For God Everything is Possible

Job 23.1-9, 16-17; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4.12-16; Mark 10.17-31

 
No matter whether we are rich or we are poor, there comes a time for many of us when we awake to discover that we are without what matters most, we are without God.

Job was a man who was very rich in every way. He owned land, and goods. But he was also rich in the joys of family, whom he loved and they him. He was also rich, it seems, in what might be called ‘moral goods’ or, in middle-class speak, ‘brownie points’. He was renowned for his honesty in business dealings and his charity to those in need. Yet it was not until all of this was taken from him that he came to see that although he possessed all things, he did not possess God. Let me quote from chapter 23 of the book that bears Job’s name:

If only I knew where to find God; if only I could go to his dwelling . . . But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him. 

The rich young man who comes to Jesus in the story from Mark’s gospel is in many ways the same as Job. He is a wealthy man when it comes to lands and goods. But he, too, is wealthy in the ways of the moral law. ‘All these commandments I have kept since I was a boy’ he tells Jesus. Yet, despite his wealth in all these things, he comes to Jesus because he is aware that something is missing. ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ he asks. The rich young man is different to Job in that he still, at the point we encounter him here, possesses his material wealth. Yet he is the same as Job in possessing his integrity, his moral uprightness. And he is the same as Job is what he does not, apparently, possess: God. For that is what ‘eternal life’ apparently meant for this young man. To possess all that God possesses. To ‘inherit’ the very life of God that can never be lost or stolen away. To possess such life as God possesses it: absolutely, and without any danger of loss or corruptibility.

So. Whether we are rich or poor, for many of us there comes a time when we awake to discover that we are without what matters most, we are without God. I say ‘for many of us’ because I am aware that there are a great many people today who never come to this awareness at all. That is not to say that there are not a great many existential crises out there. They are everywhere! It is simply to say that the emptiness a great many of us feel is rarely understood, anymore, to be about the lack of God. For most, their existential crises are about a seeping away of meaningfulness in what we do each day, but that is about as far as the analysis gets. That a loss of meaning may also signal a lack of God is something that Christians and Jews and Muslims can talk about, because we live inside a language and culture – a ‘house of being’ as Heidegger said – which names what human beings need more than anything else by the name of ‘God’. God is the name to which all names point, the desired which all desires ultimately allude to. God is the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field, the one thing necessary to life in all its fullness.

So, for we Christians, the experience of awaking to God’s apparent absence can be a very scary thing indeed. If we do not feel God’s presence and experience God’s blessing, then what is life worth? If God seems to have disappeared from the stage, then what are we to conclude? That God doesn’t care for us, or that God is dead? Or perhaps Professors Freud and Dawkins are right: God does not exist, God is no more than a cultural construct, a product of our needy, infantile, imaginations? Well, in the face of the experience to which we refer, that is indeed one way to proceed. But it is somewhat reductionist, and it suffers from the precisely the kind of cultural captivity that it accuses the believer of having – in this case, a rather unquestioning acceptance of the culture of modernity. Furthermore, it is not my way. My way is interested in what the scriptures have to say about the matter.

What today’s scriptures have to say about the experience of God’s disappearance or absence can be summarised in two ways. First, that the experience of God’s absence is more apparent than real. For both Job and the rich young man had over-identified God with the world of things and of achievements, that is, with those dimensions of life one may possess or use or control. In both cases, it was the loss of the same that brought on the crisis: in the case of Job, an actual loss; for the rich young man, the fear of such loss. For when Jesus invites the young man to sell all he has and give it to the poor, he turns away. Clearly he cannot see that possessing eternal life, possessing God, is something rather different to possessing or using or controlling things. For God cannot be possessed or used or controlled like material goods or brownie points can be possessed and used and controlled. The Jewish and Christian tradition about idolatry makes this clear. If we identify God with such things, then we have not identified God. We have created an idol instead – a false god which is not God but merely an extension of ourselves. And this is what Job and the rich young man had done. They had made their possessions and their achievements their god, and thus when these things were lost (or, in the case of the young man, when Jesus suggests that they ought to be lost) they also lose their god. Instant existential crisis ensues.

This loss of God is therefore more apparent than real. When we over-identify God with a comfortable, easy, life where things go pretty much the way we would like them to go, then the loss of such things can feel like the loss of God. But it is not. Indeed, for much of the Christian tradition, the loss or (more positively) the refusal of such things is, in fact, the precondition of really finding God. Or, to put it another way (and here we are moving into the second of our summaries) the de-identification of God with what we can possess or use or control becomes the first step in a path which realises that it is not God who is present to us, on our terms and according to our desires, but God who is present to us, under God’s terms and according to God’s desires.

Listen at what Job starts to understand in the wake of his losses: ‘But God knows the way that I take; when God has tested me, I shall come forth as gold’. And listen to what Jesus says to his disciples after the young man has turned away: ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God . . . With humankind this is indeed impossible, but for God all things are possible’. What is being taught us, in both instances, is this: that God desires to find us, even when we have apparently lost God. In the love of God, it is God’s desire that through such losses we shall discover that it is not God whom we have lost, but only the idols that keep us from God; that God can do in us and for us what we could not, in a million years, do in and for ourselves: create in us the life that is only God’s to give, the life that is full of joy, and peace and healing, a spring that quenches our thirst and a bread that finally satisfies. So there is an indispensable passage that all of us must pass through if we are to find the life that God is always near to give, a passage that St John of the Cross called the ‘dark night of the soul’ and Mark’s gospel calls, simply, ‘taking up one’s cross’. It is about the putting away of idols and the surrendering of our need to possess and use and control every damned thing.

Lest this all seem too hard, remember that God himself has walked this way before us in the person of Jesus Christ. In Christ the figure of Job as the innocent sufferer comes to its genuine fulfillment. The letter to the Hebrews speaks of him as one who became in every way like his human brothers and sisters, a high priest tempted in every way like us, and experiencing the apparent abandonment of God just as we do. The appearance of Psalm 22 in today’s lectionary is a reminder of this. But it reminds us, also, that Christ did not give up his faith in the one true God, any more than the Psalmist did. He continued to trust himself to the one who saves the wretched, finally surrendering himself into his Father’s hands and forging a path for we, as fellow human beings, to imitate and follow. So, in Christ, we know God as who knows the experience of the loss of ‘God’ from the inside. God is therefore a sympathetic God, a God who knows our weakness and encourages us to keep on walking by faith.

In fact, according to Mark there are consolations for the people of God who are able to surrender their idols to God. Listen to what Jesus says to those disciples who were willing to leave everything else in order to follow him:

Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age - houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions - and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first. 

According to Mark, whomever has surrendered their false gods – whether material wealth or a certain kind of righteousness in the eyes of our families or peers – will receive them back again in an even greater measure. Not, this time, as a reward that necessarily follows from our righteousness or hard work. Not this time as those things that can be mistaken for God but which are really just extensions of our own desire. No, following the renunciations of the ‘dark night’ they can be finally received as the gifts of sheer grace that they really are. Gifts to enjoy and give thanks for. Not things to possess and use and control. Gifts to be held lightly and to share liberally with our neighbours in the spirit of the grace which they now represent. So take heart. God is not dead or departed. God is near to give us his very self. And that is everything, everything that God can give!

