Lent and reconciliation

Jeremiah 2.1-13; Psalm 26; Mark 14.1-25

As a child I was very talkative. At the edge of the vast estates of barley, wheat and potatoes which dominated the landscape where we lived, were small stands of native bush: atop hills, on the steep slopes of mountains and along creeks. Whenever the opportunity arose, this is where I would wander. And as I wandered, I would talk. Not with myself (though many might see it that way) but with the trees and the ferns, the crows and the hawks, the wallabies and the potaroos, even the rocks and the waterfalls, that I passed on my way. I would greet them all cheerfully and enquire about what kind of day each was having. I would pause to watch and to listen a while, finally wishing each well and offering a prayer or an incantation seeking their good and their well-being. Sometimes I would tell them about me, my troubles, my hopes, my bewilderments. And I would hear their voices speaking back to me. Not in English, mind. Whatever the language, however, I understood. I heard wisdom. I heard care. I heard guidance. And, after a little while, I would return to my family, my school, and all the complex negotiations of civilised life, somehow calmed and refreshed.

As a teenager, another conversation-partner was added. The bible. I became fascinated with its characters and voices, as many and as varied as I knew in the bush, though considerably more violent. Here were people I recognised. People who suffered great injustice, whose hopes and dreams were shattered. People who coveted all that belonged to another. People who stole, raped, murdered, and committed genocide in order to obtain what belonged to another. People who were afraid, but who were able to overcome their fears through faith in God. People who were able to change their hearts and their behaviour because they believed in the mercy of God. People who carried great wounds and flaws, and yet were chosen to become God’s emissaries. These days I marvel that a book as violent and as tragic a testament to our inhumanity towards one another as ever was written, could simultaneously bear a message from and about a God of love.  But it does. On every page. For what the bible finally proclaims, surely, is just this: first, that we are loved by God, even as we fail, consistently and repeatedly, to love each other; and, second, that because God has not given up on us, it is possible not only to recognise and learn such love, and also to abide in its mysterious power more deeply and consistently. 

 So, two conversation partners, two sources of wisdom for the living of life as a trawloolway man who is also a Christian. The one located in a sacred book, a book brought to this country by the coloniser, and the other located in a sacred landscape, a landscape that is alive with the presence of ancestor-spirits who can be spoken to, and who can speak.  Both book and country, in their own ways, are sacred texts. Both, being full of divine spirit, may be consulted for wisdom and guidance, if you know how. If I have a lament, this night, it is not (as some of you may perhaps expect) that the coloniser has attended carefully to the sacred book, and not enough to sacred country. No, my lament is a tad more comprehensive than that. That the coloniser has paid little attention to either.

 Here I want to draw your attention to the second chapter of Jeremiah which says, in part:

Thus says the Lord:
I remember the devotion of your youth,
   your love as a bride,
how you followed me in the wilderness,
   in a land not sown.

What wrong did your ancestors find in me
   that they went far from me,
   and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?
I brought you into a plentiful land
   to eat its fruits and its good things.
But when you entered you defiled my land,
   and made my heritage an abomination.
The priests did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’
Those who handle the law did not know me;
   the rulers transgressed against me.

Be appalled, O heavens, at this,
   be shocked, be utterly desolate,
says the Lord,
   for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living water,
   and dug out cisterns for themselves,
   cracked cisterns
that can hold no water.

This oracle, first uttered in the presence of the last king of Judah, is uncannily prescient about where we find ourselves, right now, as a nation and as a church. It is true, is it not, that we have forgotten the ancient ways, the ways here described as a covenant, a marriage, a communion with the divine in the wild places, a country not sown or intensively cultivated by the invader. Is it not true, as the prophet says, that upon entering this country the colonists saw the land not as a cathedral in which God might be known and worshipped, but rather as a commodity to be exploited in exchange for wealth and influence? Did not the colonists clear the land of its owners and managers, its first peoples, in a manner that fundamentally fractured the terms of God’s law and covenant? Did they not covet what belonged to their neighbours, did they not steal and rape and murder in order to obtain what they desired? Does not that theft, rape and murder still continue to this day? Is not the lament of those of us who have survived that genocide also the lament of the land itself, and the ancestor-spirits who dwell therein, and of God’s own self? Are we not the voice of the crucified one who is, at one and the same time, both Christ and country?

