Taking leave of ourselves

Texts: 1 Kings 19.1-15a; Ps 42; Galatians 3.23-29; Luke 8.26-39

When the prophet Elijah fled into the desert wilderness of Mt. Horeb, he had good reason to do so.  The powerful pagan queen, Jezebel, was very angry with him for having defeated the priests of Baal, a local fertility god, in a game of ‘my god is bigger than your god.’  She promised to kill Elijah, as she had killed the other prophets of Yahweh a couple of chapters earlier.  So Elijah strapped on his pack and headed for the hills to hide.  Now, the next bit of the story is really interesting. While Elijah is out there, we are told, he suddenly falls into a profound despondency, a despondency so deep that he begs for God to take his life.  The source of this downer appears to be Elijah’s belief that he is ‘no better’ than his ancestors, for a true believer in God would never have run away at the first sign of danger.  Especially if he or she had witnessed the power of God to save only a few days earlier!  At this, his lowest point, Elijah had apparently lost faith in his capacity to have faith.  Not an easy thing to have to deal with!

Now, if we turn over to the story from Luke for a while, we find another man who appears to be hiding out.  This time it’s not a prophet, but a demoniac, that is, a man possessed by a demon.  Clearly, like Elijah, this fellow had a death-wish, because he lives in a grave-yard.  To the first-century mind, someone who lived in a graveyard would have been already ‘dead’ because he or she clearly preferred the world of the dead, a shadowy region beyond the borders of safe society and commerce.  Note also that the name of this guy’s demon was ‘Legion.’  Interesting name that.  At the time when Luke wrote his gospel, the most obvious meaning of the word was military.  A Legion, for first century Mediterraneans, was a very large company of Roman soldiers or ‘legionnaires’, a tangible symbol of Rome’s absolute power over every aspect of one’s life.  So, when Luke tells us that his man is possessed by ‘Legion’ he means us to recognise that the man has been driven ‘mad’ by the omni-present pressure of Roman power in his life.  Luke wants us to see that this man has been so colonised by Rome that there is little to nothing of his original self left.  He is now only what Rome has made of him.  He has been repressed and belittled to the point where the only escape he may contemplate is that of death.  And so he inhabits the tombs, contemplating death and yet held back from killing himself by a demon who accuses him, over and over again, of being so useless and insignificant he does not have the guts even to kill himself! 

Two stories, two men.  Both are hiding out in a wilderness where people rarely go.  Both are seeking a haven of refuge from the political power of their times.  Both struggle deeply with the decisions they have made in life, with the selves that brought them to this point of despondency or illness.  Was there another way?  Could I have handled things with more courage, more resolve?  Where has my faith in God gone to?  Is there no escape except into the darkness of death? 

These are not hypothetical questions about two chaps who may or may not have experienced all this several thousand years ago, on the other side of the world.  These are questions that have regularly been asked by many people who live in Australia today.  One of them is a fellow I know whom I shall call ‘Patrick’.  Patrick comes from Ethiopia in Northern Africa.  To my mind, he is a modern-day Elijah figure because, in the early 90s he was a trade-union leader who stood up to the increasingly racist policies of his government in the name of a justice he had learned from Christ.  As a consequence of his actions, Patrick received a series of death-threats and his house was burnt down.  At the urging of his friends, and because he had a new bride whom he loved, he finally decided to flee the country.  For the next five years Patrick was a fugitive who, many times over, fell into a deep despondency about being so powerless in the face of evil men.  He also accused himself, very often, of having failed—not only with his work for justice, but also in his trust of God.  Would someone who trusted in God have run away like that?

Another friend who asks these questions regularly is a fellow I shall call ‘Mark’.  Mark has a disease known as schizophrenia.  Schizophrenia is a mental illness that afflicts a very large number of Australians, most of them young men.  Mark’s particular history is that he comes from a good, middle-class family.  He has a mother and a father who are good people and who cared for him well.  He went to private school where he received the best of educations.  Yet, in his early twenties, he began to hear voices in his head, voices which accused him of being a nothing, a nobody, a waste of space in the world, someone unworthy to be alive.  Mark tried to kill himself, and he has tried to kill himself many times since.  In his late twenties, he came across some Christians who took him to church and tried to care for him.  He discovered a faith in God which sustains him, and yet . . .  when he is having a relapse, a downer, the voices now accuse him of failing to have faith in God.  ‘If you had faith, you would be healed of your affliction’ they say. 

To my mind, Mark is a modern day demoniac.  He is in the grip of a power which has so invaded his heart and mind that it has become very, very difficult to separate the essential Mark out from the voices he hears in his head.  Without in any way contesting the physiological and genetic basis of schizophrenia, I often wonder why it is that the numbers of people afflicted by the disease are increasing so rapidly.  Could it be that many of us are vulnerable to becoming ill, but more and more are becoming so in fact because the voices of belittlement out there in the world are becoming far more pervasive?  The new colonial powers, I sometimes think, are the moguls of consumer capitalism.  Every day they bombard us with the message that our lives are not good enough.  We would be more beautiful if we used this product or that, that we would be more successful if we wore this suit and did this kind of job, that we would be more worthy of friendship and love if we would only become more like everyone else.  I sometimes think that Mark, and others like him, are simply more vulnerable to these powers than the rest of us - that, for them, the voices of the advertiser are experienced internally and personally in a way that most of us do not hear them.  In that sense, Mark is perhaps like the demoniac of the Gerasenes, for whom a strong and tenacious resistance to Roman power was simply not possible.  In the end he was overwhelmed, and found himself dallying with the dead.

Now what is the gospel word to people for whom life has become so difficult, so stark, so bereft of comfort?  What is the gospel word for people who accuse themselves even for their lack of faith, and use that fact as another reason to condemn themselves?  Well, let us return to our stories.

