The Fast that Satiates our Hunger

Texts: Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5.12-19; Matthew 4.1-11

This morning I want to talk about a spiritual practice that, like most spiritual practices in modernity, is rarely practised anymore.  Fasting: going without food. Allowing oneself to experience genuine hunger.

Fasting used to be a very important part of Christian discipleship, especially during the season of the church year that began on Wednesday, the season of Lent.  ‘Lent’, which means ‘spring’ (somewhat anachronistically for us in the southern hemisphere) has served, since its inception in the second century, a dual purpose: (1) to prepare the newly converted for their baptism into the life, death and resurrection of Christ; and (2) to renew the baptised, all the people of God, in the life and discipline of that same Easter faith.  The practice of fasting was seen as an essential part of this purpose because it taught people the discipline of letting the old desires go—the desires that belonged to the old, pre-Christian, way of life—in order to embrace a radically new set of desires, the desires planted in our hearts by the Spirit of Jesus Christ.  Here a clear connection was being drawn between desire and hunger.  The church reasoned that if one could learn to discipline the body’s basic desire for food and drink then one might also learn to discipline the wayward desires of the heart, that these might come to more accurately reflect the love of God in Jesus Christ.

With that history in mind, it is perhaps easy to see why fasting is no longer seen as a particularly relevant or beneficial thing to do, even by many a good Christian.  Modern wisdom has become suspicious, after all, about any practice that would seem to limit or deny what the body (or the soul) feels it ‘needs’. According to the prevailing common-sense, self-denial is a bad thing, an ancient evil, a form of repression which turns perfectly happy, actualized, assertive and confident people into miserable door-mats for others to wipe their feet upon.  What is wrong, after all, with getting what you want?  Greed may not be good, but don’t we all have a right to be happy, and to follow whatever path we choose in order to obtain that happiness?  What is so wrong with eating, or drinking, or sex, if it feeds one’s inner hungers?  What is so wrong with gaining the world through financial or social 'success' if it enlarges one’s happiness?  If I were to name an anthem that sums up all this modern mythologizing, it may well be the Queen song, ‘I want it all’, which seeks to re-define the traditional notion of love so that it is no longer about putting limits on one’s own wants or needs for the sake of the other person, but about enlisting the other person -  indeed all things -  to the cause of one’s own insatiable desire.

Of course, as well as accepting and absorbing the popular mythology, many contemporary Christians have found additional reasons not to fast. Baptists, for example, often reject the practise as too 'Catholic', too much to do with working one’s way to salvation and not enough to do with being saved by God’s grace alone.  The irony here is that many of the first Baptists were very diligent fasters.  Not because they accepted the supposedly Roman Catholic notion of working one’s way to God through good works and self-discipline, but because, for them, fasting was a way to make room in one’s life for a different kind of feasting, a feasting upon the word of God.  One cannot attend to God or God’s word, which is the only source of life, they argued, unless one also, and at the same time, seeks to put aside the many false gods which clamour for our attention.  Like the god of one’s stomach, for example.  In this, ironically, the early Baptists were closer to both Catholic and biblical teaching than they are to a great many of the moderns who bear their name.

For what does the Bible actually teach us about hunger, desire, and fasting?  Well, there’s the story from Genesis, for a start, the story about Adam and Eve eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil.  Note, here, that in contrast to many contemporary assumptions about the story, the problem is not that Adam and Eve gave in to desire as such (for God had told them that they could eat and drink pretty much anything else they desired from the garden in which they lived), but that they desired more than was actually good for them.  It might just be possible, you see—despite what the prevailing wisdom says—that desire and need are often rather different.  It might be possible, in fact, that some of the things we desire are really rather poisonous.  Unfortunately, a great many poisons do not advertise their nature as a matter of course.  They can look and taste rather heavenly! That in no way mitigates a poison's essential function and identity, however: ultimately to do little else but injure, deceive or destroy whomever would take it to one's lips or heart.   

That is why I often think of the serpent (who first introduced the ludicrous idea that poison might actually be good for you) as the very first advertising executive!  Just as the serpent argued that the fruit of the tree would not kill Adam and Eve, but make them like God, so modern advertising tries to convince us that bigger and shinier houses, cars, toys, drinks, gadgets and television programmes will make us the masters of our own destinies and fulfil our every hunger.  In truth, of course, they cannot and they do not.  More usually, these many shiny things make us miserable because we don’t actually need them: they do not fill the hole that is a non-possessive relationship with God, neighbour and creation.  For that is really all we need, according to Scripture: relationships of love in which there is nothing to possess, because everything we need has already been given us.  The truth is that all this other stuff, this consuming of things, does little else than distract us from what is really real: God, and who were are in God’s embrace.