By commodifying this country and removing those whom the divine Spirit placed here to manage and cultivate its fruitfulness, colonists have polluted the sacred stream God provided for all of us as a gift, the stream of sacred lore designed to sustain us in life over many hundreds of millennia. Instead we have dug cisterns for ourselves, cisterns so badly designed that they can barely hold water: practices and structures and policies which have brought us to point of ecological emergency, and to the certainly, certainly I say, of a fundamental implosion in the biological operating-system of our planet.  Unless. Unless we repent of our sin. Unless we turn again to the God whose wisdom and way may be discerned in both sacred text and sacred country.

In the world of politics and public policy, this means removing the puppets of capitalism from government and replacing them with people who are willing to listen to the still, small, voice of the divine Spirit. In our church it means jettisoning all that remains of that possessive, status-hungry, exclusionary impulse in every state-sanctioned church and replacing it with the disciplines of listening, hospitality, and prophecy. For unless the voices we generally exclude, ignore and belittle are welcomed to the table, then we shall be as guilty of killing the prophets and dancing on their graves as the kings of Israel and the priests of its temple. And we shall pay for it in the end by finding ourselves at the wrong end of the Magnificat: scattered to the bottom of the food-chain, rendered empty, nothing.

All of which is to offer an invitation for you all in this season of Lent. See, I place before you the way that leads to death and the way that leads to life. If you die to your self-importance, and the self-importance of the colonial imagination, you will be empty enough for God to fill you with life.  But if you hang on to such things, you will find that you are already dead. And your deadness will continue to infect the systems and networks of which you are part, both publicly and privately. As the spiral of Lent into Easter is properly a return to the waters of baptism, to receive there, through repentance and the death of self, the risen life of Christ; so may it also be, for you, a turning to the rivers and creeks of country, through which that same God’s speaks a word of grace that will renew not only your own life, but the life of the whole planetary eco-system.

Garry Deverell

1st Sunday of Lent 2021, Christ Church South Yarra

Fear death by water

Genesis 9.8-17; Psalm 25.1-10; 1 Peter 3.18-22; Mark 1.9-15

In 1922 T.S. Eliot published what many still consider to be the most important poem of the 20th century. ‘The Waste Land’ presents itself as a series of scattered images of Europe in the wake of the First World War. Ranging from the author’s memories of childhood visits to Germany, through cockney conversations in a London pub and walks along the Thames, to fragmented recollections of classical stories from Rome and India, the poem depicts a world in which the ‘nymphs’ – that is, the coherence of things – ‘have departed.’  Nothing is left, says the voice of the poet, except ‘voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells’.  The poem is also about the author’s own ‘death’ – figuratively speaking – that is, his incapacity to make all these images of European meaning cohere in a way that can sustain his life.  ‘Fear death by water’ says a clairvoyant the poet consults early in the poem.  And by the end the poet is so desperately dry and thirsty in the wasteland of his imagining that he has actually begun to search for the water by which he is convinced he will die, yet it is unclear if the poet has found it, or no.

The images offered us by the first Sunday of Lent are not entirely unconnected to what Eliot saw and experienced in London at the end of World War 1.  The Noah story is about a similar cataclysm, a flood, which – like the First World War – completely did away with the world as it has previously been known. One day everyone was going about their business, sure of the foundations on which they walked and the meaningfulness of the directions in which their lives were taking them. But then, suddenly, rain began to fall. And – absurdly, irrationally, inexplicably to most - the rain didn’t stop.  Indeed, the rain kept falling until all life on earth – all except that preserved by God in the ark – was no longer alive, but dead.

And then there is the story of Jesus' baptism by John in the Jordan. If there was ever a time and a place in which the phrase ‘fear death by water’ rang with portending truth, it was the ancient Mediterranean where literally thousands of souls were sent to a watery grave by the wrath of the gods made manifest in ocean storms and the monster Leviathan who lived beneath the waves.  The rite of baptism deliberately invoked the universal fear of these apparently cosmic forces, that sense in which one could never be the master of one’s own destiny because the gods were always more powerful. Yet baptism sought, also, to both modify and transform that fear by invoking a phenomenon still very strange and foreign in the ancient world, the phenomenon of a God who seeks to influence the world solely by the grace of unconditional love.  

