Enemies, real and imagined

 Genesis 15.1-12, 17-21; Psalm 27; Philippians 3.17-4.1; Luke 13.31-35

Enemies. We all have them. And, if we don’t have any real enemies, we make them up. Or else we paint them in more dramatic terms than is strictly necessary. Observe, for example, what is happening in Ukraine at present. One of the key reasons Putin has publicly offered for invading Ukraine is that Ukraine’s national leadership has been taken over by fascists, even ‘Nazis’, who are oppressing the people. Now, from the point of view of the Ukrainians themselves, this seems entirely false. But from the point of view of Putin, who has in mind the restoration of a past, mythical, Orthodox, Russian empire, the Ukrainian leadership are indeed the evil bastards who are keeping their people from participating in this glorious restoration.

We need to be careful whom we call an enemy. Perhaps we should not call anyone an enemy, even if they explicitly choose that path, and that designation, for themselves. ‘Love your enemy,’ said Jesus in his famous sermon, ‘do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse you.’ (Luke 6.27, 28).  This is really tough teaching. If your neighbour is your enemy, what then? If you are the Ukrainian whose house is being raided by the Russian army, what should you do?  If you are an Aboriginal woman who has been raped by a British soldier, and your children killed before your eyes, how should you respond?

Let’s mine our lectionary readings for some wisdom.

The Genesis story talks about the deal or treaty YWH makes with Abram to preserve his legacy against every threat, real or imagined. If Abram is prepared to trust his future, and the future of his descendants to YWH, then YWH will make them prosper ‘as the stars in the heaven’ and the land on which he stands, stretching from Egypt to the Euphrates, will belong to them. Now, if you read this passage in its context, there are probably both good and bad reasons for Abram to feel anxious about himself and his clan’s future. Since arriving in that place, he’d become rich and inclined to feel that others wanted to take what he had. The story of his wife Sarai being given to Pharoah as a concubine is a horrific tale about the lengths that patriarchal culture will go to fight its own paranoia about losing wealth and influence. On the other hand, Abram also got caught up in a regional conflict between various Canaanite city-states in which his nephew Lot was genuinely taken into captivity.

With this background in mind, perhaps we must conclude that the treaty between Abraham and YWH comes about partly at God’s initiative and partly because of Abram’s male, patriarchal paranoia about the preservation of his legacy – legacy here understood as wealth and prestige for one’s descendents – against the indigenous tribes of Caanan. An earlier version of the covenant (in chapter 12 of Genesis) promises something rather different: that Abram’s descendants will become a blessing to all nations. Not their conquerors, but a source of their blessing. Perhaps that is what the covenant is supposed to be about, really. But this later, Genesis 15, version seems more concerned with the ways in which the indigenous nations, the people already there in the land to be taken by Abram’s seed, should be seen as enemies, and therefore a threat to Abram’s patriarchal ambitions. This is an ambiguity that has been played out in that region from the time of Abram right through to the current conflicts between Arab and Jew in Israel/Palestine. And, of course, there are tragic echoes of all that in what has happened here in the colony of ‘Australia’ as well.

The psalmist describes his fear of an enemy that has surrounded him on every side, and his appeal to the Lord for refuge and help. Most every suburban Christian I know usually reads this psalm as if they, themselves, are the psalmist and someone else – whatever or whomever we are afraid of, probably – is the enemy.  But what if that isn’t the case? Have you ever tried to read a psalm, or any other biblical passage, as if you weren’t the hero in the story but the enemy? Have you every considered the ways in which you might be the enemy? An enemy of the earth and of its flora and fauna, for example, or an enemy of the indentured classes of labour who make our clothes? Or an enemy of Indigenous people, because you stole our lands and benefit from our dispossession and hardship? How would that make a difference to your reading of sacred scripture?

The writer to the Philippians is incredibly circumspect in the way that he talks about enemies. He says that the enemy is not so much opposed to particular people, or even to Christ, but rather to the ‘cross of Christ’. Here the enemy is constructed not as someone who wants to steal your possessions or kill you. The enemy is someone who is allergic to suffering in the cause of righteousness or justice. Indeed, this enemy’s ‘god is their stomach’, an ancient way of speaking about the sin of gluttony or personal acquisitiveness. The sin of accumulating all things to yourself at the expense of many others, the sin of narcissism, we might even say. There is a sense, here, in which the writer wants, actually, to critique the acquisitive nature of the covenant we read about in Genesis 15. Here, it is Abram who could be understood as the enemy, for he seems concerned only about his legacy, the land he steals from others, and the prosperity of his own family and clan.  The writer to the Philippians prefers a citizenship that is not so attached to such things, but participates in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of a commonwealth that is ‘in heaven’, that is, in a place and a time that has yet to arrive. In that ‘heaven’ which – I hope you will agree, is a figure for some more hopeful and just future – Christ will transform the humiliated bodies of all who have suffered injustice and degradation and marginalisation, into the form of his own glorious body. In other words, all that is wrong and unfair will be put right. All that is broken will be restored. This is good news for all who suffer, or who are broken and marginalised. But you have to take a leap of faith.

