All Hallows' Eve (Hallow'een)

It is October 31 and I've just been out for an evening walk. Along the way I encountered a great many gouls and goblins, witches and warlocks, ghosts and zombies, along with many a house decorated with cobwebs, spiders, and jack-o-lanterns.  The festival of Hallow'een simply did not exist in the Australia of my youth. The evening before November the 1st passed by simply as the evening before November the 1st. For a Baptist family in an almost entirely Anglo-Australian rural town there was, quite simply, nothing to be celebrated.

But Hallow'een is now quite a big thing. Even in my home town. The change has come because of the power of global capital. There is a great deal of money to be made out of annual celebrations. And so the festivals of other countries - in this case, the USA - have now implanted themselves in the Australian psyche alongside the consumer festivals that were already here: Christmas and Easter, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Father's Day. The annual spend in richer countries around all these festivals is said to be so large that it is able to keep flagging economies going pretty much on their own. 

Of course, Hallow'een, just like Christmas and Easter, has its roots in a Christian festival that began early in the 4th century as a twin commemoration of 'all saints' and 'all souls'. Today, in the more liturgically catholic Western churches, All Saints is celebrated on November 1 and All Souls on November 2. All Saints invites believers to remember and give thanks for the dead who have most clearly and consistently followed in the way of Christ, those who have most inspired others to imitate Jesus. All Souls invites the same believers to remember and give thanks for all the baptised faithful who each, in their own very ordinary ways - and with varying quality! - also sought to follow Christ. 

The Christian festivals of the dead assume, following the teaching of St Paul, that the dead are really and actually dead. Their bodies have ceased to function, their hearts and brains have stopped entirely, and there is no longer anyone to talk to or communicate with. There is no surviving 'soul' or 'spirit' that has slipped into another metaphysical room or dimension, for the spirit - the essential character or personality - cannot survive without the body. All that is left of a dead person is the objects they possessed, their representation in word or image or textile and, most importantly, the precious memories of their loved ones and of God. But the person is simply no more. She, he or they have ceased to exist.

The consumer festival of Hallow'een apparently finds this sober Christian realism just a little too dull. A more exciting story is apparently necessary to sell all those costumes and sweets. The Hallow'een marketers have therefore revived certain northern-European ideas about the dead still being alive in some sense: dwelling, perhaps, in another realm or dimension which can be accessed via certain rituals or on certain days (especially at Hallow'een). On Hallow'een one can therefore pretend to be such a dead person - a ghost or goul or zombie - or else one can pretend to be one of those who can help the living access the dead: a medium, a witch, a shaman, priest or priestess. On the other side of this ritual transaction, one may pretend to be an ordinary representative of the living who is terrified of what the dead may do if they are not placated or bought off: you can offer a 'treat' - in eurofolk mythology an 'offering' or 'sacrifice' - to buy the dead's favour. In either case, the usefulness of this revived eurofolk metaphysics to marketers is twofold. You can sell the appropriate costume to represent the unfriendly dead. And you can sell the remedy for encountering the unfriendly dead: lots of lollies and other forms of sugary candy. Genius really. And incredibly lucrative.

The whole thing is built on ritual and, like all rituals, it teaches a very particular version of the way things are. In this case, the lesson is clear: there are ghouls about, so be ready to pay them off lest they do you harm.

As the tiresome bore I probably am, I tend to avoid the consumer festival of Hallow'een (along with those associated with Christmas, Easter and Valentine's Day). I am not inclined to fall for the consumer trick of creating a problem that buying a product will solve. Nor am I inclined to import a metaphysics of death that is entirely redundant to both the Indigenous ontology of my mob or the Christian faith of my church. 

For Aboriginal people, death is a return to 'country', to the ongoing ecological transfiguration of all that is dead into all that is alive. The individual self does not survive, but is transformed into compost for the perseverance of life itself. And, for Christians who have read and inwardly digested the New Testament, the dead are dead. They survive only in our memories and in the memory of God. We can mourn their loss, we can give thanks for their influence in our lives, but they are no longer alive in any individuated sense. 

So what of all that talk in Christian circles about a future resurrection of the body? Well, to summarise a much longer discussion, my own take on the notion of bodily resurrection is that it is the body of the cosmos as a whole that rises. All its constituent parts are, as a matter of public record, constantly passing out of life, through death, into life renewed and reconfigured. Resurrection is not, therefore, about the survival of individually identifiable bodies. In death we do, quite literally, die to our/selves. But then we are resurrected. Not as indivividual selves, but as de-identified participants in a cosmic 'Christ'. Or a cosmic 'country'. Take your pick. I recognise that this is a rather heterodox approach, but it's the one I have taken as I recontexualise Christianity within Aboriginal knowledges. I don't expect everyone to agree with me.

May your Hallowtide be blessed by the knowledge that divine love cannot be bought but is simply given, unconditionally.

Garry Worete Deverell

Garry's speech to the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne's Synod in Oct 2019

Mr President, I seek leave to speak to the motion now before us, Motion 20, ‘Next Steps for Reconciliation’.

The Anglican Church of Australia is a quintessentially colonial church. As the colony of Port Phillip Bay was being carved out of Kulin country in the mid 1830s, the local colonisers as well as those who set colonial policy back in London were overwhelmingly Anglican. Lord Melbourne, after whom this city is named, was Prime Minister. William Buxton, George Grey, Charles Grant and James Stephen, key policy-makers regarding the colonies, were also Anglicans. Collectively they were the kind of Anglicans, though, who assumed that genteel Britishness and Anglicanism were pretty much the same thing. Buxton’s Select Committee on the Aboriginal Tribes consistently conflated the promotion of British civilisation, including its newly commercial thirsts and desires, with the missionary spread of Christianity. 

Of crucial influence in the deliberations of the Select Committee were accounts of the Tasmanian frontier wars of the previous decade from Governor George Arthur and the soon-to-be bishop of Australia, WG Broughton.  Despite having little experience of Aboriginal life outside of Sydney, Broughton had presided over what historian James Boyce has called one of the ‘great whitewashes of Australian history’: the Van Diemen’s Land Government Inquiry of 1830 to consider the ‘origin of the hostility displayed by the black natives of this island’. This inquiry had infamously concluded that ‘acts of violence on the part of the natives are generally to be regarded, not as retaliating for any wrongs which they conceived themselves collectively or individually to have endured, but as proceeding from a wanton and savage spirit inherent in them.’ Against all the evidence to hand, the Inquiry reported that it was bad people – Aborigines and convicts – who caused the conflict in Tasmania. The more genteel classes were portrayed not as perpetrators but as victims, even though it was clearly their thirst for land and wealth – Aboriginal land and wealth – that caused the war.  Broughton repeated these conclusions in his evidence to the Select Committee on Aborigines. And the strategies of Swanson, Batman, Lonsdale and the many colonists that followed them here into Kulin country – a great many of them formally Anglican - were demonstrably inspired by Broughton’s plainly false assertions regarding my truwunnan ancestors.

