On Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann's 'Dadirri'

Colonisation is not only about the annexation of land and the removal of those who live on it. It is also about the annexation and repurposing of imagination and thought. The ‘white possessive’ (a term from Aileen Moreton-Robinson) wants to own the brains and hearts of Indigenous peoples, as well as our territories and bodies. That is why the ‘welcome’ offered to Indigenous people into white institutions, especially institutions of learning, is deeply conditional. ‘You are welcome’ means ‘You are welcome so long as you submit to our (white) knowledges, our (white) epistemologies and our (white) ontologies’. Resisting the terms of that conditional welcome is fraught with difficulty because it is offered by the dominant, controlling, culture. It is a welcome backed not only institutional power, but also by the dominating imagination that animates that power. In this context, when a white teacher says ‘listen to me’, the invitation comes with a number of unspoken corollaries: ‘ . . . because I know the objective truth . . . because your truth is inadequate to the real (white) world you must face . . . because your survival as a worthwhile contributor to (white) society depends upon your listening . . .’ and so on.

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann’s invitation to come listen (‘dadirri’) to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is therefore deeply radical. She is not inviting (white) people into a lovely, wafty, spiritual experience with ‘nature’, for example, the kind of experience that you can also get from a (white) Buddhism that is deeply compatible with, and supportive of, (white) middle-class suburban life. She is inviting (white) people to question and relativise the very foundations of the white possessive, including its imaginative power, its epistemologies and ontologies. What Miriam-Rose means by ‘dadirri’ is a deep and sustained process of conversion, of learning and unlearning: a learning about Indigenous practices of ethical relationality with the ancestor-creators who formed the earth, with country and waterway, with animals and plants, and finally with other people; and, with that, a subsequent unlearning of (white) practises that ignore and even abuse these deeply beloved kin. 

Conversion like this will certainly never happen if Indigenous knowledges and practises continue to be seen as interesting but marginal, pretty and decorative, like a dot painting on the wall of a suburban home that is otherwise entirely european in style. Conversion only comes, I believe, when the stability and apparent ‘success’ of a particular paradigm starts to come undone. I suppose I hope that the ecological emergency that is slowly starting to penetrate (white) Western consciousness, along with the collapse and imminent implosion of (white) churchly structures and their supporting theologies, may eventually create the kind of crisis in which Christian people will eventually turn to what the world’s oldest living cultures might have to say.

Insofar as the Christian faith can be an ally in that learning and unlearning, Miriam-Rose, myself, and many others are happy to be Christian. But the Christian faith we embrace will be necessarily different from the dominant (white) ways of being Christian. Our faith remembers that Christianity arose in a colonial setting as a protest against the excesses of the Roman empire and against the Jewish leaders who collaborated with empire in their oppression of ordinary people. Our faith remembers that Jesus was a keen observer of the processes and cycles of local ecosystems, and that he counselled his hearers to attend to the lessons he observed there in the parables. Our faith remembers that Jesus blurred the difference between bread and his body, wine and his blood, all these things being, for him, a dying and a mourning by which life and joy is given anew, as much in country and ecosystem as in human community. Our faith remembers that Jesus was concerned, most of all, with the last and the least, the forgotten victims of oppressive structures and regimes. In him we see ourselves, and we hear in his message the voice of our ancestor-creators who say that life is not yet spent, that there is hope yet for a better tomorrow.

With thanks to Prof Dorothy Lee who prompted me to write something about this.

Garry Deverell

A voice cries out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garry Deverell

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.

