Christmas: creating a body of resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God's Other Children

Texts:  Esther 7.1-6, 9-10, 9.20-22; Psalm 124; James 5.13-20; Mark 9.38-50

The Book of Esther  comes to us from a time when Jewish people were doing some serious rethinking about who they were and what God wanted them to do and be amongst the nations of the world.  Although the story is set in the Persian city of Susa at the height of that Empire’s power in the 470s and 460s BC, we believe it was written much later than that, probably during the reign in Palestine of the Priestly dynasty known as the Hasmoneans, between 150 and 100 BC.  This period was characterised by intense debate in Jewish circles about exactly how much a Jew might accept and adopt the cultural values and practices of their non-Jewish neighbours.  By this time, you see, most Jews no longer lived in Jerusalem or even Palestine.  As a result of the policies of three successive colonial masters – the Babylonians, the Persians and the Greeks – Jews had by this time become citizens not just of a small patch of land in Palestine, but of a whole Empire which stretched from Iran in the East to Greece in the West.  The most recent of their colonial masters, the Greeks, had been particularly effective in convincing Jewish people that it was not such a bad thing to participate in the politics, the religion, and the cultural life of non-Jews in general, and Greeks in particular.  But when a particular Greek King, a chap named Antiochus Epiphanes, pushed the policy a little to far by setting up an image of the Olympian god Zeus in the Temple at Jerusalem, he quickly discovered that there was a definite limit to Jewish multiculturalism.  The Palestinian Jews rebelled rather spectacularly, driving the Greeks out and setting up a rather puritanical dynasty of priest-kings in their stead.  The new rulers, the Hasmoneans, tried to turn Palestinian Jews back toward a more separatist policy.  They insisted upon a more literal approach to both the Torah, the Mosaic law, and the ritual life surrounding the Temple cult.  But while their reforms were embraced with single-minded fervour in Jerusalem itself, the wider Jewish community, now dispersed throughout the entire Near East, was at odds with itself as to the wisdom of this approach.

The book of Esther emerges out of the midst of this debate, and succeeds in throwing out some challenges to both sides of the controversy.  Where some Jews were very liberal with regard to the prevailing culture, arguing that it was quite o.k. to speak Greek, to observe Greek culture and customs, and even to adopt certain of the Greek’s religious beliefs and practices, the Book of Esther declares that there is a definite limit to such a strategy.  At its centre are two heroic Jewish characters who distinguish themselves by refusing to be so easily assimilated.  Mordecai and Esther are prepared to put their lives on the line in order to preserve their people, a people described in the book as being ‘different from other people, having their own laws, and not keeping the laws of the king’ (3.8). Indeed, Mordecai first gets into trouble when he refuses to bow before Haman, the king’s governor in Susa.

Now, as modern readers you may puzzle at this refusal.  What could possibly be wrong with honouring the land’s highest official?  At this stage in the story we have no evidence that Haman is a cruel or unethical man, or a despot.  So why will Mordecai not honour him?  The most likely answer has to do with that which the writers of Esther believe Jews ought never to compromise, and that is their monotheism, their belief in Yahweh as the one and only true God.  During the reigns of both Persian and Greek emperors, the king was usually regarded as one who shared in the divine nature of the gods themselves.  The obedience they commanded was therefore tinged with a religious as well as a political character.  To honour the king was also to worship him as a divine being, which monotheistic Jews would find difficult to do in any circumstance.  Mordecai’s refusal is therefore a religious refusal.  He will not bow down to the king’s representative because, from where he stands, this would be tantamount to worship.  In the narrative of Esther, Mordecai’s refusal becomes a distinguishing mark of Jewish identity.  For when Haman secures the king’s approval to an edict which will wipe out Jewish communities all over the empire, he does so by arguing that all Jewish people are like Mordecai – a people who are not to be tolerated because they will not obey the king (3.8).

