Fellow Heirs Through the Gospel

 Text: Matthew 2.1-12; Ephesians 3:1-12

We live in a world in which it is difficult to regard people of a different ethnicity than our own as human beings worthy of our love and care. We live in a world, in other words, that is racist to its very core.  Two personal stories will suffice to illustrate that contention.  A few years ago I spent a day riding the trains and buses of Los Angeles in California, and in doing so learned two things about that city that I hadn’t known before.  The first is that the population of Los Angeles is mostly Hispanic.  That was surprising to me, because most of the LA-based TV shows and movies I’ve seen are full of Anglo-Saxons, with an occasional smattering of African-Americans.  The second thing I learned about Los Angeles is that it fosters a segregated society.  The white minority seems to confine itself to living in the hills or by the sea, and to the suited professions for work, and to cars as a mode of transport.  I think that in the whole time I spent riding the trains and buses, I saw two Anglo faces, and they were tourists from New York.  I came away with the distinct impression that despite the enormously multicultural profile of contemporary American life, the enormous prosperity of the United States is still controlled by and for one particular ethnic enclave: white Europeans.

A second story.  At lunch a few years ago with a group of intelligent, sophisticated, Uniting Church ministers, the talk turned towards the role of Aboriginal people in our church.  Suddenly the talk became less intelligent and less sophisticated.  These people, whom I knew and respected, suddenly started to caricature, stereotype, and make fun of Aboriginal people in a way that seemed to contradict everything else they believed in.  Now, most of you know already that I am a blackfella with a white face, a native of lutruwita/Tasmania from long before the Dutch or the English arrived.  So the apparent fun of this turn in the conversation was far from fun for me.  Indeed, I felt deeply wounded by what was said.  So wounded that I was stunned into a tumultuous silence so confusing that I found myself unable to say anything to them about either how I was feeling or about the substance of what they were doing.  Now, you also know that I am rarely short of things to say, especially if I catch a whiff of injustice somewhere. So this was a really strange and bewildering experience for me.  It had been a very long time since I had felt that fearful, that powerless, and that small. But that is what racist taunts do to a person.  They makes you feel as though you are not a human being.  They bring home to you the tragic fact that there are people in the world who believe that you are unworthy of the respect they would normally extend to other human beings—simply because you belong, in some way, to an ethnic group that is other than their own.

So now I want to ask the ethical question “Why is racism wrong?”  The usual way of answering the question, in contemporary Australia, is that racism is wrong because human beings are equally deserving of respect and care, whatever their ethnicity.  Which I agree with.  But what if one were to then ask “but why are human beings equally deserving of respect and care”?  Now that is a question that Australians find much more difficult to answer, I suspect (not that we ask ourselves the question very much at all).  I know this because we Australians seem to so easily put our prohibition of racism aside, when it suits us—which says to me that deep down we don’t really know why racism is so very wrong.  Why did the Cronulla rioters chant racist slogans and beat each other up?  Why did the Aussie cricket fans at the Melbourne and Sydney tests make racist remarks towards the South African bowler Makhaya Ntini?  Why did the Australian people vote 'no', overwhelmingly, in the referedum on an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to parliament?  Because, deep down, many Australians do not believe that the ethical injunction against racism is absolute.  We believe, rather, that the prohibition can be put aside when it suits us, when something more important comes along, like wanting to defeat or belittle a person or a group or a team that we perceive, for one reason or another, to be a threat.