Taking leave of ourselves

Texts: 1 Kings 19.1-15a; Ps 42; Galatians 3.23-29; Luke 8.26-39

When the prophet Elijah fled into the desert wilderness of Mt. Horeb, he had good reason to do so.  The powerful pagan queen, Jezebel, was very angry with him for having defeated the priests of Baal, a local fertility god, in a game of ‘my god is bigger than your god.’  She promised to kill Elijah, as she had killed the other prophets of Yahweh a couple of chapters earlier.  So Elijah strapped on his pack and headed for the hills to hide.  Now, the next bit of the story is really interesting. While Elijah is out there, we are told, he suddenly falls into a profound despondency, a despondency so deep that he begs for God to take his life.  The source of this downer appears to be Elijah’s belief that he is ‘no better’ than his ancestors, for a true believer in God would never have run away at the first sign of danger.  Especially if he or she had witnessed the power of God to save only a few days earlier!  At this, his lowest point, Elijah had apparently lost faith in his capacity to have faith.  Not an easy thing to have to deal with!

Now, if we turn over to the story from Luke for a while, we find another man who appears to be hiding out.  This time it’s not a prophet, but a demoniac, that is, a man possessed by a demon.  Clearly, like Elijah, this fellow had a death-wish, because he lives in a grave-yard.  To the first-century mind, someone who lived in a graveyard would have been already ‘dead’ because he or she clearly preferred the world of the dead, a shadowy region beyond the borders of safe society and commerce.  Note also that the name of this guy’s demon was ‘Legion.’  Interesting name that.  At the time when Luke wrote his gospel, the most obvious meaning of the word was military.  A Legion, for first century Mediterraneans, was a very large company of Roman soldiers or ‘legionnaires’, a tangible symbol of Rome’s absolute power over every aspect of one’s life.  So, when Luke tells us that his man is possessed by ‘Legion’ he means us to recognise that the man has been driven ‘mad’ by the omni-present pressure of Roman power in his life.  Luke wants us to see that this man has been so colonised by Rome that there is little to nothing of his original self left.  He is now only what Rome has made of him.  He has been repressed and belittled to the point where the only escape he may contemplate is that of death.  And so he inhabits the tombs, contemplating death and yet held back from killing himself by a demon who accuses him, over and over again, of being so useless and insignificant he does not have the guts even to kill himself! 

Two stories, two men.  Both are hiding out in a wilderness where people rarely go.  Both are seeking a haven of refuge from the political power of their times.  Both struggle deeply with the decisions they have made in life, with the selves that brought them to this point of despondency or illness.  Was there another way?  Could I have handled things with more courage, more resolve?  Where has my faith in God gone to?  Is there no escape except into the darkness of death? 

These are not hypothetical questions about two chaps who may or may not have experienced all this several thousand years ago, on the other side of the world.  These are questions that have regularly been asked by many people who live in Australia today.  One of them is a fellow I know whom I shall call ‘Patrick’.  Patrick comes from Ethiopia in Northern Africa.  To my mind, he is a modern-day Elijah figure because, in the early 90s he was a trade-union leader who stood up to the increasingly racist policies of his government in the name of a justice he had learned from Christ.  As a consequence of his actions, Patrick received a series of death-threats and his house was burnt down.  At the urging of his friends, and because he had a new bride whom he loved, he finally decided to flee the country.  For the next five years Patrick was a fugitive who, many times over, fell into a deep despondency about being so powerless in the face of evil men.  He also accused himself, very often, of having failed—not only with his work for justice, but also in his trust of God.  Would someone who trusted in God have run away like that?

Another friend who asks these questions regularly is a fellow I shall call ‘Mark’.  Mark has a disease known as schizophrenia.  Schizophrenia is a mental illness that afflicts a very large number of Australians, most of them young men.  Mark’s particular history is that he comes from a good, middle-class family.  He has a mother and a father who are good people and who cared for him well.  He went to private school where he received the best of educations.  Yet, in his early twenties, he began to hear voices in his head, voices which accused him of being a nothing, a nobody, a waste of space in the world, someone unworthy to be alive.  Mark tried to kill himself, and he has tried to kill himself many times since.  In his late twenties, he came across some Christians who took him to church and tried to care for him.  He discovered a faith in God which sustains him, and yet . . .  when he is having a relapse, a downer, the voices now accuse him of failing to have faith in God.  ‘If you had faith, you would be healed of your affliction’ they say. 