What followed was nothing short of an apocalypse for the Kulin peoples on whose land we meet today. In the Victorian frontier wars that unfolded over the next 15 years, Kulin peoples were raped, murdered, shot, and poisoned in vast numbers. Their lands and seas were stolen. Their complex land-management systems and agricultural riches were destroyed, along with habitat and wildlife, by the arrival of sheep and cattle in their millions. And, when the wars were over, the survivors of this Armageddon were herded into church-run missions where they were forbidden to speak their languages, to practise culture, or even to work for a living.  The damage to this country and to those who had cared for it for upward of 80 thousand years, was nothing short of catastrophic, and Anglican policy-makers were at the heart of both why and how it happened.  

The ongoing effects of colonisation are now regularly reported by the Commonwealth’s Productivity Commission. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people remain in every way the sickest, poorest, and most disadvantaged people in modern Australia. The statistics make for horrifying reading. But I would like to remind you that we, the Aboriginal members of your church, are these statistics. We, like the apostle Paul, wear the marks of crucifixion in our hearts and in our bodies.  We, like Christ himself, are the scapegoats outside the camp who bear in our very flesh the sins of the nation.

This Synod has visited the question of justice for our people, and Anglican culpability in the destruction of our way of life, several times before.  The last discussion, in 2013 and 2014, issued in the creation of a Reconciliation Action Plan. At the request of the Archbishop, the RAP Group reviewed that plan at the end of 2017 and concluded that the RAP was unfortunately doomed to failure due to the vast gap between what it said it would do, and the resources allocated to actually do it. The Report of the Review  – tabled with AiC in February 2018 and now made available to members of Synod – argued that the diocese had entered the RAP process prematurely. Instead it asked that AiC consider how a mature Aboriginal voice might be appointed to the senior leadership of the diocese. For it remains the case, after all these many years, that there has never been a secure or tenured Aboriginal voice within the senior leadership of our diocese, nor in its schools and agencies; nor even in its theological colleges. Without a voice, we cannot call for mercy. Without a voice we cannot call for justice. Without a voice, matters of truth and reconciliation will remain a distant, and increasingly forlorn, hope.

When there was no response to the RAP Group’s report, Glenn Loughrey and I decided to convene a meeting of the Aboriginal clergy of the Province. Chris McLeod, the National Aboriginal bishop, agreed to chair the gathering.  Our discussions, which took place in August 2018, were very fruitful. We formed an Aboriginal Council of the Anglican Province of Victoria and prepared a Statement to Provincial Leadership which Glenn tabled, in person, at the meeting of the Provincial Council in November of 2018. In this statement, which has now been shared with the members of Synod, we outline clearly and concretely our aspirations towards a modest form of justice and gospel healing for our people. We also invite the bishops and other leaders of the Province into an ongoing conversation with us about how that might happen.  To date we have not received any formal response to our invitation from Archbishop in Council.

This motion therefore seeks the Synod’s support in eliciting a nuanced and considered response from AiC to both these documents. Apart from that response, reconciliation is effectively on hold in this diocese. The motion is before you. I so move.

The motion and the reports referred to in this speech can be downloaded in pdf form from http://christologia.net/deverell_motion_synod2019.pdf

Revolutions

Ruth 3.1-5, 4.13-17; Psalm 127; Hebrews 9. 24-28; Mark 12. 38-44

The book of Ruth is a parable, a story written in order to undermine the dominance of a certain kind of religious ideology that was prominent in Israel at the time of its composition.  You can read all about that ideology in the book of Ezra.  There you will read about the zealousness of a group of aristocratic religious reformers who returned from the exile in Babylon convinced that God had punished Israel primarily because its men had taken foreign wives to their beds, thus making it possible for corrupt (that is, non-Jewish) ideas and practices to flourish amongst the chosen people.  The reformers therefore forced or convinced thousands of ordinary men, most of whom had never in fact left Jerusalem at all during the exilic period, to ‘put away’ both their wives and their children as an act of religious duty.  Read against that background, one can see how the book of Ruth would have once been regarded as a revolutionary literature.  For in telling a story of the royal lineage of David, it also seeks to demonstrate that the God of Israel cannot be counted on to support such a programme.  In the verses we read this morning, the authors stress that Israel’s most lauded family only became what it was because God chose to bless and honour two revolutionary women who chose to buck the religious system of dos and donts.  Tamar, a Canaanite woman, disguised herself as a prostitute in order to get an heir for Judah, the great ancestor of the Davidic clan.  And Ruth, a Moabite woman with no firm legal or religious status in Israel, went out on a very thin and very dangerous limb in order to get a son for Naomi.  One must surely conclude, at least, that God is not one to honour our fear of ethnicities other than our own.  And perhaps we may also conclude that God will not be bound by any of our human fears or anxieties, no matter how deeply mythic or religious their origins seems to be.

Now, there is a message in this for our politicians, is there not? And for all those millions of Australians who support their current policies.  Allow me to paraphrase the Psalmist for a moment.  Prime Minister, Premier, unless God is in your vision for Australia, you dream in vain.  Unless God supports all your hard work in keeping the poor and the desperate from our shores, then you work for nothing.  In vain you rise early to plan for a strong and secure Australia, and in vain to stay up late to ‘protect’ our children from the poor and wretched, and so secure their future.  For unless God grants a future, in the sheer gratuity of his love and care, there is no future.  Unless God shares your vision, your vision will fail.  A happy and secure future, you see, is like having children.  It cannot be produced by our one’s will or effort, especially if such effort is motivated by such deeply held fears or anxieties.  Ask any parent you know, especially those who laboured anxiously to conceive for many months or years, and they will tell you that children come when they come.  They come from God, neither as reward for effort nor because of any sense of right or the privilege we could lay claim to.  They come as a gift, without reason or foretelling.  And so it is with our future, Prime Minister, Premier.  God will not labour with you to secure our children’s future by saving them from evil, dangerous immigrants.  Quite the opposite, I suspect.  Could it be, Prime Minister, Premier,, that in their arrival is our gift, God’s gift for a revolutionary future of peace and reconciliation amongst the tribes of the world?  If the parable of Ruth is to be believed, Prime Minister, Premier, then the gift comes always in the stranger, the one beyond the pale, the one who would cross a great boundary, a sea of impossibility, in order to reach us, in order to make the revolution possible.