Paul deepens the point in his reflection on this story in the letter to the Romans.  While sin and death came into the world via Adam’s desire for something he had never desired before - through his trust in the serpent’s lie - life and relationship come into the world through the simple and foundational reality of the gift, or grace.  I mean, think about it for just one second.  God has already given us all that we need in creation, and in the revelation that God, from eternity, desires nothing other than to know and love us.  The gift of Jesus Christ, says Paul, is first of all the good news that this is still the case, in spite of the fact that we have woven for ourselves so many other desires, desires for things that succeed only to maim or destroy human life.  Yet, in Christ, there is the further gift of forgiveness.  In Christ God teaches us that even where we have harmed and maimed and killed for the sake of our desire, even where we have forsaken the gifts or God for the sake of so many chimera without any substance or gravity whatsoever, God is willing to forgive.  To go searching for us in the wilderness of our sin, to take us again to Godself and give us the gift of life and of healing.  If only we will let go of our poisonous addictions!

The temptations of Jesus, as they are enumerated in Matthew’s account, make this point yet again, but in another way.  According to this story, the practise of fasting is indeed about the denial of self, but the self that is being denied is the self that buys into the lies of the devil.  For the self that desires to (1) turn the whole world, as if by magic, into something that I can consume; or (2) turn God into someone who is only there to confirm and serve my desire; or (3) turn every other being into my slave, engaged only to confirm and serve my desire; is ultimately a false self that has tragically retreated from the fulness of a world already given us in grace and love by God.  It is a self that indeed dreams of becoming like a god, but certainly not the God revealed in Jesus Christ.  For the Father of Jesus is a God who invites and pleads and remonstrates with his creation, but never bullies or coerces or forces us accept his path.  The god we would become, on the other hand - by all our misplaced faith in demonic lies - is a god who sucks our loved ones, the true God and, indeed, the whole world, into despotic slavery.

Therefore, when Jesus resists such lies, when he resists the temptations of the devil, he is not harming his essential self, the self that is God’s and belongs to God’s way of love.  It is the other self he is harming: the accumulating, consuming, magical self, the inner demon who would make all the world its food and its slave.  It is the self that Thomas Merton rightly called ‘the false self’, ‘false’ because it is built upon a lie.

As followers of Jesus, we too are called to resist such a self, and to do so because what we desire most of all is not a house built of lies on a foundation of sand, but the firm and real house that is God’s welcoming love.  This home is a gift of God, given in creation itself, and given again in Jesus Christ, who comes to us anew each day in the stories of Scripture, the sacrament of bread and wine, the call of the neighbour and the witness of the faithful.  In this perspective, to fast from all that is a lie in order to listen to what is true, to fast from all that would poison in order to drink from the waters of life, is not really a fast at all.  It is to quieten one's heart and its false desires, in order to listen for the one word, the one gift, that is able to save us from ourselves. It is to make room in one's longing for the immeasurable gift of God’s friendship, that is alone finally able to satisfy our deepest hunger and quench our deepest thirst.

Glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as in the beginning, so now, and for ever.  Amen.

What's all this LENT stuff about, anyway?

Most of the Christian churches worship God within an ecumenically agreed pattern of biblical readings and sacred seasons known as the liturgical year. With its origins in Jewish festivals like Passover and Pentecost – which commemorate the most important events in Jewish salvation history – the Christian year is the Church’s annual pilgrimage into the significance of Christ’s saving life, death, resurrection and ascension for our time and every time. It is nothing less, therefore, than a theological interpretation of reality as a whole.

Lent (a word which simply means ‘spring’ in old Germanic, and is therefore somewhat anachronistic in this part of the world) is a season of preparation for Easter. Lasting for 40 days (excluding Sundays, which are always a ‘little Easter’), it is the time when enquirers into the faith are enrolled as candidates for baptism and enter their final preparations. Candidates are called to imitate Christ’s time in the wilderness as he prepared for ministry and faced the many demonic temptations of his age. At another level, they are called to join Jesus in an imaginative pilgrimage from Galilee to Jerusalem, where everything is lost, but far more is found.

Lent is also the time when the whole church is called to return to the watersof baptism and discern therein, again and again, the precise form its radical obedience to God ought to take for the year at hand. For baptism, to which the whole season points and for which it prepares, is at once the death of Christ and the death of his followers. It is our death to all that would maim and destroy on God’s hallowed earth; it is Christ’s exorcism of all that can kill the body but can never kill the divine life itself.

In the Great Three Days, which straddle the end of Lent and the beginning of Easter, the church recalls Christ’s baptismal passage from ruin to triumph, from death through hell and into the living hope of resurrection life. In the baptisms that are performed and celebrated as Easter dawns, the church embraces that hope and promises anew to live in the power of the resurrection yet one year more.