To my mind, Mark is a modern day demoniac.  He is in the grip of a power which has so invaded his heart and mind that it has become very, very difficult to separate the essential Mark out from the voices he hears in his head.  Without in any way contesting the physiological and genetic basis of schizophrenia, I often wonder why it is that the numbers of people afflicted by the disease are increasing so rapidly.  Could it be that many of us are vulnerable to becoming ill, but more and more are becoming so in fact because the voices of belittlement out there in the world are becoming far more pervasive?  The new colonial powers, I sometimes think, are the moguls of consumer capitalism.  Every day they bombard us with the message that our lives are not good enough.  We would be more beautiful if we used this product or that, that we would be more successful if we wore this suit and did this kind of job, that we would be more worthy of friendship and love if we would only become more like everyone else.  I sometimes think that Mark, and others like him, are simply more vulnerable to these powers than the rest of us - that, for them, the voices of the advertiser are experienced internally and personally in a way that most of us do not hear them.  In that sense, Mark is perhaps like the demoniac of the Gerasenes, for whom a strong and tenacious resistance to Roman power was simply not possible.  In the end he was overwhelmed, and found himself dallying with the dead.

Now what is the gospel word to people for whom life has become so difficult, so stark, so bereft of comfort?  What is the gospel word for people who accuse themselves even for their lack of faith, and use that fact as another reason to condemn themselves?  Well, let us return to our stories.

Note, first of all, that there is no condemning God in either of our stories.  In the Elijah story, God does not confirm Elijah in that picture of himself as faithless.  Neither, in the story of the demoniac, does Jesus condemn the man for being mad.  There is not even a hint, in either story, of God shaking his or her head at a lack in the people—whether it be a lack of courage or faith or whatever.  What we see, rather, is a God who quietly and persistently gets on with restoring or creating a self that is able to resist the power of the enemy.  In the case of Elijah, God gives the exhausted prophet food and rest.  Then he takes him on retreat into the desert, when Elijah learns that the work of God is not only about fireworks and miraculous power, it is also about discerning that place of silent stillness in which there is peace.  Even if the world is out of control, there is a stillness at the heart of things in which one may find oneself again.  For the stillness is God.  In the case of the demoniac, we find that Jesus does not address the man himself, first of all, but the power that enslaves him.  In essence, Jesus tells the power that it has no authority to brutalise the man, and that it had best be gone.  Only after he has addressed the power itself, does Jesus turn to the man with his word of liberation.  “The demon is gone.  Return now to your home, to those who love you, and tell them what God has done for you.”  It seems to me there is a pattern here for any who would work with people who have a so-called ‘mental illness’.  First confront the power that is responsible—not the ill person themselves, but the crazy power of consumer capitalism.  Question its authority to belittle us all.  Then, having done that work of advocacy, address the suffering person themselves.  Tell them that they, themselves, can now re-claim their place in home and society because they are worthy.  They are worthy because God has said they are worthy.

There is a great deal else that could be said about these stories.  But I shall conclude only with this.  That the work of the gospel is a work of conversion.  It calls us to leave behind the selves we have become, the false selves which we have become at the bidding of the powers of our time, and to embrace a new self, a self made in the image of Christ.  For in Christ we are made new selves, we are made children of God, sharing in God’s own dignity.  The power of the gospel is simply this: to remind us that we are loved, that we are accepted, that we are worthy because God has declared us worthy.  The power of the gospel confronts the authority of any power in the world, whether political or economic, any power which would declare us unfit or unworthy, any power that would belittle us or make us small.  All who have been baptised into Christ have put on Christ, says the apostle.  In him you have left the belittled identities given by the powers behind.  Now you can live in the freedom of God. 

This sermon was first preached at St Luke's church in Mount Waverley in 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.

