God quite apart from what we produce – but to the gospel of karma by which we must earn our salvation by the sweat of our brows.  Instead, you can rely on me to bear witness to the love and beauty of God: a love which makes a nonsense of striving, because in Christ God has already given us everything we possibly need; and a beauty in which we may behold - if we will still ourselves long enough to notice  -  the good creation that God has given us, not as a reward for work, but as a gift.  A gift, pure and simple.  You can rely on me to bear witness to such things by my slow and steady method of work, and by my essentially contemplative spirit and imagination.

Finally, you should not expect me to immediately do and say things as they have always been done and said.  You cannot rely upon me to support and confirm whatever projects you have personally or collectively taken upon yourselves. You should not assume that the new minister will immediately see the goodness and sound logic of the ways and means by which the congregation or the parish or the Presbytery runs and follows its course.  Why? Well firstly (and this is perhaps very obvious) you may find that I’m just not very bright.  What is obvious to all and sundry may not be obvious to me!  In this circumstance, I beg your patience as I seek to listen and understand.  It might take a while, but even the dimmest person can get there in the end. And so shall I! But there is a second reason why I may not immediately come to the party, and it is this: sometimes, despite devoting considerable time and effort to a desire to understand, I simply will not come to see a harmony between the word and Spirit of God in which I have immersed my life and the way things are commonly thought and done.  In such circumstances, you can rely on me to be somewhat contrary, even iconoclastic.  In such circumstances, you can rely on me to carefully explain the difference between what already is, and the new thing God would bring into being.  I will do so, of course, as gently and carefully as I can.  I will do so in a spirit of service which wants only good for you, and not ill. But I will not demure from my calling. Where I perceive a difference between the ‘way of the world’ and the way of Jesus Christ, you can rely on me to bear witness to the way of the gospel, even if it renders me rather unpopular in the process.  Coming from a long line of dissidents, as I do - Irish, Aboriginal, Christian - I am quite prepared for that if it is God’s will.

So there you have it. That is what you can expect, and not expect, from your new minister and, indeed, from any minister of Jesus Christ. For the calling I’ve described this evening is not mine by virtue of my individual personality or personal vocation.  It is mine because I am called into a company of people and an order of ministry.  It is a vocation in which all ministers are called to share.  This is so by the gracious call and election of God which, in my experience at least, is completely irresistible. 

In that spirit, I should like to conclude with a prayer of John Wesley, which we are encouraged to pray each year at the renewal of baptismal vows, my friends, if not every day:

I am no longer my own, but yours.

Put me to what you will; rank me with whom you will.

Put me to doing, put me to suffering.

Let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you,

exalted for you, or laid aside for you.

Let me be full, let me be empty;

let me have all things, let me have nothing.

And now most glorious God

- Father, Son and Holy Spirit –

you are mine and I am yours.

May it be so for ever, 

to the glory and praise of your name.  Amen