As preparation for this great Paschal festival of death and rebirth, Lent is littered with rituals that seek to inspire a fundamental conversion of life. The day before Lent begins – traditionally known as ‘mardigras’ or Shrove Tuesday – is a feast with a particular purpose, the feast one has before a fast or a famine. We mock its significance if we reduce it to either a mere fundraiser or a celebration of sin. It is the feast of plenty that one enters into knowing full well that such feasting is not entirely good for one’s spiritual health. It is the party with your family before you go into the wilderness to fast and pray and seek the face of God. It is the last supper before you take the narrow path that leads to salvation.  ‘Fat Tuesday’ looks, with an appropriate level of apprehension, toward the 40 days of lenten fasting, in which the Christian is called to develop a discipline able to resist the demon gluttony and learn to feast, instead, on the word of God that is able to save us from the fires of our own destruction. It is also about the fast called ‘justice’, by which we are called to become poor, like Christ, that others may be enriched.

Thus, the day after Shrove Tuesday, Lent begins in earnest with the fast known as Ash Wednesday. As the name suggests, the central symbol at work here is that of ashes. Ashes are a biblical symbol of fragility, ruin, and repentance in the face of our greatest evils. Humanity, the ritual suggests, is little more than dust and ashes in the last analysis. Though God has given us a good world, by our choice for greed and gluttony, we destroy each other and burn into nothingness everything that is good or noble or praiseworthy.

The imposition of ashes on one’s forehead, sometimes mixed with baptismal water or chrism oil, reminds us of this uncomfortable but ultimately undeniable fact. The ritual also speaks of the mercy of God by which the truly penitent may be brought to life once more. Ashes we may be, but the grace of Jesus Christ has the power to reanimate even a worthless pile of dust and ashes so that it can become the compost of a better world.

In this, Ash Wednesday is a beginning symbol and anticipation of the Easter event to which Lent is leading. It speaks of our ruin, but also of the possibility of rebirth and renewal through a power in the world that is even stronger than our will-to-destruction: the love of God in Jesus Christ.

Previously published in Crosslight on March 6, 2011.

Christ the Mystery of God

Texts: Isaiah 58.1-9a; Psalm 112.1-10; 1 Corinthians 2.1-16; Matthew 5.13-20

In the middle of the first century Mediterranean world, the story of Jesus was just one story amongst many. There were as many different religious and philosophical options available to people as there are today, perhaps more. If you were in the market for a religious path to follow, there were plenty to choose from. These ranged from the simple devotions of the peasant folk to their household gods, to the more abstractly philosophical schools of the aristocratic classes. But during the period when Paul was writing his letters, the most popular religions were the mystery cults. Though various in shape, colour and form, the mystery cults all had one things in common - an obsession with the gaining of hidden or secret knowledge about the nature of things. Later, in the 2nd, century they would be gathered under the name 'Gnosticism', from the Greek word 'gnosis', which means 'knowledge'.

Gnosticism was very seductive, because it promised to let the initiate in on the biggest secrets of all - the mysteries about who we are, where we came from, and what our destinies are to be. But not all at once. The newcomer to a mystery cult would be granted access to the secrets by degrees. Only by solving the puzzles of lesser stages would one progress to an allegedly ‘higher’ knowledge of the mysteries. There was a strict pecking-order in most of the cults. Progress into the higher echelons depended very much on one's cultural capital - that is, on how impeccably compliant one had been in one’s philosophical education and, perhaps more importantly, upon who one happened to know. The higher initiates patronised those lower down the ladder; and the latter regarded their betters with a mixture of awe and envy.

When Paul writes to the Corinthians he is afraid that his fledging Christian community is turning into a mystery cult centred on Christ. He is afraid that some of the community's members have set themselves up as the higher initiates in a ladder to secret knowledge, and that these people are lording it over the others on the basis of their claims to superior gnosis into the mystery of Christ. Paul's fears are well-founded. But not only for what we today might call ‘ethical’ reasons. Paul is aware that there are two significant theological similarities between his own gospel and the language of the mystery cults, and that these similarities might cause some to miss the difference.

First, Paul is clearly happy to call his gospel a musterion, a mystery (2.1). This is right and proper, he says, because the ways and mind of God are far beyond the capacity of human beings to grasp. There will always be a sense in which the message of God's wisdom will elude us, simply because God's ways and our ways are so very different. God will always have secrets, the depth of which only God's own Spirit can fathom. Second, Paul is also happy to make a distinction between those who are mature in the mystery of Christ and those who are not. Among the less mature, Paul says that he came as one without any pretension of wisdom at all. He simply let the power of the Spirit, manifest in various signs and wonders, do the talking. But amongst the more mature, Paul spoke of wisdom and of the secrets concerning God's glory. And so the gospel of Jesus is similar to the mystery cults in two important respects. There are secrets, and there are those who understand the secrets better than others.

Yet, and this is the crux of Paul’s critique, it is at precisely those points of apparent similarity that the gospel is also very different to the mystery cults. While the secrets of the cults may be grasped through the powers and efforts of human learning and reason, Paul says that the secrets of the gospel are revealed (apocalupsen, 'unveiled') to human beings by the Spirit of God (2.10). We have received the Spirit, says Paul, in order to learn about the things of God from one who knows God intimately. And by that Spirit, he says, we also teach others about God's secrets, not in the categories of purely human reason, but in a language peculiar to the Spirit. The basic point here is this: no Christian can boast of a superior knowledge of God's ways based on the merits of his or her own efforts or intellectual powers. Whatever we are privileged to know has been given us by the gracious gift of God. That is all.