Garry Deverell

God's Other Children

Texts:  Esther 7.1-6, 9-10, 9.20-22; Psalm 124; James 5.13-20; Mark 9.38-50

The Book of Esther  comes to us from a time when Jewish people were doing some serious rethinking about who they were and what God wanted them to do and be amongst the nations of the world.  Although the story is set in the Persian city of Susa at the height of that Empire’s power in the 470s and 460s BC, we believe it was written much later than that, probably during the reign in Palestine of the Priestly dynasty known as the Hasmoneans, between 150 and 100 BC.  This period was characterised by intense debate in Jewish circles about exactly how much a Jew might accept and adopt the cultural values and practices of their non-Jewish neighbours.  By this time, you see, most Jews no longer lived in Jerusalem or even Palestine.  As a result of the policies of three successive colonial masters – the Babylonians, the Persians and the Greeks – Jews had by this time become citizens not just of a small patch of land in Palestine, but of a whole Empire which stretched from Iran in the East to Greece in the West.  The most recent of their colonial masters, the Greeks, had been particularly effective in convincing Jewish people that it was not such a bad thing to participate in the politics, the religion, and the cultural life of non-Jews in general, and Greeks in particular.  But when a particular Greek King, a chap named Antiochus Epiphanes, pushed the policy a little to far by setting up an image of the Olympian god Zeus in the Temple at Jerusalem, he quickly discovered that there was a definite limit to Jewish multiculturalism.  The Palestinian Jews rebelled rather spectacularly, driving the Greeks out and setting up a rather puritanical dynasty of priest-kings in their stead.  The new rulers, the Hasmoneans, tried to turn Palestinian Jews back toward a more separatist policy.  They insisted upon a more literal approach to both the Torah, the Mosaic law, and the ritual life surrounding the Temple cult.  But while their reforms were embraced with single-minded fervour in Jerusalem itself, the wider Jewish community, now dispersed throughout the entire Near East, was at odds with itself as to the wisdom of this approach.

The book of Esther emerges out of the midst of this debate, and succeeds in throwing out some challenges to both sides of the controversy.  Where some Jews were very liberal with regard to the prevailing culture, arguing that it was quite o.k. to speak Greek, to observe Greek culture and customs, and even to adopt certain of the Greek’s religious beliefs and practices, the Book of Esther declares that there is a definite limit to such a strategy.  At its centre are two heroic Jewish characters who distinguish themselves by refusing to be so easily assimilated.  Mordecai and Esther are prepared to put their lives on the line in order to preserve their people, a people described in the book as being ‘different from other people, having their own laws, and not keeping the laws of the king’ (3.8). Indeed, Mordecai first gets into trouble when he refuses to bow before Haman, the king’s governor in Susa.

Now, as modern readers you may puzzle at this refusal.  What could possibly be wrong with honouring the land’s highest official?  At this stage in the story we have no evidence that Haman is a cruel or unethical man, or a despot.  So why will Mordecai not honour him?  The most likely answer has to do with that which the writers of Esther believe Jews ought never to compromise, and that is their monotheism, their belief in Yahweh as the one and only true God.  During the reigns of both Persian and Greek emperors, the king was usually regarded as one who shared in the divine nature of the gods themselves.  The obedience they commanded was therefore tinged with a religious as well as a political character.  To honour the king was also to worship him as a divine being, which monotheistic Jews would find difficult to do in any circumstance.  Mordecai’s refusal is therefore a religious refusal.  He will not bow down to the king’s representative because, from where he stands, this would be tantamount to worship.  In the narrative of Esther, Mordecai’s refusal becomes a distinguishing mark of Jewish identity.  For when Haman secures the king’s approval to an edict which will wipe out Jewish communities all over the empire, he does so by arguing that all Jewish people are like Mordecai – a people who are not to be tolerated because they will not obey the king (3.8).

This represents a loud and clear clarion-call to all those Jews of the ancient world who were compromising the faith of their ancestors by participating in Greek worship and religious devotion.  And who can doubt that this was actually happening?  A few years before this, in the ancient Israelite capital of Samaria, the Jewish priests had actually asked their Greek overlords to set up a shrine to Zeus in their temple.  Clearly these priests had completely absorbed the Greek idea that Zeus, the chief of the gods, had different faces and names in different cultures, so that it didn’t really matter whether you called him Zeus or Yahweh, as long as you worshipped him.  Indeed, this idea had recently gained a foothold in Jerusalem itself.  Several years before he set up the shrine to Zeus in the temple, Antiochus Epiphanes had sanctioned the construction of a gymnasium in Jerusalem, to which many of the leading citizens subscribed.  Unlike modern gymnasiums, Greek gymnasiums were institutes for the propagation of Greek culture and religion.  In order to become a member, you had to declare your allegiance to that particular gymnasium’s patron god.  These are the kinds of practices which the writers of Esther are wanting to target.  As far as they are concerned, Jewish identity stands or falls on its belief that only Yahweh is God, that only Yahweh may be worshipped as God.

And there is a challenge for us in this as well.  We live in a world which, in many ways, is very similar to that of the Ancient Persian and Greek Empires.  We live in a multi-cultural and multi-racial society where particular ethnic and religious heritages are constantly bumping into each other.  Now, if you believe the official rhetoric, all are tolerated.  Each of us are free to worship our own God, in our own way.   But underneath it all, I put it to you that only one God is being given special treatment, one God is being subtly pushed into our hearts and minds as more worthy of our devotion than any other.  And that God is not Zeus, as with the ancient Greeks, but Mammon.  It is Money, with a capital M.  Money is present everywhere.  Temples to Money are being built right across the land.  Huge shopping centres whose architecture resembles that of the temples and cathedrals of the ancient world.  The television beams the gospel of money into our living rooms night after night.  The gospel which says that you are free to do whatever you like, but you are not free from the need to have money, and as much of it as you can.  And here is that message’s stroke of genius, the spin that takes us all in:  ‘you all need money’ it says, ‘because without money you can never be free to do what you want’.

None of this means, however, that we should never participate in the society in which we find ourselves.  Against those who would urge us to ‘come out and be separate’, touching no unclean thing in case we are somehow poisoned, the book of Esther encourages us to live in the midst of our multi-cultural and multi-religious society with integrity and poise.  Note that both Mordecai and Esther are more than happy to participate in the government of Persia.  They are happy to assume positions of responsibility, and to further the good of the king with loyalty.  Remember that Esther becomes the Queen because of Mordecai’s good counsel, and that Mordecai becomes a prominent governor because of his willingness to alert the king to a plot against his life.  All of this shows us that it is possible for Christians to participate in, and even serve a society which we do not control, so long as we are not thereby persuaded to give away what is essential to our identity as Christians.

