The Stone the Builders Rejected

 Texts:  Exodus 20.1-4; Psalm 19; Philippians 3.4b-14; Matthew 21.33-46

When a rock begins its long and tumultuous journey from the mountains to the sea, it is rough and jagged.  As the waters of many seasons push it along its way, the rock starts to lose its jagged features.  They are worn away by a continual process of bumping and bouncing against other rocks.  After an age, when the rock finally gets to the mouth of the river, most of its edges are gone.  Its surface is smooth and silky, like the texture of the water in which it has journeyed.  And it sits, with other rocks, amidst the debris of its own making, gleaming with the splendour of its own peculiar colours and personality. 

The reading from Matthew refers to a stone which is at first rejected for a building project, but later recognised as the quintessential stone from which to assemble the whole building, the ‘key’ or ‘cornerstone’, as it was sometimes called.  The stone, in Jesus’ story, is the messiah whom God sends to collect the fruits of the harvest, whom the Jewish leaders beat and kill. It is Jesus, the one who will rise from death to become the cornerstone of a new community and a new creation. 

All people are like stones, are they not?  As rocks emerge from the mountains and make their way to the sea, so the newborn baby is destined to pilgrimage.  And who can tell what is ahead, or where the journey will end?  Along the way we are inexorably changed.  In a relentless dance of choice and circumstance, we wander through the landscapes of becoming.  Sometimes we are able to choose the next move.  We can decide how to change.  At other times, we are pushed and cajoled by the forces of heredity and environment, beaten into a new shape by violence or indifference.  Who can tell what will happen next?  The past is irrevocable, the future is uncertain.  But change rolls on like a tidal wave.  Note this too, there is no such thing as a painless change.  With each change there is loss, and grief at what is lost, and the struggle to grasp hold of all that is new and the different.  

For many people, change is simply change.  It has no meaning or purpose.  The years roll by.  The landscape changes and so do people.  But there is no sense of destiny in it all.  There is no purpose.  From the perspective of faith, however, every life has an identity and purpose.  God holds us in divine care, so that no matter what changes come, we are known by God and purposed by God to be what we are, and to become what we will become.  

This is what God purposes for each of us: that we might become like Jesus, the stone the builders rejected.  When Paul says that he wants ‘to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings’ he is saying that he wants to become like Jesus – truly, madly, deeply like Jesus.  He is saying that this goal has consumed him, that all else in his life –every other goal or pursuit – has become as rubbish compared with this yearning to be joined with Christ in a mystical sense of co-identity.  For that is what ‘knowing’ means in this extraordinary passage.  The Greek ‘gnosis’ draws on a rich field of meaning which emphasises not knowledge about some reality, but an active participation in, and engagement with, that reality.  To know Christ, then, is to walk with Jesus from Bethlehem to Jerusalem.  To be born with Christ.  To grow and to wonder with Christ.  To be tempted and perplexed with Christ.  To teach and to heal with Christ.  To be angry with Christ.  To love with Christ.  To be rejected and betrayed with Christ.  And to die with Christ in that impenetrable sense of abandonment.  To know Christ is to become his mother or his friend, the one who walks with him all the way to Golgotha, there to witness the wonder of his resurrection.

Lil and I saw a fantastic film a few years ago, a film called Good Will Hunting.  It’s about a young man who grew up in the Irish precinct of Boston, whose mother died when he was very small, and whose alcoholic step-dad beat him black and blue with a wrench whenever he came home drunk.  The boy, whose name is Will, grows up protecting himself from every kind of intimacy, from every possibility of challenge or change, because he believes, deep down, that love will always turn to abuse, eventually.  He is a very smart young man, who happens to possess an eidetic memory and an extraordinary gift for mathematics.  He has read, and can quote verbatim, many of the great works of history and philosophy.  But all of this is used not to explore the world and be transformed, but to build a shining barrier which can protect him from relationship with others.  But the day comes when Will has to make a fundamental choice.  After beating a guy up, a guy who used to do the same to him when he was a kid, he finds himself in jail.  And the only way out is to agree to meet with a therapist for an hour a week.

The therapist turns out to be a fellow called Sean, played brilliantly by Robin Williams.  Sean is no theoretical therapist.  He is a man who struggles, daily, with his own pains and griefs.  But he does so with courage and truthfulness. Sean is able to challenge Will to get out of his armour, which, while very effective at keeping the pain of the world out, is just as effective at locking Will inside a private hell. Through a difficult and dangerous journey, Will is cajoled and persuaded to be truthful and confront his fears about relationship.  Eventually, with Sean as guide and friend, he finds the courage to enter the real world once more – the world of love, intimacy, risk, and vulnerability.  And it is an amazing journey to witness.  Like a rock making its way down the mountain, Will is beaten and bruised.  But all the while, little by little, his beauty emerges.  His individuality, his uniqueness, his infinite value.  And all because a wounded man pressed beyond his own fears and reached out with care and compassion.

Sean is a clearly a Christ-figure in this movie, for Christ is one who, with love and courage, reached beyond his own fear and panic and woundedness to love God and care for his neighbour.  He is one who embraced the world and was changed.  He is one who suffered the pain of change.  But in the process he found his deepest self, a self hidden in the life of God.  This is what God wants for all of us, too.  To respond to life in all its fullness, after the way of Jesus. This is the meaning of our existence.  This is what we are here for.   We are not here to accumulate wealth.  We are not here to acquire or even yearn after our neighbour’s property.  We are not here to kill, maim or lie about the ones who will not do as we wish they would do.  No, we are here to love and to honour God in the way that Jesus honoured God.  Even unto death.  

