(From the Pew Sheet)
The international outcry surrounding the ‘pranking’ of the London hospital where the Duchess of Gloucester was undergoing treatment has been one of those events in which massive and to some extent righteous indignation has colluded with a myriad other sentiments, not least opportunistic anti-Australianism, to generate a tsunami of media and political response.
By now presenters Mel Greig and Michael Christian are mere collateral in the frenzy. That’s probably sensible: they were doing their job, and while they have done what Lenny (in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men) called ‘a bad thing’ they are really no more than pawns in someone else’s obscene game. In the current bloodlust I doubt the frenzifiers will be content until one or both of them are imprisoned or, worse, takes their own life. That cycle of revenge must be broken.
As always when we look at the cycles of sin, in this case the sin that led to nurse Jacintha Saldanha tragic death, the tendrils work their way beyond the frontline. The chains of command and management of 2DayFM and its parent company, who should have intervened before Greig and Christian aired their prank, are certainly culpable. If Greig and Christian didn’t consult then management are still at fault for permitting such a culture to evolve.
That nebulous creature that Phillip Adams calls ‘dear listener’ is perhaps the most culpable of all. How dare we become a culture that thinks it’s okay to invade the privacy of a 14 year old girl, as 2DayFM did some months ago, to ascertain the secrets of her sex life? How dare we become a culture that thinks it’s funny to con private or public individuals merely for the sake of entertainment (and, let it be said, the ABC’s The Chasers falls into the same category)? Is exposure of an individual by lies and chicanery for the purposes of entertainment a decent act? A society that thinks that it is okay to laugh at deception is a society that is losing its soul. Jacintha Saldanha and her family have paid the price.
έ̉ν Χριστω̣̃ – (Fr) Michael
Wednesday 12 December 2012
Saturday 8 December 2012
'only look on us as found in Him’
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, December 9th, 2012 (SECOND SUNDAY of ADVENT)
Readings: Micah 3.1-18
Song of Zechariah
Philippians 1.3-11
Luke 3.1-16
It is probably worth recalling from time to time that there are a myriad ways to read the scriptures, and of course a myriad-myriad readings or interpretations that result. Context, as I often say, is everything, but even the contexts are myriad: there are the contexts in which the recorded events took place, the context in which they were recorded, the contexts in which they became ‘scripture’, and various variations on a theme of the context in which we read them. We are reading them in church, in a more or less isolated semi-tropical western city, in the twenty-first century. Few of us are young, few of us are anything but Anglo-Saxon; we read the scriptures not as negro slaves of the 1800s or as Asian women or as – yet – those persecuted for believing. That time I think will come, but it is not so yet. It may or may not be in our life-time.
The scene we have just read is one of several in the New Testament that indicate that, as the Jesus community spread out into the Roman Empire, it came into contact with a rival community loyal to the memory and mission of John the Baptist. There were indeed other claimants to religious Messiah-dom or similar, as we learn in the Book of Acts, but that need not detain us here. What may be useful to notice is that the Christians, followers of an executed leader, rubbed shoulders with the followers of another executed leader, the Christians’ leaders kinsman. Eventually those who sort to perpetrate the Baptist's message appear either to have given up or, more probably, were absorbed benevolently into the Christian community as the resurrection claims and worship experience of the Christians claimed a more impressive handhold on the hearts of those who were, with credibility, following John’s merely political and religious calls to reform. Gradually, in times of persecution and oppression, the powerful Spirit-enabled experience of the presence of the Risen Lord encountered in fellowship and worship inspired the Baptist’s followers to adopt him not as Messiah but as forerunner to the Messiah: I must decrease, he must increase (as the fourth gospel puts it).
I personally find this a useful reminder of the powerful impact the spiritual experiences of worship had on the early Christians, and of the centrality of the claims to resurrection hope, bodily resurrection hope, that were at the centre of the early Christians’ message. We surrender them as I have said and will say many times, at peril of death to our faith.
