Lent and racism

It's Lent in the Christian churches, a time to reflect, become aware, and repent of our bad behaviour. To repent means to stop the bad behaviour and put in place systems and practices designed to prevent such behaviour from occuring again. Repentance also means doing what you can to restore and repair the broken relationships your bad bahaviour has left in its wake. Including, of course, making just reparation.

Repentance is not primarily a practice for individuals. It is a practice for institutions, corporations and communities.

At the corporate level, I would call on the churches to repent of their racist behaviour towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, racist behaviour that includes:

• Blak-cladding, that is, making your institution look mob-friendly on the outside, whilst remaining thoroughly racist on the inside. Examples of black-cladding in churches include adorning rooms, buildings, regions and projects with blakfella tropes, hanging Indigenous art, and holding multiple 'welcome' and 'acknowledgement' of country ceremonies. None of these things are bad in themselves. They become bad when they are designed to hide the fact that the organisation continues to discriminate against blakfellas: our bodies, our knowledges, and our cultures.

• Expecting blak people to work for casual rates, or for free. The vast majority of blak people who work for churches do not enjoy permanent, secure, employment in jobs that are ongoing. Most of us work for the church as volunteers or casuals, even if we are ordained and/or have recognised qualifications in theology and ministry. Why? Because we, and what we have to offer, are simply not valued. Not enough to employ us, anyway. If there is a whitefella or someone from a more recent immigrant group going for a proper job, it is they who will most likely get it. For mob are, quite literally, the last and the least in the church's colonial economy.

• expecting underpaid or volunteer blak people (out of the goodness of our hearts) to do the anti-racism work for the whole organisation. For racism is not something that dominant cultures (read 'white' cultures) give much thought to. And certainly not something they allocate time, energy or money to. For, by definition, racism does not affect dominant cultures. 'If it is not happening to me, then it is not happening'. Thus, when blak people complain about being ignored or mistreated, the default response is 'well, you do something about it'. Which is to entirely mis/place where the responsibility lies. It is to burden victim-survivors with the task of expiating the pertpetrator's sin.

• marginalising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges. Although blak people have a long experience with this country, an experience which gives us a unique and expert perspective on how to live the life of the spirit well in this place, that is apparently of little or no consequence for the dominant culture. The churches and their instutions continue to ignore and supress the fact of our spiritual seniority in this country and worship, instead, at the feet of Europe and North America. You cannot study blak knowledges at the churchly institutions where whitefellas study. You will rarely encounter blak teachers, preachers or liturgists, except for those who are brought in for one-off, entirely token, bits and pieces. Because what is important is whitefella knowledge. Everything else, especially the knowledge of mob, is entirely surplus to requirements.

All of these corporate behaviours do enormous damage to the bodies and spirits of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We are forever wounded. We hurt. We languish. Our health suffers. For each day we must rise to the struggle to be ourselves, even in this, our own country.

The remedies for these damaging behaviours are obvious, are they not? Change the heart, not just the outward appearance. Value blak people and what we can contribute. Employ and learn from us. Care for us. Work with us. Allow us be who we are in God. Just as Jesus would.

Garry Worete Deverell

Lent 2025

Bread for Indigenous Lands and Peoples: an Aboriginal interpretation of the story of the Syrophoenician woman

Texts: Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Psalm 125; James 2:1-10, 14-17; Mark 7:24-37

Amongst the most common metaphors in the Scriptures for the loving action of the divine is the distribution of staple foods to the poor and the broken.  Proverbs 22.9 says, for example, that the generous are blessed because they give their bread to the poor. Bread was a staple food in the ancient far-West, just as it is a staple in many other places today. For Aboriginal peoples from Melbourne and coastal Victoria that staple was not bread, but the murrnong or daisy yam. Its cultivation depends on a loose soil structure that is easily permeable by air and water. When colonists arrived in these lands they brought with them millions of cattle and sheep whose grazing compacted the soil and drove our native food-crops to the brink of extinction. Consequently, Aboriginal people have gone from comfortably being able to sustain our families in health and well-being over many millennia, to now being amongst the most poorly nourished people on the continent. Because colonists stole our lands and all but destroyed the ways in which we traditionally fed ourselves, most of us now live as beggars in a brave new world of industrial farming and globalized food distribution networks. I doubt that the captains of such industries have even read these verses from Proverbs,

Do not rob the poor,
or crush the afflicted at the gate;
for the Lord pleads their cause
and despoils of life those who despoil them.

Jesus, we are told, was someone who bucked the trend. Instead of stealing the people’s food, as the Romans did through their cruel land management systems, Jesus shared bread with everyone whom that system crushed. In the gospel according to Mark, even before we arrive at the text we are reading today, there are feeding stories. Most prominent amongst them is the ‘feeding of the five thousand’ (6.30-43) where Jesus feeds a hungry crowd of Jews by miraculously multiplying the meagre offering of just five loaves and two fish. By giving them staple food to eat, he also returns to them their dignity as God’s beloved people. The 12 baskets of food left over at the end of the feast signify the 12 tribes of Israel, God’s chosen people. The number 12 here functions as a confirmation that God is honouring the covenant God has with them from of old. It is as if Mark is saying, ‘the Romans may have stolen and exploited your land, but you are still beloved of God. God will feed you, even if this colonised and exploited land cannot’.

We arrive, then, with Jesus and his disciples, at the city of Tyre on the Phoenician central coast of the Roman province of Syria. This is unambiguously Gentile, that is, ‘non-Jewish’ territory. But you need to know that it was once a territory of Israel, a territory taken by conquest from the indigenous Canaanite tribes by Joshua. Here Jesus is petitioned by a local woman whose daughter, we are told, has a demon. Now I want you to know that ‘demons’ likely refer, in the gospel of Mark, not to disembodied spirits of evil as we would imagine them in western culture, but to a disruption of wellness caused by Roman imperial occupation. This is made clear in the story of the healing of the demoniac who lives amongst the tombs at Gerasa (Mark 5.1-20). When Jesus inquires after the name of the demon who afflicts the man, it replies ‘we are legion’, in the plural. ‘Legion’, of course, is the name of a highly trained and heavily armed company of Roman infantry, usually numbering five to six thousand men. They were used as both shock-troops who took territory from others, but also an occupation force to keep conquered people under control. In the ancient far-West, they were everywhere, and their word was law. So, the demon afflicting the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter is most likely one of the many forms of unwellness—both physical and psychological—that can afflict a colonised people.