Mark’s gospel counsels us to a very similar understanding.  There the disciples are counselled to accept the action of another group of healers and exorcists, who are doing similar work to themselves and even using Jesus’ good name to accomplish it.  Now, this other group was probably Jewish, and it probably used Jesus’ name because it believed that Jesus was an important Rabbi whose authority was effective in the confrontation of evil.  In other words, they were probably like modern Jews, Muslims or Mahayana Buddhists, who believe that Jesus is an important prophet of God whose teaching and authority is to be respected - yet who do not believe, as we do, that Jesus is somehow pre-eminent, the ‘Son of God’.  “Whoever is not against us is for us”, Jesus tells his disciples, which means that we ought to be happy to work with anyone and everyone who shares our own, Christian, goals for society, even if these folk do not own the name of Christ in the same way as we do.

At the same time, and echoing the Book of Esther’s word of caution, Mark counsels Christians against sharing in whatever practices or allegiances would take us away from our essential identity in Christ.

If your hand causes you to stumble, then cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to gehenna, to the unquenchable fire.  And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off.  It is better to enter life lame than to have two feet and be thrown into gehenna.  And if your eye cause you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into gehenna, where the worm never dies and the fire is never quenched.

There are some things that, for Christians, are unacceptable, and these have to do with our ultimate allegiance to Christ.  We are free in Christ, we are not free apart from Christ.  That means that we are not free to exchange the worship and following of Jesus for that of another god – like mammon, for example.  We are not free to participate in practices which will cause other people to fall into sin, to lose their way on the path towards God.  We are not free to pretend we are not Christians, and that Christ is only our Lord on certain days of the week, but not on others.

Each of us are called to ‘have salt in ourselves’, that is, to keep ourselves fresh in Christian identity and service.  But we are also called to ‘be at peace with one another’, to work with others (no matter what their beliefs or allegiances) in bringing the kingdom values of peace with justice to fruition in our communities.  Sometimes this is impossible, because the people who rule do not share our values in any way.  But, in the meantime, I would encourage you to read the book of Esther and find encouragement for a wise discipleship in this very multi-religious and multi-ethnic society in which we currently live and move and have our being.

Wisdom for a time of madness

Proverbs 1.20-33; Psalm 19; James 3.1-12; Mark 8.27-38

We live in difficult and disorienting times. Sometimes I wonder if the world is going mad. Sometimes I wonder if I am the one who is going mad. What about you? One definition of madness is this: ‘a fundamental breakdown in the capacity to distinguish between what is real and what is not’. So how do you distinguish between the real and the not-so-real? And, more particularly for our purposes this morning, how should the Christian church go about discerning the real from the unreal?

Some of you may be thinking that to ask this question is either silly or just plain redundant. You may feel secure in your capacity to know what the truth actually looks and feels like. But tell me this: when our government told the Australian community that a group of refugees had threatened to throw their children overboard unless they were received into Australia, did you know you were being lied to? Or when Colin Powell assured the United Nations that Saddam Hussein possessed huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that he planned to use against the West, did you know that he had been lied to? Or, to pick a very live issue in our community at present, when Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten assure us that stopping the boats saves lives, how do you know that they are right, or that they are wrong?

Let me suggest, ever so tentatively, that many of us decide who is right and who is wrong before the fact. And that even after the ‘facts’ have come to light, that we conveniently change the ‘facts’ to suit ourselves. In at least two of the three instances just cited, reality was manipulated by powerful people for their own ends. They told us lies because the truth would have undermined their stated policy positions, their fundamental beliefs about how the world works, about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. I suspect that this will be the case with the policy on stopping the boats as well. But, in all honesty, I do not yet know if I am right about that or not.

‘Time will tell us the truth’. That is what we say to ourselves. That is how we reassure ourselves when reality seems difficult to grasp. But will it? Will time, or the accumulation of evidence, ever convince some of us that our democratic, transparent form of government is not very honest or transparent? Large sections of the Australian community still trust what our governments tells us, despite everything: the children overboard affair, the weapons of mass destruction debacle, the reasons we were given for sending troops into Afghanistan. Large sections of the Australian community are still going to vote for what I call the ‘Liberal-Labour coalition’ at the next election, because they believe what they are told about being overrun by ‘asylum seekers’. So, for many of us it seems, time does not reveal the truth. Many of us prefer to believe subterfuge and spin, if we find it comforting, than face the truth of what is happening to us. Some of us are like the proverbial ostrich, who sticks its head in the sand when danger arrives. Some of us would rather die believing in comforting and convenient falsities than be taught the truth by either time or the accumulation of evidence.

For Christians, there is a plumbline that helps us to discover the truth, that teaches us how to read the world in such a way that we will eventually discern, not without effort I must add!, which way is up and which way is down. This plumbline is Christ, the holy wisdom of God revealed to us in the Scriptures. Christians believe that the deepest truth of things only comes to light when it is scanned, or passed through, the UV field of apostolic testimony. That is not to say that Christians, even Christian theologians, are immune from kidding themselves - as will soon become clear.

So, having read from the apostolic testimony this morning, what can we say about our contemporary attitudes to truth, and to the finding of truth? Proverbs says that the truth has been out there for time immemorial, because Holy Wisdom has been preaching her gospel in the streets and the marketplaces since the world begun. Sadly, however, many human beings would prefer to ignore her counsels. Proverbs tells us that many people prefer to be simple, to reduce the complexities of life to simple propositions that no amount of wise teaching will ever succeed in undoing. It also tells us that the simple will eventually pay for their complacency. One day, says Proverbs, the simple will reap what they have sown. Their ignorance will be exploded by a burst of reality, which will undo the layers of lies on which they found their lives. In that moment, we are told, disaster will arrive to steal away the false comforts by which the simple hold the truth at bay.

Now, are you one of the simple? Are you the one who cannot live with too much truth? Or are you one of the wise, those who are open to the truth no matter where it may take you?

Now before you answer too swiftly, I invite you to consider another piece of apostolic testimony, namely, the story of Peter as we have it in the gospel of Mark. Perhaps, like Peter, you pride yourself on being insightful, on possessing an aptitude for recognising truths that others find too difficult to countenance. For the gospel indeed tells us that it was Peter, amongst all the disciples, who first recognised that Jesus was the messiah of God, the one anointed by God to save his people from their sins. While the other disciples apparently saw Jesus as just another prophet, it was Peter who first recognised that he was the Christ. Surely there are grounds for a certain smugness here? If you were Peter, would you not feel that you were one of the wise, seeing things not usually seen and pointing to truths that others find too difficult to grasp? Well, perhaps so. We theologians are particularly susceptible to such feelings. But we are not alone in this. I can’t count the times that someone has told me, with an impressive sense of certainty and authority, what God is really like, without having spent more than a week of their lives with either Scripture or theology! At such times, I feel like an electrician who is being lectured about how to install a new heater by someone who believes that electricity is what elephants produce when they have eaten too much.