This leads us neatly into the second of Paul's distinctions between the mystery cults and Christian faith. While there is indeed a difference between the mature and the less mature in faith, this has almost nothing to do with the cultural capital so valuable to the initiates of the mystery cults - you know, the social systems by which one may access the right teachers and the most desirable education. For Paul, the mature are those who attend not to the apparent ‘wisdom’ of these merely human discourses, but to the whispers of the Holy Spirit. Later in the letter, Paul says of the Corinthians that they are puffed up with knowledge, but that they lack the LOVE which is the special gift of God's Spirit. Listen . . . . 'Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him' (8.2). The point my friends, is not knowledge, but love. The mature in the faith of Christ are those who love God and are freed by that love to look out for others, not those who are of the impression that they know a lot about God.

Now why am I telling you all this? To make a single point, and it's this. In the eyes of God it is far more important to love than to know. It is far more important to LOVE than to KNOW. That's why you hear me talk so much about the essential relatedness of prayer and social justice. Prayer is allowing yourself to be drawn into the mysterious beauty of God's love, manifest in Israel and in Jesus Christ, there to be forgiven and made new. Here there is a profound looking and listening to what God has already said and done in the history of salvation, and a deep-down surrender to God’s re-patterning of one’s personhood according to this history’s cruciform shape. Out of this experience, then, springs the dream of social justice and of healing, that burning desire to love the present world as God presently loves it, to actively participate in God's ever-new embrace of all who suffer in the world. It is to hear Jesus say 'Freely you have received, freely give' and then to actually get on with the giving!

And so I encourage you brother and sisters, yet once more today, to enter into a more committed journey of prayer. Not the prayer which presumes to know what God wants, and proceeds to tell God what ought to be done in the world. No, I encourage you to come quietly before the Lord. To empty yourself of all desires and all wants save one. The desire to become one with God's own desire. To will what God wills. To become the agent of God's becoming. To burn with a pure flame of love for all who need God's compassion.

'Blessed are the poor in spirit . . .'

Text: Matthew 5.1-12

Matthew's beatitudes summarise the essential spirit of Jesus' teaching in much the same way as the ‘Ten commandments’ summarise the Jewish Law.  The first hearers of the beatitudes would have been familiar with their form:  “Blessed are the so-and-so, for such and such will be theirs.”  This was a common form of blessing in the Mediterranean world, often used in general conversation as an aphorism which reinforced the common values that everyone shared . . . .  “How blessed is the man whose has many children; he shall have an easy retirement!”  The main function of the form was to exalt and support the status quo, the way things were . . .  “Blessed is the man who is sober in business; he shall enjoy much wine.”  Matthew's use of the form is striking, because it does precisely the opposite of what it is supposed to do.  Instead of reinforcing the most common values and attitudes, Matthew's beatitudes actually seek to subvert these values by giving a new status to all those who were regarded, at the time, as stupid, unlucky, or cursed by the gods:  the poor, the mourners, the persecuted.  It is not an exaggeration to say, in fact, that the beatitudes are more interested in changing the world for the sake of these people, than in affirming the world as it stands.

Now, over the years, the revolutionary power of the beatitudes was effectively watered-down through sentimental preaching and the establishment of state churches as an instrument of the aristocracy and merchant classes.  In this setting, the beatitudes were heard as nothing more than exemplary religious ideals which were of no practical use in everyday life.  They made sense when associated with heaven, God, and the end of human life, but they did not make sense with regard to the real world of daily toil and commerce.  Thankfully that time is past, for most of us at least.  We no longer live in a world dominated by State churches or, indeed, any church at all.  I suspect, nevertheless, that the revolutionary vision of the beatitudes remains quite lost.  For we are moderns, most of us, and moderns are likely to regard the beatitudes, along with the rest of Christianity, as little more than a curious oddity, a relic from a no-longer-relevant past.  They have nothing to say to us in our brave new world of medical miracles and technologised capital.

Well, we could capitulate to that point of view.  Most do.  But let me ask you this.  How would your life be different if you were to take a renewed interest in the studying the beatitudes and taking them seriously?  Note that I'm talking about your life, for the moment, not the life of the whole world or the whole church.  In modernity, we have been hoodwinked into thinking that what happens in the world and the church is beyond our influence.  When addressed in these more general terms, we moderns always seem to think that the speaker is talking to someone else.  So I want to make it clear that I am addressing each of you personally, as ‘individuals’.  How would your own life be different if you took the beatitudes seriously?

Perhaps you are a person who is satisfied about your life and the way you live it.  Perhaps you believe that you are doing all that God or the Universe requires, and that you will be welcomed into heaven with open arms.  Or . . .  Perhaps you are a person who is deeply aware that you haven't got it together, that despite all efforts to the contrary, you cannot produce your own contentment.  You are deeply aware that every joy in life, every moment of happiness, every sense of well-being comes as a gift from the Lord of love.  Whatever the case, the Lord stands before this morning and says, “Blessed are the ones who know the poverty of their own religion, for God belongs to them.”

