The Stone the Builders Rejected

 Texts:  Exodus 20.1-4; Psalm 19; Philippians 3.4b-14; Matthew 21.33-46

When a rock begins its long and tumultuous journey from the mountains to the sea, it is rough and jagged.  As the waters of many seasons push it along its way, the rock starts to lose its jagged features.  They are worn away by a continual process of bumping and bouncing against other rocks.  After an age, when the rock finally gets to the mouth of the river, most of its edges are gone.  Its surface is smooth and silky, like the texture of the water in which it has journeyed.  And it sits, with other rocks, amidst the debris of its own making, gleaming with the splendour of its own peculiar colours and personality. 

The reading from Matthew refers to a stone which is at first rejected for a building project, but later recognised as the quintessential stone from which to assemble the whole building, the ‘key’ or ‘cornerstone’, as it was sometimes called.  The stone, in Jesus’ story, is the messiah whom God sends to collect the fruits of the harvest, whom the Jewish leaders beat and kill. It is Jesus, the one who will rise from death to become the cornerstone of a new community and a new creation. 

All people are like stones, are they not?  As rocks emerge from the mountains and make their way to the sea, so the newborn baby is destined to pilgrimage.  And who can tell what is ahead, or where the journey will end?  Along the way we are inexorably changed.  In a relentless dance of choice and circumstance, we wander through the landscapes of becoming.  Sometimes we are able to choose the next move.  We can decide how to change.  At other times, we are pushed and cajoled by the forces of heredity and environment, beaten into a new shape by violence or indifference.  Who can tell what will happen next?  The past is irrevocable, the future is uncertain.  But change rolls on like a tidal wave.  Note this too, there is no such thing as a painless change.  With each change there is loss, and grief at what is lost, and the struggle to grasp hold of all that is new and the different.  

For many people, change is simply change.  It has no meaning or purpose.  The years roll by.  The landscape changes and so do people.  But there is no sense of destiny in it all.  There is no purpose.  From the perspective of faith, however, every life has an identity and purpose.  God holds us in divine care, so that no matter what changes come, we are known by God and purposed by God to be what we are, and to become what we will become.  

This is what God purposes for each of us: that we might become like Jesus, the stone the builders rejected.  When Paul says that he wants ‘to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings’ he is saying that he wants to become like Jesus – truly, madly, deeply like Jesus.  He is saying that this goal has consumed him, that all else in his life –every other goal or pursuit – has become as rubbish compared with this yearning to be joined with Christ in a mystical sense of co-identity.  For that is what ‘knowing’ means in this extraordinary passage.  The Greek ‘gnosis’ draws on a rich field of meaning which emphasises not knowledge about some reality, but an active participation in, and engagement with, that reality.  To know Christ, then, is to walk with Jesus from Bethlehem to Jerusalem.  To be born with Christ.  To grow and to wonder with Christ.  To be tempted and perplexed with Christ.  To teach and to heal with Christ.  To be angry with Christ.  To love with Christ.  To be rejected and betrayed with Christ.  And to die with Christ in that impenetrable sense of abandonment.  To know Christ is to become his mother or his friend, the one who walks with him all the way to Golgotha, there to witness the wonder of his resurrection.

Lil and I saw a fantastic film a few years ago, a film called Good Will Hunting.  It’s about a young man who grew up in the Irish precinct of Boston, whose mother died when he was very small, and whose alcoholic step-dad beat him black and blue with a wrench whenever he came home drunk.  The boy, whose name is Will, grows up protecting himself from every kind of intimacy, from every possibility of challenge or change, because he believes, deep down, that love will always turn to abuse, eventually.  He is a very smart young man, who happens to possess an eidetic memory and an extraordinary gift for mathematics.  He has read, and can quote verbatim, many of the great works of history and philosophy.  But all of this is used not to explore the world and be transformed, but to build a shining barrier which can protect him from relationship with others.  But the day comes when Will has to make a fundamental choice.  After beating a guy up, a guy who used to do the same to him when he was a kid, he finds himself in jail.  And the only way out is to agree to meet with a therapist for an hour a week.

The therapist turns out to be a fellow called Sean, played brilliantly by Robin Williams.  Sean is no theoretical therapist.  He is a man who struggles, daily, with his own pains and griefs.  But he does so with courage and truthfulness. Sean is able to challenge Will to get out of his armour, which, while very effective at keeping the pain of the world out, is just as effective at locking Will inside a private hell. Through a difficult and dangerous journey, Will is cajoled and persuaded to be truthful and confront his fears about relationship.  Eventually, with Sean as guide and friend, he finds the courage to enter the real world once more – the world of love, intimacy, risk, and vulnerability.  And it is an amazing journey to witness.  Like a rock making its way down the mountain, Will is beaten and bruised.  But all the while, little by little, his beauty emerges.  His individuality, his uniqueness, his infinite value.  And all because a wounded man pressed beyond his own fears and reached out with care and compassion.

Sean is a clearly a Christ-figure in this movie, for Christ is one who, with love and courage, reached beyond his own fear and panic and woundedness to love God and care for his neighbour.  He is one who embraced the world and was changed.  He is one who suffered the pain of change.  But in the process he found his deepest self, a self hidden in the life of God.  This is what God wants for all of us, too.  To respond to life in all its fullness, after the way of Jesus. This is the meaning of our existence.  This is what we are here for.   We are not here to accumulate wealth.  We are not here to acquire or even yearn after our neighbour’s property.  We are not here to kill, maim or lie about the ones who will not do as we wish they would do.  No, we are here to love and to honour God in the way that Jesus honoured God.  Even unto death.  

When a stone reaches the mouth of the river, it is no longer the stone it was at the top of the mountain. By dying to what it once was, it is able to come alive to the goal and the purpose of its becoming. We are the stones of God.  God want to build us into a holy temple, which is beautiful to the eye, and able to host the symphonic music of all that it means to be creatures beloved by God.  But we can never become what we are purposed to become unless we put away our self-centred ambitions and submit to the way of Christ, ‘becoming like him in his death, so that, somehow, we might attain to the resurrection of the dead’.  Today I challenge all of you.  Stop hiding inside your fears about change.  Allow God to embrace you with his love and his care.  Be transformed.  Be healed. Become fruitful for the sake of the kingdom.