The woman and her daughter are doubly colonised. First by Israel, under Joshua, and now by the Roman Empire. They are poor, their way of life has been repressed, they are hungry and desperate, and they want things to change. That is why the woman is willing to break all manner of cultural and religious taboos to petition Jesus for what she needs. She falls at his feet, a sign both of desperation and of respect, asking that Jesus heal her daughter. Note that there is no buttering up of Jesus in this version of the story. In Matthew’s version, she calls him the ‘Son of David’, a name for the messiah. But here she simply calls him ‘Sir’. ‘Sir, can you heal my daughter please?’

Note that, at first, Jesus appears deeply offended at the very idea. ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ The children who should be fed first are, of course, the children of Israel, the children whom Jesus apparently believes to be the only worthy recipients of God’s love and care.  ‘Dogs’ was a racist name that Jews at the time, especially Jews from the upper echelons of society, used to describe non-Jews. So, lest anyone in this church think that Jesus would not be capable of being both sexist and racist, allow me to translate what he says here into the Australian vernacular. ‘You won’t be getting anything from me, bitch. God’s love is not for the likes of you.’ Shocking, isn’t it.

Thankfully the woman, who is apparently used to such treatment, is not put off. She retorts, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’ Or, if you will allow me to translate into an Australian vernacular once more, ‘even us bitches eat the food that falls from our betters’ tables.’  As I watch this scene unfold in my mind, I imagine Jesus pausing and drawing breath at this point. I imagine him thinking. And feeling. I imagine him considering carefully what the Syrophoenician woman has said, and why. For Jesus then responds.

And what Jesus says shows that, unlike many of us who enjoy a modicum of respect or power in our societies, he is teachable. He is open to learning new things, even theological things, from women and from people whom he regards as of lesser status and importance than himself. Jesus says, ‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’ Which, if I may again translate once more, says ‘You’re right. God’s love is not only for the children of Israel. It is for you and your daughter, too. Go back home and find your daughter well.’ I hope you’ve caught the significance of what is happening here. The Jewish rabbi, Jesus, has been tutored in theology by an indigenous woman from the conquered and colonised lands of Phoenicia. And he has accepted her teaching so completely that he is willing to so widen his understanding of God’s love that now even the ‘dogs’ of the worlds are worthy of compassion. So, Jesus is here changed, both in mind and in heart.

For those of you who are worried about the son of God needing to be taught in this manner, ask yourself why the evangelist who recorded this story might have done so. Is he not leaving an example here for those of us, especially us men, who believe we are entitled to belittle others? Is not Mark teaching such men to be humble, and to listen for the instruction of the divine in the mouths of those we so regularly ignore or perhaps abuse? Is not Mark also encouraging the colonists of the world to stop their colonising, their stealing away of the lives of indigenous people, and instead return some of their stolen bounty to our hungry mouths and hurting hearts? In this all of us who enjoy both respect and power are encouraged to follow Jesus, a man who was willing to humble himself and change his behaviour when he is shown to be wrong.

The Syrophoenician woman is an example as well. An example of every colonised woman who cannot get what she needs for herself and her children. A woman who is willing, out of sheer desperation, to break all kinds of social rules in order to obtain the staple foods that are necessary for life. Don’t let the bastards keep you down, says St Mark. Ask, and keep on asking, ask in your religious community and ask in your society, ask for the love and the care which ought to be yours. For you, too—as much as anyone else—are worthy of the love and compassion of God.

Let me conclude this brief reflection by suggesting that this suffering woman’s pleading may also be read as the pleading of the land itself, our suffering, colonised land, the land that we Aboriginal people call ‘country’. As I have noted on many other occasions, every genocide is accompanied by an ecocide. Whenever a people are subjugated, their annexed land is devastated as well.  We are witnessing this, right now, in Gaza. But we have witnessed it here in Australia as well, for we are now reaping what was sown by colonists as they compacted the soil and gave the land over to sheep and cattle. Native ecosystems have all but collapsed in many parts of the continent. The soil has become salt, the rivers and the forests are deeply unwell, and a hundred native species have already become extinct.  The land cries out in pain and longing as it suffers its own form of crucifixion, its own form of colonial subjugation and abuse.

This would not be the first time that a women’s voice stood in for the lament of a colonised land in Scripture. Native American scholar Jace Weaver points to daughters of Zelo-phehad, in Numbers chapter 27, as a case in point.* There the soon to be conquered land of the Canaanites is being allocated to the tribes of Israel. But just as the process is nearing its conclusion, five women step forward, women who name themselves Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. They claim an inheritance in the land through their father, a member of the people of Israel, who is now deceased. Later on in the story, when the conquest is all but over and Joshua is going through the allocation once more, those same women step forward to claim their inheritance (Joshua 17.1-6). This time we learn that the names of the women are also the names of five Canaanite towns in the coastal region of Hepher, which is also, very significantly, the name of their grandfather, clearly identified as a Canaanite.  The daughters, in other words, are also the land. The land making its claim for inclusion in the covenant between God and God’s people, even and especially when God’s people are inclined to forget or deny its claim.

So let us learn from the advocacy of these women of Canaan, and the advocacy of the woman of Syrophoenicia. Let us hear in them the claim of both indigenous lands and indigenous peoples for a right and equal portion in the bread that is given us all as a sign of God’s covenant of love. And let us with Jesus, the representative of God in our stories, learn that it is right and proper to both recognise this claim and to do something real and practical about it. 

Garry Worete Deverell

Sept 9, 2024

St Paul’s Cathedral, Naarm/Melbourne

* Jace Weaver, ‘Premodern Ironies: First Nations and Chosen Peoples’ in Mark Vessey, Sharon V. Betcher, Robert A. Daum, Harry O. Maier (eds), The Calling of the Nations: Exegesis, Ethnography, and Empire in a Biblical-Historic Present (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 300-301.

On the PM's latest lecturing of Indigenous People

https://www.theage.com.au/national/pm-prompts-fury-by-looking-for-forgiveness-14-years-after-rudd-s-apology-20220214-p59weu.html

Today the PM lectured Indigenous people on how we should respond to Rudd's 14 year old apology to the stolen generations. According to the PM it was hard to say 'sorry' but it is harder to say 'I forgive you'. Still, that is what Indigenous people ought to do, according to the PM. Forgive.