Note, first of all, that there is no condemning God in either of our stories.  In the Elijah story, God does not confirm Elijah in that picture of himself as faithless.  Neither, in the story of the demoniac, does Jesus condemn the man for being mad.  There is not even a hint, in either story, of God shaking his or her head at a lack in the people—whether it be a lack of courage or faith or whatever.  What we see, rather, is a God who quietly and persistently gets on with restoring or creating a self that is able to resist the power of the enemy.  In the case of Elijah, God gives the exhausted prophet food and rest.  Then he takes him on retreat into the desert, when Elijah learns that the work of God is not only about fireworks and miraculous power, it is also about discerning that place of silent stillness in which there is peace.  Even if the world is out of control, there is a stillness at the heart of things in which one may find oneself again.  For the stillness is God.  In the case of the demoniac, we find that Jesus does not address the man himself, first of all, but the power that enslaves him.  In essence, Jesus tells the power that it has no authority to brutalise the man, and that it had best be gone.  Only after he has addressed the power itself, does Jesus turn to the man with his word of liberation.  “The demon is gone.  Return now to your home, to those who love you, and tell them what God has done for you.”  It seems to me there is a pattern here for any who would work with people who have a so-called ‘mental illness’.  First confront the power that is responsible—not the ill person themselves, but the crazy power of consumer capitalism.  Question its authority to belittle us all.  Then, having done that work of advocacy, address the suffering person themselves.  Tell them that they, themselves, can now re-claim their place in home and society because they are worthy.  They are worthy because God has said they are worthy.

There is a great deal else that could be said about these stories.  But I shall conclude only with this.  That the work of the gospel is a work of conversion.  It calls us to leave behind the selves we have become, the false selves which we have become at the bidding of the powers of our time, and to embrace a new self, a self made in the image of Christ.  For in Christ we are made new selves, we are made children of God, sharing in God’s own dignity.  The power of the gospel is simply this: to remind us that we are loved, that we are accepted, that we are worthy because God has declared us worthy.  The power of the gospel confronts the authority of any power in the world, whether political or economic, any power which would declare us unfit or unworthy, any power that would belittle us or make us small.  All who have been baptised into Christ have put on Christ, says the apostle.  In him you have left the belittled identities given by the powers behind.  Now you can live in the freedom of God. 

This sermon was first preached at St Luke's church in Mount Waverley in 2004.

You are forgiven!

Texts: Galatians 2.15-21; Luke 7.36-8.3

In the story we just heard, Jesus does not one, but two things that no self-respecting Jewish Rabbi should ever do.  First, he tells a woman that her sins are forgiven.  Definitely a no-no, for only God can forgive sins, and in the eyes of the religious folk with whom he was eating at the time, Jesus was certainly not God!  Nor was he an ordained priest who could speak for God.  But then, while they are reeling from the shock of that first gesture, Jesus makes yet another controversial move.  He declares to the woman not only that her sins are forgiven, but also that it is her faith, faith mind you, that has saved her.  Now, this is pretty weird stuff, coming from a first century Jewish Rabbi.  Because, as every Jewish schoolboy could tell you, the only way to experience God’s salvation was to obey the law of Moses.  Indeed, some would have argued that obeying the law and salvation were exactly the same thing.  Salvation was obeying the law.

So, what was Jesus up to here?  Were these actions just a piece of stirring?  Was Jesus just the kind of bloke who liked to rouse his mates up before he told them he was joking and ordered another round of bitter?  Well, no.  What Jesus wanted to do was nothing less than to change their understanding of God.  In his view, their God was way too small-minded, way too concerned with fretting over the minutiae of human failing.  Jesus’ God, on the other hand, was one who was big-hearted, a God interested not so much in rules as in relationship.  The key question that this big-hearted God asks of humankind is not ‘have you done the right thing?’ but ‘do you trust me with your future, do you believe that I love you?’

There are two ways to understand sin, you see.  Yes ‘sin’—I know it’s not a particularly hot topic these days—but it’s kind of indispensable to Christian theology so the preacher really has no option but to talk about it.  One could see sin as breaking a set of moral rules set up by God.  You know, do not steal, do not kill, do not bear false witness against your neighbour.  That kind of thing.  In this case, sin is defined primarily as law-breaking.  There are many Christians, Jews and Muslims who hold this view of sin, even today.  But there is another, slightly more complex, way of understanding sin, and that is to see the breaking of those moral prohibitions not so much as a breaking of law, but as severing of trust in relationship.  That is to see the breaking of the moral law as symptomatic of a more foundational breakdown in the relationship between neighbours.  In this view, a person kills or steals because she no longer cares for her neighbour; or does not believe that her neighbour cares for her.  This latter view of sin is more faithful, I believe, to a genuinely New Testament faith.  And it is borne out in the story we are reading this morning.

Traditionally, the sinful woman in our story is portrayed as a prostitute, one who chose to sell her body to men in return for money.  If this is true, she must have been a very high class prostitute in order to afford the alabaster jar of ointment which she lavishes upon Jesus!  Such items were, in first century Palestine, very rare and precious.  Only the very rich could afford them.  It is likely, then, that the woman in Luke’s story is not a common prostitute but, rather more complexly, the slave or concubine of a Roman official, a woman who would have been passed around his friends and business associates as part of the hospitality and entertainment of his house.  If that is so, then it is really very unlikely that the woman ever really chose to become the ‘sinner’ that she is.  More likely is that her parents, or a former owner, sold her to the colonial invader in order to pay off their debts.  It is unlikely that she would have had any say in such a transaction, because in the first century woman had little say about anything.  Woman – and especially young girls -  were regarded by both Jews and Gentiles as chattels to be bought or sold according to the economic needs of their fathers or husbands.  Here is a woman, then, who probably never intended to break the Jewish moral code, but is forced to do so, whether she likes it or not, simply because she is caught up in a cruel and unjust economic system.

