The Vindication of the Martyrs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Called to Ministry

Texts: Acts 9.1-20; Psalm 30; Revelation 5.11-14; John 21.1-19

Today we take some time to reflect upon the implications of being called to minister in Christ's church.

According to the readings we heard just now, the call to ministry comes directly from the risen Jesus himself and, somewhat counter-intuitively, it comes to those who least deserve it!  Note, however, that while the call to ministry comes with bucket-loads of grace, the stringency of its demands on the one called are not thereby diminished.  Ministry asks that we lay everything at Christ's feet - possessions, plans, ego, work - everything!  Ministry is therefore very, very costly.  The reward, however - in keeping with God’s disproportionate measure of grace - is an extraordinarily new quality of life, life lived in colour rather than in the black and white.  All of this can be summarised in a short phrase from the Acts reading:  'being filled with the Holy Spirit'.  When the Spirit of Christ fills us up, the mundane becomes extraordinary, the profane becomes sacred, the activities of mere flesh and blood become the fulfilment of God's dream that the whole creation might be renewed in peace and love.  When the Spirit comes, she equips us to serve that dream after the way of Christ our Lord. . . . .    But I’m already moving too quickly.  Let us return to the beginning.

The call to ministry comes from the risen Christ himself.  Simon Peter hears the call in the midst of a meal of bread and fish on the shores of Lake Galilee.  The host is a stranger who turns out to be Jesus.  Peter is asked, three times, to nurture and teach Christ's church.  Saul of Tarsus hears the call as he rides between Jerusalem and Damascus.  The risen Christ appears to him in a blinding light.  He is told to go into the city and wait for further instructions.  After three days (that repeat and mirror Christ’s time in the tomb) he is baptised, the scales fall from his eyes, and he receives a commission to preach Christ's message to both Jew and Gentile.  My own call to ministry came through an encounter with the Christ of the Gospels.  As a thirteen year old, I was already weary of what the usual path in life seemed to offer.  Alongside my usual diet of science fiction, I began to read the gospels.  One evening I read the following in Matthew's sermon on the Mount:  'Seek first God's kingdom and his justice, and all of your hungers will be taken care of' (Matt 6.33).  Right then and there the written words came alive in a way which made my spine tingle.  I felt a presence in the room which seemed to be ADDRESSING me.  I said 'OK Jesus, I'll take you at your word.  I'm hungry for something greater.  Let's see if you can deliver the goods'.  All these years later I can report that while I'm still hungry, the goods are being delivered everyday, very often against the odds!

The call to serve Christ also comes to those who least deserve it.  Simon Peter had abandoned Jesus in the moment of his greatest need.  Luke tells us that while Jesus was being taken away to be tortured, Peter denied that he knew Jesus not once, but three times.  Yet it is this same Simon Peter whom the now risen Jesus calls to lead the fledgling church at Jerusalem.  In a striking reversal of the three-fold denial, Jesus invites Peter to affirm his love for Jesus three times.  And with each affirmation, Peter receives the commission to feed Christ's sheep.  There is a grace in this three-fold restoration which speaks of the resurrection itself.  Whatever we have done to trample God underfoot, whatever we might have contributed to the dying of life’s light, God’s grace is more than sufficient to forgive, to heal, and to breathe the life of the Christ who defeated death itself into our feeble frames!

Saul, too, is called out of disgrace into ministry.  A chief persecutor of the first generation of Christian disciples, he is nevertheless chosen by Jesus to be a travelling missionary, carrying the word of life to the furthest reaches of the ancient Roman world.  His encounter with Christ makes him blind, and he remains in that netherworld of darkness for three days.  When Ananias comes to baptise him, Saul puts away his old self, the self that was God’s enemy.  He nails it to the cross with Christ.  In the power of Christ’s resurrection, he rises to take a new name – Paul – and become, in time, the architect of Christianity as we know it.  Witness, again, the power of the call of Christ to forgive, to heal, and to set even the most vehement sceptic on the path of ministry.