Perhaps you a person absolutely at home in the modern age.  You welcome the new technology and you know how to use it.  For you, the world is full of promise and opportunity.  There's a dollar to be made around every corner.  The good life comes to those who work hard and make the most of their natural creativity.  Or . . .  perhaps you are a person who mourns the loss of a more gentle age,  when people knew their neighbours and looked out for each other; when the strong helped the weak, when the businessperson was content with his or her share and felt no need to buy out his or her competitors;  when the fruits of one's labour were shared with those who were poor. Whatever the case, the Lord stands before you this morning and says, “Blessed are the ones who mourn this passing, blessed are the gentle of heart, blessed are those who are merciful. They will receive back a hundred-fold of all they have given.  They shall inherit the earth.”

Perhaps you are a person who is content to live in your enclave of privilege and plenty.  You see your comforts as your due for hard work and right living.  Perhaps you turn a blind eye to the homeless in your own city, or the impoverished millions in that far-away place called the 'two-thirds world'.  Or . . .  perhaps you are a person who sees that your own peace is utterly interdependent with that of the whole world.  Perhaps you feel hungry and thirsty because so many others are hungry and thirsty.  Perhaps you weep and cry aloud because so many are denied their fair share of the earth's plenty. Whatever the case, the Lord stands before you this morning and says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.  Their hunger will be satisfied as they work to fill the stomachs of others.  Blessed are those who work for peace; they will know themselves to be children of God.”

Perhaps you are a person whose attention is always divided.  Deeply discontented with your life, you leap upon every fad which comes your way.  You buy what the advertisers tell you to buy.  You wear the right clothes and watch the right TV programmes.  Your values change according to your appetites for the day.  Perhaps, in your emptiness, you have become interested in astrology and bizarre theories about a spiritual world populated by angels and demons who control everything we do.  You feel like you have no control over your life, that you are a victim of forces far more powerful.  Or . . .  perhaps you are a person who knows that every heart is restless until it finds its home in God.  Perhaps you have seen that the pure vision of truth and beauty is forever being clouded by our desire for the lesser things. Perhaps you have renounced your idols for the sake of finding the one true God. Whatever the case, the Lord stands before you this morning and says, “Blessed is the heart that wills one thing, which seeks after God and God only.  In seeking, that heart will be found by God.”

If we were to study the beatitudes, and take them seriously, we would become what our faith tradition calls prophets, saints and mystics.  To be a prophet, a saint or a mystic is not only for those who have gone before us, those mysterious figures hidden away in some unattainable age that is no longer entirely real.  For every ordinary Christian, any who would take their faith seriously, is also called to be a prophet, a saint and a mystic.  Even today.  A mystic is one who makes communion with God their one goal in life.  A saint is one who has renounced worldly power and prestige for the sake of serving God.  A prophet is one who resists the values of the age in order to live the values of God's kingdom.  All Christians are called to be mystics, saints and prophets.  All Christians. 

Through the reading of these beatitudes, God today challenges all of us (myself included) to have done with trivial pursuits, and embrace the great vocation that God has put before us.  The vocation of blessedness.  Not ‘happiness’, mind you, as some would have it—even the “Good News” Bible.  Blessedness: a deep-down knowing that you are in the right place, the place where God would have you be.  Blessedness is not about ease or comfort.  Indeed, you can expect some level of vilification or even persecution for your efforts, as Matthew says.  But you will be blessed.  You will belong to God.  You will become an agent for the dawning of a wonderful new age in the world, and you will be granted that perfect peace for which all human beings seek, even in the midst of all that is wrong with the world.  In all seriousness, my friends, what else really matters?

The Way Less Travelled

Isaiah 9. 1-4; 1 Corinthians 1. 10-18; Matthew 4. 12-23

In 1916, as the horror of the 1st World War unfolded in Europe, the American poet Robert Frost wrote this poem.  Allow me to read it to you.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, and just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Friends, the lure of the well-trodden path is powerful.  In 1914, and again in 1939, the whole of Europe stood at the diverging of two paths.  One path, the path most taken in the history of that continent, led to the darkness of war. The other way, the way less taken, was (and is) the hard way of diplomacy and concession in order to make for peace.  In 1914, and again in 1939, Europe chose war:  the way most familiar, the way that made some winners but most losers, the way that is broad, making for the wholesale slaughter of many millions of lives.  In this, Europe did only what human beings usually do.  It chose the road most taken, the road for those intoxicated by the spoils of war, the lure of power and status and riches.