Nevertheless, back to being smug about one’s insightfulness. Peter, having apparently seen the truth about Jesus, then demonstrates to all that he has missed the real, existential, significance of this truth. For when Jesus begins to teach the disciples what the messiah was sent to do—that is, to suffer the rejection of the authorities, to be tortured and killed, but then to rise again on the third day—Peter cannot bear it. Taking Jesus aside, he rebukes him. ‘Look, Jesus, don’t be so downhearted. You’re the messiah, for goodness sake. The messiah thrashes his enemies. He doesn’t suffer and die, he makes others suffer and die. He makes them pay for their sins!’ All of which reveals, from the point of view of those who first heard this story, that while Peter correctly identified Jesus as the messiah, his ideas about messiah-hood were deeply flawed. ‘Get behind me Satan,’ said Jesus in reply, ‘for you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things’. And there’s the rub you see. God’s ways are not our ways. What we would like to be real is rarely the ‘really real,’ the real that God is. For we rich Christians from the post-industrial West corrupt ourselves with forlorn desires for a peace that bursts into bloom apart from the costly scars of sacrifice. So say the martyrs. And they tell us the truth.

In the reading from Mark, Jesus tells his disciples, along with everyone who is reading the story, that there can be no peace without a fight, no rest without work, no resurrection worth having, apart from one’s death. Those who want to protect themselves from the truth will only end up being destroyed by it, says Jesus; and those who want to own the truth, that is, to make and control the world according to their own solipsistic lights, they will end up losing the only thing that really matters: the truth of who they are in God. The really wise people, according to Jesus, are those who are willing to submit and sacrifice their version of the truth to that of Jesus. The wise are those who trust Jesus absolutely, even to the point of letting everything else go, every truth they have ever clung to for the sake of solidity and certainty in the world. The wise are those who die to such things in the belief that Christ will raise them anew, new beings in a new world, a world in which the only truth worth clinging too is the love and grace of God. So, who is feeling smug now? Certainly not me!

Christians, then, have a really strange—strange, that is, by the usual standards—approach to discerning the real from the unreal. Christians are, at one and the same time, both absolutely sceptical and absolutely trusting. Christians cannot believe that any version of truth produced by the world, whether by politicians, scientists or theologians, is completely and absolutely right. Apparent truths, no matter how subtlety constructed, need to be tested for their inherent capacity to hide us from the truth. For while the world is indeed real, in Christian understanding, its reality oftentimes consists in its failure to come to terms with the really real, that is, with God. So Christians are called to test and approve everything, especially the truths we manufacture about ourselves.

Yet—and here, surely, is the most extraordinary paradox—Christians can only be so sceptical on the basis of an absolute trust in a particular truth, the faith and belief that God is there, and that God is love. Without this, I would argue, there is no basis for a productive and creative scepticism, there is no really real by which we might evaluate what appears to be real. Equally, without this faith and belief, there can be no finally successful motivation for seeking the truth. For if we do not believe that the Real is finally on our side, that the Real is, in fact, a personal reality who is other than us, who nevertheless loves and welcomes us, then our search for the truth will always be permeated by a lingering suspicion that we are really alone in the universe, that the universe may well be only the entirely made-up conversation that we have with ourselves.

Someone will of course ask, and someone has always asked this of Christians: ‘But how do you know that God exists, and that God is love?’ The answer is the same today as it has always been. We know, not because we have discovered this truth ourselves, but because God has reached out to us across the chasm between God’s being and ours, and revealed that God is there, and that God is love. That revelation is none other than the man, Jesus Christ, God with a human face: God the other, who is nevertheless closer to us than we are to ourselves. So close that our knowing is not so much our knowing, but the knowing of God in and through us. We see in a glass dimly, nothing is surer, but we see nevertheless. We see that we are seen, and we love that we are loved.

And so we return to where we began. If we are mad, perhaps it is because the world regards us as out of touch with the reality it manufactures and reifies. If we are sane, perhaps it is because we have opened ourselves up to a reality that others do not wish to see. For all that, let us not forget that the truth of God is stranger even than fiction. Let us pray for the grace to be sceptical about the truths we are told in the daily round of news and advertising. Let us pray for the grace to be sceptical about the truths we design for our own comfort or security. But let us trust, absolutely, in the God who is grace and truth in Jesus Christ. For without him, we will never find the courage to admit our mistakes and let our truths go. We will never, therefore, becomes signs of the truth for a world that is going mad.

Bread is for sharing

Texts: Proverbs 22.1-2, 8-9, 22-23; James 2.1-17; Mark 7.24-37 

Today’s readings make two basic points, I suggest: (1) that God himself pleads the case of the poor against the rich; and (2) that the rich therefore have a responsibility to share what they have with the poor.  

According to the wisdom tradition represented by the reading from Proverbs, material riches are worth very little unless they are shared with those who lack such things.  Indeed, Proverbs argues that there can be only two paths in life:  to become rich by treating others with injustice, therefore attracting God’s displeasure; or to live generously and therefore attract God’s generosity.  “Which path are you on?” asks the text of its hearers.  Are you the one who treats others, especially the most vulnerable members of the community, as an exploitable source of cash for one’s personal bank account? Or are you someone who believes that wealth is a gift from God that should be shared from the beginning, such that the accumulation of wealth beyond the point of one’s basic needs becomes completely pointless?  

These are questions that also confronted the Christian church where James, the brother of Jesus, was the pastor.  We read this morning from a letter that records some of his most incisive sermons.  There we read about a church that has not yet been converted to the radical economic egalitarianism of the Jesus movement.  It is a church that betrays that fact by fawning over the rich and neglecting the poor, even amongst its own membership.  James reminds the church members that they must put their faith into action if they are to experience the true liberty of the children of God:  faith in a God who is merciful, who has promised his kingdom to those who, while materially poor, are rich in faith.  “Show me that you really believe in God’s mercy,” says James, “show me by being merciful yourselves.”  What James implies here is that it is extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, to be at once rich in faith and rich in things.  Those who are rich in faith, he seems to be saying, are those who embody Christ’s mercy by sharing their material possessions so completely that there can be little prospect of ever becoming rich as an economist would measure such things.

Of course, if we bring all this back home for a moment, one must ask the question ‘who are the rich, and who are the poor in our own place and time?’  The economists and social policy analysts would answer that poverty has pretty much the same profile anywhere.  Whether one lives in India or Australia, the poor are those who really struggle to eat nutritious meals, to find shelter or to clothe themselves.  The poor are those who cannot access adequate employment.  The poor are those who, if they get sick, cannot afford to access adequate health-care.  The poor are those whose lives are filled with so much toil that education and leisure pursuits are regarded as little more than luxuries.  The poor are those who die relatively young.  On these measures, the poorest Australians are usually Aboriginal people, or people with a long-term illness or disability, or people who care for such people over a long period of time.

Who are the rich, then, or perhaps it would be better to ask ‘who are those who are well-resourced?’  Well, having read a recent report on the matter from UnitingCare, let me suggest the following.  You can count yourself as well-resourced if:  (1) you feel confident that you can adequately clothe and house yourself and those in your care, even if you have no job for a time; (2) you feel confident that you can access adequate health care in a timely manner when you get sick; (3) you can afford to go on holiday to another place at least once every year; (4) you know how to recognise, and make the most of, any opportunities for education, employment or self-improvement that may come your way.  All of which is to say that you feel that you belong to the mainstream of Australian society, enjoying a lifestyle that most Australians assume as a right, rather than as a privilege.

