SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS, NT
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16th 2011
(PENTECOST 18 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 29)
Readings: Exodus 33.12-23
Psalm 99
1 Thessalonians 1.1-10
Matthew 22.15-33
To comprehend our communion with God we need to know the back-story, in Māori the whakapapa, of our faith. We are in the spiritual loins of our forebears as they are called into ‘peoplehood’ by a compassionate God. We are in the spiritual loins of our forebears as they are called to be God’s chosen people, led out of the sweat-yards of the Nile delta (where tragically our sisters and brothers in faith are once more in great danger: thank God for those of our Muslim cousins who have stood in solidarity with their suffering and vulnerable Christian neighbours). The people of Israel had previously been little more than a no-people, a rootless and wandering Middle Eastern tribe, descendants of patriarchs touched and blessed by God, but a people without direction. We are called by God never to forget that we, spiritually speaking, were once refugees: we were boat people even if our ocean was a desert. We were fleeing from oppression.
These are the people whose heart-cry God heard as they slaved for Pharaoh in Egypt. God heard them and had compassion not because they were a holy or nice or righteous people. God heard their heart-cries because they were a suffering people. The cries of suffering people have first-class access to the heart of the Creator. Our suffering, refugee ancestors were led by God from Egypt, perhaps in waves, or perhaps in one great and miraculous migration, escaping slavery, but soon turning on the hand that saved and fed them, soon whinging about the flavour of the manna. Rather than offering lives of thanksgiving to a saving God, they built a golden calf, generating an alternative deity: God, you may recall, was not amused. We must always recall the extent to which the story of the recalcitrant people of God has repeated itself – the degree to which for example the new people of God, the Christian community, soon forgot and still forgets its call to compassion and justice, and refuses to hear the voice of those who Frantz Fanon called ‘the wretched of the earth’.
It is worth pausing to reflect on our own golden calves. As a new religion Christianity displayed at its best considerable integrity until the fourth century, establishing itself as a religion of conspicuous love and justice, bravery and compassion. Later we tended to forget our vocation to the way of the cross, and at our worst began to proclaim the way of the sword instead. At our worst we have done that ever since – or at least until recent decades when we lost, thank God, our institutionalised supremacy (outside the US Empire).
We were not, thank God, always at our worst, despite our frequent mistakes, and more than all Muslims are terrorists – as the brave Muslim protectors are reminding us in Egypt. Few would forget, once they heard the story, the bravery of the Northern Territory, Arnhem Land missionaries who stood in the way of the guns of those European Australians who would shoot indigenous people as a form of entertainment. These missionaries were not operating out of a theology of the sword, but a theology of the cross. Still: Our Anglican denominations, perhaps even our own faith community, certainly ourselves as individuals, have had moments when we have allowed shibboleths to usurp the place of God in our priority. We have, like Moses’ recalcitrant people, come very close to becoming the no-people, the no-person we were in the loins of our ancestors.
God is a God of grace, and, although his rescued chosen people are soon a stiff-necked people, God does not reject them. Over and again that is the story of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is the story even of our Christian Testament, the story of our Christian history, and the story of our own lives. God maintains a presence with the people of God, tainted as our history may be; Moses continues to be God’s chosen instrument as the wayward people are led to their undeserved destiny.
When Matthew depicts the Pharisees’ approach to Jesus ‘to trap him’ he makes clear that they have lost all respect. We who are believers have the hindsight advantage of knowing the identity of Jesus as Lord (either in terms of the textual narrative, or in our own lives, or both). There is little doubt though that Matthew is depicting the Pharisees as a people who have lost respect for all that is wise and holy, not just Jesus. The come to trap Jesus, not to engage in conversation with him. They come armed with obsequious phrases. They come to sneer: it is not a good way to gain insight or wisdom (though we as Christ-bearers have often adopted a similar attitude when we have encountered ancient cultures previously unknown to us, and sneered at their presumed unsophistication).