What Jesus is able to see about this woman, that his dinner-table friends are unable to see, is that while she is indeed a sinner in the formal sense—someone who breaks the moral law—in her heart of hearts what she longs for most is nothing less than the restoration of her relationship with both God and her people.  In the place where she lives and works, she is simply unable to keep the Jewish law and stay alive.  As a consequence, she suffers the judgement of her religious community, a judgement which includes the belief that God has rejected her as well.  Yet, in her heart of hearts she believes that this cannot be so.  She cannot keep the moral law.  But she does not believe that God would reject her over something she cannot do.  In her heart of hearts, she believes that God loves her, that God is merciful, that God would forgive her even if her community will not.  And it is that longing, and that belief, that gives her the courage to pour out her love upon Jesus.  For her, Jesus is clearly God’s representative, the one through whom relationship with God becomes possible again.

Now, I put it to you that we, all of us, are not so different to this woman. Most of us try to live upright lives.  We believe in the value of the moral code, but we cannot always keep it. We are caught up in economic and social systems that make us sinners even where we do not intend to be.  Like when I bought some flash new clothes at Chadstone last year.  There was nothing, absolutely nothing available in the store that was not made by slave labour in China.  And the kind of clothes I needed were not available at the op shop.  Does that mean that I am condemned by God, that I shall never share in God’s salvation?  Certainly, I broke the moral law.  And I do so every day simply by being a member of this scandalously privileged society in which I live.  Every piece of buying and selling I do rips somebody off.  Yet, I do not believe that God rejects me simply because I break the moral law.  I believe that if my intention is otherwise, if I care about God and my neighbour and long to live with them in a just and loving relationship, that God will honour my desire.  I believe that God loves me, and forgives me even though I am, objectively and by any measure, a sinner.  It is faith that saves us, as Jesus says.  Faith in the fact of God’s forgiving love.

Now, that turns around what many of us commonly understand as sin.  In the perspective of the New Testament, the real sinner is the one who thinks she or he is righteous, while the really righteous person is righteous only insofar as she or he has faith in God’s love and mercy.  For that is what Jesus teaches in the story he told the dinner guests.  The righteous person is no longer the one who does no wrong.  Rather, the righteous person is someone who knows that she stands in need of God’s mercy, and believes in her heart of hearts that God will forgive her.  For righteousness is not, for the God of Jesus Christ, ultimately about keeping the rules.  It is about trusting that you are loved and accepted even though you cannot keep the rules. 

In Galatians, the Apostle Paul says this:  that a person is not justified before God by keeping the law, but by trusting or having faith in Jesus Christ.  Through Christ, he says, we die to the demands of the law, because the law only serves to highlight our guilt.  In Christ, however, we live a life in which it is not our own righteousness that matters, but Christ’s.  Only Christ was able to live the truly righteous life that made no compromise with evil.  Only he was willing to suffer the full consequence of doing so, to be killed by evil men because he would not play the game.  Therefore the Christian is called to depend on Christ, and on Christ alone, to approach God - not in one’s own righteousness but in Christ’s.  But that takes faith, faith in the word that Christ says to the woman in Luke’s story, ‘your sins are forgiven, go in peace.’

In the end, all that that save us from this dog-eat-dog world of corruption and despair is our faith in God’s word of forgiveness and mercy.  Do you believe?  Do you trust this word and believe it with all your heart?  If you do, then live the life of faith.  Do not judge your brother or sister who sins, because you are yourself a sinner who lives from the power of God’s forgiveness.  From now on, says the apostle, ‘it is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.  The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’  Paul, it seems, actually lived his life as though he was a forgiven sinner.  We are called to do so as well.

Your Pain will turn to Joy: racism and the Trinity

Proverbs 8.1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5.1-5; John 16.12-23 

Today is the beginning of what is called ‘Reconciliation Week’ here in Australia.  The week is used, in various ways and by various groups, to promote reconciliation and peace between Indigenous Australians and those who came here more latterly from across the sea. This year there is a focus on the continuing scourge of racism, in the form of a call for its eradication from both every day society and from the constitution of Australia. For who can doubt that racism is still very much amongst us?  The exchange between a football fan and dual Brownlow medallist Adam Goodes at the Sydney/Collingwood game on Friday night - when Mr Goodes was branded an ‘Ape’ - is a powerful reminder of that fact.  It is also a fact that our national constitution still pretends that Aboriginal people do not exist.  It is a thoroughly racist document in that it fails to recognise that Australia was not an ‘empty land’ when the Europeans came; that it had been inhabited and cultivated by another people for at least 60 thousands years; that it was taken from that people by force, and without lawfully recognised treaty, and that the effects of this taking are still amongst us in the form of huge levels of social, psychological and spiritual trauma amongst Indigenous people.  As you know, I am an Indigenous Tasmanian, so I know about the effects of colonisation ‘up close and personal’, as they say.  The way I look at everything – the landscape, society, the church, political and theological ideas – is profoundly influenced by that experience of loss and trauma. But I shall return to this later.

