Scott Morrison and speaking publicly about, and from, faith

This week the news cycle has been all aflutter about the Prime Minister speaking publicly about his faith. Some commentators have concentrated on the content of what he said and made a variety of judgments about that. Many more have expressed dismay that a Prime Minister would talk publicly about his faith in a secular country. Afterall, faith is a private matter and should be kept entirely out of the public realm of policy and the governing of the nation. Or so the argument goes.

I will not be commenting, today, on the content of what Mr Morrison said. Others far more competent that I have made some very important observations about that. Rather, I should like to contest the notion (again) that a government figure should keep their faith and their politics entirely separate.

First, there is nothing in the legal apparatus of this nation that requires a person in office to remain silent about matters of faith. The jurisprudential principle about the separation of church and state simply prohibits any particular religious group being given a structural place in government. It prohibits, in other words, the establishment of a state church which, as a church, is able to review government policy from within the parliament. The principle does not prohibit individual members of parliament, even of government, speaking about and from their faith on matters of public policy and discussion.

A second point is theological, rather than jurisprudential, in nature. The Christian is called not to separate but to integrate their faith and their public presence, work or office. For every Christian is responsible to make sure that the ethical values at the heart of Christ’s kingdom are made incarnate is how we live and work, in all that we do and say. That's the meaning of this line in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Your will be done on earth as in heaven.’

Now, of course, we should never bully or bash our way into making others believe, or live their lives, as we do. For such bullying and bashing would be a repudiation of Christ’s call to love. But we are called to bear witness, in word and deed, that we belong to Christ and really believe that the human community would flourish more beautifully and fruitfully if it paid heed to Christ’s teaching. That call is ours whether we are clergy or laity, politician or cleaner, teacher or accountant. For the citizenship of heaven requires us also to work and to agitate for justice, peace and compassionate governance here in the world of flesh and blood and community.

All of which is to say that whilst I don't agree with Scott Morrison on much at all, I applaud his willingness to integrate faith and work. In that, if on nothing else, he is being genuinely and authentically Christian.

Garry Deverell

April 24, 2021

The Hidden Light

1 Samuel 16. 1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5. 8-14; John 9. 1-41 

I suppose a number of you have seen a shadow-play. The shadow-play takes place in the darkness. There’s this big screen with a fire lit behind it, and the audience watches as the puppeteers tell their story by casting silhouetted shadows on the screen. Because the characters are all in shadow, you can’t see their faces or the features of their dress, and there are no colours apart from black or white. Because of this, anyone who is watching must use their imaginations to fill in the gaps, to give form and emotional detail to the character’s faces as they make their journey’s through the highs and lows of the tale as it unfolds. Now, the story we read from John’s gospel just now works a bit like a shadow-play. The writer delivers his story not with colourful figures rich in detail, but with characters barely drawn, silhouettes in light and dark. And the reader, or the hearer in this case, is invited to read between the lines, to exercise discernment about the degree to which the story’s truth is visible for all to see, or secretly hidden in the shadows.

At first glance, what we have here is a simple miracle story about a Jewish man, born blind, whose sight is wondrously restored by Jesus on the Sabbath day and therefore cast out of the synagogue for his trouble. Eventually he becomes a Christian, a believer in Jesus. But look again. Is that all there is to this story?

Most commentators will tell you that the story is ‘really’ about faith, that faith is here represented as a seeing, with lack of faith as its opposite, represented here as a kind of spiritual blindness. Note that when Jesus finds the young man after he has been cast from the synagogue, he asks him a question: “Do you believe in the Son of Humanity?” The fellow replies, “And who is he, sir, tell me so that I may believe in him.” Jesus replies, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” At that point, the young man cries out: “Lord, I believe” and worships him. This passage makes quite a solid link between seeing and believing. When the man ‘sees’ who Jesus is, suddenly he has faith in Jesus, the kind of faith which falls to its knees in worship. Seeing is firmly established as a metaphor for faith. And the case is apparently strengthened further in the commentary that follows, where Jesus says: “I came into the world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do not see may become blind”. In other words, Jesus comes to give faith to those without it, and to expose the lack of faith in those who pretend to have it. Faith is seeing, and lack of faith is blindness.

But hang on a minute. I’m not so sure that this traditionally correct approach is nuanced enough. Consider, if you will, the following questions. First, if faith is seeing, then why doesn’t John have the young man make his declaration of faith when first he is healed by Jesus? Why the long lag between seeing and believing? Second, and intimately related to this first question: if faith is seeing, then why does the young man not ‘see’ into the true identity of Jesus until right at the end of the story? When first asked who Jesus is by the Jews, the young man replies ‘He is a prophet,’ which is true, but only partly true. In the gospel of John, Jesus is pre-eminently not a only a prophet but the Christ, the Son of Humanity, the pre-existent Word of God made flesh. And later, when he is questioned more thoroughly, the young man declares that Jesus must have come from God, which is true, but again not true enough. In John’s gospel, Jesus not only comes from God, but is God: he has been as one with the Father from the beginning. And there is a further point which the traditional reading cannot account for. When the young man finally makes his confession of faith, it is not a ‘seeing’ which makes the difference, but a hearing. Jesus says to the man, “You have seen the Son of Humanity, I, the one speaking to you am he”. And it is then, and only then, that the man fall to his knees in worship. Did you catch that? The man had seen Jesus before, but it did not give him faith. Faith finally comes to him only in the wake of this self-revelatory speech of Jesus: “I am he”.

Now, why am I telling you all this? What does it matter if faith is a matter of seeing or a matter of hearing? What does it matter how faith comes, as long as it is faith? Well, it matters quite a lot actually. Because if faith comes by seeing, then it is not really faith. It is knowing. And knowing is the means by which we try to reduce God to our size and make of God some kind of idol that we can get our heads around. But a God we can get our heads around is not the Christian God, the God who made the heavens and the earth, the God of Jesus Christ. It is a God of our own making, a version of our dreams or fears, projected into the heavens and given the name ‘God’, a God we can control and domesticate. A tame God who never asks us to change.