But I am ahead of myself, for I wanted to talk about another of God’s revolutions, the revolution in which poverty becomes the most enriching experience in the world.  This is figured for us in the gospel story of the widow who gave all she had, all she had to live on, into the temple treasury.  Lest you think I am being romantic about her poverty, let me remind you of the situation such a woman would have faced in that time and place.  In a deeply patriarchal society, such as that of first-century Palestine, women are little more than goods to be bought and sold.  Upon marriage, they pass from their father’s ownership to their husband’s.  If that husband dies and there is no-one else, no other kin, who will marry her, then she reverts to the patronage of her father’s house.  But remember that we are talking about a desperately poor peasant society here.  Most men, because of hard labour and poor nutrition, could not expect to live beyond thirty five in ordinary circumstances.  Fathers and brothers would therefore be most unwilling, if they were still alive, to take the widows of their kin, especially if they had children already.  Jewish widows were, quite simply, at the bottom of the food-chain.  They were the ones left to fend for themselves when the going got tough.  And that often meant either Roman slavery, or prostitution, or both.  Often these options amounted to the same thing.  Now, add to all that the expectations of the religious elites who ran the temple, those whom Mark’s gospel calls ‘the Scribes and the Saducees’.  These groups had enormous power in Israel, in both religious and political terms.  They enjoyed the highest religious and social status because they were the heirs of the priestly casts.  But this also gave them enormous economic power, because, by declaring a person or place ritually unclean, they could also successfully blackmail any person who wished to claw their way back into a state of purity.  The phrase in Mark’s gospel, ‘they devour widows houses’ probably refers to precisely that practise.  It is likely that some of the priestly class, at least, were given to extracting money from pious widows in return for a declaration of cultic purity from sin.

Given all that, why does Mark record the story of the widow’s offering?  Wasn’t she being ripped off?  Why would she put in all that she had to live on, unless she was being blackmailed in some way?  Some commentators say that the story is told simply to highlight the evil practices of the scribes.  But I do not think this is so.  For later tradition will make explicit what is already right here in Mark’s text, namely, the intention to hold this woman up as an example of a truly revolutionary discipleship under very trying conditions.  For while it is true that the text does warn the reader against the false piety and moral blackmail of the priestly system, it does not propose an entirely socio-economic solution to the problem.  How could it?  How could a widow possibly be saved from economic ruin in such circumstances?  Is someone going to step in to give her more cash, or protect her from what the system makes inevitable?  There is no hint, in Mark’s text, that Jesus or his benefactors intend to do so.  So why is the story told?

The answer lies, I think, in a reading of the story which takes the whole flow of Mark’s gospel into account.  In chapter 1 we read that Jesus had come to preach the kingdom, to heal, and to exorcise.  In chapters 2 and 7 we read stories about Jesus’ willingness to confront or break the laws of the temple aristocracy in order to do so.  In chapters 8 & 10, Jesus tells his disciples that there is salvation only in being willing to die, to be baptised with his own baptism, to become the slave of all.  Also in chapter 10, in what I believe to be the key utterance of the gospel, Jesus declares that salvation, while impossible for human beings, is indeed possible for God.  Can you see where all this is heading?  By the time we come to this story of the widows offering, the reader couldn’t possibly believe that Jesus is offering some kind of socio-economic solution to the problems at hand.  On the contrary!  What Jesus seems to be implying is this:  that in order to overcome, to be saved, to be healed, to be liberated, or whatever, one must ultimately give the powers arraigned against us what they want:  our very lives.  Why?  Because Mark believe that it is in giving our lives over to the powers that be, that we shall ultimately gain our freedom from those powers.

Now, one can see how Karl Marx came to his stinging criticism of Christianity, can’t you.  Religion, he said, was an opiate to keep the poor in their place.  But this is of course to entirely miss the point of what Mark is trying to teach us!  You see, for Mark – and indeed for Paul who wrote before him – there are two powers in the world:  the power of religion or karma, which says that we get what we deserve, and the power of gospel and grace, which gives without reason or cause.  Now, in Mark’s world as in ours, it is the power of karma that appears to reign supreme.  We get ahead by paying our dues, working hard, and keeping our patrons happy.  Which implies, of course, that we want to get ahead, that we are happy to invest in the very system that enslaves us because we believe it will reward us.  But grace inhabits this world of karma in such a way that its power is stolen away.  The power of karma is death:  death is what the karmic system threatens us with in order to make us do and be what it wants.  But Grace says:  “in order to find yourself you must lose yourself.  In order to live, you must die.  In order to gain all things you must lose all things.”  In this way, grace promises that the moment of capitulation will ultimately become the moment of freedom, for it is in being willing to let go of what we cling to so desperately that we shall gain ourselves anew as a free people whose lives are hidden with Christ in God.  What seems ludicrous and impossible for human beings, is of course entirely possible for God.  This is God’s revolution:  the coming of a new and strange peace, at precisely that point when justice seems dead.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the new Matrix movie is called Revolutions.  In that story, it is at the precise moment when the new Son of Man, Neo Anderson, gives himself over to the power of inevitability - to the evilly karmic power of Smith who wants to repeat his banality over and over in the world until there is nothing left but the Same - that the revolution begins.  As he lies crucified upon the power of the machines, absorbed, it seems, into the power of the same old thing, a miracle begins to happen.  What was absorbed begins to absorb.  What was dead now begins to infect the whole system with life.  What had been given away now spreads through all the world, bringing light and life and peace where there was only darkness, death and enmity.  So it can be for us.  Jesus promises that if we give over to him that which controls us most, our desire to ascend the karmic ladder and become someone, then we can be saved.  Only in dying is there is life, only in stillness is there dancing, only in suffering the evil of what surrounds us is there freedom from it.  This is the revolution the gospel promises.  What is impossible for human beings, is possible for God.