Today is also, for the Christian community, the feast of the Holy Trinity.  It is a day when we reflect explicitly on themes that are regrettably (for liberal Protestants such as ourselves) much more implicit during the rest of the year: namely the nature and mission of God as a Trinitarian communion of three persona, the ‘Father’, the ‘Son’ and the ‘Holy Spirit’.  The lections for today seek to encourage such reflection.  The reading from Proverbs speaks of ‘Wisdom’ as if she were a person, a person who cannot be simply separated from God as yet another of God’s myriad creations.  Wisdom is here spoken of as the very ‘first’ of God’s possessions, appointed ‘from eternity’, begotten of God rather than created out of nothing.  Wisdom is furthermore both a witness and co-worker with God in the act of creating the universe, a master craftswoman at Yahweh’s side.  It is clear that many early Christian theologians understood this passage, and its sister passages in the apocryphal Book of Wisdom, as Jewish presentiments concerning Jesus Christ.  We are all familiar with the opening poem at the beginning of John’s gospel: 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was the same as God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in him was life, and that life was the light of all people . . .  The true light, which enlightens everything, was coming into the world.  (1.1-9).

Like Wisdom, the Word exists in the beginning with God and shares in the divine action of creating.  The Word, like Wisdom, may be understood as some kind of emanation from God.  In other words, the Word is born of God, not made by God out of non-divine material.  And finally, like Wisdom, the Word is imagined as a divine light which enlightens the world.  Much recent scholarship concludes that Lady Wisdom is the model out of which John created the divine Logos which became, in short order, the second person of the Trinity, the divine Son.  The Son shares in the deity of the Father, but cannot be absolutely identified with the Father, certainly not without remainder.

Look at John’s careful treatment of the relationship between the Father and the Son in our gospel lection for today.  ‘All that belongs to the Father is mine’, says Jesus. He also says ‘My Father will give you anything you ask for in my name.’  Names are important in New Testament imagination.  Names represent a person who is not present.  They are the same as the person themselves, yet they are different from that person also, because they can stand for, or represent, that person in their absence.  So when Jesus says ‘The Father will give you anything you ask for in my name’, what he is really saying is this: ‘I am the exact representation and presence of my Father.  If you cannot see the Father physically, yet, in looking upon me and listening to my voice you can see and hear the Father, for everything I am, I received from my Father, and everything the Father is has been given to me. So ask in my name.  To do so is ask of my Father what I has already been given you in me’.  According to John, then, Jesus of Nazareth is the same as the pre-existent Word of God who was begotten of God the Father before the creation of the world and shares in his Father’s deity and power; in Jesus we therefore see and hear all that we can, as human beings, see and hear of God.  Jesus is the Father’s face and arms and voice for the material world of flesh and blood in which we live and move and have our human being.

What of the Holy Spirit, then?  Well, according to John once more, the Spirit clearly shares in the divine being of the Father and the Son.  Jesus says that the Spirit will come once he, the flesh-and-blood Christ, has passed from this world.  The Spirit will guide the disciples into the truth of God, a truth the Spirit will repeat and echo into our hearts exactly as it is spoken in the life of God, in the divine conversation between the Father and the Son.  The Spirit possesses everything that the Father and the Son possess.  The Spirit shares in the divine being of the Father and the Son, but also in the relationship of non-identity they share with each other.  Some theologians have speculated that the Spirit is the relationship between the Father and the Son, the very intangibility of their love and regard for each other, the substance of their conversation and their care.  That may well be true, for the Spirit is indeed less ‘solid’ than the Father and the Son in terms of character and identity.  The Spirit is a tad more wild and mysterious in her workings, like a wind that comes from nowhere and goes to nowhere.  And yet, what she brings us from her divine companions is something very valuable indeed: truth, hope and joy.  She is the midwife of these things, John tells us, the one who assures us that they are real and that they will one day belong to us, even as we weep and grieve and labour in this valley of tears we call our world.

The reading from Romans makes a similar point.  It makes the claim that all who believe in Jesus Christ and have received the justification that comes from him as a free gift of grace, have also received the gift of the Holy Spirit, who is nothing other than the vessel in which the love and mercy of God arrive.  This gift, says the Apostle, gives us hope when life is difficult.  She helps us to rejoice when there is little to rejoice about.  She helps us to persevere and to be disciplined in the face of difficult circumstances.  For the promise is there for all who believe, that our pain will turn to joy and that our weeping will one day turn into laughter.

Now, it is unfortunately true that around our church today there will be a great many sermons that skip over the feast of the Trinity and over trinitarian theology, because so many of our preachers simply do not have the knowledge or the will to know what to do with it.  Many, unfortunately, see the doctrine of the Trinity as something of an irrelevance, an ancient curiosity that really has nothing to say to our contemporary world or faith.  Nothing, of course, is further from the truth.  What such preachers fail to appreciate it that the doctrine of the Trinity, like all doctrine, is a story.  A story of God, and God’s dealings with the world of human beings that unleashes the power to transform our despair into joy, our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh and feeling.  The doctrine of the Trinity is shorthand, in other words, for everything the Christian faith has to offer by way of truth, faith, hope and love.  It is the grammar out of which we may start to comprehend our world, our society and our church as the arena of God’s action for forgiveness, justice and peace.

‘Why is racism wrong?’ for example.  Have you ever asked yourself that question?  What story, what grammar do we depend upon to render the denigration of another person (on the basis of nothing more than their skin-colour or ethnic origin) as fundamentally wrong, false, evil, immoral?  Well. For Christians, it is the doctrine of the Trinity!  The Father gives the Son into the world of flesh and blood in order to show us how to live, to reveal to us what is right and what is wrong, what makes for life and what makes for death.  In the face of the Son we learn that God does this out of an infinite love for 'the world', for us all (cf. John 3.16). God longs for our life, not our death, for our flourishing, not our diminishing.  In the face of Christ we learn that God is no bully, but is nevertheless prepared to come amongst us in the vulnerable form of the Son, to remonstrate and plead with us, that we might choose the way to life.  God does this even to the point of being misunderstood or, conversely, understood very well, but ultimately rejected. Even to the point of death, death on a cross.  Not that death can kill God’s love, for in the power of the Spirit the Son is raised to life as a sign of hope that all who follow in Christ’s way will themselves be raised, will themselves transcend death’s dominion when the racists and the death-squads come to exact their terrible revenge. 