Garry Deverell

I am myself

Texts: Acts 3.12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3.1-7; Luke 24.36-48 

When, in Luke’s version of the story, the risen Jesus first appears to his closest friends and companions, they are not entirely convinced that he is Jesus, the man they had known and loved. At first they think he is a ghost, some kind of other-worldly apparition who has come to harm them. They start to believe only after Jesus has said, ‘Look, I am not a ghost, I am myself’ and invited them to touch the wounds in his hands and his feet. A few moments later he eats some fish in the presence, again to show that he is himself, ‘in the flesh’ as it were. This story, and the one before it about the encounter on the road to Emmaus, have always intrigued me. Not because of their apparently miraculous elements (I have never really struggled with the idea that the God who created the universe can also alter its rules) but because they model for us that rather paradoxical process by which Christian selves become yet more themselves by dying to themselves. So, that is what I should like to talk about this morning: becoming who you are by letting go of who you are in order to become a new self that is like the risen Christ.

According to Luke’s story, Jesus was not always himself. Which is not to say that he was not recognisable as himself. His name was Jesus, he was a son to his mother and a brother to his siblings. He grew up in Nazareth and learned a trade, which he then used to support his family. Everyone who knew him over a period of years could have identified him as himself, even if they had not seen him for some time. Even after his baptism by John in the Jordan, even after Jesus left his home town in pursuit of a new and dangerous vocation, Jesus was recognisably Jesus. And yet. And yet Jesus had not yet become entirely himself. Even at the point of his death on the cross, Jesus was not yet what God had promised he would be. He was not yet the risen one, who could shake off the power of sin, evil and death. He was not yet the new kind of human being that the disciples encounter in our story: a flesh and blood person who could nevertheless appear and disappear as though he were no longer subject to the limitations of time and space. For much of Luke’s story, then, Jesus is not yet himself in the sense of having become who God had destined him to be.

Crucially, in the story, Jesus is only able to become truly himself by letting go of a whole heap of cherished dreams about his future, some originating in his own imagination, and some in the imagination of others. His mother, being a Jewish mother, probably hoped that Jesus would become a successful merchant or, even better, perhaps a lawyer or rabbi. She, and he, had to let go off such dreams. His friends and companions hoped that Jesus would become a political leader, a leader who could oust the Romans and restore the fortunes of Israel. They, and he, had to let go of that plan. And from the story of the garden of Gethsemane, we can surmise that Jesus himself would really have preferred to live rather than to die, to retire quietly to some regional small business perhaps, rather than to suffer the wrath of the Jewish Council. Yet, in the end, he makes a crucial decision which makes all the difference. ‘Not my will, but yours be done’ he says. He says that to God, his Father. And by that decision he lets go of his own hopes and dreams in favour of his Father’s hopes and dreams, which ultimately enables God to complete the process of his becoming. By this death, Jesus becomes the Christ, the one anointed by God to bring a new kind of life in the world, a life so new that most of us still have trouble coming to terms with what it all means.

But that is how it is for all of us, as well. We shall never be truly ourselves until we are able to let go of ourselves—the usual hopes and dreams planted in us by family, friends, and culture—grasping, instead, the self that God wills and promises for us, the self that is Christ. The Christ-self, as the First Letter of John tells us, is ‘righteous’. Not ‘righteous’ in the sense of a self-interested hiding away from the rest of the world or a sitting in judgement upon it. No, the Christ-self is righteous in the sense that Jesus was ‘righteous’—an engaged embodiment of the mercy of God, a tough kind of love that is centred on other people and refuses to simply abandon them to the powers of death, despair or banality. According to John, we shall never be entirely ourselves until we are like the risen Christ, the new human being, the revelation of what God intends for humanity in general. ‘When he appears,’ says John’ we shall be like him’. This is God’s promise, but like all God’s promises, it is not a promise that can be fulfilled apart from the choices we make. God created us for freedom. To become who we are, we must choose the path that Christ would choose.

Ego eimi autos . . . I am myself. That is what the risen Christ said to his disciples. And we shall only be able to say that ourselves if we are prepared to do what Jesus did, to take our baptism into his death seriously as a very real dying and a rising. We shall be ourselves when, by faith, we have allowed Christ to take away the fear of what others may think, and the desire to conform to all that is conventional or common-sense. We shall be ourselves when we are prepared to risk both security and sense for the sake of a gospel of outrageous love. We shall be ourselves when we stop believing that there is nothing we can do to transform this crazy world of economic and scientific rationalism. We shall be ourselves when prayer has become a more familiar habit that watching TV or surfing the internet. We shall be ourselves when we are able to attend to the needs of others (‘needs’, note that, not ‘wants’), even if that means putting aside what we think we might need for ourselves. We shall be ourselves when we are able to surrender ourselves to Christ and say ‘not my will, but yours’. Now, I am very aware of not yet being myself. And you, I know, are aware of it too. But in faith I believe that Christ will complete the work that he began when I was baptised. He will do it for you to. If only you, and I, will surrender. If only you, and I, will let go.

This homily was first preached at St Luke's Uniting Church, Mt Waverley.

