Scott Morrison and speaking publicly about, and from, faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garry Deverell

April 24, 2021

The blessed martyrs

Ephesians 1.3-14; Mark 6.14-29

In the story we heard this morning from Mark’s gospel, we learn that John the Baptist was imprisoned and executed because he spoke up against the law of a powerful family in the name of the law of God.  Herod, the Roman-appointed governor of Galilee, had ‘married’ Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, even though she was still married to Philip.  The priests and rabbis apparently tolerated this situation because they were afraid of Herod’s power.  But John did not.  Presumably he believed that officials who sat in the place of David in Israel had a special responsibility to set an example for others.  In the prophetic tradition to which John belonged, the king was also the pastor or shepherd of the people.  It was therefore intolerable that any heir of David should publicly bless and normalise any behaviour that trampled the love of both God and neighbour underfoot.  John clearly made these observations in the public arena and, having suffered imprisonment for some time, was finally executed for his trouble.

Although Stephen is properly regarded as the first Christian martyr, John the Baptist can be regarded as the prototype of Christian martyrs in that (1) his essential calling was to be a witness to the coming of the Christ, God’s anointed king; (2) he lived that calling out by loudly proclaiming the difference between the values of the messianic kingdom and the values of the socio-political reality in which he lived; and (3) he was executed for his trouble.  This is what Christian martyrs have done ever since, have they not?  Think of the famous martyrs of the ancient world, whose essential crime was a refusal to put aside the Lordship of the Christ for the sake of keeping things nice with the Empire.  Think of modern martyrs like Oscar Romero or Dietrich Bonheoffer, who did not consider themselves free to tolerate the oppressive power of Military juntas or Nazi Führers because of their Christian responsibility to love God and neighbour before even their own safety and survival.  Think of the less famous martyrs of the Philippines or of West Papua, humble pastors and church leaders who dared to confront the murderous greed of their governments in the name of God’s love for the poor.  These many lost their lives not because they were careless or suicidal, but because they felt compelled to bear witness to the faith, hope and universal love that had been revealed to them in Jesus Christ.

It is perhaps difficult for we distracted occupants of the world’s ‘most liveable city’ to imagine our way into the minds and hearts of the martyrs.  For the martyrs believe in God’s blessing so powerfully that they are willing to entrust themselves to that blessing even to the point of death.  They believe, with the writer to the Ephesians, that they are destined to received all that God has promised in Jesus, a share in that great company whose sins and failures are forgiven, a share in the inheritance that the gospels describe as the kingdom of God.  We, on the other hand, are so regularly unsure of God’s blessing that our faith stumbles at the first hurdle.  How can God be God, we ask ourselves, when so many of God’s people live as though God didn’t really matter?  How can God be God when the world is so full of pain and evil?

With thoughts like these we display our lack of genuinely Christian faith.  For we are not called to believe in the church or its self-made righteousness.  We are called to believe in the righteousness of God in Christ, and in his infinite mercy towards all who place their trust in him.  Nor are we called to believe in the evils of the world, as though they had some kind of substance of their own.  We are called to believe in the God who, in Christ, has disarmed the powers and led them captive in his train.  In Christ the powers are revealed for what they are:  hollow nothings which have no more substance than the fear and awe of those who are taken in by their lies. In that light, we are then called to be part of the antidote of God would apply towards everything that is evil, a people of compassion who love our neighbours genuinely, offering care and shelter in the midst of whatever has befallen them.

So let us examine our lives and our faith in the light of the martyrs, their lives and their deaths.  For the martyrs are simply what we are all of us called to be:  ordinary people who trust themselves, absolutely, to an extraordinary God.  Make no mistake, the martyrs do not possess anything that you and I have not already received in baptism.  They have no super-human strength to withstand the darts of the evil one.  The martyrs are tempted in every way, like us, and their biographies are often littered with many failures along the way.  Yet the martyrs, like all the baptised, experience the call to cling not to their own works of righteousness, but to God, and to proclaim this mercy from God before the cruelty of powerful men.  For them, a time came to answer that call even to the point of endangering their lives.  In such a situation, every baptised Christian is forced to choose who they really believe in.  Do I believe in myself, and in the fears and anxieties that flood my body?  Or do I believe in the God of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen that my fears and anxieties, and even my death, may not have the final word?

