I will give you as a light to the nations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Still-born Hope? Asylum-seekers in Australia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Vindication of the Martyrs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kingdom of God is near!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The call to prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing in God's Gift

Philippians 3.4b-14; Matthew 21.33-46 

Ministry is not, of course, for so-called ‘ministers’ alone.  We are all called to share in Christ’s ministry by the commissioning we received at our baptism, albeit in different ways.  In recognition of the fact that the particular shape of that ministerial offering can change from time to time, it is a good idea for congregations to annually call upon its members to prayerfully consider how they might contribute to the ministry of the church in the year to come.  There are two main ways to contribute:  (1) by serving on a group that carries out Christ’s ministry—either locally, or in the wider community; or (2) by providing the church with the financial support it needs to carry out this ministry.  One hopes, of course, that every member will contribute in both these ways!  Still, I recognise that the circumstances of life sometimes make it impossible to do as much as you would like to do.  Ill-health or poverty, in particular, have an impact on what one may contribute.  I  know that, the church knows that, and God knows that.  So please don’t hear anything that follows as some kind of law that you have to obey in order to obtain the favour of God.  If you are sick or short of money, you have burdens that are difficult to carry.  In those circumstances it is the rest of us who are called to help carry those burdens.  For the church is, most of all, a community in which the concerns and difficulties of the one become the concerns and difficulties of the many.

As many of you will know, the proper resourcing of the church’s ministry is guided by the ancient Jewish concept of stewardship.  Stewardship, in a nutshell, is a use of resources which understands that those resources do not belong to oneself alone, but are given by another for a particular purpose.  Stewardship is sharing in another’s resources in a way that honours the spirit in which they are given.  You can see the stewardship principle at work in the story we heard just now from Matthew’s gospel.  Here Jesus tells a parable about a landowner who invests heavily to set up a working vineyard.  He then invites some people to run the vineyard on his behalf.  Together they form a covenant in which both parties will reap the fruit that the vineyard produces because both parties have contributed to the resourcing of the vineyard.  The managers agree to act as stewards for the landowner, to run the place so that it will produce a bountiful harvest in which both parties can share together.  For Jesus and for Matthew, the parable is a picture of the relationship God has formed with his people.  God is like a landowner who has entered freely into a covenant with human beings, a covenant that will bear abundant fruit for us all so long as the land is managed wisely, according to the landowner’s intentions that is.

By analogy, the Christian tradition has always gone on to say this:  that nothing that you own and no skill or talent that you possess belongs to yourself alone.  It belongs to God as well.  God is the co-owner of what you have because God is both its creator and enabler. What you have was given you according to a particular covenant or agreement:  that you take what you are given and use it only to bear the fruit of faith, hope and love in the world.  So, while we are free to be as creative as we like with what we are given, in the end our gifts will only bear truly good fruit if they are managed according to the Maker’s instructions.  If they are not, or if we get greedy and deny the Maker his share in what we produce, then things will eventually go bad for us.  According to our parable, the Maker will one day call us to account for what we have done with his gifts.  Why?  Because the nature of the gift is this:  it can never be possessed and hoarded for one’s own benefit alone.  Like the manna God gave in the desert, if you take more than your fair share, the gift will go off and disappear.  Gifts are given so that they will remain gifts, freely given over and over again, so that the whole community can benefit and not just those who are strongest or brightest.

In turning to the writings of Paul, we find that all the gifts and talents we are given can be summed up in a single word:  Christ.  For Paul, Christ is the gift that reveals what all God’s gifts are ultimately for—our transformation from people who feel we must compete with one another into people who accept ourselves and one another.  Let’s look at the psycho-theology of this for a moment.  In the passage we read from Philippians, Paul contrast his former life with that he now lives, albeit incompletely, with Christ.  His former life was lived according to ‘the flesh’, which means that he built his sense of being worthwhile in the world upon the social and cultural expectations of his time.  As a Jew of Palestine in the first century, there was a particular way to get ahead, to become a winner.  First, one had to have been born a Jew.  A non-Jew didn’t have a chance.  Second, one needed to join the Pharisees, a political and religious party that wielded great influence and power on the basis of its claim to truly understand what was right and wrong.  Third, one needed to be zealous in making life difficult for anyone who didn’t share one’s views of what was right and wrong.  In Paul’s case, this meant persecuting the earliest Christians. 