Paul’s story reminds me of a friend, a fellow named David, a minister of the gospel in the Churches of Christ.  One of the roughest characters you would ever meet.  An alcoholic and a junkie, a bikie who beat people up in pub brawls, a consummate abuser of relationships, he trashed three marriages.  But, by David’s own account, God took him by the scuff of the neck and said, and I quote, 'Come with me, Thompson'.  He's still a rough character.  He can still sink a lager or two.  But he's one of the most real and honest pastors of Christ I've ever met.  He knows how to listen, how to share your pain.  And people are healed and comforted because Jesus called Dave Thompson to ministry.  I tell that little story to make a single point.  God calls all of us to ministry, no matter what state we're in when the call comes.  Paul once wrote that ministry was like a glittering treasure which is carried around in jars of clay (2 Cor 4.7).   That means that even you and I, with all our secret fears, anxieties and sins, are still God's chosen vessels for this marvellous word of life.  So, my friends, we have no excuse.  If we are baptised, we are called to ministry.  It is as simple as that.

Finally, the life of ministry is characterised by a peculiar paradox.  On the one hand, we are to sacrifice everything we possess and everything we are for the sake of Christ.  Yet, by doing so, we are promised a life of joy, and riches beyond our wildest dreams.  When Jesus commissions Peter he warns that the freedom to which he has become accustomed will eventually be done away with.  He speaks of a time when people will bind him up and lead him away to be crucified.  Similarly, when Paul is commissioned by Ananias, the Lord says that Paul will suffer for Christ's name.  And we know from Paul's own letters, that he is eventually put under permanent house arrest in Rome because of his unwillingness to accord Caesar greater homage than Christ.  Such is the slavery and the sacrifice of those who are called to ministry.  The modern martyrs of El Salvador, Iraq, the Philippines and many other places, those who die because of their love of the poor in Christ's name, are a permanent challenge to us about the quality of our Christian discipleship.  They call to us from their graves saying 'are you really willing to follow Christ wherever he may lead you?'  I am constantly floored by Christ's words in Mark: ' Any who seek to follow me must take up their cross and follow in my steps.  For the one who would save their life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it' (8.34, 35).  These words sound like absolute foolishness according to the conventional wisdom, do they not?  The TV tells us to buy, to consume, to get richer, to make ourselves more beautiful etc., etc . . . But Christ tells us that gaining the world is the same as losing your soul, losing the sense of what life is about, losing life's joy and purpose.  But that's why the way of Christ, a way through suffering and sacrifice, is also the way to life.  Because it's only by resisting the conventional wisdom, it's only by swimming against the stream, that we'll find out what life is all about.  Luke says it like discovering that there's a land of light and colour out there when all your life you've known only the darkness of being blind.  It's like scales falling from your eyes to reveal the beauty of God's earth.

In closing I simply want to note that the call to Christ's ministry does not usually come as some kind of experience subsequent to our conversion.  Rather, it comes as part of the conversion experience itself.  Thus for Paul.  Thus for us.  To be converted, to be baptised, to be filled with the Spirit, to be commissioned for ministry - these are all experiences and decisions that belong together.  In your conversion and in your baptism, you were filled with the Spirit and equipped with everything you need to begin on way of discipleship, which is also the way of ministry.  Today the risen Christ says to all of us 'I love you.  I forgive you.  I have given you are ministry to perform in my name.  What are you doing about it?'

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church on the 3rd Sunday of Easter in 2001.

Breaking Out with Jesus

Text: Luke 24.1-35

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re going around in circles?  Do you ever get the feeling that the record is stuck, that you’ve heard it all before?  I got that feeling as I watched the evening news last night, and now I feel sick to the stomach.  For even as we gather in this season on which Christ rose from a violent death, the ancient feuds continue unabated. In Columbia and Afganistan, in Iraq and the Sudan, the cycle of violence and despair turns yet again: an eye for an eye, a church for a mosque, a wrong for a wrong.

To my mind, what we see in all this is what Nietzsche called ‘the eternal return of the Same’, the irrepressible tendency of human beings to crave what they have always craved, to believe what they have always believed, and to know what they have always known.  With the eternal return the rhetoric of ‘new life’ is just a figure of speech, because nothing new is really possible.  The circle returns, endlessly, to where it began.  Violence begets violence, and despair begets only despair.  In the end even the most hopeful amongst us are seduced.  We begin to believe that we’ve seen in all before, that there is nothing new under the sun.

