'The words I have spoken are spirit and life': the poetics of faith

Ephesians 6.10-20; John 6.56-69

‘Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.’ What is the Apostle talking about when he utters these enigmatic words?

In part, the Apostle is seeking to make a crucial distinction between what we can see, touch, hear and taste, and what we can’t. There are things in this universe, he wants to say, which we cannot sense in any ordinary way, and yet they are real¬ - as real as this lectern, or that book, or you and I. Let me elaborate a little.  Let’s pursue the example of that book. In one sense, it is just a book. It is made of paper, of pulped wood and chemicals. Perhaps there is a little leather. Certainly, there is a lot of ink, ink which is distributed liberally on the page to create words. A book, just a book. And yet it is not just a book, is it? For there, in those pages, resides the trace and the effect of a story and an event that is far bigger and more cataclysmic in their import than any mere book could be.  The trace and effect of that God who has made our world from nothing and passed through it in cloud and fire and a people liberated from slavery; the trace and effect of Holy Wisdom becoming flesh and dwelling amongst us, full of grace and truth; the trace and effect of life bursting forth from the tombs in which we would enclose it; the trace and effect of transformation, salvation, the liberation of the world from its bondage to death and decay. The trace and effect of things far larger and more deeply complexly interwoven than mere pulp and paper, vellum and ink could ever mean on their own. What we see and touch and taste is a book. But what we feel, especially when it is read aloud, is the shaking of the earth and the remaking of the cosmos.

So when the Apostle talks about rulers, authorities, dark powers of evil who dwell in heavenly realms, he is asking us to look beyond the surface of what things might mean and listen, instead, for the resonance and timbre of a great opera that has been unfolding since before the universe was made, a cosmic drama concerning good and evil, making and unmaking, faith in the God of life and the appetite of humankind for mayhem and destruction.  Here the Apostle wants to teach us what literature scholars call a ‘hermeneutic’, a strategy for rightly reading the times and places in which we live.

Take, for example, some of the events that dominate the news. ISIL kills many thousands of people in Iraq and Syria, most of them Muslims.  The Abbot government turns back another boat of desperate asylum seekers. A young Aboriginal woman dies in police custody. The disability pension is reclassified so that thousands of recipients lose their benefits.  A pop star goes into rehab for drug abuse. What are these events all about? What do they really mean? Some - usually journalists - might read them as examples of the ongoing struggle between the weak and the strong, the ones who will form the future and those who will not.  Such readings assume, all too pragmatically, that history is written by the strong, and that it is the strong who always win.  But if we read those same events in the light of that opera an Apostle might sing, they are about faith and disbelief, flesh and spirit, light and darkness. They are about the struggle of the people of God with forces that can never be reduced to mere flesh and blood, to bodies that are either weak or strong. They are about the struggle with an ancient and cosmic evil that would seek to enlist anything and anyone to its cause, and without caring whether those enlisted understand what is at stake or not.  By reading things this way, those of us who have heard the gospel come to understand that the events that dominate our televisions or, indeed, our own lives, have a cosmic significance. They are important not simply because these events apparently determine whether we can expect a comfortable future or not. They matter because they are traces and effects of God’s eternal desire to wrest life from death, light from darkness, faith from doubt.

Let me put all this another way. The world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon’s TV show from the late 90s and early Noughties is our world. Despite the claims of the eternally prosaic and unimaginative, we do indeed live in a world populated by creatures that want to suck our blood and remove our brains and hearts. We do indeed live in a world in which the scarcity of wisdom figures and wise mentors to show us the way forces most of us to simply do our best with the limited resources we have, effectively making it up as we go along.  We also live in the world of Harry Potter, JK Rowling’s series of novels. A world in which a dark lord would seek to re-establish the rule of ‘might is right’ and there is only a small band of courageous and principled neophytes to stand against him, this time, albeit, with the help of plentiful apostle figures.  We are indeed in the midst of a battle. Not a battle against mere flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities that are so pan-dimensional that they can barely be named at all.  The Jewish and Christian traditions name such powers variously as the devil, the Evil one, the demonic, the Father of Lies, Satan, Beelzebub. But these are names which can never entirely capture or domesticate what is really at work: evil, entropy, destruction, all that would make for death and meaninglessness and nothingness.