The Gospel of John was actually written, in part, to combat that segment of church and society that had begun to associate sight, knowledge and faith in this idolatrous way. These people, who were later called Gnostics, believed that one could know God up close and personal, that one could have a personal hotline to Jesus and his power, that one could ascend to a direct knowledge of God through a secret path of wisdom which left behind the limitations and sufferings of the body and of ordinary life. To these beliefs and practices, John pronounced a resounding “NO!” No, he says, one may not escape the body and its sufferings, because even the divine one of God took on flesh and suffered like the rest of us. Indeed, John has the divinity or glory of God coming to light not in beatific visions or specialist knowledge, but in the disfiguration of a crucified man, raised above the earth. Jesus is indeed the light of the world for John, but this light lies hidden in the enigma of suffering and of signs that are difficult to interpret. So faith is certainly not about seeing and knowing. On the contrary, as Jesus says to the disciple Thomas, “Blessed are those who do not see, and yet come to believe” (20. 29).

If only these Gnostic ideas had died out with the Gnostics. But they have not. They are alive and well and living in your local branch of Christian fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is dangerous to genuine faith because it has no humility. It believes not only in right doctrine, and the ability to know without any form of doubt what right doctrine is. It believes in wrong doctrine, and the ability to locate it in others. It believes that there is a war going on between believers and unbelievers, and that it can calmly discern the difference between the two. And it believes, finally, that God is on its own side, but not on theirs. Fundamentalism is based on a faith which can see and know, rather than on a faith which believes and trusts in a God who withdraws from our eyes in the figure of the suffering one.

Note this too, that fundamentalism is alive and well not only within the churches, but also beyond the church in the general community. It surfaces, for example, in the certainty of people who approach the church for a ritual service, in baptisms, weddings and funerals. Many of these folk get quite upset when the church will not order these services according to the customer’s already-determined demands and purposes. Why? Because, in many cases, the “customer” is a fundamentalist of the neo-pagan variety, who cannot accept that the church has a calling and a duty to resist this new kind of cultural orthodoxy in the name of Christ.

To these modern Gnostics, who ask as the Pharisees did, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus replies, “If you were blind you would not have sin, but now that you say ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” You see, for Christians the point is not to be able to see, but to believe that God sees us, not to claim a certain, unassailable, knowledge or experience of God, but to trust that God knows us. The interesting thing about light, as the writer to the Ephesians notes, is that it exposes and makes visible everything in the world but itself. So if Christ is the light of the world, we can trust him to make visible our own paths through life, including the sin that so easily entangles. But we should not expect to see or experience Christ with any sense of certainty until that day when he is revealed in all his fullness. To stare into the sun is to be blinded. But blindness, for Christians, is not such a big deal. “Faith is the intimation of things not seen,” says the writer to the Hebrews (11.1). And Paul says something similar: “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5.7).

The life of faith turns out to be, then, not a full-colour motion picture for those who can see clearly, but a shadow play in which the fully sighted have no significant advantage over those who see not so well. The things of God are hidden in the enigmas of the world, in parables and signs which are difficult to interpret; and pre-eminently in the sufferings of Christ and those who suffer with him and for him by their baptism into his passion. Remember that the ‘healing’ our young man received was soon transmuted into persecution by those who refused to share his growing sense of faith.

So it is for all who are baptised into Christ’s ways. For that is the way of things in a world that prefers the light of the Television and the enlightenment of three-minute-interviews to the dark light of faith, hidden in the career of a suffering God. It is the world in which ministers of the gospel, no matter how hard we try to make ourselves understood, will only rarely be understood—because the people whom we address are blind to the God and gospel to which he is bearing witness. It is a world in which, as for the Jewish leaders in our story, the message of the gospel falls upon deaf ears because of this all-pervasive belief that God and the ways of faith are ours to possess and manipulate for the sake of our own consumer ends. In a world such as this, Christians are called not to know, but to be known, not to see, but to be seen by God, who gazes upon us with a love so wide and long and deep that it surpasses all our imaginings.

We lived in deeply uncertain times. The COVID-19 is only just beginning to bite, but it is being transmitted at an exponential rate consistent with a scenario in which our capacity to respond to all who are sick or dying will be quickly overwhelmed. What we ‘see’ and ‘know’ in this scenario is not at all comforting! Now is the time to actually activate our faith in a God who loves us. To look to Christ for a word of healing. For Christ has indeed promised to heal us, but not in the way a doctor might. The salve Christ offers is far more profound. Indeed, it is salv-ation. Salvation. A medicine that can revive and remake us even if we die. So do not fear. Do not fear even death. For the last enemy is death, and it has been overcome by Christ in his resurrection. Cling to him and you will be saved. Believe in him, and you will share his glory.

All glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so now, and forevermore.

Prepared for Lent 4 2020 on the First Sunday of the COVID-19 lockdown

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.

The blessing of faith

Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22.23-31; Romans 4. 13-25; Mark 8.31-38 

In the land of Israel and of Palestine there is a war. Despite the current truce, people are being killed daily, and not only those who carry weapons. Non-combatants are losing their lives also: men, women, and children. Over these past decades since the creation of Israel as a modern state many thousands of families have been left to grieve for their loved ones in numbers that most of us would find unimaginable. I remember an interview with one of those Palestinian women who survived the 1983 massacre carried out by the “Christian Militia” in southern Lebanon, a massacre that was clearly engineered by Ariel Sharon as Israeli Defence minister. With eyes that, even 18 years later, had not done with crying, she described how the militias had entered the one-room house of her family at night. They shot her father and brother immediately, and while they were still alive but helpless, proceeded to rape her mother and herself. She was only 12 years old at the time. Then, after they had killed her mother also, the militias left. 

It is these kinds of atrocities which fuel the resolve of the suicide bombers. For many there seems no better way to honour the dead than to take from the enemy ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life’. And let’s not kid ourselves here. While the war between the Israeli military and Hamas is certainly political, and certainly ethnic, it is also, and most importantly, a religious war. It is very much a religious war: a struggle between two religious laws, the law of Moses and the law of Mohammed, each striving for supremacy over the other, each claiming the land for itself in the name of the God who gave it, and each doing so to the absolute exclusion of the other. The Israeli government has said, on many occasions, that there shall be no Palestinian state while the suicide bombings continue. Hamas, on the other hand, will accept nothing less than the total exclusion of Israel from the occupied territories and beyond. And Hamas is willing to fight for that end with the only effective weapons it appears to have, the bodies of its young. How does one resolve such a deadlock? How does one break this cycle of retributive and summary justice, especially a justice that seems so deeply religious in its culture and derivation? A difficult question, a very difficult question! But one I believe to be essentially religious and theological in character. For whether the individual combatant and his or her superiors have a personal religious commitment or not, all of them speak and think and act within a complex web of religious and theological meaning. Each of them act out their sense of vengeance and of justice within a language and code that is religious to the very core. So there will be no solution to this conflict without that solution being also a religious and theological solution.