I'm not sure where the PM learned his Christian doctrine, but I feel he has failed to grasp the heart of the matter. First, forgiveness is something that can only be given freely and in spite of all reasonable expectation. It cannot be commanded or coerced from traumatised and wronged victims. A coerced act of forgiveness is not forgiveness. It is a contractual exchange in which one party surrenders the truth in order to buy favour from a far more powerful patron. Nothing gracious about that.

A second observation is that the PM's doctrine of forgiveness seems to have skipped a fairly crucial step, a step we Anglicans call 'repentance and amendment of life' on the part of those who perpetuate the wrongs and therefore create victims. Repentance cannot be reduced to saying sorry. Repentance requires doing whatever it is possible to do to unweave the injustice committed, to give back what was stolen, to bind up the wounds, to restore what was broken. Now, obviously, not all can be restored. Not all can be healed. Not all can be repaired. Not in this lifetime, anyway. But repentance requires that everything that can be done, is done.  Without this desire and this real, concrete, action, sorry is just a word. A word that fails to become incarnate, to take flesh, to inhabit the real world.

The PM lacks compassion, that has been clear for a long time. But his theology, as a Christian who owns his faith in public, also requires considerable rennovation. To that end, I call on his government to honour the Uluru Statement from the Heart and establish a treaty commission to negotiate a path of true repentance with my people. If that path is finally fruitful, who knows? Forgiveness and reconciliation may indeed become possible.  But, as things currently stand, we are a very long way from any such thing.

Garry Deverell

The Paradox of Forgiveness

Text: Matthew 18.21-35

On August 22 in 2005 an extraordinary rite of mutual forgiveness was simultaneously enacted in the English city of Coventry and the German city of Dresden. The English ceremony took place at Coventry Cathedral which, on the 14th of November 1940, was destroyed by German bombs. The German ceremony took place at the newly restored Frauenkirche, which was destroyed by English bombs on the 13th of February 1945. For the blindness which led to their mutual destruction of each other in the 2nd World War, the German worshippers sought forgiveness from the English, and the English worshippers sought forgiveness from the German. Real forgiveness, as we learn from the parable in today’s gospel, is hard. It cannot be granted without an acknowledgment of real guilt or a commitment, from the parties who have breached the relationship, that they we seek to make amends as best they can. So the liturgies at Coventry and Dresden did not shy away from covering that territory. The words that were spoken on that day were the result of many meetings, over many years, between representatives of the Christian communities in both cities. For this was no small thing. The bombing of Coventry was part of a campaign explicitly designed to kill people—women, men and children—and so to cower them into submission and surrender. The Dresden bombing took place when the war was all but over. It is widely acknowledged that there was not even a strategic military reason for the bombing, which levelled Dresden and killed 40 000 people. The motive was revenge. It was humbling to be in Dresden on August 13th of 2005 to hear a local Catholic priest tell us, with tears, how much it meant to him, and to the people of Dresden, that my colleagues and I should come to Dresden to reflect with them on the forgiveness at the heart of our shared gospel.

The crimes committed in the 2nd World War were, you see, not only crimes committed by one group of human beings against another. They were also crimes committed by one group of Christians against another. Most of the soldiers, sailors and airmen involved in the conflict were Christians—Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Reformed, Orthodox and Roman Catholic—Christians who were killing each other not for Christ, but for territorial Empire. What the Second World War highlighted, graphically and tragically, was not only the inhumanity of men and women towards other men and women, but also the lack of true peace or reconciliation at the heart of European Christianity.

Turning now to today’s gospel reading, I’d like you to note just two things. First, that Peter’s question about forgiveness is not occasioned by the misdeeds of someone beyond the community of faith. Peter asks how many times he is called to forgive a member of his own church. “Seventy-times-seven” times, says Jesus, or, if I may translate, as many times as is necessary for the sake of reconciliation. For what is the church if not a reconciled community, a community that is able to live at peace with itself in spite of all the sins of its members? What is the church if its members cannot forgive each other as Christ has forgiven them? If the church cannot do this, then it is not the church. It is nothing more than a sociological or political reality where birds of a feather flock together. If a church’s members cannot live with each other’s differences and forgive each other’s sins, then we are nothing more than a social club, gathered around the very ghettos of race, class or gender that Christ came to overcome.

People sometimes ask me why I am still part of the church, especially given the church’s participation in the genocide against my people. The people who ask are usually those who have been wounded by the church, people who feel that the church has let them down or, at least, undervalued what they had to contribute. My reply usually goes something like this: the scandal of the gospel is that Christ, who had no sin, yet became sin for our sake. He took on the flesh of people who hate and kill each other. By doing so, he loved and accepted our fragile humanity. He forgave our sins and made reconciliation possible. Who am I, then, to pretend that I am somehow superior to anyone else in the church? The church can only exist by forgiveness. How can I, who have been forgiven my sins by both Christ and my sisters and brothers, refuse to forgive the church? I cannot.

That does not mean, of course, that we should forgive each other’s sins willy-nilly, whether there are any true signs of repentance or not. Expecting victims to forgive a perpetrator who shows no signs of remorse and no willingness to change their behaviour is simply to reinforce the power of perpetrators, and does nothing for victims except to retraumatise and preserve them in their victimhood. Last week’s reading, from earlier in this same chapter of Matthew, should make that clear. The one who has clearly and incontrovertibly sinned against another needs to repent and amend their lives if they are to retain their membership of the church. For where there is, in fact, true repentance and amendment of life, true forgiveness also becomes possible. Without it, though, forgiveness should remain forever off the table.

Which brings me to the second thing I would like you to notice about today’s gospel passage: that forgiveness is only possible for people who are willing, themselves, to forgive. That’s the point of the story about the forgiven slave who cannot forgive his brother, is it not? Although the king, out of sheer mercy, had forgiven his unpayable debt, the slave was not able to do the same for a brother who owed him something. So the king threw the unmerciful slave into prison. Now, some of you, I know, will think this very harsh. Perhaps some of you will even get a little theological and say that this story encourages a gospel of works because what it says, in the end, is that it is our capacity to forgive that ultimately earns God’s forgiveness. Well, to that I would reply in the classically reformed way: that our capacity to forgive another does not earn God’s forgiveness, but rather shows that we are people who have truly experienced the power and truth of forgiveness ourselves. Only the person who knows that they can never repay the debt owed to God, only the person who knows themselves to be loved and forgiven it all, would possibly be able to forgive the crimes of his or her brother. If we do not know this, deep in our bones, perhaps we have never experienced the true power of forgiveness?