How does one battle such a slippery enemy? What resources can the people of God draw upon? Well, the writer to the Ephesians is no more prosaic in prescribing an antidote for evil than he is in naming evil itself.  Invoking the metaphor of a warrior, the Apostle encourages the people of God to don the full armour of God, including a ‘belt of truth’, a ‘breastplate of justice’, and ‘sandals of peace’, as well as ‘shield of faith’, a ‘helmet of salvation’ and ‘the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’. Of course, we should never take these images literally, that is, prosaically. We should never make the mistake of thinking that the Christian is a soldier who fights the enemy as the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’ fought Saddam Hussein or the Taliban.  If we make that mistake then we have missed the point of the struggle in the same way that many mistake the point of ‘jihad’ in the Qur’an.  Christians and Muslims alike do not battle flesh and blood, strong or weak bodies, we battle evil in all its guises - whether those guises be hunger, addiction and self-loathing or systemic injustice, the culture of economic rationalism or the totalising power of the rich.  And the weapons we use are not weapons that kill, they are weapons that bring life: weapons that are really elements of a vision, a grand story, about the desire of God to transform the world into a place where truth, justice and healing are realities for everyone and everything.

Another way to talk about all this is suggested by the passage we read from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus completes his long sermon about bread and wine with the words ‘The Spirit gives life, the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life’.  Like the writer of Ephesians, John is here seeking to distinguish between literal or prosaic readings of the world, and those inspired by the more poetic renderings of faith.  As we have been learning in the last few weeks as we have together pondered the meaning of Jesus’ feeding of the 5000, it is a merely ‘fleshly’ reading that concludes that Jesus wants only to feed the ordinarily hungry and the ordinarily thirsty.  On the contrary, what John has been helping us to understand is that Jesus himself is the ‘bread’ and the ‘wine’ that we need. He is the heavenly bread and wine which God has sent to satiate that longing in us for a form of life that truly at peace with both God and ourselves, a form of life the gospel calls, simply, ‘eternal’ life.  This is ‘spiritual’ reading of the events the gospel describes, a rendering of the feeding by the sea of Tiberius that in very real ways gave birth in the church to our celebration of the Eucharist.  Because of the ‘spiritual’ poetics of John, which he contrasts with more ‘fleshly’ readings, we have come to see that the bread and wine we share at the Supper is far more than bread and wine.  Together, the bread and wine are the Word make flesh, Jesus himself, who by our eating and drinking takes up residence not only in our bodies, but also in our minds and hearts.  By eating and drinking in this manner, with the eyes of faith wide open, John teaches us to learn a new way of reading the world and to take this poetics to ourselves as the only language that is able to give us life.  ‘Learn of Jesus in prayer’, says John. ‘Approach the table in prayer and see there the word of God made flesh in Jesus, who is able to inhabit your life by faith and give you hope and a future, despite what the cynics, the politicians and the journalists might say. Learn of Jesus in the operatic ritual of the Eucharist and learn to give thanks for God’s victory over all that would make for death, for darkness, for injustice or despair.’

So, if you got lost in all of that, don’t worry. Here comes the summary. How do we recognise evil? By listening to Jesus and taking his wisdom into our hearts. How do we discern the difference between right and wrong? By listening to Jesus and taking his wisdom into our hearts. How do we fight the darts cast our way by the evil one? By listening to Jesus and taking his wisdom into our hearts? How do we take Christ’s wisdom into our hearts? By prayer, by the reading of the Scriptures in a spirit of prayer, and by participation in the supper that celebrates his mysteries.

I close with a prayer by Leonard Cohen, a Jew who knows the poetics of the Christian faith better than many Christians that I know. Here he throws himself upon the mercy of God, as we all must if we are to find our way through the sufferings of this life to the life of resurrection that Christ promises.

Show me the place, where you want your slave to go
Show me the place, I've forgotten I don't know
Show me the place where my head is bending low
Show me the place, where you want your slave to go
Show me the place, help me roll away the stone
Show me the place, I can't move this thing alone
Show me the place where the word became a man
Show me the place where the suffering began.

This homily was first preached at Monash Uniting Church in August 2015.