Hidden with Christ in God: a message for the Aussie bloke

Texts: Colossians 3.1-11; Luke 12.13-21

You have heard the saying 'If you're too heavenly minded, you'll be no earthly good'.   Many of us have been used to taking that saying as gospel, as a word of cautionary wisdom about not getting too carried away with religious stuff.  It's a very Australian approach to life, if you think about it.   Particularly so when we recognise that what usually passes as 'Australian' is actually a caricature: the white, working-class, bloke.  This bloke likes to think of himself as a practical person who acts according to the plain and simple maxims of common-sense.  He doesn't like anything that is too way out, too unfamiliar or too foreign.  He knows what he knows, and likes what he likes.  'And that', he says, 'is good enough for me, mate'.  And that's why the archetypal Australian bloke is supremely suspicious about religion.  Religion represents everything that can't be nailed down in life.  As such, it has the unnerving capacity to call one's common-sense, everyday, view of things into question. Given too much credence, religion has the potential to up-end  the Australian bloke's sense of where things ought to be. Incredibly, the religion of Christ asks him, and all of us, to invest not in the concrete stuff of house, car, footy and a boat for going fishing, but in the rather less tangible matters of love, justice, ecology and intimacy with God.  For the archetypal Australian bloke, this stuff is too airy-fairy and too foreign.  And because we've all been influenced by this approach to life (even if we're not male, white or working-class), Paul's message to the Colossians must, at times, sound like utter nonsense.

In this part of Colossians, Paul actually rails against the common-sense approach to things, the view of life which says 'If you're too heavenly minded you'll be no earthly good'. Indeed, he pleads the opposite:  to set one's mind not on earthly things, but on the things of heaven!  And then he says some rather strange things: religious-sounding things.  He says that all Christians have ‘died’, and that our lives are now ‘hidden with Christ in God’.  He says we've taken off the old self, like you take off a coat, and put on a new self which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.  The upshot of all this appears to be that Paul wants us to stop living according to the common wisdom, and start living this 'hidden' life with Christ.  'Now what', I hear the typical Australian bloke say, 'is the blighter on about!'  What does all that mean?  And why should I take his advice anyway?  I'm quite happy with my life the way it is, thank you very much!'

Well, let me surprise you all by taking those two questions absolutely seriously.  They are very good questions.  They're good questions even if you're not a fan of the archetypal Australian bloke, which I (if you hadn't guessed already) am not.  And they're good questions for two reasons.  First, they call Christian people to give a genuine and credible account of their faith which can be understood by people who do not belong to the church.  In theological terms, we hear in these questions the call to bear effective and relevant witness to our faith in the society and culture of which we are part.  This implies a second reason. Our strange and peculiar language points to a strange and peculiar experience - the experience of finding one's true identity and vocation in Christ.  Our mate's questions are a stern reminder that unless that experience is genuine - truly, madly and deeply genuine - then we really are just kidding ourselves.   In that case our typically Australian mate would be absolutely right in dismissing us.  According to Paul, we are called by God not to believe a series of doctrines and belong to a club called The Church, but to be disciples of Jesus Christ:  to live radically new lives with our whole minds, bodies and experience . . .  but I run ahead of myself.

Allow me to return to the first of those questions the archetypal Australian bloke might ask of Paul's message to the Colossians:  'what is the blighter on about!?'  What does Paul actually mean when he talks about putting off the old self and putting on the new?  And what's all that mysterious stuff about having died but living a life 'hidden with Christ in God?'  Well, this is where I reckon the parable of Jesus about building bigger barns comes in handy.  I suspect that a lot of us are like this fellow who dreams of building bigger and bigger barns to put all his stuff in.  The modern, suburban version might talk about elegant clothes and houses, flash cars or yachts on the river.   These are the modern symbols of wealth and success, of having made it in the lucky country.  Few of us ever get there, but most of us dream of getting there.  That's why so many of this nation's poorest folk spend so much of their modest incomes on gambling and tattslotto tickets.  It's the lure of the dream they've been sold by the advertisers. 

The bad news is that this dream is killing us.  It's killing the poor, certainly, because being poor means you'll never possess the material symbols which prove you're a success.  So you spend your days feeling like a failure, battling a low self-image and wondering whether there's any point.  Or you get angry at those who do seem successful.  And you learn to hate them, or you rob from them, or you abuse or perhaps assault them.  Because you wish you had what they seem to have: the money to be free and happy.  But those of us who are relatively well off, whether rich or middle-income earners, are being killed by the dream as well.  Because the dream promises happiness if you get this stuff, but when you get it you don't feel happy.  You feel empty and ripped off.  It’s like someone stole the punchline to the world's funniest joke.  At base, you see, is the reality that all things must die.  All things pass away.  If we invest our sense of personhood and wellbeing to things material, then we're already dead.  Because material things are dead.  They don't have life, and can't give us the things which fill life with meaning and purpose.  And it doesn't matter how much of that stuff we accumulate, it won't give us the magic.  And when we face death, whether that be sooner or later, we're all confronted with that stark fact.  When you're dead, the symbols of wealth and success spell a big fat zero.  When I worked as a chaplain at the Epworth hospital in Melbourne, I met a number of high-flying business men who had gained the world but lost their souls.  It wasn't until their run-ins with death that they awoke to this fact.  And it was terrifying.

So when Paul says 'you have died', when he talks of 'putting off the old self', he's talking about this experience exactly.  Some folks are confronted with death through accident or mis-adventure.  And they are forced to change their lives, to put to death old ways of being and embrace new ways.  But Paul says to us, don't wait until that happens to you.  Put to death the deeds of common-sense wisdom right now.  Because the ‘common sense’ is a lie.  Put to death the version of success you've been sold by the advertisers.  Put to death the dream of happiness from wealth and comfort.  Put it to death.  Put it all to death.  Let it all go into the dark.  If you let it go, then you've got a shot at finding out what life is really about.  If not, you'll just be whistling in the dark until the day your body catches up with the despair and desperation you already feel in your spirit.

But where is this new life to replace the old?  And how do I find it?  Well there is mystery here.  That must be frankly admitted.  Paul says, 'you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God'.  He also says that the new self is one which 'is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the creator'.  There are clues and traces here, traces of God and of transcendence.  But not answers of the kind we've been conditioned to expect -  water-tight answers, complete answers, answers available right now, like the results of a google search.  Nevertheless, the clues are exciting!  Paul encourages us to look for the answers in a person, a person who lived and died on this earth of ours, a person who now lives in the heart of God.  Somehow he blazed a trail for us: a trail by which he suffered the dark night of death and a profound renunciation of the common way; a trail that broke through to the other side, the side where God is.  And this person, who is called Christ, the 'anointed one', somehow found his own true identity and purpose in God, and became one with God.  And so it is Christ who holds the secret of who we are in his home in the heart of God.  Paul encourages us to seek, and walk, after the way of Jesus Christ, who is the image of the Creator who made him, and made us.  In following him, we are promised a new self that, like Christ, is forged in the image of the one who made us.