The reality of the Resurrection, which we celebrate this morning, confronts this cycle absolutely. For the resurrection of Jesus is about the in-breaking of something that is so new, so different, so unheard of, that, strictly speaking, we cannot even describe it.  It is, as Jürgen Moltmann says somewhere, an event entirely without comparison or analogy.  It is an event which shatters every established pattern, every expectation, every shred of certainty we may have had about the way things are.   It is like the T-Shirt which I bought at a U2 concert a few years back which said “Everything You Know is Wrong”.  It is the explosion within Sameness of a reality which is totally and radically other than anything that we could ever think or imagine:  it is the arrival of God.  And what is the purpose of this interruption?  To change things.  To change things so entirely that we will never again become captive to all that seems predictable, or ‘necessary,’ or ‘fated’.  When Christ rises he does not rise, like Lazarus, to a life lived as it had been lived before.  When Christ rises, he rends not only the entrance to his tomb, but also the very fabric of the way things have always been, so that God’s creatures may never be slaves to the Same ever again.

Here we find ourselves inside Luke’s story of the Emmaus road.  Like us, the travelling companions live in that time after the resurrection.  The women had been to the tomb and witnessed its emptiness, but scarcely able to understand what had happened themselves, find that they cannot make themselves understood amongst their male companions, who remain trapped inside their cycle of grief, anger and despair.  Like many of us, they are stuck within the endless cycle of expectation and disappointment: their messianic hope had been shattered on a Roman cross.  Still, it is here, in the very centre of that circle, that the Christ chooses to meet them. 

As two of these disciples journey toward Emmaus, Jesus joins them, listening to their woeful story of hopes dashed and despair grown large again.  But then he does something rather surprising.  He begins to preach to them from the Scriptures, but not in the mode of many of the sermons I’ve heard, which do little more than confirm and comfort me in what I already know.   No, this is a profoundly dis-confirming preaching, which first castigates them for their lack of faith in the prophets, and then proceeds to deconstruct their Scriptural knowledge so radically that the meaning of the same is utterly and irreversibly altered.  The results were, I imagine, terrifying.  Suddenly the disciples begin to see that everything they had ever known and believed was wrong.  Yet despite the upset, there is something compelling in what Jesus says that compels them to hang onto him. 

So when they urge Jesus to join them for the evening meal, he consents to do so.  And there he does something which really dislodges their expectations.  In a careful repetition of what he had done at the last supper, Jesus takes bread, says a prayer of blessing, and breaks it so that all gathered may eat.  At that moment, we are told, the companion’s eyes are opened.  They recognise that the stranger is Jesus, their friend, the crucified one.  And yet he is not that one.  He is radically different.  He is somehow other.  If that isn’t weird enough, Luke then tells us that in that precise moment of recognition, at that very nano-second, Jesus vanishes from their sight and is seen no more. 

Turning to each other in wonder and excitement, the disciples declare the way in which their hearts were ‘burning’ within them when they heard the word preached.  Note the word: ‘burned,’ as in purged by a bushfire, not ‘warmed’, as by a cosy open fire on a winter’s night.  The disciples rise from where they are and return to the place of despair and forlorn logic from which they came.  They return to Jerusalem with a distinct and special mission:  to declare and confirm that Christ had indeed been raised, and that he had make himself known to them in the breaking of bread.  Which is to say, they returned to Jerusalem to dis-confirm the miserable logic of the Same which held sway there, to interrupt and fragment its omnipotent power by the burning joyfulness of all they had glimpsed in the risen Christ.

Now, this is a strange and wondrous story by any standard.  So strange and wonderful that I am certain that almost everything I intend in speaking about it this morning is not quite right.  But this is how it is with the resurrected Christ.  He comes to us as the word that is strange and in/credible, not conforming to the logic of what we know and experience to be real and trustworthy.  He comes to us not to confirm what we know or to reinforce our sense that things will never change.  He comes to transform that inclination utterly, to show us, in the blazing light of his risen glory, that the Eternal Return of the same is killing us.  Slowly killing us, but killing us all the same.  And who can doubt this word?  Hasn’t life become genuinely banal for us in this neo-pagan world of circles?  Hemmingway wrote famously that most people live lives of “quiet desperation”.  The writer of Ecclesiastes complains that all is ‘vanity’, by which he means that human beings, despite all their apparent thirst for experience, tend to look only for that which may be easily integrated into the logic and the framework which is always already there: the framework of violence, the strong over the weak, the deserving over the less deserving.  But Christ is raised to shatter that logic, to undo the idolatrous gaze that works such vanity into all that is seen and touched and felt.  Christ is raised to set us free.