Finally, in Luke’s gospel, it is instructive to learn something about how to regard the enemy from Christ, whose enemy is Herod, the puppet-king of the Roman occupation, who is obviously so afraid of Christ’s teaching that he has put out a ‘hit’ on him. Christ’s response to this news is quite extraordinary. Rather than go into hiding, rather than gathering a militia to protect himself, what Christ does is offer a lament over Jerusalem, a city divided against itself, a city that will at once listen to a prophet’s preaching and honour a prophet’s office, but also, in time, kill that prophet for speaking inconvenient or uncomfortable words.  Jesus himself, as indicated in the final verses of this passage, will himself be welcomed by the Jerusalemites as a prophet and even a messiah, but a week later be killed by those same Jerusalemites. Here the enemy is within. Not the other, someone from another group or tribe, ethnicity or religion. The enemy is your friend, your comrade, your congregation, your synagogue, your church, your ethnic group. Those closest to you and about whom you care the most. In the face of enemies such as these, Christ teaches us simply to lament, which is an ancient way of naming the evil and injustice of which we are capable, and then simply living, with tears, in the truth of it.  Here there is no hint of revenge or strategizing towards getting the upper-hand. There is a simple acceptance of the awful truth of the situation and a deep-down trust that if anyone can make this better, it is certainly not ourselves. It is God alone.

That’s kind’ve how I see the situation here in the colony known as ‘Australia’ as well. I long ago abandoned all hope that we, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, could ever dig ourselves out of the hole we find ourselves in. We are too busy imitating the coloniser by fighting with each other to present a united front. Although the Uluru Statement from the Heart piques my interest. A deeply compromised and conservative document, it yet represents the closest we have yet come to speaking to our colonisers with one voice.

Certainly, there is little political will towards justice from the coloniser, at least insofar as the political class can be said to represent the will of the people. Colonisers, and particularly the mining, forestry and agricultural companies that continue to enjoy extraordinary levels of subsidised support from the taxpayer, benefit enormously from our dispossession and marginalisation. And they continue to destroy, wound, and maim country in order to make their squillions. In my estimation, we have little to look forward to from these sectors but an endless charitable paternalism, breadcrumbs from the imperial table.

 What can the person of faith do, then, except to be as honest and as truthful as one can be, to name what is actually the case in the presence of the colonising powers, to lament that it is so, and place oneself and one’s people in God’s merciful hands? In this there is a hope, against all evidence to the contrary, that our bodies of humiliation will one day be transformed into bodies of glory. How that might come to be remains, for me at least, a profound mystery. But without the leap of faith which Christian called ‘resurrection faith’ there is nothing to look forward to at all. The last enemy, after all, is death.  And its sting is fierce. Unless . . .  unless God is for us, and not against us.

Notes roughly approximating a homily delivered at Koonung Heights Uniting Church on the 2nd Sunday of Lent, 2022.  The live homily can be found here.

Garry Deverell

Taking leave of ourselves

Texts: 1 Kings 19.1-15a; Ps 42; Galatians 3.23-29; Luke 8.26-39

When the prophet Elijah fled into the desert wilderness of Mt. Horeb, he had good reason to do so.  The powerful pagan queen, Jezebel, was very angry with him for having defeated the priests of Baal, a local fertility god, in a game of ‘my god is bigger than your god.’  She promised to kill Elijah, as she had killed the other prophets of Yahweh a couple of chapters earlier.  So Elijah strapped on his pack and headed for the hills to hide.  Now, the next bit of the story is really interesting. While Elijah is out there, we are told, he suddenly falls into a profound despondency, a despondency so deep that he begs for God to take his life.  The source of this downer appears to be Elijah’s belief that he is ‘no better’ than his ancestors, for a true believer in God would never have run away at the first sign of danger.  Especially if he or she had witnessed the power of God to save only a few days earlier!  At this, his lowest point, Elijah had apparently lost faith in his capacity to have faith.  Not an easy thing to have to deal with!