Matthew’s Pharisees encounter something greater than they can comprehend. The God of Jesus Christ is not a player of games, and despite hundreds of years of misinterpretation – misinterpretation that was caused by Christian interpreters losing the perspective of the cross and interpreting from the perspective of the sword – Jesus does not here give the Emperor of Rome a ringing endorsement. The tone is far more one of ‘render as much as you like to Caesar, but God will always be God’. Wherever claims to divinity are made – whether in the form of a golden calf or the form of an emperor who proclaims himself divine – God’s voice of justice will eventually speak out, and false deities will crumble.
These days, as we of the community of Jesus are increasingly marginalized, the voice of God will be an ever more subtle revelation, an ever more counter-cultural revelation of divine will. Prime Ministers and Political parties may have their own golden calves, and little time for any consideration of matters of faith, justice, or God at all, yet even so sometimes God’s compassionate voice will speak. While it’s too early to crow, the events surrounding the rejection of off-shore bases for the so-called ‘processing’ of asylum seekers suggest that even in contemporary Australia in all its disinterest in Christianity the voice of the compassionate God can still be heard. This is so, it seems, despite valiant attempts by Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard to out-tough each other, to out-Hanson each other in the name of a Golden Calf named National Interest. Whatever the national interest – the head of Caesar, the sacred cow – might be, the interests of God are always love and compassionate justice. Refugees, like the Hebrews in Egypt, will find a home.
The onus will be on us to be the face of Christ in the home they have found. In every possible way.
TLBWY
Sunday 23 October 2011
Friday 7 October 2011
Inclusion or Disgrace?
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9th 2011
(PENTECOST 17 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 28)
Readings: Exodus 32.1-14
Ps 106.1-6, 20-24
Philippians 4.1-9
Matthew 22.1-14
If we were to take but one message away from the Year of Matthew, year after year, (or third year after third year!) it would be the need to recognize that the context in which a biblical text is written is always an inescapably powerful weight resting around the shoulders of the text and its interpreters. Approaches to the scriptures that see them as effectively dictated from on high may well provide a great sense of satisfaction to the reader, to any person in the in-crowd, but they will not proclaim the grace-filled, welcoming and embracing Reign of God, the central message that we are commissioned by Jesus to proclaim. An outstanding contemporary Serbo-Croatian theologian, Miroslav Volf, has written a book called Exclusion and Embrace, in which he argues that a church that does not embrace inclusion even at the cost of reconciliation with bitter enemies (he is, remember, a Balkan Christian who saw the brutality of Slobodan Milosevic and his allies) is failing to embrace the Great Commission of Jesus.
To be a church of welcome in our post-modern world is to be a church that listens to the ways our words may fall on the ears of those who are hurting most in our communities and societies. We may, thank God, no longer be the powerful player that we once were in the western world – governments fail to quake in their boots when an Anglican or other Christian leader makes a pronouncement these days – but we are nevertheless a people of privilege. We are the wealthy of God’s earth, and most of us live lives of considerable comfort. Matthew was writing the gospel for a community who were unsure whether they would see their next meal, let alone where it would come from. Matthew’s telling of the Jesus is a gospel of hope for a frightened people. We are generally not a frightened people – though moments of trial in our lives may frighten us, and can open our ears to hear as Matthew’s people once heard.
You may have seen the chilling and multi Academy Award winning 1997 Italian movie film Life is Beautiful , directed and starred in by Roberto Benigni. In it the lead character, played by Benigni, creates a narrative alternative to reality in a concentration camp in order to protect his pre-school son from the Nazis. It is a chilling film, one I hope never to see again, yet undoubtedly one of the most powerful films I have ever seen. The point here, though, is that Benigni’s character creates a narrative in which the four year old boy believes he is in a game in which the child who remains hidden the longest will win a German tank. By this Benigni’s character conceals the boy from the Nazis, and although his own life is taken in the closing moments of Nazi control of the camp, the boy’s life is saved.