In the baptism of Jesus a peculiarly Jewish logic about the meaningfulness of things is therefore brought to both its zenith and conclusion. For the semitic peoples of the ancient world both shared and did not share in the pagan fear of catastrophe that obsessed their neighbours. Like their neighbours, they believed that the power of nature - the power of water, if you like - signified everything in the universe that could take one’s life away, everything that could render one’s plans and schemes both null and void, everything that could make a mockery of the notion that we are the masters of our own fate.  Unlike their pagan neighbours, however, who were constantly seeking to do deals with the gods to secure their protection against catastrophe, the Hebrew preachers believed that the power behind all power was essentially both good and gracious, and desired nothing other than the good of the people, and desired this good unconditionally.

The Hebrew stories about death by water were also, therefore, stories of LIFE by water. A flood comes to consume the earth and all its wickedness. Yet God preserves the seeds of a new world in an ark that floats upon the receding torrent for 40 days and 40 nights.  The angel of death is sent to destroy all the firstborn of Egypt. Yet God’s people are preserved by walking through the depths of the Red Sea and trecking, for 40 years, through the wilderness until they cross into the land of their freedom via the Jordan river.  Jesus’ life as a carpenter and compliant citizen of the Roman state is put to death in that same river by baptism that he might rise to live the life ordained for him by the God who claims him as his beloved Son.  He receives, at that moment, the Spirit of God, who immediately drives him into the wilderness so that he can really learn what it means to do away with one’s own dreams and embrace the dreams of God.  For 40 days and forty nights Jesus learns what it means to repent, to change one’s mind and heart, for the kingdom of God has indeed come near.

Friends, the 40 days and nights of Lent begin with these stories of death by water in order to set our course aright. 40 days and nights hence is the beginning of the paschal Triduum, the Great Three Days which commemorate the fulfillment of Jesus' own baptism: his death on the cross at the hands of evil powers, and his rising to life as a sign of God’s final triumph over such powers by the power of what we rightly call love.  We look forward to this time because in Jesus’ rising is the possibility of our own rising. In Jesus’ triumph is the possibility of our own triumph. In Jesus' victory is our own victory.  Easter is therefore our goal and our destination.  

Yet, and this is very important, these stories of death by water also remind us that there can be no rising without a dying; there can be no prize without a willingness to give up on the very notion of winning; there can be no victory without a submission to complete and utter loss.  For Lent is the process of getting to Easter by a dying to ourselves and a living to God. Lent is about confessing the truth about ourselves and our world, the truth of our utter helplessness to make for either sense or for good apart from a divinely given sensibility concerning the good.  Lent is about the art of repentance and surrender, of turning from what is evil and giving ourselves only to what is beautiful and noble and true. Lent is about forsaking the business of getting by and learning to walk in the byways of God. It is about crying through the night and welcoming the joy of dawn. Lent, in short, is designed to kill everything in us that keeps us in chains so that God can free us, can redesign us, and fill our ‘empty cisterns’ with a new resonance for salvation. And we speak of these things in image and metaphor precisely because they are far too important to leave to the prosaic, rational, flat language of the prevailing discourse.

I pray you all a blessed and holy Lent.  In the name of God . . .

This homily was first preached within the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist, North Melbourne.

I am myself

Texts:  1 John 3.1-7; Luke 24.36-48

When, in Luke’s version of the story, the risen Jesus first appears to his closest friends and companions, they are not entirely convinced that he is Jesus, the man they had known and loved.  At first they think he is a ghost, some kind of other-worldly apparition who has come to harm them.  They start to believe only after Jesus has said, ‘Look, I am not a ghost, I am myself’ and invited them to touch the wounds in his hands and his feet. A few moments later he eats some fish in the presence, again to show that he is himself, ‘in the flesh’ as it were.  This story, and the one before it about the encounter on the road to Emmaus, have always intrigued me.  Not because of their apparently miraculous elements (I have never really struggled with the idea that God can do miracles) but because they model for us that rather paradoxical process by which Christian selves become yet more themselves by dying to themselves.  So, that is what I should like to talk about this morning: becoming who you are by letting go of who you are in order to become a new self that is like the risen Christ.