But what of our Australian mate's second question?  'Why should I take Paul's advice?  I'm happy with my life just as it is!'  Perhaps there is a sense in which many of us are happy with being unhappy.  We've become so used to feeling like life has passed us by, or that we've been failures in life, that we've become numb to any new possibility.  Many of us, I suspect, find it less scary to sit in our misery than to contemplate the possibility of transformation.  Eric Fromm, the eminent psychotherapist, called this numbness  ‘the fear of freedom’.  Many of us are scared to face the new or the unknown because we're afraid to die.  There is no new person or new world without the passing of the old.  Deep down we all know that.  And many choose to stay put.  That is the greatest tragedy of life, I think. Not earthquakes.  Not famines.  The tragedy of inertia, portrayed so beautifully by King Lear in Shakespeare's marvellous play.  Here was a man who knew he was going to hell, that he was already in hell.  But he decided to stay there because the prospect of changing was too much too bear.  Here, too, the message of Christ has something to say.  'Perfect love drives out all fear'.  Perfect love drives out all fear.  We Christians believe, you see, that Christ's path through death to life was not entirely of his own making.  We believe that God chose him and loved him before the creation of the world, to be the one who would suffer and die to make a way to God for us.  God did this because of love, love for every single one of us.  So there is no need to be afraid of change.  If God is for you, who can be against you?  In the end, you see, the journey to a strange place is actually a return home.  The new identity is actually an old one.  The person you will become is simply the person you already are, deep inside.  So don't be afraid, my Australian mate.  Surrender to God and set yourself free.

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church in 2004.

Everything is refuse compared to knowing Jesus Christ

This homily on Philippians 3.4b-14 and John 12.1-9 is made available as a sound file.  Please click here to download or listen.

The homily was preached at St David's, Oakleigh, on the fifth Sunday of Lent, 2013.

The gift of death

Texts:  Isaiah 25.6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21.1-6a; John 11.32-44

Because I could not stop for Death,

he kindly stopped for me.

There is something arresting about these lines from Emily Dickinson.  When read out loud, they send a shock-wave through one’s body because their subject is . . . death.  Death, that shadow, that reality which so many of us would rather avoid thinking about.  Death, that end to all our powers, that blind assassin of achievements, whether they be evil or good, lies or truth.  Death, that destroyer of suburban dreams, that terrifying democrat who respects neither our station in life nor the tapestries of intimacy we weave therein.  Death is indeed one whose piercing gaze we would rather not countenance.  The truth is that few of us have any time for death.  We are busy.  We would rather not stop.  And yet . . .  isn’t it strange that Dickinson speaks of death’s ‘kindness’ in choosing to stop for her?  How could death ever be regarded as kind?

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking of that paradigm example of modernity called medicine, and its unfortunate practise of keeping a person breathing when they’d rather slip away, that brand of so-called ‘care’ which insists on keeping our bodies alive, when, at the same time, our deepest spirit longs for nothing else but quiet, peace, and an end to the pain.  Many of you will have stared this experience in the face.  And many of you will have recoiled in horror, and prayed earnestly that God would grant the kindness of death, a death which comes, quietly, to liberate a loved one from the coils of despairing mortality.  In circumstances such as these, death can indeed be seen as a kindness.  But this morning I would like to push us beyond circumstances such as these, and explore a far more difficult proposition. Might there be a sense in which death as such, any death and every death, might actually be regarded as a gift from God?

Death as a gift.  The idea just seems so contradictory, especially if you’ve been raised, like me, in the Christian church!  Because so much of our theology seems to regard death as the enemy.  And with good cause.  I think of the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden of Eden.  For many years I imagined that human beings were created immortal by God, and that death came into the world as a form of punishment for our pride, our believing that we could be like God.  Emphasis on the word punishment.  And that is certainly one way to read the story . . .  if you want to ignore the following details.  That Adam and Eve were not created immortal, and that their expulsion from the garden of Eden is effected so that they will never eat of the ‘tree of life’ and become immortal.  In the actual Genesis story, as opposed to the imagined one, the expulsion from the garden is not a punishment, but a measure to ensure that the plan for human beings continues according to God’s intention.  And that intention explicitly includes mortality.  Death.

But what of that other famous passage in 1 Corinthians 15, where the apostle Paul speaks of death as the ‘last great enemy’ that God will overcome?  Indeed, how can we Christians not see death as the enemy, if we believe that God wills that our ‘mortal bodies put on immortality’, that our fleshly bodies become ‘spiritual bodies’, as Paul says?  Today’s reading from Isaiah would seem to echo that sentiment as well.  There the prophet describes death as the ‘shroud’, the ‘sheet of sorrow’ that covers the people, and promises that God will ‘swallow up death forever’.  And again, in Revelation, the writer imagines a ‘new heaven and a new earth’ in which death, along with sorrow and pain, have been done away with forever.  Surely, then, death is not part of the plan of God.  Surely it can only be seen as an enemy to be done away with: the last enemy; the last, and greatest, evil.

Again, it is possible to read the story that way if you are happy to do away with the more subtle character of the narratives in question.  It is important to notice, in Paul for example, that while death will ultimately be done away with, in the meantime it performs a crucially important function. For Paul, death is the indispensable means by which we put aside our own will to make room for the will of Christ.  By our baptism we are buried with Christ in death, so that we may be raised to a life no longer controlled by the desires of our own egos, but by Christ.  Now this is very important.  Here the ordinary, ‘common-sense’, understanding of death is subjected to a radical deconstruction, a veritable transfiguration.  No longer is death simply death, the cessation of consciousness, of life, of biological functioning. No, death is also a radical decentring of personality, an act of the will by which, paradoxically, desire and personal ambition are done away with so that the desires and ambitions of God might take up residence in that very same personality.  Here death is indispensible to what John of the Cross called the ‘dark night of the soul’, the profoundly disturbing loss of all that one thinks or knows or feels in order to make room for that which is unthought, unknown, and unfelt . . .  for God, who is all that we are not.