We are fast coming to a time when even Australian Christians – who, for generations, have taken their freedom for granted  - may also be asked these kinds of questions.  With a government like ours – which so clearly despises God’s little ones who suffer because of persecution, poverty or illness - anything is possible.  The questions are certainly asked as we approach that time when our fragile bodies are no longer able to go on, and death suddenly becomes a reality we can no longer avoid.  But the questions are also asked in the midst of our lives, at the noonday of our powers.  I hear God asking these questions of me, every time I become obsessed with my own survival or success, every time I am tempted to worship at the idols of public opinion or economic aggrandisement, every time I am tempted to spurn the needs of another in order to sure up my own future.  When God comes to ask such questions of your own life, how will you respond?  Will you respond with the faith declared at your baptism, a faith in the love and mercy of God beyond even death?  Or will you cling, ever more tenaciously, to the shadows and illusions of the propagandists who dominate our meda?  That is the question for this day and this moment.  Think on the witness of the martyrs.  How will you respond?

Repent!

Texts:  Malachi 3. 1-4; Philippians 1. 3-11; Luke 3. 1-6

In this second week of Advent, we turn our gaze to the career of John the Baptist, one of the more intriguing figures in the gospel, one whom Luke describes as the forerunner of Christ, the one who announces his coming.  But who, exactly, was John the Baptist?  Where did he come from, and why did he end up preaching in the desert region east of Jerusalem?  You would be aware that I grew up a Baptist.  My family attended a Baptist church.  And so when I first started hearing the stories of John the Baptist, I assumed he was named that way because he was the first Baptist Christian, the one who started our denomination.  Of course, it wasn’t long before I realized my mistake.  I soon learned that John was called ‘the Baptist’ because he baptised his converts in the Jordan river, washing away their sins in a dramatic sign of repentance.  I also discovered that John was a very fiery preacher, one who didn’t mince his words in calling people to abandon their lax attitudes to religion.  John believed that the kingdom of God was coming very soon, and that people ought to repent of their wrongdoing in order to be ready for that day. 

When I was growing up, John the Baptist came to represent for me something like the ideal revivalist preacher, a person who was ultimately concerned with the state of each individual soul, and wanted to save that soul from the fires of hell.  Of course, the way we read the Scriptures is invariably influenced by the kind of church we are part of, and the kind of spirituality which is valued there.  My church was essentially revivalist.  It had inherited its theology and its spirituality, its way of believing and practicing the faith, from the frontier evangelists of 18^th century America.  These were preachers who believed that Christianity was about saving souls from hell, and that the way to save souls from hell was to get them to repent of their drinking, swearing and fornicating and believe in Jesus, who would forgive them of all their sins and set them on the path to clean living and churchgoing.  It was only very much later, at university, that I began to see that John the Baptist was probably not THAT kind of revivalist preacher, that John’s understanding of salvation and saving souls was perhaps a little more nuanced.

To show you what I mean, I’d like to return to our text in Luke’s gospel, chapter 3.  There you find that Luke is very careful to give us a context for the appearing of the Baptist in the desert.  And it is important to note both what he tells us and what he does not tell us.  He tells us nothing about the private lives of those coming to hear his preaching.  We hear nothing about the private sins that would have been high on the agenda of 18^th century revivalist preachers:  booze, fornication and bad language. What Luke does tell us about, however, is politics and social ethics.  He tells us about who is in power at the time, and who their political allies happen to be.  Because, for Luke, the Baptist is a preacher whose primary concern is not the private sins of individuals but the public sins of a people and a nation.  This means that the Baptist is much more like Martin Luther King Jr. than Billy Graham, if you get my drift.  He gets himself mixed up with politics.

