Shalom Dreaming - hope and endurance

Texts: Isaiah 65.17-25; Luke 21.5-19

When the exiles returned to Jerusalem, their prophets imagined a time when the misery of former times would no longer be remembered: the fundamental injustice and corruption of Hebrew society in the period before Jerusalem's destruction; the fall of Jerusalem to the foreign invader; the captivity of Israel's noble families in Babylon.  In the passage from Isaiah, the prophet declares that these memories of trauma and disgrace are to be put aside forever, because God has begun the work of making a new Jerusalem out of the ashes of the old, a Jerusalem characterised by peace, or Shalom.

Where the former Jerusalem had ignored the terms of covenant with Yahweh, this new Jerusalem would be a 'joy and delight' to its God.  The resources of Israel would no longer be concentrated into the hands of the aristocratic few.  The peasantry would no longer suffer the early deaths of malnutrition and disease, because they would now enjoy equal access to the land's bounty.  Neither would the majority be alienated from the fruits of their labour.  No longer would they work for others without just recompense.  No, in this new Jerusalem of Yahweh's making, the poor would live in the houses they built and enjoy the harvest of their own planting.  Shalom.

Alongside these covenantal social reforms, the prophet anticipates a new depth of spiritual communion between the people and their God.  In former times, the people had cried out to God for deliverance from their ills.  Yet God, on many occasions, had seemed distant and unresponsive: as distant and unresponsive as the people sins had made them from God.  But now God would come closer than ever before.  Even before the cry of distress came to people's lips, God would already be present to offer assurance and care.  Here the prophet implies not so much a change in God as a change in the people's approach to God.  In times gone by, the people would cry out to God for help.  Yet they had shown little inclination to mend their ways by returning to the peaceful terms of the covenant.  The prophet dreams of a time when the spirituality of the people is thoroughly covenantal, where the people are more intimately and wholeheartedly lovers of God.  Shalom.

Finally, the prophet indulges in a little cosmological dreaming.  Not only will the people enjoy peace, but the non-human order also. The imagery here is quite beautiful:

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together;

the lion shall eat straw like an ox;

. . . they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.

This is a vision of cosmic peace, where even 'natural' enmities have been put aside; where even carnivorous animals become vegetarians!

 

Now, contrast all of that with the rather bleak vision of Jerusalem presented by Luke's gospel, a Jerusalem that would have been profoundly disappointing to the prophets we've been discussing. For this Jerusalem of the 1st century, far from experiencing covenantal Shalom, is once more the scene of terror and dismay, this time at the hands of the Romans. At the time in which Luke writes, the temple, which so poignantly symbolised the hope of Shalom for so many Jews, was once more in ruins. And with it, one might conclude, so was the ancient Hebraic dream of peace.

 

How does a community deal with disappointment on this scale, particularly a religious community, which has dreamed such wonderful dreams—dreams about a world reborn to justice, truth and love? How did the black community of America cope when their great dreamer, Martin Luther King Jr., was taken by a sniper's bullet? How did the Salvadoran community deal with the death of their courageous archbishop, Oscar Romero, who had dared to imagine an El Salvador where the poor would be destitute no longer? The easiest thing to do, it seems to me, is to give up the dream, to conclude that the dream is a hoax; or, perhaps, that such dreams belong to an era of idealism which we have wisely left behind. People who come to such conclusions often join the very forces against which they have raged for so long. Like the hippies of the peace and love generation, who grew up to become the kings of western capitalism, thus demonstrating that they were really just as greedy and individualistic as those they had formerly accused.

 

I must confess to having felt the temptation to abandon the Christian dream on many occasions. Whenever I see a disaster like the inter-ethnic massacres in the Sudan a few of years ago, I feel that temptation. Or the civil wars in Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria. For these conflicts are not, in any way, fated or necessary. They are the results of centuries of co-operation between ethnically-based oligarchies and foreign colonialism. They are the result of the greedy exercise of power and a basic lack of care and respect for people and their future. For years, ordinary people in each of these places have been agitating against the power of the privileged few over their lives. And, eventually, they each gained a victory of sorts. The promise of free elections and an end to violence. Yet now, as we speak, the dreams which came into being through the poet-politicians of each of these communities . . . with so many dead and dying, where is all that now? And when I see the decline of genuine Christian witness in the midst of our own increasingly stratified and materialistic society, I ask myself the question: what am I to do? How can I resist the power of these enormous forces?