If all that is difficult to take in, then listen again to the story of the death and raising of Lazarus.  Except, this time, listen not so much for the events of the story, but for the theological images  evoked by Lazarus’ death.  Can you hear Jesus say that, by Lazarus’ death, the glory of God will arrive? . . .   Can you hear him say that, with this death, there is an end to knowing and a beginning to believing? . . .   Can you hear Thomas say ‘Let us go with Jesus, that we may die with him also’?  . . .   This whole story imagines death, not just as the cessation of life, but as the occasion of salvation.  By the death of Lazarus, all concerned engage the reality of their own deaths as well.  In weeping, they experience the death of their ‘seeing’, which, for the Greeks, was a cipher for knowledge.  According to John, God cannot be known in the same way as we know other things.  Indeed, it is only when we are prepared to lose our capacity to ‘know’ that we may see God’s glory.  Only when we die to ourselves, may we rise to God, and find our true selves.

Death, then, is a gift in this sense.  By coming to the end of our powers, we make room in our lives for the power of God.  By coming to the end of our knowing, we make room in our minds for the knowing of God.  By coming to the end of our desire, we make room in our hearts for the desire of God.  By coming to the end of our capacity for peace, we make room in our hearts for the peace of God.  If the coming of God in any of these ways is a good thing, then death may be seen as a gift.  Indeed, one might even say that death is God’s gift of grace for all who would be released into the radically new way of being alive which we call being ‘in Christ’.  And while I believe that my actual and final death will also be my passage to God, I also believe that in meditating upon the fact of my death right now, while I’m alive, I might be persuaded to die a little now, and so become more fully alive than I have ever been before.

Thomas Merton once prayed with these words.  I’d like to make them my own today, in honour of the saints who have lived and died before us, and who model for us the way to salvation:

My hope is in what the eye has never seen.  Therefore, let me not trust in visible rewards.  My hope is in what human hearts can never feel.  Therefore let me not trust in the feelings of my heart.  My hope is in what human hands have never touched.  Do not let me trust what I can grasp between my fingers.  Death will loosen my grasp and my vain hope will be gone.[1]

---

[1] Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, New York, Noonday Press, 1958, p.39

I lay down my life

Texts:  1 John 3.16-24; John 10.11-18

In the passage we read just now from John’s gospel, Jesus is addressing his Jewish opponents. ‘I am the good shepherd’ he says, ‘because I lay down my life for the sheep that I know and love by name.  You, on the other hand, behave like the hired hand who runs away when the wolf comes by, because he does not love the sheep and cares not for their fate.  The life I lay down, I lay down by my own choice.  But I will take it up again.  This power I have received from my father.’  This morning I should like to dwell for moment on this sense of volition we get in John’s gospel around the death of Jesus, that Jesus somehow chooses to lay down his life, and that he does this out of love for his disciples. 

It is difficult for we moderns to really understand why the crucifixion happened.  On one level, of course, we know exactly why it happened.  Jesus got himself into trouble by being incredibly naïve, by seeking to upset the carefully negotiated détente that existed between the Roman state and the Jewish authorities.  Jesus died because he was a starry-eyed idealist who could neither comprehend nor accept the real-politik of his time.  From that perspective, the perspective of historical and political ‘realism’, the more theological explanations for his death seem rather odd.  That Jesus died for our sins.  That he chose to die out of love for sinners.  That his life was given to exhaust and destroy the power of sin and death over our human future.  Journalists are completely lost with it all, as a review of the film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe revealed a few years ago.  ‘What I have never understood,’ says the journalist, ‘is why Aslan, or Jesus, had to die.  If God loves us, why would he need some kind of blood-sacrifice?  Why doesn’t he just forgive us and be done with it?’  Even bishops and theologians have trouble understanding it all, as regular readers of our esteemed denominational newspaper will have discovered.

There are, of course, good reasons why we find the death of Jesus difficult to understand.  One of them I have mentioned before in this church.  Affluent westerners now live at a great distance from the rather sobering fact that life comes from death.  Indeed, we have become afraid of death because we have forgotten about its connection to life.  When we lived nomadic or agricultural lives, we were much more aware of the connection.  We saw that the beasts that provide our meat had to be slaughtered.  We saw that the plants that produced the grains for our bread had to die in order for us to harvest their fruits.  We saw that the land became fruitful again by ploughing in the dead remains of the harvest.  When you buy your food from the supermarket, when medicine has all but removed that daily certainty that death is around the corner, it is difficult to see that life itself comes at a cost, the cost of other life.

At one level, then, the theology of the death of Christ reflects upon a simple biological fact:  that life itself is very costly, that the aliveness of one is made possible only by the death of another.  Theologically, there is a sense in which this is true even with the doctrine of creation.  Here the creation only becomes possible, is only able to come into existence as something other than God because God is willing to undergo a kind of death, the death of God’s right to exercise sovereignty over the creation.  If God retained that right, you see, then the creation would be no more than an extension of God’s own mind and will.  It would always do what God willed it to do.  It would not be God’s other.  What God apparently chose to do, though, was to expend his power to create a power other than his own, a power that is able to choose a way other than that which God would have chosen. 