This represents a loud and clear clarion-call to all those Jews of the ancient world who were compromising the faith of their ancestors by participating in Greek worship and religious devotion.  And who can doubt that this was actually happening?  A few years before this, in the ancient Israelite capital of Samaria, the Jewish priests had actually asked their Greek overlords to set up a shrine to Zeus in their temple.  Clearly these priests had completely absorbed the Greek idea that Zeus, the chief of the gods, had different faces and names in different cultures, so that it didn’t really matter whether you called him Zeus or Yahweh, as long as you worshipped him.  Indeed, this idea had recently gained a foothold in Jerusalem itself.  Several years before he set up the shrine to Zeus in the temple, Antiochus Epiphanes had sanctioned the construction of a gymnasium in Jerusalem, to which many of the leading citizens subscribed.  Unlike modern gymnasiums, Greek gymnasiums were institutes for the propagation of Greek culture and religion.  In order to become a member, you had to declare your allegiance to that particular gymnasium’s patron god.  These are the kinds of practices which the writers of Esther are wanting to target.  As far as they are concerned, Jewish identity stands or falls on its belief that only Yahweh is God, that only Yahweh may be worshipped as God.

And there is a challenge for us in this as well.  We live in a world which, in many ways, is very similar to that of the Ancient Persian and Greek Empires.  We live in a multi-cultural and multi-racial society where particular ethnic and religious heritages are constantly bumping into each other.  Now, if you believe the official rhetoric, all are tolerated.  Each of us are free to worship our own God, in our own way.   But underneath it all, I put it to you that only one God is being given special treatment, one God is being subtly pushed into our hearts and minds as more worthy of our devotion than any other.  And that God is not Zeus, as with the ancient Greeks, but Mammon.  It is Money, with a capital M.  Money is present everywhere.  Temples to Money are being built right across the land.  Huge shopping centres whose architecture resembles that of the temples and cathedrals of the ancient world.  The television beams the gospel of money into our living rooms night after night.  The gospel which says that you are free to do whatever you like, but you are not free from the need to have money, and as much of it as you can.  And here is that message’s stroke of genius, the spin that takes us all in:  ‘you all need money’ it says, ‘because without money you can never be free to do what you want’.

None of this means, however, that we should never participate in the society in which we find ourselves.  Against those who would urge us to ‘come out and be separate’, touching no unclean thing in case we are somehow poisoned, the book of Esther encourages us to live in the midst of our multi-cultural and multi-religious society with integrity and poise.  Note that both Mordecai and Esther are more than happy to participate in the government of Persia.  They are happy to assume positions of responsibility, and to further the good of the king with loyalty.  Remember that Esther becomes the Queen because of Mordecai’s good counsel, and that Mordecai becomes a prominent governor because of his willingness to alert the king to a plot against his life.  All of this shows us that it is possible for Christians to participate in, and even serve a society which we do not control, so long as we are not thereby persuaded to give away what is essential to our identity as Christians.

Mark’s gospel counsels us to a very similar understanding.  There the disciples are counselled to accept the action of another group of healers and exorcists, who are doing similar work to themselves and even using Jesus’ good name to accomplish it.  Now, this other group was probably Jewish, and it probably used Jesus’ name because it believed that Jesus was an important Rabbi whose authority was effective in the confrontation of evil.  In other words, they were probably like modern Jews, Muslims or Mahayana Buddhists, who believe that Jesus is an important prophet of God whose teaching and authority is to be respected - yet who do not believe, as we do, that Jesus is somehow pre-eminent, the ‘Son of God’.  “Whoever is not against us is for us”, Jesus tells his disciples, which means that we ought to be happy to work with anyone and everyone who shares our own, Christian, goals for society, even if these folk do not own the name of Christ in the same way as we do.

At the same time, and echoing the Book of Esther’s word of caution, Mark counsels Christians against sharing in whatever practices or allegiances would take us away from our essential identity in Christ.

If your hand causes you to stumble, then cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to gehenna, to the unquenchable fire.  And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off.  It is better to enter life lame than to have two feet and be thrown into gehenna.  And if your eye cause you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into gehenna, where the worm never dies and the fire is never quenched.

