Jesus the Fire of God

Texts: Exodus 3.1-12; Psalm 46.4-11; 2 Peter 3.3-16; John 8.12, 28-30, 54-59

As we wind our way toward the conclusion of this ‘Season of Creation’ next Sunday, with its celebration of Saints Clare and Francis of Assisi, the resources provided by the Uniting Church and, indeed, the global church, go missing in action. There are no specific liturgical resources provided for today, and no suggestions for a theme. That being so, I’ve decided to lead you on a pathway that begins and ends with fire.

Perhaps the oldest story still in human memory is not from the bible, but from the songlines of multiple Aboriginal nations, stretching from the Yupan-guthi on Cape York to the Whadjuk in Perth. It is the saga of seven beautiful sisters who come to earth from the stars and are chased by a mischievous ancestral spirit from the very moment of their arrival. To evade the mischievous spirit, they use the magic of fire—the essence of their creative power—to create hiding places and shelters all over the continent of Gondwana. Their flight forms much of the landscape we know as the Great Dividing Range and both the southern and western deserts. Eventually the sisters turn back into the pure flame of their true forms and return to sky as a constellation of stars. There they are still pursued by the mischievous spirit, the morning star, across the night sky.

This old, old story has much wisdom to share. It tells us that fire is both beautiful and creative. It is beautiful, because it lights up the dark and draws us to itself. Its warmth and its light make us feel as home.  Fire is also creative. With fire, we can transform raw ingredients into tasty meals. With fire we can bend and melt metals, forging them into new forms. With fire, we can farm the landscape of Australia through ‘cool’ burning and make it fruitful, as my kin have been doing since the seven sisters shared their secret fire with us.  We all need fire. It is the divine warmth and light around which we gather as community. And it is the divine power which makes and remakes the land and skyscapes on which we all depend for life. As Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, ‘nature’s bonfire burns on’ even as we humans seek to darken its blaze. 

It is not at all surprising, then, that the divine appears to the ancestors of the Jewish people as fire, also. The call of Moses, as we read it just now in the book of Exodus, begins when he strays onto the mount of God and sees a bush that is burning but without being consumed. From these flames a voice is heard, identifying this fire as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a God who has heard the cries of God’s people under the enslavement of the Pharoahs and has ‘come down’ to deliver them to a wide and spacious land, filled with milk and honey. Here we learn, amongst other things, that the God of the Hebrews, as with the seven sisters of primordial dreaming, is a fire who both draws people to Godself and also transforms them by giving them a mission and a purpose in the world. God is the Holy Fire who provides us a home. God is also the fire that leads us out to share that sense of home and freedom with many others.

Of course, the road to freedom is not entirely straight forward. There are many dangers along the way, many enemies who would prevent us from becoming the free people God would call us to be. That is why the Psalm for today imagines God as one who must sometimes become a fierce and consuming fire in order to protect the people of God. One might imagine, here, that fire is transformed into a weapon of war, as it is transformed in a thousand and one Hollywood epics retelling the terrible deeds of both ancient and modern worlds. But no. That is not what the Psalmist imagines. For him, God is a fire who actually burns the weapons of war so that they can no longer to do harm. Here wars are ended not by using fire as a weapon against other weapons, as in your standard arms race, but as the substance which makes war impossible in the first place. God as a consuming fire, a fire which transforms violence and abuse into nothing. God as a still-point around which we are called to be still, ourselves. To stop our bickering, to deescalate our violent ambitions and share, instead, the gift of our common home in God. Oh, that the warriors of our world would learn this lesson. Oh, that our politicians might learn to be still and wonder at the consuming fire of divine love, that would have us surrender our weapons and look at each other with joy and welcome.

Which brings us to the story of Jesus, whom the evangelist John calls the ‘light’ or the ‘glory’ of the divine amongst us, here in the midst of our communities and our world.  For when the enemies of Jesus seek to cut him down to size, he claims to have been around since well before the patriarch Abraham. He claims to be divine, the very same ‘I am’ who addressed Moses as fire in the burning bush and led the people through the wilderness as the ‘Shekinah’, or glory, of the pillar of fire. For Christians, Jesus is indeed our light. He is the campfire in our midst who holds the darkness as bay. He is the glory who lights our way through the wilderness our lives. Who helps us to find shelter, a home and hearth, that is warm and nourishing and welcoming for everyone. He is fire who consumes in us all that is false and untrue and sets us free to be real and genuine. He is the great transformer, the fire of alchemy that can turn us from being afraid into being comfortable with who we are and what we are called to do in the world. He can turn our mourning into dancing and our spears into pruning hooks. He can make all that is dead alive and fresh once more.