At a human rights conference at Whitley College in 1997, in the midst of lots of grand speeches about the call to justice and reconciliation, I met a man named Retosa. At lunch one day, I asked him where he was from, and what he did all day. His reply showed me what forgiveness really looks like, in practice. Restosa was from Liberia, and what he did all day was this: gathering families who had killed each other’s children during the first civil war (1989-1997) together into a room to confess their sins and learn the journey towards forgiving one another. “Only the person who knows the depth of their crime, and the amazing liberation that is possible because of God’s forgiveness, could possibly summon the courage to forgive such crimes from the heart” said Retosa. Perhaps that is why this extraordinary work is being undertaken by a Christian pastor rather than a social worker.

Allow me to summarise what we have noticed in this way. (1) That the church is called to be a community of reconciliation. (2) That our capacity to be that community is directly related to the extent to which our sins, which are many, are forgiven in Christ. And, finally, this: (3) that Christ’s forgiveness comes alive in the world only where the church knows itself to be a community of forgiven sinners. For that, my friends, is what all that talk in Matthew about binding and loosing is all about (see 18.18-20). Christ will only do in the world what his church is willing to do. For we are his body, in whom the Spirit of Christ faces this world. What we do, or do not do, is what Christ himself does. Such is Christ’s vulnerability. Such, then, is our responsibility.

The paradox of forgiveness is this, then: that we are forgiven only insofar as the truth of our own forgiveness has so penetrated our hearts that we are able to regard others, also, with mercy and grace. May God help us to repent, and amend our lives, and forgive those who trespass against us, as God in Christ has forgiven us.

Let me finish with a prayer, the litany of reconciliation from Coventry Cathedral:

‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’

The hatred which divides nation from nation, people from people, class from class,
     God forgive.

The covetous desires of people and nations to possess what is not their own,
     God forgive.

The greed which exploits the work of human hands and lays waste the earth,
     God forgive.

Our envy of the welfare and happiness of others,
     God forgive.

Our indifference to the plight of the incarcerated, the homeless, the refugee,
     God forgive.

The lust which dishonours the bodies of men, women and children,
     God forgive.

The pride which leads us to trust in ourselves and not in God,
     God forgive.

‘Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.’*

Garry Worete Deverell

* I've adapted the litany to address concerns around gender and ethnicity.  The original can be found on the website of Coventry Cathedral.

Repent or perish

Texts: Isaiah 55.1-9; Psalm 63.1-8; 1 Corinthians 10.1-13; Luke 13.1-9

Today the Scriptures confront us with the question: ‘do you hunger and thirst for nothing, or do you hunger and thirst for God?’ The Psalmist clearly hungers and thirsts for God; and God, out of an infinite kindness, satisfies this hunger completely:

O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water . . My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips . . . for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.

Isaiah, on the other hand, speaks of a desire that is not so satiated, a hunger and a thirst that is not quenched because it is a hunger and a thirst for something other than God:

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy?

 To spend one’s labour and one’s money on things that can never, in a million years, bring satisfaction is to spend oneself for nothing. Some of you will remember the Rolling Stone’s hit from the mid 1960s:

When I'm drivin' in my car
And that man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination
I can't get no satisfaction

When I'm watchin' my T.V.
And that man comes on to tell me
How white my shirts can be
But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me
I can't get no satisfaction.

The point made by this song and, nowadays, in a slightly more sophisticated manner by cultural critics like Noam Chomsky, is that you can never satiate an essentially spiritual hunger with food or drink or consumer goods, no matter what the advertisers might say. For while the consumer society lives from the human desire for things – a bigger or better house, car, phone, dress, suit, storage-solution, diet, boyfriend, body – none of these things will ever do the trick. For in the end, for all their shiny attractiveness and glitter, consumer goods are like mirages. They come into view, they attract our attention and give birth to a desire. But once we possess them – once we have them in our hands - they disappear. For consumer goods never deliver what they promise: happiness, peace, contentment, an end to the never-ending cycle of desire. Having shelled out our hard-earned cash, what we finally hold in our hands is nothing, nothing substantial. What we possess, instead, is a shell with a hollow heart. And this hollowness signifies nothing other than the hollowness we continue to experience in the heart of ourselves, the hollowness of unfulfilled desire. So out we go again, on the hunt for something that can finally fill the void.

 
According to the faith of Christians, in fact there is only one thing that will fill the void, and that thing is not really a thing at all, but a person, the God made known in Jesus Christ. Jesus, as Bach memorably wrote, is the joy of all our human desiring. He is the bread and the water and the wine that can finally satiate our thirst. He is reality, the truly substantial, solid and concrete and undeniable as you like. We are all searching for him, whether we know it or not; but we seldom find him because we in search for in all the wrong places. He is the one who can fill the great big hole in our hearts. By comparison, everything else is as insubstantial as fog.

The problem, of course, with hungering and thirsting for every damned thing that is not God is that you can eventually starve to death. Perhaps not literally – we might still be walking around – and yet we do so as zombies. You know, the walking dead who have no zest for life, no joie de vivre. In the passage we read this morning from 1 Corinthians chapter 10, St Paul speaks about the history of God’s people Israel and points out that even though the people of Israel saw the reality of God with their own eyes - having been led out of their slavery in Egypt with great power and an undeniable series of miraculous signs - when they found themselves in the desert of Sinai they nevertheless began to hanker after everything they had left behind in Egypt. They hankered even for the conditions of slavery from which they had been freed. They longed, in other words, for that which is evil, for that which makes not for life, but for death. Many who were possessed by that desire in fact perished in the wilderness. Their corpses littered the desert. Now how do you explain that? How do you explain a desire for evil and not for good, especially when evil’s greatest longing is for our death?