The Vocation of Preachers

John 12. 20-33; 1 Corinthians 1.18-31

In 1819 John Keats, the English poet, sat transfixed before an ancient vase he happened upon in an Italian museum.  It was an urn from ancient Athens, the principle city of Greece, and it featured the carved figures of women and men dancing to some kind of ritual in a forest glade.   Something about these figurines captured the poet’s attention and, more than that, took him away into a rapt meditation upon the capacity of art to convey spiritual truths.  What Keats found most moving was the way in which the artist had captured a moment of truth—the truth of a particular human joy and longing—in the stillness of such beautiful forms.  He wondered at the way in which such truth could be frozen in stone, and therefore rendered communicable even to people who would view the urn thousands of years later.  The poem he wrote to commemorate the occasion closes with the famous aphorism,

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.—That is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

In saying this, Keats revealed his admiration for a particularly Greek way of seeing the world.  Many of the ancient Greeks believed that the deepest truth about things was revealed to human beings through their eyes, particularly in beautiful and bright forms, and even more particularly in the beautiful and bright forms of the human body.  I’m sure that many of you will have seen pictures of those strong and erect young men carved in white marble, often standing at the entrance of public buildings or temples, often naked, and often with some kind of weapon in their hands.  Or of slender women draped in bejewelled finery with garlands in their hair.  Usually in a state of semi-undress.  Understand that such figures represented far more than an ideal for human beauty.  They also represented a Greek understanding of God.  For them, God was exactly like one of these statues:  strong beyond all strength, glorious and bright with the brightness of the sun, beautiful such as to inspire a longing to be joined with God, but also distant and impervious to any kind pain or suffering. 

Now, in the passage we read from John’s Gospel this afternooon, who asks to see Jesus?  Some Greeks.  Some Greeks ask to see Jesus.   And because they are Greeks, they are perhaps hoping to see a particular kind of Jesus, a Jesus who is like one of their Athenian statues of the human form divine:  a strong and noble Jesus, a Jesus whose form is beautiful in that classical Greek sense, a Jesus who shines with divine light and ignites their desire for him, a Jesus who is clearly more than human, who somehow sails above the ordinariness of human pain and regret and grief in some kind of cool, divine inscrutability. 

Now, in case you believe I might be imputing motives to these fellows that don’t exist, consider the following.  That John’s whole Gospel might be characterised as a sermon to the Greeks, and particularly to Greek-speaking intellectuals.  More than the other gospels, John talks about Jesus in a language which Greek-speaking intellectuals would understand and appreciate.  He samples, for instance, their idea of the logos—a differentiated idea or a form that is already there in mind of the God before the universe begins—to explain how Jesus could be considered divine.  “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God.”  The Gospel also seems to address that peculiarly Greek obsession with light and seeing and form as the appropriate way to find out about divine things.  Only in John’s gospel do you have Jesus proclaiming that he is the light of the world.  Only in John’s gospel do you find passages where Jesus exhorts his listeners to become “children of the light,” children who gaze at the glorious brightness of God and are drawn to that light like moths to a flame.  Now, all of this is very, very Greek, right down to the word which John uses for ‘seeing’ in this passage.  It is eidein,  from which we get the English words “idea” and “idol”.   The Greeks, in wanting to “see” Jesus, are therefore looking for a form, an “idol,” if you like, in which their divine “idea” might be both seen and admired. 

But wait.  Doesn’t this imply that John is basically on board with all this Greek stuff, that he is something of a pagan philosopher, seeking to transform Jesus into some kind of semi-divine hero like Ulysses or Hercules, therefore priming his image for popular consumption in a world dominated by Greek thinking?  Well . . . Yes and No.  Yes, he wanted to talk about Jesus in a way that people other than his own tribe, the Jews, would understand and appreciate.  As one must always do, if one is a preacher.  But no, he didn’t buy into a pagan version of God in the process.  Indeed, the passage we are reading contains one of the most damning critiques of pagan versions of the divine you will find in all of literature!  Note, if you will, Jesus’ response to what the Greeks ask.  I quote.

The hour has come for the son of man to be glorified.  Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.  Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life . . .  Now my soul is troubled, but what should I say? “Father save me from this hour?”  No, it is for this hour that I have come.  Father, glorify your name! . . .  Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of the world will be driven out.  And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.

What we find here is a specifically Christian warping or transfiguration of the Greek idea of divine beauty so admired by Keats.   For John argues that the human form of God is not strong and beautiful, in that classical sense we described earlier.  Nor is it impervious to the ravages of ordinary human life—the passing of time, the reality of evil, or of human suffering.  On the contrary, according to John, the human form of God is the crucified Jesus.  A suffering man, hanging from the most vile instrument of torture of the ancient world.  A man vulnerable to being troubled in soul.  A man, like seed planted in the ground at winter-time, who is as erasable as anyone else by death.  In describing Jesus like this, John effects nothing less than a transvaluation of all that the Greek intellectuals of his time would have considered both rational and beautiful.  Beauty, he declares, no longer has anything to do with the classical forms of the Olympic body or the Olympian gods, objects of religio-erotic desire that they were.  For the real beauty of God, says John, is manifest in a love for what is generally understood as the least desirable of all: the weak one, the ugly one, the criminal one, the suffering one.  And, if I may be permitted to bring St. Paul into the conversation as well, the reason of God—God’s logos— is manifest in those whom the world considers fools.  What we learn from these two great apostles, then, is that God actually loves the unlovable, and desires the undesirable.  Such love, we are taught, is also very powerful.  So powerful that it is able to create fruit for God from dead seeds, to raise these little ones, these ‘nothings’ (as Paul would have it) from despair to hope, from darkness into light, from misery into blessedness.  Of course the power we speak of now is also a transvaluation of the dominant discourse of power.  It is the paradoxical power of the powerless and the broken.  It is the pouring out of God’s very life, on the cross of Christ, that those who were dead may live.

Perhaps you are wondering what all this might mean for our valedictorians, and about the ministry they are called to exercise?  Well, allow me to suggest that thinking of the Greek intellectual has not, in fact, withered away.  It is everywhere present in the Western account of reality, perhaps especially so in the bright light of Australia.  It visits us in every commercial which represents happiness and the good life in terms of the beautiful forms of sculptured bodies that reflect our bright sunlight, impervious, it seems, to age or poverty or distress.  It visits us in New Age notions of God as some kind of universal being which is everywhere present, especially in nature, and yet (like nature) is blind and deaf and dumb to our specifically human anxieties.  It is with us in that form Christianity which exalts the idea that we can have a direct and ‘pure’ relationship with Jesus that somehow bypasses the messy materiality of church and tradition, in both their fidelity and their infidelity.  Finally, it visits us in our cultural obsession with seeing as the preeminent way of knowing what is true.   If we see its form, even if “it” is only on the TV or on the web, we believe it.  If we don’t see it, then we don’t believe it.   These are the realities we live with as members of Western civilization, and they are not so very different from the assumed realities of John’s “Greeks”.  The colonial powers might have changed.  But their message has not!

