Becoming Christ Together

Texts:  Exodus 17.1-7; Psalm 78. 1-16; Philippians 2.1-13; Matthew 21.23-32

Last week the Uniting Church Synod of Victoria and Tasmania met at La Trobe University in Bundoora.  The Synod is a regular gathering of representatives from Uniting Church presbyteries, schools, hospitals, missions and other agencies from right across Victoria and Tasmania.  According to the regulations of the Uniting Church, the Synod is responsible for overseeing the mission of the church in presbyteries, colleges, agencies and schools.  It is also responsible for the selection and training of ministerial candidates and the management of church property and finances within its bounds.  Over the course of last week, then, the Synod gathered to listen to reports and to make decisions about all these matters.

There is a permanent temptation in a church like ours to make decisions as though we were the Labour Party.  Increasingly, the church is organising itself into factions— ‘liberals’, ‘progressives’, ‘neo-orthodox’, ‘evangelicals’—and strong groups have formed to actively lobby the councils of the church on a range of issues.  The most organised groups are the ‘Reforming Alliance’ and ‘The Progressive Christian Movement’ but there are others.  In my opinion, the church climate has become so factionalised, that it is now almost impossible to turn up to a Synod or Presbytery meeting to participate, simply, as a Christian and member of the Uniting Church who wants to discern the will of Christ in company with others.  For now you will find yourself pigeon-holed before you even get there.  Several times in the years since I began attending the church’s councils I have seen people assume that I will support or oppose such and such a proposal because I belong to a group that it variously called ‘the theological fascists’ or the ‘intellectual mafia’.  No such group exists, as far as I can tell, and if it does, I’ve never been invited to one of its meetings!  But the very fact that a person can be so easily dismissed represents a very troubling tendency in the church, a trend in which people decide not to listen to other people on the basis of a whole lot of convenient assumptions about what those other people are likely to believe or do, assumptions that function only to reinforce the ill-conceived prejudice of one’s own position.  It is the kind of thing that has, frankly, made me very wary of attending the church’s councils at all.

Now, one only has to read the New Testament to discover that this situation is not a new one for the church to find itself in.  The church has apparently been sinning in this way since the beginning!  The letter of Paul to the Philippians is a case in point.  Why would Paul need to exhort the Philippians to be ‘of one mind and heart, in full accord’ unless that were not the case?  The church at Philippi was clearly as factionalised as the Uniting Church is today.  The solution Paul offers for this disunity is not, however, the one that we are most often encouraged to adopt in both church and society.  It is not the solution of so-called ‘tolerance’, where each party simply accepts (or assumes) that the other can never agree with me, and should therefore be smilingly gazed at across a great distance.  For tolerance assumes that neither party will change.  Neither, of course, does Paul recommend the George Bush kind of solution, that is, ‘I want them to agree with me so I’ll use my bigger stick to beat them into submission’.  No.  No way.

What Paul recommends is what I, also, would recommend to my church this morning.  That the way to a unity of mind and purpose in the church has nothing to do with what you desire or what I desire, but with what God desires.  Listen to what Paul says:

Let the same mind be in your community as was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was God did not consider equality with God a thing to be exploited, but emptied himself instead, taking the form of a slave and being found in human likeness.  In that way he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

I could talk about the meanings of this passage all day, but for now I would like you to note two things only.  First, that Paul offers up Jesus as a model for what and how we should desire as a church.  What we should desire is not our own vision of the world, but God’s vision of the world.  And how we should desire it is by emptying ourselves of our own desire.  Emptying ourselves.  It sounds Buddhist to many modern ears, but it is not.  In Buddhism you empty yourself of desire in order to desire either nothing at all, or, as Slavoj Zizek has convincingly argued, to allow your powerful neighbour to make use of you for their own manipulative purposes.  In Christianity, by contrast, our desires are put aside in order to make room for the desire of God, who is pure and unadulterated love.

The second thing I would have you note is a consequence of the first.  That unity of heart and mind in the Christian community can never be achieved apart from a serious and widespread willingness to listen and look for the desire of God in the story of Jesus of Nazareth.  It sounds obvious when you put it like that, doesn’t it?  But the point is far from obvious to so many of our church councils.  In part this is so because of sheer laziness and inertia.  Many of us know and believe that the contemplation of Christ’s story is the beginning of everything that has any consequence, that we can never hope to act in the world as God would act unless we contemplate Christ’s story with regularity and devotion.  Yet many of us also crowd out this devotion by our devotion to other things.  Thus, Christ’s way and will has not had opportunity to sink its roots deep down into our hearts.  So much so, that when we come to the point of meeting in community to discern the mind of Christ, we rarely know enough of Christ to make genuinely Christian decisions! But inertia and laziness is not the whole story.  The other reason why we are not inclined to contemplate Christ’s story as the source of our knowledge of God is because most of us (whether ‘liberals’ or ‘evangelicals’) have been formed by the culture of ‘modernity’, a culture in which the point of religious faith is certainly not to conform ourselves to the will of God revealed in Christ, but rather to make God’s ways ‘fit’ our own ways, to assume that God must make sense according to what we already think we know about how the world works.  I am glad that this culture is crumbling, but its influence is still very powerful in the church.  A church that wants God to fit its own agenda is unlikely, it seems to me, to spend a great deal of time contemplating the life of Christ.

So what’s to be done?  If Christian unity, a oneness of heart and mind, is a consequence of this contemplatio Christi alone, then clearly we should spend more time doing that, and at the most fundamental levels of the church.  We should encourage one another to read the Scriptures and believe in them.  We should meet together, in pairs and groups, to discuss the Scriptures and to wait upon the Spirit of Christ in prayer.  We should put aside the novels, the magazines, the sociology and the television for a bit, and read a bit of Christian theology.  We should put aside even the works of goodness and charity for a while each week.  Not because Christ is not present and active in all of these things, but because we shall not be able to recognise how Christ works through all the business of life unless we get to know him in the shape of our gospel tradition.  The point of the Christian love of neighbour, you see, is not to become a doormat for someone else’s desire.  It is not to serve the other slavishly, at the expense of one’s own desire alone.  It is, rather, to serve God first.  To recognise that what is best for my neighbour is what God desires for them.  Which, in turn, requires that both of us, if we are Christian, contemplate the word of God in Christ together.  Only then shall we be able to serve each other truly.

This is true not only for Synods and Assemblies, but also for congregations and small faith communities.  I leave these thoughts with you for your consideration.  Test what I say against the story of Christ, and if I am wrong, please tell me.  Because I too, would rather do Christ’s will than my own.