There are some things that, for Christians, are unacceptable, and these have to do with our ultimate allegiance to Christ.  We are free in Christ, we are not free apart from Christ.  That means that we are not free to exchange the worship and following of Jesus for that of another god – like mammon, for example.  We are not free to participate in practices which will cause other people to fall into sin, to lose their way on the path towards God.  We are not free to pretend we are not Christians, and that Christ is only our Lord on certain days of the week, but not on others.

Each of us are called to ‘have salt in ourselves’, that is, to keep ourselves fresh in Christian identity and service.  But we are also called to ‘be at peace with one another’, to work with others (no matter what their beliefs or allegiances) in bringing the kingdom values of peace with justice to fruition in our communities.  Sometimes this is impossible, because the people who rule do not share our values in any way.  But, in the meantime, I would encourage you to read the book of Esther and find encouragement for a wise discipleship in this very multi-religious and multi-ethnic society in which we currently live and move and have our being.

Choosing Christ's Peace

Texts: Hebrews 11.29-12.2; Luke 12.49-56

The following of Christ is not for people who are allergic to making choices. It is not for any who would rather keep their options permanently open, or for those of us who prefer to spread our allegiances around in order to keep things nice with important allies. For when Christ calls, he calls us to choose.

The sacred texts we read just now were written in the midst of a world that was, in many respects, just like the one that has arrived for us with the ascendency of George Bush’s America. The world was ruled by an imperial power, a power whose influence pervaded every sphere of life, whether that be political, economic, domestic or spiritual. Local cultural and religious organisations were tolerated, in the public sphere, so long as their aims and practices did not conflict with the agenda of Rome. Where local organisations did conflict with Rome, its members could be charged with both the political crime of sedition and the religious crime of blasphemy. For what Bush’s America leaves implicit, Rome put out there for all to see: that the accumulation and maintenance of absolute power is tantamount to making oneself into a god who requires both obedience and worship. In the world of first-century Rome, those arrested on suspicion of either sedition or blasphemy were often held for long periods without charge, questioned and even tortured without recourse to adequate legal representation, pushed through a show-trial, and then summarily executed. Ironically, or tragically (depending on your point of view), this whole system of intimidation and repression had a particular name in the first century: the pax romana, the ‘peace of Rome’.

It is impossible to comprehend the words of Jesus in the gospel we read just now, unless one understands that it was this ‘peace’, this pax romana, that Luke wanted to challenge and contest. From the point of view of the Evangelist, the peace offered by Rome was no peace at all. It was a false peace, an uneasy peace. It was a peace that demanded nothing less than the selling of one’s mind, soul and body to the invader. If one were to accept the pax romana, one would need to divest oneself of anything resembling an independent thought or will or action. Theologically, accepting the peace of Rome was tantamount to choosing Caesar, and all things Roman, as god.

For Christians, of course, this was impossible. For Christians are those who, having heard the call of Christ to follow, have freely and without compulsion chosen to give themselves over to Christ as Lord and God. For Christians, there is only one authority in heaven and earth, and that is Christ. Having been baptised into his death, we have died to the basic principles of this world, to its false forms of peace and justice, in order to look for a peace that is still to come. The peace to come, in Christian understanding, is the pax Christi, the peace of Christ. It is a cosmos in which people honour each other with a radical hospitality and unconditional love, very much after the manner of Christ himself. It is a peace in which the poor are no longer poor, and the rich no longer rich. It is a peace in which the colour of one’s skin and the accidents of one’s progress through life are no longer reduced to function as symbols of one’s worth (or lack of it). The peace of Christ is a peace that the world cannot generate for itself. It is the gift of God in Christ’s life, death and resurrection. It is a gift that Christians learn to receive and recognise only through the repeated discipline of immersing ourselves in the story of Christ’s faith, hope and love (that is, by prayer and worship in the Christian tradition). Furthermore, it is in the name of this peace that Christians take up the responsibility to resist the false ‘peace’ of the various empire-builders that appear, again and again, in human history.