The members of Paul’s Corinthian church were not immune, it seems, from such intoxications.  Somehow they forgot the simple commandment of Jesus—‘love one another as I have loved you’—and became obsessed with the desire to lord it over each other.  They became like a modern political party, forming factions gathered around charismatic leaders or preachers, each claiming a holier ground than the others.  Each group in the Corinthian church claimed that their version of faith and practice was somehow more authentic than the others, a better expression of the traditions received from the fathers and mothers of the movement.  Which meant, of course, that all the people who did not take such a view were to be regarded with suspicion.  Indeed, with the passage of time and with the application of that lethal cocktail of fear and propaganda, these others became not simply suspicious, but the very face of all that is wrong with the world.  They became the enemy.  And isn’t this how it goes with so many of our churches; or, indeed, with our attitudes to those who come here seeking asylum?   Well, Paul will have none of it.  ‘What has all this lusting for power over and against one another to do with the message of the cross?’ he says.  ‘I came amongst you, not in power or using the arts of persuasive rhetoric to seduce you.  I came only with the message of the cross, which is sheer foolishness to those who lust for power.  But to those of us who are being saved, it is the very power of God’.  Listen to what the apostle is saying:  If we are Christians, if we are followers of Christ and his gospel, then there can be only one power:  the power of love, the power which lays down its power for the sake of including everyone in the wide embrace of God’s love.  The power iconically presented in figure of a crucified God.

You see God, the God of Jesus Christ, is one who takes the way less traveled, the way that human beings seem so very afraid to take.  A way that welcomes and embraces even the sin of another, and bears that sin, the horror of it, the hurt of it, the burden of it, in the hope that love will forge its doggéd way through the morass.  Emmanuel Lévinas, the Jewish philosopher, said famously that the only way in which we may all come to share equally in God’s justice is if we assume that the other, the other human being - any other human being - has a prior claim to our welcome and our service.  Prior, that is, to our own claims upon that person.  This way—the way of a God who wanders lonely though the dark and ritually impure regions of Naphtali and Zebulun, the places where the other may actually live—is the way that leads to light and liberation from oppression for us all.  This way—the way of a pilgrim Christ who wanders these anonymous and unimportant habitations, touching the impure and loving the loveless—this is the way by which the kingdom comes near.  If the God of Christians were a God who pandered to political success or popular opinion, then Christ would not have lived such a marginal existence, and died such a sordid death.  Christ would have marched into Jerusalem with an army of Zealots and taken power by force, and stunned everyone with his Hitleresque rhetoric, and built an empire on the labour of the poor and ritually unclean.  If God were really like that that, then Christ would have taken the way most travelled.

But he didn’t.  And, if we are his disciples, then we shall not either.  We shall take the least travelled way.  The way that looks out for the other, the neighbour, even at deep personal cost.  The way that owns and faces its fear of the other, and of what that other may do to me if I make myself vulnerable.  The way that calls on the power of God in prayer, the power of love, asking that God may do in me and in my relationships with others what I am unable to do for myself.   If we will welcome the other who is God, if we will sit at table and commune with God in prayer, then we shall find—as the English Benedictine John Maine often said—that the power to love even our enemies will grow within.  Not as the result of a personal project, a work of discipline which aims to purify the self by practiced technique or psychological training.  No, this power comes simply by letting God in.  By letting God be in us all that God would be.  And in the Christian tradition, that ‘letting be’ is known as the prayer of quiet.  The prayer which welcomes God in the less-traveled way of the Psalmist who said:  ‘One thing I asked of the lord . . .  to live in the house of the Lord all my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple’.  Here God is welcomed into my space, but immediately overwhelms and transgresses that space so that I find that the tables are turned and it is I, myself, who am being welcomed, I myself who cross a threshold into the superabundant hospitality of God.  

The way less travelled by is the way of the Christ.  He calls us as he called the sons of Zebedee to accompany him on that way.  To leave behind the sin that entangles, to be welcomed by God, that we may have power to welcome and love even our enemies.  There is no greater seducer than the God who was in Christ.  There is no greater wielder of power.  But unlike a Hitler, or Jim Jones, or a Jerry Falwell, the power of God is laid down at the feet of the sinner in an ultimate gesture of submission and vulnerability and love.  And the sinner must decide what to do with this vulnerable God.  May God grant us courage to choose the way less travelled by.  For that, and that only, will make the difference—for ourselves, for our church, for our world.

Rejoice! A study in faith's absurdity

Texts:  Isaiah 11.1-10; Ps 72.1-7, 18-19; Rom 15.4-13; Matthew 3.1-12

 

Like most all of the lections we read during Advent, the Scriptures for today describe two kinds of reality.  First they describe the world as it is now, a world dominated by the rich, the unscrupulous and the powerful at the expense of the poor, the principled and the vulnerable.  Then they imagine or look forward to a day in which the tables are turned, a day when the poor, the vulnerable and the faithful will rejoice in God’s salvation, while their enemies are done away with forever.  In the Matthew reading, for example, John the Baptist announces God’s supreme displeasure at the behaviour of the Jewish elites who governed Judea in the first half of the 1^st century.  These royal and priestly classes had chosen to collaborate with the invading Romans in order to preserve their status and wealth, even though this meant turning a blind eye to the way in which the invaders exploited and robbed the ordinary folk of their very livelihoods.  John castigates them for their poisonous hypocrisy.  Like the prophet Isaiah before him, John warns that a ‘day of the Lord’ is at hand, a cataclysmic day in which all their faithless and self-serving ways would be exposed, while the faithful ones, those who suffer because of the sins of these elites, would be vindicated forever.  I quote: 

