Behold, I am making all things new!

Texts: Acts 11.1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21.1-6; John 13.31-35

‘I am making everything new . . .  The old order of things has passed away’.  These are the words of the one who sits upon the throne of heaven in John’s apocalyptic vision.  John writes for a church that is being persecuted under the tyranny of Rome.  It is crying out with a grief and pain that echoes that of Israel under the Pharaohs in Egypt.  What the seer has to say is meant to create a new hope for all who weep.  He imagines a completely new world, a new universe, where the apparent gap between the present reality and the promised peace of God is finally and completely bridged.  God will himself come to dwell with his suffering people and every tear they have ever shed will be wiped away and the thirst of all who cry out for justice will finally be quenched.

This is a bold theology, a theology that many a self-proclaimed ‘realist’ is likely to decry with words that echo Karl Marx’s critique of religion as nothing more than an ‘opiate’ for suffering people.  Is the hope of the Seer false?  Is his theology merely a panacea for pain rather than a genuine cure?  Not, I think, if one also believes in the truth of the Easter proclamation that ‘Christ is risen’.  For in the writing of that other John, John the evangelist, we find an Easter hope that actually begins in the midst of reality as it is, the reality of suffering, pain and injustice.  ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.’ (13.31).  This is John’s way of saying that the transformation of the whole creation from a dark place of suffering into a bright place of blissful peace is beginning right now with something that will happen to Jesus.  But when is it beginning?  Well, read the verse before this one.  ‘As soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out.  And it was night.’  According to John, the transformation of the world begins not with Easter morning and with shouts of resurrection, but with the betrayal of Jesus by his friend Judas in the dead of night on a very ordinary Thursday.  This is where the transformation begins.  Here. With betrayal and failure and the departure of all that is good and true and noble.  The transformation begins then, in the midst of failure, the failure of all those moral codes that rule our society, our religion, our hearts.

That this breakdown can be not only an ending and a loss, but also the chance for a new beginning – a revolution, indeed – can be seen from the story of Peter’s vision at Joppa that we read in Acts.  Here we find out how the earliest church of the Jews learned that God loves the Gentiles too.  But it was a difficult lesson.  It was a lesson that the church could only learn with great a deal of pain and disorientation and loss.  For at the time of Jesus, Peter and Paul, most self-respecting Jews believed, deep down in their marrow, that it was only the people of Israel who were beloved of God.  Other races or ethnic groups, the 'gentiles' as they were called, had not been 'chosen' as Israel was, and were therefore unworthy of inclusion in God's family.  This understanding was carried into the earliest Christian church, which clearly believed that God's message of salvation in Christ was for the Jewish people only.  But all that is changed by a vision Peter saw one day in the trading city of Joppa . . .

Peter's vision was absolutely decisive for the earliest churches.  It showed them that Jesus had died not just for the Jews, but for everyone on the planet.  It also showed them that the most important matters of faith were not doctrinal purity and ethical legalism, but unconditional love and the works of compassion that flow from that love.  It's very instructive, I think, that the Spirit was given to Cornelius before either he or his family signed any doctrinal statement or made any promises about the ethical life.  God, at least, simply accepted them as they were.  Peter says of that experience, 'if God gave them the same gift as he gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could oppose God?'

Nevertheless, it seems there are a lot of folks around these days who want to oppose God's universal love.  And they invariably do it in the name of some kind of moral code that has not yet been broken by the gospel of transformative love.  There are some who do it more obviously.  People like those in the neo-Nazi movement, who believe that God's earth is only for people with white skin and an Anglo-Saxon or Germanic background.  Consequently they persecute and terrorise anyone who is Asian, Hispanic or black.  Or the right-wing extremists of Christian America who believe that Christian faith and being homosexual are mutually exclusive options.  So they set up programmes to 'rescue' gays from their sin.  Or, worse still, they form gangs who wander the night streets looking for vulnerable young men to harass.

But there are others who oppose God's universal love in less obvious ways, which are nevertheless just as damaging.  This week the nation has celebrated ANZAC day.  ANZAC day celebrates a collection of myths that enshrine a particular moral code, a moral code that considers it a great good that a man or woman should sacrifice their lives for the glory of the nation.  The ANZAC mythology also says that it is a good thing, a thing to be memorialized and celebrated, that a man or woman should sacrifice the prohibition against killing another human being for the glory of the nation.  People who do this, so the ANZAC code of morality tells us, will be treated as heroes.  They will be given medals and honoured in parades.  Now I know very well that this is not ALL that ANZAC day celebrates.  I know very well that there is a legitimate mourning for fallen and traumatised comrades there in the mix as well.  But consider for a moment the terrible contradiction that recognition sets up, both for soldiers and for the nation.  On the one hand, the solider is told to kill other human beings, and to do so for the glory of the nation.  On the other hand, the soldiers who do so are then condemned to live with the terrible horror of what they have done for the rest of their lives.  Today the guilt and depression of that heart of darkness has been psychologised as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, but that name erases as much as it reveals. It erases the fact that even the most prestigious medal and even the most honorific parade cannot take away the simple fact that to kill another human being is to disown life itself, ANZAC morality notwithstanding.