This I believe, and this I declare to you today.  But I want you to note two important implications of this belief.  And these reflections are guided directly by Luke’s text.  First, resurrection belief is sustainable only if one believes what Luke says about the disappearance of Christ at the very moment that we recognise him.  Remember what we heard from Moltmann. The resurrection is an event without analogy.  No matter how much we try to understand and describe him, the risen Christ will always and everywhere elude and elide our grasp.  We see him as in a glass darkly; he is a flash of light at the corner of our eyes, which, if we turn to take squarely into the full ambit of our gaze, will disappear into invisibility.  The Celtic tradition speaks of the Christ who always comes in the guise of the stranger, a stranger who is gone even before one realises who he was.  In precisely that mode, the Emmaus story tells us that no matter how ingenious our resurrection accounts and theologies become, they will certainly not secure a Christ who may be domesticated for our own use and purpose.  Christ will not allow himself to be manipulated like that.  He will not join us in our crusades against those we see as our enemies.

Which leads into my second point, and a rather perplexing one at that.  Perhaps you will have noticed how Luke structures his story after the model of a first century worship service?  First there is a Gathering of companions, who come immediately from the circle of despair, and they are joined there by Christ.  Then there is a Service of the Word, a recounting of the Scriptures and a preaching; and it is Christ himself who does this; yet he is not recognised by those who hear.  Then there is a Eucharist, where Christ is again the anonymous presider who breaks bread, blesses, and share it with his companions.  And then there is a Mission.  The disciples, having finally discerned the risen Christ, are then driven out by the burning in their hearts to dis-confirm and question the logic of the world from which they came. 

What Luke is telling us here is simply this: that it is in the gathered worship of the Christian church that Christ chooses to reveal his radically new word and reality.  That worship itself is the mode by which he interrupts and fractures the logic of despair.  For in the reading of Scripture, the preaching of the word, and in the breaking of the bread, Christ himself comes to call us out of whatever trap of fate or necessity in which we have become ensnared.  In worship he gives us a glimpse of that world in which violence and despair have been done away, absorbed into Christ’s death on the cross.  In worship we learn that Christ is risen to make another world, another logic possible, the world and logic a transfiguring love which is able to cast out all fear—even the fear of our enemies.

But how can this be?  How is it that this ordinary human language of worship may become the language of Christ?  Didn’t I just say to you that Christ comes to interrupt our language and to un-say all that we might say of him!  Well, there is a great mystery here, a mystery tied very much to the mystery of Christ himself, who, in the incarnation, is said to be God in an ordinary human life.  Perhaps all that one may say about this mystery is something like this:  That in the human language of Christian worship, Christ speaks himself so resolutely that even where our liturgy seeks to enlist him to our wars against others or enrol him in our logic of violence and despair, Christ is able to address us in his own voice, from the margins as it were.  Even from that marginal place, Christ is able to speak powerfully: to so dispossess our liturgy of the meanings we intend, that, somehow, even as we say it, we hear it said back to us with a meaning not our own, in an inflection and tongue not our own, so that our hearts burn with confusion, and terror, but ultimately with the holy joy of people who are really being liberated from their bondage to the same old thing.  Christ will not succumb to the tombs we may make for ourselves or for him.  Christ will break free.  He will always break free, and he will break us free with him. 

I pray to God that Christ may do just that, even with what we say and do this morning. 

A Great Friday reflection

 'You will all fall away,' Jesus told them, 'for it is written: "I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered."' (Mark 14.27)

'Then everyone deserted him and fled' (Mark 14.50).

According the the gospels of Mark and Matthew, when Jesus is arrested for blasphemy and treason by the temple police, all his disciples flee. That includes not only the wider group who cried 'hosanna to the Son of David' upon Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, and not only Judas the betrayer, but also the Twelve who were apparently closest to Jesus. On this Great Friday, I want to risk some observations about one of the many ways in which Christian disciples of the modern era, those who claim to be followers of Jesus today, also abandon their namesake at the point of his greatest human need and vulnerabilty.