Now, I’m not going to assume that I actually know which of you are poor, or which of you are rich.  Appearances can be very deceiving, especially in this age of credit-cards and long-term mortgages!  For the record, I’m relatively rich.  What I will do, however—and this is my burden and responsibility as a minister of Christ—is repeat the good news for both the rich and the poor, the good news at the heart of our faith tradition: - that if you are poor, God loves you, and calls you into a community called the church in which it is completely o.k. to expect that your legitimate needs will be taken care of;  - that if you are rich, God loves you too, and calls you to share what you have with the poor and thus become rich in other ways, rich in faith and in love and in mercy.  This good news is none other than that proclaimed in the story we read from Mark, where the well-resourced Jesus learns that God’s food is for everyone, not just for those who are part of his own particular religion or ethnic group; and where a poor Syrian woman, whose daughter needs God’s food very badly, asks and argues for what she needs, in the faith that God cares . . .  and finally receives from God what she needs through Jesus.

The good news is no more complicated than this, I suggest: that God is merciful.  So trust that God will be merciful to you; and trust that you can now live according the liberty and generosity of that mercy in your relationship with the needy people God places in your path.

Liturgy of the Dance

Texts: 2 Samuel 6.15; 12b-19; Ephesians 1.3-14; Mark 6.14.29

I’ll never forget the first time that I went to one of those massive dance parties that the gay community organises here in Melbourne around Easter.  Having agreed to accompany a friend of mine, I soon learned that there was more to dancing than just dancing, for the whole event unfolded according to the rubrics of a long-established ritual.  As with any half-decent liturgy, the preparations for our participation began well before the event itself.  At 3 o’clock, I assisted my friend in removing his excess body-hair and then moisturising.  At five o’clock we showered, shaved, re-moisturized, and applied the golden tanning-lotion that would make our bodies look tastily Latin.  Then we donned our vestments—loose jeans and muscle-shirts—all the while making our way through a sumptuous bottle of red. 

Having prepared ourselves thus, we made our way to a tasty little pad in Fitzroy for what I have come to see as the Gathering Rites and the Liturgy of the Word.  Arriving at 7.30 pm precisely, my friend and I were greeted at the door with smiles of recognition, hugs and kisses, and an introduction or two.  Climbing the stairs, I remember entering a room which can only be described as  . . . soothing.   You know, the lights were low, and the music was gentle.  I was new at this, but the gathering tribe greeted me kindly.  Everyone was smiling.  Everyone had a drink in their hands.  Over the four-hour dinner that followed, I was gently questioned about who I was and why I had come.  They discovered I was a minister, so I spent the evening listening to confessions and homilies from lapsed Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians and atheists.  Very spiritual it was, very spiritual indeed.  In the background, the pace and the volume of the music seemed to rise with the spirits of the people.  There was laughter, the telling of stories, even some singing—a kind of longing or supplication for that which had not yet arrived or come together in our lives. 

At 11.30pm, the Liturgy of the Sacrament began.  Handing over their offerings, each received from the host a half-tab of ecstasy.  (As a mere catechumen, I did not feel I could accept).  Asking why the ecstasy was strictly necessary, I was told that it was all part of the experience.  If one did not take the ecstasy, it was more difficult to give oneself to the dancing, to be taken out of oneself by the music.  The ecstasy, they said, helps you to lose yourself, so that yours fears and anxieties slide away into irrelevance.  It also gives you the stamina to dance until dawn.  “You’re not going to make it without this stuff,” they told me.  So, off we went in our taxi to the dance. 

From the moment we started across the tarmac to the warehouse, there was a buzz in the air.  People were excited, very excited.  From all around, from every angle, bodies were pouring into this huge cathedral-like warehouse where the heady concoction of electronic rhythms, dazzling lights, and writhing bodies was beginning to work its magic—the magic, that is, of turning 9000 individuals into a communion of bodies which moved as one.  In there, you see, it was too loud for talk or conversation.  Here the words shared earlier in the evening had to take on other forms, mainly the form of The Dance.  In the Dance, everyone communicated with everyone else through the presence of another, the presence of music.  Music became the great mediator and host.   Everyone moved together, at once initiating and responding to the impulses of the bodies which were nearest.  As the night went on, I drank deeply of that music, at times even feeling that the Music and I had merged to become the same entity and that, in the same movement, a genuine communion with these other human beings (usually very different to me) had become possible as well.  I was intoxicated.  

But my friends had been right.  By about 3 am I was running out of puff, so much so that I was barely able to register the arrival in my personal space of a celebrity, a real celebrity.  Magda Zubanski!  (She’s very short!)  By four, I was completely whacked and ready to leave.   So I said my farewells and left, while my new friends continued their ecstasy-enhanced worship.  As I left the rhythms behind and set out on the long walk back to Clifton Hill, the chill morning air brought me back to myself.  The sense of being intoxicated subsided.  And I found myself asking a question, of myself or God, I do not know. Was this Dance I’d encountered just an escape from the pain of life, an escape into the drug-assisted nothingness of an egoless communal; or was it, rather, the arrival of a more divine Self, a Self which puts to death, for a moment, the ego’s self-obsession, so that we are enabled, if only for a moment, to catch a glimpse of what Love might make of us?

That question returned to me again as I read this extraordinary passage from 2^nd Samuel, the story of David’s dancing before the Ark of the Lord.  For David, like so many young men and women in our community today, had a great deal of pain in his life.  Snatched from the simple and, well, un-complex, life of a shepherd on the hillsides of Israel, David became embroiled in the complex personal and social politics of his time.  On the basis of his miraculous defeat of Goliath, captain of the enemy Philistines, Israel’s King Saul had taken David to himself as a mascot for the fighting men, a symbol of the presence of Yahweh in their midst.  Indeed, Saul came to love David as his men did.  Yet, as David took to fighting in more conventional ways, and succeeded more and more as a leader of men, Saul grew jealous and afraid.  What if David grew hungry for the throne?  What then?  So Saul began to plot against David’s life, timidly at first, but more madly and boldly as time went by.  Eventually, David had to become a fugitive from the very King he had loved and honoured.  In his distress, he found a loyal and loving companion in Saul’s son Jonathan, who helped David to escape Saul’s net on more than one occasion.  The love between them was sealed with a covenant, we are told; indeed their love for each other surpassed the love between men and women.  We are told that too.  So when David is finally forced to a guerrilla war against Saul, and Jonathan is killed along with his father, David is shaken to the core.  In reading this story of David’s early life, one cannot help but think that he was caught up in events over which he had very little control, even to the point of being forced to do that which he dreaded most.  So, as David dances ecstatically in the midst of this wild and musical procession to Jerusalem, it is possible that he dances as a man would if he wanted to escape his life.  Could it be that he dances in order to forget the pain of his conflict with Saul, and the grief of his loss of Jonathan?  Could it be that he dances, like so many of our young people today, in order to escape himself?  Maybe so.  Maybe so.