The Rituals of Faith

Texts: Exodus 12.1-14; Psalm 149; Romans 13.8-14; Matthew 18.15-20

Today I want to talk to you about the importance of ritual. Now that might sound strange coming from the mouth of a Protestant minister. One of the concerns which Protestants have always had with the Catholic and Orthodox churches is that they have been ritualistic churches – concerned too much with ceremony and ritual, and not enough with living out the faith in more practical ways. But I have come to believe that many Protestant churches have made a great mistake in trying to do away with rituals. Because rituals perform a very important function for all of us. They help us to celebrate, to mourn, to remember, and to move on in life. In short, they help us to grow up and grow wise in our faith.

Today’s reading from Exodus underlines the importance to Jewish people of a particular ritual known as the ‘Passover’. All over the world, Jewish people celebrate this ritual together on the 14th of Nisan, which falls within the first few weeks of April by our calendar. Here the family gathers to share a meal of lamb, unleavened bread, wine, and bitter herbs. Words are said over the meal, and prayers are said, which remind the people that they are loved by God, who liberated them from slavery in Egypt and brought them to a land of abundance in Israel. According to the Exodus passage, the Passover ritual was instituted by God’s own command to Moses. On the night of their liberation, the people of Israel were told to gather in their households and cook a lamb without blemish or defect. They were to eat this lamb, along with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, in readiness for the flight from Pharaoh to freedom. They were to eat the meal with their travel clothing on, and their bags packed. And they were to spread the blood of the slaughtered lamb on the doorposts of their houses, so that when the Lord came to kill the gods of Egypt, he would pass by that house. Today when Jews eat their Passover meal, they do so with a great sense of thankfulness for the mercy of God. The slaughtered lamb is understood to symbolise an offering for Israel’s sin. The herbs remind them of their terrible suffering under the Pharaoh. The unleavened bread is a reminder of their haste in departing. And the wine represents the blood by which God spared their lives, even as judgement was visited on the strongest in the oppressor nation.

For Jews, the eating of a Passover meal is essential to their faith. It is a ritual by which they both remember their liberation and express the hope that an even more wonderful liberation might be theirs in the future of God. For Jews, the Passover is a ritual which tells a story, the story of a people and their faith. But it is also the story of each life captivated by that story. In the celebration of the Passover, individual worshippers come to see how it is that God has wrought mercy and rescue in their own lives. And they are called and empowered to live out that liberation within the concrete facts of their own bodies and relationships. By participating in the Passover rituals, individual worshippers learn how to leave the slavery of Egypt behind and enter into the journey towards life and hope in the ‘Land of Promise’.

Christian rituals function in exactly the same way. The Christian equivalent to the

Passover meal is the Easter Vigil – which happens during the night before Easter dawn. Here the Christian community gathers around a fire outside a darkened church. The Easter candle is lit as a sign of the promise that Christ shall be raised, and the community follows that light into the darkened church, where is placed in the centre of the sanctuary. In the liturgy which follows, the whole story of God’s salvation is told through a series of readings from the Scriptures, beginning with the creation in Genesis and ending with the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. As the story unfolds candles are lit, one by one, to bring joy and a future into the lives of all present. The church grows brighter, the shadows retreat, and hearts grow warm with hope. Then, at the very moment when the crucified Jesus is acclaimed as the Risen One, those who have been preparing for baptism come forward. You see, the season known as Lent, the forty days that proceed Easter, was originally designed to teach baptismal candidates about the way of Jesus Christ, and to encourage them in the solemn vows that they would be making at their Easter baptism. Now, in the midst of the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, those vows are made. Having heard the whole history of God’s salvation, each candidate now owns that story for themselves. They are ritually submerged in the water of the red sea and of the Jordan, and emerge to their inheritance in a land filled with milk and honey, the ‘promised land’ of God. They are crucified with Christ and buried in the tomb, and then raised to life with Christ. They put off the clothing of their old allegiances and ways of life, and are clothed anew with Christ himself, the garment of their salvation. In the joy of that moment, the whole community reaffirms its baptismal vows, and shares in the Eucharistic supper, thus taking to itself, once more, the Christ who lived, and died, and lives for ever to pray for our release from slavery.

In the Great Vigil of Easter, Christian worshippers are reminded of who they are, and to whom they belong. There they experience a renewed call from the Spirit to live after the way of the crucified and risen Christ, to follow his way in the concrete relations of their daily lives. The Great Vigil is Christianity’s most powerful ritual, because it tells the story in full that other rituals tell only in part: the story of God’s transformative love, in Christ, for all the world. It is there to transform our lives and renew us in the faith of Christ. What a shame, then, that while the service is in our own Uniting Church worship book, that so few actually do it!

When Paul talks, in the reading from Romans, about clothing ourselves with Christ in readiness for the day of our salvation, he is recalling the experience of baptism, and inviting us to live out of that ritual in an imaginative engagement with the everyday. Here Paul asks us to imagine that we are awake in those moments of darkness before the dawn arrives, those moments of stillness and anticipation when the night has not yet passed, but the day is at hand. We are invited to take the opportunity afforded by that quietness to reflect on a particular question: how may I be ready to live the day which is coming for all its worth? How may I cast off the deeds of darkness and embrace the light that is in Christ? Paul suggests to us that we live in a time where there is no time to waste. We are called to stop living for ourselves, and start living for God. Can you see the potential for powerful, transformative, ritual in the association Paul draws between salvation and the coming of the dawn? Each dawn signals the arrival of new possibilities. Could we not use the newness of each dawning day to renew ourselves in the vows we have made to Christ? Could we not, as we put on our clothes in the morning, immerse ourselves in a prayer of recommitment?

I know of no-one who seizes these possibilities for ritual more fully and enthusiastically than the monks of St. Benedict. They rise before the dawn and put on the simple habit of Christ’s poverty. Then they gather to chant the Psalms, and to invite the Lord to weave his salvation into the simple but demanding work of their day. I aspire to be a monk too, albeit one who has chosen to live in the midst of this messy and complicated world. I want to be one who weaves daily, weekly, and seasonal rituals to remind me of who I am in Christ, and what I am called to be in Christ. I want to be one who remembers the story of faith each day, and makes that story my own. I want to be one who daily finds ways to embrace the transformative power of the deepest ritual of all: the ritual of dying with Christ, that I might be reborn to his love.

In the reading from Matthew, Jesus says ‘whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven’. What did he mean? Well, amongst other things, he wanted us to know that rituals change things, that rituals change people’s lives. For rituals are vows. They are a binding of earth to heaven so that the Son of God may become flesh amongst us and carry us home to God in his risen power.