If we step back a little and look at these phenomena from a New Testament perspective, the apostle calls our preference for evil rather than good by the biblical name ‘idolatry’. Now, an idol is an object we make, but then forget that it is we who made it. We elevate that self-made object into the place that only God should properly occupy, the space of our greatest desire, the place of our deepest love and worship. But here’s the rub (and the philosopher Feuerbach wrote about this extensively more than a century ago): any object that we make and then elevate to the status of a deity most often symbolises nothing other than ourselves, our deepest desires, the things we long for most. To worship such a thing is therefore to worship ourselves. It is become like Narcissus in the Greek myth, who became so enamoured by his own image on the surface of a pool that, in the attempt to hold and possess his own reflection, he fell in and drowned. The love of things in other words, is really the love of ourselves, a worshipping of our own ingenuity at creating ever-new ways to deceive ourselves. And it is a sad fact that most of us would rather worship ourselves than God. Even if, by so doing, we make ourselves miserable with hunger and thirst.

For miserable is what we are, is it not, when no matter how hard we work and how many things we obtain as the just deserts of our hard work, we nevertheless feel as empty as a drum? The truth is this, you see: we cannot, no matter how hard we try, replace our need for God with an idol that represents ourselves. The good and the beautiful and the true - the life worth living, the life that is meaningful and joyful - is not something we can actually create for ourselves by the sweat of our brow. Human beings are not God. We cannot create such wondrous phenomena out of nothing. When they come our way, the good the beautiful and the true arrive not by hard work or ingenuity, but as sheer gift or grace, an act of unconditional love from God. Such gifts are indeed priceless, as Isaiah says:

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

No matter how clever or rich or hardworking you are, you will not be able to buy, beg or steal the life of joy. It is like the manna that the Israelites ate in the desert of Sinai. It is like the water they drank from the rock. It is a gift that cannot be stored or profited from. It is God’s gift in Jesus Christ, and in the way of life that he represents. It is grace, and mercy and peace with one’s enemies.

So if you feel like you are on a treadmill, or like a mouse on one of those wheels in a cage, or if you value your house, your car, your toys, your clothes, your social reputation, or even the apparent ‘needs’ of your family more than you value the gift of God, then I would encourage you to ‘repent’. Yes, ‘repent’! Not a fashionable word, I know, but then again preachers are not supposed to be fashionable! When the gospel-writer talks about ‘repentance’, he means this: to change one’s heart, to stop longing for things and start longing for God; to stop going in one direction, to turn around 180 degrees, and go in the opposite direction. Repentance, you see, is not just for the Trumps and Putins of the world, those whom we rightly see as evil incarnate. It is also for us, with our far more ordinary and prosaic evils. The evil, for example, that is content to let the rest of the world starve to death and descend into endemic criminality so long as we are able to preserve the comforts and relative affluence of our own homes and hearth. Repentance is what Lent is about. It is a return to the promise we all made at our baptism to turn away from the devil, and all his works, and turn instead to Christ and his gift of life, life in all its fullness. It is to turn from a life of empty slavery, in the thrall of our many idols, toward a life of thanksgiving for the many gifts that God bestows upon God's beloved people. It is to reimagine the fruitfulness of our lives, not in terms of the quest for safety and status and the accumulation of things, but in terms of our readiness in the power of God to produce the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience and self-discipline.

So let us reflect on our lives in the light of the word that is able to give life. Let us give away the appetites that lead to death, and let us repent. A change of heart can make all the difference, both for ourselves and for the world at large.

Garry Deverell

Luke's baptism of Jesus

Texts:  Isaiah 43.1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8.14-17; Luke 3.15-17, 21-22

The baptism of John was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  You will remember, in Luke’s story, that John went out from Jerusalem to the Judean wilderness.  There he took the pose and demeanour of an Old Testament prophet, preaching apocalyptic sermons about the coming of God’s judgment upon a wicked and adulterous generation.  You will remember that he looked for a day in which God’s anointed would arise to accomplish God’s purposes.  “I baptise you with water,” said John, “but one is coming after me who will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”  Luke saw John’s baptism as a kind of shadow or figure of that more terrible baptism to come.  By being baptised in water, the penitent could prepare themselves for the judgement day; having been purified of sin, he or she could face the coming deluge with a certain amount of hope.  In the baptismal practise of John, then, the primary actors are the penitent (who repents of their sins), and the prophet (who baptises).  

The baptism of Jesus is somewhat different, however.  There is no trace in the gospel accounts of a penitent Jesus, especially not in Luke.  In fact, Luke goes to great lengths in the previous chapter to establish that Jesus already enjoys God’s favour (2.40, 52), and is therefore not a sinner who is called to repent or be baptised in the sense established by John.  Neither do the gospel accounts consider the agency of John in the baptism to be of especial significance.  Luke, indeed, leaves him out altogether.  He is present at the scene by implication only.  So, if the baptism of Jesus is not a baptism of repentance, what is it?  It is two things, I think.  It is fist a unique sealing of the relationship between Jesus and the two other Trinitarian figures—Father and Spirit—a relationship characterizes by filial love, blessing and mutual empowerment.  And it is, second, a modelling of what baptism must signify for all who are baptised “into Christ”, as the liturgy has put it since the first Christian century.  Let us look at each of these meanings in turn, and then consider what their importance might be for ourselves, we who meet here tonight.

The scene of Christ’s baptism is rightly regarded as a key source for any genuinely Christian understanding of God.  For in this baptism we are given a small insight into the nature of a God who is otherwise rather mysterious.   There we find that our God is a Father, who has a Son, and that the two are related to one another through the agency of a Spirit who embodies both hope and a mission of love.  The baptism passage is rich with a symbolism which is not so readily understood these days, so allow me to spell it out a little. 

First, when we read that the Spirit descended upon the baptised Jesus in the form of a dove, we are meant to recall a story from the Hebrew Bible.  In the story of Noah, God decides to destroy the earth with a flood because human beings had become wicked beyond belief.  So God places Noah, the only righteous one to be found, with his family and many animals in a huge boat which is able to ride out the deluge.  When the sun comes out, Noah sends out a dove.  When it returns to him with an olive branch, he knows that the waters are beginning to subside and they are saved.  In Jewish tradition, then, the dove became a symbol of God’s salvation from disaster and calamity.  The appearing of a dove meant that the difficult times were nearly at an end, and that the new day would soon appear.  In the context of Jesus’ baptism, Luke therefore wants us to understand that the Spirit has come to Jesus as a sign and promise that all will be well, even though his life will be like being swept away in a deluge of water and fire.  This is a message that Jesus really needed to hear, because he was about to be swept up in the fear and hatred of both Jew and Gentile authorities!  