Luke's baptism of Jesus

Texts:  Isaiah 43.1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8.14-17; Luke 3.15-17, 21-22

The baptism of John was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  You will remember, in Luke’s story, that John went out from Jerusalem to the Judean wilderness.  There he took the pose and demeanour of an Old Testament prophet, preaching apocalyptic sermons about the coming of God’s judgment upon a wicked and adulterous generation.  You will remember that he looked for a day in which God’s anointed would arise to accomplish God’s purposes.  “I baptise you with water,” said John, “but one is coming after me who will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”  Luke saw John’s baptism as a kind of shadow or figure of that more terrible baptism to come.  By being baptised in water, the penitent could prepare themselves for the judgement day; having been purified of sin, he or she could face the coming deluge with a certain amount of hope.  In the baptismal practise of John, then, the primary actors are the penitent (who repents of their sins), and the prophet (who baptises).  

The baptism of Jesus is somewhat different, however.  There is no trace in the gospel accounts of a penitent Jesus, especially not in Luke.  In fact, Luke goes to great lengths in the previous chapter to establish that Jesus already enjoys God’s favour (2.40, 52), and is therefore not a sinner who is called to repent or be baptised in the sense established by John.  Neither do the gospel accounts consider the agency of John in the baptism to be of especial significance.  Luke, indeed, leaves him out altogether.  He is present at the scene by implication only.  So, if the baptism of Jesus is not a baptism of repentance, what is it?  It is two things, I think.  It is fist a unique sealing of the relationship between Jesus and the two other Trinitarian figures—Father and Spirit—a relationship characterizes by filial love, blessing and mutual empowerment.  And it is, second, a modelling of what baptism must signify for all who are baptised “into Christ”, as the liturgy has put it since the first Christian century.  Let us look at each of these meanings in turn, and then consider what their importance might be for ourselves, we who meet here tonight.

The scene of Christ’s baptism is rightly regarded as a key source for any genuinely Christian understanding of God.  For in this baptism we are given a small insight into the nature of a God who is otherwise rather mysterious.   There we find that our God is a Father, who has a Son, and that the two are related to one another through the agency of a Spirit who embodies both hope and a mission of love.  The baptism passage is rich with a symbolism which is not so readily understood these days, so allow me to spell it out a little. 

First, when we read that the Spirit descended upon the baptised Jesus in the form of a dove, we are meant to recall a story from the Hebrew Bible.  In the story of Noah, God decides to destroy the earth with a flood because human beings had become wicked beyond belief.  So God places Noah, the only righteous one to be found, with his family and many animals in a huge boat which is able to ride out the deluge.  When the sun comes out, Noah sends out a dove.  When it returns to him with an olive branch, he knows that the waters are beginning to subside and they are saved.  In Jewish tradition, then, the dove became a symbol of God’s salvation from disaster and calamity.  The appearing of a dove meant that the difficult times were nearly at an end, and that the new day would soon appear.  In the context of Jesus’ baptism, Luke therefore wants us to understand that the Spirit has come to Jesus as a sign and promise that all will be well, even though his life will be like being swept away in a deluge of water and fire.  This is a message that Jesus really needed to hear, because he was about to be swept up in the fear and hatred of both Jew and Gentile authorities!  

Furthermore, when the Spirit comes and the voice of the Father is heard from heaven, Luke’s hearers would have been reminded of that cycle of oracles in the book of the prophet Isaiah often called the Servant Songs. There God promises an Anointed One, a messiah, who will save the people from their sins, and from the oppression of their enemies, though not without pain, suffering, and terrible loss to the Servant’s own self.  When Jesus receives the Spirit and hears the voice from heaven, Luke wants us to understand that he is being given an identity and a vocation in life which stands in the tradition of the Servant from Isaiah.  The Spirit comes to empower him for his messianic mission.  The voice resounds to confirm him in his identity as a Son specially beloved by his Father, a Son encouraged to remain in that love no matter how difficult the road ahead may be.  The story of the baptism is therefore rich with images which establish both the identity of Jesus in God, and the vocation and mission to which he is called: to save the world from itself.