So, racism is wrong because God is a communion of love since all eternity, and wants to include everyone, without remainder – whatever their skin colour or ethnic origin – at the table of mercy and hospitality shared forever by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Racism is wrong because God is willing to put everything on the line in Jesus Christ - and, through the Spirit, also within the very human and therefore fragile history of the church - in order to make that message resonate loud and clear within the arena of our inhumanity toward one another.  Racism is wrong, finally, because it will not have the last word. The last word is love, the love shared between the Father and the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit, a love that is always going out of itself in creative and hospitable action.  In the gift of Christ we who believe are empowered to rejoice in the final victory of that love even as the evil of racism continues to permeate our world.  For the Spirit is a deposit, a guarantee of that which is to come: a sign in our midst of that final peace-making, the shalom of God, when all who are reconciled to God are also reconciled to one another.  In the work of Christ and the giving of his Spirit, every sin is both forgiven and forgotten and the idea that someone might be used and abused because of their race has become absolutely laughable. Racism is wrong, in summary, because God is a trinity, a threefold relation of divine equals who go out toward one another and toward the cosmos in love and mercy.  In this story and this grammar is the indispensable plumbline of care and regard and justice . . . for the church, for human society, and for the whole of creation.

You Are My Witnesses

Acts 1.1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1.15-23; Luke 24.44-53

The passage from Acts 1 we have read just now seems to make four basic points about our lives as Christians:

1. that we are called to be witnesses to Jesus and his kingdom
2. that we receive the power to become his witnesses by waiting, together with our brothers and sisters in Christ, for an empowering that comes through the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit
3. that we are called to be witnesses not only in the comfortable, familiar places where we live most of our lives, but also in uncomfortable, unfamiliar places – like that of another nation or ethnic group
4. that we are not alone in all of this because while Jesus might have gone from us in the flesh, he is still very with us ‘in the Spirit’.  The work we do as witnesses is therefore his own work as well.

This morning I have time to say something about only the first of these points.  The others will have to wait for another time.

I want to challenge you to take this calling very seriously.  Being a witness means being willing to testify, in both word and deed, to the difference that knowing Christ makes in your life.  Since I joined the Uniting Church in 1995, I have observed that Uniting Church people are very good at witnessing to Christ with their deeds.  And that is to be applauded! But many Uniting Church people seem very poor at witnessing to Christ with their words.  How many of us actually talk with our friends or our families about Christ?  How many of us invite our friends and family along to worship, or to a bible exploration, or to a lecture or workshop in which the Christian faith is being discussed? Not many, I suspect. And why is that so?  Well, let me guess at a few of the most common excuses we make to ourselves.  (1) ‘I don’t know what to say’; (2) ‘I find evangelism distasteful – I’m worried that my friends will be offended’; (3) ‘I don’t believe that it is our words that make a difference to people, it is the quality of the lives we live’.  Let’s take a look at each of these excuses, one by one, and see how they look under the pressure of a bit of scrutiny.

What of the first excuse, ‘But I don’t know what to say’.  It is certainly true that many Christians do not know what say by way of bearing witness to friends and families.  So I won’t deny the truth of the excuse.  It is an excuse, nonetheless.  For if we don’t know what to say, then surely there is a reason for that:  either that we do not know our faith very well, or we are not confident in that faith.  In either case, the solution is certainly not to remain unknowledgeable, or to remain unconfident.  It is certainly not to remain an infant in matters of faith, a little baby Christian who can say nothing of Christ to anyone.  It is to seek the kind of help that will enable us to become more mature, more grown-up in the faith, so that we know who we are in Christ and can speak confidently of what we know, believe and feel.  Such help is ready at hand – in the personal counsel of the more mature members of one’s own church, in spiritual directors and mentors from other churches, in courses, seminars and bible-study groups, and in books, videos and websites by the bucket-load.  The resources are everywhere about.  So what are you waiting for?  Take the initiative.  Go our there and get yourself some decent spiritual food.  Grow up in the faith, and start to bear fruit!

What of the second common excuse for not bearing witness to Christ:  ‘I find evangelism distasteful – I’m worried that my friends will be offended’.  Again, I actually believe the people who say this.  I don’t think they are telling a lie.  They do, indeed, worry that bearing witness to Christ will endanger their friendships.  There are two things to be said in response.  The first is that our allegiance to Christ and his commandments will indeed endanger our friendships sometimes.  That is because, as Christians, we are called to listen to Christ first and others second.  If there is a disagreement between what Christ asks of us and what our friends or family ask of us, we must of course do what Christ asks, even if that means offending our friends of family.  That is what it means to follow Christ as our only Lord.  Of course, having said that, we should also remember that amongst the commands that Christ has given us are these:  ‘love your neighbour as you love yourself’ (Mt. 22.39); and, ‘so far as it depends on you, be at peace with everyone’ (Rom 12.18).  What that means in the context of bearing witness is pretty clear, is it not?  That in speaking about Christ to our friends and family, we should do so in a way that is as gentle and respectful as possible.  ‘Speak the truth in love’ say the Letter to the Ephesians (4.15).  That is how we are to bear witness to Christ.  If our witness, a speech that shares Christ with our friends and family, is not couched in a respectful tone and in the context of respectful relationships, then we are not being Christian when we speak.  Word and deed fail to match up.  Yet, we are called to speak.  Even at the risk of being rejected - even as Christ spoke, and was rejected.