Yet also at the heart of Christianity in its infancy was the palpable expectation of the imminent return of Jesus, striding as it were across the clouds to wind up history and take his followers to their eternal home. As I have suggested in my pew sheet musings, I have a more de-mythologised and possibly even agnostic approach to the question of the parousia, the Second Coming. If that appears that I have an inconsistent approach to the themes of scripture I can only plead a precedent in and amongst the early Christians, who were as early as the third decade of Christianity beginning to revise their expectations of Jesus’ return. I prefer to speak in terms of God’s embrace, as I said last week, of history, not merely that ‘God has the whole world in his hands’ but that all cosmic history is within the embrace of God. It seems to me that the scriptural pictures of a sudden end must be given some cognizance, but that we must also recognize in the language of parousia our own preparedness to meet the Creator as Judge, our own preparedness to stand in the searching light of Christ, knowing that we have not been good enough, knowing that we have much sorry-saying to do (which we pre-enact in our liturgical and private confessions). We need to plead that God will look, as the all but unsurpassed William Bright hymn puts it, ‘not on our misusings of his grace, our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim’ but ‘only look on us as found in Him’, as found in the crucified redeemer.
I would then not want to lose (though I often do) the sense of urgency in biblical apocalyptic: ‘even now the axe is lying at the foot of the tree’. Nor, though, would I want to lose sight of the social justice dimension of apocalyptic: whoever has two coats must share’. As international soccer officials workout how to spend millions on goal detection technology for FIFA it is worth wondering how many meals that sort of money might purchase for those fleeing the hatreds of Syria. And less I let myself off the hook, I might recall that I have far more shirts, shoes, money than 95% of the world. Look not on our misusings of thy grace.
Yet the gospel is good news, not bad news. No we do not deserve the forgiveness of God, but as the gospel character put it, ‘only say the word, and I shall be healed’. We must not cheapen grace, yet grace is all surpassing, and there in the piercing judgement stare of the returning Christ, at the end of history or the end of our histories, there is a word of welcome: ‘come, eat with me’. Do I deserve it? No! Only sit in the car with me as someone drives at 67 kmh down the 100 kph sections of the Tiger Brennan Drive and you will discover, if you did not already know, that I am far from a fine model of all that I preach! I suspect though that most of us are not, and there is the reminder of our need for the pleading of Christ. We cannot abuse the forgiveness of God, nor can we live up to it.
In the end we can but plead again and again that we are transformed to be practisers of love. That is what Paul turns to over and again in his letters: Love. Embody love, practise live, be love. Love God, love neighbour, love self: we fall short of all three. For that very reason we must turn time and again to the coming Christ and seek his healing hand.
TLBWY
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, December 9th, 2012 (SECOND SUNDAY of ADVENT)
Readings: Micah 3.1-18
Song of Zechariah
Philippians 1.3-11
Luke 3.1-16
It is probably worth recalling from time to time that there are a myriad ways to read the scriptures, and of course a myriad-myriad readings or interpretations that result. Context, as I often say, is everything, but even the contexts are myriad: there are the contexts in which the recorded events took place, the context in which they were recorded, the contexts in which they became ‘scripture’, and various variations on a theme of the context in which we read them. We are reading them in church, in a more or less isolated semi-tropical western city, in the twenty-first century. Few of us are young, few of us are anything but Anglo-Saxon; we read the scriptures not as negro slaves of the 1800s or as Asian women or as – yet – those persecuted for believing. That time I think will come, but it is not so yet. It may or may not be in our life-time.
The scene we have just read is one of several in the New Testament that indicate that, as the Jesus community spread out into the Roman Empire, it came into contact with a rival community loyal to the memory and mission of John the Baptist. There were indeed other claimants to religious Messiah-dom or similar, as we learn in the Book of Acts, but that need not detain us here. What may be useful to notice is that the Christians, followers of an executed leader, rubbed shoulders with the followers of another executed leader, the Christians’ leaders kinsman. Eventually those who sort to perpetrate the Baptist's message appear either to have given up or, more probably, were absorbed benevolently into the Christian community as the resurrection claims and worship experience of the Christians claimed a more impressive handhold on the hearts of those who were, with credibility, following John’s merely political and religious calls to reform. Gradually, in times of persecution and oppression, the powerful Spirit-enabled experience of the presence of the Risen Lord encountered in fellowship and worship inspired the Baptist’s followers to adopt him not as Messiah but as forerunner to the Messiah: I must decrease, he must increase (as the fourth gospel puts it).
I personally find this a useful reminder of the powerful impact the spiritual experiences of worship had on the early Christians, and of the centrality of the claims to resurrection hope, bodily resurrection hope, that were at the centre of the early Christians’ message. We surrender them as I have said and will say many times, at peril of death to our faith.