Read in the context of this clash of two religious laws, each of them claiming an exclusionary legitimacy over the other, the letter of Paul to the Romans takes on an extraordinary poignancy. For Paul writes as a Jew who sees serious flaws in the use of religious law to make any such claims. Listen to what he says to his fellow Jews in Romans chapter 2, verses 17-24:

If you call yourself a Jew and rely on the religious law and boast of your relation to God and know his will and determine what is best because you are instructed in the law, and if you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth, you, then, that teach others, will you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You that forbid adultery, do you not commit adultery? You that abhor idols, do you not rob sacred places? You who boast in the law, do you not dishonour God by breaking the law?

And then again, in chapter 3 verses 28-30: 

For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the religious law. Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not also the God of non-Jews? Yes, of non-Jews also, for God is one; and God will make righteous the Jew on the grounds of faith and the non-Jew too, through that same faith. 

Can you hear what Paul is saying here? The difficulty with believing that one’s own religious law is superior to another’s, and therefore worth opposing to that other’s by whatever means seem necessary, is simply this: that any religious law worthy of that name is impossible to keep. Its righteous demands are way beyond the capacity of even the most devoted of worshippers. Now, if that is so, then the promotion of that law as the highest law of God, the only law, the law to which all other codes must bow in submission, ends up in a profound and tragic irony. God is actually dishonoured by the ones who promulgate that law in his name. And so the law also condemns the very one who would keep it! So what is the law for, according to Paul? Not to save, he says, but to condemn. Not to exalt the one who believes in the law over those who do not, but to humble such a person to nothing beneath the impossible demands of divine justice. And doesn’t this analysis describe the situation in Israel and Palestine so very well? The Jewish law condemns the Jews for their murder, and the Islamic law condemns the Muslims for theirs. And yet the war continues, because these respective laws are applied only and exclusively to the ones perceived as the enemy! 

There is only one way beyond this tragic situation, says Paul. And that is to relinquish all belief in the efficacy of one’s religious law, whatever its contents, to establish your superiority over another. In fact, says Paul, no human being is able to claim superiority over another because all of us are justified, made righteous and whole, not by the works prescribed by the law, but by faith in the mercy of God to all, and for all. Now, this is where Paul makes a very interesting and clever move, a move that has the potential, even today, to dissolve the power of religious conflict. He invokes the story of Abraham: how God promised that he would be the father of many nations, and that his descendents would live in the land which we today call Israel or Palestine; how Abraham was made righteous and whole not by his obedience to a religious law, which has not yet been given, but by his faith in God’s promise, even when such promises seemed no more that a foolish dream. And that is how it is for us too, says Paul, whether Jew or Gentile. None of us are made righteous and whole by our obedience to a religious law, but rather by our faith in God’s merciful promise. 

Now this is really important stuff in the midst of the religious wars in the Middle East. For the three religious traditions which hold Jerusalem to be holy are also traditions which look to Abraham as the first witness to a God who is one. And Abraham, in a cycle of stories which all three traditions regard as authoritative, is one who is justified not by his obedience to the law-giving of Moses, or of Jesus, or of Mohammad, but by his faith in the merciful promise of God! Can you hear the hope in this proclamation? Can you see the potential there for demolishing the very ground which justifies this war? If Abraham is our common father in faith, witnessing to the one God in whom we all believe, then cannot Jew and Christian and Muslim sit down at table together, not as enemies, but as siblings? If we are justified and made whole not, first of all, by our obedience to the law as we find it in our particular traditions, but by our faith in God’s mercy, than can we not share, humbly, in the wonder of that gift together? And finally, if God promised Abraham that his descendents would live in the land and become a blessing to the whole world, can we not share, as daughters and sons of Abraham, in that inheritance? For the text of Genesis 17.7 is quite clear. The promise is for all Abraham’s offspring, not for Jew alone, or Christian, or Muslim. It is for all Abraham’s seed.

So, let me encourage all of you to prayer. Let us pray, along with Jews and Muslims who share these convictions, that the stories of Abraham may be read and reread in the schools and markets of the holy land. And not only there, but in the parliaments and palaces of Iran, Iraq and Libya; in Mosul where ISIL is holed up; in the White House and at 10 Downing Street; at Kiribilli and at the Lodge; and in the homes of both Meshaal & Netanyahu. Most of all, let us pray that the story of Abraham’s faith may penetrate even into the training and education of soldiers, that they may learn the lesson at the heart of all our faiths: that Shalom, the within and between peace of God, comes only to those who are willing to die – not in conflict with one’s enemy – but to the very idea of the enemy. Only by dying to the basic principles and claims of this dark world, says Jesus, may we rise with him to the peace of our Father’s kingdom.

This homily was first preached at Ormond College on the 2nd Sunday of Lent in 2009.

God of the living

Haggai 2.1-9; Luke 20.27-38 

When the word of the Lord came to Haggai, the leading families of Judah were in serious disrepair.  Their forebears had witnessed the total destruction of their beloved city, Jerusalem, with the Temple of Yahweh as its centrepiece.  They and their children had been clamped  in chains, and then carted off to exile in Babylon.  Jerusalem had fallen, they believed, not primarily because a greedy emperor wanted their lands, but because God had abandoned them.  The people who now returned to the ruined city had grown up on a steady diet of preaching that condemned their fathers and grandfathers for their sins.  It was their failure to rule for the sake of the poorest and most vulnerable in the land, to live according to the covenant established with Moses and the great King David, that the prophets railed against most.  God had abandoned their families to destruction, so the prophets said, in exactly the same way as they, themselves, had abandoned their covenant duties toward the vulnerable and the poor.

So here the survivors live and worked, a new generation of Jewish aristocrats, earnestly seeking to make new lives.  Released from exile, they had returned to Judah to rebuild their inheritance.  The stately houses had all been repaired, the walls and the public buildings of the city also.  Economic life had begun to return, albeit slowly. Yet—and here’s a great puzzle—the great temple to Yahweh, jewel in Jerusalem’s crown, had not yet been restored.  Not one bit.  It remains, at the opening of the book of Haggai, a pile of rubble on the ground.  But why?  Now, I don’t know about you, but I would have expected the returned exiles to start work on the temple immediately, as a sign of their gratefulness to God for arranging their return!   But perhaps this assumption fails to take account of how deeply traumatising the exile has actually been?  Perhaps it fails to perceive a serious and ongoing spiritual malaise in the hearts of the people.