When Christ speaks of bringing fire and a sword to the earth one must recognise, therefore, that this is not a sword or a fire that may in any way be compared to the fire or the sword of an imperial power. It is not, in any sense whatsoever, a ‘shock and awe’ campaign like that of Bush in Iraq, nor a kill-them-all-by-night campaign like that of Sharon in Palestine. No, the ‘sword’ that Christ brings is nothing other than his vulnerable humanity, his faith, his hope and his love. The fire he brings is nothing other than that kindled by his passionate care for the poor, the marginalised, and the victims. In a world such as that of Rome, or indeed of the emerging American empire, intangibles such as these are regarded as far more dangerous than any bomb, for they have the power to un-do or even destroy the fears and anxieties upon which all such regimes thrive and are founded.

Of course, the practise of Christ’s virtue is deeply costly for those of us who have the faith and courage to follow that way. As believers who look for a ‘better country’ than the one on offer in the here and now, we resist the values and practices of the here and now. And that, my friends, can be very dangerous. In the passage we read from earlier, the writer to the Hebrews notes that those who practise their faith in God’s coming peace are very often ridiculed, imprisoned, beaten up, exiled, tortured, or even killed. Just as Christ was, in fact. This is the baptism of which Christ speaks in Luke. The baptism into suffering and death at the hands of the powers-that-be for the sake of one’s hope that the whole world might be resurrected in love. One’s hope in such things can even divide families—those who long for something better from those who, whether because of fear or brainwashing, are content to ingratiate themselves towards the power of the imperium.

All of which leads me to ask a very old, but still very pertinent question. If the way of Christ is to resist the Imperial Power with prophetic perseverance and suffering love, why is it that church folk are still amongst the most prominent beneficiaries of the current world system? Why is it that church schools and educational institutions receive so much support from both public and private sectors, and why is it that church people are still amongst the most wealthy and successful members of the community?

Perhaps I may be so bold as to answer this way. Many church people continue to be successful because so many of us gave away the actual following of Jesus long ago. Perhaps as long ago as the Constantinian transformation of Christianity in the Roman Empire of the fourth century. A great many church people no longer resist the values of the imperium because they have chosen the benefits of capitulation to the present regime over the faith, hope and love of Christ toward a better country. I’m not sure that I can put it any more starkly than that.

Still, if that is what has occurred, then I weep for the church and I weep for the world. Because the values of the current world powers make only for misery, and on a terrifying scale. If, as the advertisers constantly tell us, the only people worth two crumpets in this world are white men and women of average intelligence, with large bank accounts, obscenely expensive cars, and beautifully sculptured bodies, then God help the rest of us! In a world with that kind of pecking order, the rest of us are reduced to irrelevance. The rest of us become fodder for an industry whose sole purpose and aim is to enrich the elites. Now, for the people who work the sweatshops of Asia and South America in order to, for example, create the uniforms of our Olympian athletes, that fact is clear and obvious. But for those of us who live middle-class lives here in the West, it is not so obvious. Unless, of course, one has read the stats on the alarming increases in our community of mental illness, substance addiction, paedophilia, family breakdown and suicide. Even then, one can always blame the victim. And that is what we usually do. Until we become victims ourselves. When that happens one sees, often for the first time, that we are all perpetrators and that we are all victims, duped into believing the usual propaganda about middle-class progress.

In times like these, it seems increasingly likely that Christians will have to adopt the ancient visage of the “fools” for Christ, those who resist the logic of the imperium to the point of great personal cost. If the elites continue to protect their interests as aggressively as they are doing in our present time, it may be necessary that many more Christians will have to reconcile themselves to being economically poor, or having low-status jobs, or not having jobs at all. In addition, many of us may have to get used to increased levels of mocking or patronisation. It is likely that, in times to come, our own lives, and those of the one’s we love, may actually be in danger. Yet, in all this, we are called to count our losses as nothing compared to the surpassing wonder of knowing Christ our Lord, who, having endured the cross and its shame, now imbues us, and all who follow him, with the promise of a world renewed. In the name of that faith, that hope, and that love, we are called to be happy in our resistance toward the inhumanity of Bush and Howard. For by doing just that, Christ himself comes to make the better country real. And that is enough for me. In that is our peace, and, I believe, the peace of the world.