In these days of terror and war, our secular society needs the rituals of faith more, perhaps, than ever before. How is one to make sense of what is happening unless one is able to place it within the framework of suffering, slavery, and the longing for justice expressed so powerfully in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions? If September 11 is able to teach us nothing else, I hope it will teach us that there is no such thing as a ritual-free space. What our secularized political leaders still do not grasp is this: that the attacks on New York and Washington were driven by a sense of the religious and of ritual, albeit a perverted form of the same. In that perspective, the question the world ought to be asking, ten years on, is not “How do we capture, kill or lock up the terrorists so that they can’t do it again?” but “How do we successfully undo the power of this ritual, so that the desire to do it all again is displaced into something more life-affirming?” Why did Bush and Blair bomb Iraq back into the stone-age? Because they asked the first question rather than the second. They didn’t understand that to take that course of action would achieve nothing by way of a real solution. It is clear now, is it not, that the campaign against Iraq played right into the evil ritual’s logic, absorbed into that story as a demonic event by which the desire for revenge against the West would be multiplied a hundredfold.

Let me suggest to you that the only effective way to confront such rituals is to enter deeply into the human roots from which they spring, to know the pain and darkness of that people’s experience, and then to gather it all up into the weaving of a more redeeming ritual, a ritual that has the power to transform darkness into light, and pain into praise. The Easter Vigil (along with the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist from which it springs) does exactly that: teaching, explicitly, that the logic of ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘a tooth for a tooth’ must come to its termination in us, within the dying of our sin-saturated selves, if there is ever to be a real basis for justice and peace. My earnest prayer is that the ritual practice of this power-in-powerlessness would spread even into the corridors of the Whitehouse, and of the Israeli Parliament, and of Hamas and the Taliban, so that their inhabitants may learn the way of peace by which the world may be transformed in love.

The Pearl of Great Price

Texts:  Genesis 29. 15-28; Romans 8. 26-39; Matthew 13. 31-33, 44-52

In the book of Genesis we read of a man named Jacob, who looked upon the daughter of Laban, his uncle, and loved her.  In return for Rachel’s hand in marriage, Jacob agreed to work for Laban seven years - great price by any standard, particularly when one remembers that in the ancient near-East, it was usually the bride’s father, not the groom, who paid out the money.  Daughters were considered expensive liabilities to have around the household too long, so the sooner they could be married off, the better, and the bride-price was considered a worthwhile investment towards achieving that end.  Nor was the youngest of daughters ever, and I mean EVER, married off before the older – as Jacob discovers when he wakes up from his marriage stupor and discovers Leah, not Rachel, lying beside him.  So we are left with the overwhelming impression that Jacob loved Rachel more than anything else in the world.  His love, it seems, made him a little mad, mad enough to put aside his rights as an eligible bachelor and his reputation as a man of considerable rank in the community.  Mad enough to put aside his self-respect and work like a slave for 14 years in order to finally secure the one whom he treasured so very dearly.

When Matthew recounts Jesus’ parables of the treasure and the pearl, I am sure he has exactly that quality of devotion in mind.  For Jesus speaks of people who, like Jacob, stumble upon a treasure that so captivates their devotion that they are willing to forsake everything they have in order to obtain it.  One is a peasant, working as a farm-hand in somebody else’s field.  He is very poor, one who works for another because he has very little property of his own.  But one day, as he works the plough, clunk!  He finds a treasure.  We are not directly told what the treasure is.  But we are told that the treasure is so valuable that the man daren’t move it.  Instead, he hides the treasure in a deeper hole and goes off to sell everything he has in order to buy the entire field.  Clearly the treasure is worth far more than everything he owns!  The second parable is similar.  It tells of a merchant in search of fine pearls.  One day he comes across a pearl which absolutely captures his imagination with its beauty.  So great is its value that the merchant is prepared to sell everything else he owns, a very considerable estate, in order to buy that one pearl.  So here is that madness again, the madness that is able to drive a person to renounce all that they are and all the many things they possess in order to obtain the one thing that has claimed their heart.  The psychiatrist, I am sure, would call the madness an ‘obsessive-compulsive’ disorder and warn us that the condition is quite irrational and very dangerous!

But these are stories about God.  Like the treasure and the pearl, and like Rachel in the Genesis story, God is one who takes our hearts captive in a moment of irreducible wonder.  Suddenly we become aware that God is all in all, that God is the heart that beats behind every heart, that God is the still-point at the centre of a turning universe.  And we realise, perhaps for the first time, that nothing but God actually matters.  So much so, that we are compelled to consider all else we possess, or all else that we long for, as mere rubbish beside the incomparable vision before us in that moment of recognition.  In his great work which is, in many ways, a simple commentary upon these parables, Soren Kierkegaard notes that it is the desire for one thing, and one thing only, that is able to purify our lives and our hearts.  The advertisers are out to sell us many things, to make us desire and long for everything under heaven.  Our society would like us to be good citizens which, these days, means being a good consumer of all the pretty things that we don’t really need.  But the beatific vision of the pearl or the treasure compels us to turn aside from all that and desire the one thing that is of more value than all the wonders of the worlds put together.  God.

Make no mistake.  The love of God is a kind of madness.  It can make you obsessive, it can make you sick - at least that is how many others will come to view what you may become or what you may choose to do as a disciple of Christ.  I have a deep admiration for the monastic orders of the church in this regard. For the monastics are people who have taken the word of the gospel quite literally.  They leave everything behind— family, possessions, status, career—in order to devote themselves to the praise of God and the service of other human beings.  And there, in the secret life of prayer, these men and woman also seek to lose even their very selves, that they may know the surpassing beauty of knowing God.  I believe, with Martin Luther, that there can be a monasticism for ‘ordinary’, workaday, people like you and I, a genuine following of Christ in the midst of the secular world, if you like.

The secular monk is simply a disciple, one who has learned from Jesus that their land, their possessions, their skills, their talents, everything they have and everything they are, is for God.  Imagine what freedom could be ours if we really believed that!  That terrible anxiety we all experience with regard to our possessions and property would no longer be there.  We would be free to praise God for what we have, and to share it willingly and joyfully with whoever is in need.  And we would no longer hoard our gifts and talents as though they were ours alone.  We would no longer hide our lights under bushels.  We would offer them to everyone out of love, and for the praise of God.   But most of all, we would no longer be afraid to talk about God with one another.  The anxieties we all have, in contemporary Australia, about being branded religious fanatics or irrational obsessives would evaporate because, in the joy of a genuine relationship with God, we would be happy to take the yoke of Christ, to become his ‘fool’ for the sake of love and of the gospel.

