Losing Ourselves to Gain Ourselves for Justice

 Texts: Acts 16.16-34; Revelation 22.12-21; John 17.20-26

Five years ago, two hundred and fifty Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders gathered at Uluru to sign a ‘Statement from the Heart’ which called upon the Australian people to join with them in working toward a ‘makaratta’ or treaty between our peoples, built upon truth-telling and a constitutionally recognised Indigenous ‘voice’ to the national parliament. Two days ago, at a ceremony on Gadigal land in Sydney, nine national religious leaders signed a resolution calling upon the federal parliament to work towards a referendum on the ‘voice’ as soon as possible. The religious leaders represented Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. I’m grateful to God that there were also Catholics, the Uniting Church, the National Council of Churches and, yes, even Anglicans. Chris McLeod, our national Aboriginal bishop, represented our Primate, Archbishop Geoffrey Smith, on this occasion.

One of the pleasing things about this ceremony was the fact that none of the nine religious leaders gave a speech. Rather, they listened. They listened to an oration from Rachel Perkins, an Arrente and Kalkadoon woman, a prominent filmmaker, and the daughter of Charlie Perkins, the man whose 60s activism played a key part in the recognition of mob as human beings in the 1967 referendum.  Ms Perkins used her oration to call for unity – amongst mob, in the general community, and in the faith communities – unity in supporting the Statement from the Heart and the call of the religious leaders for a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament. For this is the only way, she argued, that we are ever likely to see something like justice arrive in our nation, the nation of Australia, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

It goes without saying, perhaps, that you only have to call for unity if unity isn’t actually there. And it isn’t. Demonstrably. None of the communities Ms Perkins was addressing can claim to be agreed, even within themselves, on either the Statement from the Heart or the urgency of a referendum. I can tell you, with some authority, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are not agreed. Many mob do not even know what the Statement from the Heart actually says. And the same is surely true with the Anglican community. Perhaps even more so. The ministry conference I attended during the week made it quite clear to me that a voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – indeed, even as simple a matter as listening to the mob who are part of us, who live and work in our midst - is really the very last thing on our ecclesial mind.  The very last.  What seems to be uppermost in our Anglican minds are things like the intrusion of the state into our affairs and . . . you guessed it, sex (who can have it, and what kind).  Which, on my most buoyant days, attracts little more than a gentle eye-roll but, on others, a feeling of deep despair at just how tone-deaf and narcissistic we have become. Honestly!

That’s why I really feel for the Jesus of John’s Gospel, whose earnest prayer for unity appears in today’s lections. Let’s listen in to his prayer once more, the prayer he offered, according to John, just before he was arrested and crucified:

I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

(17.20-23)

Now there’s a few things in this passage which require some clarification. First, when Jesus prays for ‘those who will believe in me through their word’, the ‘their’ in this sentence is the disciples, the apostles, who will go out to preach. ‘Those who will believe in me through their word’ are therefore the Christian communities these apostles will found and, ultimately, everyone who decides to become a Christian because of the apostolic witness. So that’s us, my friends. Jesus is praying for us.  Not for someone else, some historical community on the other side of the globe. For us. For our conflict-ridden community.

A second and crucially important clarification. When Jesus says that he has given us his glory, the glory already given him by his Father, he is not talking about fame and fortune, or even about victory or success in any conventional sense. For when John talks about glory, in this his gospel, he is in fact talking about crucifixion and the sacrificial pouring out of one’s life for others. Allow me to quote from an earlier passage, that scene at which Judas leaves the supper to betray Jesus to the authorities:

So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘Do quickly what you are going to do.’  So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night . . .   When he had gone out, Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.

(13.26-27, 30-31)

 And an even earlier passage, in chapter 12:

‘Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life . . .

 

‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—“Father, save me from this hour”? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ . . . Jesus said, ‘This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.