I put it to you that the pile of rubble at the heart of the city can indeed tell us something about the heart of its people at the time.  Although the people had indeed returned to Jerusalem, it does not necessarily follow that every single one of them was able to attribute that change in fortune to the forgiveness or care of God.  The return had been a struggle, afterall.  Having arrived, the seeding money from the Emperor Darius had been quickly spent on essential capital works to defend the city against its enemies.   But with the walls built, it had proven difficult to grow food and build up acceptable levels of trade and economic life.  No matter how hard the people worked, they could not, it seemed, reach a point of satisfaction in what they had achieved.   I quote from Haggai chapter 1: 

Consider how you have fared, declares the Lord.  You have sown much, and harvested little; you eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill; you clothe yourselves, but no-one is warm; and you that earn wages do so to fill bags with holes.

It seems that many of the people had become hard and pragmatic during their Babylonian exile.  Perhaps they had taken God’s abandonment, so eloquently versified by the prophets, as an unalterable given.   Perhaps a great many of them had decided (deep in their hearts if not as a matter for public declaration), to now make futures for themselves that did not look for God’s blessing in any way whatsoever.  Perhaps they believed that God was permanently absent or disapproving, so that the fortune of one’s family was now something one had to build on one’s own.  If that were true then, of course, there was little point in rebuilding the temple!  Why pour scarce family money and resources into worshipping a God who may not even care anymore?  Surely, if God could not be counted upon, one simply needed to get on with the hard work of securing a future for one’s family in spite of God?  Of course, few would have uttered such things publicly in Jerusalem.  Yet one suspects that this is what most of the people believed.  And their action, or inaction, regarding the public honouring of God tends to betray that fact.

Now, this practical atheism of the post-exilic Jewish leaders, has a familiar ring to it I reckon.  Like the returned exiles, most Australians say that they believe in some kind of higher power they are content to call God.  Like the returned exiles, most of our fellow Australians believe that we are here to make life as prosperous as possible for our children.  To that end, we defend our country against its enemies, and we work as hard as the returned exiles did.  But we are like the returned exiles in another way also.  We are practical atheists.  While most of us declare that God may well exist, we also believe that God’s existence or non-existence is actually rather irrelevant to the way we live our lives.  Deep in our hearts we suspect that God doesn’t actually care for us very much.  Afterall, if God cared for us, if God considered us worthy of his care, wouldn’t our lives be more satisfying than they are?  Wouldn’t they be less painful and disappointing?

So, we are not so very different, contemporary Australians and post-exilic Jews.  Who would have thought?  Because of our practical atheism, neither of us are particularly inclined to provide, out of our hard-earned resources, for any public honouring or worship of God.  We are all very aware, are we not, that most of our friends and family visit  the church for particular occasions, but they do not belong to the church in the sense of submitting their own fortunes to the will and way of God in Christ.

The word of the Lord that came to the prophet Haggai is therefore as much a word for us as it was for his contemporaries.  Allow me quote: 

Is this a time for you to live in your panelled houses, while my house lies in ruins? . . . Take courage, all you people of the land, says the Lord Build my house, for I am with you, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt.  My spirit abides among you; do not fear.  The latter splendour of this house shall be greater than the former, say the Lord of hosts: and in this place I will give peace. 

This prophecy addresses the pragmatism of practical atheists in two ways.  First, to our deep-down grief and resignation in the face of God’s absence or abandonment the prophecy speaks a word of gentle comfort.  “I have not abandoned you,” says the Lord.  “I felt betrayed and hurt and angry at your sin, but that does not mean that I have abandoned you altogether.  See, I am with you now.  My spirit is nearby, even as I have been nearby in the history of your people.”  The word of comfort in Scripture is usually associated with an encouragement to remember, to remember the ways in which God’s love and care have become tangibly real in days gone by.  “Remember what you learned from your parents,” says the Lord.  “When the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt, I rescued them and brought them into a land of their own.  When you were taken in exile, I forgave your sins and brought you back to the land of your inheritance.”  And for we who came to birth in latter days, God says, “Remember, most of all, the way I myself came to be with you in human form, to receive in my own body the full consequence of human evil; but also to show you the way of love that leads to peace.  Remember Christ hanging on a cross.  This is my loving solidarity with you in the tragic logic of your inhumanity toward one another. But remember, also, Christ risen from the grave into the bosom of God’s peace.  This is the future you may share, also, if you cling to Christ absolutely, if you allow his way to become your way.”  The word of prophecy comes first, therefore, to resist the story of abandonment with a story of God’s loving presence.

But there is a second element to the prophecy.  We noted earlier the grumbling of the returned exiles that no matter how hard they worked to secure the prosperity of their families, they were never entirely satisfied.  No matter how much they grew, produced or procured, the prosperity they sought somehow eluded them.  This is how it is, I think, with all who believe they can built a prosperous future apart from the gift and blessing of God.  Without God, you see, we are all at sea when it comes to knowing what to build.  For we do not, apart from God, understand what genuine prosperity might look and feel like.  How many people believe that keeping up with the economic fortunes of the Joneses or the Chiangs or the Rajahs will bring prosperity and peace?  How many people believe that if we work hard all our lives, we might eventually experience peace and prosperity in some kind of leisured retirement?  The prophecy of Haggai, by way of contrast, understands that prosperity has very little to do with economic security, but everything to do with Shalom, that is, with our willingness to be at peace with everything that God would give us.  Shalom is not something that we may earn by our hard work.  It is something to be received as a gift from God.  If we believe we must produce it by our energy and effort, then it shall allude us forever.  If, on the other hand, we are able to see that all the world—earth, air, fire and water—is a gift from God, then we shall perhaps be content to simply share in the common wealth of that gift with our fellow human beings.  God’s way to prosperity is, in fact, the opposite of that which is pursued by most of us.  It is to share our food and our homes with the hungry and to honour God with our praise and thanksgiving.