 

In that context, the exhortations of Jesus for those who are being persecuted take on a new power. Here in the western church we are not being persecuted with the ferocity that Christians were being persecuted towards the close of the new Testament period. And we are not being killed and maimed like countless Christian workers in Africa, Burma, the Philippines and the Middle-East. But we are facing a time of terrible decision. In the face of the colonising and secularising forces of western capitalism, how are we to respond? Do we simply join in with it all? Do we simply capitulate to the New World Order where the rich get richer and the poor die young. Or do we somehow find the Christian dream once more, and live by it, no matter how difficult?

 

Jesus stands amongst us this morning, as he did in the Lukan community of old, and encourages us to keep living the dream. 'Don't run after false messiahs', he says. These are the American-styled ‘pentecostal’ preachers who promise peace when there is no peace, who promise a personal relationship with a ‘Jesus’ who does nothing except numb your heart and spirit to the realities of everyday life in much the same way as alcohol does. A real Messiah, I submit, would ask us to bear witness to the Christian dream right in the middle of everyday life, with our eyes open and our hearts and minds alert. Which is precisely what Jesus asks of us: to offer a critique of everyday life in the light of Shalom. To protest. To say it is not good enough that so many thousands of children die of malnutrition, that Aboriginal children suffer in squalor, that the resources of the future are being exported to provide for the greed of today. Don't be afraid, says Jesus, when you make your protest before even the captains of industry or the officials of government. If you keep living in the dream—if you allow it to well up into your thinking, your feeling, your praying—then you will find wisdom and words to do it justice. 

 

But most of all, when all seems lost, when the whole world seems mad on destroying itself, keep believing the dream. For if you do this, you will, in the end, actually become the dream. You will, in the words of the new Testament, become its body and spirit in the world. For the dream is Christ—all that he did and said as an incarnation of God’s own dreaming or Spirit. Insofar as we allow Christ to become the primary compass for our own living, insofar as we allow his own dream and Spirit to become ours, that is the extent to which the kingdom of Shalom will arrive in our own place and time. That is how the dream will stay alive in the world. So what will you do? Capitulate to the way things are? Or make yourself available for God’s dreaming?

How to become a saint

Texts: Ephesians 1.11-23; Luke 6.20-31 

If the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church is to be believed, it is really rather difficult to become a saint.  There are several requirements.  First, one must be dead, which does tend to dampen the ambitions of many a popular preacher!  Second, one must have lived a very virtuous and holy life.  Not necessarily from birth, but certainly from the time when a person first began to follow Christ in earnest.  Third, one must have produced at least two ‘miracles’, that is, unusual phenomena that may not, after careful investigation, be accounted for by reference to the normal processes of what is ‘natural’.  It is quite permissible, as it happens, to produce a miracle after you are dead.  Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, for example, was exhumed from his grave several times over a period of three hundred years, and his body had not decayed in the way that bodies should.  To the Roman authorities, that kind of thing will boost your sainthood score enormously. 

Of course, sainthood was not always so.  In the New Testament a saint is simply a disciple, a person who has heard the gracious call of Christ to follow, and chosen to obey that call out of a fundamental faith and trust in God.  At one level, then, sainthood should never be understood as something one may ‘earn’ through a life of exemplary virtue or heroic deeds.  For sainthood is a gift—the gift of God’s love and forgiveness in Christ.  It is also true, nevertheless, that there are those who really believe and trust in this love of God, living their lives out of its power . . . and there are those who don’t.  In the passage from Ephesians that we read a moment ago, the writer prays earnestly that his hearers will live out of the enormous power of God, demonstrated in the works God wrought in Christ for our salvation.  Note well, the power is God’s, not ours.  Yet the writer still feels the need to pray that such power may become the most important fact in his hearer’s lives, which implies that they are not yet the people God has called them to be. 