Are you catching the vision?  Can you climb the mountain and see the promised land?  How blessed is the one who sees visions and dreams dreams!  How blessed are they that glimpse the pearl of great price and treasure the vision in their hearts!  For that vision is like a beacon of hope when troubles and persecutions come, as they inevitably do.  When Paul wrote about the things that try to separate the disciple from the love of Christ, he was speaking from personal experience.  Paul was one of the many thousands of mystics and prophets and saints who knew the gritty, dirty, reality of discipleship—hardship, distress, persecution and famine for the sake of the gospel.  Yet for Paul, as for many other saints, the vision that sustained him was the sign of the cross, the sign that God withheld nothing of himself from us, but had reached out to us in God’s own fit of madness, to love with the gift of his very own son.  For people who know this deeply, who have meditated upon that sign in the dark light of prayer, the ‘trials’ of faith become a participation in God’s own suffering love.  And so they are counted as a privilege, tangible signs that Christ is present and active in the world as love.  In this perspective all things, all things—even those things that seem to tear the world apart—may be seen to work for good.  And, for that reason, even the greatest darknesses can be embraced with a deep sense of thankfulness.

So . . .  I have a question for you all this day.  What vision dominates your horizon?  Is it the vision of financial security?  Or perhaps the vision of an easy retirement, basking in the reflected glory of your children’s achievements?  Or perhaps the dream of professional success, and the admiration and respect of your peers?  Or . . .  is it the vision of God— that pearl, that treasure of great price?  How willing are you to renounce all that, for our contemporary world, makes for commonsense and security and good management in order to obtain it?  How mad are you willing to become for the sake of Christ and of his gospel?  Only you know the answer to these questions.  You and God.  Remember that God is always at the heart of you, calling and whispering, calling . . .  and whispering.  How will you respond when you hear that gentle voice today?

The Yoke of Christ

Texts:  Genesis 24.34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Song of Songs 2.8-13; Romans 7.15-25a; Matthew 11.16-19, 25-30

Today I want to talk about what it means to wear the yoke of Christ.  In a saying unique to Matthew's gospel, Jesus says:

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden light'.

What kind of yoke is Jesus talking about here?  You'll be relieved to know that it has very little to do with having egg on your face or, indeed, with becoming the butt of someone's awful humour!  But it has everything to do with the sheer discipline and hard work of labouring for Christ in the workshop of the world.  Those of you who've spent some time on a farm will know that a yoke is the piece of sculpted wood which goes around the neck of a bullock when it is harnessed to a plough.  Sometimes the piece of wood is designed to harness two or even three bullocks abreast.  Here the yoke becomes a means of joining the beasts to each other as much as to their work.  By becoming harnessed so, the bullocks learn a discipline essential to their task.  The discipline of working with each other and with their task-master - walking at the same pace and pulling with the same effort, so that the plough cuts its furrow with maximum effect, efficiency, and balance.

That Matthew should use an image of servitude to describe the life of following Jesus might surprise some of you.  Afterall, most of us have been taught that the Christian life is about throwing off our chains and walking in freedom.  Well, that is most certainly true.  But here Matthew is telling us that the freedom we aspire to in Christ will only come to us through a form of radical submission to Christ's will and way.  In one of the many paradoxes of the gospel, we are told that the way by which we might lay our burdens down is to take up the yoke of Christ and submit to his tutelage.   Which goes, of course, to the heart of discipleship.  To be a disciple is to submit oneself to the disciplines of the master we have chosen to follow.  It is to take that master's yoke upon oneself and learn how to plough the fields of the world according to the master's peculiar vision.

We see something of the joy and the cost of discipleship in the rather lovely story of Rebecca in Genesis.  Here is a women who lives under the protection and patronage of her father and brother in the land of Ur.  Life is secure, it is predictable, it is safe.  But one day a chap turns up from a far and distant land, and paints an entirely new scenario for her.  Why not come with him to that other land and to a different life?  Why not come and be the wife of a wealthy stranger named Isaac, a man whom Rebecca has never met?  Why not leave who she is right now, and welcome a radical change in role, identity and purpose?  Now I don't know about you.  But I think I'd be very, very wary.  But when Rebecca is asked if she wants to go, she says 'YES!'.   Somehow she is able to see the promise of that life far away.  Somehow she is able to find the courage to leave the safe and familiar behind and embrace the promise of what will be. 

For the earliest disciples, Jesus was like that stranger who came from a distant land saying 'follow me'.  In hearing that call and that challenge, each of them weighed up the cost against the promise, the tangible against the intangible, the known against the unknown.  Some took a risk.  They took up the yoke of Christ, which is also his cross.  They chose to follow him no matter where he led, and very often against the dictates of either reason or moral duty.  Others chose to stay with the yokes they were already wearing.  Like familial and civic duty, and keeping your head down lest the occupying force, the Roman, cut it off.  At least, that's how an ancient middle-eastern writer named Matthew saw it.  But now to the really difficult questions.  How might we few, gathered this morning in this shrine of Christ, really take up the yoke of Christ in our own lives and living?  But perhaps there is a more pressing question to be answered first.  Is there any real sense in taking the yoke of Christ seriously in this age of Ebay, atheism and new-age spirituality?

I believe there is a great deal of sense in doing so, because people have become so very burdened in this brave new world we've created!   The Ebay generation is burdened by the belief that we can somehow buy and consume our way to peace and happiness.  The tragedy here is that the world of modern consumerism offers nothing more than the eternal return of the same in the tired old story-lines of soap operas and pop music.  The more you buy, watch or consume, the less you get of anything genuinely new that is able to liberate us from our slavery to the same old thing. The new atheism, on the other hand, is burdened by the belief that we can somehow reason our way to peace and happiness.  Ironically, what the ‘new’ atheists are pedalling, is the rather ‘old’ story that got us into the economic and environmental mess we find ourselves in today, so so-called Enlightenment’s story about human beings pulling themselves out of the mire through disinterested reason and scientific enquiry.  The tragedy, here, is two-fold.  First, the Enlightenment story has never really comes to terms with the fact of human sin, what the apostle describes as knowing what is good and helpful and true, but failing to actually do it.  In this, paradoxically, psychoanalysis is certainly the Apostle’s ally!  Second, the Enlightenment story has never been comfortable with what might be called ‘the irrational’, that tendency of life itself to occasionally contradict everything we think we know, to surprise and lift us out of the quagmires in which we bury ourselves by our reason, that tendency which we Christians call the arrival of grace as from some place other that our very circumscribed understandings of reality. Which is where you’d think the dominant new-age spiritualities of our time might have something helpful to offer, with their promises of liberation through that which is not at all reasonable, through an embrace of all that is wild and untameable in the human spirit.  The tragedy here is that new age spiritualities are as weighed-down as consumerism and atheism with a glorious story about the capacity of human beings to break their own chains.  Instead of looking to what we might buy or consume, or to the light of human reason, contemporary spiritualities look to the deepest self for inspiration, that which is called, variously, ‘the god within’, the ‘best self’ or even the ‘collective unconscious’.  Whatever the language, whether Jungian or pagan in origin, the belief is the same: that we can somehow liberate ourselves, that the human spirit is unquenchable, and that it is able to rise above its sins and misdemeanours in order to make the world anew.  From a Christian point of view, from the point of view of the Apostle Paul, we cannot.  And I submit to you that the real history of human civilisation bears witness to this.  Whatever our aspirations, even if they are informed by that other story told by Jews or Christians, we fail to meet them.  Over and over and over again.  That is the true burden of our human condition.