When a people abandons its worship of God, when the symbols of public worship (a temple or a church, for example) are allowed to fall into ruin while the symbols of private wealth (houses, cars and lots of gadgets) grow ever more glamorous, then we are in serious trouble as a culture.  For when we scramble to procure our own security, our own salvation, we finally lose the very quality that makes us human:  our capacity to be thrilled by all the wonder of the God’s gift, our capacity, in short, to be really alive and awake as human beings.  For the resurrection of Christ is not the final procurement of an economically secure future for ourselves or our offspring, as the Saducees suggested in their question to Jesus in the gospel story.  No.  The resurrection of Christ is neither a buying nor a selling, but a simple enjoyment with our brothers and sisters (of every age and tribe) of all that teaming life that God would give us, if only we could put aside our hankerings, and simply receive what is offered with thankfulness.  May God grant that it may be so, even for this Uniting Church. 

You are forgiven!

Texts: Galatians 2.15-21; Luke 7.36-8.3

In the story we just heard, Jesus does not one, but two things that no self-respecting Jewish Rabbi should ever do.  First, he tells a woman that her sins are forgiven.  Definitely a no-no, for only God can forgive sins, and in the eyes of the religious folk with whom he was eating at the time, Jesus was certainly not God!  Nor was he an ordained priest who could speak for God.  But then, while they are reeling from the shock of that first gesture, Jesus makes yet another controversial move.  He declares to the woman not only that her sins are forgiven, but also that it is her faith, faith mind you, that has saved her.  Now, this is pretty weird stuff, coming from a first century Jewish Rabbi.  Because, as every Jewish schoolboy could tell you, the only way to experience God’s salvation was to obey the law of Moses.  Indeed, some would have argued that obeying the law and salvation were exactly the same thing.  Salvation was obeying the law.

So, what was Jesus up to here?  Were these actions just a piece of stirring?  Was Jesus just the kind of bloke who liked to rouse his mates up before he told them he was joking and ordered another round of bitter?  Well, no.  What Jesus wanted to do was nothing less than to change their understanding of God.  In his view, their God was way too small-minded, way too concerned with fretting over the minutiae of human failing.  Jesus’ God, on the other hand, was one who was big-hearted, a God interested not so much in rules as in relationship.  The key question that this big-hearted God asks of humankind is not ‘have you done the right thing?’ but ‘do you trust me with your future, do you believe that I love you?’

There are two ways to understand sin, you see.  Yes ‘sin’—I know it’s not a particularly hot topic these days—but it’s kind of indispensable to Christian theology so the preacher really has no option but to talk about it.  One could see sin as breaking a set of moral rules set up by God.  You know, do not steal, do not kill, do not bear false witness against your neighbour.  That kind of thing.  In this case, sin is defined primarily as law-breaking.  There are many Christians, Jews and Muslims who hold this view of sin, even today.  But there is another, slightly more complex, way of understanding sin, and that is to see the breaking of those moral prohibitions not so much as a breaking of law, but as severing of trust in relationship.  That is to see the breaking of the moral law as symptomatic of a more foundational breakdown in the relationship between neighbours.  In this view, a person kills or steals because she no longer cares for her neighbour; or does not believe that her neighbour cares for her.  This latter view of sin is more faithful, I believe, to a genuinely New Testament faith.  And it is borne out in the story we are reading this morning.

Traditionally, the sinful woman in our story is portrayed as a prostitute, one who chose to sell her body to men in return for money.  If this is true, she must have been a very high class prostitute in order to afford the alabaster jar of ointment which she lavishes upon Jesus!  Such items were, in first century Palestine, very rare and precious.  Only the very rich could afford them.  It is likely, then, that the woman in Luke’s story is not a common prostitute but, rather more complexly, the slave or concubine of a Roman official, a woman who would have been passed around his friends and business associates as part of the hospitality and entertainment of his house.  If that is so, then it is really very unlikely that the woman ever really chose to become the ‘sinner’ that she is.  More likely is that her parents, or a former owner, sold her to the colonial invader in order to pay off their debts.  It is unlikely that she would have had any say in such a transaction, because in the first century woman had little say about anything.  Woman – and especially young girls -  were regarded by both Jews and Gentiles as chattels to be bought or sold according to the economic needs of their fathers or husbands.  Here is a woman, then, who probably never intended to break the Jewish moral code, but is forced to do so, whether she likes it or not, simply because she is caught up in a cruel and unjust economic system.

What Jesus is able to see about this woman, that his dinner-table friends are unable to see, is that while she is indeed a sinner in the formal sense—someone who breaks the moral law—in her heart of hearts what she longs for most is nothing less than the restoration of her relationship with both God and her people.  In the place where she lives and works, she is simply unable to keep the Jewish law and stay alive.  As a consequence, she suffers the judgement of her religious community, a judgement which includes the belief that God has rejected her as well.  Yet, in her heart of hearts she believes that this cannot be so.  She cannot keep the moral law.  But she does not believe that God would reject her over something she cannot do.  In her heart of hearts, she believes that God loves her, that God is merciful, that God would forgive her even if her community will not.  And it is that longing, and that belief, that gives her the courage to pour out her love upon Jesus.  For her, Jesus is clearly God’s representative, the one through whom relationship with God becomes possible again.

Now, I put it to you that we, all of us, are not so different to this woman. Most of us try to live upright lives.  We believe in the value of the moral code, but we cannot always keep it. We are caught up in economic and social systems that make us sinners even where we do not intend to be.  Like when I bought some flash new clothes at Chadstone last year.  There was nothing, absolutely nothing available in the store that was not made by slave labour in China.  And the kind of clothes I needed were not available at the op shop.  Does that mean that I am condemned by God, that I shall never share in God’s salvation?  Certainly, I broke the moral law.  And I do so every day simply by being a member of this scandalously privileged society in which I live.  Every piece of buying and selling I do rips somebody off.  Yet, I do not believe that God rejects me simply because I break the moral law.  I believe that if my intention is otherwise, if I care about God and my neighbour and long to live with them in a just and loving relationship, that God will honour my desire.  I believe that God loves me, and forgives me even though I am, objectively and by any measure, a sinner.  It is faith that saves us, as Jesus says.  Faith in the fact of God’s forgiving love.

Now, that turns around what many of us commonly understand as sin.  In the perspective of the New Testament, the real sinner is the one who thinks she or he is righteous, while the really righteous person is righteous only insofar as she or he has faith in God’s love and mercy.  For that is what Jesus teaches in the story he told the dinner guests.  The righteous person is no longer the one who does no wrong.  Rather, the righteous person is someone who knows that she stands in need of God’s mercy, and believes in her heart of hearts that God will forgive her.  For righteousness is not, for the God of Jesus Christ, ultimately about keeping the rules.  It is about trusting that you are loved and accepted even though you cannot keep the rules. 