In this context, in this civilization in which the church itself is also, so often, a very willing participant, ministers of the gospel are called to do what the apostles did, in their different ways.   To so immerse ourselves in the story of the crucified and risen Christ, that the most dominant sight and sense and values of our civilization are displaced, cast aside, even put to death.  Like Paul and John, we are called to a prayerful passivity before the crucified, a passivity that, with time and by the Spirit, comes to so scarify and refigure our sight and sense and values that we are no longer the slaves of what our world would consider either reasonable or beautiful.   In the grace of God, this habitual contemplation of the crucified will eventually empower us to let go of the way we see with our eyes—which, of course, is to see according to our cultural conditioning—in favour of a seeing that comes by faith in a God who gives life to the dead and wisdom to fools.  With that different kind of vision, in the ‘dark light’ that spills out from the cross, we are called, first, to deconstruct and unmask the gods of our age.  To say our ‘no’ to their oppressive power.  To announce that the judgement of God has arrived to expose their lies.  But then we are called to declare the promise of God toward everything these gods have wrecked and wasted: nothing less than the conversion, the transfiguration, the resurrection of the broken soul after the image of God’s son.  To declare, in other words, the good news that God loves the fool, the weakling, the sinner.  To declare that God, in Christ, will raise the sinner up to life and dignity and the inheritance of children, first in Christ’s church, and finally in the joyful paradise of the redeemed. 

I know of no better poetic summation of the vocation of Christ and of his messengers that this one, from Leonard Cohen, who happens to b a Jew.  It takes the form of a prayer:

If it be your will that I speak no more
And my voice be still, as it was before
I will speak no more, I shall abide until
I am spoken for. If it be your will.

If it be your will that a voice be true
From this broken hill I will sing to you
From this broken hill all your praises they shall ring
If it be your will to let me sing

If it be your will, if there is a choice
Let the rivers fill, let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill on all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will to make us well

And draw us near and bind us tight
All your children here, in their rags of light
In our rags of light, all dressed to kill
And end this night. If it be your will.
If it be your will.

In this prayer of surrender, valedictorians, is your calling as pastors and teachers of Christ’s church.  To such praying as this you are, or will be, ordained.  May God give you power to contemplate and really accept the truth of God’s amazing love, and then freely to share its inexhaustible riches with all God’s children.

This homily was preached at the Valedictory service for the Uniting Church Theological College, Melbourne, in 2009.

Light for dark times

Texts:  2 Corinthians 4.3-6; Mark 9.2-9

Have you ever noticed how the gospel of Mark has no resurrection appearances?  Unlike the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, Mark doesn't deliver his readers a post-resurrection Jesus who appears to his disciples and gives them final instructions.  Instead, what you find there in chapter 16 is a group of the women turning up at the empty tomb where they discover, not a risen Jesus, but a nameless young bloke in an alb who tells them Jesus is risen.  So he's the one who gives them the instructions in this gospel, he, an intermediary or witness.  He tells the women to go and tell the other disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee.  And how do the women respond to the news?  Well, let me quote verse 8 of chapter 16, the last verse in Mark:

They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Now this is not exactly victorious, happy-ending stuff.  This is not a glorious ascension into heaven and a blessing of the faithful, like in Luke.  It's not a beachside scene where Peter is given the job of forming the church, like in John.  There's not even a dignified farewell and instructions for the ongoing mission, as in Matthew.  No, Mark has a distinctly unhappy and unresolved ending.  An ending where the risen Christ seems strangely absent, and the first witnesses of the resurrection are left fearful and bewildered.

Now, while the dreamer in me is forever drawn to the clear and incisive vision of John’s gospel, it is Mark's gospel that resonates most powerfully with my lived experience of being a disciple of Christ.  Why?  Because it doesn't deliver Jesus to me on a platter, all dolled up and unambiguously victorious in the face of life's complexity and difficulty.  No, in Mark's gospel, the glory of Jesus is a hidden glory, hidden beneath the stifling weight of the oh-so-human politics, religion and psychological trauma of Mark’s time.  Mark’s community was composed, you see, of a smallish bunch of Jewish Christians who had fled Jerusalem after its destruction in 70 AD.  They were a refugee community who felt like the whole world was falling down around them, and that the plans of God for Israel were pretty much over.  In the midst of their despair and poverty, the glorious presence of the risen Christ was really not particularly obvious.  Which is not to say that the risen Christ was not present for Mark and his community.  It’s just to say that Mark and his community had to work towards a theology of Christ’s presence that made sense in their unique and particular circumstances.

That's where this incredible story of the transfiguration comes in.  When Jesus is still alive, and still preaching and teaching in Galilee, Mark tells us that he took his best mates Peter, James and John—the inner circle of the disciples—up onto a mountain to be by themselves.  You can understand, I'm sure, the motivation here.  As Mark tells the story, Jesus has been tearing around Galilee for months, preaching and healing.  The crowds follow him everywhere.  Crucially, Jesus had already negotiated a number of run-ins with the ruling figures in Jerusalem, the scribes and the Sadducees.  He had offended their sense of religious propriety, and they had made it clear that if he continued upon the course he had set himself, he would end up in serious trouble.  Indeed, Mark tells us that immediately prior to this mountain trip, Jesus had told his disciples that they were all headed for Jerusalem, where he would be arrested and crucified.   After all that, I think you can see why Jesus would be wanting to get away from it all!  Also, if I were Jesus, I reckon I'd be having some doubts about my resolve.  I'd be wondering if I had the wherewithal to follow through on what I believed I had to do.  And I'd be wanting some space, and the companionship of some good friends, to help me come to terms with all of that.

So there they are, camped up in the mountains like so many before them.  Like Moses on Mount Horeb, who had run away from his enemies in Egypt.  Like Elijah on the run from political assassins.   And like these two great figures before him, Jesus has an encounter with God there that strengthened his resolve to fulfil the mission which God had given him.  Mark tells us that the long-gone Moses and Elijah came to talk with him.  Not metaphysically, you understand, but mystically. Jesus converses with Moses and Elijah in a moment of concentrated prayer, in the manner that we, also, may converse with the great scholars and mentors of the faith:  we may meet them, that is, in the God who binds us all together across space and time; we may hear their voice; we may attend to the way in which they have become icons of God’s way and will; we may watch for their faithful decisions, and learn a thing or two about the call of God within our own place and time. 

What Jesus learned, in prayer, for his own pilgrimage is communicated by what Mark then tells us through the device of a cloud and voice, a device well-known and understood by his Jewish community.  Just as Yahweh, a voice in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, had confirmed the identity and destiny of the people of Israel as they crossed the red sea and then journeyed toward the land of promise, now the cloud of God and the voice of God confirm and encourage Jesus in his messianic identity as the suffering son of God.  Indeed, in doing so, they repeat the message Jesus had already received at his baptism, a story already told by Mark at the very beginning of his gospel.  We conclude, therefore, that Jesus here receives a reminder and an encouragement from his Father.  To finish what he has begun.  To walk the way of the wilderness to his own land of promise, even as his ancestors have done.