When a stone reaches the mouth of the river, it is no longer the stone it was at the top of the mountain. By dying to what it once was, it is able to come alive to the goal and the purpose of its becoming. We are the stones of God.  God want to build us into a holy temple, which is beautiful to the eye, and able to host the symphonic music of all that it means to be creatures beloved by God.  But we can never become what we are purposed to become unless we put away our self-centred ambitions and submit to the way of Christ, ‘becoming like him in his death, so that, somehow, we might attain to the resurrection of the dead’.  Today I challenge all of you.  Stop hiding inside your fears about change.  Allow God to embrace you with his love and his care.  Be transformed.  Be healed. Become fruitful for the sake of the kingdom.

Garry Deverell

I should be glad of another death

Texts:  Isaiah 60.1-6; Psalm 72. 1-7; Ephesians 3.1-12; Matthew 2. 1-12

 . . .  were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

from T.S. Eliot, ‘The journey of the Magi’ (1927)

I have seen something.  Something which is difficult to recall with accuracy, and almost impossible to speak about.  Something wonderful, and terrifying, and intoxicating, and utterly strange.  What I have seen, I saw not with my eyes, nor even with my soul (whatever that is).  It was, rather, a feeling that I had, myself, been seen by another.  Seen transparently and utterly, as under a field of ultra-violet light, so that nothing of who I am or will become now remains hidden.  Seen in such a way as to transform my entire sense of who is the observer and who the observed.  So that the whole manner of my observation¬, whether of self or society, has been irrevocably changed.  What I see now is no longer what I saw before, even though I’m looking out on the same scenes, the same people.  It’s as if my seeing is charged, now, with the consciousness of that other, so that my seeing is always already what this other sees as well.  It was not so before I saw.

When the Magi set out on their journey, it was because they, too, saw something.  But what they saw is also difficult to name.  When Matthew says that it was a star that they saw, the star clearly evokes a peculiar and particular fact:  the birth of a king for the Jews.  The star rises in the east, a permanent sign and symbol for the rising of new hopes and expectations for the downtrodden people of Judea, hopes that are coming to birth in the babe of Bethlehem.  That is what Matthew, I think, intends to say about the meaning of the star.  And yet there is a logic in his story which works against all that.  For it is not the babe’s own people who see the star, or recognise it’s significance.  It is not Herod, the king of the Jews, or his counselors who journey to pay homage to the newly born Messiah.  Rather, it is Magi from the East who accomplish all this.  Gentiles.  Natives of a foreign land.  Infidels.  So what did they see?  What did they see that could possibly move them to become interested in the significance of a minor principality, a tiny outpost of the great Roman Empire?  What moved them to leave where they were, to say goodbye to all that was solid and familiar, to put aside responsibilities and livelihoods?  What moved them to put relationships on hold, to put plans on hold, to change direction altogether and journey into a difficult and dangerous land?  What could they possibly have seen to make things so?

Perhaps they saw what I have seen.  Perhaps they saw something that is difficult to name.  Perhaps they were grasped by an experience of having, themselves, been seen by some other.  An Other whose irrefutable presence imbues one’s own seeing with a vision ‘far more deeply interfused’, so that the ordinary shines with beatific glory, and former gods, former objects of desire, are rendered as lifeless and void as plastic.  Perhaps they saw, therefore, that the baby of Bethlehem was both far more and far less that a Messianic pretender for a provincial people.  Perhaps they saw here something of rather more cosmic significance, the arrival of something the world had never seen before, and yet had yearned for since its first creature drew breath.  Perhaps they saw in the child the possibility of that which seemed so very impossible.  Perhaps they were surprised by . . .  by JOY.

When one considers the state of things, it is indeed difficult, I think, to believe that joy is possible.  Most of the world’s people live in poverty.  And they live in poverty because of the excessive greed of the rest of the world, the greed of those of us who belong to the so-called ‘developed economies’.  Because the economic elites require endless consumer choice at the lowest possible price, the poor are condemned to short lives of hard labour and ill health.  And this is not simply a 1st World/ 3rd World phenomenon either.  Even within the 1st World economies, there are those who must work themselves to death so that the elites may continue to enjoy their consumer freedom.  That is why we have sweat-shops.  That is why the large franchises employ ‘casual’ work forces (=low wages, few rights).  That is why we have a huge ‘informal’ work force which receives almost nothing in return for its economic contribution.  

And here is the most joyless bit of all.  Whether you are rich or poor, a hard worker or a hard drinker, whether you’re the CEO of Telstra or a technician who’s just been made ‘redundant’, our joy is being stolen away by advertising.  Because advertising wants to sell us something, something we don’t really need.  And when we get that something, whether by the divine right of the rich or by sheer hard work and ingenuity, we know straight away that we didn’t really need it at all.  Because we still feel empty.  Beneath the shiny happy exterior we put on for our friends, beneath the happy-go-lucky persona of the working-classes or the cool and confident aire of the middle-to-rich, we are still empty.  The pages of New Idea and Cosmopolitan are full of people who still haven’t found what they’re looking for.