I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

Get the gist?  The day of the Lord is like a deluge of fire.  The faithful ones are like wheat, preserved from the fire and taken to God’s own heart.  But the deceitful ones, who only want to protect themselves, are like the worthless chaff that is thrown into the fire and burned.  The outcome of that purgatorial cleansing is beautifully described in the song of praise we heard from the vision of Isaiah.  There the prophet imagines a world in which the remnant of God’s people, the righteous and the weak, who survive the punishment of their oppressors, are gathered to God in such a way that their experience of misery and shame is transformed utterly.  The song imagines a future where the people of God will experience reconciliation with their enemies and with God, rejoicing in God’s gift of peace for all time to come:  ‘The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.’

It’s a wonderful vision.  So wonderful that I sometimes feel that it’s all too good to be true!  Of course, I have no difficultly with the part of the story that describes the evil and self-serving corruption of the elites.  Who could deny it?  At this time of year our political leaders come out with platitudes about peace on earth and the importance of defending human rights and democratic freedoms. Right now, at this moment, Nelson Mandela is being lauded as a champion of such Western values.  At the same time, both at home and abroad, political prisoners are being denied their democratic rights to legal representation and a fair trial. American drones are bombing large populations of non-combatant civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The folk who flee the brutal conflicts in Palestine, Iraq, Sri Lanka and Syria are being detained for up to five years while their cases are being examined.  And our domestic gaols are overwhelmingly populated by two groups of suffering people for whom the wider community seems not to care: Aboriginal people and the mentally ill.  These facts completely undermine the West’s apparent commitment to justice and human dignity.  In the face of such hypocrisy, I feel angry, I feel powerless, and eventually I succumb to what some have called “hope-fatigue.”  Bono – from the rock band U2 - said it all in his memorable song from 2001: 

 

Jesus won’t you take the time

to throw this drowning man a line

   “Peace on earth.”

I hear it every Christmastime

but hope and history just won’t rhyme,

so what’s it worth,

   this “peace on earth”?

The fact that Advent coincides with Australia’s summer festival doesn’t help the situation, for me.  As a child summer was the time when all our family friends went to the beach for a holiday.  In summer, we knew that we were poor and that neither our church nor our community really gave two hoots.  I still feel that.  It still hurts.  The feeling is compounded by all the rampant consumption that dominates our cultural landscape at this time of year.  Because of what I experienced as a child, I find it difficult to see anything in all of this consumption apart from a complete indifference to the suffering of other people.  In the Philippines, right now, there are kids starving because they don’t have enough to eat.  In Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Columbia, kids are being sold into sex-slavery so that the rest of their families will be able to stay alive.  Even here in Australia, there are thousands and thousands of families who find it difficult to put a roof over their heads or pay the grocery bill.  Yet, each summer, middle-class Australians escape to their second or third homes at the beach and indulge in an exchange of goods which is surplus, entirely surplus, to anything they might possibility need.  Again, I feel sick to the stomach.  I feel overwhelmed at the enormity of this indifference.  In the middle of all of this nausea I simply find it difficult to believe that a day of salvation is at hand.  Very difficult. 

Now, part of my anxiety about all of this is clearly emotional and psychological.  It is tied up with my experience of the world, and the narratives I create to account for that experience.  But part of the anxiety is also theological, and has more to do with a puzzle which the bible itself sets up, and puts into play.  Let me try and spell it out for you.  Here, this world:  evil, corrupt, rich getting richer, poor getting more miserable.  There, world to come:  peace, joy, no more bad guys, vindication for all who suffered at their hands.   Great distance from here to there.  How is the distance crossed?  How do we get from here to there?  On this particular point, the “how” bit, the bible doesn’t seem to be very clear, almost as though it doesn’t actually know how.  On my worst and most cynical days, this does not inspire confidence!

Of course, the theologians have tried to fill in the gaps in the biblical witness.  Theologians like to do that.  The ‘evangelicals’ say that Jesus will return with a whole army of heaven and whip the nasty people’s backsides.  Then he’ll wave his kingly sceptre and the world will return to an Eden-like state in which we’ll all love each other the way that God loves us.  But this theory raises more questions than it solves.  Amongst other things, one must ask why Jesus would behave so very differently on his second visit than he did on his first.  The first time around he didn’t force anyone to do anything.  He invited, he loved, he argued forcefully, he exampled a different way to be.  But he didn’t compel anyone to do anything.  That would have been to override the human freedom we have, apparently so prized by God that he allows us to use that freedom to do evil.  Wouldn’t a powerful army of warrior-angels kind’ve undermine that whole God-is-love image, God as the supreme protector of our responsibility to choose?