Which leads us to the second purpose for which Luke apparently intended the story of Jesus’ baptism, namely, that it should become a model and a paradigm for every Christian baptism.  Now, when I say that, I’m not only talking about ceremonies and rituals, although I certainly mean those things as well.  Since the second century most of the church (the ‘free’ churches are an unfortunate exception) has included prayer for the gift of the Holy Spirit as an essential part of every baptismal celebration.  Here the Spirit is called upon to gift the newly baptised person with a new identity and purpose in Christ, and to enable that person to carry out their mission only in the power which the Spirit is able to give.  Most traditional baptismal liturgies rightly conceive of baptism as a ritual which symbolises far more than the moment of getting wet itself.  They understand (with Luke and Paul) that Christ’s baptism was a shorthand way of talking about the life, the death, and the resurrection he was to undergo after he was baptised.  In a similar manner, the traditional liturgies understand that every Christian baptism is a participation in Christ’s own baptism, that is, his life, his death, and his resurrection.  Every baptised Christian is therefore called to find themselves by losing themselves, to plunge themselves so totally into Christ’s messianic journey, that nothing of the old self remains at the end of it all except what belongs to Christ.  The traditional liturgies understand that baptism is life, and that to live is to live from Christ, in Christ, and for Christ, and to do so in the power of his Spirit.  With Luke and Paul, these liturgies therefore encourage us to think about salvation—the redemption of our bodies, minds and spirits—as entirely dependent upon the grace and mercy of God in Christ.  Only by joining ourselves to Christ, both ritually and ‘really,’ can we ever pretend to a sure and certain hope that is free from illusion and wishful thinking.

We so we come full circle.  I began by pointing out the difference between John’s baptism and the baptism of Christ.  The first emphasises the will for repentance in the soul of the baptised, while the second emphasises the mercy and love of God.  Of course, both are necessary for Christian baptism.  But the second is infinitely more important.  Without a consciousness that one will be saved because of God’s unconditional love alone, penitence could easily take on the aura of a good work which can performed in order to secure God’s favour.  Even baptism itself can take on that flavour sometimes, and I think that this is especially the case in churches where the traditional liturgical forms have been abandoned.  Such churches forget that we are saved from our despairs and our fears only because God has called us by name and promised to persevere in mercy towards us even through the very worst that life can dish out for us.  Such churches often revert to the baptism of John, which tried to immunise the penitent from judgement through an act of the human will.  

It is not the human will that will save us, though.  Which one of us can honestly say that we might save ourselves from ourselves by an act of our wills?  I couldn’t even stick to a diet, let alone a programme of spiritual formation!  No, you, like me and everyone else, ultimately depend upon the mercy and love of God to which this baptism of Jesus bears witness.  In baptism he sought to submit himself, utterly, to the destiny and vocation he could never have generated on his own.  Only by a similar submission to God, only by allowing Christ to live out his baptismal life in us and for us, do any of us have even the twinkle of a hope.  Only by believing that God loves us, and will never abandon us to the futility of our own intelligence or will, do any of stand a chance of surviving the deluge which is life itself, or, indeed, the apocalyptic deluge to come.  I thank Christ that it is so! 

This sermon was preached at South Yarra Community Baptist Church on the commemoration of the Baptism of Jesus in January 2004.

Can you be baptised with my baptism?