With this capacity for alchemy and transformation, Jesus remind us Aboriginal people of the Old People who made our world and gave us the law. We recognise him as an ancestral spirit, like the seven sisters, who visits the world with the gift of divine fire. So, Jesus is as much a friend to us Aboriginal people, as he is to you settlers. A gift from the heavens for warmth, and for home, and for light when all the other lights of the world appear to be going out.  Let us look to him and his ways for wisdom when we can find none of our own.

Garry Worete Deverell

Season of Creation 4

South Sydney Uniting Church

Sept 29, 2024

‘Hold not thy peace at my tears’

Texts: Psalm 39; Isaiah 2.2-4; Acts 10.34-43

If you’re anything at all like me, you may wonder at God’s apparent inaction in the face of genocidal mania. When one group of people decides, whether out of trauma from their own histories or because of sheer racism, that entire populations of other people deserve little else but starvation and death, what, exactly, is God up to? Why, as the Psalmist intimates in verse 13 of tonight’s lection, does God hold God’s 'peace' whilst suffering is rampant?

The Psalmist’s phrase, ‘hold not thy peace at my tears’, brings our study of peace to a rather more uncomfortable place than we have been before, in this series. For here we are encouraged to consider the ways in which the word ‘peace’ may come to signify, in certain settings, a fundamental indifference to the suffering of others. 

Take, for example, the experience of the Palestinian peoples at this moment. They suffer, they cry out in pain at the wholesale destruction of their society and the death of their children. They cry out even in the streets of Melbourne. But the reaction of the global north is largely one of indifference. In the face of starvation, our governments cut off aid. In the face of infanticide, our governments cancel visas. In the face of genocide, our political leaders keep their ‘peace’. 

Not that indifference is out of character for the nations of the global north. For the wealth and power of these nations is largely founded on the subjugation and subsequent exploitation of the global south.  You cannot unleash suffering on that kind of scale unless you have a particular talent for indifference.

The theological question remains, though. For those of us who would like to believe in a better power, a divine power, a power more loving and caring than most of our governors, what are we to make of God’s apparent inactivity in the face of all this pain? Does the indifference of our governments actually mimic an indifference from God?

The Christian answer is ‘no’, absolutely not. God is not at all indifferent to our suffering. God does not, in fact, hold God’s ‘peace’ whilst the whole world is burning.  Here I would like to draw your attention to the preaching of St Peter in the Acts of the Apostles:

God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the holy spirit and with power; he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him . . . they put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day. (Acts 10.38-40)

The God you meet here is not one who is ‘at peace’ with suffering, but one who acts to do something about suffering. God chooses a human being, one Jesus of Nazareth, to be the sign or icon in the world of what God is doing. Jesus goes about doing God’s work, making God’s compassion real and practical. He does good. He heals the sick, he welcomes the outcasts and the victims of powerful but indifferent men, he strengthens the weak and all who live in fear. He casts out the various traumas that bind and hold them in chains. 

By doing so, Jesus of course attracts the ire and then, finally, the murderous intent of those who own his society, those who benefit the most from the status quo.  He is captured, tortured, and put to death for treason.  But that is not the end. At just the point at which Jesus’ divine mission appears to have been put down for good, God vindicates his cause and raises both it and him from the dead. His disciples then carry his mission forward. His spirit so animates what they are doing that the divine mission can ever after be located not only with Jesus, but also with all who seek to follow him, to imitate his ways.

The point here, if you didn’t catch it, is that God acts, that God unfolds a compassionate influence in the world on behalf of the poor, the broken and the marginalised. Not by magic, the waving of a divine wand. And not, indeed, through the application of a naked and irresistible power, such as that attached to empire. If the divine acted like that, then God would be little more than a bully, another instance of the global north's exercise of power, which so regularly kills and maims and destroys. To be different to that, God must exercise God’s power not by edict, but by persuasion. Not by force, but by love. Not by legislation, but by parable. To be God, as the theologian Karl Barth famously argued, God must act like Jesus.

So what does that look like in our world, the world that we much live in? How does God turn ‘swords into ploughshares’ and ‘spears into pruning hooks’, as the oracle from Isaiah puts it (2.4)? Like this. God invites human being like you and I to place the story of Jesus at the centre of both our social and ecological imaginations, thus giving us the opportunity to act as Jesus would act and to speak as Jesus would speak. For the gospel of Jesus is as a stranger and a sojourner in the world. Without our bodies, it can never gain traction or weight in the world. It can never become real. Without our assent, it can never leave its mark. God therefore needs us to be vessels of the gospel. Such is God’s lowliness. Such is God’s love. 