Now, if we turn over to the story from Luke for a while, we find another man who appears to be hiding out.  This time it’s not a prophet, but a demoniac, that is, a man possessed by a demon.  Clearly, like Elijah, this fellow had a death-wish, because he lives in a grave-yard.  To the first-century mind, someone who lived in a graveyard would have been already ‘dead’ because he or she clearly preferred the world of the dead, a shadowy region beyond the borders of safe society and commerce.  Note also that the name of this guy’s demon was ‘Legion.’  Interesting name that.  At the time when Luke wrote his gospel, the most obvious meaning of the word was military.  A Legion, for first century Mediterraneans, was a very large company of Roman soldiers or ‘legionnaires’, a tangible symbol of Rome’s absolute power over every aspect of one’s life.  So, when Luke tells us that his man is possessed by ‘Legion’ he means us to recognise that the man has been driven ‘mad’ by the omni-present pressure of Roman power in his life.  Luke wants us to see that this man has been so colonised by Rome that there is little to nothing of his original self left.  He is now only what Rome has made of him.  He has been repressed and belittled to the point where the only escape he may contemplate is that of death.  And so he inhabits the tombs, contemplating death and yet held back from killing himself by a demon who accuses him, over and over again, of being so useless and insignificant he does not have the guts even to kill himself! 

Two stories, two men.  Both are hiding out in a wilderness where people rarely go.  Both are seeking a haven of refuge from the political power of their times.  Both struggle deeply with the decisions they have made in life, with the selves that brought them to this point of despondency or illness.  Was there another way?  Could I have handled things with more courage, more resolve?  Where has my faith in God gone to?  Is there no escape except into the darkness of death? 

These are not hypothetical questions about two chaps who may or may not have experienced all this several thousand years ago, on the other side of the world.  These are questions that have regularly been asked by many people who live in Australia today.  One of them is a fellow I know whom I shall call ‘Patrick’.  Patrick comes from Ethiopia in Northern Africa.  To my mind, he is a modern-day Elijah figure because, in the early 90s he was a trade-union leader who stood up to the increasingly racist policies of his government in the name of a justice he had learned from Christ.  As a consequence of his actions, Patrick received a series of death-threats and his house was burnt down.  At the urging of his friends, and because he had a new bride whom he loved, he finally decided to flee the country.  For the next five years Patrick was a fugitive who, many times over, fell into a deep despondency about being so powerless in the face of evil men.  He also accused himself, very often, of having failed—not only with his work for justice, but also in his trust of God.  Would someone who trusted in God have run away like that?

Another friend who asks these questions regularly is a fellow I shall call ‘Mark’.  Mark has a disease known as schizophrenia.  Schizophrenia is a mental illness that afflicts a very large number of Australians, most of them young men.  Mark’s particular history is that he comes from a good, middle-class family.  He has a mother and a father who are good people and who cared for him well.  He went to private school where he received the best of educations.  Yet, in his early twenties, he began to hear voices in his head, voices which accused him of being a nothing, a nobody, a waste of space in the world, someone unworthy to be alive.  Mark tried to kill himself, and he has tried to kill himself many times since.  In his late twenties, he came across some Christians who took him to church and tried to care for him.  He discovered a faith in God which sustains him, and yet . . .  when he is having a relapse, a downer, the voices now accuse him of failing to have faith in God.  ‘If you had faith, you would be healed of your affliction’ they say. 

To my mind, Mark is a modern day demoniac.  He is in the grip of a power which has so invaded his heart and mind that it has become very, very difficult to separate the essential Mark out from the voices he hears in his head.  Without in any way contesting the physiological and genetic basis of schizophrenia, I often wonder why it is that the numbers of people afflicted by the disease are increasing so rapidly.  Could it be that many of us are vulnerable to becoming ill, but more and more are becoming so in fact because the voices of belittlement out there in the world are becoming far more pervasive?  The new colonial powers, I sometimes think, are the moguls of consumer capitalism.  Every day they bombard us with the message that our lives are not good enough.  We would be more beautiful if we used this product or that, that we would be more successful if we wore this suit and did this kind of job, that we would be more worthy of friendship and love if we would only become more like everyone else.  I sometimes think that Mark, and others like him, are simply more vulnerable to these powers than the rest of us - that, for them, the voices of the advertiser are experienced internally and personally in a way that most of us do not hear them.  In that sense, Mark is perhaps like the demoniac of the Gerasenes, for whom a strong and tenacious resistance to Roman power was simply not possible.  In the end he was overwhelmed, and found himself dallying with the dead.