At the time when Paul writes this letter he has, however, become a Christian.  Now he considers all those pursuits, all those ways of establishing one’s worthiness in the world, to be nothing more than ‘rubbish’ (in the Greek it is more like ‘excrement’).  Why?  Because at some point he came to realise that no matter how hard he worked on the matter, he would never establish, completely and unassailably, that he was a good and acceptable fellow in the eyes of his fellow-Jews.  There would always be someone whom he both respected and envied who could look at him as an inferior, a person who was not yet what they were.  There would always be—if I may translate into a more contemporary idiom—more fashionable, more wealthy, more laudable people about, who could make him look and feel unworthy by comparison.  For that is what this phrase ‘the flesh’ means for Paul: a social and cultural system of written and unwritten laws which is designed to make us all failures. 

Now what the gift of Christ did for Paul is what it can do for all of us as well:  release us from our bondage to any social and cultural assessment of our worthiness or unworthiness.  How?  By declaring that God loves and accepts us just as we are.  By untethering our sense of worthiness or unworthiness from what other people may or may not think.  By measuring our ‘rightness’ not according to the winds of social, or even religious, fashion but according to the love and forgiveness of God made manifest in the gift Christ made of his very life.  Paul promises that if we are prepared to die with Christ to the basic principles of this world—its pecking order, it fascination with wealth and status, its tendency to make us all unworthy—then we can also be raised with Christ into a world in which everything is a gift, and therefore no-one can claim to have worked their way to the top via some kind of meritocracy. 

The prize Paul strains towards is therefore a rather funny kind of prize.  It is not the prize that our society and culture values—the prize of houses and cars and superannuated luxury.  It is the prize of being freed from the compulsion to own and possess everything we see.  It is the prize of knowing that everything one has is a gift, and can therefore be given again.  It is the prize of detachment from the values and material acquisitiveness of one’s society, because Christ has already given us the only thing that it truly valuable:  God’s love and forgiveness. 

In this perspective, perhaps you can see that the responsibility to consider, prayerfully, how you will serve Christ’s ministry on an annual basis has little to do with any law or expectation.  On the contrary, I would encourage you to see your reflection on such matters as an opportunity to give tangible form to nothing other than God’s amazing grace.  Freely you have received from Christ all that you need and more.  You are free now to give what you have received, without in any way losing anything that is truly valuable.  For in Christian perspective, it is the giving itself that is also our freedom.  If we cannot give what we have away, we are still in chains.  It is not we who possess the thing, whatever it is, but the thing that possesses us.  By giving we are released from this possession.   And we receive into ourselves the gift of Christ’s very self, a self that is the pure gift of God’s acceptance—never measurable according to the scales of our world, never quantifiable according to our usual measure of success of substantiality.  And yet . . .  is there anything more real and valuable in all the world?  I think not. 

The Way Less Travelled

Isaiah 9. 1-4; 1 Corinthians 1. 10-18; Matthew 4. 12-23

In 1916, as the horror of the 1st World War unfolded in Europe, the American poet Robert Frost wrote this poem.  Allow me to read it to you.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, and just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Friends, the lure of the well-trodden path is powerful.  In 1914, and again in 1939, the whole of Europe stood at the diverging of two paths.  One path, the path most taken in the history of that continent, led to the darkness of war. The other way, the way less taken, was (and is) the hard way of diplomacy and concession in order to make for peace.  In 1914, and again in 1939, Europe chose war:  the way most familiar, the way that made some winners but most losers, the way that is broad, making for the wholesale slaughter of many millions of lives.  In this, Europe did only what human beings usually do.  It chose the road most taken, the road for those intoxicated by the spoils of war, the lure of power and status and riches.