In T.S. Eliot’s extraordinary poem, he imagines himself to be one of the Magi turning up at the birth of Jesus.  The journey has been hard, and long, in a thoroughly twentieth-century way.  Its been too hot and too cold, and the transport has not been at all comfortable.  Not like home.  Their porters and servants were only interested in booze and women, and each town seemed either too expensive or too hostile or too alien.  And, of course, the stumbling attempt to walk against the grain of all that is consumable and fashionable seemed, for much of the time, to be nothing but sheer foolishness.  But when they arrived, when they actually found that which came to find, they were utterly and completely unprepared.  For while they were witnesses to a birth, a birth much like all the other births they have ever seen, this was a birth which induced a kind of death in all touched by its power.  So much so, that when the Magi returned to their own lands and their own lives, they found that their old obsessions, their old desires and plans have disappeared.  That the people and pastimes they had once admired seemed now to possess no more substance than that of shadows, clutching at worthless gods.

When people of faith see something, or rather, when they become aware of a gracious presence whose vision suffuses and possesses their own, the world is utterly changed.  Black and white suddenly appears colourful.  The hopeless situation becomes pregnant with possibility.  The brick wall which impedes all progress becomes an opportunity to learn rock-climbing.  Not, I must stress, in psychologically disturbed ways, which seek to deny and sublimate the very real pain and darkness of life.  No.  The new way of seeing is about depth and complexity.  And about double-vision.  While acknowledging the painful realities, the changed vision I’ve been describing does not allow those realities to become totalized, to take over the world and rule there without rival.  The vision granted by faith is about discerning, even in the midst of the very worst that life can dish out, the real but hidden properties of light, hope, love, joy.  Seeing those things which are ordinarily hidden, naming them, and so bringing them into the light.

According to Eliot, the Magi suffered a death in order to become mystics, mystics who could see that the birth of a provincial messiah was also the possibility of their own rebirth in the cosmic plan of God.  So too, I would encourage all gathered here this morning to continue on that same journey.  The journey where despair and darkness is refused its ultimate power.  Where the advertisers are exposed as charlatans.  Where the all-pervasive wrongs of the world are no longer allowed to be all-pervasive.  Where the seemingly pointless birth of a provincial king in the ancient world of Rome is no longer regarded as pointless.  Where love and joy and peace are discerned and named and allowed to flourish.  And that which seemed impossible becomes a possibility once more.

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church on the Feast of the Epiphany 2003.

Hidden with Christ in God: a message for the Aussie bloke

Texts: Colossians 3.1-11; Luke 12.13-21

You have heard the saying 'If you're too heavenly minded, you'll be no earthly good'.   Many of us have been used to taking that saying as gospel, as a word of cautionary wisdom about not getting too carried away with religious stuff.  It's a very Australian approach to life, if you think about it.   Particularly so when we recognise that what usually passes as 'Australian' is actually a caricature: the white, working-class, bloke.  This bloke likes to think of himself as a practical person who acts according to the plain and simple maxims of common-sense.  He doesn't like anything that is too way out, too unfamiliar or too foreign.  He knows what he knows, and likes what he likes.  'And that', he says, 'is good enough for me, mate'.  And that's why the archetypal Australian bloke is supremely suspicious about religion.  Religion represents everything that can't be nailed down in life.  As such, it has the unnerving capacity to call one's common-sense, everyday, view of things into question. Given too much credence, religion has the potential to up-end  the Australian bloke's sense of where things ought to be. Incredibly, the religion of Christ asks him, and all of us, to invest not in the concrete stuff of house, car, footy and a boat for going fishing, but in the rather less tangible matters of love, justice, ecology and intimacy with God.  For the archetypal Australian bloke, this stuff is too airy-fairy and too foreign.  And because we've all been influenced by this approach to life (even if we're not male, white or working-class), Paul's message to the Colossians must, at times, sound like utter nonsense.

In this part of Colossians, Paul actually rails against the common-sense approach to things, the view of life which says 'If you're too heavenly minded you'll be no earthly good'. Indeed, he pleads the opposite:  to set one's mind not on earthly things, but on the things of heaven!  And then he says some rather strange things: religious-sounding things.  He says that all Christians have ‘died’, and that our lives are now ‘hidden with Christ in God’.  He says we've taken off the old self, like you take off a coat, and put on a new self which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.  The upshot of all this appears to be that Paul wants us to stop living according to the common wisdom, and start living this 'hidden' life with Christ.  'Now what', I hear the typical Australian bloke say, 'is the blighter on about!'  What does all that mean?  And why should I take his advice anyway?  I'm quite happy with my life the way it is, thank you very much!'

Well, let me surprise you all by taking those two questions absolutely seriously.  They are very good questions.  They're good questions even if you're not a fan of the archetypal Australian bloke, which I (if you hadn't guessed already) am not.  And they're good questions for two reasons.  First, they call Christian people to give a genuine and credible account of their faith which can be understood by people who do not belong to the church.  In theological terms, we hear in these questions the call to bear effective and relevant witness to our faith in the society and culture of which we are part.  This implies a second reason. Our strange and peculiar language points to a strange and peculiar experience - the experience of finding one's true identity and vocation in Christ.  Our mate's questions are a stern reminder that unless that experience is genuine - truly, madly and deeply genuine - then we really are just kidding ourselves.   In that case our typically Australian mate would be absolutely right in dismissing us.  According to Paul, we are called by God not to believe a series of doctrines and belong to a club called The Church, but to be disciples of Jesus Christ:  to live radically new lives with our whole minds, bodies and experience . . .  but I run ahead of myself.