‘Who can rescue us from these bodies of despair?’ asks the Apostle?  Only Jesus Christ.  Only the one who comes to us extra nos, as the Latin theologians styled it, from the ‘outside’ to share with us the free gift of God’s acceptance, love and transforming Spirit. For the gospel-writer, for Matthew, the gift-nature of salvation is expressed in the language of revelation: 

I praise you, Father, Lord of all creation, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father for this is your good pleasure (Matt 11.25-26)

Here, on the lips of Jesus, Matthew locates an origin for our liberation which comes from somewhere other than ourselves - our imagination, our reason, even our buying power.  It is the light not of our reason, but of revelation, the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ.  For Jesus goes on to say,

All things have been given to me by my Father.  No-one knows that Son except the Father; and no-one knows that Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him (11.27).

The point here is that, like little children who are able to simply trust in what their parents give them and tell them, God gives the gift of salvation to all who are able to receive what is revealed in simple faith.  To put aside all they think they know and simply embrace what is given.  What is given, then, is a capacity to re-know and re-shape the world according to what is revealed in Jesus Christ.  It is the putting off of the old yoke of servitude to the way things are normally known and done in favour of the new ‘yoke’, a yoke that is not our own but that of Christ.   In one of the very many paradoxical moves of the gospel story, Matthew promises that all who come to Jesus will find that his own particular yoke is ‘easy’, and his burden ‘light’.  The word 'easy' should not, of course, be taken to mean that life with Jesus will be all beer and skittles.  It certainly is not!  Following Jesus is so deeply counter-cultural that his followers are very often persecuted and maligned for their lack of assent to the status quo.  The claim is, rather, that in following Jesus each person will find a way through life which 'fits' and addresses their most genuine needs and longings.  Not the needs and longings which are created by the ascendant powers of the society in which we live.  But the more fundamental needs and longings which everyone has . . .  for a home, a love, and a truth.   The yoke of Christ disciplines our hearts to acknowledge these longings, and to seek their fulfilment through a relationship with God.

Allow me to close with a three simple observations about taking the yoke of Christ for today.  First, I believe Jesus is calling us to faith, faith in what God has revealed in Jesus Christ.  It is the faith of the bible, of the ecumenical creeds and of all Christian thinking that springs from these fonts.  Faith is a simple acceptance of these things, a leap into the unknown by which we might then, paradoxically, re-understand everything we thought we understood but did not.  Faith is not - please understand! - without thought, reason or imagination.  It is, rather, a thought and imagination that allows itself to be disciplined by the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, so that the entire world of what we know and imagine can be re-thought, re-imagined and re-reasoned in its light.

Second, I believe Jesus is calling us to prayer and to a deeper communion with God.  Prayer is the well from which we draw the essential water to sustain our journey in faith.  So let me ask this of all of you.  Do you pray?  Do you know what prayer is?  Do you know how to pray?  If the answer to any of these questions is no, then I would urge you to seek counsel and direction from a person you respect in the faith.  Because prayer is at the centre.  Without prayer, there is no life with God.

And finally, I believe Jesus is calling us to live with integrity and justice in our relationships with other people and with all life on our planet.  That includes our families and love ones, certainly.  But it also includes the more complex relationships we have with people far and wide, across the whole expanse of this web of life we call the earth.  If we are genuine in our desire to take the yoke of Jesus, then it matters whom we support and don't support in our spending patterns and in our choices as consumers.  It matters that we say or don't say things when the world is taken over by pokie machines or homophobia or whatever.  It matters that we do or don't do things in the face of poverty and violence and corruption.

The yoke of Christ calls us to discipline and to a life of dedicated labour after the way of Jesus.  But it is also the promise of blessing, rest and healing in gentle communion with God.  This stole that I wear as a minister is a symbol of the yoke of Christ which I am vowed to carry all my days.  But each baptised Christian has made a pledge no less demanding and no less rewarding.  I encourage all of you to explore that pledge anew this day.

'Here I Am'

Genesis 22.1-14; Rom 6.12-23; Matt 10.40-42

When Abraham hears the voice of God calling to him, he replies ‘here I am’.  When Samuel the prophet hears the voice of God calling to him in the middle of the night, he also replies ‘here I am’.  When Mary of Nazareth is called by the angel Gabriel to be the mother of Jesus Christ, she replies ‘Here I am’.  ‘Here I am’.  It is a phrase that signifies the willingness of the individual to put aside whatever they might have been doing, whatever they might have planned to do, whatever (indeed) they might have previously understood the will of God to have been, in order to obey and give themselves over to this new word from God which arrives, fresh and new born, in the moment of the call. ‘Here I am’, says Abraham.  And taking his son, his only son Isaac, whom he loves, Abraham heads off to the mountain of Moriah to sacrifice not only his son, but everything he had come to believe about God’s plans for himself and his family up until that point.

The simplicity and immediacy of Abraham’s response in our text seems to offend our sense of how things would ‘really’ be, psychologically, if we ourselves we confronted with such a call.  Abraham had, afterall, been working to a rather different game-plan up until now.  Long ago, God had called him to leave his home in Ur and travel to a land far away where he had no family ties or right of claim to the land.  Then God had made a solemn covenant with him, promising that through his son Isaac, God would make of Abraham’s descendents a great nation through whom the whole world would be blessed.  And let’s not forget that God had brought Isaac into the world against the odds, in the years of his parent’s dotage, when the time for childbearing had well and truly passed!  Psychologically, then, I think I would have been quite disturbed if God suddenly turned around and said to me, ‘Oh, that game plan we’ve been working on all these years, I’ve decided to throw it away.  Time to do something different.  I want you to kill your son, and with him every sense of destiny that we have ever produced together’.  Psychologically, I think I would have been deeply disturbed at what was being proposed.  I think I would have struck up an argument with God right there, just as Abraham himself had done a few chapters earlier over the proposed destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  I would have argued that if God were really to go ahead with this change of plan, then God was nothing more than a two-faced liar who could not be trusted to keep a promise.  But there is no sign of an argument in the text we have received.  The text says, very simply, that Abraham took some wood and some fire, and his son Isaac, and headed off toward Moriah to make the sacrifice.