One of the ways in which modern disciples abandon Jesus is to opt out of the rites and rituals of Passiontide.  Passiontide, also known as Holy Week, is the week immediately preceding the celebration of Pascha (or Easter).  From at least the 2nd century, this was the most important week of the Christian calendar, the week in which Christians commemorated the last week of Jesus' life, and especially his suffering, torture and execution (his passion) at the hands of the Roman and Jewish authorities.  These events are recalled in a series of rituals, or embodied stories, in which worshippers are invited to journey with Jesus into Jerusalem, through his anointing by Mary, his last meal with the disciples, his arrest, interrogation, torture and crucifixion.

I have personally participated in the rituals of Passiontide for many years now, and find them to be continually capable of producing everything from tears to bewilderment to joy as I am invited into their visceral and profound mode of meditation upon Christianity's most holy mystery: the death of God in Christ.  Being close by Christ as he walks toward his death - not just in mind and thought, but in the profoundly tacit and bodily way that ritual makes possible - I find that I am confronted with both my spiritual poverty and the gratuitous love of God in ways that truly get under my skin and make a really big difference to the way I do my relationships, my ethics, my worship, my politics.  Those of us who walk this way to the end are perhaps more like the women in Mark and Matthew's accounts of the passion, the women who stay with Christ to the end even as they live through moments of incredible anguish, grief and bewilderment. Having passed through the passion of Christ, having lived it 'up-close-and-personally', they learn how to recognize resurrection when they see it and feel it, even if they do not understand it entirely (those who think they completely understand the event of the resurrection are kidding themselves!)  The men, who fled at the first sign of danger, must later learn how to own and live the life of resurrection from the women!

I notice, however, that very few modern protestant Christians share my enthusiasm for a womanly Passiontide.  In every parish in which I have served as a minister (with one clear exception), less than a quarter of the usual congregation showed up between the last Sunday of Lent and the Feast of the Resurrection.  For the most important week of the Christian calendar, in other words, most of those who own the name of Christ went missing in action. 

Now, over the years people have given a great many explanations for why this is so.  And the explanations and excuses are very revealing. Here are a few of the most common . . .

• 'I was tired and needed a rest'.  I'm all for resting. Indeed, we Jews and Christians are told by God to give a seventh of our life to resting, and on a regular basis.  But why do so many Christians choose the most important week of the Christian calendar to do their resting? Why then?  And why isn't Holy Week understood not only as a legitimate form of rest, but at the paradigm example of what 'rest' can really mean? Why is Holy Week not understood to be a primary means by which the peace and reconciliation of God is made real in our lives?  As much as it pains me to say it, the answer is probably this: that most people who call themselves 'Christians' are actually pagans underneath. Their identities have been formed, in other words, not primarily by the Christian story and by their baptism into that story, but by the prevailing values and stories of contemporary Western culture.  In that culture, 'rest' has a very different meaning.  It means self-indulgence.  It means doing whatever you like. It means being free of responsibilities in general, and free of the responsibility to be a disciple of Jesus Christ in particular.
• 'Easter is a time to spend time with family'.  Again, I am all for family. Indeed, the faith tells us to honour our parents and treat our children with respect and dignity.  But why do so many Christians choose family over Passiontide?  Why is Passiontide seen as less important than family? I would never dream of skipping the events of Holy Week to visit family.  Does this mean that I love my family less than others? No. It simply means that I make a priority of learning how to do family from Christ and from the events described in the rituals of Holy Week.  The washing of people's feet, for example.  Or staying with someone in their inexplicable suffering, even if I feel entirely powerless to do anything about it. Or dying that someone else may live.  That kind of thing.
• 'I don't really go in for all that ritualistic stuff'.  This one usually comes from old protestants (both liberal and evangelical) who believe that faith is a private world of ideas and values that can be sequestered off from the rest of life when it is expedient to do so, rather than a public embodiment of the very life of God in ritual storytelling (worship), ethical practices and participatory politics (community).  Again, I would argue that old protestantism has little to do with the apostolic faith we receive from the bible and from tradition, and that it has considerably more to do with a contemporary privileging of the individual sense of self over and against communal realities such as ritual, tradition and story.  When people object to ritual, I know that their Christianity is only skin-deep.  It lives in their minds, but has barely begun to penetrate into their bodies, their loyalties and their communities. Ritual, for them, is a threat to this sense of the inviolable self. It calls such a self into question, the rituals recalling the suffering of Christ especially.