Yet we are told by the authors of this passage - indeed, David says it himself - that he dances “before the Lord,” before Yahweh the God of Israel.  The authors want us to understand that the dance of David is a form of divine worship, a dancing which was not unusual in Israel, particularly if one belonged to the traditions of the prophets.  Earlier in the story of David we are told that he spent considerable time hiding out with a particular order of prophets who lived at Ramah under the leadership of Samuel.  It was common at that time, we are told, that the prophets would fall into ecstatic trances when the Spirit came upon them.  Their bodies would convulse as a sign that it was God who directed their speech as well as their bodies (1 Sam 19.18ff).  The dance of David owes something to this, I suspect.  Those who saw him would have understood that he danced as an oracle would, that the movement of his body and the cries of his rejoicing should be taken as a word of encouragement for the people from God.  As the Ark was processed into Jerusalem, so the Lord’s own favour would return to his embattled people, to undergird and support his servant David in all that he did on their behalf.  All the more so because this prophetic message is presented within a priestly and liturgical framework.  David danced in an ephod, we are told, which is amongst the most sacred garments of a priest.  He also offers sacrifices for sin and well-being before the Ark, as a priest would have done.  The message is clear.  David’s dancing is, at one and the same time, an act of worship and a message from God.  In the priestly persona he prays to God on behalf of the people.  He cries out with their longings for peace and prosperity.  In the prophetic persona, he becomes at the same time an oracle for God, one who addresses the people with a word of assurance and promise. 

Dancing, I suggest to you tonight, is therefore a potent symbol of the gospel covenant as we experience it in our worship.  It can become, for us, the double-performance of both human prayer and divine address.  On the one hand, the Dance can expresses our deep desire and longing to be free of conflict and grief and sorrow and oppression.  I believe I witnessed that longing in the dancing of the gay community that night in the docklands—the longing of a people still deplored and feared, not least by many of our churches and the families who inhabit them.  One can also see something of that spirit in the dance scene from The Matrix Reloaded, when the whole of the people of the city of Zion dance out their longing for salvation from the machines that are coming to destroy them.  On the other hand, the Dance can become an icon or oracle of God for us, a material and fleshly way by which God calls us to turn, in repentance, to accept with empty hands God’s gracious offer of mercy, forgiveness, and healing.  In the image and experience of the dance, then, God shows us a profound mystery.  The mystery that theologians call Christ, or the Paschal Mystery.  In Christ the man, you see, all the pains and griefs and longing of human beings are lived out in a life of total prayer, a prayer offered to God as one who hears, and loves, and saves.   Yet, in Christ, we also learn that the griefs and longings of human beings belong to God first of all.  For Christ is God amongst us, living our griefs and dying our deaths, that we might also die to our fears and our sins, and be reborn to a new kind of live altogether.   Christ, in his Spirit, continues to live amongst us in the church, living our prayer and praying our life until earth and heaven are reconciled, and all are finally free as Christ is free.

The Dance of David, then, is an important symbol of both our Christian gospel and our Christian experience.  Like all good symbols, it should be taken literally.  That is, it should be lived in the body as well as spoken about in conversation.  For when I go dancing with my friends, I experience something of my own pain and longing.  I long for a world in which, for example, gay Christians are accepted not only as priests and ministers, but more importantly as human beings, capable, and worthy of, the giving and receiving of love.  Yet, when I go dancing with my friends, I also hear and experience something of God’s good news.  That despite everything, Christ has died our death that we might die his.  In the experience of the Dance, God invites us to leave our selves, selves full of pain and bitterness and malice, behind: to nail that self to the cross with Christ, that we might rise into the joy of the children of God and share in the ecstasy of the divine dance of love, which is the true liturgy of the redeemed.

Of course, dancing is not always unambiguously good, as the gospel reading shows.  There the child Herodius loses herself in the dance, only to be possessed by the evil intentions of her mother toward the prophet, John the Baptist.  In a similar way many of our young people, in losing themselves to the dance, make themselves the victims of unscrupulous people - sexual predators and drug dealers, with all their sordid intentions.  Still . . .   I would witness that the Dance, if it is a dance before God and in the power of the Spirit, really can save us.  If we can lose ourselves in the worship of Christ, then Christ will come to fill our emptied egos with good things, with his own self, a self which has passed through the waters of despair, and now dances in the freedom of God.  In this new ballroom of grace and promise, we join the dance of God’s own self—forever ceding ourselves for the other’s sake, and yet receiving truer, kinder, more loving selves from the other in return.  And so I say to you, finally, tonight.  Lose yourselves in the Dance, and the Dance will become the source of your rejoicing. Both now and in the life to come. Amen

Garry Deverell

This sermon was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church in 2003.

The Wind Blows Where It Will

Texts:  Isaiah 6.1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8.12-17; John 3.1-17

When we choose to give ourselves to God in baptism, thus calling on Christ to come and live with us by the companionship of the Holy Spirit, we also choose to cede, or put aside, our right to do whatever we would like.  When we choose to live God’s way, we also choose to die to our own way.  In the language of John’s gospel, at baptism we are re-born ‘from above’.  We cease to live according to the many wills associated with our first birth, whether those of self or society.  We start to live according to the unfathomable will of the Spirit, who has mid-wived us into a broad new land, a land in which the only thing that matters is the utterly extravagant love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—a love so broad and deep that it spills out into the world of human beings, inviting them to love and be loved as the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father.  At baptism, according to John, we are caught up in the wild and excessive love that is the divine will of the Spirit, a will and a way that cannot be domesticated.  ‘Like a wind that comes and goes according to a hidden purpose, so it is with everyone born of the Spirit’, says John.  When we are baptised, we vow ourselves to a God who might take us in directions entirely opposite to the ones we had planned ourselves. 

Take Isaiah, for example.  It is likely that Isaiah was originally a priest or a Levite, a male member of that tribe of Hebrews who were given no land in Israel but set aside, instead, to serve Yahweh in the worship of the temple.  The Levite, even more than other Israelites, could expect that life would unfold according to a particular plan or pattern.  In early childhood he would begin to learn his father’s trade.  At his father’s workplace, the temple in Jerusalem, he would learn how to keep the altar fires burning, how to slaughter beasts for religious sacrifice, how to lead the temple rituals and shepherd the people in their religious observances.   He would also learn the law of Moses by heart, and take his turn preparing meals for the other temple servants.  At the moment he was born, this was the life prepared for Isaiah, a life of service in the temple of Yahweh.