Allow me to return to the first of those questions the archetypal Australian bloke might ask of Paul's message to the Colossians:  'what is the blighter on about!?'  What does Paul actually mean when he talks about putting off the old self and putting on the new?  And what's all that mysterious stuff about having died but living a life 'hidden with Christ in God?'  Well, this is where I reckon the parable of Jesus about building bigger barns comes in handy.  I suspect that a lot of us are like this fellow who dreams of building bigger and bigger barns to put all his stuff in.  The modern, suburban version might talk about elegant clothes and houses, flash cars or yachts on the river.   These are the modern symbols of wealth and success, of having made it in the lucky country.  Few of us ever get there, but most of us dream of getting there.  That's why so many of this nation's poorest folk spend so much of their modest incomes on gambling and tattslotto tickets.  It's the lure of the dream they've been sold by the advertisers. 

The bad news is that this dream is killing us.  It's killing the poor, certainly, because being poor means you'll never possess the material symbols which prove you're a success.  So you spend your days feeling like a failure, battling a low self-image and wondering whether there's any point.  Or you get angry at those who do seem successful.  And you learn to hate them, or you rob from them, or you abuse or perhaps assault them.  Because you wish you had what they seem to have: the money to be free and happy.  But those of us who are relatively well off, whether rich or middle-income earners, are being killed by the dream as well.  Because the dream promises happiness if you get this stuff, but when you get it you don't feel happy.  You feel empty and ripped off.  It’s like someone stole the punchline to the world's funniest joke.  At base, you see, is the reality that all things must die.  All things pass away.  If we invest our sense of personhood and wellbeing to things material, then we're already dead.  Because material things are dead.  They don't have life, and can't give us the things which fill life with meaning and purpose.  And it doesn't matter how much of that stuff we accumulate, it won't give us the magic.  And when we face death, whether that be sooner or later, we're all confronted with that stark fact.  When you're dead, the symbols of wealth and success spell a big fat zero.  When I worked as a chaplain at the Epworth hospital in Melbourne, I met a number of high-flying business men who had gained the world but lost their souls.  It wasn't until their run-ins with death that they awoke to this fact.  And it was terrifying.

So when Paul says 'you have died', when he talks of 'putting off the old self', he's talking about this experience exactly.  Some folks are confronted with death through accident or mis-adventure.  And they are forced to change their lives, to put to death old ways of being and embrace new ways.  But Paul says to us, don't wait until that happens to you.  Put to death the deeds of common-sense wisdom right now.  Because the ‘common sense’ is a lie.  Put to death the version of success you've been sold by the advertisers.  Put to death the dream of happiness from wealth and comfort.  Put it to death.  Put it all to death.  Let it all go into the dark.  If you let it go, then you've got a shot at finding out what life is really about.  If not, you'll just be whistling in the dark until the day your body catches up with the despair and desperation you already feel in your spirit.

But where is this new life to replace the old?  And how do I find it?  Well there is mystery here.  That must be frankly admitted.  Paul says, 'you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God'.  He also says that the new self is one which 'is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the creator'.  There are clues and traces here, traces of God and of transcendence.  But not answers of the kind we've been conditioned to expect -  water-tight answers, complete answers, answers available right now, like the results of a google search.  Nevertheless, the clues are exciting!  Paul encourages us to look for the answers in a person, a person who lived and died on this earth of ours, a person who now lives in the heart of God.  Somehow he blazed a trail for us: a trail by which he suffered the dark night of death and a profound renunciation of the common way; a trail that broke through to the other side, the side where God is.  And this person, who is called Christ, the 'anointed one', somehow found his own true identity and purpose in God, and became one with God.  And so it is Christ who holds the secret of who we are in his home in the heart of God.  Paul encourages us to seek, and walk, after the way of Jesus Christ, who is the image of the Creator who made him, and made us.  In following him, we are promised a new self that, like Christ, is forged in the image of the one who made us.

But what of our Australian mate's second question?  'Why should I take Paul's advice?  I'm happy with my life just as it is!'  Perhaps there is a sense in which many of us are happy with being unhappy.  We've become so used to feeling like life has passed us by, or that we've been failures in life, that we've become numb to any new possibility.  Many of us, I suspect, find it less scary to sit in our misery than to contemplate the possibility of transformation.  Eric Fromm, the eminent psychotherapist, called this numbness  ‘the fear of freedom’.  Many of us are scared to face the new or the unknown because we're afraid to die.  There is no new person or new world without the passing of the old.  Deep down we all know that.  And many choose to stay put.  That is the greatest tragedy of life, I think. Not earthquakes.  Not famines.  The tragedy of inertia, portrayed so beautifully by King Lear in Shakespeare's marvellous play.  Here was a man who knew he was going to hell, that he was already in hell.  But he decided to stay there because the prospect of changing was too much too bear.  Here, too, the message of Christ has something to say.  'Perfect love drives out all fear'.  Perfect love drives out all fear.  We Christians believe, you see, that Christ's path through death to life was not entirely of his own making.  We believe that God chose him and loved him before the creation of the world, to be the one who would suffer and die to make a way to God for us.  God did this because of love, love for every single one of us.  So there is no need to be afraid of change.  If God is for you, who can be against you?  In the end, you see, the journey to a strange place is actually a return home.  The new identity is actually an old one.  The person you will become is simply the person you already are, deep inside.  So don't be afraid, my Australian mate.  Surrender to God and set yourself free.

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church in 2004.

The Vindication of the Martyrs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gift of death

Texts:  Isaiah 25.6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21.1-6a; John 11.32-44

Because I could not stop for Death,

he kindly stopped for me.