Having said all that, I am not of course arguing that people should attend the worship of Holy Week even if they are genuinely prevented by things like illness or accident.  Nor am I saying that people should never go away to another church or ecclesial community to share in these things.  If some time away from home and work can be combined with participating in the rites of another Christian community, well and good. The beauty of the ecumenical rites is that they can be celebrated almost everywhere!  Neither of these circumstances comes into the ambit of my central thesis: that Holy Week is that time of the year when those who call themselves Christians are stripped of their external presentation and trappings and thus revealed for what they truly are.

Can skin-deep Christians who abandon Christ at the moment of his deepest humanity be redeemed? Not by my rantings, nor by even the most sincere efforts of any evangelical soul. But even the men who abandoned Christ and resisted sharing in his sufferings were welcomed into the grace of the risen Christ. Nothing, it seems, is impossible for God . . . And I rejoice that it is so.

Holy Saturday 2013

Everything is refuse compared to knowing Jesus Christ

This homily on Philippians 3.4b-14 and John 12.1-9 is made available as a sound file.  Please click here to download or listen.

The homily was preached at St David's, Oakleigh, on the fifth Sunday of Lent, 2013.

What about me? A tale of two prodigals

This homily on Luke 15.1-3, 11-32 is offered as a sound file. It was preached at South Yarra Baptist Church on the fourth Sunday of Lent, 2010.

Please click here to download the file in .mp3 format.

Repent or perish

Texts: Isaiah 55.1-9; Psalm 63.1-8; 1 Corinthians 10.1-13; Luke 13.1-9

Today the Scriptures confront us with the question: ‘do you hunger and thirst for nothing, or do you hunger and thirst for God?’ The Psalmist clearly hungers and thirsts for God; and God, out of an infinite kindness, satisfies this hunger completely:

O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water . . My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips . . . for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.

Isaiah, on the other hand, speaks of a desire that is not so satiated, a hunger and a thirst that is not quenched because it is a hunger and a thirst for something other than God:

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy?

 To spend one’s labour and one’s money on things that can never, in a million years, bring satisfaction is to spend oneself for nothing. Some of you will remember the Rolling Stone’s hit from the mid 1960s:

When I'm drivin' in my car
And that man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination
I can't get no satisfaction

When I'm watchin' my T.V.
And that man comes on to tell me
How white my shirts can be
But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me
I can't get no satisfaction.

The point made by this song and, nowadays, in a slightly more sophisticated manner by cultural critics like Noam Chomsky, is that you can never satiate an essentially spiritual hunger with food or drink or consumer goods, no matter what the advertisers might say. For while the consumer society lives from the human desire for things – a bigger or better house, car, phone, dress, suit, storage-solution, diet, boyfriend, body – none of these things will ever do the trick. For in the end, for all their shiny attractiveness and glitter, consumer goods are like mirages. They come into view, they attract our attention and give birth to a desire. But once we possess them – once we have them in our hands - they disappear. For consumer goods never deliver what they promise: happiness, peace, contentment, an end to the never-ending cycle of desire. Having shelled out our hard-earned cash, what we finally hold in our hands is nothing, nothing substantial. What we possess, instead, is a shell with a hollow heart. And this hollowness signifies nothing other than the hollowness we continue to experience in the heart of ourselves, the hollowness of unfulfilled desire. So out we go again, on the hunt for something that can finally fill the void.

 
According to the faith of Christians, in fact there is only one thing that will fill the void, and that thing is not really a thing at all, but a person, the God made known in Jesus Christ. Jesus, as Bach memorably wrote, is the joy of all our human desiring. He is the bread and the water and the wine that can finally satiate our thirst. He is reality, the truly substantial, solid and concrete and undeniable as you like. We are all searching for him, whether we know it or not; but we seldom find him because we in search for in all the wrong places. He is the one who can fill the great big hole in our hearts. By comparison, everything else is as insubstantial as fog.