The gospel leaves it mark at precisely the point at which we need it. And our needs can be vastly different. If we are beneficiaries of all that the global north has accumulated from the poor of the world, placing Jesus at the centre calls us to live simply and to share what has come to us with those who have nothing. To crucify ourselves for the sake of the downtrodden. If, on the other hand, we are poor or ill or broken inside by all that has befallen us in life, then making Jesus central calls us to embrace the power of the resurrection to be all that we can be, to stand up and take pride in who we are and claim both the respect and the justice that God desires for all creatures.

So, whomever you are, and no matter how you think about the ways of the divine, hear this, please: God is not indifferent. In Jesus we learn that God is irrevocably for us and for the world. So don’t you be indifferent either. Do something. Act. Out of love for both yourself and others, do something good. And keep doing it. For the way to a real and genuine peace goes not by the way of indifference, but by an active participation in both the cross and resurrection of Jesus. This is the way. The way of Christ.

Garry Deverell

Evensong, St Paul’s Cathedral

Lent 5, 2024

Abiding in God's love

 Texts: Acts 8. 26-40; Psalm 22.25-31; 1 John 4.7-21; John 15. 1-8

Just now we heard from the reading of Scripture that our love for God is shown and demonstrated in the love we have for our fellow human beings.  John says to us: 

Those who say they love God and hate their brothers and sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God who they have not seen.  The commandment we have from God is this:  those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

Now, while I’m certain that everyone here would want to affirm that with all their hearts, I nevertheless find myself wondering why so many of us in the Christian Church  - including the Prime Minister, apparently - seem not to care particularly for people beyond the circle of our immediate friends and family.  On the one hand, we genuinely believe that our love of God is also a love of neighbour, while on the other we trace an unconscious circle about us, a circle which divides those worthy of being regarded as ‘neighbours’ from those who are not. Despite years of Christian teaching, I suspect that most of us still believe that the ‘brothers and sisters’ the apostle calls us to love are none other than those people with whom we are most comfortable.  Our closest friends and relations.

But the apostle has something rather more expansive in mind. Very early on in the Church's history, when the Christian community was composed entirely of ethnic Jews, it was forced to ask the same question that we are asking this morning, ‘who are our brothers and sisters?’  Luke’s story about Phillip and the Ethiopian official answers that question in a way that radically undermined the Jewish status quo, and threatens to do the same to our own.  We are told that an angel came to Phillip and commanded him to head south from Jerusalem to Gaza.  On the way he meets an Ethiopian eunuch who is treasurer for the Queen.  Clearly this man is sympathetic to Jewish faith, and has probably been to Jerusalem to participate in one of the Jewish festivals . . . but there is a problem.  According to the Scribal law of the time, a male person could only become a Jew through circumcision.  But this man was a eunuch, that is, his genitalia had been completely removed, probably as a child in slavery.  So, although he believed in Yahweh and loved the Hebrew Scriptures, and though he clearly desired to be part of the great company of God people, he could not.  The Scribal law had effectively constructed a huge wall in front of people like him, with a sign on the gate which said ‘Keep out, God does not want you’.   

Imagine this man’s joy, then, when Phillip shares a new interpretation of the Jewish faith with him.  Beginning with the Isaiah’s account of a suffering servant who, like the eunuch, was denied the chance of passing on his name to future generations, Phillip spoke of a God who vindicated the servant’s just cause by raising him from the dead so that his name, and his cause, would live forever.  And then Phillip invited the eunuch to become part of God's people, not through circumcision, but through faith in Jesus and the Christian rite of baptism, in which we die to worldly assessments of who we are and what we are worth, and are raised with Christ to the right hand of God!  In the preaching of Philip the man hears about a rather different God, a God who loves and welcomes everyone who believes, no matter what their ethnic or religious heritage (or, indeed, the state of their genitalia!).  And in the background of the story Luke, the theological innovator, is telling his hearers that because God love those outside the circle, so should they.  And so should we.

However . . .  like so many things in life, this is easier said than done. I think it has to be frankly admitted that it is very difficult to move with genuine love and concern beyond our own circle, the circle of our own comfort.  If we have grown up with a particular way of living life, and thinking about the meaning of our lives, it can be very threatening to be exposed to other ways of life, to other ways of thinking.  We feel safe amongst those who know us and understand not only our language, but also our basic assumptions about what is important and what is not.  So much so that when, on the odd occasion, we find ourselves bumping into people who look and speak differently to us, and who clearly have quite another set of values to us, we become quite naturally uncomfortable, or even afraid.  Why? Because the existence and perseverance of these ‘other’ ways, these ‘other’ people, implicitly calls into question our own ways, our own assumptions about life.  As a consequence, our foundations may feel less steady. 