Yet also at the heart of Christianity in its infancy was the palpable expectation of the imminent return of Jesus, striding as it were across the clouds to wind up history and take his followers to their eternal home. As I have suggested in my pew sheet musings, I have a more de-mythologised and possibly even agnostic approach to the question of the parousia, the Second Coming. If that appears that I have an inconsistent approach to the themes of scripture I can only plead a precedent in and amongst the early Christians, who were as early as the third decade of Christianity beginning to revise their expectations of Jesus’ return. I prefer to speak in terms of God’s embrace, as I said last week, of history, not merely that ‘God has the whole world in his hands’ but that all cosmic history is within the embrace of God. It seems to me that the scriptural pictures of a sudden end must be given some cognizance, but that we must also recognize in the language of parousia our own preparedness to meet the Creator as Judge, our own preparedness to stand in the searching light of Christ, knowing that we have not been good enough, knowing that we have much sorry-saying to do (which we pre-enact in our liturgical and private confessions). We need to plead that God will look, as the all but unsurpassed William Bright hymn puts it, ‘not on our misusings of his grace, our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim’ but ‘only look on us as found in Him’, as found in the crucified redeemer.
I would then not want to lose (though I often do) the sense of urgency in biblical apocalyptic: ‘even now the axe is lying at the foot of the tree’. Nor, though, would I want to lose sight of the social justice dimension of apocalyptic: whoever has two coats must share’. As international soccer officials workout how to spend millions on goal detection technology for FIFA it is worth wondering how many meals that sort of money might purchase for those fleeing the hatreds of Syria. And less I let myself off the hook, I might recall that I have far more shirts, shoes, money than 95% of the world. Look not on our misusings of thy grace.
Yet the gospel is good news, not bad news. No we do not deserve the forgiveness of God, but as the gospel character put it, ‘only say the word, and I shall be healed’. We must not cheapen grace, yet grace is all surpassing, and there in the piercing judgement stare of the returning Christ, at the end of history or the end of our histories, there is a word of welcome: ‘come, eat with me’. Do I deserve it? No! Only sit in the car with me as someone drives at 67 kmh down the 100 kph sections of the Tiger Brennan Drive and you will discover, if you did not already know, that I am far from a fine model of all that I preach! I suspect though that most of us are not, and there is the reminder of our need for the pleading of Christ. We cannot abuse the forgiveness of God, nor can we live up to it.
In the end we can but plead again and again that we are transformed to be practisers of love. That is what Paul turns to over and again in his letters: Love. Embody love, practise live, be love. Love God, love neighbour, love self: we fall short of all three. For that very reason we must turn time and again to the coming Christ and seek his healing hand.
TLBWY
Saturday 1 December 2012
Combatting amnesia
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012 (FIRST SUNDAY of ADVENT)
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012 (FIRST SUNDAY of ADVENT)
Readings:
Jeremiah 33.14-16
Psalm
25.1-10
1
Thessalonians 3.9-13
Luke 21.25-38
Some nine or ten times in Luke’s gospel telling we find
reference to signs. Bluntly there are in Luke’s scheme two types of sign: good
signs and bad signs. Luke is not one for befuddling complexities: good signs
come from God, bad signs are the speculative fantasies of human beings. At a
time when the idiot fringes of the media are morbidly obsessed with the
hitherto ignored Mayan Calendar, disregarding the explanations of Mayan observers,
playing with the entertainment-hungry imagination of a bored public and
counting down to yet another end of the world we stand reminded that there is
nothing new under the sun. There will always be those who are gullible, believing
that the ennui of life might be alleviated
by some new celebrity scandal or the end of the world.
Jesus sets a different challenge. His challenge to those who
would follow him is to read the times as the times that are embraced by God.
When early on Easter morning we light the paschal calendar and the priest
intones a prayer declaring all time to be God’s time, declaring that God is the
Alpha and Omega in whom all time is embraced, we are entering deep into the
world of Luke’s understanding. Jesus, as Luke tells the story, is uninterested
in idle speculation – whether by those who purport to be his followers or those
who are uninterested in the Way of Jesus Christ.