In Galatians, the Apostle Paul says this:  that a person is not justified before God by keeping the law, but by trusting or having faith in Jesus Christ.  Through Christ, he says, we die to the demands of the law, because the law only serves to highlight our guilt.  In Christ, however, we live a life in which it is not our own righteousness that matters, but Christ’s.  Only Christ was able to live the truly righteous life that made no compromise with evil.  Only he was willing to suffer the full consequence of doing so, to be killed by evil men because he would not play the game.  Therefore the Christian is called to depend on Christ, and on Christ alone, to approach God - not in one’s own righteousness but in Christ’s.  But that takes faith, faith in the word that Christ says to the woman in Luke’s story, ‘your sins are forgiven, go in peace.’

In the end, all that that save us from this dog-eat-dog world of corruption and despair is our faith in God’s word of forgiveness and mercy.  Do you believe?  Do you trust this word and believe it with all your heart?  If you do, then live the life of faith.  Do not judge your brother or sister who sins, because you are yourself a sinner who lives from the power of God’s forgiveness.  From now on, says the apostle, ‘it is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.  The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’  Paul, it seems, actually lived his life as though he was a forgiven sinner.  We are called to do so as well.

Rejoice! Advent Hope and Humour

Texts:  Zephaniah 3.14-20; Philippians 4.4-7; Luke 3.7-18

Like most all of the lections we read during Advent, the Scriptures for today describe two kinds of reality.  First they describe the world as it is now, a world dominated by the rich, the unscrupulous and the powerful at the expense of the poor, the principled and the vulnerable.  Then they imagine or look forward to a day in which the tables are turned, a day when the poor, the vulnerable and the faithful will rejoice in God’s salvation, while their enemies are done away with forever.  In the Luke reading, for example, John the Baptist announces God’s supreme displeasure at the behaviour of the Jewish elites who governed Judea in the first half of the 1^st century.  These royal and priestly classes had chosen to collaborate with the invading Romans in order to preserve their status and wealth, even though this meant turning a blind eye to the way in which the invaders exploited and robbed the ordinary folk of their very livelihoods.  John castigates them for their poisonous hypocrisy.  Like the prophet Zephaniah before him, John warns that a “day of the Lord” is at hand, a cataclysmic day in which all their faithless and self-serving ways would be exposed, while the faithful ones, those who suffer because of the sins of these elites, would be vindicated forever.  I quote:

I baptise you with water; but one is coming after me . . .  who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

Get the gist?  The day of the Lord is like a deluge of fire.  The faithful ones are like wheat, preserved from the fire and taken to God’s own heart.  But the deceitful ones, who only want to protect themselves, are like the worthless chaff that is thrown into the fire and burned.  The outcome of that purgatorial cleansing is beautifully described in the song of praise we heard from the final part of the book of Zephaniah.  There the prophet imagines a world in which the remnant of God’s people, the lame and outcast ones who survive the punishment of their oppressors, are gathered to God in such a way that their experience of misery and shame is transformed utterly.  The song imagines a future where the people of God will praise God for ever, rejoicing in his love and mercy for all time to come. 

It’s a wonderful vision.  So wonderful that I sometimes feel that it is all too good to be true!  Of course, I have no difficultly with the part of the story that describes the evil and self-serving corruption of the elites.  Who could deny it?  At this time of year our political leaders come out with platitudes about peace on earth and the importance of defending human rights and democratic freedoms. At the same time, in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, soldiers and intelligence officers from the West are bribing, torturing, and killing local people in order to preserve and promote our economic interests – 100s of billions of dollars worth of economic interests.  Both at home and abroad, political prisoners are being denied their rights to legal representation and a fair trial, while the folk who flee these conflicts and come to our shores are being detained for up to four years while their cases are being examined.  Meanwhile, few governments in the history of post-colonial Australia has done more to erode the rights and hopes of Aboriginal people than the current government, with its suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act in the Northern Territory and other places.  Hypocrisy like this, naked hypocrisy, makes me feel sick to the stomach.  I feel angry, I feel powerless, and eventually I succumb to what some are calling “hope-fatigue.”  Bono said it all in his memorable song from 2001: 

Jesus won’t you take the time

to throw this drowning man a line

   “Peace on earth.”

I hear it every Christmastime

but hope and history just won’t rhyme,

so what’s it worth,

   this “peace on earth”?

The fact that Advent coincides with Australia’s summer festival doesn’t help the situation, for me.  As a child summer was the time when all our family friends went to the beach for a holiday.  In summer, we knew that we were poor and that neither our church nor our community really gave two hoots.  I still feel that.  It still hurts.  The feeling is compounded by all the rampant consumption that dominates our cultural landscape at this time of year.  Because of what I experienced as a child, I find it difficult to see anything in all of this consumption apart from a complete indifference to the suffering of other people.  In sub-Saharan Africa there are kids starving because they don’t have enough to eat.  In Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Columbia, kids are being sold into sex-slavery so that the rest of their families will be able to stay alive.  Even here in Australia, there are thousands and thousands of families who find it difficult to put a roof over their heads or pay the grocery bill.  Yet, each summer, middle-class Australians escape to their second or third homes at the beach and indulge in an exchange of goods which is surplus, entirely surplus, to anything they might possibility need.  Again, I feel sick to the stomach.  I feel overwhelmed at the enormity of the injustice.  In the middle of all of this nausea I simply find it difficult to believe that a day of salvation is at hand.  Very difficult.

Now, part of my anxiety about all of this is clearly emotional and psychological.  It is tied up with my experience of the world, and the narratives I create to account for that experience.  But part of the anxiety is also theological, and has more to do with a puzzle which the bible itself sets up, and puts into play.  Let me try and spell it out for you.  Here, this world:  evil, corrupt, rich getting richer, poor getting more miserable.  There, world to come:  peace, joy, no more bad guys, vindication for all who suffered at their hands.   Very great distance from here to there.  How is the distance crossed?  How do we get from here to there?  On this particular point, the “how” bit, the bible doesn’t seem to be very clear, almost as though it doesn’t actually know how.  On my worst and most cynical days, this does not inspire confidence!