Contrast the injunction to kill another human being for the glory of the nation with the compassion we are called to by Christ.  'A new commandment I give you' says Jesus.  'Love one another as I have loved you'.  The Greek word agape, here translated 'love' is probably being connected by John with a Hebrew word, hesed, meaning 'unconditional compassion or kindness'.  Compassion means, of course, to 'suffer with' someone.  And love in the agapic sense means to care for someone without condition.  So the love which Jesus calls us to exercise is a love like his own: an unjudging, unconditional compassion for all who suffer in whatever way.  It's the kind of love exemplified in our time by Mother Teresa, who cared for the social outcasts of Indian society, even though that meant breaking the very fabric of Hindu morality.  Such love perseveres beyond the boundaries of our various moral codes.  If any such code gets in the way of love, it must be broken!

The kind of love Christ calls us to offer is far from sentimental or traditionalistic.  It is very costly because it is a call to share the darkness of any who are hurting even to the point of shattering our most persistent notions of what is virtuous and just.  This is a very motherly kind of love.  A mother simply loves the ones she has given birth to, even if they pierce her heart, which they inevitably do to one degree or another.  A mother keeps loving even if her children go places and do things she would rather they didn't.  A mother keeps loving even when the pain of sharing her child's confusion and mistakes is very great.  So the call to love is a call to imitate the motherly love of God.

On this day which celebrates Easter, the ending that is a new beginning, let us learn this lesson: that the love of God is a shattering of the moral codes by which we live in order that we might be open to a world that no longer needs or depends on such codes.  Let us learn that the unconditional love of mothers actually provides us with a powerful picture of the transformative love of God in Jesus Christ.  For it shows us how love can plant a seed of hope in even the darkest of places, the darkest of times.  It reveals how such love may start a revolution that is eventually able to turn gentile-haters into gentile-lovers or betrayers of Christ into lovers of Christ.  In this we might even come to see that the hope of Christians is a real hope, a hope planted in the bedrock of what happened to the Christ who shared in our humanity. He was shattered on the cross, broken on the moral codes of Romans and Jews.  But when he was shattered, so were their codes, and ours!  For he rose to show us that the code of God is love, and therefore none of the ways in which we divide up the world into the virtuous and the less-virtuous will ultimately prevail.  Because Christ is risen, a new order has begun.  It is not yet entirely here, to be sure.  But it is coming.  It is coming!

Garry Deverell

This sermon was preached at St Columba's in Balwyn on the 5th Sunday of Easter, 2013.

Repent!

Texts:  Malachi 3. 1-4; Philippians 1. 3-11; Luke 3. 1-6

In this second week of Advent, we turn our gaze to the career of John the Baptist, one of the more intriguing figures in the gospel, one whom Luke describes as the forerunner of Christ, the one who announces his coming.  But who, exactly, was John the Baptist?  Where did he come from, and why did he end up preaching in the desert region east of Jerusalem?  You would be aware that I grew up a Baptist.  My family attended a Baptist church.  And so when I first started hearing the stories of John the Baptist, I assumed he was named that way because he was the first Baptist Christian, the one who started our denomination.  Of course, it wasn’t long before I realized my mistake.  I soon learned that John was called ‘the Baptist’ because he baptised his converts in the Jordan river, washing away their sins in a dramatic sign of repentance.  I also discovered that John was a very fiery preacher, one who didn’t mince his words in calling people to abandon their lax attitudes to religion.  John believed that the kingdom of God was coming very soon, and that people ought to repent of their wrongdoing in order to be ready for that day. 

When I was growing up, John the Baptist came to represent for me something like the ideal revivalist preacher, a person who was ultimately concerned with the state of each individual soul, and wanted to save that soul from the fires of hell.  Of course, the way we read the Scriptures is invariably influenced by the kind of church we are part of, and the kind of spirituality which is valued there.  My church was essentially revivalist.  It had inherited its theology and its spirituality, its way of believing and practicing the faith, from the frontier evangelists of 18^th century America.  These were preachers who believed that Christianity was about saving souls from hell, and that the way to save souls from hell was to get them to repent of their drinking, swearing and fornicating and believe in Jesus, who would forgive them of all their sins and set them on the path to clean living and churchgoing.  It was only very much later, at university, that I began to see that John the Baptist was probably not THAT kind of revivalist preacher, that John’s understanding of salvation and saving souls was perhaps a little more nuanced.