Alongside that, psychologists tell us that in modern life, where we’ve all been seduced into tearing around all the time, we have significantly less energy for engaging with people who are different to us.  We tend to conserve our energy by sticking to interaction with a small, stable group of family and friends.  Rarely do we find the energy to move beyond that circle.  And when we do, the shock of the new is all the more a shock because we are tired, and therefore more vulnerable to having our foundations rocked.  No wonder we stick to what we know.  No wonder we stick to who we know.

For all these reasons and more, I have a great deal of empathy with any who say to me, ‘I haven’t the time or the energy to move beyond my own circle of friends, I haven’t the time or the energy to engage with other ways of worshipping God or thinking about the meaning of my life’.  I understand that.  I know that it is difficult and scary and energy-zapping to do so.  Its like asking people to break out of cocoon, or to leave the safety of our mother’s womb.  Yet . . .  this is precisely what God calls us to do.  God says ‘If your really knew me, if you really had my love down deep inside of you, then you'd want these 'others' to share in that love too.   And you'd be willing to open yourselves to the rich ways in which my life is manifested in their strange and beautiful ways . . .’

Today's lections challenge us to so locate ourselves in this love of God for those beyond the circle, that we absorb God's own compassionate drive, and own it for ourselves.  There is an interesting interplay in the passages from gospel and epistle between the language of abiding in God and the language of being sent beyond the circle to ‘bear much fruit’.  The love of God is described as a love which is not self-interested or self-directed.  Rather, it is the kind of love which looks upon the other, the world of people and their sins, with compassion.  The Father sends the Son into the world to be its saviour.  Yet even there, in the mist of the smeared, bleared world of darkness, betrayal and death, even in this place so very far beyond the circle of God's presence and power, the Son yet continues to abide with the Father, and teaches his people to abide with the Father as well.  How marvellous!  Here John is teaching us that abiding in God's love is not about locking yourself in a safe place and feeling the warmth, but actually taking that safe place with you beyond the circle, into the land of the 'other' which is not safe.  

The image of the vine and the branches is instructive.  The branches of a vine can grow a very long way from their source.  They are ‘sent out’ from the source in order to be fruitful, and they cannot be fruitful unless they are sent.  Yet even in their great distance from the vine, in the act of bearing fruit, they are nevertheless connected with the vine in a vital way.  Without this connection, they will die, they will bear no fruit.  So it is with us.  God sends us out beyond the circle to bear the fruit of love and justice in a world which has ceased to believe that these are possible.  It is not safe outside the circle.  Yet it is safe.  Safe because we carry the love of God with us, and the perfect love of God is powerful.  Powerful enough to cast the fear from our hearts and disarm our enemies.  It is the power of the resurrection, which is stronger even than death.

So let us examine our lives.  Are we able to go out from the comfort and safety of our own circle of friends, and our own ways of making meaning, into the alien territory of those who need God's love most of all?  Are we able to befriend the person from a different ethnic group, with a view of the world which is harsher and less privileged than ours?  How deep is our faith?  How much do we trust in the abiding love of God - a love which promises to hold us in life, even in the midst of alien terrain?  While it is absolutely true that God ask us to do an impossible thing, God seems not to be as troubled as we are by impossibilities.  God has promised that if we stay connected to him, then he will give us the power we need to do that impossible thing.  I am certain that if we abide with God in prayer, and in the reading of the Scriptures, and in the faith and communion of the church, then we will find that God also abides with us as we risk moving out from our comfort-zones into more difficult territory.  I hope this is a lesson the Prime Minister is able to learn as well.

It is appropriate, I think, that in this age of compassion-fatigue and economic rationalism that John the Elder should have the last word:  ‘Little children, let us love not in word or speech alone, but in truth and action’.

Garry Deverell

Easter 5

Coca-Cola and Christ

Texts:  Jeremiah 23.1-6; Luke 1.68-79; Colossians 1.11-20; Luke 23.33-43

Today is the festival of Christ the King.  It is the last Sunday, and the last word, of the Christian year.  It serves to remind us that, in the end, God will be sovereign over all things. The English mystic, Julian of Norwich, captured the essence of that affirmation when she said, 'all will be well and all things shall be well'.  Now . . .  if you pause to reflect for a moment, you'll realise how laughably audacious that message appears to be.  In the middle of economic meltdown, wars and rumours of wars, in the middle of horrific poverty and environmental crisis . . . 'all shall be well and all things shall be well'?