It is in this sense, then, that I can see some point to all the Roman posturing about sainthood.  Underneath all the rules and procedures, under all that detritus of centuries, what the canon-law of saints really says is this:  that saints are people who shine with faith and trust—not in themselves, their own virtues or achievements—but in the virtues and achievements of Christ on their behalf.

This, then, is the paradox of Sainthood or, if you prefer, discipleship.  Disciples live from a power, a virtue, a miracle which they have not generated for themselves.  They depend, utterly, upon Christ.  Yet, it is precisely that attitude of dependent faith which makes them radiate with goodness, care and compassion.  Think about it.  If we have died to ourselves in baptism, if we have been crucified to the basic values of this world, then the life we live in faith is not our own life at all.  It is God’s.  It is the divine life that was made human in Jesus.   We rise from the waters to live the life of Christ: to imitate and repeat his life in our own.  In this perspective, the amazing faith of the saints is no more than a grace that is actually believed in and received, rather than considered but then put aside when it really counts.

What is the difference, then, between a Mary McKillop and your average church attendee?  From God’s perspective, not a great deal!  God loves both of them.  God forgives both of them.  God calls both of them to die, to take up their cross and follow Christ into a quality of life and love that the world cannot give.  Yet one of them chooses to live from the power of this gracious call, to trust in its power, and the other (one suspects) chooses to do so only very rarely.  One chooses to love as Christ loved, loving the neighbour even to the point of great personal sacrifice, while the other perhaps chooses to put faith aside when the going gets tough or when there is money or status at stake.  One really believes that Christ’s life, no matter how difficult, is the only life worth living.  The other suspects that Christianity is impractical, a set of admirable ideals mind you, but not to be lived too literally.

This morning you and I are called to be Mary McKillops.  To let go of all our hungers for health, wealth, family and security—to surrender such things into the hands of God—and to hunger instead for the commonwealth of peace and justice that Christ will bring.  A hunger for the kingdom is exactly like the hunger for food.  If you are starving, if you have nothing to eat, you will do almost anything to find nourishment.  You will travel hundreds of kilometres over rough and dangerous terrain, like the refugees of South Sudan, in search of the one thing you need to sustain life.  So it is with the desire for God’s kingdom.  It is a desire that consumes all else, a desire which comes to us as a painful longing that the world might be different than it is, a desire which drives and motivates us as though it came from a place other than ourselves.  And so it does, for it is the desire of God!

The saint is not one who gets everything right, who is always successful and admirable.  The saint is one who trusts in God, who believes God’s promises, even when the chips are down and there seems little foundation for faith.  The saint is one who, in a sense, becomes who he or she is because he or she is first able to allow God to be who God is, and this in the midst of  a body and soul given over to God to do with as God wills.  This is a calling not simply for the especially intelligent or gifted or capable.  It is a calling for us all, because in the end sainthood is not about self-generated achievement or sanctity.  It is about trusting that Christ will complete his work in us, even when our sin looms large. 

Wounded by God

Texts:  Joel 2. 23-32; Psalm 65; 2 Timothy 4. 6-8, 16-18; Luke 18. 9-14

The book of Joel is amongst the most enigmatic works of the Hebrew bible: ‘enigmatic’ because it reflects on an event so disturbing that the authors seem hardly able to speak its name.  From the start of the book to its end, one may read about the dark and terrible effects which that event had in the minds and hearts of the people.  You can read, also, about the prophet’s attempts to heal that darkness, the way in which he tried to soothe the wounded and comfort the despairing.  But you will not discover, with any real certainty, what the event was that actually caused it all.  Some interpreters say that the land was overtaken by a horde of locusts, a veritable army of insects, so large that every living thing, plant or animal, was destroyed in its wake.  Others say that the book reflects upon one of the climactic invasions of Hebrew territories by the Assyrians, the Babylonians or the Greeks, after the manner of so many of the other writings in the Hebrew canon.  But how is one to decide between the two?  For if the authors are writing about locusts, they describe them with the aid of an elaborate and chilling military metaphor.  And if they are writing about an invading army, the image of swarming locusts is invoked to describe its horrible effects on the population of Israel.  But, in the end, the honest reader is left with a sense of radical undecidability.  Something happened.  Something truly awful.  But we can’t really know what that something was.  All we are left with are startling images and the emotions they evoke, traces of a trauma which cuts so deeply that the authors seem unwilling to name it directly, even to themselves.  It is too painful.