You see, at the time when the Baptist appeared things were not at all well in Israel.  Judea and Galilee were small vassal states within the great empire of Rome.  Tiberias was the emperor, and each province of his empire was overseen by a local governor or procurator.  The procurator of Judea was Pontius Pilate, and he was garrisoned at the aptly named Caesarea, on the Mediterranean coast.  Pilate was a cruel man who routinely and summarily put people to death.  He was not noted for looking too deeply into the facts of a case, preferring to make an example of pretty much any Jew who seemed to him to represent a rebellious spirit.  And the procurator’s power was absolute within his territory.  He could order a massacre, and none of the locals could do anything about it, least of all the Jewish kings or high priests, all of whom were only tolerated by Rome’s good grace.  The kings of trans-Jordan and Galilee, the Herods, had absolutely no power apart from Rome.  Though Jewish, and descended from the aristocratic leaders of the past, the Herods were puppets for Rome, collaborators in the repression of the Jewish population at large.  Even the high priests at the temple in Jerusalem, traditionally the key advisors to kings and wielders of political power in their own right, were largely compromised in this highly charged setting.  In order to preserve the legitimacy of their temple worship, the priests were also forced to play Rome’s game, to participate in repressing any person or movement which sought to question Rome’s authority in any way.

So when the Baptist appears in the desert to preach, we find that his preaching has a resolutely political edge. ‘In the wilderness’, we are told, ‘the word of the Lord came to John, son of Zechariah, and he went into the whole region of the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’.  And what kinds of sins did John have in his sights?  We find out as we read further in our text.  John is interested not in fornication or drinking, but in questions of social justice.  Under the economic conditions encouraged by Rome, some were growing rich but most were extremely poor.  The rich ones were usually collaborating with Rome in some way.  And so John commands those who have more to share what they have with those who have little, even down to clothes and food.  He commands the tax collectors to take no more than Rome asks them too, to stop ripping people off to line their own pockets.  So too with the soldiers who served in Roman garrisons.  ‘Stop using your power to extort money from people’ he tells them, ‘or you will be in big trouble when the kingdom of God arrives’.

The ‘kingdom of God’ featured very highly in John’s preaching, and Luke sees John as the forerunner, the messenger who announces that the kingdom of God will arrive very soon.  He quotes Isaiah chapter 40 to make his point:

The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled

and every mountain shall be levelled.

The crooked shall be made straight,

and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

When that sermon was first preached in Babylon, during the exile of the Jews in the 6^th century BCE, the prophet imagined a great highway being built from Babylon to Jerusalem, with the Lord returning to his holy city in a fiery chariot to save his people.  But in the hands of Luke, the sermon takes on a more specific meaning.  For Luke, the kingdom of God preached by John is going to level out the scandalous inequalities in Jewish society.  The tall mountains, those who have grown rich on oppression and collaboration, will be knocked down.  And those who dwell in the valleys of death’s shadow will be raised to the sunlight once more.  For Luke, and apparently for John himself, the coming kingdom of God is a kingdom of which will bring both despair and salvation.  Despair for the rulers and collaborators, but salvation for all who are victims and trust in the Lord.

Why am I telling you all this?  Because I believe that the kingdom of God began to arrive in the person of Jesus Christ, whom John announced.  In him we see the compassion of God for the poor and the victims.  In him we see God’s judgement on the rich and the oppressors.  In Christ we see a God who sides with the victims against the overwhelming power of their enemies, and promises that their reign of terror will come to an end.  Can you see how relevant that message is for our own world, a world which is ravaged by greed, and the misuse of power?  Ours is a world in which people are tortured and killed for questioning their governments or senior business operators, a world in which the poor become even more poor day by day, because they must service their interest repayments before they can build their schools and hospitals.  If this Advent season means anything at all, it means that there is hope for these people. There is HOPE.   Because Christ has come in the flesh, because Christ became a victim himself, and because Christ rose from death to overcome the worst that people could do to him, there IS hope for all who struggle under the yoke of our inhumanity towards one another.

This gives us, perhaps, quite another spin on Christmas from the one many of us were raised on.  The Christmas of the revivalist preachers was about the salvation of the individual from their individual vices.  But I’m here to point out that God’s plans are much bigger than that.  They include the salvation of all who suffer for political and social reasons as well.  And I’m proud to be part of a church which continues to preach in that tradition, the tradition of political preaching which found its patron saint in John the Baptist.

This sermon was preached on the second Sunday of Advent in 2000 at Devonport Uniting Church.