Of course, the theologians have tried to fill in the gaps in the biblical witness.  Theologians like to do that.  The evangelicals say that Jesus will return with a whole army of heaven and whip the nasty people’s arses.  Then he’ll wave his kingly sceptre and the world will return to an Eden-like state in which we’ll all love each other the way that God loves us.  But this theory raises more questions than it solves.  Amongst other things, one must ask why Jesus would behave so very differently on his second visit than he did on his first.  The first time around he didn’t force anyone to do anything.  He invited, he loved, he cajoled and argued forcefully, he exampled a different way to be.  But he didn’t compel anyone to do anything.  That would have been to override the freedom we have as human being, a freedom apparently so prized by God that he allows us to use that freedom to do evil.  Wouldn’t a powerful army of arse-kickers kind’ve undermine that whole God-is-love image, God as the supreme protector of our right to choose?

“Damn right,” say the liberal theologians, “let’s attend more closely to the story as it’s actually told.”  That God became a child, one of us.  He was born in our midst, full of grace and truth.  He went about the place healing, driving out our demons, and teaching us how to love one another.  But then the rich elites got hold of him.  They tortured him and nailed him to a cross.  Sure, there was a resurrection, but it’s all rather mysterious.  Now you see him, now you don’t.  He lives on in the world as a kind of memory or spirit of the good.  Perhaps this suggests that God is like our deepest and best self?  God changes the world only when we decide to change the world.  God prompts and pricks our conscience, but refuses to do anything other than what we choose to do for ourselves: giving our second coat to someone who needs it, to pick a relevant Scriptural example.  But again, I’m really not sure that this theory solves anything much.  It makes a mockery, for instance, of all those bible passages which insist that it is not we, ourselves, who make the world’s salvation, but God alone.  By grace, the action of God, are we saved through faith, and this is the gift of God, not of human works, lest anyone should boast (Eph 2.8,9).  If the liberal theory were correct, then I would personally consider the whole hope-of-salvation thing to be no more than a cruel joke visited upon us by a God who raises our hopes and expectations, but never intends to meet them with anything real.

Well.  What’s to be done with all of this?  What am I to do with the anxiety of my lived experience?  What am I to do with the theological conundrum?  When in doubt, I have often considered it wise to take a break from all the anxiety and tell a story.  A story takes you out of yourself, and here’s a good one I came across a few years ago.

The time has come for St. Peter's annual three-week vacation, and Jesus volunteers to fill in for him at the Pearly Gates. "It's no big deal," Peter explains.  "Sit at the registration desk, and ask each person a little about his or her life.  Then send them on to housekeeping to pick up their wings."

On the third day, Jesus looks up to see a bewildered old man standing in front of him. 

"I'm a simple carpenter," says the man.   "And once I had a son.  He was born in a very special way, and was unlike anyone else in this world.  He went through a great transformation even though he had holes in his hands and feet.  He was taken from me a long time ago, but his spirit lives on forever.  All over the world people tell his story."

By this time, Jesus is standing with his arms outstretched.  There are tears in his eyes, and he embraces the old man.

"Father," he cries out, "It's been so long!"

The old man squints, stares for a moment, and says, "Pinocchio?"

This story is not an ordinary story.  It is a joke.  A joke distinguishes itself from a story as such by introducing an unexpected element into what would otherwise be all very familiar.  In this story, we expected that the old man would squint and say “Jesus?”  We were set up for that by everything that went before—the religious setting, the details about the old man’s son.  But the story transcended its own boundaries and became a joke by taking us by surprise, by shocking us with the arrival of something entirely unforeseen.  Parables are like that as well.  They subvert the rules of the game.  And the greatest parable of all is Jesus.

You see, John’s hearers expected that their messiah would come along to whip the Romans with superior military strength.  They were wrong.  And our own expectations, all these years later, are probably just as misguided.  Whether we are evangelicals who expect that Christ will change things one day by the might of his superior power, or whether we are liberals who expect that Christ is so much one of us that he is only able to help those who help themselves, we are probably all mistaken.  For the story of Christ is still in motion, and we are not privy to the punch-line.  In another part of Luke’s gospel, we are told only that we cannot know what is to happen, or how.  For the punch-line is God’s.  As Jesus shocked the Greeks with his human weakness, and scandalised the Jews by his failure and cross, so this fool from God will appear a second time.  And while we moderns may pretend to have followed the story so far, the joke, the punch-line, will surely leave us all so gob-smacked that the only response available to us will be to be astonished, to laugh, to rejoice. 

For that is what we humans do when we are genuinely surprised.  We absorb the shock, we adjust our imagination, and then we laugh!  Like Sarai at the announcement of her old-age pregnancy with Isaac.  Like the Baptist in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary came near with the Christ-child.  That is why Paul counsels the Philippians to cease their worrying and rejoice.  Stop trying to master it all with your brain, stop trying to second-guess God, he says.  Instead, surrender your concerns into God’s hands.  Relax into that surprising peace which surpasses all understanding.  The peace that is absurd.  The strange peace that we have cannot have manufactured for ourselves, because it defies every effort at human reasoning.

On my better days I see that Advent hope is a choice.  It’s about believing in the possibility of surprise.  It’s about believing that our tragic and repetitive history has an unforeseen and unpredictable punch-line which will fly in the face of everything that either the evidence or our secular reason might cause us to expect.  And that’s the hope I encourage from you as well.  The hope of a Mary of Nazareth who, in that ancient time of Advent waiting, become a bearer of the impossible to a tired and un-surprisable world.  Rejoice, people of God!  For while the night may be filled with tears, joy shall indeed come with the morning.  How, I have no idea.  But I believe it shall come.

For God Everything is Possible

Job 23.1-9, 16-17; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4.12-16; Mark 10.17-31

 
No matter whether we are rich or we are poor, there comes a time for many of us when we awake to discover that we are without what matters most, we are without God.

Job was a man who was very rich in every way. He owned land, and goods. But he was also rich in the joys of family, whom he loved and they him. He was also rich, it seems, in what might be called ‘moral goods’ or, in middle-class speak, ‘brownie points’. He was renowned for his honesty in business dealings and his charity to those in need. Yet it was not until all of this was taken from him that he came to see that although he possessed all things, he did not possess God. Let me quote from chapter 23 of the book that bears Job’s name:

If only I knew where to find God; if only I could go to his dwelling . . . But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him. 