This is often the way with a trauma, which I understand to be an unexpected event, a wounding which is visited upon us from somewhere ‘beyond’ our usual frame of reference, a happening which so interrupts the ‘normal’ flow of our lives that we can scarcely believe it has happened.  One day we are healthy and happy, the next day we have cancer.  One moment we are happily married.  The next we are inexplicably alone.  We are engaged in the one of the normal tasks at work, sending a fax, say, when suddenly an aeroplane crashes into the building and explodes.  How does one integrate such experiences?  How does one find a language to explain what has happened, even to oneself?  It is difficult.  Very, very difficult.  Because what has happened seems impossible.  It could not have happened, and certainly does not happen in that person’s world.  And because the impossible is also impossible to name, the only means by which a traumatised person may begin to integrate their trauma, to make it somehow real, is to draw an analogy with something else that person knows.  To paint a picture with colours they have already seen.  To tell a story with characters they’re already familiar with.  To make a song with a tune they’ve been humming all their lives.  That’s why the writers of Joel spoke about their own trauma in terms of locusts and armies.  These were things they already knew about.  Devastating things.  And they provided the images by which the new trauma might be approached but not approached.  Described but certainly not tamed or domesticated.  Acknowledged as real, but never finally mastered or integrated into their known world. 

But now I want to note something even more enigmatic.  The principle name in Joel for the unnamable trauma which had befallen the people is not, in fact, either locusts or invading armies but “THE DAY OF THE LORD”.  Listen as I locate the places where this intriguing phrase is found: 

Alas for the day!  The day of the Lord is near: as destruction from the Almighty it comes.  Is not food cut off before our eyes, joy and gladness from the house of God (1. 15-16).

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it in near - a day of darkness and gloom (2. 1-2).

The earth quakes, the heavens tremble.  The sun and the moon are darkened, and the stars withdraw their shining.  The Lord utters his voice at the head of his army . . .  Truly the day of the Lord is great; terrible indeed - who can endure it? (2. 10-11).

The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.  Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape . . .  and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls (2. 31-32).

Multitudes, multitudes, in the valley of decision!  For the day of the Lord is near . . .  The Lord roars from Zion . . . the heavens and the earth shake.  But the Lord is a refuge for his people, a stronghold for the people of Israel (3. 14, 16).

In that day the mountains shall drip sweet wine, the hills shall flow with milk, and all the stream beds of Judah shall stream with water; a fountain shall come forth from the house of the Lord . . .  Judah shall be inhabited forever, and Jerusalem to all generations (3. 18-20).

What I find most revealing about this ‘day of the Lord’ is that it names a trauma, but not only a trauma.  It is also the name which Joel gives to the experience of God’s salvation, that moment of exodus and of freedom that is the beginning of a new age when the Spirit of God’s peace and justice will fall upon all people, from the least of them to the greatest (2. 28-29).  ‘The day of the Lord’ is therefore  - somewhat paradoxically - both a trauma and a healing, a judgement of sin and an invitation to new life.  Indeed, one might say that the trauma and its healing are mysteriously joined here, that they become the inside and the outside of the same experience.  One might even say that the Book of Joel encourages us to believe that the people of Israel might never have retained their sense of God as saviour without their having been wounded by God as warrior and judge. 

Emmanuel Lévinas, a Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher who died in 1995, wrote about these things more profoundly than anyone I know, but he gave them a particular spin.  Lévinas argued that human beings are so self-absorbed that the only way in which God can get our attention is to make us suffer in a very specific way:  to take us hostage as sufferers of another person’s suffering.  Lévinas, whose parents were killed in the Nazi death-camps, believed that God comes to claim us through a fundamental disruption of the relatively ‘safe’ worlds most of us inhabit.  By confronting us with the face of suffering in another human being, God calls us to be transformed.  In the encounter with another’s suffering, says Lévinas, we are substituted for this other:  we feel his or her pain in our own bodies, and we know ourselves to be responsible in some way.  Our peaceful lives are therefore peaceful no more.  The world changes, and we are changed with it. 