Please, tell me if I'm wrong, but I would have thought that it was not God who was directing the fate of the world, but multi-national corporations like Coca-cola.  And I'm being absolutely serious here.  The Coca-cola Company is amongst the most powerful forces in the world today.  It owns and controls more subsidiary food and drink companies than any other.  It employs more people and has a greater cash-flow than many governments.  But what is more significant is the power Coca-cola has over people's hearts and minds.  You see, Coke was the first to create not just a product, but a need.  None of us actually need Coca-cola.  It's a sugary soft-drink with almost no nutritional value at all.  But if you go into the poorest village of India and ask people what you can do for them on a hot day, they are more than likely to ask for a Coke.  Before Coke came along, industries would create products to fulfil the needs of already-existing markets.  But with Coke, something quite new came into being.  Through the power of advertising, Coke actually began to produce the markets themselves.  To create needs that weren't there before.  The need for a sugary cola drink.  A tailor-made product to fulfil a tailor-made need.

Coca-cola's advertising is very, very effective.  It is omniscient.  It is everywhere.  If you're a young person these days, it's almost impossible to feel like you're having a good time unless you have a coke in hand.  Coke is the symbol of youthfulness and vitality.  It's also the symbol of western freedom.  I can do anything I want.  I can be anything that I want.  The Coca-cola market-researchers are very, very clever.  In the last few years they have even tried to tap into the renewed interest in things spiritual.  They present Coke as the pathway into other worlds, the elixir of the gods which can keep you forever young and deliver you from the boredom and tedium of everyday life.  With Coke, life can be an adventure with mystery and intrigue.

The Coca-cola company has used its power very subtly.  But the effects are devastating.  The people of Mexico City are very poor.  They have difficulty finding the money to buy enough food to maintain a good standard of health.  Yet they drink more Coca-cola than the whole of Australia put together.  Why?  Because they have been brainwashed by advertising.  I might be hungry, but if I'm drinking Coke, things can't be too bad.  Note, also, that the Coke company has a rather appalling record when it comes to labour policy.  Most of its operations these days are in the two-thirds world.  Impoverished workers are paid pittance to produce the sugary stuff.  They are hired and fired at will, with little or no compensation or redundancy measures in place.  Workers will therefore do pretty much anything for the company in order to keep their jobs.  Consider, too, that the Coke Company  is a large contributor to the environmental crisis that we now find ourselves in.  Huge tracts of rainforest have been removed, in some of the world's poorest countries, to make way for sugar plantations which supply the Coke juggernaut.  Clearing the forests has led to climate change, an extreme shortage of both land and firewood for subsistence farmers, water shortages, and the kind of landslides that regularly occur in places where land-clearing has become extreme.

Add to all that the capacity of Coca-cola to silence its western critics.  Not by the crude means you can get away with in the two-thirds world.  But by throwing around the sponsorship dollar.  An example.  The United Methodist Church in the United States, a church whose rhetoric for social justice is very impressive, tends not to say anything about Coca-cola because Coke contributes a very large sum of money to the running of one of its principal seminary at Emory University in Atlanta.  Now, if the church can be so easily pacified, governments even more so.

In a world run by companies like Coca-cola, where is the sovereignty of God.  How can all things be well, when the world is so obviously coming to grief?  Well, the very same questions were being asked on a hill outside Jerusalem, a little over 2000 years ago.  There, on a Roman cross, hung the man many had hoped would turn things around for the Jewish people.  He had been hailed as the Messiah, the chosen one of God, who would rescue the people from domination and poverty at the hands of the Roman invaders.  But now that particular dream lay in tatters.  There he hung, between earth and heaven, bleeding from the nails in his hands and the scourge of the whip.  Where was God at this moment?  Where was the power of God?  Why didn't God come down from heaven and nuke all those whom had put Jesus up there?  Why didn't God take back the world from the powers of darkness by mounting a counter-invasion?  Why didn't God make things right?

The words of Jesus on the cross give some clues as to why God didn't, and why God doesn't, do such things.  When the soldiers nail him there, Jesus says 'Father, forgive them.  They don't know what they're doing'.   God, you see, is not in the habit of forcing people to do what they are not inclined to do.  God is the maker of that most treasured of human qualities - freedom.  The capacity to do good, or to do evil.  The capacity to love or to hate.  The capacity to create good things, or to destroy.  The trouble with freedom is that all things can very easily come to grief.  And they did for Jesus.  When God created human freedom, God knew that God himself would eventually be caught up in what human beings do.  That God would eventually be nailed to a cross.  But he did it anyway.  And he did it out of love.  Out of love, God is willing to submit to our freedom.  Out of love, God is willing to forgive, and to suffer the consequences of our foolishness.  Out of love, God is crucified with the poor of India, and the disappeared of Pinochet's Chile, and the murdered priests of El Salvador.  And, out of love, God is willing to forgive them all.