The members of Paul’s Corinthian church were not immune, it seems, from such intoxications.  Somehow they forgot the simple commandment of Jesus—‘love one another as I have loved you’—and became obsessed with the desire to lord it over each other.  They became like a modern political party, forming factions gathered around charismatic leaders or preachers, each claiming a holier ground than the others.  Each group in the Corinthian church claimed that their version of faith and practice was somehow more authentic than the others, a better expression of the traditions received from the fathers and mothers of the movement.  Which meant, of course, that all the people who did not take such a view were to be regarded with suspicion.  Indeed, with the passage of time and with the application of that lethal cocktail of fear and propaganda, these others became not simply suspicious, but the very face of all that is wrong with the world.  They became the enemy.  And isn’t this how it goes with so many of our churches; or, indeed, with our attitudes to those who come here seeking asylum?   Well, Paul will have none of it.  ‘What has all this lusting for power over and against one another to do with the message of the cross?’ he says.  ‘I came amongst you, not in power or using the arts of persuasive rhetoric to seduce you.  I came only with the message of the cross, which is sheer foolishness to those who lust for power.  But to those of us who are being saved, it is the very power of God’.  Listen to what the apostle is saying:  If we are Christians, if we are followers of Christ and his gospel, then there can be only one power:  the power of love, the power which lays down its power for the sake of including everyone in the wide embrace of God’s love.  The power iconically presented in figure of a crucified God.

You see God, the God of Jesus Christ, is one who takes the way less traveled, the way that human beings seem so very afraid to take.  A way that welcomes and embraces even the sin of another, and bears that sin, the horror of it, the hurt of it, the burden of it, in the hope that love will forge its doggéd way through the morass.  Emmanuel Lévinas, the Jewish philosopher, said famously that the only way in which we may all come to share equally in God’s justice is if we assume that the other, the other human being - any other human being - has a prior claim to our welcome and our service.  Prior, that is, to our own claims upon that person.  This way—the way of a God who wanders lonely though the dark and ritually impure regions of Naphtali and Zebulun, the places where the other may actually live—is the way that leads to light and liberation from oppression for us all.  This way—the way of a pilgrim Christ who wanders these anonymous and unimportant habitations, touching the impure and loving the loveless—this is the way by which the kingdom comes near.  If the God of Christians were a God who pandered to political success or popular opinion, then Christ would not have lived such a marginal existence, and died such a sordid death.  Christ would have marched into Jerusalem with an army of Zealots and taken power by force, and stunned everyone with his Hitleresque rhetoric, and built an empire on the labour of the poor and ritually unclean.  If God were really like that that, then Christ would have taken the way most travelled.

But he didn’t.  And, if we are his disciples, then we shall not either.  We shall take the least travelled way.  The way that looks out for the other, the neighbour, even at deep personal cost.  The way that owns and faces its fear of the other, and of what that other may do to me if I make myself vulnerable.  The way that calls on the power of God in prayer, the power of love, asking that God may do in me and in my relationships with others what I am unable to do for myself.   If we will welcome the other who is God, if we will sit at table and commune with God in prayer, then we shall find—as the English Benedictine John Maine often said—that the power to love even our enemies will grow within.  Not as the result of a personal project, a work of discipline which aims to purify the self by practiced technique or psychological training.  No, this power comes simply by letting God in.  By letting God be in us all that God would be.  And in the Christian tradition, that ‘letting be’ is known as the prayer of quiet.  The prayer which welcomes God in the less-traveled way of the Psalmist who said:  ‘One thing I asked of the lord . . .  to live in the house of the Lord all my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple’.  Here God is welcomed into my space, but immediately overwhelms and transgresses that space so that I find that the tables are turned and it is I, myself, who am being welcomed, I myself who cross a threshold into the superabundant hospitality of God.  

The way less travelled by is the way of the Christ.  He calls us as he called the sons of Zebedee to accompany him on that way.  To leave behind the sin that entangles, to be welcomed by God, that we may have power to welcome and love even our enemies.  There is no greater seducer than the God who was in Christ.  There is no greater wielder of power.  But unlike a Hitler, or Jim Jones, or a Jerry Falwell, the power of God is laid down at the feet of the sinner in an ultimate gesture of submission and vulnerability and love.  And the sinner must decide what to do with this vulnerable God.  May God grant us courage to choose the way less travelled by.  For that, and that only, will make the difference—for ourselves, for our church, for our world.