Yet it is not only Jesus who receives encouragement and guidance.  Those who are listening to this story as preaching, the members of Mark’s community, are present in the story as the figures of the disciples, Peter, James and John.  Think, for a moment, about how the story unfolds from their point of view.  In following Jesus up the mountain, it has been made clear that they, too, are apprehensive about what the future may hold.  On the one hand, they are excited about the ministry of Jesus, his preaching and his healing.  They are filled with hope for what God may do with them and for their suffering people.  Yet they have also become quite disoriented by Jesus’ more recent talk about how the messiah must suffering and die.  What does it all mean?  Is God with them or not?  How could the death of Jesus accomplish anything useful at all?  Will God also abandon Jesus, in whose face they have discerned the very image of God on earth?  So, these are the questions that swim around their heads and hearts as Peter, James and John camp with Jesus on the mountaintop.  At that very moment, Mark tells us, Jesus was transfigured before them.  His clothes became shining white, whiter than any earthly bleach could ever make them, white as the glorious presence that had appeared to Israel, to Moses and to Elijah.  Only this time the glory emanated from Jesus himself.  The divine shekinah shines out through the suddenly translucent body of Jesus their friend.

What did Mark want his community to hear in this story?  And what would the Spirit want us to hear?  To return to where I began, this morning, I want you to note that the transfiguration is the closest Mark comes to telling a resurrection appearance story.  Only, unlike the resurrection stories that appear in the other gospels, this one (which precedes them all diachronically) is placed right in the middle of Jesus' ministry in Galilee, well before the crucifixion ever occurs.  It is a very, very brief revelation of divine glory, and of the resurrection life promised by God.  It is a foretaste, if you like, of the end of the drama in which we are all, as Christians, enrolled.  It assures us, as it assured Mark’s community, that God may indeed be found with Jesus, and that Jesus will see us through, even in the middle or midst of our pilgrimage, even when we are most knee-deep in the mire of our difficulties. 

Yet, and this is important, the story of the transfiguration does not deliver, for all that, the kind of certainties that many contemporary forms of faith would seek to deliver.  Certainties about being saved from poverty, illness or addiction, or from the real-politics that makes for war, genocide and the flight of refugees.  Note, in the story, that the revelation received does not transform the disciples into warriors of faith who can suddenly say, finally and definitively, who God is or what God is up to in the world.  They see and hear God, certainly.  They see God flash out at them in brilliant glory; yet it is the very brilliance of the revelation that guarantees that they will grasp very little of God’s detail, as it were.  They hear God’s voice from the cloud, certainly, but every Jew knows that clouds hide as least as much as they reveal.  The whole thing is over in a moment, leaving very important impressions, memories, hopes indeed. Yet, in the end, the disciples are given nothing other than these, nothing more substantial by which they might command or control the forces arraigned against them.  It is salutary to note that when Jesus leads the disciples down the mountain once more, the work of healing and preaching continues, and it is just as hard and thankless as before.

What is Mark telling us?  He is telling us this.  That the life of discipleship is not usually about the experience of triumph and victory and power; it is about God’s revaluation of these values, such that experiences of defeat, weakness and tribulation are nevertheless charged, in faith, with a persevering dynamism of divine care and love.  Neither is discipleship about having a clear and unambiguous relationship with God that arms us with power to finally transcend the forces arraigned against us, whether from within or without; it is about the hope that Christ will accomplish what we could never, in a million years, accomplish for ourselves.  What Mark tells his community through this story, therefore, is what he would also tell us this morning: that the life of discipleship is about getting on with life not triumphantly, but faithfully, through the often very hard yakka of caring and preaching in a world which the gods of our age have rendered blind and deaf and dumb.  And being sustained in that by the impressions, traces and hopes given us in the transfiguration, that is, by a capacity to see the divine Spirit quietly and constantly at work where others see only toil and trouble.

The story of the transfiguration is, in Nicholas Lash's memorable phrase, an 'Easter in ordinary'.  It tells us that even the most difficult and dark places of the earth are nevertheless alive with the presence and activity of God.  With the eyes of faith, which are given the Church precisely in the revelatory story of Christ’s transfiguration, it is possible to see that God does not abandon us in our ignorance, in our mediocrity, or even in our poverty.  God is present here.  God is working there.  God is making the resurrection happen by even the smallest increments of loving invitation and of hope.  Even the smallest. 

Now I don't know about you, but for me this message of Mark's is very good news.  Because I don't find the Christian life to be particularly victorious.  And I've never met a God who wants to rescue me, magically, from every difficulty.  But Mark tells me that an authentic discipleship is about being prepared to follow Jesus to the cross, and find there that even the very worst that human beings can do to each other is not strong enough to overpower the love of God for this crazy old world.  Mark tells me that the liberating power of the risen Christ is available at any time, and in any place.  Not as apparently miraculous fireworks or the arrival of the marines.  But as the power to persevere in faith, hope and love because these, and only these, have the power not only to outlast evil, but to so absorb its power that it is no longer evil.  That is a sermon for another day.  But for now, know that this I hold in faith: when evil and death have withered away, faith, hope and love will still be there.

So here's a practical suggestion right at the end.  A suggestion for how you might find that that presence of Christ if it seems to not be there.  Get on with being a disciple.  Read the gospel of Mark.  Notice what Jesus does in his ministry in Galilee.  And do the same.  Repeat it otherwise in your own place and time.  Remember what the young bloke said at the tomb?  'He is not here, he is risen . . .  go and find him in Galilee'.  Which mean 'go and find him in the midst of being his disciple and sharing in his ministry, and the ordinary will be transfigured before you'. 

I’d like to close with a poem from Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, in a reflection on exactly these themes, says this:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:        

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.  

Í say móre: the just man justices;

Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—

Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

As Hopkins says:  Christ shines out in everyone and everything that is Christ-like in the world.  He worships his father through everything that the just do to worship him, which is to say, in everything that that seeks to repeat his words and his works for our own times and places.  In this is our hope and our glory.  Not in creating a justice and a peace from our own imaginations, but in the imaginative reception of what Christ would render unto his Father through a heart of faith—perhaps even your heart, perhaps even mine.

Garry J Deverell

Feast of the Transfiguration

Matthew's baptism of Jesus

Isaiah 42.1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10.34-43; Matthew 3.13-17

Every culture and people have their foundational stories, stories which are able to tell us who we are, where we belong, and what our purpose in life might be.  For Christians, one of those foundational stories in that of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan river.  It is foundational because it is a story not only about who God is, but it is also about who we are as people who ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.  If we listen carefully, it is a story that can also provide invaluable guidance about where we belong in the world, and what we are to do with our lives.  It certainly did that for the early Christian communities.  So . . . listen carefully!