While we rightly look on Hitler’s Third Reich as one of western history’s darkest hours, we need from time to time to recall that the earliest Christians underwent their periods of abject fear and persecution, and that the most exclusive of the Christian writings - not least the Book of Revelation that some of us will soon be studying together – were written in such a context. As with Benigni’s tale, Matthew tells the story of Jesus in such a way as to offer hope – the hope of redemption and of divine retribution – to Christ-followers living in fear for their lives.
We could of course use this analysis to dismiss the hope-filled writings of our scriptures as pie-in-the-sky. It needs to be said that these narratives would not have transformed frightened believers into willing witnesses and even martyrs were it not for their over-powering experience of the presence of the victorious risen Christ who came to them in worship, in scripture and in fellowship. I fear too many of our most liberal analysts of the scriptures forget this, turning resurrection stories into a motion passed by a committee of story-tellers. It was not so, but rather the life-transforming experience of those who first and subsequently encountered the risen Lord.
At the same time though we must remember that as they began to tell the Jesus story they began to be victimised. Again, as I’ve said a few times recently, we lost the impetus of the Jesus story when we became the dominant religious paradigm, and used the story to keep the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate. Eventually, tragically, in recent decades we have been exposed as having blundered into an arguably worse morass, enabling a church culture that allowed and then set about protecting perpetrators of gross betrayals of human decency, let alone of the gospel. In recent decades we have come once more to be a minority in society, to be back where some of the first Christians were – though perhaps not a persecuted minority like Matthew’s people. Nevertheless, as a marginalised and sometimes parodied people of Jesus we are cast back on the mettle of our own integrity, cast back for example to the place where Paul’s Philippians were (twenty years perhaps before Matthew) as they struggled to be Christ-bearers in a world that was largely scornful of their new religious movement.
Even there though, as Paul knew only too well from his struggles particularly with the Corinthian and to a lesser extent the Galatian people, there was room for destabilisation of the Jesus community. Philippians is, along with 1 Thessalonians, Paul’s most loving letter, but it is not without its cautions. Euodia and Syntyche, perhaps amongst the founding mothers of the Philippian Jesus community, are beginning to show signs of slipping into a power struggle, that most human yet most demonic of destructive force in church communities. Unlike the Galatians or the heinous Corinthians, the Philippians have not surrendered to the dark side, but the possibility is there, and Paul does all he can to nip it in the bud: I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche, to be of the same mind in the Lord. They have, Paul indicates, done much for the gospel, but this can be undone.
We need to know that too, for our world is in that respect unchanged from theirs: there can be no place for power struggles in the servant people of God. Paul – genuinely believing his own Galatian adage ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’, offers his own life as an example (few of us would be so brave!). Paul has just written I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death that somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead; now he adds whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things … it is these things that have been for years now the sole grace-filled focus of his life. That is our challenge too, as we seek to become a grace-filled, inclusive people of God, graced guests at the Feast of God, a people of inclusion and embrace.
TLBWY
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9th 2011
(PENTECOST 17 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 28)
Readings: Exodus 32.1-14
Ps 106.1-6, 20-24
Philippians 4.1-9
Matthew 22.1-14
If we were to take but one message away from the Year of Matthew, year after year, (or third year after third year!) it would be the need to recognize that the context in which a biblical text is written is always an inescapably powerful weight resting around the shoulders of the text and its interpreters. Approaches to the scriptures that see them as effectively dictated from on high may well provide a great sense of satisfaction to the reader, to any person in the in-crowd, but they will not proclaim the grace-filled, welcoming and embracing Reign of God, the central message that we are commissioned by Jesus to proclaim. An outstanding contemporary Serbo-Croatian theologian, Miroslav Volf, has written a book called Exclusion and Embrace, in which he argues that a church that does not embrace inclusion even at the cost of reconciliation with bitter enemies (he is, remember, a Balkan Christian who saw the brutality of Slobodan Milosevic and his allies) is failing to embrace the Great Commission of Jesus.