But note the way that theology has already complicated, here, the simple sense that the nomad or the farmer has that death is somehow necessary to life.  For what God does , in giving us life, somehow transcends the simple categories of necessity, of cause and effect.  What God does is introduce the wildcards of love and volition, which means that life and death are no longer a matter of necessity alone, unfolding according to a pre-programmed genetic imperative, but of choice, and especially the choice to love.  The death Jesus dies is not, therefore, to be understood only as some kind of necessary death, a death like that of the beast which is slaughtered (against its will) to feed the tribe.  His death certainly does feed the tribe, let us make no mistake about that.  What are we doing at communion, if not to participate in the food and drink that is able to give us the life of the kingdom of God?  Yet, let us be clear, this life is given us not because we take it from Jesus, against his will, but because he has chosen to give it.  Out of love.

There is a sense, then, in which the crucifixion simply manifests in human history what God has always been about: love.  And what is love?  According to the Johannine corpus, love is what God is as trinity, a community of service and care.  It is hospitality, the willingness to make a home within one’s own life for someone who is other than oneself.  It is solidarity, living the sufferings of another as though they were one’s own.  It is sacrifice, the laying down of ones own powers, one’s own capacities for life, that they may be taken up by another.  It is to centre oneself on helping another to come alive, in the faith that life shared is the best life of all. 

Perhaps our difficulties with the death of Christ come down to this, then.  That we moderns have become strangers to love, and especially to its costs.  Over and over we are told that love is something other than what Christ would teach us.  Over and over we are told that love is a contract or convenience that is fine while it serves our own interests, but can be legitimately done away with when it begins to cost us somehow.  Over and over we are told that love is about feelings of euphoria, a drug to help us cope with the pains of life.  As such, when love itself becomes painful, we are better to ditch it.  Over and over we are told that laying down one’s life for another, and especially for the stranger, is irrational.  Life is about securing yourself against the misfortunes of others.  Life is about comfort, no matter that our comfort deprives others!  Today elections are won or lost on this platform.  Is it any wonder that we struggle with the death of Jesus, then, a life laid down for another!

The good news of Easter is that life shared, life laid down for others, creates a new kind of life altogether, a life hitherto unimagined in the history of the world.  In the mystery of divine love for the world, the self-centred egotism that has destroyed human life for millennia is itself destroyed and done away with, absorbed, as it were, into the death of Christ so that the usual cycles of human relating—our cruelty, indifference, violence and greed—is not only interrupted, but done away with altogether.  You might not believe that this is so, if you look at the world we live in.  But what God gave us, in the time he spent amongst us in the flesh, was a glimpse into the reality of God, a reality yet more real than that reality we usually experience, a reality that is close enough to change our world if only we will believe and live our lives accordingly.  Faith, you see, is the place in which God’s reality (which is sometimes called grace) arrives in the world.  It is the place where love finds soil enough to flourish.

I pray for the faith of the people of God, that we shall be able to resist the rationalism and cynicism of our world, and let love in.  I pray that we might summon faith enough to love each other as Christ has loved us.  

Easter in Ordinary

Acts 2. 14, 36-41; Psalm 116.1-4, 12-19; 1 Peter 1.17-23; Luke 24.13-35

Well the times have come full circle and we find ourselves in the Easter season once more.  Like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, we sing the Easter refrain 'He is Risen!' and crack open the symbols of new life and fertility:  Easter eggs, Easter bunnies.  And they remind us of the new life which came with Christ’s resurrection, just like last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.  And we get up early on Easter morn and sing the Easter refrain 'He is Risen!' and crack open the symbols of new life and fertility:  Easter eggs and Easter bunnies.  And, well, the times have come full circle and we find ourselves in the Easter season once more.  Like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, we sing the Easter refrain 'He is Risen' with hearts full of joy, and crack open the symbols of new life and fertility:  Easter eggs, Easter bunnies and . . .  do you get the feeling that I’m going around in circles?  Do you get the feeling that the record is stuck, and you’ve heard it all before? 

Friends, what I have done just now is reflect back to you what I myself hear at Easter time just about every year.  I hear the resurrection of Christ being tied to the cycles of nature, to the return of fertility, to the flowering of flora and fauna in the European springtime.  For that is what the theology of the resurrection has become in our culture: an affirmation of the Eternal Return of that which we saw last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and so on.  Here the Christian meaning of the resurrection has been collapsed into that old pagan celebration of Oestre, the Anglo-Saxon god of fertility, whose advent is celebrated with the cyclic return of the sun to warm the world and awaken the life that lays dormant in the soil.   This Easter celebrates what Nietzsche called ‘the eternal return of the Same’, the irrepressible tendency of nature to repair and replace itself; but more seriously, of human beings to want what they have always wanted, to believe what they have always believed, and to know what they have always known.  It is an Easter in which the rhetoric of ‘new life’ is just a figure of speech, because nothing new is really possible.  The circle returns, endlessly, to where it began.  Which makes me think that perhaps the best symbol of this modern Easter is not even the fertile bunny or the egg of new life, but the Big Mac.  Because each time you have one, it tastes exactly the same as the one you had last time.

Of course, the Feast of the Resurrection has absolutely nothing, nothing I say, to do with the Eternal Return which is 'Easter'.  On the contrary, the resurrection of Jesus is about the in-breaking of something which is so new, so different, so unheard of, that, strictly speaking, we cannot even describe it.  It is, as Jürgen Moltmann says, an event entirely without comparison or analogy.  It is an event which shatters every established pattern, every expectation, every shred of comfort and certainty we may have had about the way things are.   It is like the T-Shirt which I bought at a U2 concert a few years back which said “Everything You Know is Wrong”.  It is the explosion within Sameness of a reality which is totally and radically other than anything that we could ever think or imagine:  it is the arrival of God.  And the purpose of this interruption?  To change things.  To change things so entirely that we will never again become captive to all that is predictable, or ‘necessary,’ or ‘fated’.  When Christ rises he does not rise, like Lazarus, to a life lived as it had been lived before.  When Christ rises, he rends not only our hearts, as Peter says in his Pentecostal sermon, but also the very fabric of the way things have always been, so that God’s creatures may never be slaves to the Same ever again.