You see, the power of God to be sovereign in the world is very different to that of Coca-cola or any of the other multinational powerbrokers.  And it is different to the power currently being wielded by the Synod of Victoria and Tasmania over other councils of the church.  God's reign of peace will come, not as a result of forceful or manipulative practices, but by the subtle and pervasive power of love.  The power of passive resistance.  The power of martyrdom and of prayer.  Christ himself is the trail-blazer in this regard.  He loved the poor.  He healed the sick.  He was a veritable presence of God for the little ones of his time.  And when he was crucified, he did not remain that way.  Somehow he rose to new life.  Not life as it had been, life in the shadow of death.  But life in all its fullness.  Life lived in the peace and communion of God.  The rumour of God, then, has never been put down.  It remains the strongest power in the world.  It whispers in the ears of political leaders.  It challenges the bullying practices of companies like Coca-cola and the Uniting Church.  It beckons to us each time we come to the place of dread, when we realise that life according to the vision of the advertisers is not all its cracked up to be.  One day, we believe, the rumour will cease to be a rumour.  That which has whispered in our hearts will be proclaimed from the rooftops.  Everyone will know that Jesus is the king.  And his glory will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.

This homily was recently adapted from a sermon first preached at Devonport Uniting Church in 1998.

Prayer and love

Texts:  Amos 7.7-17; Psalm 82; Colossians 1.1-14; Luke 10. 25-37

Today I want to share with you a great puzzlement of mine, a puzzlement which arose from a particular set of historical circumstances, circumstances which may well have shaped my life and thinking more deeply and profoundly than almost any-thing, or any-one, else.  'Why is it', I ask myself, 'why is it that the Beatles released ‘All You Need is Love’, that song of all songs, and then, and then broke up as a group?' . . .   It is a puzzle, is it not, this predilection in human beings for separating those things that God intended to be together.  I mean, let's think about it for a moment.  Love and sex . . .   Work and vocation . . .   Christmas and being happy . . .  Toil and rest . . .   Lennon & McCartney . . .   Hey, even Michael Jackson and being an African American!   I mean, what is it with us?  What is it that makes human beings want to pull things apart?  Why does the experience of equilibrium, balance, harmony scare us so? 

Now, we're a bunch of Christians here today, and we are just as prone to blowing things apart as anyone else.  Perhaps even more so.  Because the people of God have an alarmingly persistent capacity to blow apart the most fundamental relationship of them all, the chord that sets the tone for everything else, simply this:  being with God . . .   and doing God's work.  Being with God . . .  and doing God's work.

Picture the people the prophet Amos was dealing with.  These were seriously mixed-up people, I'm telling you.  Amos complains that the leading citizens of Israel, the priests of Yahweh amongst them, had become traffickers in human flesh.  'They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals', he says.  'They grind the poor into the dust' he says.  But all the while, as this is going on, what are these same leaders up to?  Well.  They're keeping up appearances aren't they!  They're heading out to the holy places of Bethel and Gilgal to offer their sacrifices and their songs of praise to Yahweh!  Needless to say, God is not impressed.  In fact, he's very, very, upset.  'I hate, I despise your festivals; I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . .  Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.  But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream'.  Now, fairly obviously, the religious folk of Amos' time had a problem with hypocrisy. The leaders of Samaria had separated the worship of God from the doing of God's justice.  They thought they could fill their cupboards with the produce of other people's labour and still turn up to church; they imagined that God wouldn't be overly concerned with their slavery auctions so long as they continued to tithe.  They were wrong!  That's fairly obvious in hindsight.  But have you ever considered how it is that they came to lose their way in the first place, how it was that deeply religious people turned into colonizers and slave-traders? 

To ask that question is to step down from the high pulpit of the prophet and ask why, for example, Martin Luther King, hero of faith, was unfaithful to his wife on more than one occasion.  Or why the church missions, committed to the welfare of Aboriginal people, colluded in the removal of children not just from their parents and communities, but from each other as well.  To ask such questions is to withdraw the pointing finger of hindsight and turn, instead, toward the mirror of one's own self.  ‘How is it that I, a person committed to Christ and his work, do the things that I do and say the things that I say?  Because, surely, many of those things that I do, and fail to do, are not after the way of Jesus, whom I claim to follow!’