It should also be acknowledged that the story also offends many of us at a moral level.  How can the God of life, the God who called life into being from the watery chaos and condemned Cain for killing his brother Abel, now order his most faithful servant to kill his own son?  Isn’t there a fundamental inconsistency there?  Isn’t this kind of blood sacrifice the kind of thing that the pagan gods demanded?  Surely it is not the God of Jews and Christians, who would later say ‘do not kill’ to Moses on the Mount of Sinai, who now commands Abraham to kill his only son, whom he loves? Well, yes it is.  It is ‘Yahweh’, the God of the Jews, in a story that the Jewish people preserved as a treasured part of their holy canon of Scripture.  It is not a pagan import. So, what are we to make of all this ethical and psychological trauma, the trauma we ourselves experience in reading this text?  And why is there no sign of such disturbance in the text itself?

Time for a little theology!

Today’s gospel calls those who receive the word of God ‘prophets’ and ‘the righteous’.  But what does righteousness really mean, in Christian faith?  Is it to keep the commandments and follow the letter of the moral law?  Well yes . . . and no.  Yes, baptised Christians are indeed called to give themselves over to the good described by the Jewish law, to reject those attitudes and behaviours which make only for misery and death in favour of the way of life of goodness that leads to life.  That is what the Apostle says to his readers in Rome.  ‘Now that you have died with Christ to all that is wrong with the world,’ he says, ‘you are no longer the slaves of sin, but the slaves of righteousness.  So give your bodies over to doing what is right’.  OK, but that is not the whole story!  For the righteousness that Christians are now able to do is not something that they can either produce for themselves or, as something self-produced, depend on to get them into heaven.  The Apostle also writes that the righteousness of Christians is a gift from God that comes through faith in Jesus Christ, the son of God, who alone is righteous in God’s eyes.  It is not something that anyone is able to produce for themselves.  It is not a reward for being good and keeping the moral law.  It is a gift, the gift of Christ’s very life which, having been laid down for us on the cross, now wells up in us as the power of resurrection, the power of life beyond the wages or consequence of our failure to keep the moral law, namely death.

In this perspective, the Christian is not under law, but under grace.  We are called to do what is right, certainly, but what is right is no longer defined by a narrow keeping of the moral law, as if that could save us.  It is defined by a fundamental decision to trust in the promise of God and cling to God as one who graciously gives life, even to the dead.  According to Saint Paul, it is this very faith and trust in God’s promise that motivated Abraham.

What our Genesis text preserves, you see, is the virtue of this fundamental faith and trust in the God of life.  When God calls Abraham to sacrifice his son in an act that would appear to contradict everything that God had hitherto promised to do, Abraham chooses to believe that appearances can be deceiving.  He makes what the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard rightly called ‘a leap of faith’, a leap into what appears (to our human imagination) to be either irrational or immoral in the name of a fundamental faith and trust in the God whose gift to us is life, even when we are dead.  At the moment when the call came to him, Abraham had no way of knowing for sure how the story would finish.  The simplicity of his submission, his ‘Here I am’ exudes a quiet but hard-won faith that God would again gift him with life and future, in spite of the logic of what appeared to be happening, the logic that would lead to the death of his son, and with him, of the promise of a nation that would bless the whole world.  At this point, he chooses to believe in the God of life even as that God appears to be leading him into the land of death.  His faith is vindicated, of course.  The story ends with another call from God, and another ‘Here I am’ from Abraham, in which the boy Isaac is saved, and God provides a Christ-like ram to sacrifice in his place.  Still, at the moment when faith is called upon, the way is not always clear.  One must choose to trust or not to trust, to give oneself wholly over to God in a belief that all will be well, or else to second-guess God and proceed according to our own lights.

I put it to you that if we are really Christians, we cannot proceed according to our own lights.  I put it to you that our own lights get us nowhere except a place that is very dark and dead.  Where has the celebrated ‘reason’ of the so-called Enlightenment got us, if not to the world we actually live in, where technology is stealing away our very humanity, where the vicissitudes of cyber-space and the small-screen distance us from one another, and from caring for one another in the flesh?  And where has the ‘morality’ of the so-called Enlightenment got us, if not to a world where the powerful control everything, even the bodies and the appetites of the poor? Christians are called to listen to other voices, the voices of the prophets who proclaim a salvation that does not come from ourselves - our moral codes or our reason - but from a God who, in the figure of the Crucified One, has forgiven us our many sins and gifted even the dead with life.  To those who receive their word and believe it, to those who make a leap of faith into Christ’s arms, there is indeed a reward.  The reward that is Christ himself, the light of the world and the author of life in all its fullness.  So, to we who profess to believe, there remains the ongoing challenge that is as new today as it ever was.  When God calls, shall we reply with a ‘Just a minute, let me see how reasonable that request seems’ or a ‘I just need to see if that fits my moral code’?  Or shall we reply in the voice and with the faith of Abraham, ‘Here I am?’

Rublev's Philoxenia

Texts:  Genesis 1.1-2.4; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20

Today is Trinity Sunday, and that excites me a great deal.  You may find that surprising.  To the modern heart and mind, and even those of Christians, the Trinity can sound like an anachronistic formula from the mystical and magical past.  One might fairly ask questions about both the intellectual integrity and the social relevance of the doctrine.  Does the idea that the one God is really three make any sense?  And even if it did make sense, what difference would that make to anything important?  Would it stop Aboriginal deaths in custody, for example?  Or the war in Yemen?

I could spend the next fifteen minutes trying to answer those questions.  I could tell you that theologians of every confessional standpoint have rehabilitated the Trinity as perhaps the most important of Christian symbols, a symbol which mirrors and represents the whole history of God's identity and mission.  I could tell how the post-modern imagination has been drawn to the Trinity as a quintessential icon of the reality in which we live, composed as it is of that splendid interplay between identity and difference.  I could tell you how political and liberation theologians have found in the Trinity a model for re-making both church and world in the image of a God who is, first of all, an egalitarian community of love . . .   But I'm not going to go on with all that.  There's no need.  Because it is all present in this wonderful painting from 15^th century Russia.  It is all contained in Andrei Rublev's marvellous icon, know as the Philoxenia.