Now what is the gospel word to people for whom life has become so difficult, so stark, so bereft of comfort?  What is the gospel word for people who accuse themselves even for their lack of faith, and use that fact as another reason to condemn themselves?  Well, let us return to our stories.

Note, first of all, that there is no condemning God in either of our stories.  In the Elijah story, God does not confirm Elijah in that picture of himself as faithless.  Neither, in the story of the demoniac, does Jesus condemn the man for being mad.  There is not even a hint, in either story, of God shaking his or her head at a lack in the people—whether it be a lack of courage or faith or whatever.  What we see, rather, is a God who quietly and persistently gets on with restoring or creating a self that is able to resist the power of the enemy.  In the case of Elijah, God gives the exhausted prophet food and rest.  Then he takes him on retreat into the desert, when Elijah learns that the work of God is not only about fireworks and miraculous power, it is also about discerning that place of silent stillness in which there is peace.  Even if the world is out of control, there is a stillness at the heart of things in which one may find oneself again.  For the stillness is God.  In the case of the demoniac, we find that Jesus does not address the man himself, first of all, but the power that enslaves him.  In essence, Jesus tells the power that it has no authority to brutalise the man, and that it had best be gone.  Only after he has addressed the power itself, does Jesus turn to the man with his word of liberation.  “The demon is gone.  Return now to your home, to those who love you, and tell them what God has done for you.”  It seems to me there is a pattern here for any who would work with people who have a so-called ‘mental illness’.  First confront the power that is responsible—not the ill person themselves, but the crazy power of consumer capitalism.  Question its authority to belittle us all.  Then, having done that work of advocacy, address the suffering person themselves.  Tell them that they, themselves, can now re-claim their place in home and society because they are worthy.  They are worthy because God has said they are worthy.

There is a great deal else that could be said about these stories.  But I shall conclude only with this.  That the work of the gospel is a work of conversion.  It calls us to leave behind the selves we have become, the false selves which we have become at the bidding of the powers of our time, and to embrace a new self, a self made in the image of Christ.  For in Christ we are made new selves, we are made children of God, sharing in God’s own dignity.  The power of the gospel is simply this: to remind us that we are loved, that we are accepted, that we are worthy because God has declared us worthy.  The power of the gospel confronts the authority of any power in the world, whether political or economic, any power which would declare us unfit or unworthy, any power that would belittle us or make us small.  All who have been baptised into Christ have put on Christ, says the apostle.  In him you have left the belittled identities given by the powers behind.  Now you can live in the freedom of God. 

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

Christmas: creating a body of resistance

Texts:  Isaiah 9.2-7; Titus 2.11-14; Luke 2.1-14

The stories and readings of Christmas will have little power or consequence unless we understand that the events they describe take place within a particular kind of political reality – worlds dominated by an imperial super-power, a military emperor who can make ordinary people do and say whatever he wants them to do or say.  When Isaiah was preaching in Jerusalem at the end of the 8th century BCE, that power was the king of Assyria, whose empire stretched from India to Egypt.  The darkness of his harsh and oppressive rule extended even into the daily lives of the people of Israel, whose labour and produce was heavily taxed to enrich the emperor and support his expansionist policies.  In this environment, the power of the local Jewish King was so insignificant that there was really little option for him except to become a local supporter of the Emperor’s will.  To defy the Emperor would have left Judah open to attack by one of its small neighbours, some other petty king with powerful ambitions.  In this environment, “security” and “safety” was guaranteed only by sucking up to the biggest power on earth, the Emperor of Assyria.  Yet the situation of the ordinary people could hardly have been described as “safe” or “secure”.  The Jewish people suffered terribly because there was little practical sense in which they could claim to be free.  They belonged to the Emperor of Assyria.  The economic and social privileges granted them under the covenant with Yahweh their God were severely curtailed, because the Emperor now claimed to own their bodies, their houses, and all they produced.  There was precious little of their lives or their livelihoods that the Emperor could not claim as his own.  In the words of Isaiah, they were a people who walked in a very great darkness.  They were an oppressed people ruled by the soldiers of a foreign power.