Transformed by Love

Texts: Isaiah 62.1-5; Psalm 36.5-10; John 2.1-11

The Psalm we read just now speaks about the ‘steadfast love of Yahweh.’  In Hebrew the term is chesed Yahweh, a deeply loyal kind of love which is able to persevere and endure even when the loved one chooses to spurn and trample the lover’s careful attentions underfoot.  It is important to note that the chesed Yahweh is a strictly divine kind of love.  The Psalmist never once uses the term to speak about the love of human beings, probably because he believes that human beings are incapable of performing such love.  To his mind, God alone is capable of chesed love, yet it is human beings who are most in need of its healing and transforming powers.   This because we tend, as human beings, to be so very inconstant in the covenants and promises we make—whether to God or to one another.  So this morning I would like us to contemplate chesed love for a little while, this strong and constant love that we all need so very much.  And I should like us to do so by fixing our attention on four evocative images, which the lections conveniently provide for us.

In the first image, the chesed love of God is likened to that of a mother bird who gathers her chicks under the shelter of her wings when a storm is at hand.  The Psalmist writes “How precious is your steadfast love, O God!  All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.”  What a wonderful picture!  The Psalmist, like many of us, is riding out some storms in his life.  He is being mocked for his religious faith, and there are apparently wicked people nearby who would very much like to remove him from the place and work to which God has appointed him.  He is afraid, and he feels alone, so he calls out to the one who has promised his protective presence and love, no matter what.  The Psalmist believes that God’s love for him is far more constant and reliable than the machinations of a royal court, where people are only valued insofar as they are politically useful.  So he cries out to God as the one who will shelter him from the cyclone of inconstancy to which he is being subjected.  He looks to God to be a kind of still-point for him, a loving gaze of reliable compassion at the eye of a very scary storm.

A second image comes from the same pen, in the same Psalm, where God’s chesed love is likened to the hospitality of a generous host.  Again, I quote.  “How precious is your steadfast love, O God!  [All people] feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.”  Here the refuge of God is not merely a tiny corner to hide from the wind, but God’s own homestead, a wide and spacious place of welcome and delightful refreshment, freely available to all who ask.  Of course, the Psalmist has a very specific place in mind, when he imagines God’s homestead.  It is the temple where he worships and prays each day.  For him, the temple is precisely that place in which he experiences God presence, a place of beauty and peace which continually draws him into God’s embrace.  There, in the sacred liturgy, God reaches out to feed him with sacred words that are sweeter than honey, and with the water of the sacred vessels, a veritable draught of Holy Spirit to sustain the worshippers.  We Christians have taken exactly this meal-imagery of Jewish worship into our own liturgy.  For us, Jesus is the great host who feeds us with himself in the bread, the water and the wine.  He is the bread of heaven and the cup of life, offered to sustain us on the long and weary journey towards healing.  For that reason, the desire of Christians for the eucharistic presence of Christ is not all that very different from the Jewish desire for Torah and for the ritual meals of the Synagogue.  For all of us desire the healing touch of God’s chesed love.  And for all of us, Jew or Christian, it is the story of God told in worship that is able to show us what that love is like.

A third image is found in the reading from Isaiah.  There the chesed love of God is compared to that of a bridegroom who delights in his bride.  I quote:  “As a young man marries a young woman, so shall your Maker marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.”  Now, lest you get the impression that God’s love is only as good as the starry-eyed infatuation of the newly-married—which (let’s be honest) is largely blind, and lasts only for a short while—please take note of the context in which that image is invoked!  The wider passage speaks about God’s continuing concern and loyalty toward a people that has completely deserted God’s ways, becoming both morally and spiritually desolate in the process.   This is a lover who is able to delight in his bride even though he knows what she is really like, ‘warts and all,’ as they say.  God, we are told, is like the bridegroom in his delight towards the bride.  Yet he is very unlike the typical bridegroom in that he delights in his bride even as she runs after other lovers.

Now, there is good news here, is there not?  For we are not so very different from the chosen people of old.  We are people who swell with love and devotion for God when it suits us, when we want to fill our empty lives with a little spirituality and pretend we have risen above the mediocrity all around us.  But we are so easily distracted, so easily lured away from our devotion.  All it takes is the prospect of a little more cash, or a little romantic attention from an attractive somebody.  Sometimes all it takes for us to abandon God’s ways is the prospect of relaxing into some television.  This is who we are.  This is the pathos of our inconstancy.  Thank Christ, then, that God is not like us!  Thank Christ that God is chesed love, loyal and steadfast even where we ourselves fail.  For without that love, we would all fade into the nothingness and desolation of beings who have no anchor, no centre out of which to be anything at all.  We would exist only as clouds exist—accidently and ephemerally, for only a moment.  In the end, it is only God’s loving attention which holds us in being and gives us a future which is of more worth than that of a cloud’s.  In the end, we are what we are only because God holds and purposes us according to the horizon of his gift.  In God, we become who we are only as we receive ourselves from God.