“Damn right,” say the ‘liberal’ theologians, “let’s attend more closely to the story as it’s actually told.”  That God became a child, one of us.  He was born in our midst, full of grace and truth.  He went about the place healing, driving out our demons, and teaching us how to love one another.  But then the rich elites got hold of him.  They tortured him and nailed him to a cross.  Sure, there was a resurrection, but it’s all rather mysterious.  Now you see him, now you don’t.  He lives on in the world as a kind of memory or spirit of the good.  Perhaps this suggests that God is like our deepest and best self?  God changes the world only when we decide to change the world.  God prompts and pricks our conscience, but refuses to do anything other than what we choose to do for ourselves.  Giving our second coat to someone who needs it, to pick a relevant Scriptural example.  But again, I’m really not sure that this theory solves anything much.  It makes a mockery, for instance, of all those bible passages which insist that it is not we, ourselves, who make the world’s salvation, but God alone.  By grace, the action of God, are we saved through faith, and this is the gift of God, not of human works, lest any man should boast (Eph 2.8,9).  If the liberal theory were believed, then I would personally consider the whole hope-of-salvation thing to be no more than a cruel joke visited upon us by a God who raises our hopes and expectations, but never intends to meet them with anything real.

Well.  What’s to be done with all of this?  What am I to do with the anxiety of my lived experience?  What am I to do with the theological conundrum?  When in doubt, I have often considered it wise to take a break from all the anxiety and tell a story.  A story takes you out of yourself, and here’s a good one I came across one day.

The time has come for St. Peter's annual three-week vacation, and Jesus volunteers to fill in for him at the Pearly Gates. "It's no big deal," Peter explains.  "Sit at the registration desk, and ask each person a little about his or her life.  Then send them on to housekeeping to pick up their wings."

On the third day, Jesus looks up to see a bewildered old man standing in front of him. 

"I'm a simple carpenter," says the man.   "And once I had a son.  He was born in a very special way, and was unlike anyone else in this world.  He went through a great transformation even though he had holes in his hands and feet.  He was taken from me a long time ago, but his spirit lives on forever.  All over the world people tell his story."

By this time, Jesus is standing with his arms outstretched.  There are tears in his eyes, and he embraces the old man.

"Father," he cries out, "It's been so long!"

The old man squints, stares for a moment, and says, "Pinocchio?"

This story is not an ordinary story.  It is a joke.  A joke distinguishes itself from a story as such by introducing an unexpected element into what would otherwise be all very familiar.  In this story, we expected that the old man would squint and say “Jesus?”  We were set up for that by everything that went before—the religious setting, the details about the old man’s son.  But the story transcended its own boundaries and became a joke by taking us by surprise, by shocking us with the arrival of something entirely unforseen.  Parables are like that as well.  They subvert the rules of the game.  And the greatest parable of all is Jesus.

You see, John’s hearers expected that their messiah would come along to whip the Romans with superior military strength.  They were wrong.  And our own expectations, all these years later, are probably just as misguided.  Whether we are evangelicals who expect that Christ will change things one day by the might of his superior power, or whether we are liberals who expect that Christ is so much one of us that he is only able to help those who help themselves, we are probably all mistaken.  For the story of Christ is still in motion, and we are not privy to the punch-line.  In another part of Matthew’s gospel, a part we read last week, we are told only that we cannot know what is to happen, or how.  For the punch-line is God’s.  As Jesus shocked the Greeks with his human weakness, and scandalised the Jews by his failure and cross, so this fool from God will appear a second time.  And while we moderns may pretend to have followed the story so far, the joke, the punch-line, will surely leave us all so gob-smacked that the only response available to us will be to be astonished, to laugh, to rejoice. 

For that is what we humans do when we are genuinely surprised.  We absorb the shock, we adjust our imagination, and then we laugh!  Like Sarai at the announcement of her old-age pregnancy with Isaac.  Like the Baptist in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary came near with the Christ-child.  That is why Paul counsels the Romans to cease their sniping at each other and rejoice.  Stop trying to control the outcomes, stop trying to whip your opponents with their lack of understanding, he says.  Instead, surrender your concerns into God’s hands.  Relax into that surprising peace which surpasses all understanding.  The peace that is absurd.  The strange peace that we have cannot have manufactured for ourselves, because it defies every effort at human reasoning.

On my better days I see that Advent hope is a choice.  It’s about believing in the possibility of surprise.  It’s about believing that our tragic and repetitive history has an unforseen and unpredictable punch-line which will fly in the face of everything that either the evidence or our secular reason might cause us to expect.  And that’s the hope I encourage from you as well.  The hope of a Mary of Nazareth who, in that ancient time of Advent waiting, become a bearer of the impossible to a tired and un-surprisable world.  Rejoice, people of God!  For while the night may be filled with tears, joy shall indeed come with the morning.  How, I have no idea!  But I believe it shall come.

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