Luke – or indeed Jesus in his dinner discourse – uses a kind
of creative or constructive nostalgia in order to generate a narrative of hope
for the future. A people who forget their past, a people with amnesia, are a
people who are losing their soul. At a time of persecution, such as that into which
the western Church is probably currently sliding, the temptation is to be overladen
with images of our failings. Because some
church workers, clergy included, have betrayed the gospel with atrocities,
predominately sexual and predatory, we are tempted to a form of amnesia that
tells us that all bearers of the
image or name of Christ are at worst predatory or at best dysfunctional human
beings. This is only a shadow form of the suffering that has been undergone by
Indigenous peoples in Australia and throughout the colonial world. Indigenous
peoples have often experienced the absolute and systematic dismantling of their
corporate story in the name of modernization and even, sometimes,
evangelization. This is only a shadow form, too, of the suffering that has been
experienced by many of our forebears in faith, and indeed is still being
experienced by our sisters and brothers in Christ in some parts of the world
today. Nevertheless it is a wakeup call for us all in the cosy West, and things
will not get easier.
Jesus reminds those who gather with him at table of the
story of God’s hand on the chosen people. Luke deliberately calls to mind these
words, depicting the events of this meal not as a time of tension and betrayal –
he does not even mention the presence of Judas at the table – but as a focussed
attempt by Jesus to remind his guests at table of God’s firm hand on their
remarkable history of saving exodus and continued survival against all odds.
Luke depicts the events in this way precisely because the Christian
community was, by the time he was recording these events, experiencing
alienation and persecution. He wanted them to know clearly that they were now a
people held in the hand of the saving redeeming, history-transforming God, that
no matter what might befall them as individuals, that the redeeming hand of God
was greater. As Luke builds his crescendo towards the events of Holy Week and
Easter he wants us to know, if I may be anachronistic for a moment, the truth
of Luther’s famous words, variously translated, but here rendered
… take
they our life, goods, fame, child and wife,
Let these all be gone, they yet have nothing won;
The kingdom ours remaineth.
Let these all be gone, they yet have nothing won;
The kingdom ours remaineth.
Faith in the resurrected Christ, it has to be emphasized, is
not about the avoidance of our own suffering and death. We may suffer, and we will die – we will not even ‘pass away’
as our modern fluffy parlance prefers. We will die. There is (if I may digress
momentarily) an irony that we now live in a world wherein we can put any four
lettered word we like on the bumper of our car, but the verb ‘to die’ is verboten.
Luke’s Jesus – and therefore
I suggest both the historical Luke and the historical Jesus – demands that his
audience stands head held high no matter what befalls them. No one claims this
is easy. The early Christians’ belief in the presence of the risen Christ in
their lives and in their corporate life as community transformed contexts that
could have been contexts of deepest despair into times of faith celebration and
almost brutal optimism. I believe – and I don’t want to experience this – that this
is a charism (a gift) that can and will come to believers in time of
persecution, that it is, or rather it is, rather than some of the
fluffy stuff we emphasize in times of comfort, that this is a gift of the
Spirit to persevere against all odds, even when death appears to have the final
word in my life or yours. The God who
led the people of Israel out of Egypt, and led them home again out of Babylon,
will lead the new people of God safely out of the persecutions they are facing
from the Roman overlords, from those who have destroyed the Temple, from those who
are seeking to alienate the Christian community and ensure it has no lifelines.
God will have, Jesus is subtly telling his guests, the final say, and the final
say is not the ‘no’ of persecution but the ‘yes’ of easter and of the ‘new
heavens and new earth’.
The audience of Jesus
had to know the narratives to experience the encouragement. At the time of this
discourse of Jesus they had yet to experience the remarkable resurrection event,
but by the time Luke was telling the Jesus story the Christ-community were well-experienced
in that presence of the Spirit that assured them of the resurrection presence of
Christ. This is the narrative that encouraged the earliest Christians to face their
own mortality with disdain. And this confidence comes only from the constant
awareness and rehearsal of the presence of the risen, resurrected Christ in the
midst of the Jesus community. It is to that narrative of hope against all hope
that the risen Lord invites his people in every age and every circumstance.
TLBWY
Saturday 17 November 2012
More to be pitied than all people?