Let me suggest to you, tonight, that there is, in point of fact, a reason why racism is wrong, why it is always wrong, and why the prohibition against racism should never be put aside for any reason whatsoever.  The reason is revealed to us in the event of the Epiphany, when Christ appeared in the world to show us that God loves and cares for everyone, without distinction, no matter what their ethnicity.  For that is the message Matthew wants to communicate in the story of the visit of the Magi to the Christ-child in Bethlehem.  He writes to a predominantly Jewish audience in one of the most multicultural areas of the Roman Empire—the province of Galilee.  Most Jews had traditionally believed that God had chosen them, exclusively, to be the recipients of his love and care, and there were apparently vestiges of  precisely this kind of theological racism in Matthew’s community.  In reading the gospel carefully, it becomes clear that Matthew’s predominantly Jewish constituency found it very difficult to accept that others—non Jews, Romans, Greeks, Cretans, Arabs—might also be welcomed by God into the divine covenant of love, peace and justice.

What Matthew says to his community, by way of a response, it this:  ‘Who were the first to recognise the significance of the Jesus’ birth?  Who were they, who were first called by God through the rising of the star, to come and worship him?  Who were they who were first called to be God’s evangelists and prophets, those who tell the good news that Messiah is born?  Are they Jews?  Are they members of the ‘chosen people’?  Actually no.  They are Easterlings, foreigners, infidels.  What they understood, and you must learn to grasp yourselves, is that the Christ born in Bethlehem is a light not only for Israel and for the Jews, but for everyone.  What he offers us, by his teaching, his way of life, and finally by his death and resurrection, is a light to guide the feet of all people into the loving embrace of God’.

What Matthew says to his community was, of course, foreshadowed by the writer to the Ephesians.  The mystery revealed in the gospel, he says, is simply this: that Christ has come to make all people, regardless of their history or ethnicity,  fellow-heirs with the Jews, of all that God has promised.  Crucially, he adds one more thing, however.  The church, he says, is the means by which this mystery of Christ’s universal love is made known in the world, and especially to those who are most powerful, the rulers and authorities who control things.  That means that we, the church, are called not only to preach the universal love of God and to oppose racism, but also to embody this gospel in our own communal life.  Which the church, to its shame, has not always done.  The church has become disturbingly silent in the face of racist oppression in both this nation and other nations. Our leaders prevaricate, for example, on the genocide that is occuring in Gaza.

And so I conclude my brief reflection with this.  Racism is wrong for one reason, and one reason only:  that in Christ we have learned that the divine loves and cares for all people without distinction.  Such pan-ethnic love is absolute, because it is of the very nature of God, whom the 1st letter of St. John names Love itself.  Therefore the prohibition against racism can never, under any circumstance or for any reason, be legitimately put aside.  Let us praise the God whom has made it so by the sending of his Son into the world.  And let us pray that racism shall wither way, both in our wider culture and society, but also within the dark seeding-places of our own hearts.

Garry Deverell

Adapted from a homily first published in Cross Purposes: a forum for theological dialogue 11 (2008): 3-5.

Light for dark times

Texts:  2 Corinthians 4.3-6; Mark 9.2-9

Have you ever noticed how the gospel of Mark has no resurrection appearances?  Unlike the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, Mark doesn't deliver his readers a post-resurrection Jesus who appears to his disciples and gives them final instructions.  Instead, what you find there in chapter 16 is a group of the women turning up at the empty tomb where they discover, not a risen Jesus, but a nameless young bloke in an alb who tells them Jesus is risen.  So he's the one who gives them the instructions in this gospel, he, an intermediary or witness.  He tells the women to go and tell the other disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee.  And how do the women respond to the news?  Well, let me quote verse 8 of chapter 16, the last verse in Mark:

They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Now this is not exactly victorious, happy-ending stuff.  This is not a glorious ascension into heaven and a blessing of the faithful, like in Luke.  It's not a beachside scene where Peter is given the job of forming the church, like in John.  There's not even a dignified farewell and instructions for the ongoing mission, as in Matthew.  No, Mark has a distinctly unhappy and unresolved ending.  An ending where the risen Christ seems strangely absent, and the first witnesses of the resurrection are left fearful and bewildered.