(12.24-25, 28, 30-33)

I share these passages at length to convey the sense in which John uses the concept of ‘glory’. For him, the pinnacle of Christ’s glorification by the Father is not, in fact, his resurrection or ascension to the Father. It is his crucifixion, that moment when he surrenders himself entirely to his Father’s will out of love for the people to whom he was sent. So let’s be clear, let’s make no mistake. When Jesus talks about glory, he is talking about sacrificial, cruciform, love. A love that bears fruit only at great personal cost. The cost, even, of death. So, this is what Jesus prays for us: that we might live into his cruciform glory; that we might suffer and perhaps, even die, for the sake of the world and our fellow Christians;  that we might be as one in such love, that the world might know and learn of God’s love by the way we pour out our own lives for others.

A third clarification, if you will indulge me. When Jesus talks about unity as ‘oneness’, he is not talking about ‘uniformity’. He is not talking about us all becoming carbon-copies of each other in body or mind, and thus simply unable to disagree with each other. No. The model Jesus uses for ‘oneness’ is not the cookie-cutter but the circular reciprocity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In this earliest example of mature trinitarian thinking, John has Jesus pray that we might indwell each other – as the Father does the Son, and the Son the Father – not to the point where we simply become each other, without any hint of differentiation. For the Father is NOT the Son and the Son is NOT the Father. Each comes to ‘indwell’ the other, rather, in something of the manner that dancers and jazz musicians do, by their intuition about where the other is going next, and their choice to cooperate with each other out of a deep and abiding care and respect. That is why the Cappadocian fathers of the church called the trinity a circle-dance: a mutual yielding and cooperation of each with the other, even as the possibility for dissension and disagreement remains forever at hand.

This, then, is what Jesus prays for the church. And, if I may speak quite personally again, it is why I remain a Christian even though many of my fellow-Christians regularly wound and drive me crazy. It is why I am a Christian even though the church has never come to terms with its leading role in the attempted genocide of my people. It is why I remain a Christian even though the church remains racist. It is why I remain a Christian even when mob are ignored and rendered invisible by our Councils and theological colleges. It is why I am a Christian. Why? Because I believe in the sacrificial love of Christ for sinners as the only hope for us all. The only hope. The only hope. For I, too, regularly hurt my kin. I, too, am blind to the sufferings of others and too much centred in my own hurts and fears. I, too, am in desperate need of grace: the undeserved favour that is offered to us all for the making of the church, and of a society, and of an ecology that is finally reconciled, made one, whole and at peace.

That is not to say that we are equal in our sacrificial callings. We are not. It is incumbent upon the more powerful partner to do the lion’s share of the work to close the yawning gap between us, whether that gap be economic, cultural or theological. So let’s call a spade a shovel. The social and economic rules in this commonwealth, the cultural assumptions of this colony, and the theological imagination of this colonial church, are all those of white people, of colonists whose forebears are in Europe. If you are not from Europe, or your forebears were not – and especially if you are Indigenous to this country, with its 300 clans or nations – the only way to survive is to adapt to the colonial rules and imagination.  Doing so is enormously costly and regularly depletes and exhausts the personal and economic resources all of us who really prefer to live from and to country. Yet colonists do it with relative ease, and white people assume that there is no other way to live. The playing field is therefore deeply and structurally uneven. The fight is fixed, the mare has been hobbled, the dice have been loaded. And this is especially the case if you are ‘the wrong kind of black’. So, if we are really the church, if we are to take Christ’s call to sacrificial love seriously, it is incumbent upon the strongest to do most of the sacrificing. Which, let’s be honest, is deeply counter to everything we are taught from an early age.

I’ve not even attempted, today, to explore the other lections. I’ve not explored the ways in which the gospel frees slaves and interrupts the accumulation of wealth (as in the Acts reading). I’ve not explored what ‘washing one’s robes’ might mean in order to eat from the tree of life (as in the reading from Revelation). Strong hint, though. It has something to do with dying to the basic principles of this world and rising to a completely different set of values.

