Fellow Heirs Through the Gospel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garry Deverell

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

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.