Now, while the dreamer in me is forever drawn to the clear and incisive vision of John’s gospel, it is Mark's gospel that resonates most powerfully with my lived experience of being a disciple of Christ.  Why?  Because it doesn't deliver Jesus to me on a platter, all dolled up and unambiguously victorious in the face of life's complexity and difficulty.  No, in Mark's gospel, the glory of Jesus is a hidden glory, hidden beneath the stifling weight of the oh-so-human politics, religion and psychological trauma of Mark’s time.  Mark’s community was composed, you see, of a smallish bunch of Jewish Christians who had fled Jerusalem after its destruction in 70 AD.  They were a refugee community who felt like the whole world was falling down around them, and that the plans of God for Israel were pretty much over.  In the midst of their despair and poverty, the glorious presence of the risen Christ was really not particularly obvious.  Which is not to say that the risen Christ was not present for Mark and his community.  It’s just to say that Mark and his community had to work towards a theology of Christ’s presence that made sense in their unique and particular circumstances.

That's where this incredible story of the transfiguration comes in.  When Jesus is still alive, and still preaching and teaching in Galilee, Mark tells us that he took his best mates Peter, James and John—the inner circle of the disciples—up onto a mountain to be by themselves.  You can understand, I'm sure, the motivation here.  As Mark tells the story, Jesus has been tearing around Galilee for months, preaching and healing.  The crowds follow him everywhere.  Crucially, Jesus had already negotiated a number of run-ins with the ruling figures in Jerusalem, the scribes and the Sadducees.  He had offended their sense of religious propriety, and they had made it clear that if he continued upon the course he had set himself, he would end up in serious trouble.  Indeed, Mark tells us that immediately prior to this mountain trip, Jesus had told his disciples that they were all headed for Jerusalem, where he would be arrested and crucified.   After all that, I think you can see why Jesus would be wanting to get away from it all!  Also, if I were Jesus, I reckon I'd be having some doubts about my resolve.  I'd be wondering if I had the wherewithal to follow through on what I believed I had to do.  And I'd be wanting some space, and the companionship of some good friends, to help me come to terms with all of that.

So there they are, camped up in the mountains like so many before them.  Like Moses on Mount Horeb, who had run away from his enemies in Egypt.  Like Elijah on the run from political assassins.   And like these two great figures before him, Jesus has an encounter with God there that strengthened his resolve to fulfil the mission which God had given him.  Mark tells us that the long-gone Moses and Elijah came to talk with him.  Not metaphysically, you understand, but mystically. Jesus converses with Moses and Elijah in a moment of concentrated prayer, in the manner that we, also, may converse with the great scholars and mentors of the faith:  we may meet them, that is, in the God who binds us all together across space and time; we may hear their voice; we may attend to the way in which they have become icons of God’s way and will; we may watch for their faithful decisions, and learn a thing or two about the call of God within our own place and time. 

What Jesus learned, in prayer, for his own pilgrimage is communicated by what Mark then tells us through the device of a cloud and voice, a device well-known and understood by his Jewish community.  Just as Yahweh, a voice in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, had confirmed the identity and destiny of the people of Israel as they crossed the red sea and then journeyed toward the land of promise, now the cloud of God and the voice of God confirm and encourage Jesus in his messianic identity as the suffering son of God.  Indeed, in doing so, they repeat the message Jesus had already received at his baptism, a story already told by Mark at the very beginning of his gospel.  We conclude, therefore, that Jesus here receives a reminder and an encouragement from his Father.  To finish what he has begun.  To walk the way of the wilderness to his own land of promise, even as his ancestors have done.