The first thing that Matthew tells us that Jesus came from all the way from Galilee to be baptised by John in the Jordan.  That’s quite a long way and, if you happen to be a young man seeking your fortune in the big wide world, in entirely the wrong direction!  For John was baptising people not in the middle of the city, where people gathered to work and do their business, but in the desert wilderness—way, way off the beaten track.  For John was preaching a baptism of repentance, calling people to reflect upon their lives and ask the question “Is what I’m doing with my life really enriching, satisfying, what I am put on this earth to do?  Or am I just doing it because everyone else is, or because I am afraid of something, or for some other reason I don’t quite understand?”  In John’s eyes, the Jewish people, particularly the most wealthy and successful, had forgotten about the call of their God to live lives characterised by justice, compassion and prayer.  And so he beckoned them out into the wilderness, to a place where the normal trappings of life were no longer there to support and ensnare.  He beckoned them to a place rich with meaning in Jewish faith, a place which marks the passage of a people who had been slaves in Egypt to their freedom in the land of promise.  “Be baptised in the Jordan,” he told them.  “Like the people who crossed this river in ancient times, you cross this river also.  Repent!  Put off your life of slavery to economic and social demands.  Wash away your sins and rise from the waters to pursue the life of freedom that God will give you!”

So, when Jesus comes to John it is not by accident.  It’s not that he was wandering in the desert one day, like some tourist in modern-day Palestine, and happened across a bizarre ceremony that would be kinda fun to have a go at.  No, Jesus comes to John with a deeply held belief and purpose:  that God had called him to leave behind all that was expected of him by his community, that is, to be the head of his household and chief provider for his mother, his brothers, and his sisters.  Jesus believed that God had called him to claim an entirely different identity and mission, a vocation that could only, perhaps, be finally discovered and embraced through this watery ritual of death and rebirth.

For that is what baptism meant for the Jews of the first century.  The word “baptism” literally means “to be immersed in water”, and the ceremony first came to prominence in the century before Christ as a way for Gentiles, non-Jews that is, to embrace the Jewish faith and community.  After a long period of preparation in which the candidates learned both the wisdom of the Jews in law and prophets and the ethical demands of the Jewish life, they would be taken to a body of water and washed thoroughly—yes, even immersed in that body of water.  Thus the name:  “baptism”.  The symbol is not perhaps so obvious to us these days, especially to those of us who have witnessed hundreds of infant christenings over the years.  Stripped naked and immersed in water, the candidates were killing off their former way of life by a symbolic drowning.  They were also washing away their sins so that God might lead them in a new, and very different, way of life.  What John does, then, is take an established Jewish ritual for the initiation of Gentiles into Judaism and applies it to lapsed or lost Jews, Jews who had forgotten what it meant to trust and obey the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

One should understand that, in the ancient world, water was not so benign as we regard it today—flowing purely and freely from our taps as it does.  In the ancient world, water very often symbolised chaos and evil.  In water, people lost their lives.  On the waves of the sea, many ancient people drowned.  With the flooding of the rivers, they lost their harvests.  In the ancient world, people knew that water was both necessary to life but also the bringer of death.  “Fear death by water” said the Buddha in T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Wasteland.  What that meant for Eliot, as it means for us, is that the waters of baptism should not be regarded as tame, given only to feed and sustain life as we know it.  The waters of baptism are dangerous:  they are designed to take our lives away.  Without doing so, they cannot give us a new life.  There is a terrific byzantine icon of Jesus baptism in which you can see, under his feet, the terrifying figure of Leviathan, an ancient symbol of water’s power to kill and destroy.  In order to be baptised, Jesus had to be willing to submit himself to the power of Leviathan.  For that is the only way to overcome Leviathan’s power.  Perhaps we moderns only get in touch with something of that ancient sensibility when a tsunami comes along.

So, all of these meanings hover in air and stir in the water as Jesus comes to be baptised by John.  That is why John at first refuses to baptise Jesus, according to Matthew.  For Matthew’s community, you see, which knew these meanings very well indeed, Jesus is not a person who needed to be baptised.  He is not a sinner who had lost his way and therefore needed to be cleansed and renewed in the water.  “That may be true,” says Matthew in reply, “but baptism symbolises other things as well:  not just the putting away of a life of sin but, more positively, the embrace of an identity and vocation from God.  This is why Jesus asks John to baptise him—in order to symbolise and fulfil all that God rightly asks of him.”  

And so Jesus is baptised.  Note the tense and the mood of that verb.  Jesus does not baptise himself.  Baptism is not something that he, or anyone else, can do for themselves.  It is something that another gives or bestows upon us.  The primary agent in baptism is God.  It is God who baptises, it is God who gives us the grace and the power to put aside the life of sin and embrace the life of faith.  It is God who acts in baptism, even though he does so through the agency of his servant.  For Jesus that servant was John.  For us, it is the church.  What this means, of course, is that salvation is not something we can accomplish for ourselves.  In the Christian view of the world it is simply not possible, by virtue of one’s own ingenuity and power, to be liberated.  In Christian understanding, even the will to be liberated is a gift from God.  Therefore, it is only by virtue of God’s love and grace that we can ever be saved.  

Yet, for all that, a well-informed human will and intention must be present, as it was for Jesus.  Without such will, there is no sacrament.  That is why the church can never baptise a person for whom there is neither faith in God, nor the will to follow God’s way.  What does that mean for infant baptism?  Simply this:  that we must stop baptising children where the primary caregivers have little-to-no informed intention of living a genuinely Christian life, immersed in the church and loyal to the promises made.  The word sacrament means, in fact, “promise”.  In the sacrament of baptism, we hear the love and promises of God.  But we also enact our own promises, promises to turn away from evil and embrace the life of Christ not only in word, but in deed also.  If we or our primary caregivers can neither understand nor make those promises, then the church has no business in baptising us.  To do so would be to mock the promises of God!

But what does God promise us in baptism?  Here we can learn from the baptism of Jesus once more.  As he emerges from the waters of death, Matthew tells us that Jesus saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon his ‘like a dove.’  This event is rich with resonance from Jewish history and theology.  It first recalls the messianic passage we read from Isaiah, where the servant of the Lord is given the Spirit in order to perform a particular task and mission in the world:  to accomplish justice for the oppressed, to open the eyes of the blind, to be a light for the nations, and to release the captives from prison.  In his baptism, Jesus therefore learns his task in the world:  to be God’s light and hope, and the promise of justice, for all who suffer.  This image of the Spirit descending like a dove reinforces that identity.  In the story of Noah, the dove comes as the waters of the flood recede, a sign that God’s new world is beginning to emerge.  So it is for Jesus, and for all who are baptised.  The Spirit is a sign or guarantee that there is life after disaster and death, that no matter how much we lose in baptism we shall be given, by that same action, blessings and riches beyond measure.  The dove:  a sign of God’s love after the deluge is over.