And so we come to the third common excuse: ‘I don’t believe that it is our words that make a difference to people, it is the quality of the lives we live.’  What makes this an excuse is the first part of the sentence, the ‘I don’t believe that it is the words that make a difference to people’.  I’m quite o.k. with the second bit, the bit about the quality of our lives, because I certainly agree that the character and quality of our lives bear witness to Christ in very powerful ways.  But that is no excuse for not talking about Christ with our friends and neighbours.  There are several reasons for this apart from the obvious fact that the New Testament understands ‘bearing witness’ as a unity of word and deed.

The most important of these is that speech is the mode by which we make sense of what we do; or, to put it another way, words and speech are the means by which we interpret what we do to ourselves and to each other.  There is a fundamental problem, you see, with assuming that people will always see our behaviour as a manifestation of Christ or the kingdom; or even with assuming that they will interpret our actions as manifestations of a desire for love or justice.  For most people know longer know anything of Christ or the kingdom.  They do not know that Christ, justice, peace and love all belong to a mutually interpretive field of meaning.  Therefore, it is rarely clear to others that what we do, we do in the name of Christ, in imitation of his love.  What we see as an act of faith in God, others may see as a gamble with chance.  What we see as diaconal service, others may see as an unhealthy ‘need to be needed’.  What we see as an act of redistributive justice, others may see as ‘rewarding the lazy’ out of a sense of unhealthy guilt.  See what I mean?  The meaning of what we do cannot enter the public realm, the public realm of a discourse that we share with other people, unless we are able to articulate an horizon of meaning for what we do, first for ourselves, but then for others.  In this sense, the witness to others can perhaps be characterized as a public act of worship.  For it is in worship (as ritual, or 'embodied story) that we articulate the meaning of our Christian lives most profoundly and holistically.  But when the worship of the community comes to a close, the Spirit drives us out into the world to share both who we are, and what we are becoming, with everyone else - in speech as well as in action. Worship is again the model.  In worship we do things, but we also say what we do, we bring its meaning to speech.

SO . . .  there is, is fact, no excuse (if we are Christians) for failing to share our faith with the world in speech as well as in action.  Of course there will be hesitancy. Of course there will be a little fear and trembling.  Indeed, I’d be a little worried if there wasn’t!  But speak we must.  Not, first of all, because we are commanded by Jesus to do so.  No, even before the command there ought to be (surely!) some sense in us that the good news of God’s love is so good that we would be selfish indeed not to share it with our friends and neighbours.  Besides, God has promised that (a) we are not given this task as isolated individuals, but as a community, and (b) we are given this task in the power of the Spirit, who will help and encourage us to say and do what Jesus has called us to say and do.  So, if you are not sharing your faith with others, I encourage you to take a good hard look in the mirror and ask the question:  ‘am I a Christian or not?’  I hope you will answer ‘yes’ and I hope you will join with your brothers and sisters to share our common faith with the world in which we live.

Behold, I am making all things new!

Texts: Acts 11.1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21.1-6; John 13.31-35

‘I am making everything new . . .  The old order of things has passed away’.  These are the words of the one who sits upon the throne of heaven in John’s apocalyptic vision.  John writes for a church that is being persecuted under the tyranny of Rome.  It is crying out with a grief and pain that echoes that of Israel under the Pharaohs in Egypt.  What the seer has to say is meant to create a new hope for all who weep.  He imagines a completely new world, a new universe, where the apparent gap between the present reality and the promised peace of God is finally and completely bridged.  God will himself come to dwell with his suffering people and every tear they have ever shed will be wiped away and the thirst of all who cry out for justice will finally be quenched.

This is a bold theology, a theology that many a self-proclaimed ‘realist’ is likely to decry with words that echo Karl Marx’s critique of religion as nothing more than an ‘opiate’ for suffering people.  Is the hope of the Seer false?  Is his theology merely a panacea for pain rather than a genuine cure?  Not, I think, if one also believes in the truth of the Easter proclamation that ‘Christ is risen’.  For in the writing of that other John, John the evangelist, we find an Easter hope that actually begins in the midst of reality as it is, the reality of suffering, pain and injustice.  ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.’ (13.31).  This is John’s way of saying that the transformation of the whole creation from a dark place of suffering into a bright place of blissful peace is beginning right now with something that will happen to Jesus.  But when is it beginning?  Well, read the verse before this one.  ‘As soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out.  And it was night.’  According to John, the transformation of the world begins not with Easter morning and with shouts of resurrection, but with the betrayal of Jesus by his friend Judas in the dead of night on a very ordinary Thursday.  This is where the transformation begins.  Here. With betrayal and failure and the departure of all that is good and true and noble.  The transformation begins then, in the midst of failure, the failure of all those moral codes that rule our society, our religion, our hearts.

That this breakdown can be not only an ending and a loss, but also the chance for a new beginning – a revolution, indeed – can be seen from the story of Peter’s vision at Joppa that we read in Acts.  Here we find out how the earliest church of the Jews learned that God loves the Gentiles too.  But it was a difficult lesson.  It was a lesson that the church could only learn with great a deal of pain and disorientation and loss.  For at the time of Jesus, Peter and Paul, most self-respecting Jews believed, deep down in their marrow, that it was only the people of Israel who were beloved of God.  Other races or ethnic groups, the 'gentiles' as they were called, had not been 'chosen' as Israel was, and were therefore unworthy of inclusion in God's family.  This understanding was carried into the earliest Christian church, which clearly believed that God's message of salvation in Christ was for the Jewish people only.  But all that is changed by a vision Peter saw one day in the trading city of Joppa . . .

Peter's vision was absolutely decisive for the earliest churches.  It showed them that Jesus had died not just for the Jews, but for everyone on the planet.  It also showed them that the most important matters of faith were not doctrinal purity and ethical legalism, but unconditional love and the works of compassion that flow from that love.  It's very instructive, I think, that the Spirit was given to Cornelius before either he or his family signed any doctrinal statement or made any promises about the ethical life.  God, at least, simply accepted them as they were.  Peter says of that experience, 'if God gave them the same gift as he gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could oppose God?'