Yet it is not only Jesus who receives encouragement and guidance.  Those who are listening to this story as preaching, the members of Mark’s community, are present in the story as the figures of the disciples, Peter, James and John.  Think, for a moment, about how the story unfolds from their point of view.  In following Jesus up the mountain, it has been made clear that they, too, are apprehensive about what the future may hold.  On the one hand, they are excited about the ministry of Jesus, his preaching and his healing.  They are filled with hope for what God may do with them and for their suffering people.  Yet they have also become quite disoriented by Jesus’ more recent talk about how the messiah must suffering and die.  What does it all mean?  Is God with them or not?  How could the death of Jesus accomplish anything useful at all?  Will God also abandon Jesus, in whose face they have discerned the very image of God on earth?  So, these are the questions that swim around their heads and hearts as Peter, James and John camp with Jesus on the mountaintop.  At that very moment, Mark tells us, Jesus was transfigured before them.  His clothes became shining white, whiter than any earthly bleach could ever make them, white as the glorious presence that had appeared to Israel, to Moses and to Elijah.  Only this time the glory emanated from Jesus himself.  The divine shekinah shines out through the suddenly translucent body of Jesus their friend.

What did Mark want his community to hear in this story?  And what would the Spirit want us to hear?  To return to where I began, this morning, I want you to note that the transfiguration is the closest Mark comes to telling a resurrection appearance story.  Only, unlike the resurrection stories that appear in the other gospels, this one (which precedes them all diachronically) is placed right in the middle of Jesus' ministry in Galilee, well before the crucifixion ever occurs.  It is a very, very brief revelation of divine glory, and of the resurrection life promised by God.  It is a foretaste, if you like, of the end of the drama in which we are all, as Christians, enrolled.  It assures us, as it assured Mark’s community, that God may indeed be found with Jesus, and that Jesus will see us through, even in the middle or midst of our pilgrimage, even when we are most knee-deep in the mire of our difficulties. 

Yet, and this is important, the story of the transfiguration does not deliver, for all that, the kind of certainties that many contemporary forms of faith would seek to deliver.  Certainties about being saved from poverty, illness or addiction, or from the real-politics that makes for war, genocide and the flight of refugees.  Note, in the story, that the revelation received does not transform the disciples into warriors of faith who can suddenly say, finally and definitively, who God is or what God is up to in the world.  They see and hear God, certainly.  They see God flash out at them in brilliant glory; yet it is the very brilliance of the revelation that guarantees that they will grasp very little of God’s detail, as it were.  They hear God’s voice from the cloud, certainly, but every Jew knows that clouds hide as least as much as they reveal.  The whole thing is over in a moment, leaving very important impressions, memories, hopes indeed. Yet, in the end, the disciples are given nothing other than these, nothing more substantial by which they might command or control the forces arraigned against them.  It is salutary to note that when Jesus leads the disciples down the mountain once more, the work of healing and preaching continues, and it is just as hard and thankless as before.

What is Mark telling us?  He is telling us this.  That the life of discipleship is not usually about the experience of triumph and victory and power; it is about God’s revaluation of these values, such that experiences of defeat, weakness and tribulation are nevertheless charged, in faith, with a persevering dynamism of divine care and love.  Neither is discipleship about having a clear and unambiguous relationship with God that arms us with power to finally transcend the forces arraigned against us, whether from within or without; it is about the hope that Christ will accomplish what we could never, in a million years, accomplish for ourselves.  What Mark tells his community through this story, therefore, is what he would also tell us this morning: that the life of discipleship is about getting on with life not triumphantly, but faithfully, through the often very hard yakka of caring and preaching in a world which the gods of our age have rendered blind and deaf and dumb.  And being sustained in that by the impressions, traces and hopes given us in the transfiguration, that is, by a capacity to see the divine Spirit quietly and constantly at work where others see only toil and trouble.

The story of the transfiguration is, in Nicholas Lash's memorable phrase, an 'Easter in ordinary'.  It tells us that even the most difficult and dark places of the earth are nevertheless alive with the presence and activity of God.  With the eyes of faith, which are given the Church precisely in the revelatory story of Christ’s transfiguration, it is possible to see that God does not abandon us in our ignorance, in our mediocrity, or even in our poverty.  God is present here.  God is working there.  God is making the resurrection happen by even the smallest increments of loving invitation and of hope.  Even the smallest. 