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, November 18th, 2012 (ORDINARY SUNDAY 33)
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, November 18th, 2012 (ORDINARY SUNDAY 33)
Readings:
1 Samuel 1.4-20
Psalm:
Song of Hannah
Hebrews
10.12-14, 19-25
Mark 13.1-11
As they emerged from the mishmash of tribal groups that wandered
the eastern Mediterranean – the hotspot even now descending into yet another
bloodbath – the Hebrew people gradually came to know themselves as a
distinctive people, a people called to be worshippers of a single Creator God,
a people called to serve and even covenant with that one God rather than to
hedge the bets of the many gods available. At best the Hebrew people of God
knew this to be a wonderful privilege. There were to be honest other times – not
least the holocaust of the twentieth century of our era – when it was a terrible
and seemingly godforsaken time of vulnerability and brokenness.
We must make no mistake: Jesus uniquely was a Hebrew of the Hebrews,
though it is his follower Paul who later uses that phrase. Jesus was a follower
of the Torah of his people to such an extent that he embodied Torah-Law, to
such an extent that he challenged the established practitioners and corrupters
of that Torah-Law, to such an extent that their knowledge of the vast gap
between their claims of Torah-fulfilment and his practice of Torah-embodiment
meant that religious and civic leadership joined in an evil symbiotic
relationship of wanting him dead. As an Easter people of God we will say that
his death was not the end of the story: that he transcended his own death, and
that he-in-us will and does transcend the frailty of our own deaths, too,
transforming our mortality into immortality, even though we cannot but fail to
understand that. For those pastors, priests and theologians who do not acknowledge
the resurrection hope as central to our faith I say I fully understand that far
too much Christian speech is about the afterlife, and it is meritorious to
focus instead on this worldly issues, but at the same time Paul was absolutely
right: if we have nothing to say in the face of that last great injustice
death, then our faith is mere pathos, our god smaller than death, and we are
more to be pitied than all people.
Jesus however invited his followers into what we have often
come to call a ‘new and living way’, a new and dynamic relationship with the
death conquering God. Incorporated into this is the belief that our life is in
a very real sense no longer ours, that we are answerable to the unseen Creator God
who called the Hebrews out of nothingness, and to that extent and indeed much
more we are called to be a visible counter-culture. We are called not to be
perfect – which is just as well – but to know ourselves to be under scrutiny.
The implications of this for churches facing a Royal Commission is profound: we most be open to scrutinty both human and divine. We are called to enter into a relationship with the Creator that was previously
unavailable, inaccessible to the Hebrew people. Jesus himself makes bizarre claims
about his own self as Temple because he becomes the new location of human
access to God. Jesus, though, following the events his followers came to name
as resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, is no longer limited in space and
time. As an aside it is worth noting that our every prayer should be suffixed
with a formula that reminds us that all our prayers must and can only be made ‘through
Jesus Christ our Lord’ – the sloppiness of much contemporary conversation with
God suggest that we have become nonchalant and lackadaisical in our relationship
with the Creator, Redeemer and Giver of Life.
In the event we call Pentecost – though John and Luke tell
the story in very different ways (the church year follows Luke) – the role of Jesus
as new Temple is extended throughout space and time. The author of the book we know as Hebrews knew that well, portraying Christ as the priest who, in Hebrew
thought, enters the Holy of Holies once a year, but who now becomes for us
effectively a conduit into the eternities of God. He emphasizes also that this
is a High Priest who has walked the walk of our own existence,
even as we know from the gospel records to the point of crying out ‘my God, my
God, why have you forsaken me’, the pain-filled words of the psalmist and of
every person who has cried out at the loss of God and God-hope. For that
reason, too, I believe every person for whom we hope and pray can be caught up
into resurrection hope, though perhaps we can leave that thought for another day. But,
just as Jesus has become the embodiment of a new way to God, so we are called and,
where we allow it, empowered by the Spirit to embody that way of hope for those
we are called into contact with in our fallible human journeys. We are called
to be advertisements and contacts with God for the too busy, the too cynical,
the too hurt to believe. In all our fallibility – and for most of us that’s a
lot – we are called to be pathways to the knowledge of God (or more accurately,
pathways to the knowledge of Jesus who is the pathway to the knowledge of God).
We are called to be Samuels, reminders of God’s love in the world.