But let me conclude with this. If we are ever to be reconciled, if we are ever to come to terms with the hurt and the injustice we render, one to another, in this colony called ‘Australia’, we must discipline ourselves to live into the prayer of Christ to his Father. If there is ever to be something like justice, we must be prepared to put aside all our many forms of cheap and trivial grace, our many band-aid solutions and duct-tape fixes. Instead, if we are colonists, we must learn what it means to love at great cost, to embrace genuinely cruciform solutions to end our cultural and economic warfare against the last and the least. If Christ, whom we claim to worship, was willing to give himself entirely for our salvation - to pour out his life even to death, for the sake of all this world’s most little and vulnerable ones - what prevents us from so giving ourselves for this great work? What? What precisely? Is it the fear of losing ourselves? Losing our treasured control? Losing our sense of moral and intellectual superiority, our sense of being on the side of the angels? Is it a fear of losing what we believe is rightfully ours to possess?

Please, friends, don’t be afraid. Listen to the wisdom of country once more, the wisdom which Christ embraced and shared with his disciples: ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’ In reality, there is nothing to lose, my friends, nothing but fool’s gold and false promises. But look at what you can gain! Justice for the vulnerable, peace for the troubled, a home for the exiles. And friends. Friends who love you and have your back. A community in which you can laugh, and cry, and dance and sing. A communion of all creatures which includes the plants and the animals, the waterways, the starry host and the earth itself. A veritable body for Christ, who fills and embraces all that is alive. So, please, don’t be afraid to lose all you have for the sake of justice. For you will receive back a hundredfold everything you ever could lose.

Garry Deverell

7th Sunday after Easter, 2022

St Paul's Cathedral, Naarm/Melbourne

Becoming Christ Together

Texts:  Exodus 17.1-7; Psalm 78. 1-16; Philippians 2.1-13; Matthew 21.23-32

Last week the Uniting Church Synod of Victoria and Tasmania met at La Trobe University in Bundoora.  The Synod is a regular gathering of representatives from Uniting Church presbyteries, schools, hospitals, missions and other agencies from right across Victoria and Tasmania.  According to the regulations of the Uniting Church, the Synod is responsible for overseeing the mission of the church in presbyteries, colleges, agencies and schools.  It is also responsible for the selection and training of ministerial candidates and the management of church property and finances within its bounds.  Over the course of last week, then, the Synod gathered to listen to reports and to make decisions about all these matters.

There is a permanent temptation in a church like ours to make decisions as though we were the Labour Party.  Increasingly, the church is organising itself into factions— ‘liberals’, ‘progressives’, ‘neo-orthodox’, ‘evangelicals’—and strong groups have formed to actively lobby the councils of the church on a range of issues.  The most organised groups are the ‘Reforming Alliance’ and ‘The Progressive Christian Movement’ but there are others.  In my opinion, the church climate has become so factionalised, that it is now almost impossible to turn up to a Synod or Presbytery meeting to participate, simply, as a Christian and member of the Uniting Church who wants to discern the will of Christ in company with others.  For now you will find yourself pigeon-holed before you even get there.  Several times in the years since I began attending the church’s councils I have seen people assume that I will support or oppose such and such a proposal because I belong to a group that it variously called ‘the theological fascists’ or the ‘intellectual mafia’.  No such group exists, as far as I can tell, and if it does, I’ve never been invited to one of its meetings!  But the very fact that a person can be so easily dismissed represents a very troubling tendency in the church, a trend in which people decide not to listen to other people on the basis of a whole lot of convenient assumptions about what those other people are likely to believe or do, assumptions that function only to reinforce the ill-conceived prejudice of one’s own position.  It is the kind of thing that has, frankly, made me very wary of attending the church’s councils at all.

Now, one only has to read the New Testament to discover that this situation is not a new one for the church to find itself in.  The church has apparently been sinning in this way since the beginning!  The letter of Paul to the Philippians is a case in point.  Why would Paul need to exhort the Philippians to be ‘of one mind and heart, in full accord’ unless that were not the case?  The church at Philippi was clearly as factionalised as the Uniting Church is today.  The solution Paul offers for this disunity is not, however, the one that we are most often encouraged to adopt in both church and society.  It is not the solution of so-called ‘tolerance’, where each party simply accepts (or assumes) that the other can never agree with me, and should therefore be smilingly gazed at across a great distance.  For tolerance assumes that neither party will change.  Neither, of course, does Paul recommend the George Bush kind of solution, that is, ‘I want them to agree with me so I’ll use my bigger stick to beat them into submission’.  No.  No way.