There is something arresting about these lines from Emily Dickinson.  When read out loud, they send a shock-wave through one’s body because their subject is . . . death.  Death, that shadow, that reality which so many of us would rather avoid thinking about.  Death, that end to all our powers, that blind assassin of achievements, whether they be evil or good, lies or truth.  Death, that destroyer of suburban dreams, that terrifying democrat who respects neither our station in life nor the tapestries of intimacy we weave therein.  Death is indeed one whose piercing gaze we would rather not countenance.  The truth is that few of us have any time for death.  We are busy.  We would rather not stop.  And yet . . .  isn’t it strange that Dickinson speaks of death’s ‘kindness’ in choosing to stop for her?  How could death ever be regarded as kind?

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking of that paradigm example of modernity called medicine, and its unfortunate practise of keeping a person breathing when they’d rather slip away, that brand of so-called ‘care’ which insists on keeping our bodies alive, when, at the same time, our deepest spirit longs for nothing else but quiet, peace, and an end to the pain.  Many of you will have stared this experience in the face.  And many of you will have recoiled in horror, and prayed earnestly that God would grant the kindness of death, a death which comes, quietly, to liberate a loved one from the coils of despairing mortality.  In circumstances such as these, death can indeed be seen as a kindness.  But this morning I would like to push us beyond circumstances such as these, and explore a far more difficult proposition. Might there be a sense in which death as such, any death and every death, might actually be regarded as a gift from God?

Death as a gift.  The idea just seems so contradictory, especially if you’ve been raised, like me, in the Christian church!  Because so much of our theology seems to regard death as the enemy.  And with good cause.  I think of the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden of Eden.  For many years I imagined that human beings were created immortal by God, and that death came into the world as a form of punishment for our pride, our believing that we could be like God.  Emphasis on the word punishment.  And that is certainly one way to read the story . . .  if you want to ignore the following details.  That Adam and Eve were not created immortal, and that their expulsion from the garden of Eden is effected so that they will never eat of the ‘tree of life’ and become immortal.  In the actual Genesis story, as opposed to the imagined one, the expulsion from the garden is not a punishment, but a measure to ensure that the plan for human beings continues according to God’s intention.  And that intention explicitly includes mortality.  Death.

But what of that other famous passage in 1 Corinthians 15, where the apostle Paul speaks of death as the ‘last great enemy’ that God will overcome?  Indeed, how can we Christians not see death as the enemy, if we believe that God wills that our ‘mortal bodies put on immortality’, that our fleshly bodies become ‘spiritual bodies’, as Paul says?  Today’s reading from Isaiah would seem to echo that sentiment as well.  There the prophet describes death as the ‘shroud’, the ‘sheet of sorrow’ that covers the people, and promises that God will ‘swallow up death forever’.  And again, in Revelation, the writer imagines a ‘new heaven and a new earth’ in which death, along with sorrow and pain, have been done away with forever.  Surely, then, death is not part of the plan of God.  Surely it can only be seen as an enemy to be done away with: the last enemy; the last, and greatest, evil.

Again, it is possible to read the story that way if you are happy to do away with the more subtle character of the narratives in question.  It is important to notice, in Paul for example, that while death will ultimately be done away with, in the meantime it performs a crucially important function. For Paul, death is the indispensable means by which we put aside our own will to make room for the will of Christ.  By our baptism we are buried with Christ in death, so that we may be raised to a life no longer controlled by the desires of our own egos, but by Christ.  Now this is very important.  Here the ordinary, ‘common-sense’, understanding of death is subjected to a radical deconstruction, a veritable transfiguration.  No longer is death simply death, the cessation of consciousness, of life, of biological functioning. No, death is also a radical decentring of personality, an act of the will by which, paradoxically, desire and personal ambition are done away with so that the desires and ambitions of God might take up residence in that very same personality.  Here death is indispensible to what John of the Cross called the ‘dark night of the soul’, the profoundly disturbing loss of all that one thinks or knows or feels in order to make room for that which is unthought, unknown, and unfelt . . .  for God, who is all that we are not.

If all that is difficult to take in, then listen again to the story of the death and raising of Lazarus.  Except, this time, listen not so much for the events of the story, but for the theological images  evoked by Lazarus’ death.  Can you hear Jesus say that, by Lazarus’ death, the glory of God will arrive? . . .   Can you hear him say that, with this death, there is an end to knowing and a beginning to believing? . . .   Can you hear Thomas say ‘Let us go with Jesus, that we may die with him also’?  . . .   This whole story imagines death, not just as the cessation of life, but as the occasion of salvation.  By the death of Lazarus, all concerned engage the reality of their own deaths as well.  In weeping, they experience the death of their ‘seeing’, which, for the Greeks, was a cipher for knowledge.  According to John, God cannot be known in the same way as we know other things.  Indeed, it is only when we are prepared to lose our capacity to ‘know’ that we may see God’s glory.  Only when we die to ourselves, may we rise to God, and find our true selves.

Death, then, is a gift in this sense.  By coming to the end of our powers, we make room in our lives for the power of God.  By coming to the end of our knowing, we make room in our minds for the knowing of God.  By coming to the end of our desire, we make room in our hearts for the desire of God.  By coming to the end of our capacity for peace, we make room in our hearts for the peace of God.  If the coming of God in any of these ways is a good thing, then death may be seen as a gift.  Indeed, one might even say that death is God’s gift of grace for all who would be released into the radically new way of being alive which we call being ‘in Christ’.  And while I believe that my actual and final death will also be my passage to God, I also believe that in meditating upon the fact of my death right now, while I’m alive, I might be persuaded to die a little now, and so become more fully alive than I have ever been before.