The rich young man who comes to Jesus in the story from Mark’s gospel is in many ways the same as Job. He is a wealthy man when it comes to lands and goods. But he, too, is wealthy in the ways of the moral law. ‘All these commandments I have kept since I was a boy’ he tells Jesus. Yet, despite his wealth in all these things, he comes to Jesus because he is aware that something is missing. ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ he asks. The rich young man is different to Job in that he still, at the point we encounter him here, possesses his material wealth. Yet he is the same as Job in possessing his integrity, his moral uprightness. And he is the same as Job is what he does not, apparently, possess: God. For that is what ‘eternal life’ apparently meant for this young man. To possess all that God possesses. To ‘inherit’ the very life of God that can never be lost or stolen away. To possess such life as God possesses it: absolutely, and without any danger of loss or corruptibility.

So. Whether we are rich or poor, for many of us there comes a time when we awake to discover that we are without what matters most, we are without God. I say ‘for many of us’ because I am aware that there are a great many people today who never come to this awareness at all. That is not to say that there are not a great many existential crises out there. They are everywhere! It is simply to say that the emptiness a great many of us feel is rarely understood, anymore, to be about the lack of God. For most, their existential crises are about a seeping away of meaningfulness in what we do each day, but that is about as far as the analysis gets. That a loss of meaning may also signal a lack of God is something that Christians and Jews and Muslims can talk about, because we live inside a language and culture – a ‘house of being’ as Heidegger said – which names what human beings need more than anything else by the name of ‘God’. God is the name to which all names point, the desired which all desires ultimately allude to. God is the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field, the one thing necessary to life in all its fullness.

So, for we Christians, the experience of awaking to God’s apparent absence can be a very scary thing indeed. If we do not feel God’s presence and experience God’s blessing, then what is life worth? If God seems to have disappeared from the stage, then what are we to conclude? That God doesn’t care for us, or that God is dead? Or perhaps Professors Freud and Dawkins are right: God does not exist, God is no more than a cultural construct, a product of our needy, infantile, imaginations? Well, in the face of the experience to which we refer, that is indeed one way to proceed. But it is somewhat reductionist, and it suffers from the precisely the kind of cultural captivity that it accuses the believer of having – in this case, a rather unquestioning acceptance of the culture of modernity. Furthermore, it is not my way. My way is interested in what the scriptures have to say about the matter.

What today’s scriptures have to say about the experience of God’s disappearance or absence can be summarised in two ways. First, that the experience of God’s absence is more apparent than real. For both Job and the rich young man had over-identified God with the world of things and of achievements, that is, with those dimensions of life one may possess or use or control. In both cases, it was the loss of the same that brought on the crisis: in the case of Job, an actual loss; for the rich young man, the fear of such loss. For when Jesus invites the young man to sell all he has and give it to the poor, he turns away. Clearly he cannot see that possessing eternal life, possessing God, is something rather different to possessing or using or controlling things. For God cannot be possessed or used or controlled like material goods or brownie points can be possessed and used and controlled. The Jewish and Christian tradition about idolatry makes this clear. If we identify God with such things, then we have not identified God. We have created an idol instead – a false god which is not God but merely an extension of ourselves. And this is what Job and the rich young man had done. They had made their possessions and their achievements their god, and thus when these things were lost (or, in the case of the young man, when Jesus suggests that they ought to be lost) they also lose their god. Instant existential crisis ensues.

This loss of God is therefore more apparent than real. When we over-identify God with a comfortable, easy, life where things go pretty much the way we would like them to go, then the loss of such things can feel like the loss of God. But it is not. Indeed, for much of the Christian tradition, the loss or (more positively) the refusal of such things is, in fact, the precondition of really finding God. Or, to put it another way (and here we are moving into the second of our summaries) the de-identification of God with what we can possess or use or control becomes the first step in a path which realises that it is not God who is present to us, on our terms and according to our desires, but God who is present to us, under God’s terms and according to God’s desires.

Listen at what Job starts to understand in the wake of his losses: ‘But God knows the way that I take; when God has tested me, I shall come forth as gold’. And listen to what Jesus says to his disciples after the young man has turned away: ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God . . . With humankind this is indeed impossible, but for God all things are possible’. What is being taught us, in both instances, is this: that God desires to find us, even when we have apparently lost God. In the love of God, it is God’s desire that through such losses we shall discover that it is not God whom we have lost, but only the idols that keep us from God; that God can do in us and for us what we could not, in a million years, do in and for ourselves: create in us the life that is only God’s to give, the life that is full of joy, and peace and healing, a spring that quenches our thirst and a bread that finally satisfies. So there is an indispensable passage that all of us must pass through if we are to find the life that God is always near to give, a passage that St John of the Cross called the ‘dark night of the soul’ and Mark’s gospel calls, simply, ‘taking up one’s cross’. It is about the putting away of idols and the surrendering of our need to possess and use and control every damned thing.

Lest this all seem too hard, remember that God himself has walked this way before us in the person of Jesus Christ. In Christ the figure of Job as the innocent sufferer comes to its genuine fulfillment. The letter to the Hebrews speaks of him as one who became in every way like his human brothers and sisters, a high priest tempted in every way like us, and experiencing the apparent abandonment of God just as we do. The appearance of Psalm 22 in today’s lectionary is a reminder of this. But it reminds us, also, that Christ did not give up his faith in the one true God, any more than the Psalmist did. He continued to trust himself to the one who saves the wretched, finally surrendering himself into his Father’s hands and forging a path for we, as fellow human beings, to imitate and follow. So, in Christ, we know God as who knows the experience of the loss of ‘God’ from the inside. God is therefore a sympathetic God, a God who knows our weakness and encourages us to keep on walking by faith.

In fact, according to Mark there are consolations for the people of God who are able to surrender their idols to God. Listen to what Jesus says to those disciples who were willing to leave everything else in order to follow him:

Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age - houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions - and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first. 

According to Mark, whomever has surrendered their false gods – whether material wealth or a certain kind of righteousness in the eyes of our families or peers – will receive them back again in an even greater measure. Not, this time, as a reward that necessarily follows from our righteousness or hard work. Not this time as those things that can be mistaken for God but which are really just extensions of our own desire. No, following the renunciations of the ‘dark night’ they can be finally received as the gifts of sheer grace that they really are. Gifts to enjoy and give thanks for. Not things to possess and use and control. Gifts to be held lightly and to share liberally with our neighbours in the spirit of the grace which they now represent. So take heart. God is not dead or departed. God is near to give us his very self. And that is everything, everything that God can give!

Garry Deverell