What Paul recommends is what I, also, would recommend to my church this morning.  That the way to a unity of mind and purpose in the church has nothing to do with what you desire or what I desire, but with what God desires.  Listen to what Paul says:

Let the same mind be in your community as was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was God did not consider equality with God a thing to be exploited, but emptied himself instead, taking the form of a slave and being found in human likeness.  In that way he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

I could talk about the meanings of this passage all day, but for now I would like you to note two things only.  First, that Paul offers up Jesus as a model for what and how we should desire as a church.  What we should desire is not our own vision of the world, but God’s vision of the world.  And how we should desire it is by emptying ourselves of our own desire.  Emptying ourselves.  It sounds Buddhist to many modern ears, but it is not.  In Buddhism you empty yourself of desire in order to desire either nothing at all, or, as Slavoj Zizek has convincingly argued, to allow your powerful neighbour to make use of you for their own manipulative purposes.  In Christianity, by contrast, our desires are put aside in order to make room for the desire of God, who is pure and unadulterated love.

The second thing I would have you note is a consequence of the first.  That unity of heart and mind in the Christian community can never be achieved apart from a serious and widespread willingness to listen and look for the desire of God in the story of Jesus of Nazareth.  It sounds obvious when you put it like that, doesn’t it?  But the point is far from obvious to so many of our church councils.  In part this is so because of sheer laziness and inertia.  Many of us know and believe that the contemplation of Christ’s story is the beginning of everything that has any consequence, that we can never hope to act in the world as God would act unless we contemplate Christ’s story with regularity and devotion.  Yet many of us also crowd out this devotion by our devotion to other things.  Thus, Christ’s way and will has not had opportunity to sink its roots deep down into our hearts.  So much so, that when we come to the point of meeting in community to discern the mind of Christ, we rarely know enough of Christ to make genuinely Christian decisions! But inertia and laziness is not the whole story.  The other reason why we are not inclined to contemplate Christ’s story as the source of our knowledge of God is because most of us (whether ‘liberals’ or ‘evangelicals’) have been formed by the culture of ‘modernity’, a culture in which the point of religious faith is certainly not to conform ourselves to the will of God revealed in Christ, but rather to make God’s ways ‘fit’ our own ways, to assume that God must make sense according to what we already think we know about how the world works.  I am glad that this culture is crumbling, but its influence is still very powerful in the church.  A church that wants God to fit its own agenda is unlikely, it seems to me, to spend a great deal of time contemplating the life of Christ.

So what’s to be done?  If Christian unity, a oneness of heart and mind, is a consequence of this contemplatio Christi alone, then clearly we should spend more time doing that, and at the most fundamental levels of the church.  We should encourage one another to read the Scriptures and believe in them.  We should meet together, in pairs and groups, to discuss the Scriptures and to wait upon the Spirit of Christ in prayer.  We should put aside the novels, the magazines, the sociology and the television for a bit, and read a bit of Christian theology.  We should put aside even the works of goodness and charity for a while each week.  Not because Christ is not present and active in all of these things, but because we shall not be able to recognise how Christ works through all the business of life unless we get to know him in the shape of our gospel tradition.  The point of the Christian love of neighbour, you see, is not to become a doormat for someone else’s desire.  It is not to serve the other slavishly, at the expense of one’s own desire alone.  It is, rather, to serve God first.  To recognise that what is best for my neighbour is what God desires for them.  Which, in turn, requires that both of us, if we are Christian, contemplate the word of God in Christ together.  Only then shall we be able to serve each other truly.

This is true not only for Synods and Assemblies, but also for congregations and small faith communities.  I leave these thoughts with you for your consideration.  Test what I say against the story of Christ, and if I am wrong, please tell me.  Because I too, would rather do Christ’s will than my own.