Thomas Merton once prayed with these words.  I’d like to make them my own today, in honour of the saints who have lived and died before us, and who model for us the way to salvation:

My hope is in what the eye has never seen.  Therefore, let me not trust in visible rewards.  My hope is in what human hearts can never feel.  Therefore let me not trust in the feelings of my heart.  My hope is in what human hands have never touched.  Do not let me trust what I can grasp between my fingers.  Death will loosen my grasp and my vain hope will be gone.[1]

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[1] Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, New York, Noonday Press, 1958, p.39

Mark's Baptism of Jesus

Texts: Genesis 1.1-5; Psalm 29; Mark 1.4-11

Today the church celebrates baptism within a social and cultural environment where the rite has been largely sanitised of its dangerous and subversive qualities.  In the churches that allow the baptism of infants the rite is all-too-often reduced to a quaint and pleasant little naming ceremony.  Friends and relatives gather in their finery on a bright Sunday morning; the child’s forehead is wetted with a few tiny drops of water while his or her godparents are content to make promises they can neither comprehend nor keep.   In the so-called ‘baptist’ churches, on the other hand, the rite is often reduced to its pre-Christian tribal meanings, i.e. baptism as a rite of passage into responsible adult membership of the tribe or congregation.  Unfortunately, neither of these practices is adequate to the baptism undergone by Jesus, the baptism that is paradigmatic for Christians.  For while the baptisms of the tribe pander to social and anthropological needs, the baptism of Jesus models the rather contra-cultural action of God by which the baptised person is torn away from his or her ‘natural’ tribal roles in favour of a way of life which actually subverts and calls into question the most common paths by which we journey through life.

The confession that makes us genuinely Christian in the sacrament of baptism is infinitely more difficult than the choice to fulfil the symbolic law of tribe, society or culture. For, in theological perspective, the impossible journey towards the joy of salvation goes by no other way than by a rather traumatic encounter with God who was in Christ.  For it is the view of the New Testament we can never become who we truly are apart from the interventions from beyond either self or tribe that we call creation and redemption.  Christian baptism is not, therefore, any easy thing to undertake.  It is not something that everyone can or should do as a matter of course.  Far from it.  If it is genuinely Christian, baptism should be difficult and painful.  For in baptism we admit that it is neither ourselves nor our tribe that gives us life in all its fullness, it is God.

When a human being comes face to face with this truth, there is a breaking down and a loss.  Like the man on death row in Tim Robbins' film Dead Man Walking, who for most of the story protests his innocence and holds himself together by the sheer wilfulness of his fantasy.  And yet, when death is imminent, he can hold himself no longer.  Death comes like a paschal angel and exposes the lie on which his life has been built.  He collapses, he falls apart before our eyes.  There is weeping and a disintegration.  But finally there is the truth, a truth which is finally able to resist and overcomes his fantasy as from somewhere or somebody else (indeed, in and from the face of his prison chaplain), and he claims this truth as his only hope of joy or salvation.

To confess or avow the truth which comes from another, rather than from ourselves alone, is painful in the extreme, for here we touch the raw wound of that founding trauma that most of us spend our whole lives running from.  The founding trauma who is God.  “In the beginning,” says the Book of Genesis, the universe was a void and formless waste.  It was a watery Nothing.  But over this dark Nothingness the Spirit of God brooded, and that Spirit spoke.  “Let there be light!” and there was.  This is a story about the making of the world, certainly, but it is also about the making of the human self.  It tells us that the Self is never itself without the traumatic intervention or presence of another.  The call or voice of this other summons us from the womb-like Nothing of infinite solipsism into the real world of consciousness, inter-dependence and relationship.  Thus, we are called to ourselves by an intervention, a creation, an interrupting trauma that leaves its mark on us forever. 

In this, says Slavoj Žižek, Christianity and psychoanalysis are agreed:  that the first event is the traumatic arrival of another, and that most us spend our lives running away from this event, pretending that we can found ourselves, or make our own salvation.[1]  Ironically, the way to healing is to return to the founding trauma, and find there a God who is irrevocably for us, who longs for and promises our liberation. For those who are baptised, this constitutes a return to the violence of the cross, that sacrifice to end all sacrifices in which is revealed, as René Girard has said, a God who asks for the worship of mercy rather than sacrificial appeasement.[2]  This is not to say that a return to the founding trauma can be accomplished by human beings in and of themselves.  For a trauma is exactly that kind of event that cannot be in/corporated or re/membered.  Yet, and this is the hope and grace of baptism, God is one who makes the return possible from the side of divinity.  In the Spirit, God makes of Christ the saving link between the founding trauma and the event of baptism, so that our baptism ‘into Christ’ becomes a real submersion of the self in the yet more real  selfhood of Christ in his accomplished humanity, the only humanity finally competent to perform the unique mercy of God.  So here, in baptism, the human self is both lost and recovered more wholly than ever before; trauma is transfigured into joy.  Joy, of course, is a vocative language, a language of prayer.  Its primary motivation is neither to constitute the other as a version of the same, nor to reduce the transcendence of the other to a particular appearance.  Joy simply celebrates the always-already-accomplished fact of the other as the salvific centre of itself.