To show you what I mean, I’d like to return to our text in Luke’s gospel, chapter 3.  There you find that Luke is very careful to give us a context for the appearing of the Baptist in the desert.  And it is important to note both what he tells us and what he does not tell us.  He tells us nothing about the private lives of those coming to hear his preaching.  We hear nothing about the private sins that would have been high on the agenda of 18^th century revivalist preachers:  booze, fornication and bad language. What Luke does tell us about, however, is politics and social ethics.  He tells us about who is in power at the time, and who their political allies happen to be.  Because, for Luke, the Baptist is a preacher whose primary concern is not the private sins of individuals but the public sins of a people and a nation.  This means that the Baptist is much more like Martin Luther King Jr. than Billy Graham, if you get my drift.  He gets himself mixed up with politics.

You see, at the time when the Baptist appeared things were not at all well in Israel.  Judea and Galilee were small vassal states within the great empire of Rome.  Tiberias was the emperor, and each province of his empire was overseen by a local governor or procurator.  The procurator of Judea was Pontius Pilate, and he was garrisoned at the aptly named Caesarea, on the Mediterranean coast.  Pilate was a cruel man who routinely and summarily put people to death.  He was not noted for looking too deeply into the facts of a case, preferring to make an example of pretty much any Jew who seemed to him to represent a rebellious spirit.  And the procurator’s power was absolute within his territory.  He could order a massacre, and none of the locals could do anything about it, least of all the Jewish kings or high priests, all of whom were only tolerated by Rome’s good grace.  The kings of trans-Jordan and Galilee, the Herods, had absolutely no power apart from Rome.  Though Jewish, and descended from the aristocratic leaders of the past, the Herods were puppets for Rome, collaborators in the repression of the Jewish population at large.  Even the high priests at the temple in Jerusalem, traditionally the key advisors to kings and wielders of political power in their own right, were largely compromised in this highly charged setting.  In order to preserve the legitimacy of their temple worship, the priests were also forced to play Rome’s game, to participate in repressing any person or movement which sought to question Rome’s authority in any way.

So when the Baptist appears in the desert to preach, we find that his preaching has a resolutely political edge. ‘In the wilderness’, we are told, ‘the word of the Lord came to John, son of Zechariah, and he went into the whole region of the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’.  And what kinds of sins did John have in his sights?  We find out as we read further in our text.  John is interested not in fornication or drinking, but in questions of social justice.  Under the economic conditions encouraged by Rome, some were growing rich but most were extremely poor.  The rich ones were usually collaborating with Rome in some way.  And so John commands those who have more to share what they have with those who have little, even down to clothes and food.  He commands the tax collectors to take no more than Rome asks them too, to stop ripping people off to line their own pockets.  So too with the soldiers who served in Roman garrisons.  ‘Stop using your power to extort money from people’ he tells them, ‘or you will be in big trouble when the kingdom of God arrives’.

The ‘kingdom of God’ featured very highly in John’s preaching, and Luke sees John as the forerunner, the messenger who announces that the kingdom of God will arrive very soon.  He quotes Isaiah chapter 40 to make his point:

The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled

and every mountain shall be levelled.

The crooked shall be made straight,

and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

When that sermon was first preached in Babylon, during the exile of the Jews in the 6^th century BCE, the prophet imagined a great highway being built from Babylon to Jerusalem, with the Lord returning to his holy city in a fiery chariot to save his people.  But in the hands of Luke, the sermon takes on a more specific meaning.  For Luke, the kingdom of God preached by John is going to level out the scandalous inequalities in Jewish society.  The tall mountains, those who have grown rich on oppression and collaboration, will be knocked down.  And those who dwell in the valleys of death’s shadow will be raised to the sunlight once more.  For Luke, and apparently for John himself, the coming kingdom of God is a kingdom of which will bring both despair and salvation.  Despair for the rulers and collaborators, but salvation for all who are victims and trust in the Lord.

Why am I telling you all this?  Because I believe that the kingdom of God began to arrive in the person of Jesus Christ, whom John announced.  In him we see the compassion of God for the poor and the victims.  In him we see God’s judgement on the rich and the oppressors.  In Christ we see a God who sides with the victims against the overwhelming power of their enemies, and promises that their reign of terror will come to an end.  Can you see how relevant that message is for our own world, a world which is ravaged by greed, and the misuse of power?  Ours is a world in which people are tortured and killed for questioning their governments or senior business operators, a world in which the poor become even more poor day by day, because they must service their interest repayments before they can build their schools and hospitals.  If this Advent season means anything at all, it means that there is hope for these people. There is HOPE.   Because Christ has come in the flesh, because Christ became a victim himself, and because Christ rose from death to overcome the worst that people could do to him, there IS hope for all who struggle under the yoke of our inhumanity towards one another.

This gives us, perhaps, quite another spin on Christmas from the one many of us were raised on.  The Christmas of the revivalist preachers was about the salvation of the individual from their individual vices.  But I’m here to point out that God’s plans are much bigger than that.  They include the salvation of all who suffer for political and social reasons as well.  And I’m proud to be part of a church which continues to preach in that tradition, the tradition of political preaching which found its patron saint in John the Baptist.

This sermon was preached on the second Sunday of Advent in 2000 at Devonport Uniting Church.