Furthermore, when the Spirit comes and the voice of the Father is heard from heaven, Luke’s hearers would have been reminded of that cycle of oracles in the book of the prophet Isaiah often called the Servant Songs. There God promises an Anointed One, a messiah, who will save the people from their sins, and from the oppression of their enemies, though not without pain, suffering, and terrible loss to the Servant’s own self.  When Jesus receives the Spirit and hears the voice from heaven, Luke wants us to understand that he is being given an identity and a vocation in life which stands in the tradition of the Servant from Isaiah.  The Spirit comes to empower him for his messianic mission.  The voice resounds to confirm him in his identity as a Son specially beloved by his Father, a Son encouraged to remain in that love no matter how difficult the road ahead may be.  The story of the baptism is therefore rich with images which establish both the identity of Jesus in God, and the vocation and mission to which he is called: to save the world from itself.

Which leads us to the second purpose for which Luke apparently intended the story of Jesus’ baptism, namely, that it should become a model and a paradigm for every Christian baptism.  Now, when I say that, I’m not only talking about ceremonies and rituals, although I certainly mean those things as well.  Since the second century most of the church (the ‘free’ churches are an unfortunate exception) has included prayer for the gift of the Holy Spirit as an essential part of every baptismal celebration.  Here the Spirit is called upon to gift the newly baptised person with a new identity and purpose in Christ, and to enable that person to carry out their mission only in the power which the Spirit is able to give.  Most traditional baptismal liturgies rightly conceive of baptism as a ritual which symbolises far more than the moment of getting wet itself.  They understand (with Luke and Paul) that Christ’s baptism was a shorthand way of talking about the life, the death, and the resurrection he was to undergo after he was baptised.  In a similar manner, the traditional liturgies understand that every Christian baptism is a participation in Christ’s own baptism, that is, his life, his death, and his resurrection.  Every baptised Christian is therefore called to find themselves by losing themselves, to plunge themselves so totally into Christ’s messianic journey, that nothing of the old self remains at the end of it all except what belongs to Christ.  The traditional liturgies understand that baptism is life, and that to live is to live from Christ, in Christ, and for Christ, and to do so in the power of his Spirit.  With Luke and Paul, these liturgies therefore encourage us to think about salvation—the redemption of our bodies, minds and spirits—as entirely dependent upon the grace and mercy of God in Christ.  Only by joining ourselves to Christ, both ritually and ‘really,’ can we ever pretend to a sure and certain hope that is free from illusion and wishful thinking.

We so we come full circle.  I began by pointing out the difference between John’s baptism and the baptism of Christ.  The first emphasises the will for repentance in the soul of the baptised, while the second emphasises the mercy and love of God.  Of course, both are necessary for Christian baptism.  But the second is infinitely more important.  Without a consciousness that one will be saved because of God’s unconditional love alone, penitence could easily take on the aura of a good work which can performed in order to secure God’s favour.  Even baptism itself can take on that flavour sometimes, and I think that this is especially the case in churches where the traditional liturgical forms have been abandoned.  Such churches forget that we are saved from our despairs and our fears only because God has called us by name and promised to persevere in mercy towards us even through the very worst that life can dish out for us.  Such churches often revert to the baptism of John, which tried to immunise the penitent from judgement through an act of the human will.  

It is not the human will that will save us, though.  Which one of us can honestly say that we might save ourselves from ourselves by an act of our wills?  I couldn’t even stick to a diet, let alone a programme of spiritual formation!  No, you, like me and everyone else, ultimately depend upon the mercy and love of God to which this baptism of Jesus bears witness.  In baptism he sought to submit himself, utterly, to the destiny and vocation he could never have generated on his own.  Only by a similar submission to God, only by allowing Christ to live out his baptismal life in us and for us, do any of us have even the twinkle of a hope.  Only by believing that God loves us, and will never abandon us to the futility of our own intelligence or will, do any of stand a chance of surviving the deluge which is life itself, or, indeed, the apocalyptic deluge to come.  I thank Christ that it is so! 

This sermon was preached at South Yarra Community Baptist Church on the commemoration of the Baptism of Jesus in January 2004.

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.

The kingdom of God is near!

Texts:  Jonah 3.1-5, 10; Psalm 62.5-12; 1 Corinthians 7.29-31; Mark 1.14-20 

After John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the good news and saying ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.’ 

These words represent Mark’s summary of Jesus’ ministry.  They are his shorthand way of summing up the whole of Jesus’ purpose and ministry in that obscure 1^st century province of Rome known as Galilee.  This morning I should like to dwell for a moment on how these words might change things.  How did they change the world of Jesus’ first hearers?  How did they change the world of Mark, as he repeats them to his small, fragile, congregation around the time when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans?  And finally, how might these words change things even for us today?

So,  let’s first ask how the coming of Jesus into Galilee changed things.  That things did change, and pretty radically, is clear from the passage we read about the calling of the first disciples.  There must have been something very compelling about this young Rabbi, Jesus, something very compelling indeed!  For it was a very big deal in that time, and in that society, for young men in the prime of their working lives to leave the family business and follow a religious teacher about the countryside.  When Simon and Andrew, and James and John, leave their boats and their nets they also leave what most of their contemporaries would have regarded as their most basic obligation in life—to care for their families and assure their survival in the world.  So even though there was a precedent, in Jewish faith and story, for people to do such things, by the time of Jesus such actions were regarded as irresponsible and even immoral.  So, things changed immediately for these families when Jesus came by.  ‘Follow me,’ he said to their menfolk.  That they did so would have had an immediate impact, socially and economically. 

But we must ask ‘Why?  Why would these men in the prime of their working lives risk both their fortunes and the disapproval of their peers like that?’  According to Mark, it had rather a lot to do with who Jesus was, and the message he brought with him.  From the beginning of his gospel, Mark leaves us in no doubt that Jesus in the Messiah, the one anointed by God to set Israel free from its bondage to decay.  He comes, then, as the bearer of good news and the advance glory of the kingdom of God.  Jesus, according to Mark, is a sign in dark times that God has heard the cries of his people’s distress, and will soon put right all that has gone wrong in the world.  All that follows in the gospel confirms this reading.  By his healings, his exorcisms, by the miraculous feedings and his sacrificial death for the sins of the people, and finally by his resurrection, Jesus shows everyone that God has indeed come near to save them.  Jesus himself is that nearness.  He is the human face of God, God with his people in the form of his Son. 