Why don't you look at it for a moment?  Take your time.  What do you notice? 

There are three figures in the painting, sitting at a round table.  Each wears a cloak and bears a staff, indicating that they are resting a while in the midst of a long journey.  The figures have androgynous features, that is, we can't be certain if they are men or women.  But we do know that they represent the three persons of the Trinity. The figure in the middle is Christ.  He is looking to the figure on the left, which is the Father; the Father appears to be gazing at both Christ and the Spirit, who is the third figure; the Spirit seems to be looking at both the Father and the chalice of wine which sits in the middle of the table.  There is only one cup of wine, which is apparently being shared by all three.  But if you look carefully, you will notice that the shapes of the Father and the Spirit form the silhouette of a larger chalice, which actually surrounds and contains Christ.  Finally, note that in the background of the picture are three objects:  a house or temple, an oak three, and a mountain.  You yourself, as you look at the picture, are in the foreground.

What does all this mean?  Many things, but I have time only to mention a few.  First, the seating arrangement of the three speaks of an equality between them.  There is none who is more important than the others.  There is none who sits at the head of the table, because the table is round.  God, you see, is more like a circle than a pyramid.  No one is the boss because all three are the boss.  They make their decisions together, and there is no room for hierarchy or for lording it over another.  Second, the three gaze at each other as if they are in love.  There is an uncanny knowing between them which can only be described with words like respect, deference, trust, hospitality, communion, peace.  The word communion is reinforced by their use of a single chalice of wine.  It is, of course, the Eucharistic cup, which stands for love poured out by a profound sacrifice of the one for another.  This sign of Christ’s crucifixion therefore says that at the centre of the relations between Father, Son and Spirit is a mutual self-giving for the other, a laying down of life that the others might be made alive. God, then, is a circle-dance of love where each is constantly being enlivened by the sacrifice of another.  In this view, God continues to be God only by a never-ending movement of mutual hospitality and giving.

Third, the painting invites its observers—that's you and me—to take our place at the table with Father, Christ, and Spirit.  There is a space spare, and its shape is a chalice filled with Jesus.  Here Rublev, who is from the Orthodox tradition, wants us to understand that we, too, may become part of the divine community:  if only we will accept the grace of God which overflows into the world in the shape of Christ crucified; if only we will take the cup of sacrifice and receive from it the renewing life of God;  if only we will accept the cruciform mission of the Trinity, to lay down our own lives for the sake of another.   The message is clear.  We may all become children of God if we will walk the way of the Christ; if, in baptism, we are willing to put aside the life of self-aggrandizement, and embrace a new existence controlled by Christ’s neighbour-directed compassion and mercy.  There's something in there, I think, about changing the world, about becoming involved in a revolution of radical hospitality.  Perhaps if Christians were to take that seriously, then the bloodshed in Australian holding cells could indeed be stopped?  Perhaps we could put aside our differences as Roman or non-Roman Christians, and share at the Eucharist together?

But what of those objects in the background of the icon?  The house of God, which is the church?  The tree of life, which is at the end of our journeys?  The mountain of revelation, where we meet the Lord and hear his word?   Each is there to remind us that God is forever present, to be encountered in any number of places along the way.  The trick is to make one's way with eyes and ears open and expectant.  Otherwise a house might just be a house, and a tree just a tree, and a mountain just a mountain.  It is the life of daily prayer, prayer immersed in the stories of God in the bible, which enables us to recognise God in all the business of life.  How is your prayer life going?  Have anyone ever taught you to pray?

Finally, Rublev's icon remind us of the Trinitarian form of that ritual we call the Lord's Supper or Holy Communion.  He wants to show us that wherever or whenever the supper is taken, the Trinitarian God is present and active in both church and world.  Have you ever noticed that the classical Communion prayer, sometimes known as the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, has three key elements?  The first is a prayer of thanksgiving to the Father-Creator (eucharistia) for everything that he has done to save us from our sins and make us whole once more.  The second is a remembering of Christ (anamnesis) and his sacrifice for the sake of the world.  This part culminates in the narrative of the last supper which Jesus shared with his disciples.  The final part invokes the creativity of the Holy Spirit (epiclesis), to make real the presence of Christ in the bread and wine, and make that presence real and effective in the mission and discipleship of the people of God, who go out from the feast as the newly constituted body of Christ.

A picture paints a thousand words.  But I hope this icon will inspire us to move beyond words and into an active communion with the Trinity of love.  Use it in prayer.  Allow God to draw you into the divine community, there to experience its grace and its love.  Allow God to send you out into the world, there to serve the poor and despised as Christ did; there to make your sacrifices for the sake of love and of peace.

Glory be to God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit­ - as in the beginning, so now and for ever, world without end. Amen.

Christ's Ascension: superabundant presence

Acts 1. 1-11; Psalm 47, 32-35; 1 Pet 4.12-14; 5.6-11; Jn 17.1-11

The story of the Ascension, where the risen Jesus takes leave of his disciples and is taken up into heaven by God, can be found only in Luke, the Gospel, and in The Acts of the Apostles.  You will not find the story in Matthew or John, and the reference to an ascension in Mark 16 comes from a very late manuscript which almost certainly relies on Luke’s account.  So the Ascension belongs to Luke.  It is his story.  But why does he tell us the story at all, where the other gospel writers do not?  And why does he think it so important that he tells it not once, but twice—once at the end of his Gospel and once in Acts?  These are questions I’d like to consider today.

One very modern reading of the Ascension is actually a rather distressing story, because it appears to both repeat and fulfill a story that has become very familiar in our modern age: the one about a God who deliberately takes his distance from those who need him, and who, in the end, abandons his people to their own powers of survival.  Even the Church sometimes reads the story thus.  On the television and in the press you will today hear religious voices, voices claiming to speak for the Church, who will tell you that God has indeed left us.  Because there is no longer any authoritative teacher amongst us, they say, we must each of us invent our spirituality, invent our morality, invent our religious practices.  Because Christ has taken leave of us, because God is either dead or permanently absent, we have no alternative except to accept responsibility for our own destinies, to assume the mantel of godhood ourselves. We are condemned, as it were, to a freedom without God.  