In this, as with the prisoner in Dead Man Walking, we catch a glimpse of the absurdly paradoxical hope inscribed in Christian baptism.  For baptism is not only a letting-go of the fantasy-self, the lie of a self that is its own law and judge, but also the arrival of another self, a truer self given in love by God.  Such arrivals are inscribed everywhere in Mark’s story, literally everywhere.  The river in which Jesus is baptised is the Jordan.  It is the river that, in the memory of Israel, marks their exodus from the land of slavery into the land of promise, their transformation from a loose collection of tribal nomads into a federated nation with a land and a holy vocation given by Yahweh.  The baptism therefore recalls that God is one who liberates, who takes a broken people to his breast and gives them both a new name, and a new purpose.  Note, also, that the baptism of Jesus is placed by Mark alongside a memory of the exile in Babylon.  Isaiah interpreted that event as an intervention by God to change the people’s hearts.  The city’s nobles had become obsessed with their own power and prestige.  They had forgotten the claims of charity and mercy, and so God destroyed the city.  In that context, the baptism of Jesus can be read as a renewal of the work of God in human society:  after destruction and exile comes forgiveness and a new covenant, the advent of a new relationship between God and the people of God’s affection.

Still, the most potent trace of joy’s arrival, in Mark’s story, is when the heavens are ripped open as Jesus comes out of the water, and the Spirit of God descends upon him like a dove.  Again, one does not necessarily understand these symbols unless one knows the stories of the Hebrew Bible.  There one reads of a God who dwells in a holy of holies, an ark that is placed behind a curtain in the innermost chamber of the temple.  Only the High Priest, or some specially appointed leader like Moses, may approach God there, and usually only once per year at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  To my mind, the theatre of these Jewish rituals is about the irreducible otherness of God, the danger of assuming too close a familiarity with God.  God is in heaven, hidden behind a veil that we may not open from our side.  Yet, here in the baptism of Jesus, the veil that separates God from ourselves is not simply put aside, but ripped to pieces.  Furthermore, it is done by God, from God’s ‘side,’ if you like.  In the Spirit, God actually leaves the holy of holies in heaven, and comes to dwell within the heart and spirit of one who is not simply a prophet, but a Son, a beloved one.  No longer is God to be understood as the other beyond us, beyond our being in the heavens.  From now on God is to be understood as the other who is Christ, a human being who walks amongst us, who speaks our language, who shows us what God is like as a child reveals the form and character of his or her parent. 

To put all this another way, what Mark proclaims about what happened to Christ is also something that may happen to all of us.  After the collapse and breakdown of the false self that is part of a genuinely baptismal avowal, God promises to come to us with the gift of a new self: a self forged within by the cruciform activity of the Spirit who was in Christ and now bears, forever, Christ’s form and character.  In the Spirit, Christ himself comes to us as the love and vitality that empowers us to put off the old and embrace the gift of the new and truer self.  Paul said it perfectly in Galatians:  ‘Now I live, and yet not I; it is Christ who lives within me.  The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me’ (2.20).

To conclude, then, Mark’s story confronts the common-place understanding and practice of baptism in two ways.  First, it tells us that there is no such thing as a Christian baptism without the hard and soul-destroying work of confession and repentance.  In the first centuries of the Christian church, this was taken very seriously.  Several years were given over to the catechumal learning of the faith.  Through a process of action and reflection, the catechumens wrestled against the demons of both self and tribe; and they did so in the power of a newly arriving self, symbolised for them in the mentor or sponsor who was, themselves, a figure of Christ.  Second, the story tells us that baptism will bear its human fruit not because of our own will or determination, but because God is faithful.  The Father sends the Spirit, the Spirit of his son Jesus, to hollow out the old self from the inside out, and replace it with a selfhood of God’s own making and design.  In this sense, baptism is not simply about the ceremonial occasion itself.  It is rather a parable and a ritual performance of the Christian life as a whole:  a calling and a pledge to leave the false self behind, and to wrestle always to find the truth about things which is God’s gift to everyone who asks for it. 

Baptism, then, is a destroying and a building.  It is the Christian life.  It is a promise from God that may only be received and performed by means of a human promising: to walk the way of the cross by which trauma is transfigured into joy.

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[1] Žižek, On Belief , p. 47.

[2] René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (London/New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 210.

Why do we need a Saviour?

Luke 2.8-20

In Luke’s story about the birth of Jesus, an Angel drops by the fields around Bethlehem with a rather startling news-break for the Shepherds who worked there.  “Do not be afraid,” says the Angel, “for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour who is Christ, the Lord.”  Now, it’s a marvellous scene isn’t it, a scene recreated a thousand times over every Christmas.  Shepherds, angels, bright lights, heavenly choirs, wise men from the east . . .  hang on, there aren’t any wise men in Luke’s story! . . .  but anyway.  It is clear that most of us like the story.  We must do, because we keep telling it at a thousands “carols by candlelight” events all over the country.

What I reckon we’ve lost in all this retelling, however, is what the story actually means. What did Luke mean, for example, when he has the angel say:  “To you is born a Saviour”.  What’s a Saviour, and why would you want one?  A friend of mine at Uni asked a question exactly like that a few years ago.  We were having a discussion about why one might become a Christian, a follower of Christ.  I testified that for the writers of the New Testament, one became a Christian out of a deep-down conviction that life without Christ was no life at all, that it was, rather, a half-life in which one was afraid of everything and driven by that fear to a futile assertion of one’s own existence against the void of nothingness that we know, deep down, is wide open and beckoning beneath us all.  Turning to Christ, I said, is like turning to a life-saver when you are drowning:  Christ does for us, and in us, what we cannot do for ourselves: Live!  Live as God intended us to live: free of fear, free to breathe in God’s air and God’s love, free to give ourselves away.  “Right,” says my friend.  “But I’m quite happy as I am.  Why would I need a saviour?”