Let me suggest an answer to that question, an answer that comes from my reflections not only upon Scripture and upon the behaviour of others, but also upon my own life, my own behaviour, my own sin.  Christian people become instruments of oppression and abuse when they cease to pray.  Let me repeat that.  Christian people become agents of abuse when they cease to pray.

'Wait a minute', I hear you say, 'those people in Amos' time prayed a lot.  They were always in church praying and singing hymns.  Yet, it obviously had no effect on what they did.  So how do you figure that?'  Well, let me suggest to you that there's a great big difference between making a lot of noise in church and praying.  Indeed, making a lot of noise is often (but not always) the very opposite of prayer.  But rather than rush at what I mean here too quickly, I'd like to put on the brakes for a moment and invite us, instead, to attend to that parable which we head from Luke's gospel earlier on.  And to hear it, perhaps, in a different key than you've heard it before.

I want to make just two observations about the parable this morning.  There's much more that could be said, but this morning I want to limit myself to just these two things.  First, did you notice the question the lawyer didn't ask Jesus?  You'll remember they'd been speaking about the two great commandments: 'Love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself'.  'Do this, and you will live', Jesus had said.  And then the lawyer asked 'Who is my neighbour?’, which is a perfectly fine question, except that it betrays a fatal kind of arrogance about the side of the equation he perhaps should have asked about.  'Who is my God?'  This lawyer, you see, was a faculty member of the local theological school.  You know, the prestigious one.  In Jerusalem.  On the hill.  Next to the temple.  He knew all about God.  Or thought he did.  He'd probably written several books on the topic.  So why ask about something he already knew everything about? 

Second, did you notice that Jesus didn't actually answer the lawyer's question—the one he asked, as opposed to the one he didn't ask?  The lawyer asked 'who is my neighbour?', and Jesus replied not with a definition of the neighbour, but with a story about how neighbours behave - about the being of a neighbour, if you like.  Now why would he do that?  Why would he deliberately sidestep the lawyer's question like that?  I submit to you that the story of the good Samaritan is actually an answer to the question the lawyer failed to ask:  'Who is God?'  And I submit that Jesus told the story because this lawyer, despite all his learning and his knowledge, did not know the answer to that question.  That God is like a Samaritan.  God is the stranger who has mercy on us, even though we are God’s enemies.

How do good men and women of God become abusers?  By failing to understand that God is one who has mercy.  By not, in other words, ever really experiencing the grace and mercy of God for themselves.  Oh, we may have the theory of grace down pat.  We may know the bible verses off by heart.  We may even sing about God's love week by week in church.  But somehow the truth of that grace, that mercy, has never really taken root in our hearts.  We have never allowed ourselves to face the sheer givenness of the gift: we have never allowed ourselves to confront the possibility that we might actually accept God's acceptance of us.  And so, not being able to accept ourselves, and love ourselves, we fail to love others.  With the same plumbline we use to abuse ourselves, we abuse these precious others that God places in our path.  And we do so, very often, without even a shade of awareness that we do it. 

There is only one real solution to the problem I have described.  And I am convinced of this more and more.  We must dedicate some special time each day, each week, each month, each year, to what the mystics of the church call the prayer of the heart: a prayer that consists not of telling God things, or presenting God with a shopping list, or even saying the daily office, valuable as it is.  The prayer of the heart is simply becoming still enough to hear the voice of God in Scripture.  The still, quiet voice at the centre of all things, the voice whose nature is always to have mercy, to offer grace and forgiveness, to heal the wounded soul.  The voice that speaks not in English, or German or even Italian, that most divine of languages, but in the soothing language of love's silent gaze.

God has ordained that the work of God should flow from a deep and abiding being with God, from a veritable baptism in the love which holds all things together in Christ.  Doing and being, mission and ritual, politics and prayer.  What God has joined together let no one separate.  That is how we may become citizens of light.  That is how we may finally bear fruit for the word sown in us: by bringing such things back together again.  And folks, I say this in all seriousness:  our future as individuals, as families and communities, and even as a nation, depends on our doing so.

This sermon was first preached at St Luke's, Mount Waverley, in 2004.

Behold, I am making all things new!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garry Deverell

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

What about me? A tale of two prodigals

This homily on Luke 15.1-3, 11-32 is offered as a sound file. It was preached at South Yarra Baptist Church on the fourth Sunday of Lent, 2010.

Please click here to download the file in .mp3 format.