Now I don't know about you, but for me this message of Mark's is very good news.  Because I don't find the Christian life to be particularly victorious.  And I've never met a God who wants to rescue me, magically, from every difficulty.  But Mark tells me that an authentic discipleship is about being prepared to follow Jesus to the cross, and find there that even the very worst that human beings can do to each other is not strong enough to overpower the love of God for this crazy old world.  Mark tells me that the liberating power of the risen Christ is available at any time, and in any place.  Not as apparently miraculous fireworks or the arrival of the marines.  But as the power to persevere in faith, hope and love because these, and only these, have the power not only to outlast evil, but to so absorb its power that it is no longer evil.  That is a sermon for another day.  But for now, know that this I hold in faith: when evil and death have withered away, faith, hope and love will still be there.

So here's a practical suggestion right at the end.  A suggestion for how you might find that that presence of Christ if it seems to not be there.  Get on with being a disciple.  Read the gospel of Mark.  Notice what Jesus does in his ministry in Galilee.  And do the same.  Repeat it otherwise in your own place and time.  Remember what the young bloke said at the tomb?  'He is not here, he is risen . . .  go and find him in Galilee'.  Which mean 'go and find him in the midst of being his disciple and sharing in his ministry, and the ordinary will be transfigured before you'. 

I’d like to close with a poem from Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, in a reflection on exactly these themes, says this:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:        

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.  

Í say móre: the just man justices;

Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—

Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

As Hopkins says:  Christ shines out in everyone and everything that is Christ-like in the world.  He worships his father through everything that the just do to worship him, which is to say, in everything that that seeks to repeat his words and his works for our own times and places.  In this is our hope and our glory.  Not in creating a justice and a peace from our own imaginations, but in the imaginative reception of what Christ would render unto his Father through a heart of faith—perhaps even your heart, perhaps even mine.

Garry J Deverell

Feast of the Transfiguration

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.

In the darkness, a star

Isaiah 60.1-6; Luke 2.28-32; Ephesians 3.1-12; Matthew 2.1-12

The devastating floods in the Philippines in the last three weeks remind me that in January 2004 many of our brothers and sisters in the human family experienced the darkest moments of their lives.  A powerful earthquake off the coast of Aceh province in Indonesia caused a tsunami wave that hit the coasts of many countries around the rim of the Indian Ocean very, very hard.  We are told that more than 200 thousand people lost their lives.  Four million people also faced extreme hardship in the aftermath of the wave.  In the Maldives, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Indonesia, dwellings and centres of economic activity were gutted, while public amenities were either destroyed or rendered ineffectual.  At the same time, there were grave concerns for the health of survivors as they face the triple-wammy of depleted food and water supplies, flesh decaying in and near waterways, and a severe lack of medical resources for tending the wounded.  It was very heartening, you will recall, to see that both government and non-government relief efforts swung into action immediately.  What much of that effort never addressed, however, was the emotional and spiritual devastation at the heart of it all.  Can you imagine what it was like for those thousands of  families that lost everything—beloved family members, dwellings, livelihoods?  Can you imagine the overwhelming power of that grief, as it came upon folk like the wave itself, a veritable tsunami of feeling, colour and sensation that threatened absolutely everything taken for granted up until that point?  Maybe, maybe not.  Personally, I struggled.  I have felt grief, who hasn’t?  But how could I possibly assume that my own experience in any way qualified me to understand theirs?