But one day, while he is going about his duties (perhaps he is polishing the silverware or some other rather humble task), Isaiah is suddenly caught up in an extraordinary vision.  He sees Yahweh himself, awesome and kingly, a presence which fills the whole temple.  Isaiah immediately falls into a fearful panic, for he knows the stories of Moses very well.  He knows that Yahweh does not show himself to sinful mortals, for they cannot bear the purity and truth of his holy gaze.  ‘Woe is me!’ he calls out. ‘I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live amongst a people of unclean lips’.  This is another way of saying, ‘I honour the Lord with what I say, but not with what I do.  My people and I are liars.’  Isaiah was right, of course, for if one reads the rest of the book that bears this story, you will discover that the Jewish nation was in pretty bad shape at the time.  On the one hand, the Jewish people made quite a show of going to the temple to worship, and of keeping the many feast days and festivals that marked the history of their liberation by God from Egypt.  But the moment worship was over, the nobles, the politicians and the landowners would go back to what they did with most of the time, that is, increase their wealth by stealing small farms on the edge of their existing lands, squeezing their workers for more production at less cost, and bribing the bureaucracy so that their plans and schemes could go ahead with a minimum of interference from the law.  As a Levite, it is more than likely that Isaiah himself was caught up in all this bribery and corruption.  For the Levites doubled as a kind of civil service for the aristocracy.  They handled the affairs of state, as well as the apparatus of the temple.

So at the moment he has the vision, Isaiah knows that he is done for.  For in the searing light of God’s glorious presence, the shadows hidden in darkness come to light as well.  Isaiah knows that there is little point in hiding what he is, or what his people are.  Covenant-breakers.  Liars.  Cheats.  Exploiters of the weak.  Yet, God has not come to do away with Isaiah, or even to chastise him.  Why chastise a person who is already aware of their darkness?  No, God has come to change the course of Isaiah’s life.  Taking a burning coal from the altar where sacrifices for sin would have been made day after day, a seraph, one of God’s servants, touches it to Isaiah’s lips and says:  ‘Your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out’.  In other words, 'I know jolly well that you are a liar and a hypocrite.  But you are forgiven.  From now on your lies have been burned away.  From now on, your lips will speak only the truth.’  For what happens then is this:  that Isaiah the Levite, whose life had been pretty cosy and predictable up until now, is suddenly called to become a prophet, a man whose speaks the truth to kings and priests and businessmen, and cops a fair bit of flack for his trouble.  ‘Whom shall I send, and who shall go for us?’ says the Lord.  And Isaiah, who can hardly believe that he is still alive, responds in the classical manner of prophets from time immemorial: ‘Here I am; send me!’

Now, in the Christian grammar of baptism, it is not only special people like prophets who are called to live and speak the truth.  It is all of us, all who are born by water and the Spirit into the realm of God’s love.  For at our baptism, we encounter a God who knows jolly well who we are—sinners who betray God, others and self every day of the year.  Yet God is not particularly worried about who we are at that moment.  In baptism, certainly, we are forgiven our sins; they are washed away just like dirt from a grubby child.  Yet God has more in mind than the miracle of forgiveness.  God also wants to change our lives, from the inside out, to give us a new vocation in life, a new purpose.  Like Isaiah the prophet, who was called to speak the truth whether it is fashionable to do so or not, every baptised Christian is also called to live a new life, a life determined not by what we want, but by what God wants.

The difference between life with God, and life without God, is simply this, you see:  that life without God leads to death; but life with God leads to yet more life.  That is why the apostle Paul calls Christians people of the Spirit.  ‘Spirit’ can also mean ‘breath’, the very breath that animates our bodies and make us alive.  In that sense, all who live are spiritual beings.  Yet, in Christian perspective, one can be alive and breathing, and yet destined to run out of breath because one is not plugged in to the true source of life and breathing, the Spirit of God, the very Spirit who not only animated the daily doings of Jesus of Nazareth, and also raised his dead body into the radically new life of resurrection.  What God wants to do for us, then, is exactly what God did for Jesus.  God wants to fill us so full of the life of his Spirit, that there is little left in us of all that is dying or dead.  God wants to catch our lives up into the life and energy that is the extraordinary love between the Father and the Son.  God wants us to let go of everything that holds us back from the giving and receiving of divine love.  God wants us to receive this love, the love that is the Spirit, and make it real in the world through what we do and what we say.

You will remember that I spoke, a couple of weeks ago, about what the love of God looks like in practise.  I spoke about God’s love as a three-fold movement of solidarity with the weak, hospitality toward the stranger, and the costly giving away of one’s life that another soul may grow and flourish.  What I also implied at that time, I will say more explicitly this morning.  That the one who loves others in this manner, is also loved in this manner by God.  The power that makes it possible for us to love others in this way is the very power that loves us in this way.  This means that, for Christians, there can be no fear that we shall somehow be depleted or used up by our loving.  Not if we are also believe that we are loved by God, and especially by God as he is embodied in both the rituals and relationships of the Christian community.  For the Spirit who comes to dwell with us is the Spirit of life itself, life that is always enough and never runs out.  That means that no matter where this Spirit take us, or whom the Spirit puts in our path, there shall always be life and love enough to go around.  As long, that is, as we are willing to live the life of the Spirit, and not simply the lives that we might choose for ourselves.

I conclude with this. If you are baptised, you belong to God, and the Spirit of God has come to dwell with you.  You have given yourself into the hands of God, and God is absorbing you into the life and love that circulates, like the energies of a dance, between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  But God is not a bully.  The power of love is a power that can be refused.  If you resist God, he with plead with you, and argue, and remonstrate forever.  But God will never make you do what you do not want to do.  That is why the promises of baptism need to be renewed day after day.  Each day, when you get out of bed, God promises Godself to you once more: to love and to cherish you, to lead you into the freedom of the children of God.  But that cannot happen without your say-so.  The humility of God is such that God requires our agreement to move forward, a promising that responds to God’s own promising with faith and trust and obedience.  My prayer on this Trinity Sunday is that God may give us grace to so surrender our lives, that the life of God may come to flourish in our hearts and in our world.

Garry Deverell

Come Holy Spirit, renew the church

Texts:  Ezekiel 37.1-14; Acts 2.1-21; John 15.26-27; 16.4b-15

“Mortal, can these bones live?”  That is what God asked Ezekiel as the prophet was taken in a vision to look over the valley where Jerusalem had made its last stand against the Babylonian armies.  The valley, we are told, was full of the bones of Israel’s finest—young men who had been sacrificed to their king’s greed—bones from which every trace of flesh had been removed, so that now they gleamed white in the sun.  But the vision of Ezekiel was not really about the fate of an army a hundred years before.  It was about the great sorrow that continued to undermine the hopes of Ezekiel’s people even now, as they languished in the cities of their enemies and tried to forget what had happened to them.

“Mortal, can these bones live?”  That is also a question that a senior minister of our church asked about his own congregation this week.  It is a question I often find myself asking about the church at large.  The title I chose for our service today is ‘Come Holy Spirit, Renew the Church.’  For it is not only the 'world', but the church as well, that stands in urgent need of  God’s renewal.   The main reason why this is so might be summed up like this:  the church stands in as much need of renewal as the rest of the world because the rest of the world has colonised the church.  Or, to put it another way, much of the church now thinks and feels and believes as though it were not the church, but the world.  Let me give you some examples of what I mean.