Here we find ourselves inside Luke’s story of the Emmaus road.  Like us, the travelling companions live in that time after the resurrection.  The women had been to the tomb and witnessed its emptiness, but scarcely able to understand what had happened themselves, find that they cannot make themselves understood amongst their male companions, who remain trapped inside their cycle of despair.  And that is where we find the companions as they begin their journey.  Like many of us, they had lived though a cycling of highs and lows: their messianic hope had been shattered on a Roman cross.  Yet it is here, within the circle of despair, that the Christ chooses to meet them. 

Now, having joined them, Jesus, listens to their woes.  We would expect that of him, would we not?  But then he does something rather surprising.  He begins to preach to them from the Scriptures, but not in the mode of most of the sermon’s I’ve heard, which do little more than confirm and comfort me in circle of that which I already know.   No, this is a profoundly dis-confirming preaching, which first castigates them for their lack of faith in the prophets, and then proceeds to deconstruct their Scriptural knowledge so radically that the meaning of the same is utterly and irreversibly altered.  The results were, I imagine, terrifying.  Suddenly the disciples begin to see that everything they had ever known and believed was wrong.  Yet despite the upset, there is something in what Jesus says that compels them to hang onto him. 

So when they urge Jesus to join them for the evening meal, he consents to do so.  And there he does something which really dislodges their expectations.  In a careful repetition of what he had done at the last supper, Jesus takes bread, says a prayer of blessing, and breaks it so that all gathered may eat.  At that moment, we are told, the companion’s eyes are opened.  They recognise that the stranger is Jesus, their friend, the crucified one.  And yet he is not that one.  He is radically different.  He is risen.  If that isn’t weird enough, Luke then tells us that in that precise moment of recognition, at that very nano-second, Jesus then vanishes from their sight and is seen no more. 

Turning to each other in wonder and excitement, the disciples declare to each other the way in which their hearts were ‘burning’ within them when they heard the word preached.  Note the word: ‘burned,’ as in purged by a bushfire, not ‘warmed’, as by a cosy open fire on a winter’s night.  The disciples rise from where they are and return to the place of despair and forlorn logic from which they came.  They return to Jerusalem with a distinct and special mission:  to declare and confirm that Christ had indeed been raised, and that he had make himself known to them in the breaking of bread.  Which is to say, they returned to Jerusalem to dis-confirm the logic of the Same which held sway there, to interrupt and fragment its omnipotent power by the burning presence of all they had glimpsed in the risen Christ.

Now, this is a strange and wondrous story by any standard.  So strange and wonderful that I am certain that almost everything I intend in speaking about it tonight is not quite right.  But this is how it is with the resurrected Christ.  He comes to us as the word that is strange and in/credible, not conforming to the logic of what we know and experience to be real and trustworthy.  He comes to us not to confirm what we know or to reinforce our sense of what is good and noble and true.  He comes to change all that, to show us, in the blazing light of his risen glory, that the Eternal Return of the same is killing us.  Slowly killing us, but killing us all the same.  And who can doubt this word?  Hasn’t life become genuinely banal for us in this neo-pagan world of circles?  Hemmingway wrote famously that most people live lives of “quiet desperation”.  He was writing about himself, of course, a man who was constantly on the look-out for new experience, something which might cut across the boredom of his life.  The writer of Ecclesiastes complains that all is ‘vanity’, by which he means that human beings, despite all their apparent thirst for experience, tend to look only for that which may be easily integrated into the logic and the framework which is always already there.  But Christ is raised to shatter that logic, to undo the idolatrous gaze that works such vanity into all that is seen and touched and felt.  Christ is raised to set us free from such a thing.

This I believe, and this I declare to you today.  But I want you to note two important implications of this belief.  And these reflections are guided directly by Luke’s text.  First, resurrection belief is sustainable only if one believes what Luke says about the disappearance of Christ at the very moment that we recognise him.  Remember what we heard from Moltmann. The resurrection is an event without analogy.  No matter how much we try to understand and describe him, the risen Christ will always and everywhere elude and elide our grasp.  We see him as in a glass darkly; he is a flash of light at the corner of our eyes, which, if we turn to take squarely into the full ambit of our gaze, will disappear into invisibility.  The Celtic tradition speaks of the Christ who always comes in the guise of the stranger, a stranger who is gone even before one realises who he was.  In precisely that mode, the Emmaus story tells us that no matter how ingenious our resurrection accounts and theologies become, they will certainly not secure a Christ who may be domesticated for our own use and purpose. 

Which leads into my second point, and a rather perplexing one at that.  Perhaps you will have noticed how Luke structures his story after the model of a first century worship service?  First there is a Gathering of companions, who come immediately from the circle of despair, and they are joined there by Christ.  Then there is a Service of the Word, a recounting of the Scriptures and a preaching; and it is Christ himself who does this; yet he is not recognised by those who hear.  Then there is a Eucharist, where Christ is again the anonymous presider who breaks bread, blesses, and share it with his companions.  And then there is a Mission.  The disciples, having finally discerned the risen Christ, are then driven out by the burning in their hearts to dis-confirm and question the logic of the world from which they came.  What is Luke telling us in all this?  Simply this: that the risen Christ ministers to us in the gathered worship of the Christian church.  That he reveals himself to us in the reading of Scripture, the preaching of the word, and in the breaking of the bread. 

But how can this be?  How is it that this ordinary human language of worship may become the language of Christ?  Didn’t I just say to you that Christ comes to interrupt our language and to un-say all that we might say of him!  Well, there is a great mystery here, a mystery very much at the heart of everything I am trying to do in my own journey through life.  And a mystery tied very much to the mystery of Christ himself, who, in the incarnation, is said to be God in an ordinary human life.  Perhaps all that one may say about this mystery is something like this:  That in the human language of Christian worship, Christ himself arrives in the midst.  Not to confirm what we intend to say, but rather to so dispossess our symbols of the meaning we intend, that, somehow, even as we say it, we hear it said back to us with a meaning not our own, in an inflection and tongue not our own, so that our hearts burn with confusion, and terror, but ultimately with the holy joy of people who are being liberated from their bondage to the same old thing. 