The Authority of Love

Text:  Deuteronomy 18. 15-20; Psalm 111; 1 Corinthians 8. 1-13; Mark 1. 21-28

According to Mark’s gospel, when Jesus began to preach in Galilee the local people were astonished at the authority with which he delivered his teaching.  They made a particular point of contrasting the authority of Jesus with that of the scribes, who were the official theologians of Judaism at the time.  Now the scribes were not stupid or ignorant men.  On the contrary, they were very well educated; and literate not only in the theology of their own faith, but also with regard to the Greco-Roman culture in which they lived their daily lives.  They knew the philosophers, they knew their history, they knew their politics.  Consequently, they could always be counted on to say something intelligent about being a Jew in the first century.  But for all their study, and all their knowledge of the faith, it seems that the ordinary people of Galilee were not particularly impressed when the scribes opened their mouths.  Somehow their words lacked the authority which they now discerned in the message of Jesus.

So what is this authority thing, anyway?  How does one person have it and another not?  Well, in the Greek of the Mark’s text, authority is a kind of power.  It is a power which is given to one person by others - because they see in that one person, Jesus in this case, a distinguishing integrity between who that person is what that person does.  Let me tell you a story.

Beginning in the 1930s, someone began writing the word ‘Eternity’, in perfect copperplate script, all over the footpaths of inner Sydney.  For a great many years, nobody knew who was doing it.  The word simply appeared.   People saw the word unexpectedly, as they stepped off their trains in the morning, or as they left a coffee-shop, or a business meeting.  Everyone wondered what the word meant.  And, in wondering, many considered questions concerning the meaning of life, questions they had never given their attention before.  After many years, the identity of the author was revealed.  His name was Arthur Stace, who worked as a cleaner at the Red Cross.  His story was compelling.  Stace grew up in squalid poverty, sheltering under other people’s houses and stealing food from their doorsteps.  His sisters were prostitutes and his father an alcoholic.  For many years Arthur himself had wandered the streets of Sydney in a drunken stupor.  But one night he staggered into a men’s meeting at the Church of St. Barnabas in Paddington.  And there he heard a sermon about eternity.  It changed his life.  From that moment he gave up the grog, because he felt that God had called him to a special task.  To write the word Eternity.  And that is what he did for the next forty years. 

TODAY, in Sydney, Arthur Stace is a legend.  He name commands great respect from people at every eschalon of society.  His one-word sermon was traced onto the harbour bridge in lights at the close of the new year’s fireworks display at the turn of the century.  And the city of Sydney has inscribed the word permanently onto the footpath of Martin Place.  Why?  Because people can see that there was an integrity between who Martin Stace was and the message he proclaimed.  He was a simple, uneducated man who was saved from dereliction by his hearing a single word.  Eternity.  And he dedicated his life to placing that single word before others.  Not in a pushy way.  Not in a preachy way.  But in the way of a simple, uneducated man who knows, from the depths of his own life, what Eternity means. 

Authority, you see, comes from deep within a person’s life.  It comes from their experience of an encounter with Jesus Christ, and from the integrity Christ creates in them between who they are and what they do and say.  This is the kind of authority which the people of Capernaum saw in Jesus.  Here was one who acted and spoke not as one who had no personal experience of the promise he proclaimed.  He spoke not theoretically, but existentially.  He spoke about God and about life as he knew them to be in his own life and experience.  The people of Galilee saw that, and so they listened as to one who speaks with the authority that comes from integrity.

When Paul writes to the Corinthians, he upbraids them for mis-locating their authority in mere head-knowledge.  These were people who believed that it was the complexity of their theology which would save both themselves and their hearers.  But this is not the case, says Paul.  What empowers our lives is not what we know, but how we love:

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.  Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him . . .

Paul’s point is this.  If you love God, then you will love other people.  You will build them up and support them at that point in their lives where they need support.  Why?  Because that is what God does in loving us!  And it is only out of that experience of being loved by God, most usually at a point when other loves fail, that we gain the authority to act with love in the lives of others.

If Paul is right, friends, then we have no authority as Christians to tell others how it should be for them.  Because we don’t actually know how it is for others, or should be, not at least with any degree of certainty!  Our only authority is that which comes from our particular experience of being known and loved by God.  In that authority we are called to love and support and serve, and to bear witness to God’s love in our lives.  But no more.  Beyond that we have no authority.  Beyond that we are pretending.  And people see through that.

Thomas Merton wrote that the point of our Christian journey is not to know God in the abstract – in general, as it were - but to love God with our entire beings - even as God loves us, and knows us by that loving even more than we can ever know ourselves!  People of God, because God loves you, and because you have known that love in your life and experience, you now have the authority to love other people.  That is your calling, that is your vocation as God’s children.  That is your special dignity in life.  It is no more than that.  But it is no less either.