Mark 10.35-45

Today we gather to witness a most astonishing and disturbing event.  In a few moments we shall watch as a small child is put to death . . .  and then we shall see her being raised to an entirely new life.  Is that what you expected to see today?  Is that why you came?  Baptism, you see, is a profound ritual of death and re-birth.  It seeks to imitate the experience of Jesus as he was tortured and killed by evil men, buried in the ground, but then raised to be with God forever.  At its heart, the ritual of baptism seeks to bind the heart and spirit of the baptised person to the heart and Spirit of Jesus Christ.  Baptism is therefore a moment of high drama on the journey of faith.  It is not to be entered into lightly, for it is very, very dangerous to join a life to that of Jesus Christ.

Baptism is dangerous in three ways.  First, it will certainly kill you.  Second, it will take you into a strange and terrifying new world - a world I like to call 'the Godzone'.  And finally, baptism will lead you to do stuff which no respectable citizen ought to do.  You'll lose your reputation for being a nice person.  You'll nuke your credibility.  So don't go messing about with baptism.  I'm warning you.  It's dynamite.

When Jesus talked about baptism, he was talking about death.  When James and John, two of his friends, asked to be head honchos in the political oligarchy they thought he would set up, Jesus asked them this question:  ‘Are you able to drink the cup that I will drink, or be baptised with the baptism I am baptised with?’  In Mark's story of Jesus, cups and baptisms were short-hand ways of talking about Jesus' crucifixion.  The cup represented blood, and baptism was about being drowned.  The message is clear.  Just like for Jesus' friends, if we want to belong to Jesus then we've got to be prepared to die.

Now there are big deaths and there are little deaths.  Being baptised is both.  In baptism, we're called by God to nail all the destructive stuff in our lives to the cross with Jesus.  You know what I'm talking about.  Being so ego-centric that we don't give a toss about anyone else.  Living like money means more than people or clean air.  Being control freaks who won't come at anything that gives someone else the reins.  Worshipping at the altars of false gods.  Like TV.  Or Sport.  Or the perfect body.  Or corporate image.  Baptism means letting go of all that stuff.  It's killing us.  We need to let that stuff go in order to grab hold of the new life which Christ offers us. You can't have both.

If you’re serious about dying with Christ through baptism, then you'll eventually wake up in a strange and terrifying world - the Godzone.  You'll meet weird people there.  People who don't pretend they have it all together.  People who struggle with life.  People who are honest about their doubts and fears.  People who believe that God loves them and will never forsake them.  You'll also get to know a self that you never knew existed.  A self which is unafraid of life.  A self which can sit with pain and not want to run away.  A self which regularly forgets itself in the raptures of loving . . . loving people, and beauty and truth.  A self that can stand to be alone with that dark and terrible fire which is God.

But, be warned!  If you hang out in the Godzone too much—if you allow your baptism to shape your life—then you'll lose most of your credibility as a nice, middle-class, person who is going somewhere.  You'll find that your core values are changing, that they're no longer consistent with the dominant values of our society (or even your family).  You'll be sickened by the way in which the strong exploit the weak.  You'll become an advocate for the voiceless ones, the vulnerable ones, the forgotten ones.  Your drive to get ahead will be transformed into a desire to come alongside.  You'll stop hoarding your love and your time and your money.  You'll learn to give yourself away, as if that was all that mattered.  Because, in the end, you'll see that only God matters.  The God who gives himself away in Jesus Christ.

I hope you can hear what I'm saying.  Baptism is a very big thing.  It is not a nice day for the rellies. It is not an outing for grandma's christening gown.  It is not a naming ceremony.  Baptism is God's offer of love and liberation.  But it is also our response to that love, that vulnerable love of a God that is able to change our lives and makes us vulnerable too.  In baptism we become inextricably joined with the crucified and risen God.  We promise to live his life, and die his death, and we submit ourselves to be raised to the Godzone with him.  Live dangerously.  Live out your baptism.

This sermon was delivered at Christ Church, Kensington, in October 2003.