Now I reckon that’s a line you’ll get everywhere you turn today.  “A saviour is born.  So what?  Why would I need a Saviour?”  Many of us live in Saviour-free zones, these days, I think.  Especially if we are middle-class.  For middle-class people are raised by their apparently successful parents to believe that the successful life is the self-made life. “It’s up to you,” they tell us, “if you don’t make a go of life it will be nobody’s fault but your own.  So study hard, and work hard; save your cash and be careful with it and the good life will be yours.”  A few years ago another friend of mine, a psychologist, gave me a book with the curious title:  If You See the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!  The book was a clear message from him to me, in the psycho-babble that characterizes our time:  “You don’t need a Saviour; saviours are bad; they encourage dependency.  It’s only when you kill off your personal saviours that you’ll finally give yourself a chance at the good life.”

Now, I reckon there’s a little bit of truth in that, but not a great deal of truth.  I don’t doubt that all of us responsible for our own lives.  That is a deeply Jewish and Christian notion.  Neither do I doubt that many of us avoid accepting such responsibility by shifting the blame for our misfortunes to others.  Again, in Jewish and Christian thought, such blame-shifting is seen as a very big problem.  But to then conclude that each of us, alone, are capable of both imagining the good life and then making it come to pass, is nothing less than sheer fantasy.  The paradox of the “Kill the Buddha” book, and all the other self-help therapies on the New-Age shelf at your local bookstore, is that the writer is himself posing as a Saviour, that is, as someone who can help his readers in a way that they, alone, and left to their own devices, cannot.

To my way of thinking, Jesus is a Saviour precisely because he provides us with the spiritual vision and strength do that which we cannot, I repeat, cannot do for ourselves.  Now the very person who, at Uni, told me that she didn’t need a Saviour was, I think, bound up in all kinds of chains.  She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see they were there.  But they were there nevertheless.  O yes, they were there.  There were the chains of the beauty-myth.  You know, “In order to exist, to be worthy to exist, I must look slim, trim and terrific.”  There were the chains of the nuclear-family myth:  “I must have a man and some kids in order to be worthwhile in life, to fight against the fear that I shall cease to be”.  And there were the chains of the status myth:  “I must have a big house and successful professional career in order to be really worthwhile, to register my value in the eyes of my friends.”  I could go on, but I won’t.

What I want to say is this: that Jesus is not only a Saviour, he is THE Saviour.  That is, he can do for us what nobody else, not even our therapist or the Buddha, is able to do:  to release us from the fear that lies beneath every other fear and every other anxiety that there is:  the fear of death.  You see Jesus arrived in a time and place that, in many ways, was plagued by the same fears and sins as our own.  People believed that they had been put on the earth to assure the future of their families.  They worked hard to leave their children in a better condition, money and status-wise, than their own parents had left them.  The fear that this might not be so drove them to compete with everyone else, with other families, for an ever-larger slice of the limited resources bequeathed in creation.  Underneath it all, of course, was the fear that we may cease to be.  People feared that if their families fell into poverty and ruin, they might well die out.  Not even the memory of a name would be left as a witness to having ever existed.  Such fears run deep in all of us, any anthropologist will tell you that.  They dominate our own lives as much as they dominated the lives of our ancient forebears.

What Jesus said to the people of his own time and place, and would also say to us today, is this:  that there is no need to fear death.  Death is not something that troubles God.  Trust in God and he will give you life even if you die.  Now listen carefully, lest you get the impression that Jesus was interested only in physical, biological death.  He was not, and I am not.  Jesus spoke, rather of the many deaths we must face as a part of life, the deaths which tell us, in fact, that life can never entirely be something of our own making or genius.  The slow dying of our young, fit bodies.  The diseases that limit what we can do to one degree or another.  The loss of a job.  The loss of a friend.  Disappointment in love or career.  The fact that our children may not care to do what we think they ought to do.  Not being able to have children.  Or whatever.  According to Jesus, all these things are a sign in the world that we are not the masters of our own destinies, that we cannot accomplish the good life out of our own resources, nor can we even imagine what it might be like.  Jesus saves us by helping us to see that life comes when we are able to both accept and embrace the fact of death.  We are not immortal souls, no matter what the many new age sages might say.  We are mortal.  We will die.

But the good news is this.  If we can die to our desire to make a way for ourselves in the world, if we can let go of our need to keep up appearances and wear the socially-determined badges of status and success, if we can trust not in these human artefacts of success and happiness  but in God, then God will grant us life, life in all its fullness.  Let me quote to you from a passage later in Luke, a passage which goes to the heart of how Jesus would save us:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves (that is, their socially-constructed desires) and take up their cross daily and follow me.  For the one who wants to preserve his life will lose it, and the one who wants to lose his life for my sake will save it.  What does it profit anyone to gain the whole world but lose their very selves in the process?

Christ, you see, lived a life designed to please no-one else but God his Father.  He knew that God loved him, and that was enough.  Because of that single fact, he was then able to give away the mad rush to get ahead in the world.  The assurance of God’s love freed him.  Instead, Jesus spent his time and energy in works of prayer and compassion.  Freed from the concern to please everyone else, he was able to please his Father God, to live as though people mattered - not competing against them (as in a market economy), but giving himself to them, as a gift without need of return.  In the cross and the resurrection of Christ, we therefore see both the paradoxical logic and the message of his life writ large:  “It you will die with me, you will also live with me.  If you will let go, God will give you all things.”

At Christmastime the Christ is born to us, a Saviour.   Let me gently suggest that despite all appearances to the contrary, and despite the so-called wisdom of the self-help gurus, we might all need a Saviour after all!