We are called also to be Hannahs. Hannah, in a prototype of
the song that will be sung by Mary at the beginning of her calling, sees the
world through the eyes of God. How blest are those behind razor wire, or hunger
striking in Nauru, as they believe in hope for their children. How blest are
those in the impoverished hospital wards of Africa, the women and children
dying of HIV Aids, their husbands long gone one way or another. How blest are
those trapped in cycles of unemployment and unemployability, those failed by
education systems unsuited to their needs and stories. How blessed are those
who mourn: ‘you raise up the poor from the deep, and lift the needy from the
ash heap’ (1 Sam 2.8). Although it is hard, we are called to touch the
untouchables (some of us will recall the Baptist missionary Graham Staines who
died with his sons in India for doing precisely that) and to love the unlovable:
no-one pretends that is easy, but it is your vocation and mine.
We are called also, though, to see through the limitations
of time and glimpse the eternities of God. When we stand at the graves of those
we love – as many of you have and all of us will – we are called to glimpse the
hope of eternity. When I deliver the last rites to the dying I whisper the
strange words ‘we all go down to the dust and weeping at the grave we make our
song, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia’. They are strange words, but they make sense
only if, in the journey of death we see the glimpse of eternal life, and in the
gentle (or let’s be honest, with Dylan Thomas, sometimes ungentle) beckoning of
God we glimpse a dynamic and inviting eternity of life. Jesus, the Temple,
invites us through the conduit that is his body, through the veil, through
trials and persecutions and sufferings and death, into the birth of eternity.
That is the journey in which you and I share, and on which we can whisper words
of justice and of resurrection-hope for those who hurt around us.
TLBWY
Saturday 10 November 2012
Judged by a dead woman
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, November 11th, 2012 (ORDINARY SUNDAY 32)
Readings: Ruth 3.1-5, 13-17
Psalm 127
Hebrews 9.23-28
Mark 12.38-44
As I have indicated in my notes* on the second of our Markan scenes, the glimpse of the widow at the Temple treasury (probably a first century equivalent of an auto-teller / handy-bank / hole in the wall, set up to receive but not to issue cash) should not be romanticised. It often was in my boarding school chapel experience (my only childhood exposure to the texts of Christianity), and this was probably not atypical of the teaching of the churches in the mid-twentieth century. It is too easy to read the scene through western eyes, expecting that God will, perhaps in the person of Jesus, somehow miraculously intervene in this poor woman’s plight, patting her on the back for her self-sacrificing generosity, and sending her home with a shopping trolley full of groceries as a reward. To understand the desperate nature of such a woman’s plight we need instead to picture the women we seen in media footage from refugee camps in, for example, Sudan or Somalia, their wasted breasts too impoverished to provide the nurture their near-dead child so desperately needs, their gnarled hands and bodies suggesting seventy years of life experience rather than often no more than the twenty that is the chronological truth.
There are questions we cannot ask of this text – Jesus so far as we can see does nothing to intervene in the plight of the woman. She becomes a powerful symbol of the corruption and evil of a state – in this case the Roman Empire, though the previous scene has some disturbing things to say about religious leaders, too – that leaves its most vulnerable members to die. The intertwining of religious and civil leadership in Mark’s telling of the Jesus story should warn us against any attempt to become too cosy in finger-pointing at the state: in Vladimir Putin’s Russia it would appear church and state are once more cosily in bed. While that is not the case here there are often dark mutterings when church leaders speak too noisily about issues such as migration or poverty, and I suspect we compromise ourselves even in the 21st century far more than radical interpreters of the gospel would like us to. In particular we compromise ourselves when we reduce the gospel to a cosy programme of personal salvation.
Our woman, then, is a victim of greed, corruption and self-interest, and the indictment Jesus delivers to a society that deprioritises basic human needs – today we would say human rights – is, the scene suggests, a society that has lost any ability to echo or foreshadow the values of God’s reign. This woman – already cast to the outer of society by a social structure that saw women to have value only insofar as they produced children – this woman will die, and, assuming this was an actual scene in the life of Jesus, almost certainly did die soon after these events.
What is dwelling deep in the DNA of this series of scenes in Mark’s gospel-telling is an acidic critique of the abuse of power. The widow is the victim of those who construct self-serving structures in the fabric of society that ensure only men have rights, and that women’s only function is a procreative one. While we might pretend that this is so first century, we might also recall that it is only in the last month that a US politician claimed that women who conceive a child by rape should see that child as a gift of God. While I have worked pastorally with one woman who raised a child conceived by rape, I would never in a million years impose that decision on any victim of a violent crime. Similarly we have been watching only this past week as the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church effectively stall any attempt at instigating a Royal Commission into sexual abuse by clergy. The abuse of power by clergy or other pastoral and therapeutic workers who sexually or psychologically offend against those in their care, while not the elusive unforgivable sin, is nevertheless a brutal abuse of privilege, and any attempt by the institutional church to stymie investigations is a betrayal of the gospel.