The problem, of course, with hungering and thirsting for every damned thing that is not God is that you can eventually starve to death. Perhaps not literally – we might still be walking around – and yet we do so as zombies. You know, the walking dead who have no zest for life, no joie de vivre. In the passage we read this morning from 1 Corinthians chapter 10, St Paul speaks about the history of God’s people Israel and points out that even though the people of Israel saw the reality of God with their own eyes - having been led out of their slavery in Egypt with great power and an undeniable series of miraculous signs - when they found themselves in the desert of Sinai they nevertheless began to hanker after everything they had left behind in Egypt. They hankered even for the conditions of slavery from which they had been freed. They longed, in other words, for that which is evil, for that which makes not for life, but for death. Many who were possessed by that desire in fact perished in the wilderness. Their corpses littered the desert. Now how do you explain that? How do you explain a desire for evil and not for good, especially when evil’s greatest longing is for our death?

If we step back a little and look at these phenomena from a New Testament perspective, the apostle calls our preference for evil rather than good by the biblical name ‘idolatry’. Now, an idol is an object we make, but then forget that it is we who made it. We elevate that self-made object into the place that only God should properly occupy, the space of our greatest desire, the place of our deepest love and worship. But here’s the rub (and the philosopher Feuerbach wrote about this extensively more than a century ago): any object that we make and then elevate to the status of a deity most often symbolises nothing other than ourselves, our deepest desires, the things we long for most. To worship such a thing is therefore to worship ourselves. It is become like Narcissus in the Greek myth, who became so enamoured by his own image on the surface of a pool that, in the attempt to hold and possess his own reflection, he fell in and drowned. The love of things in other words, is really the love of ourselves, a worshipping of our own ingenuity at creating ever-new ways to deceive ourselves. And it is a sad fact that most of us would rather worship ourselves than God. Even if, by so doing, we make ourselves miserable with hunger and thirst.

For miserable is what we are, is it not, when no matter how hard we work and how many things we obtain as the just deserts of our hard work, we nevertheless feel as empty as a drum? The truth is this, you see: we cannot, no matter how hard we try, replace our need for God with an idol that represents ourselves. The good and the beautiful and the true - the life worth living, the life that is meaningful and joyful - is not something we can actually create for ourselves by the sweat of our brow. Human beings are not God. We cannot create such wondrous phenomena out of nothing. When they come our way, the good the beautiful and the true arrive not by hard work or ingenuity, but as sheer gift or grace, an act of unconditional love from God. Such gifts are indeed priceless, as Isaiah says:

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

No matter how clever or rich or hardworking you are, you will not be able to buy, beg or steal the life of joy. It is like the manna that the Israelites ate in the desert of Sinai. It is like the water they drank from the rock. It is a gift that cannot be stored or profited from. It is God’s gift in Jesus Christ, and in the way of life that he represents. It is grace, and mercy and peace with one’s enemies.

So if you feel like you are on a treadmill, or like a mouse on one of those wheels in a cage, or if you value your house, your car, your toys, your clothes, your social reputation, or even the apparent ‘needs’ of your family more than you value the gift of God, then I would encourage you to ‘repent’. Yes, ‘repent’! Not a fashionable word, I know, but then again preachers are not supposed to be fashionable! When the gospel-writer talks about ‘repentance’, he means this: to change one’s heart, to stop longing for things and start longing for God; to stop going in one direction, to turn around 180 degrees, and go in the opposite direction. Repentance, you see, is not just for the Trumps and Putins of the world, those whom we rightly see as evil incarnate. It is also for us, with our far more ordinary and prosaic evils. The evil, for example, that is content to let the rest of the world starve to death and descend into endemic criminality so long as we are able to preserve the comforts and relative affluence of our own homes and hearth. Repentance is what Lent is about. It is a return to the promise we all made at our baptism to turn away from the devil, and all his works, and turn instead to Christ and his gift of life, life in all its fullness. It is to turn from a life of empty slavery, in the thrall of our many idols, toward a life of thanksgiving for the many gifts that God bestows upon God's beloved people. It is to reimagine the fruitfulness of our lives, not in terms of the quest for safety and status and the accumulation of things, but in terms of our readiness in the power of God to produce the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience and self-discipline.

So let us reflect on our lives in the light of the word that is able to give life. Let us give away the appetites that lead to death, and let us repent. A change of heart can make all the difference, both for ourselves and for the world at large.

Garry Deverell