In his influential book, After God: the future of religion, the Cambridge philosopher Don Cupitt argues that from now on we must view Christian faith as a fictional novel which human beings, alone, have authored.   In this thoroughly modern schema, Luke’s Ascension story is cited as a one of the primary figures of divine abandonment.  First, God dies with Christ on the cross.  Then he appears as an illusory flash of memory and wishful thinking in the resurrection.  Finally, he disappears entirely into a cloud of superstitious obscurity at the Ascension.  And what of the Spirit that Christ promised, the Spirit who would come to us after he had gone away?  To the modernists, this “Spirit” is just another word for the spiritual life we invent in God’s absence.  The Spirit is our invented meaning-structures, something like a collective unconscious in which we collect the stories we have written to rescue ourselves from absurdity. 

Well, how ought one respond to such thinking?  Perhaps like this.  First, it is important to recognise the legitimacy of the experience from which it arises.  For many folk, Christ has indeed left the stage.  A Catholic friend recently told me she has stopped going to church because of the abuse of children by priests.  She couldn’t understand how a Church full of the Spirit of Christ could allow such a thing.  For her, any residual sense of Christ’s presence in the world has now disappeared.  And who can blame her, or any of the victims of abuse or repression, for seeing things like that?  Certainly not me!  Yet, today I would bear witness to another way of reading the Ascension story, and, as a consequence, another way of understanding the experience of abandonment.  For there is a bigger story here in Luke’s account, and I believe that if we can only allow ourselves this enlarged vista, then even the very real ‘fact’ and ‘experience’ of divine abandonment will turn out to be something other than what it appears to be.

Let me summarise what Luke has to say like this.  While, by virtue of the Ascension, Christ is indeed no longer present as a particular human being who occupies a particular place and time, he is nevertheless, also by virtue of the Ascension, more abundantly present and active than he has ever been before.  And this not as some kind of ghostly presence who hangs in the air but never takes form.  No, says Luke, Christ is now present as the material body of Christian believers, brought into being and inspired by the very Spirit that made Jesus who and what he was.  The Spirit now makes the Church what Jesus of Nazareth was, so infusing and shaping its life and work that the mission of Jesus continues in the Church as a real and tangible Christ-presence for the world.  

If Luke were here today, I think he would say that the modernist use of his story seriously neglects some of the crucial details.  There is certainly a withdrawal of the divine presence here.  Christ is taken from the community into heaven.  But it would be premature and reductionist to then assume that the gap, the emptiness left by God’s withdrawal, may be filled only by the activity and imagination of human beings.  Now, I want you to listen carefully, because this next bit is a little tricky.  Presence is not, as the moderns insist, simply about being able to see and touch things in such a way that we can get our heads around them, to so imagine things that they take on an objective solidity that we can measure and put boundaries around.  Presence is not, as the philosopher Edmund Husserl claimed in 1913, something which human beings make and cause to appear by the power of their thinking.  On the contrary!  Following Luke, I put it to you that presence is more properly what is given us in the resurrection and ascension of Christ - the irreducible power and authority of the Other (exousia in Greek), a presence which so exceeds and overwhelms our powers of comprehension that when God visits us, while we know he has done so, but we are left powerless to explain how or why.  Even to ourselves.  Why?  Because the Other is a strong and passionate love that takes hold of us completely, body and soul, covering and surrounding us like baptismal water, entering our lungs as if to drown us.  In a repetition of the death and resurrection of Christ, our human powers are put to death, our powers to know things, to objectify and use other people, to control who and how God would be.  We suddenly find ourselves dispossessed of even our power to picture what God is like.  So much so, that we imagine that God has abandoned us.  We flounder, we struggle, we suffer terribly.  We feel that God has left the theatre, and we are left alone with nothing but a forlorn hope.  We despair.  We die . . .  But that is not the end.  Finally, this Other arrives in our bodies as the power of a new life, life lived on a plane hitherto unimagined, life lived in communion with the God who is love.  In that power, we are commissioned and sent to bear witness, not to the power of this presence in our lives, but to the power of our lives in this presence, a presence forever marked now by the sacred names of “Christ,” “Spirit,” “Love”.

Whew!  Let me try and say all that in another way.  In the wake of the Ascension, Christ remains present to us, but this presence is of a different order.  It is what Jean-Luc Marion calls a ‘saturating presence,’ a presence which so pervades and infuses the world with God’s glory that it confuses and dazzles our limited imaginations.  Ever heard the expression “He couldn’t see the wood for the trees”?  It’s like that.  While we may not be able to pin Christ down to a particular bodily form and draw borders around him which define where he is an where he isn’t, he is abundantly, even super-abundantly, present in material realities that we encounter everyday:  in the body which is the Church, past, present and future; in the bread and wine broken and poured out for the life of the world; in the Scriptures read and preached; and in the stranger, the widow and the orphan we are called to meet in our ministry of care.  Christ is ascended to the Father so he can be “everywhere present”.  

But how, I hear you ask, does this presence really address our sense of God’s absence?  What good is a superabundant presence if it dazzles our eyes so much that we cannot see that Christ is with us?  Here we turn, for a moment, to John’s Gospel.  We read there a prayer of Jesus for the Church, which comes as the end of a long conversation which John stages at the Last Supper before Jesus is crucified.  It is a conversation about how the disciples will cope when Jesus has gone.  As with Luke, John does not portray Jesus’ imminent disappearance as a withdrawal of presence, pure and simple.  In a profoundly paradoxical statement in chapter 14.28, Jesus says to his friends “I am going away; but I am coming to you”.   Hear that?  “It is by going away that I will come to you”.  For John, the going away is exactly what is needed in order to accomplish a more profound communion with Jesus than was ever before possible, a communion which echoes and redoubles the love which Jesus already shares with his Father.   For Jesus will now come in the Spirit to gather his people into the divine presence by the power (exousia again) of the Name which is “I Am”, the divine name, which signifies here a participation with Jesus in that sacrificial giving and receiving of divine love which we call, in shorthand, the Trinity.  It is a participation which goes way beyond knowing and seeing, or even imagining.  Love, you see, does not cling to the thoughts and images by which we would normally try to master each other.  Love surrenders to the invisible gaze of this other who can neither be seen nor objectified, and learns to do the same by way of return.  Love surrenders itself, as Christ surrendered his self. And in surrendering, it finally abandons its sense of abandonment.  

I conclude with this.  The Ascension is for Christians both a fact and a promise.  The fact is this: that Christ is everywhere present as the authority and power of God, a power which before and behind us, a power which forever seeks our surrender to God’s love.  And here is the promise:  if we will first discipline ourselves, through prayer, to discern Christ’s presence in the midst; and if we will then surrender ourselves to his transgressive love, body and soul; then that wound of abandonment which haunts every human being will ultimately find its healing.  For Christ has not left us as orphans.  He comes to us tangibly and bodily every day, to love and care for us as only God knows how.  If only we will recognise and surrender. 

Garry Deverell