Lest this be seen as an attack on our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic church, I remember only too well in my days in the ABC producing a documentary that investigated a brutal betrayal of a young woman within the Anglican Church in the Diocese of Sydney, and know of many other cases across the spectrum of churchmanship and theology. Where we have betrayed those in our care we must confess to our sins and accept the punishment that is appropriate.
When the gospels relate Jesus’ abhorrence of those who call themselves ‘father’ and 'parade phylacteries in the market-place', or as our reading today more generally puts it ‘like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces’ the critique is not of titles or clothing choices, liturgical or otherwise, but of oppressive and exploitative attitudes. The titles or clothes I use have nothing to do with my effectiveness as an ambassador of the vulnerable Christ – no more than do the choices you make. What does matter is the decisions you and I make about the ways in which we represent Jesus in the community into which God has called us: do we represent a grasping and dictatorial, oppressive God, or do we represent the welcoming and compassionate vulnerable God revealed in Christ of the Cross?
We can major in the minors, getting hung up on externals, or we can realise that the self-revelation of God that we are called to emulate starts not in a private hospital but a manger, and ends not in splendour but on a criminal’s cross. The love of God is revealed in defencelessness and dare I say it even inefficiency, not in the magnificence of a carefully choreographed display of efficiency and power.
The impoverished woman of the temple almost certainly died in her poverty. We strip Christianity of its message and its meaning if we leave her there. If we leave her there with no more than the hope of social reconstruction and a better society one day then history suggests we are deluded. If we leave her there with just the hope of pie in the sky then we are open to charges of otherworldliness and psychopathic disinterest in the plight of the pain-filled.
We must do better than that: this woman, or indeed all those left oppressed in the marketplace by the Scribes and the Pharisees of every century, including victims of those pretending to proclaim the name of Jesus, look at us with the eyes and ears of judgement. What have I done to touch those around me with the message of Easter hope and restitution? What have I done to ameliorate the plight of those at the bottom of the heap? To be honest my answer is ‘precious little’. May God forgive me, and empower me and you to do more.
TLBWY
* NOTES ON THE GOSPEL READING: Mark 12.38-44
Let us not romanticize the woman placing her mite in the Treasury. This woman was cactus. There was no ambulance at the foot of the cliff, let alone safety net at the top. This observation on the part of Jesus is a telling indictment of a corrupt religious structure, and will be followed in the next scene by his promise to ‘tear down’ the whole corrupt edifice. The question we must ask, as our religious institutions teeter on the brink of financial collapse, is whether this too might be the work of the Spirit, stripping away our Linus blankets and throwing us back on the justice and compassion that is the heart of the gospel message
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, November 11th, 2012 (ORDINARY SUNDAY 32)
Readings: Ruth 3.1-5, 13-17
Psalm 127
Hebrews 9.23-28
Mark 12.38-44
As I have indicated in my notes* on the second of our Markan scenes, the glimpse of the widow at the Temple treasury (probably a first century equivalent of an auto-teller / handy-bank / hole in the wall, set up to receive but not to issue cash) should not be romanticised. It often was in my boarding school chapel experience (my only childhood exposure to the texts of Christianity), and this was probably not atypical of the teaching of the churches in the mid-twentieth century. It is too easy to read the scene through western eyes, expecting that God will, perhaps in the person of Jesus, somehow miraculously intervene in this poor woman’s plight, patting her on the back for her self-sacrificing generosity, and sending her home with a shopping trolley full of groceries as a reward. To understand the desperate nature of such a woman’s plight we need instead to picture the women we seen in media footage from refugee camps in, for example, Sudan or Somalia, their wasted breasts too impoverished to provide the nurture their near-dead child so desperately needs, their gnarled hands and bodies suggesting seventy years of life experience rather than often no more than the twenty that is the chronological truth.