Which brings me to the final image I wanted to speak about this morning:  God’s chesed love as the primal power of transformation or alchemy.  We read in Isaiah of a love which is realistic about who we are in our sin, and yet looks and hopes for our transformation into people of substance.  I quote.  “You shall receive a new name from the mouth of the Lord.  No longer shall you be called ‘Forsaken,’ and your land ‘Desolate’; instead, you will be called ‘My Delight’ and your land ‘Beloved’.”  There is an additional claim being made, here, for God’s love.  Not only does it continue to regard us with delight, even as we sin.  It is also able to change us, to change our deepest motivations and desires so that we begin, however slowly, to desire what God desires and become the people God desires that we be.  How does this happen, how is love able to change a human heart?  It is a mystery!  Yet I believe that the apostle John had an unusual insight into such things, and that the first hint of an answer may be found in his story of the wedding at Cana in Galilee.

Now, I’ll be up front with you.  For many years I really didn’t ‘get’ this story where Jesus turns the water into wine.  Even when I learned that the Gospel of John was built around seven ‘signs,’ of which this miracle was the first—even when I learned that the signs were supposed to tell us who Jesus really is—I still didn’t entirely get it.  I mean, turning water into wine.  What that’s all about?  How does it show us who Jesus is?  Doesn’t it show only that Jesus was a conjurer, a magician, an alchemist?  What have any of those things to do with the deeper theology of the Gospel—Jesus as the Word of God and the Bread of Life; Jesus as the great ‘I Am’ who repeats only that which he had already heard from his Father; Jesus, whose miserable, dark cross is the very place where the light and glory of God is made known?  But then it hit me.  The alchemist’s trick of turning water to wine is exactly the right thing for the Word of God to be doing.  For the message it conveys is one of transformation:  the Word of God crucified, a word and pledge of sacrificial love, is precisely that reality which is finally able to transform the sinful-ridden self into a self redeemed and made new.  For John has a very sacramental imagination.  The water is us, my friends.  We begin the transformation journey at the waters of our baptism, the most ordinary water in the world.  But when Christ dies for us, when he signs for us the chesed love of God through the sacrificial spilling of his blood, we become extraordinary, we rise from the waters to receive the eucharistic wine.   At that point, Christ himself becomes our life—our lifeblood, our joy, our future.  The water of our humanity is changed into the wine of Christ, as it were, that substance which we imbibe in order to envision a blessedness, and a cause for celebration, we could never have generated for ourselves.

Now, I know this reading makes for a rather radical re-reading of the significance of wine for Christians.  It has often been said amongst evangelicals that drinking wine is a sin primarily because it causes the drinker to lose control.  But that is exactly why wine is such a great symbol for the transformation which Christ would forge for us!  It is only in ceding control of our lives, it is only by giving ourselves over to the intoxicating effects of Christ on our hearts and minds, that we shall ever be transformed into his image and likeness.  For the chesed love of God transforms us by intoxication.  It reaches into the places where we are afraid and ashamed, and displaces those powers with something far more deeply interfused:  the certainty of a divine mercy which is outrageous in its audacity and totally unreasonable in the sheer size of its vision.  Let me read to you from another of John’s writings:  “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear . . .  we love because first loved us.” (1 Jn 4.18, 19).  How does God’s chesed love transform our desire?  By driving away the fear of karma that is harboured so deeply in our hearts—the fear that we shall have to reap what we sow.   It is the intoxicating joy of being forgiven that changes us into people who are able to forgive others.  If God is for us, who can stand against us?

So there you have it.  Four images of the steadfast chesed love of God.  God’s love is like a refuge from the storm and the hospitality of a generous host.  It is like the continuing delight of a bridegroom for his bride, even though the bridegroom has learned what the bride is really like through harsh experience!  Finally, the love of God is like the alchemical power of the miracle-worker.  It can transform even our fear and inconstancy into the power to love, forgive, and cherish.  Even to love, forgive and cherish ourselves.  Imagine that!  So as you receive this love from your host in the liturgy, in the form of sacred words and a sacred meal, be mindful of the enormous power of the gift you are being offered.  May God give you power to receive the gift with thankfulness, and faith enough to submit yourselves to the intoxicating joy it promises.

This sermon was first preached to a mission of the Tamil Church of Melbourne in 2005.