Nevertheless, it seems there are a lot of folks around these days who want to oppose God's universal love.  And they invariably do it in the name of some kind of moral code that has not yet been broken by the gospel of transformative love.  There are some who do it more obviously.  People like those in the neo-Nazi movement, who believe that God's earth is only for people with white skin and an Anglo-Saxon or Germanic background.  Consequently they persecute and terrorise anyone who is Asian, Hispanic or black.  Or the right-wing extremists of Christian America who believe that Christian faith and being homosexual are mutually exclusive options.  So they set up programmes to 'rescue' gays from their sin.  Or, worse still, they form gangs who wander the night streets looking for vulnerable young men to harass.

But there are others who oppose God's universal love in less obvious ways, which are nevertheless just as damaging.  This week the nation has celebrated ANZAC day.  ANZAC day celebrates a collection of myths that enshrine a particular moral code, a moral code that considers it a great good that a man or woman should sacrifice their lives for the glory of the nation.  The ANZAC mythology also says that it is a good thing, a thing to be memorialized and celebrated, that a man or woman should sacrifice the prohibition against killing another human being for the glory of the nation.  People who do this, so the ANZAC code of morality tells us, will be treated as heroes.  They will be given medals and honoured in parades.  Now I know very well that this is not ALL that ANZAC day celebrates.  I know very well that there is a legitimate mourning for fallen and traumatised comrades there in the mix as well.  But consider for a moment the terrible contradiction that recognition sets up, both for soldiers and for the nation.  On the one hand, the solider is told to kill other human beings, and to do so for the glory of the nation.  On the other hand, the soldiers who do so are then condemned to live with the terrible horror of what they have done for the rest of their lives.  Today the guilt and depression of that heart of darkness has been psychologised as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, but that name erases as much as it reveals. It erases the fact that even the most prestigious medal and even the most honorific parade cannot take away the simple fact that to kill another human being is to disown life itself, ANZAC morality notwithstanding.

Contrast the injunction to kill another human being for the glory of the nation with the compassion we are called to by Christ.  'A new commandment I give you' says Jesus.  'Love one another as I have loved you'.  The Greek word agape, here translated 'love' is probably being connected by John with a Hebrew word, hesed, meaning 'unconditional compassion or kindness'.  Compassion means, of course, to 'suffer with' someone.  And love in the agapic sense means to care for someone without condition.  So the love which Jesus calls us to exercise is a love like his own: an unjudging, unconditional compassion for all who suffer in whatever way.  It's the kind of love exemplified in our time by Mother Teresa, who cared for the social outcasts of Indian society, even though that meant breaking the very fabric of Hindu morality.  Such love perseveres beyond the boundaries of our various moral codes.  If any such code gets in the way of love, it must be broken!

The kind of love Christ calls us to offer is far from sentimental or traditionalistic.  It is very costly because it is a call to share the darkness of any who are hurting even to the point of shattering our most persistent notions of what is virtuous and just.  This is a very motherly kind of love.  A mother simply loves the ones she has given birth to, even if they pierce her heart, which they inevitably do to one degree or another.  A mother keeps loving even if her children go places and do things she would rather they didn't.  A mother keeps loving even when the pain of sharing her child's confusion and mistakes is very great.  So the call to love is a call to imitate the motherly love of God.

On this day which celebrates Easter, the ending that is a new beginning, let us learn this lesson: that the love of God is a shattering of the moral codes by which we live in order that we might be open to a world that no longer needs or depends on such codes.  Let us learn that the unconditional love of mothers actually provides us with a powerful picture of the transformative love of God in Jesus Christ.  For it shows us how love can plant a seed of hope in even the darkest of places, the darkest of times.  It reveals how such love may start a revolution that is eventually able to turn gentile-haters into gentile-lovers or betrayers of Christ into lovers of Christ.  In this we might even come to see that the hope of Christians is a real hope, a hope planted in the bedrock of what happened to the Christ who shared in our humanity. He was shattered on the cross, broken on the moral codes of Romans and Jews.  But when he was shattered, so were their codes, and ours!  For he rose to show us that the code of God is love, and therefore none of the ways in which we divide up the world into the virtuous and the less-virtuous will ultimately prevail.  Because Christ is risen, a new order has begun.  It is not yet entirely here, to be sure.  But it is coming.  It is coming!

Garry Deverell

This sermon was preached at St Columba's in Balwyn on the 5th Sunday of Easter, 2013.

The Vindication of the Martyrs

Psalm 23; Revelation 7.9-17; John 10.22-30

A moment ago we heard from the Book of Revelation.  In the scene presented to us, the writer imagines that heaven is like a vast temple or throne-room.  The one on the throne is never named or described in any detail, but we are left in no doubt that it is the God of Israel, Moses and Elijah, the God and Father of our Lord Christ.  Immediately before the throne is one who looks like a Lamb who has been slain.  It is Christ, the paschal lamb who was slain to atone for the sins of the world.  Interestingly, in the Book of Revelation, the one on the throne can never be seen or addressed apart from a seeing and addressing of the Lamb.  One can never see the deity on the throne directly; every view is obscured by the Lamb.  This is very clever theology.  God may only be known by what God reveals of Godself in the face, form and voice of the Lamb.  The Lamb is God, that is, he is all we may know of God.  There is a resonance here with that phrase from Jesus in the Gospel of John:  “The Father and I are one.”  But that is not what I want to dwell on this evening.