The Wind Blows Where It Will

Texts:  Isaiah 6.1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8.12-17; John 3.1-17

When we choose to give ourselves to God in baptism, thus calling on Christ to come and live with us by the companionship of the Holy Spirit, we also choose to cede, or put aside, our right to do whatever we would like.  When we choose to live God’s way, we also choose to die to our own way.  In the language of John’s gospel, at baptism we are re-born ‘from above’.  We cease to live according to the many wills associated with our first birth, whether those of self or society.  We start to live according to the unfathomable will of the Spirit, who has mid-wived us into a broad new land, a land in which the only thing that matters is the utterly extravagant love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—a love so broad and deep that it spills out into the world of human beings, inviting them to love and be loved as the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father.  At baptism, according to John, we are caught up in the wild and excessive love that is the divine will of the Spirit, a will and a way that cannot be domesticated.  ‘Like a wind that comes and goes according to a hidden purpose, so it is with everyone born of the Spirit’, says John.  When we are baptised, we vow ourselves to a God who might take us in directions entirely opposite to the ones we had planned ourselves. 

Take Isaiah, for example.  It is likely that Isaiah was originally a priest or a Levite, a male member of that tribe of Hebrews who were given no land in Israel but set aside, instead, to serve Yahweh in the worship of the temple.  The Levite, even more than other Israelites, could expect that life would unfold according to a particular plan or pattern.  In early childhood he would begin to learn his father’s trade.  At his father’s workplace, the temple in Jerusalem, he would learn how to keep the altar fires burning, how to slaughter beasts for religious sacrifice, how to lead the temple rituals and shepherd the people in their religious observances.   He would also learn the law of Moses by heart, and take his turn preparing meals for the other temple servants.  At the moment he was born, this was the life prepared for Isaiah, a life of service in the temple of Yahweh.

But one day, while he is going about his duties (perhaps he is polishing the silverware or some other rather humble task), Isaiah is suddenly caught up in an extraordinary vision.  He sees Yahweh himself, awesome and kingly, a presence which fills the whole temple.  Isaiah immediately falls into a fearful panic, for he knows the stories of Moses very well.  He knows that Yahweh does not show himself to sinful mortals, for they cannot bear the purity and truth of his holy gaze.  ‘Woe is me!’ he calls out. ‘I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live amongst a people of unclean lips’.  This is another way of saying, ‘I honour the Lord with what I say, but not with what I do.  My people and I are liars.’  Isaiah was right, of course, for if one reads the rest of the book that bears this story, you will discover that the Jewish nation was in pretty bad shape at the time.  On the one hand, the Jewish people made quite a show of going to the temple to worship, and of keeping the many feast days and festivals that marked the history of their liberation by God from Egypt.  But the moment worship was over, the nobles, the politicians and the landowners would go back to what they did with most of the time, that is, increase their wealth by stealing small farms on the edge of their existing lands, squeezing their workers for more production at less cost, and bribing the bureaucracy so that their plans and schemes could go ahead with a minimum of interference from the law.  As a Levite, it is more than likely that Isaiah himself was caught up in all this bribery and corruption.  For the Levites doubled as a kind of civil service for the aristocracy.  They handled the affairs of state, as well as the apparatus of the temple.

So at the moment he has the vision, Isaiah knows that he is done for.  For in the searing light of God’s glorious presence, the shadows hidden in darkness come to light as well.  Isaiah knows that there is little point in hiding what he is, or what his people are.  Covenant-breakers.  Liars.  Cheats.  Exploiters of the weak.  Yet, God has not come to do away with Isaiah, or even to chastise him.  Why chastise a person who is already aware of their darkness?  No, God has come to change the course of Isaiah’s life.  Taking a burning coal from the altar where sacrifices for sin would have been made day after day, a seraph, one of God’s servants, touches it to Isaiah’s lips and says:  ‘Your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out’.  In other words, 'I know jolly well that you are a liar and a hypocrite.  But you are forgiven.  From now on your lies have been burned away.  From now on, your lips will speak only the truth.’  For what happens then is this:  that Isaiah the Levite, whose life had been pretty cosy and predictable up until now, is suddenly called to become a prophet, a man whose speaks the truth to kings and priests and businessmen, and cops a fair bit of flack for his trouble.  ‘Whom shall I send, and who shall go for us?’ says the Lord.  And Isaiah, who can hardly believe that he is still alive, responds in the classical manner of prophets from time immemorial: ‘Here I am; send me!’