So that is why the fisherman abandon themselves, all that they are worth, to follow him.  That is why they repent of the way of life they had lived up until they met Jesus; that is why they believe in the good news that he bears; that is why they leave their nets and follow him, all the way to Jerusalem and the tragedy that unfolds there.  Because in Jesus they see that God is both near them and for them, turning the world upside down for the sake of the poor, the downtrodden and for all who had become lost in the lust for wealth and power.  In Jesus they saw a light to illumine a very cruel and dark world.

And yet, as Mark is recounting all this for his congregation, the world does not feel like it has changed much at all.  In fact, for Mark’s congregation, it is difficult to see that the coming of Jesus has made any difference whatsoever.  For they are a small and fragile group of Jewish Christians who fled from Jerusalem when it was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70.  It is likely that they lost their homes and their livelihoods.  It is also likely that many of their number were killed.  So now, as Mark tells his story, they are overcome with grief for what has been lost, and are full of uncertainty about the future.  Where, they ask, is Jesus now?  For there is little sign of his presence and power anywhere.

Mark’s gospel can be seen as an extended sermon, a sermon in the form of a story of narrative, which has been specifically designed to answer his community’s questions and suggest a way forward.  In answer to the question ‘Why has God suffered us to lose so much by the hand of our enemies?’ Mark answers:  ‘You are followers of Jesus.  Jesus did not shrink even from death at the hands of his enemies.  You have lost almost everything, some even their lives, but you have not lost all.  You have not lost God, the only source of life and health and happiness.’  For Mark answered the related question of where Christ had gone in this way:  ‘In Jesus the reign of God came near, but it has not yet arrived.  Yet, we carry the promise of that coming with us—in the memory of Christ and his teaching, in the values we live by in our community, and in the ritual of the Eucharist, by which we believe Christ continues to feed us for the pilgrimage of faith.  So let us recall, dear brothers and sisters, that while Christ has not yet come in all the fullness of his kingdom, he has yet given us a portion of his Spirit to sustain us.  Christ is with us, then.  But not in a form that we can possess and manipulate for our own pragmatic ends.  He is with us as his resurrected self:  the promise of a future that is gift, not possession.’  And finally, in answer, to the question about what they should do now, Mark says this:  ‘My beloved people, let us go to Galilee where Christ once walked amongst us.  Let us establish ourselves there as refugees and start to rebuild our lives.  But let us do so after the pattern of the community that Christ formed with his disciples.  Let us believe that the risen Christ will do so again, let us ask him to so form our community in the values of the kingdom that we, ourselves, will become a light for the world, even as Jesus was.  So then, let us become Christ’s body, in whom the very Spirit of Christ is at work.  Let us make repentance, faith and the following of Christ our life’s work and vocation.’  With these, any many other words, Mark encouraged his fragile community.

But now we must turn to what difference all this might make to our own lives, our own world, if any.  For we are not fishermen by the sea of Galilee, and we are not (at least not in this particular congregation) a community of refugees.  Still, we are a Christian community.  By our baptism, the risen Christ melded us into himself, into his life, his death, and his resurrection, that we might no longer live the futile life of those who imagine they can live without God.  We are called to pursue, instead, the risen life of Christ, and to do it communally, in concert with the sisters and brothers God has given us in faith.  In this community at Boronia, we are called to be so possessed by the Spirit of Christ, so vulnerable to his work in us, that his life and vitality becomes evident to all, overflowing with compassion, giving and thanksgiving. We are called, in short, to become 'fishers of people', witnesses to the freedom Christ brings in our families and communities. So, you see, the call of Jesus to those first disciples was not only for them.  Nor was it only for Mark’s little community.  It is also for us.  We, too, are called by Jesus to repent, to believe in the good news of God’s deliverance, and to follow Christ in all his ways.

To repent means to let go of anything in your life that gets in the way of your devotion to Christ.  When Paul tells the Corinthians to live as though their present circumstances were of little account, he does so believing that their devotion to comfort and convenience is misguided.  He does so believing that their present circumstances are not absolute, are not God, and are therefore passing away into nothingness.  What matters, he says to them and to us, is the coming kingdom and its ways.  For it is the kingdom, and not our present comfort or convenience, that is permanent.  So live according to the kingdom and its values, live as though the kingdom was already here, in all its fullness.  Repent of all that prevents you from doing so, put it aside in favour of your faith in the coming kingdom, where the rich will no longer be rich and the poor will no longer be poor.  For the kingdom comes not to destroy us utterly, not to take away all that is of lasting value or significance.  On the contrary, the kingdom is the arrival of God’s deliverance.  It comes to restore our lost equilibrium and peace.  It comes to resuscitate our flagging spirits, sucked dry, as they are, by the vanity of the present world system. 

And if you are unsure about how to go about all this, if you feel so entangled in your present circumstances that you can see no way out, take heed of Christ’s call to the disciples, “Follow me.”  To follow Christ is to learn his story and his ways, and order your life to imitate or ‘echo’ his.  In the early church, people were taught how to do this when they were preparing for baptism.  Our own Uniting Church, however, has tended to assume that people will learn the way of Christ my osmosis, or by some mysterious appearing of such things in the brain.  No matter.  If you want to respond to Christ’s call, you can.  Christ calls you whether you are young or old, healthy or ill, bright or (how should I put it), a few pennies short of a full quid.  What is important in following him, you see, is not your own capacities, but his.  ‘When Christ calls us,’ wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘he calls us to die.’  To die to our own plans and to live by his; to die to our own powers, and live by his; to die to our own pattern of life, and live as though the free gift of the kingdom were all that really mattered.

And so I conclude where I always conclude.  What will you do with this call from Christ?  Will you respond with your whole heart and soul and strength, or will you hedge your bets? 

God who searches the Wasteland

Texts: Jeremiah 4.11-12, 22-28; Psalm 14; 1 Timothy 1.12-17; Luke 15. 1-10

Midway this way of life we're bound upon
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
where the right road was wholly lost or gone.