This accounts, I think, for the way in which even the most cold-hearted Australian observer sometimes changes their view of asylum-seekers or Aborigines when they actually meet such folk face-to-face, when they finally see and hear their stories through words, tears and the lines of suffering etched on another’s face.  When encountered by the face of another’s suffering, and not just rhetoric about it, we are confronted with a gaze that makes an absolute and irrefusable claim on us.  It cuts through the right-wing rubbish about individuals and individual responsibility and calls us to make an ethical response: to act as if it is we, ourselves, who are responsible for this other’s suffering.  This, according to Lévinas, is a call from God to justice, and it comes to us in the real flesh-and-blood face of the neighbour.

As always, there is much more that could be said.  But I will close with this.  The faith of Christ is about the redemptive power of wounds.  It is about apostles locked up in prison cells, their lives being poured out as a libation for others, who see visions of God, and angels, and heavenly rewards.  It is about hateful people like tax-collectors, exploiters and thieves par excellence, tripping over their wounds and their wounding of others, only to find that God has welcomed and healed them by that very movement.  It is about congregations who are unjustly deprived of their churches who nevertheless discover that through poverty of spirit comes a richness in faith. The faith of Christ is about people who take up their cross daily, that unique cross which God has chosen for them, and carrying that cross as though it were a pearl of great price or a treasure found in a field.  Because that’s what the cross of Christ is, for Christians:  an instrument of suffering in which the very glory of God’s love lays concealed.  So I say this to everyone here who has suffered, or is suffering, a trauma (and I know that you are!) It is a difficult saying, but true nevertheless.  Love your wound and befriend it.  For it is probably an angel of God in disguise.

The Prayer for Justice

Texts: Jeremiah 31.27-34; Psalm 119.97-104; 2 Timothy 3.14 - 4.5; Luke 18.1-8

When I was 13 years old I had a dream which I will carry with me all my life. In the dream I was wandering down High Street in Sheffield. It was a lovely day, but suddenly the sky became black with stormclouds. And then a great wind blew in from the west, a tempest which became so violent that it threatened to pull the trees from the ground. But this storm was more than just a storm. Somehow I knew it to be an angel of darkness, come to uproot and destroy everything in its path. Quickly I ran through the streets, imploring everyone I met to seek refuge in the house where I lived. 'It's the only safe place', I told them. But most laughed at me and went on their way. By the time I arrived home, accompanied by a few trusting souls, the storm had begun to howl in a truly unearthly manner. As we closed the door, I felt the storm reach out as if with claws to prevent us. With a very great effort, which took all our strength, we managed to close the door and collapse on our loungeroom floor. Through the window we could see cars being tossed in the air as though they were feathers. Buildings were ripped up and thrown down in pieces. People and animals and trees were being swept away as if by a giant tidal wave. But through the deluge, somehow, though the walls shook and the ceiling groaned to the point of breaking, our old weatherboard house stayed together. And we stayed together too. We huddled in a circle and prayed as we had never prayed before. We prayed that God would spare our souls. We prayed for the storm to pass. And though we began that time together in panic and fear, very soon a calm descended upon us. Even as the din outside became violent beyond imagining, the sense of our safety in God's care became more and more certain. And, eventually, I felt a strange compulsion, to leave the circle of prayer and go outside. I felt a strong and urgent compassion well up within me. A compassion for those perishing outside. I forgot my fear. Though the storm had become like a raging demon, I opened the door and went outside. With chaos all around, I addressed the tumult in a quiet voice, saying 'You can't enter this place. It is a house of God'. Immediately the wind died to a whisper and the dark clouds dispersed. The birds began to sing once more, the sun came out and I awoke.