Now, in the Christian grammar of baptism, it is not only special people like prophets who are called to live and speak the truth.  It is all of us, all who are born by water and the Spirit into the realm of God’s love.  For at our baptism, we encounter a God who knows jolly well who we are—sinners who betray God, others and self every day of the year.  Yet God is not particularly worried about who we are at that moment.  In baptism, certainly, we are forgiven our sins; they are washed away just like dirt from a grubby child.  Yet God has more in mind than the miracle of forgiveness.  God also wants to change our lives, from the inside out, to give us a new vocation in life, a new purpose.  Like Isaiah the prophet, who was called to speak the truth whether it is fashionable to do so or not, every baptised Christian is also called to live a new life, a life determined not by what we want, but by what God wants.

The difference between life with God, and life without God, is simply this, you see:  that life without God leads to death; but life with God leads to yet more life.  That is why the apostle Paul calls Christians people of the Spirit.  ‘Spirit’ can also mean ‘breath’, the very breath that animates our bodies and make us alive.  In that sense, all who live are spiritual beings.  Yet, in Christian perspective, one can be alive and breathing, and yet destined to run out of breath because one is not plugged in to the true source of life and breathing, the Spirit of God, the very Spirit who not only animated the daily doings of Jesus of Nazareth, and also raised his dead body into the radically new life of resurrection.  What God wants to do for us, then, is exactly what God did for Jesus.  God wants to fill us so full of the life of his Spirit, that there is little left in us of all that is dying or dead.  God wants to catch our lives up into the life and energy that is the extraordinary love between the Father and the Son.  God wants us to let go of everything that holds us back from the giving and receiving of divine love.  God wants us to receive this love, the love that is the Spirit, and make it real in the world through what we do and what we say.

You will remember that I spoke, a couple of weeks ago, about what the love of God looks like in practise.  I spoke about God’s love as a three-fold movement of solidarity with the weak, hospitality toward the stranger, and the costly giving away of one’s life that another soul may grow and flourish.  What I also implied at that time, I will say more explicitly this morning.  That the one who loves others in this manner, is also loved in this manner by God.  The power that makes it possible for us to love others in this way is the very power that loves us in this way.  This means that, for Christians, there can be no fear that we shall somehow be depleted or used up by our loving.  Not if we are also believe that we are loved by God, and especially by God as he is embodied in both the rituals and relationships of the Christian community.  For the Spirit who comes to dwell with us is the Spirit of life itself, life that is always enough and never runs out.  That means that no matter where this Spirit take us, or whom the Spirit puts in our path, there shall always be life and love enough to go around.  As long, that is, as we are willing to live the life of the Spirit, and not simply the lives that we might choose for ourselves.

I conclude with this. If you are baptised, you belong to God, and the Spirit of God has come to dwell with you.  You have given yourself into the hands of God, and God is absorbing you into the life and love that circulates, like the energies of a dance, between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  But God is not a bully.  The power of love is a power that can be refused.  If you resist God, he with plead with you, and argue, and remonstrate forever.  But God will never make you do what you do not want to do.  That is why the promises of baptism need to be renewed day after day.  Each day, when you get out of bed, God promises Godself to you once more: to love and to cherish you, to lead you into the freedom of the children of God.  But that cannot happen without your say-so.  The humility of God is such that God requires our agreement to move forward, a promising that responds to God’s own promising with faith and trust and obedience.  My prayer on this Trinity Sunday is that God may give us grace to so surrender our lives, that the life of God may come to flourish in our hearts and in our world.

Garry Deverell