Now, I imagine that for some of you the images on our television screens in 2004, and the more recent images of the floods in the Philippines, give rise to a number of faith questions.  Questions like, ‘how can a good and loving God allow such a disaster to occur?’  Some of you will have noted that the 2004 tsunami was an apparently ‘natural’ disaster, and should therefore be distinguished from those disasters which stem directly from the evil will and actions of human beings.  ‘The holocaust of the 1940s killed a great many more people that this tsunami,’ you may be saying to yourself, ‘but I can come to terms with that because the holocaust was clearly the result of a specifically human action and will.  This tsunami is, however, different.  No human being willed it.  That puts the blame squarely at the feet of God.  If this is God’s world, if God made and sustains it in being, then a so-called ‘natural’ event is really an event that God has either willed or allowed.  Which then raises the question, how could a good and loving God will or allow such terrible suffering?’  Some of you will have looked at such questions before, perhaps in philosophy courses at university.  I remember examining the question for the first time during a religious studies course in grade 12.  Anyone who has done so will know that the question of God’s justice in the face of suffering is not a new one.  It has been discussed for at least two and a half thousand years, perhaps more.  Still, for all that, an event like the 2004 tsunami brought the rather academic question home to many of us in a very existential way.

I do not propose to rehash what the philosophers have said this morning, although I am happy to talk about it all with any of you, at a time that is more conducive to lengthy discussion (I am, as some of you know already, well-trained in philosophy).  For I stand before you today not as a philosopher, but a preacher.  And what the preacher is constrained to do is this:  to address whatever has occurred within our world with a word from the God we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  In order to do that, the preacher must begin not with the God of the philosophers, but the God of Scripture, a God who has spoken to us in Jesus Christ, his life and his words.  Furthermore, the preacher is not at liberty to simply choose his or her favourite passage, in order to repeat a comforting mantra for himself or his congregation.  A preacher who pursues his or her craft within the faith and practise of the church catholic must work from the Scriptures of the day as they are set in the lectionary.  What that very often means is that the word of Scripture contradicts both what the congregation would like to hear and what the preacher would have liked to have said, if the matter were left to his or her own wisdom.

So, as we turn to the Scriptures for today what we discover is this:  that God would address the human experience of suffering and disaster with a burning light of hope and a call to have faith.  For what each of the Scripture passages we read have in common is this:  they are all of them, in their literary contexts, addressed to situations which might be described as dark, dismal and despairing.  Isaiah preaches to a people worn out and dispirited by decade upon decade of forced exile in a foreign land, a people who are very often tempted to believe that God does not care for them anymore.  To this defeated and weary people he dares to address a word of contradiction:  “the Lord is rising upon you,” he says, “to make you bright with glory among the nations.  Kings will come to the brightness of your dawning greatness, bringing offerings that befit your greatness.” 

Paul, too, offers a word to contradict how the Ephesians actually feel:  “You may feel small and insignificant in the world, you may feel as though the most powerful rulers and principalities of this world have it all over you, but this is not the case,” he says.  “But you are of great significance,” he says, “for in you the powers who rule the world are being confronted with a mystery they could never have discovered for themselves:  that God is not a tribal warlord, who forever supports one faction against another; no, God is one who plans to reconcile even the most common of enemies in one body through the cross of Jesus, across all the terrible enmities and differences that would otherwise keep them apart.  In the church,” says Paul, “that dream of reconciliation is already taking place:  you are therefore a sign of contradiction in the world.  You make it possible for the world to believe that enemies may become friends, and that peace may become a reality.”  The people feel small, powerless to change their world.  But Paul offers a word to contradict how they feel.  All is not as it seems.

And finally, in the passage from Matthew’s gospel, we read about a star of prophecy that appears in the dark winter of the ancient world’s oppression under the Roman emperor and his agent in the province of Judea, Herod the Great.  The star rises in the East, and is recognised by both Jewish and Oriental sages as a prophecy about Christ: a child born to be king of the Jews, certainly, but also a light who (like the star) reaches into the darkness of the non-Jewish world as well.  In the context of Matthew’s birth stories, in this world torn apart by barbarism and fear, the star is a sign that a redeemer has come who will save not only the Jews, but also the whole world, from its many, many sins.  The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, says Matthew, and that light is the sign of Emmanuel, that God is with us.