So begins Dante's great story of the soul's journey towards God, The Divine Comedy. And it continues, a few stanzas later, with this:

How I got into it I cannot say,
because I was so heavy and full of sleep
when first I stumbled from the narrow way.

Dante is certainly not the only person in the history of the world to have woken to find themselves in a strange and unfamiliar place. It is so with many of us. To all intents and purposes, life seems well enough. 'Well' in the sense of 'can't complain'. 'Well' in the sense of 'comfortable'. 'Well' in the sense of 'uneventful'. But these are adjectives which betray a terrible forgetfulness. A forgetfulness about the call to follow Jesus. A forgetfulness about the possibility of pain and risk on mission with God. A forgetfulness about the ecstatic moments of joy and celebration in the embrace of God's love. Forgetfulness is like being asleep. In sleep we dream of the life unlived, the heroic life filled with daring and courage for the sake of love. But it remains a secret. Only very rarely is it made real.

Dante awoke from his slumbers to find himself in a very scary place, an unfamiliar wood. He was lost. Have you ever felt like a stranger in your own life? Have you ever woken up and asked 'how on earth did I get here?' 'Here' is not a place, of course, but the life we're living. Suddenly the truth hits us, and we can see our life for what it is: unreal, a lie, a wasteland of lies. We begin to question the value of everything we've ever done, the purposefulness in what we've slaved so hard to become. Have any of you seen the Scottish film called Trainspotting? It's about a group of heroin addicts who party their way through the most appalling lives imaginable. As the film's observers, we can see their lives are a waste. But they can't see that themselves. They just keep on trashing themselves and their friends and their families for the sake of that little rush of heaven called heroin, all the while pretending that life is grand. But there comes a wake-up call about half-way through the film. One of the girls has a baby, but she's neglected the little fellow awfully. One afternoon she wakes up after a particularly crazed trip to find her child dead. He's simply died from neglect and starvation. The scene is one of the most harrowing I have ever seen. She wails and wails and wails, and her partners in crime are shaken to the very core with shame. Suddenly they are confronted with the truth they've made: their lives are garbage, a wasteland of garbage.

The prophet knew about rubbish lives. He announced the fact to the people of Jerusalem around 600 BCE. They'd forgotten about God. They'd forgotten about love and care for one another. They'd gotten into ripping each other off for the sake of making money and becoming powerful. But Jeremiah declares the truth in a devastating picture of the fruitful land gone to desert:

I looked to the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;
and to the heavens and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro.
I looked, and lo, there was no-one at all,
and all the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord,
before his fierce anger.

These images are not just about the coming historical disaster known as the exile, when the noble classes of Jerusalem would be captured and taken to Babylon. More primally, they are about the condition of the people's hearts and souls. Their souls are a wasteland, made desolate through greed and that numbing forgetfulness about God and the ways which bring life. When you awake to a wasteland of your own making - as Dante did, as the Hebrew nobility did, as the apostle Paul did - life can become very scary indeed.

For many, that is where life effectively ends. Some try to run from the wasteland by denying its existence. By blowing their life savings on a hedonistic trip.  Or having an affair.  Or buying a red sports car. Or drinking themselves back into the stupor from which they came. For others, the wasteland is just so terrifying that they take their own lives. I guess that's how it was for Kurt Cobain, idol to millions of disaffected kids all over the world. Shortly before killing himself with sleeping pills, he penned the words 'Jesus don't want me for a sunbeam, Jesus don't want me at all'. Either way, the sense of waste remains because you can never escape from yourself.

Ursula Le Guin tells the story of a young wizard named Ged who gets too big for his boots by trying a spell which is way beyond his years to control. The spell goes wrong and Ged succeeds only in releasing a shadow into the world which immediately begins pursuing Ged. The shadow is terrifying. It succeeds in stealing all the young wizard's zest for life, and weighs on him a heavy sense of shame and dread. The shadow pursues him to the edge of the world where the young wizard seeks the help of a dragon to defeat his foe. The dragon guides him toward a terrible truth. The shadow is his own self, a shocking externalization of Ged's own darkness and conceit! Running, he learns, will never effect an escape because you can't run from yourself!  In Le Guin's story, the dragon functions as the paragon of hope: a Christ figure who advises the young wizard to stop running and acknowledge his shame and guilt.

That's what Christ does for us, too. As in the parables we heard this morning, Christ is one who searches for us in the wastelands of our own making. We are like sheep who get lost on the mountain slopes, who turn aside from the narrow paths which the shepherd has forged for us. Yet the shepherd does not abandon such sheep to their foolishness. He leaves the ninety-nine more level-headed sheep, and searches for the lost one until he finds it. The apostle Paul reports that when he was lost in the wasteland of blasphemy and violence, 'the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus'. Christ is the guide you will find in your own wilderness, too. The guide who reminds us that life is still possible. He appears in many forms: the shepherd, the peasant woman, the poet or the young lover (as in Dante's Comedy), but he is the same Christ. He is always there in the wasteland, because he represents the love of God for all who get lost, for all who lose their way to the garden of God. Remember, he knows the wasteland well. That is what Good Friday and Holy Saturday are all about: Christ's journey of solidarity into the wasteland of human misery and sin, there to share our shame for the sake of becoming our guide toward a new way, a way that leads to life in all its fullness.

Remember, though, that life in all its fullness - symbolized in the parable by the joy of heaven's angels - comes not only because of the guide's love, but also because of our own repentance. There are two sides to any rescue operation, are there not? You've heard the joke I'm sure: ‘How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb must want to change!’ So it is with the pilgrimage toward life. The guide may appear in the midst of the wasteland, calling our name and offering forgiveness. But unless we are willing to leave where we are and follow, we shall remain in our misery. The biblical word for wanting to change is 'repentance', which means, literally, turning right around and setting out in a radically new direction.

Perhaps you have woken in a strange place recently, a place that scares you to death. A place populated by demons and hobgoblins and terrible, nagging questions about the ultimate value of everything you've even been and done. If so, Jesus comes to you this morning and says, 'don't be afraid. You need to face the truth of your own life in order to be reborn. That will be painful. It will even mean putting to death the self you're accustomed to being. But don't worry. I will be here to guide you into resurrection. You are forgiven your sin and your foolishness. When you pass through the waters and the fires, I will be there. Trust me, listen to me, and together we will walk the path to your only true home . . . in the heart of God'.