Is tea a worthy substitute for wine at communion?

The Uniting Church's National Christian Youth Convention in January 2009 celebrated the Eucharist using billy tea instead of wine, apparently under the leadership of pastors from the Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress. I was not present, but I gather it was a moving occasion. This ceremony was again conducted last week at a gathering of Uniting Church youth pastors in Sydney.  Again, tea was substituted for wine and again (I am told) it was a moving occasion.

The idea of using staple foods for communion has been around since the beginning of Christianity. That is, apparently, one of the reasons bread and wine were chosen by the early Christian churches. These were relatively cheap and common staples for Mediterranean-rim communities. Commonness speaks of the very ordinary places in which God chooses to dwell and act. Good theology.

It should be remembered, though, that (unleavened) bread and wine were not chosen only because they were common. They were chosen because of their particular Jewish history as symbols of exodus and of atoning sacrifice. The (not yet risen) bread reminded people of the haste with which they fled the oppressor. The wine reminded them of the blood of the lamb by which the Angel of God's wrath recognised their homes and passed over or by.

The early Christian communities also learned from Jesus that the bread and wine were to symbolise his body and his blood at their ritual meals, a body broken and blood poured out in atoning and liberating sacrifice. Wine was chosen not simply because it was common, but because it was red like Christ's blood, and because it was a drink of celebration already associated with the salvation history of the Exodus.

For that reason, I find it rather difficult to accept that common billy tea could really function to carry all those meanings. It is not red and, as far as I know, carries no liberative or salvific meanings in either Indigenous or migrant Australian cultures.  That said, I'd be happy to consider the use of other red-coloured drinks such as some Indigenous Christian communities actually do - some of them derived from native plants - but not common billy tea.

One other reason I'd balk at using tea is because of its colonial history. It was very often one of the substances which colonial authorities used to 'buy' Aboriginal land. It was very often exchanged for land, at least in the understanding of whitefellas. For that reason, tea is not a neutral pan-Australian symbol. It is one of the instruments by which the country was stolen.  I have a few misgivings about the use of damper in Indigenous contexts as well, since flour was also one of those colonial buying tools. I am not as concerned about this as about tea, however, because flour can at least keep you alive by providing nutrition - and it did keep many Aboriginal communities alive as more traditional food sources were driven away or destroyed. Tea, on the other hand, had and has very little nutritional value. But there are Indigenous alternatives here too, and they are as various as the clans and where they come from. I am a supporter of moves in every community to use whatever is the basic staple at communion [And what is bread, anyway, if not the staple food in any given culture?]

Some have argued for the use of tea on other grounds. Tea can be seen, for example, as a symbol of hospitality, welcome, and an open table.  I would agree. In Christ we learned, of course, that God is a hospitable God who would ultimately long to welcome all people to the banqueting table of heaven.

My difficulty with using tea remains, however, because surely the symbols we use at communion need to carry ALL the meanings associated with the meal, and not simply SOME of them. While tea can indeed speak of God's hospitality (in some cultural contexts) it cannot, I would argue, carry the crucial meanings of reconciliation through atonement and of God's sacrificial, costly, love - themes that stand at the heart of the Christian message.

I also have a difficulty with any theology of Eucharist that sees the table of communion as open to absolutely everyone, without remainder. From the beginning, Christians certainly welcomed everyone to their ordinary meal tables, whatever their beliefs or lifestyles. Here they followed the example of Christ himself. But they did not welcome everyone to the ritual meal known as the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist. This meal was reserved for the baptised, for those who had 'signed up', as it were, to the Christian life - with all its beliefs and practices. Why? Because the meal was seen as a weekly reaffirmation of the covenantal promises made in baptism. Now, you can't RE-affirm what you've never affirmed in the first place. In that context, it made no sense to welcome those who were not signed-up. And it still doesn't.

So the invitation to the table is indeed for all. But the mode by which Christ's invitation may be accepted is by passing through the waters of baptism, which (in Christian understanding) is our death to the basic principles of this dark age, and our rising with Christ to a new (de-colonised) way of life.

Let me conclude by noting that the use of tea instead of wine (or another blood-coloured drink) is not something that has been proposed or practiced at any official Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress gathering that I have attended. Certainly not at the national theological forum we held about worship and the Eucharist in Jabiru during 2010.  As one of the Aboriginal theologians helping to form both policy and practice on these things, I would strongly resist any such move.