According to the New Testament, the church has been given a mission: to bear witness to the crucified and risen Jesus in both word and deed.  This witness is to be a public witness, a witness that everyone can see and hear and touch and taste.  If the witness is not public, then many will never encounter God’s lament about the state of our world, nor his word of grace and promise for a future that is better for us all.  The witness is also to be a common witness, a witness that the church renders as a community of people who have together discerned , through prayer and a listening to the word of God, how it is that God would have them share the gospel with their community.  More and more, however, the church is succumbing to a rather different understanding of its mission, an understanding that derives not from the pages of the New Testament, but from the imaginations of conservative governments (and I include the Blairite style of Labour in that as well).  For what neo-liberal and conservative politicians have successfully sold the church, over the past 150 years, is the idea that Christian faith and mission should be expressed not through a public communal witness, but privately and individually. 

Think about it for a second.  Why is it that most of our children and grandchildren do not, in any way, participate in the life of a congregation of God’s people, and yet continue to claim that they are Christians?  Why is it that so many of the people who request baptism for their children are quite immovable in their belief that it is possible to be a Christian without actually doing any of the things that the New Testament suggests that Christians actually do?  Or, to bring things a little closer to home, why is it that congregations no longer even try to identify a common mission in which all the members of the church will participate with both their time and their talents?   Why is it that most of us settle for privately conceived and executed modes of support for this cause or that?  In both cases, the answer is fairly clear, I think.  That the church has bought, holus bolus, the secular state’s understanding of religious faith or mission: something that you believe in the privacy of your own mind and home -  not something that you enact and perform in common with other people, or put at the centre of your public engagement with the world.  In this, the secular state has been extremely successful in rendering the reality and mission of the church largely invisible.  If we can only imagine ourselves as private individuals, if we can no longer even comprehend what it might be like to be part of a communal mission that is visible and effective in the world, then we are no longer the church, but simply functionaries of the neo-liberal imagination.  We are no longer the church, but the world.

A second example.  Some of you may be aware that we recently handed over the management of our Pre-School to an agency of the Uniting Church called UnitingCare Connections.  We did so at the direction of the Synod, which was itself following a directive from the government that there should no longer be any independently run Pre-Schools.  All Pre-Schools are now required to run as clusters, under the umbrella of a common management agency.  It’s cheaper and more efficient that way, or so the argument goes.  Since becoming part of UnitingCare Connections both the local committee of management as well as the staff of our kinder have been treated with little more than contempt.  Not only has Connections failed to manage the Pre-School in a competent manner, it has done so without caring.  There is little to no evidence that Connections gives too hoots about the children who come to the Pre-School, or the staff who teach the children, or the local committee members who work their butts off to keep the whole thing running.  And unfortunately this is not an isolated incident.  Over the past six months I have heard about similar experiences right across the church.  As UnitingCare moves in to take over local ministries and missions, usually with the promise of ‘lightening the load’ for local people, local people are being deprived of their capacity to share in the mission of the church.  Local workers are being sacked or ‘let go’—both those formerly employed by the church, and those who work hard as volunteers.  And why is this happening?  Let me suggest that this is another example of the church being colonised by the world.  As UnitingCare grows, as it takes on more and more governments contracts, it is quickly absorbing what remains of local ministries and missions.  In the process, it is also absorbing what remains of a New Testament styled church, gathered around the Eucharist and the word of God, and transforming it into an economically-driven instrument of the secular state.  UnitingCare is now doing to local churches and ministries what the Boards of Education of our former Methodist and Presbyterian denominations did with church schools—handed them over to the secular imagination so that every trace of Christian faith and practice is finally removed.  So the church is in pretty bad shape all round, I reckon.  And I know this is so because my colleagues, younger people like myself who have been in ministry for ten years or less, are at the point of collapsing under the weight of it all.  The weight of a church that is no longer behaving like a church.  The weight of the incredibly harsh opposition they feel when they do what they are called to do, preach the gospel of Jesus in word and deed.  The weight of inertia and denial and despair.

‘Mortal, can these bones live?’  Can the spent bodies all about, that speak of the church’s failure to be the church, ever be raised up and redeemed?  Can the church ever become the church that the New Testament promises and envisions?  More humbly, can even the Uniting Church begin to look, in reality, something like the church described in its own Basis of Union ?  Well yes, it can.  Against all reason or expectation, it can.  And it can, not because it believes in itself, not because it has generated a new vision for new times or developed a wonderful new program to render itself more attractive to the consumer culture of our times.  No, the wreckage of the church can be redeemed because of Pentecost, that is, because God does not abandon us even when we abandon ourselves.  

When the people of Judah languished in their shame and their grief in the great cities of Babylon, God sent forth the breath of his Spirit.  He raised up prophets and leaders like Ezekiel and Ezra and Nehemiah—prophets who were able to speak the truth about the failure of the people certainly—yet they were also able to speak of the burning hope that God had placed within their hearts, a hope for that future of peace and joy that God had promised of old.  What strikes me to the heart when I read these prophets is this—and it encourages me in my own ministry—is that God places a word of faith and hope on their lips, and compels them to speak and to act according to that gift, even when they, themselves, feel as though all is lost.  When their hearts lament, their lips speak of a glorious future.  When their bodies are weary, their voices nevertheless speak of God’s future as though it were already present.  In this way, the prophets wear in their own bodies, at one and the same time, both the truth of where the people are at that moment, and the truth of where God would take them.  In this they are like Christ himself, whose crucifixion, in John’s gospel doubles as the moment at which the times are overturned, and a new world begins.

‘Mortal, can these dry bones live?’  Yes they can, because God sends the Spirit upon any church that is willing to wait, patiently, for the breath of life, the dunamis or dynamism, than comes from God alone.  If we try to deny the impossibility of what we face by pretending that all is well, or that things are not as bad as they seem, then we shall continue, of course, to live in the imagination of the secular state.  We shall not realise our great need of God, the God who alone sends forth a Spirit that is able to give life.  We shall continue to believe that we can generate such life for ourselves.  Note that in John’s gospel, Jesus speaks of the Spirit as one who throws into relief the confusion of the world with regard to what is right and wrong, and what is just and unjust, and about who God is.  The Spirit comes to demythologise all our fantasies about a humanity that can fulfil its destiny apart from the truth that is revealed in Jesus Christ.  The Spirit comes to uncover the lies we tell about ourselves:  the lies about privacy and individuality.  The Spirit comes to create in us an imagination that is able to resist the confusions of the world in which we live, to form us into a people who are able to live out a communal imagination, and testify to this imagination visibly, that is, before the prevailing powers of this world.  The Spirit comes to unweave the web of lies into which we have all been spun, and replace it with the word of truth, who is none other than Christ himself.

‘Mortal, can these bones live?’  Yes, they can!  If we will finally come to the end of ourselves, if we will stop trusting in the gods of this world, and renew our trust in the God of Jesus Christ.  Yes they can!  If we will allow God to renew our minds and hearts in the image of his Son.  Yes they can!  If we will stop resisting the Spirit, and decide to put out the welcoming mat instead.  Yes they can, yes they can, yes they can!

This sermon was preached at St. Luke's Uniting Church on Pentecost Sunday, 2006, in the midst of a very controversial takeover of our local kindergarten by UnitingCare Connections. You can probably tell that I was not impressed with the way in which this was done!