I pray to God that Christ may do just that, even with what I have said to you this morning.  Maranatha!  Come Lord Jesus, come!

I want to acknowledge the work of three other theologians of the resurrection in the composition of this sermon: Ebarhard Jungel, Jean-Luc Marion and Nicholas Lash.

Can These Bones Live?

Texts: Ezekiel 37.1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8.6-11; John 11.1-45

As Ellie Wiesel and his companions watched, the German guards led a young boy to the gallows. He was well-known to them all. A sprightly lad with a quick sense of humour. His presence had done much for their flagging spirits of late. But now their humour was gone altogether, and a sickness of heart gripped the whole company. The boy had stolen a loaf of bread. He was to be executed for his trouble, and the whole population of the concentration camp was being forced to watch. As the noose was placed about the boy's neck, Ellie heard a whispered question, 'Where is God now?' And that, my friends, is a question that I often ask myself. 'Where is God now?' Where is God for all those Africans whose lives are being stolen away by war and famine? Where is God for the street kids of Columbia, whose parents abandon them to hunger and disease and a culture of violence? Where is God for we Indigenous people, whose land and stories and children was taken away without our consent or permission, whose lament can never be stilled? Where is God?

Ezekiel must have been asking the very same question as he looked out over the people of Israel following their exile to Babylon. He imagines Israel as a standing army - once glorious in battle, but now defeated absolutely. In Ezekiel's vision, this people once chosen by God lie dead across a whole valley. Their bones are dry and white in the sun. Even the sounds of mourning have passed away. There is no sound but that of emptiness, that thin whisper which says 'Our life is dried up, our hope is lost, we are cut off from God completely'. That note of national despair finds its echo in the more personal story of Lazarus of Bethany. Lazarus is a man greatly loved by his family and respected in the community. Suddenly, in the prime of his life, he becomes ill and dies. And note this. While Lazarus' sisters and the whole community mourn, Jesus, the very face of God in this story, is nowhere to be seen. He remains in another town, a long way off.

I must confess to you, my friends, that sometimes when I am in pain or despair I feel as though God does not care. But, more often, I wonder whether God can actually do anything about our pain. Oftentimes, even as I go about my duties as a Minister of the church and representative of Christ, I find myself wondering whether God may, in fact, be impotent. Perhaps God does care, perhaps God cares a great deal. But it may be that God can't do anything about it. Maybe God brought the world into being, but now is helpless to change its course. Maybe God had good intentions, but the whole thing just got out of hand. Most of the time, my friends, I have absolutely no problem believing in the reality of God's love. As I gaze at the image of the crucified Christ, I know in my heart that God suffers out of love for the whole damned creation. But frankly I wonder if God has any power to turn things around. I wonder if Christ may still be crucified, if God may be as dead and impotent as Nietzsche suggested.

But when I begin to think this way, when I begin to think that all is hopeless and lifeless, that line from Ezekiel comes to mind, 'Mortal, can these bones live?' I hear the question as a challenge to the despairing vision of my personal perspective. And I am reminded that my personal vision is extremely limited, that there is a supreme arrogance in writing things off so easily. When Martha meets Jesus on the road to Bethany, Jesus tells her that Lazarus will rise again. Martha brushes his comment off by reciting a line from the official doctrine of the Pharisees, 'Of course, Master, he will rise again with all the righteous at the last day'. But Jesus immediately challenges the limited nature of her vision. He talks of himself as the 'resurrection and the life' and declares that any who believe this will never be defeated by the powers of death, even in the midst of this life. 'Do you believe this?' he asks Martha. And this is Jesus' challenge to all of us.

Do you believe that the dry bones around you, or within, can live? Do you believe that God has the power to not only love us but to save us? Such belief is rare, I think. And it is rare because of the ways we are taught to see. Psychologists talk about a condition known as learned helplessness. Most people who believe that they can never progress beyond a despairing situation in which they find themselves, have learned that belief from their parents or other significant people in their lives. The children of alcoholics, for example, learn that they can never face a difficult challenge without the aid of a drink. But, of course, the drink eventually robs them of the capacity to face any situation. At another level, most of us have been taught to be passive and helpless as members of our society. Though we live in a democracy, and we are all proud of the freedom we have, very few of us ever exercise that freedom by resisting government policy or setting up ways of life which go against the flow of 'normal' social commerce. We have all been lulled into thinking that we are powerless to change anything. In the face of big business and big government, what can we do?

The reality, of course, is that things can be different. It's not only government or big business or big personal hurdles which stop us. It's what we believe. Do you know why I set aside time everyday to read the Scriptures and pray? Not because I ought to as a Christian. Not because I am a minister. I pray because I believe in a God who brings life to the dead. In that sacred half-hour, I read the stories of God in the Bible, and I wait for God to show me the ways to hope and resurrection in the midst of my own despairing reality as well as that of the communities in which I am engaged. In that little room, I wait for God like the Psalmist waits for the morning. And God indeed comes to me. God lifts me up. God renews me in hope, and fills me with visions for a better day.

Do you believe that these bones can live, my friends? When Jesus had done with weeping, he showed the power of his love by commanding the dead Lazarus to come forth from his tomb. And, blow me down, he did!  Against all reason, all expectation, all predication or calculation . . . Lazarus came forth! The dead man lived! Now, listen carefully. This is not a story about God's liberation at the end of time. It is not primarily about the hope of resurrection for all who die in the righteousness of Christ. Those stories, with that intent, come later in this gospel.  This, however, is a story about here and now. It calls us to believe in a God who brings life to the dead in the midst of our present lives, in our present stories, here and now. Do you believe the promise of God, my friends? Do you believe that God’s Spirit can come from the North and the South, from the East and from the West, to breathe new life into defeated bones? I do. Not smugly, and not triumphantly, I hope that’s clear! My belief is hard won, and I need the constant discipline of prayer to retain it. But I do believe! And you can too.

Can you imagine what could happen if you believed?