The situation was not all that different when Jesus was born over 700 years later.  The global power had changed, certainly.  It was now the Romans who ruled the roost.  Yet the lives of the Jewish people were much the same.  Their political leaders, whether kings or councils, spent most of their time sucking up to the Romans and doing their bidding.  That was the way to survive.  What that meant for the ordinary folk, the folk who actually produced the food and built the roads and the houses and whatever else, was misery.  For again, whoever they were or whatever they produced ultimately belonged not to themselves, but to the Emperor of Rome.  So that while most people could feed themselves, if they worked hard, and while some people could even become quite wealthy if they worked very hard to supply the Romans with what they wanted most, everyone (whether rich or poor) belonged not to themselves or even to God, but to the Emperor.  If the Emperor demanded something of you, through the agency of a governor or even a local solider, you had no right to resist.  If you valued your life, or the lives of your loved ones, you did as you were told.  That is what Luke is trying to tell us with his tale about an Imperial command that the whole world should be registered.  He is telling us that in the world in which Jesus was born, you did as the Great Power told you.  To resist was to die.

Lest we think all of this is ancient history, and that we have somehow transcended such oppression, let me invoke the name of General Augusto Pinochet - until the late 1990s the President of Chile.  Chile is a very small country in the grand scheme of things.  But Pinochet did in his time what the great power in our modern world - the United States - wanted him to do.  He promoted the policies of contemporary neo-liberalism.  He forced his people to give away any privileges they might enjoy under international human rights or labour agreements in order to turn the country into a quarry to fuel the engine of Western consumerism.  He killed and tortured anyone who resisted his policies, and he did so with secret police trained by the American intelligence services – principally the CIA.   And all the time he pretended to be a good Catholic.  When he was finally excommunicated from the church by the bishops of Chile, he threw some of them into prison, where they joined many other Christians, lay and ordained, who had dared to challenge the power of the state.  In the end, Pinochet fell from power because Christians finally found their voices once more, and started to articulate a different vision for Chile.  Against the story told by Pinochet - in which every person was required to sacrifice themselves, their families, and their livelihoods for the economic glory and prosperity of the nation - the church posited a counter-story in which the bodies of the people belonged to a God of love who would never force them to do anything against their will, who nevertheless called them to a different kind of prosperity, the prosperity and security that comes when people love one another, and share whatever they have so that the rich may never be too rich and the poor may never be too poor.

So what the promised coming of a Messiah meant for Isaiah’s Judah and Joseph and Mary’s Jerusalem is exactly the same as it means for us in our contemporary world.  It means that God does not surrender the bodies of his people to the oppression and slavery of whatever global power is wanting to have its way with us.  It means that just as God took our human flesh to himself in Jesus so that our bodies were no longer simply ours but God’s as well, God continues to take a body to Godself in the church, a social body which God makes for Godself in the conversions wrought through baptism and Eucharist.  It means that God stands with us and for us against the powers of this world, not in Spirit alone, but also in the body and in bodily practices that make for peace, justice and the integrity of creation.   For in Jesus the yoke of the oppressor’s power is broken.  In Jesus we see a body broken up, tortured, and finally killed by the power of an evil state. Yet.  When the powers appear to have his body absolutely within their control - enclosed within the silent tomb of death - at precisely that moment, Jesus breaks free in the power of the resurrection to show that not even coercion and death is finally strong enough to defeat the power of love.  For the truth revealed in the resurrection of Jesus is this: that the power of our political overlords is ever only the power we grant them through our fear and our failure to believe that we can be what God has called us to be.  If a child born amongst the poorest can one day threaten the power of Empire – not because he is smart or strong, but because he believes absolutely in liberating word of God that stirs within him – then the church, too, can become a community of resistance that threatens the power of Obama, Putin and Abbot to enslave us all in the neo-liberal lies of our time.

I pray that we, who take the name of Christ to ourselves tonight, may give our bodies not to the state, out of some kind of fear that we shall miss out on the ‘relaxed and comfortable’ life it promises, but to God and to God’s mission of love, that the world may find its liberation through the revolutionary giving of Jesus.  For in the end, it is only the gift of God, ever given again by his people, that shall save our world from its lies and self-deceptions.  It is precisely that radical sharing and giving, that politics of love, which we remember and perform in the Eucharist, which we shall now prepare to eat together.

Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to all God has favoured with his care.

This sermon was first preached at St Luke's, Mt Waverley, on Christmas Eve 2006. Another version was subsequently published in Cross Purposes: a forum for theological dialogue 26 (2011):8-10.