How to become a saint

Texts: Ephesians 1.11-23; Luke 6.20-31 

If the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church is to be believed, it is really rather difficult to become a saint.  There are several requirements.  First, one must be dead, which does tend to dampen the ambitions of many a popular preacher!  Second, one must have lived a very virtuous and holy life.  Not necessarily from birth, but certainly from the time when a person first began to follow Christ in earnest.  Third, one must have produced at least two ‘miracles’, that is, unusual phenomena that may not, after careful investigation, be accounted for by reference to the normal processes of what is ‘natural’.  It is quite permissible, as it happens, to produce a miracle after you are dead.  Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, for example, was exhumed from his grave several times over a period of three hundred years, and his body had not decayed in the way that bodies should.  To the Roman authorities, that kind of thing will boost your sainthood score enormously. 

Of course, sainthood was not always so.  In the New Testament a saint is simply a disciple, a person who has heard the gracious call of Christ to follow, and chosen to obey that call out of a fundamental faith and trust in God.  At one level, then, sainthood should never be understood as something one may ‘earn’ through a life of exemplary virtue or heroic deeds.  For sainthood is a gift—the gift of God’s love and forgiveness in Christ.  It is also true, nevertheless, that there are those who really believe and trust in this love of God, living their lives out of its power . . . and there are those who don’t.  In the passage from Ephesians that we read a moment ago, the writer prays earnestly that his hearers will live out of the enormous power of God, demonstrated in the works God wrought in Christ for our salvation.  Note well, the power is God’s, not ours.  Yet the writer still feels the need to pray that such power may become the most important fact in his hearer’s lives, which implies that they are not yet the people God has called them to be. 

It is in this sense, then, that I can see some point to all the Roman posturing about sainthood.  Underneath all the rules and procedures, under all that detritus of centuries, what the canon-law of saints really says is this:  that saints are people who shine with faith and trust—not in themselves, their own virtues or achievements—but in the virtues and achievements of Christ on their behalf.

This, then, is the paradox of Sainthood or, if you prefer, discipleship.  Disciples live from a power, a virtue, a miracle which they have not generated for themselves.  They depend, utterly, upon Christ.  Yet, it is precisely that attitude of dependent faith which makes them radiate with goodness, care and compassion.  Think about it.  If we have died to ourselves in baptism, if we have been crucified to the basic values of this world, then the life we live in faith is not our own life at all.  It is God’s.  It is the divine life that was made human in Jesus.   We rise from the waters to live the life of Christ: to imitate and repeat his life in our own.  In this perspective, the amazing faith of the saints is no more than a grace that is actually believed in and received, rather than considered but then put aside when it really counts.

What is the difference, then, between a Mary McKillop and your average church attendee?  From God’s perspective, not a great deal!  God loves both of them.  God forgives both of them.  God calls both of them to die, to take up their cross and follow Christ into a quality of life and love that the world cannot give.  Yet one of them chooses to live from the power of this gracious call, to trust in its power, and the other (one suspects) chooses to do so only very rarely.  One chooses to love as Christ loved, loving the neighbour even to the point of great personal sacrifice, while the other perhaps chooses to put faith aside when the going gets tough or when there is money or status at stake.  One really believes that Christ’s life, no matter how difficult, is the only life worth living.  The other suspects that Christianity is impractical, a set of admirable ideals mind you, but not to be lived too literally.

This morning you and I are called to be Mary McKillops.  To let go of all our hungers for health, wealth, family and security—to surrender such things into the hands of God—and to hunger instead for the commonwealth of peace and justice that Christ will bring.  A hunger for the kingdom is exactly like the hunger for food.  If you are starving, if you have nothing to eat, you will do almost anything to find nourishment.  You will travel hundreds of kilometres over rough and dangerous terrain, like the refugees of South Sudan, in search of the one thing you need to sustain life.  So it is with the desire for God’s kingdom.  It is a desire that consumes all else, a desire which comes to us as a painful longing that the world might be different than it is, a desire which drives and motivates us as though it came from a place other than ourselves.  And so it does, for it is the desire of God!

The saint is not one who gets everything right, who is always successful and admirable.  The saint is one who trusts in God, who believes God’s promises, even when the chips are down and there seems little foundation for faith.  The saint is one who, in a sense, becomes who he or she is because he or she is first able to allow God to be who God is, and this in the midst of  a body and soul given over to God to do with as God wills.  This is a calling not simply for the especially intelligent or gifted or capable.  It is a calling for us all, because in the end sainthood is not about self-generated achievement or sanctity.  It is about trusting that Christ will complete his work in us, even when our sin looms large.