For the people of Judah, the exile to Babylon was like the apocalypse of my dreaming. In the imagination of their poets and prophets, the army of Babylon was like an evil angel, come to uproot and destroy everything they had ever achieved. For some, exile was the end of their faith in Yahweh. How could the God who had led them out of slavery in Egypt now send the evil wind of calamity into their midst? What kind of God would do that? Why had the angel of death who killed the firstborn of Egypt now turned his sword towards Israel? For others, though, the turmoil of exile occasioned a deep and heart-wrenching reconsideration of their relationship with God. In the depths of their despair, they turned, as if for the first time, to the Torah or Law given by Moses. There they heard about a covenant made with Yahweh, a covenant which promised peace or Shalom to Israel if only the people would love Yahweh before anything else, and demonstrate this love by keeping the law. For these exilic Hebrews, the law became the focus of a new act of spiritual devotion. In meditating upon it day and night, they became aware of their immoral and broken condition under the covenant. They became aware of their culpability as a sinful people who had abandoned the just requirements of the law. And it broke their hearts. As the Psalmist said 'My eyes cry streams of tears because your law is not kept'.

But then a moment of transfiguration occurred. Out of the new depths of their meditation upon the law, they sensed that God was calling them into a new kind of covenant, a covenant not so easily broken because it was less like a contract and more like a relationship. The difficulty with much of Israel's understanding of the covenant prior to the exile was that it was literal and legalistic. Israel's teachers were overwhelmingly of the opinion that obtaining God's favour was primarily a matter of obeying the letter of the law. But people were not, by and large, taught that you could never hope to obey the law unless you loved the law, unless you lived with it day and night and allowed it to form the very core of your stance towards the world. People were not, by and large, taught that the law had a spirit, and that spirit was the mind and heart of its creator, the Lord Yahweh. Prior to the exile, people were not often taught that to meditate upon the law was to enter into an intimate relationship with Yahweh himself. But this was always God's intention. This was what God had longed for from the beginning. And so the apparently 'new' covenant we read of in Jeremiah is not really new at all. What is 'new' is the experience of exile, of brokenness, and what that does to Israel's capacity to understand God's ways. Let me quote:

This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, 'know the Lord,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.

In the exile, the Hebrew people began to realize that it was not obeying the law which gave them a right relationship with God. It was a relationship with God which enabled them to live in God's way. Crucially, the exile taught Israel that the law was there to form their relationship with God; it was not a list of dos and don'ts to earn God's favour.

Now, let me ask you a question. Are you here this morning because you love God, or are you here because you want to earn God's favour? Are you here because you want to know God, to be transformed by God, or are you here because you want to be a good Christian? Motives are very important, you know. They make all the difference. Search your heart. Are you, perhaps, a religious person, one who has a contract with God? One who says, 'God, I am afraid of life. In return for being a good Christian I expect you to keep me safe from pain and hurt and let me into heaven when I die!'. Or are you, instead, a godly person, one who has a relationship with God? One who experiences God's love and forgiveness; one who weeps day and night because the world is so lost to God's peace?

Luke tells a story about a persistent widow. She lobbies the local magistrate for a just solution to her plight. And though the magistrate has no regard for either God or justice, he eventually rewards her efforts just to get her off his back. Luke tells this rather strange little story in order to show us what a true disciple of Jesus is like. She is like a widow who longs for justice, and will not cease from crying out until she gets it. But where does such depth of longing come from? What kind of experience can sustain that sense that I deserve a better deal than what I've got right now? A relationship with God. A life of prayer and meditation upon the life of God revealed in the crucified form of Jesus Christ. A life of communion with the God who is, himself, like a hungry widow who roams the earth crying out for food. In the end, its communion with that God, its spending time with that God, which gives you the burning desire for a better deal, and the strength to keep on asking.

If you are a religious person, I encourage you, this day, to come in from the storms of life which so frighten you, and begin that life of communion with God. Gather with the faithful to read God's lore, to meditate upon its stories of faith, and be transformed. There, in the bosom of God's love, you'll lose your fear. You'll be able to stand up and face those demons which tear at your soul, and say to them: 'You may not enter, this is God's dwelling-place'. And in the depths of your communion with the crucified one, whose hands are outstretched to embrace the whole creation, a new yearning will take root in your soul. A yearning for justice. A cry for peace. The birthpangs of God's promised healing.