To be a church of welcome in our post-modern world is to be a church that listens to the ways our words may fall on the ears of those who are hurting most in our communities and societies. We may, thank God, no longer be the powerful player that we once were in the western world – governments fail to quake in their boots when an Anglican or other Christian leader makes a pronouncement these days – but we are nevertheless a people of privilege. We are the wealthy of God’s earth, and most of us live lives of considerable comfort. Matthew was writing the gospel for a community who were unsure whether they would see their next meal, let alone where it would come from. Matthew’s telling of the Jesus is a gospel of hope for a frightened people. We are generally not a frightened people – though moments of trial in our lives may frighten us, and can open our ears to hear as Matthew’s people once heard.
You may have seen the chilling and multi Academy Award winning 1997 Italian movie film Life is Beautiful , directed and starred in by Roberto Benigni. In it the lead character, played by Benigni, creates a narrative alternative to reality in a concentration camp in order to protect his pre-school son from the Nazis. It is a chilling film, one I hope never to see again, yet undoubtedly one of the most powerful films I have ever seen. The point here, though, is that Benigni’s character creates a narrative in which the four year old boy believes he is in a game in which the child who remains hidden the longest will win a German tank. By this Benigni’s character conceals the boy from the Nazis, and although his own life is taken in the closing moments of Nazi control of the camp, the boy’s life is saved.
While we rightly look on Hitler’s Third Reich as one of western history’s darkest hours, we need from time to time to recall that the earliest Christians underwent their periods of abject fear and persecution, and that the most exclusive of the Christian writings - not least the Book of Revelation that some of us will soon be studying together – were written in such a context. As with Benigni’s tale, Matthew tells the story of Jesus in such a way as to offer hope – the hope of redemption and of divine retribution – to Christ-followers living in fear for their lives.
We could of course use this analysis to dismiss the hope-filled writings of our scriptures as pie-in-the-sky. It needs to be said that these narratives would not have transformed frightened believers into willing witnesses and even martyrs were it not for their over-powering experience of the presence of the victorious risen Christ who came to them in worship, in scripture and in fellowship. I fear too many of our most liberal analysts of the scriptures forget this, turning resurrection stories into a motion passed by a committee of story-tellers. It was not so, but rather the life-transforming experience of those who first and subsequently encountered the risen Lord.
At the same time though we must remember that as they began to tell the Jesus story they began to be victimised. Again, as I’ve said a few times recently, we lost the impetus of the Jesus story when we became the dominant religious paradigm, and used the story to keep the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate. Eventually, tragically, in recent decades we have been exposed as having blundered into an arguably worse morass, enabling a church culture that allowed and then set about protecting perpetrators of gross betrayals of human decency, let alone of the gospel. In recent decades we have come once more to be a minority in society, to be back where some of the first Christians were – though perhaps not a persecuted minority like Matthew’s people. Nevertheless, as a marginalised and sometimes parodied people of Jesus we are cast back on the mettle of our own integrity, cast back for example to the place where Paul’s Philippians were (twenty years perhaps before Matthew) as they struggled to be Christ-bearers in a world that was largely scornful of their new religious movement.
Even there though, as Paul knew only too well from his struggles particularly with the Corinthian and to a lesser extent the Galatian people, there was room for destabilisation of the Jesus community. Philippians is, along with 1 Thessalonians, Paul’s most loving letter, but it is not without its cautions. Euodia and Syntyche, perhaps amongst the founding mothers of the Philippian Jesus community, are beginning to show signs of slipping into a power struggle, that most human yet most demonic of destructive force in church communities. Unlike the Galatians or the heinous Corinthians, the Philippians have not surrendered to the dark side, but the possibility is there, and Paul does all he can to nip it in the bud: I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche, to be of the same mind in the Lord. They have, Paul indicates, done much for the gospel, but this can be undone.
We need to know that too, for our world is in that respect unchanged from theirs: there can be no place for power struggles in the servant people of God. Paul – genuinely believing his own Galatian adage ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’, offers his own life as an example (few of us would be so brave!). Paul has just written I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death that somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead; now he adds whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things … it is these things that have been for years now the sole grace-filled focus of his life. That is our challenge too, as we seek to become a grace-filled, inclusive people of God, graced guests at the Feast of God, a people of inclusion and embrace.
TLBWY
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