Shift your gaze to the scene before the Lamb.  A great multitude is gathered, so large that not even a Channel 7 film crew would feel confident in proposing a figure.  The multitude is composed of people from every nation, ethnicity and language under heaven.  They are robed in white and they have palm branches in their hands.  And what are they there for?  What is their intention and purpose?  Simply this: to offer a sacrifice of praise to the one on the throne and to the Lamb.  In this they are joined by angels, elders, and four living creatures.  The angels represent the hosts of heaven, the elders the people of Israel, and the creatures the whole creation of birds, animals and reptiles.  What we witness here, then, is the worship our own gathering aims to imitate, albeit dimly, as in a glass darkly: the worship, honour and praise that shall one day be offered to God by humans, beasts, and the whole creation:

Amen!  Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgivingand honour and power and mightbe to our God forever and ever!  Amen!

But let us return our gaze, once more, to the multitude arrayed in white.  Who are they, and how did they come to be there?  Well, conveniently enough for us, one of the Elders in the scene addresses exactly that question to the writer of Scripture:  “who are they, and where did they come from?”  It is, of course, a rhetorical question, and the writer barely has time to open his mouth before the Elder replies:  “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal, the time of trial; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.  For this reason, they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night.”  He says are few more things as well, but I’ll come to that later.

There’s just one thing I’d like you to note from these words.  This multitude, those chosen by God for salvation, are in fact a group of martyrs.  The phrase “they have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb” is not there simply for decoration.  It means, quite literally, that these people have lived their lives in imitation of Christ.  By dying with Christ, by following his way even unto death, they succeeded in casting aside the evils of the world, the flesh, and the devil.  So now they are washed clean, raised to resurrection life with Jesus.  The Lamb was slain to atone for their sins, and these are they who left those sins behind by dying a death like his own.

Now, of course, there are martyrs and there are martyrs.  We happen to live in a world in which it is still very, very likely that you will be murdered because of your faith in Christ.  According to the American-based organisation, International Christian Concern, it is currently very dangerous to actually practise Christian faith (as opposed to having some private opinions about God) in the following parts of the world: Ambon and Aceh in Indonesia, Mindanao in the Philippines, China, Palestine, Nigeria, Pakistan, some parts of India, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Egypt and Morocco.  And I’m sure that’s not the whole story.  In places like this, faith is indeed costly.  You can lose your job or your home because you attend a church.  And you can lose your very life if you decide to oppose the social or economic policies of the government or the military in the name of Christ.  For Christians from these parts of the world, martyrdom is a daily possibility.  You could really be put to death after the manner of the saviour.

But then there is the martyrdom to which I believe WE are called, ‘we’, that is, who live in the democratic West.  According to the Book of Revelation, it is ONLY the martyrs who make is to heaven to be with God.  All of us are called to martyrdom in one way or another.  So how do we, here in the West, die after the manner of Christ, how do we forfeit our lives for the sake God?  Well, this is not a trick question.  The answer is pretty straight-forward really.  Being a martyr in the West is exactly the same as being a martyr in those countries where Christians are openly persecuted.  For the Christian is one who, by definition, has ‘unplugged’ from the Matrix, the basic principles and powers of the world, in order to live life by a different code and agenda—the code and agenda of Christ.  Every Christian who is literally martyred in Mindanao or Pakistan does so because they are already, in a sense, dead.  Baptism is the Christian’s funeral.  In baptism we die to all the powers and influences that colonise us—from the ‘terror’ rhetoric of governments to the consumer religion of television—and rise to share in the freedom of God’s radically new society.  Christ died because he believed the world should be different than it is, because he was motivated by a vision of God’s coming justice.  In baptism, the Christian renounces what Christ renounced and embraces what Christ embraced.  Anyone who does this, whether the consequence be a literal death or not, is a martyr to Christ’s cause.  The root meaning of the word ‘martyr’ is witness.  Anyone who dies with Christ in baptism witnesses to Christ’s way.  Whether one literally lives or dies thereafter is very much up to the community in which one happens to live.

Now, in that perspective, the resurrection we celebrate in this season of Pascha takes on a very specific meaning.  For the persecuted Christians of the late first century, the Christians for whom the books of John and Revelation were written, resurrection was primarily about vindication, the vindication of what we might call the “lost cause” of peace with justice.  To their eyes, the resurrection of Jesus was not simply a miracle, a display of divine magic to wow anyone who might be watching on television.  It was God’s vindication of Jesus’ cause, God’s stamp of approval on the life he lived for the sake of the poor, the oppressed, the marginalised and the wretched.  When Jesus was crucified it appeared, of course, that Jesus had been abandoned, that God was on the side of the Romans and their aristocratic Jewish collaborators.  But his resurrection burst forth like a neon-sign in the fog, a sign which declared that Jesus’ cause was God’s cause, that Jesus’ values were God’s values, that Jesus’ people were God’s people.

It is on that basis, and that basis only, that any of us could dare to die with Christ, to live and die with him in the service of the forgotten and forsaken.  For if Christ is risen, then his cause in just.  It is God’s cause, and so we can count on God to vindicate all that we do in imitation of Christ, even if the powers that be make life very difficult (even impossible) for us.  Even when we walk through the valley of the shadow, we need not despair.  For the Lamb that was slain is risen to be our shepherd, the one who knows what we feel and seeks to befriend and protect us in the night-time our fears.  Because he is risen, we are assured that God will never loose us from God’s grip.  He will hold us tight to Christ, so that even if we die with him, we shall also live with him. 

All of us, then, are called to be martyrs.  To worship Christ and his ways even unto the ridicule of our friends, even unto the loosing of jobs and homes and reputations, even unto death.  But God promises that if we do so, that if we will only let go of such things, we shall experience a freedom and a joy we never imagined was possible.  The joy of the redeemed who, even though they die, yet they live—and far more abundantly than even the Murdochs or the Packers.

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church on the fourth Sunday of Easter 2004.