Now, what if we were to believe that these ancient words of prophecy, addressed to these several ancient experiences of despair and hopelessness, were also a word for ourselves today—and especially for everyone affected by tsunami or flood?  What if we were to believe that even death and destruction is finally unable to quench such a word?  What if we were to believe that God is not in fact mad, or on holiday, or evil, but rather is with us in exactly the same way as God was with us in Christ—through his love, copping the very worst of our humanity in order to show that human beings can be a hell of a lot more human than that, that we can be like Christ himself?  Well, if we were to believe such things, and if we were to show our belief by the way that we love, then we would be Christians, imitators of Christ.  And that is what we are in fact called to be this Christmas season, the season of tsunamis and floods, as we are called to be in every other week of our lives: Christians who imitate Christ’s love for a world in trouble and despair. 

So what the Scriptures give us today is not a philosophical answer to a set of questions about the justice of God, but the possibility of a practical faith that actually changes things.  Karl Marx once said that our task is not to understand the world, for that is ultimately impossible, but to change it for the better.  Let me suggest, with Isaiah Berlin, that he learnt that from faith.  Allow me to conclude, then, with a few comments about how a Christian might respond, practically, to what has occurred this last few weeks in the Philippines, or in January 2004 around the rim of the Indian ocean.

First, a Christian would not pretend to understand the grief of the victims.  Their grief is theirs, and our grief is ours.  We should not confuse the two, because doing so can prevent us from really hearing what the victims are saying about their experience and their needs.  Listen to how many times the journalists and anchor-persons at channels nine and seven project their own vision onto that of the victims they are interviewing, thus making it very difficult for the victims to tell their own stories and state their own needs.

Second, Christians respond not as individuals but as a community.  Maggie Thatcher was wrong.  There is such a thing as a society, and it began with the church.  Christianity is an irreducibly communal faith.  We talk together about what is most important.  Out of that talk comes decision and a plan of action.  Then we do it together.  I would welcome a congregation-wide conversation about (a) how we are feeling about what has happened; and (b) how we might respond to what has happened together.  Why not meet this week?

Third, Christians love their neighbours as they love themselves.  The victims of the tsunami and of the Philippines floods, I suggest, might well be our neighbours.  So how might we love them as we love themselves?  Well how about this, for starters.  At Christmas time you all received Christmas gifts that you really didn’t need, and you possibly bought gifts for others that they really didn’t need.  Apparently Australians spent around $22 billion on this strange process of mutual self-enrichment.   I would suggest, then, that each of you consider giving at least as much to your neighbour as you received yourself at Christmas.  For that would be a truly Christian gift, a gift that is given without thought of repayment.  Imagine if every Australian did the same!  That would amount to $22 billion worth of disaster relief each year.

Finally, Christian love is not only about the sharing of resources, it is also about the embodied love of the face-to-face.  In Christ, God faces us and we face God.  In is primarily in the face-to-face of Christ that God is with us.  Perhaps we ought to consider, together, the establishment of a more personal relationship with a local community affected by the floods?  In 2004 many of us did so with Sri Lankan and Indonesian communities.  Perhaps we can now do so via the many Filipino brothers and sisters who worship in our churches.

To conclude, then.  When disasters like these hit, we can allow it to overwhelm our faith, hope and love.  Or we can see it as an opportunity to exercise, in real and practical ways, our faith, hope and love.  What is faith unless there is uncertainly and ambiguity?  What is hope, if all that is hoped for has already come to pass?  And what is love if no-one is in need of it?  Some might see the floods as a sign that God is either dead or wicked.  I myself think differently.  I see it as an opportunity for people of faith to actually exercise their faith.  Perhaps it is only as we do so that the world will once again learn that God is love.  For Christianity is unique amongst the major faiths in this:  that the word of God can only arrive at its purpose by becoming flesh.  The star from the East did not remain a star, you recall, an idea or a prophecy enshrined in the heavens.  It waned to give way to a child, a child who grew to become the human face of a loving and suffering God.

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.