And then there is the voice from heaven:  “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”  Here Jesus finds out who he is.  It is likely that Jesus suspected something for much of his life, but now all his imaginings and intimations come together.  For here God owns Jesus as his son and messiah, the one by whom salvation will come not only to the Jews, but also to the Gentiles.  Remember that the most crucial component of this identity, in Christian understanding, is that of suffering.  Christ will not be the Son of God, and will not bring salvation to the world, unless he suffers and dies.  This understanding is confirmed, in Matthew’s narrative, by Jesus use of the ‘sign of Jonah’ in chapter 12.  There some teachers come to Jesus and ask him for a sign that he is indeed the messiah sent by God.  Jesus replies that no sign will be given them except the sign of the prophet Jonah, who spent three days in the belly of a sea monster, deep in the ocean.  “So shall it be for the Son of Man,” says Jesus, “who shall spend three days buried in the heart of the earth”.  Matthew wants us to understand that Jesus baptism anoints him to be the messiah, certainly, but a peculiar kind of messiah: a messiah who must suffer and die in order to accomplish his work.  The imagery of baptism is unmistakable.  Here baptism becomes a figure for his death and his resurrection:  buried in the water, risen to life on the third day.

Now, I said at the beginning that this story of Jesus baptism is not only about God and Jesus, but also about all who ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.  We’ve seen something of that as we’ve gone along.  But let me now conclude by making some things explicit which have perhaps been hidden in the detail up until now.  The baptism of Jesus became, in early Christian theology, the paradigm or model for what it meant to ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.  ‘Belief’ you see, is neither intellectual assent on its own, nor a group of habitual bodily practices on their own.  Belief is ‘faith’, a decisive unity of intellectual and bodily action which has its object and inspiration within the thought and action of another, an ‘other’ in whom one’s very self is taken apart and re-constructed.  Christians are made into Christians by becoming immersed in the symbolic world of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that is figured in baptism, and precisely by that immersion, are transformed into people whose seek to imitate Christ is every way.  What we therefore learn from Jesus’ baptism is what it ‘belief in Jesus Christ’ actually looks like in a particular life:

1. a leaving of the well-worn expectations and loyalties of our society in favour of a life of faith dedicated to God;
2. a dying to sin, and the lostness of our culture, in order to rise to a new life, a life of grace and peace given us by God; in this we participate in Christ’s saving death and resurrection—‘the sign of Jonah’;
3. the conferral and gift of a new identity.  In our baptism, God owns us as his sons and his daughters.  Jesus was the first, in other words, of many siblings.  The whole company of these siblings is called ‘the church’.
4. a commissioning for mission, for now we are anointed with the Spirit so that we can share with Jesus his vocation as messiah.  In the baptismal liturgy we declare God’s promise that we are now, as a baptised people, the body of Christ, in whom the Spirit of Christ dwells.  All of us, whether we are ‘ordained’ or not, are therefore called to be lights for the nations and to work for the freedom of everyone from whatever it is that keeps them in chains.

The story of the baptism is therefore foundational for the identity and vocation not only of Jesus, but of ourselves as well.  As many as are baptised into Christ have died with Christ.  By participating in the baptism of his death and resurrection we, each of us, are given a new, messianic, mission and vocation.  As Christ gave himself for the sake of the world, so now we—as his body, the church—are called to join with him in loving the world, for the glory of God.  That is what it means, therefore, to ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.

Mid-life confessions

At forty-seven years old I am no longer young. The 'warrior phase' is well and truly behind me. The future stretches out far more bleakly (or should it be 'really'?) before me.

For several years now, a great many changes of mind and heart have been insinuating their way into my imagination. Perhaps I should come clean and confess that I no longer see or hear or feel as I once did about a great many things. Some of you who knew me best when I was a twenty-something or thirty-something may be surprised at what you read here. Others, the wisest amongst you, will have seen what was coming from a very long way off.

1.
When I was young, I dreamed of writing a revolutionary book of theology or philosophy that would fundamentally change its reader's hearts and minds. Now I know that I will never write such a book. Or, if I were by some miracle to produce such a tome, I know it would sink like a stone into obscurity because the practice of reading such books is almost gone.

2.
When I was young, I dreamed that youthful enthusiasm and imagination would fundamentally change the political landscape so that a new era of peace with justice could emerge. Now I know that the powers of greed and entropy are far more entrenched than I could have imagined. I also know that the vast majority of young people have been recruited by those very powers, whether they are aware of the fact or not.

3.
When I was young, I thought that the world was my oyster and that I would die a prosperous and comfortable man. The key to my future, I surmised, was education. Education would lift me from the poverty in which I had grown up, and release me into a prosperous future in which I could do whatever I wanted to do and be whatever I wanted to be (to paraphrase the Master's Apprentices). Now I can see that I unconsciously pursued the kind of education that would render me rich in words and ideas and values but poor in things.

4.
When I was young, I imagined that I would remain healthily capable, competent and energetic well into my seventies. Now I know that growing older means coming to terms with the fading of one's powers. Now I know that ill-health can shatter one's dreams and bring them to naught.

5.
When I was young I imagined that serving Christ was a glorious thing, a praiseworthy thing, a making of oneself into a powerful centre of moral authority that would draw whole communities into its thrall. Now I understand that following Christ is about being despised, rejected and rendered anonymous. It is about becoming an object of scorn for both monster and moralist alike. It is about losing oneself entirely.

All of which is to say that, for me, the world is not at all as I imagined it would be when I was young. I am no longer the 'promising young leader' that some described two decades ago. I am a person whose hopes and dreams lie in ruins under a towering rubble of self-deception, ill health, and Christian realism.

For all that, and most likely because of all that, I find myself able to give thanks. I give thanks for my wife Lil, for the way she has stuck by me with tenacious love over 25 years.  I give thanks for my daughters Erin and Gretel, who continue to be the light of my life. I give thanks for my mum and dad, who walked this way before me. I give thanks for the treasures of Christian faith - baptism, bible, prayer and eucharist - which continue to sustain and comfort me. I give thanks for friends who love me loyally even when I am being a dick. I give thanks that I have a roof over my head and that I can still string two words together. Two words may now be all that Christ requires.