According to Luke’s story, Jesus was not always himself.  Which is not to say that he was not recognisable as himself.  His name was Jesus, he was a son to his mother and a brother to his siblings.  He grew up in Nazareth and learned a trade, which he then used to support his family.   Everyone who knew him over a period of years could have identified him as himself, even if they had not seen him for some time.  Even after his baptism by John in the Jordan, even after Jesus left his home town in pursuit of a new and dangerous vocation, Jesus was recognisably Jesus.  And yet.  And yet Jesus had not yet become entirely himself.  Even at the point of his death on the cross, Jesus was not yet what God had promised he would be.  He was not yet the risen one, who could shake off the power of sin, evil and death.  He was not yet the new kind of human being that the disciples encounter in our story: a flesh and blood person who could nevertheless appear and disappear as though he were no longer subject to the powers of time and space.  For much of Luke’s story, then, Jesus is not yet himself in the sense of having become who God had destined him to be. 

Crucially, in the story, Jesus is only able to become truly himself by letting go of a whole heap of cherished dreams about his future, some originating in his own imagination, and some in the imagination of others.  His mother, being a Jewish mother, probably hoped that Jesus would become a successful lawyer or rabbi.  She, and he, had to let go off that dream.  His friends and companions hoped that Jesus would become a political leader, a leader who could oust the Romans and restore the fortunes of Israel.  They, and he, had to let go of that plan.  And from the story of the garden of Gethsemane, we can surmise that Jesus himself would really have preferred to live rather than to die, to retire quietly to some regional synagogue perhaps, rather than to suffer the wrath of the Jewish Council.  Yet, in the end, he makes a crucial decision which makes all the difference.  ‘Not my will, but yours be done’ he says.  He says that to God, his Father.  And by that decision he lets go of his own hopes and dreams in favour of his Father’s hopes and dreams, which enables God to complete the process of his becoming.  By this death, Jesus becomes the Christ, the one anointed by God to bring a new kind of life in the world, a life so new that most of us still have trouble coming to terms with what it all means.

But that is how it is for all of us, as well.  We shall never be truly ourselves until we are able to let go of ourselves—the usual hopes and dreams planted in us by family, friends, and media—grasping, instead, the self that God wills and promises for us, the self that is Christ.  The Christ-self, as the 1^st letter of John tells us, is ‘righteous’.  Not ‘righteous’ in the sense of a self-interested hiding away from the rest of the world or a sitting in judgement upon it.  No, the Christ-self is righteous in the sense that Jesus was ‘righteous’—an engaged embodiment of the mercy of God, a tough kind of love that is centred on other people and refuses to simply abandon them to the powers of death, despair or banality.   According to John, we shall never be entirely ourselves until we are like the risen Christ, the new human being, the revelation of what God intends for humanity in general.  ‘When he appears,’ says John’ we shall be like him’.  This is God’s promise, but like all God’s promises, it is not a promise that can be fulfilled apart from the choices we make.  God created us for freedom.  To become who we are, we must choose the path that Christ would choose.

Ego eimi autos . . .  I am myself.  That is what the risen Christ said to his disciples.  And we shall only be able to say that ourselves if we are prepared to do what Jesus did, to take our baptism into his death seriously as a very real dying and a rising.  We shall be ourselves when, by faith, we have allowed Christ to take away the fear of what others may think, and the desire to conform to all that is conventional or common-sense.  We shall be ourselves when we are prepared to risk both security and sense for the sake of a gospel of outrageous love.  We shall be ourselves when we stop believing that there is nothing we can do to transform this crazy world of economic and scientific rationalism.  We shall be ourselves when prayer has become a more familiar habit that watching TV or surfing the internet.  We shall be ourselves when we are able to attend to the needs of others (‘needs’, note that, not ‘wants’), even if that means putting aside what we think we might need for ourselves.  We shall be ourselves when we are able to surrender ourselves to Christ and say ‘not my will, but yours’.  Now, I am very aware of not yet being myself. And you, I know, are aware of it too.  But in faith I believe that Christ will complete the work that he began when I was baptised.  He will do it for you to.  If only you will surrender.  If only you will let go.