There are questions we cannot ask of this text – Jesus so far as we can see does nothing to intervene in the plight of the woman. She becomes a powerful symbol of the corruption and evil of a state – in this case the Roman Empire, though the previous scene has some disturbing things to say about religious leaders, too – that leaves its most vulnerable members to die. The intertwining of religious and civil leadership in Mark’s telling of the Jesus story should warn us against any attempt to become too cosy in finger-pointing at the state: in Vladimir Putin’s Russia it would appear church and state are once more cosily in bed. While that is not the case here there are often dark mutterings when church leaders speak too noisily about issues such as migration or poverty, and I suspect we compromise ourselves even in the 21st century far more than radical interpreters of the gospel would like us to. In particular we compromise ourselves when we reduce the gospel to a cosy programme of personal salvation.
Our woman, then, is a victim of greed, corruption and self-interest, and the indictment Jesus delivers to a society that deprioritises basic human needs – today we would say human rights – is, the scene suggests, a society that has lost any ability to echo or foreshadow the values of God’s reign. This woman – already cast to the outer of society by a social structure that saw women to have value only insofar as they produced children – this woman will die, and, assuming this was an actual scene in the life of Jesus, almost certainly did die soon after these events.
What is dwelling deep in the DNA of this series of scenes in Mark’s gospel-telling is an acidic critique of the abuse of power. The widow is the victim of those who construct self-serving structures in the fabric of society that ensure only men have rights, and that women’s only function is a procreative one. While we might pretend that this is so first century, we might also recall that it is only in the last month that a US politician claimed that women who conceive a child by rape should see that child as a gift of God. While I have worked pastorally with one woman who raised a child conceived by rape, I would never in a million years impose that decision on any victim of a violent crime. Similarly we have been watching only this past week as the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church effectively stall any attempt at instigating a Royal Commission into sexual abuse by clergy. The abuse of power by clergy or other pastoral and therapeutic workers who sexually or psychologically offend against those in their care, while not the elusive unforgivable sin, is nevertheless a brutal abuse of privilege, and any attempt by the institutional church to stymie investigations is a betrayal of the gospel.
Lest this be seen as an attack on our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic church, I remember only too well in my days in the ABC producing a documentary that investigated a brutal betrayal of a young woman within the Anglican Church in the Diocese of Sydney, and know of many other cases across the spectrum of churchmanship and theology. Where we have betrayed those in our care we must confess to our sins and accept the punishment that is appropriate.
When the gospels relate Jesus’ abhorrence of those who call themselves ‘father’ and 'parade phylacteries in the market-place', or as our reading today more generally puts it ‘like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces’ the critique is not of titles or clothing choices, liturgical or otherwise, but of oppressive and exploitative attitudes. The titles or clothes I use have nothing to do with my effectiveness as an ambassador of the vulnerable Christ – no more than do the choices you make. What does matter is the decisions you and I make about the ways in which we represent Jesus in the community into which God has called us: do we represent a grasping and dictatorial, oppressive God, or do we represent the welcoming and compassionate vulnerable God revealed in Christ of the Cross?
We can major in the minors, getting hung up on externals, or we can realise that the self-revelation of God that we are called to emulate starts not in a private hospital but a manger, and ends not in splendour but on a criminal’s cross. The love of God is revealed in defencelessness and dare I say it even inefficiency, not in the magnificence of a carefully choreographed display of efficiency and power.
The impoverished woman of the temple almost certainly died in her poverty. We strip Christianity of its message and its meaning if we leave her there. If we leave her there with no more than the hope of social reconstruction and a better society one day then history suggests we are deluded. If we leave her there with just the hope of pie in the sky then we are open to charges of otherworldliness and psychopathic disinterest in the plight of the pain-filled.
We must do better than that: this woman, or indeed all those left oppressed in the marketplace by the Scribes and the Pharisees of every century, including victims of those pretending to proclaim the name of Jesus, look at us with the eyes and ears of judgement. What have I done to touch those around me with the message of Easter hope and restitution? What have I done to ameliorate the plight of those at the bottom of the heap? To be honest my answer is ‘precious little’. May God forgive me, and empower me and you to do more.
TLBWY
* NOTES ON THE GOSPEL READING: Mark 12.38-44
Let us not romanticize the woman placing her mite in the Treasury. This woman was cactus. There was no ambulance at the foot of the cliff, let alone safety net at the top. This observation on the part of Jesus is a telling indictment of a corrupt religious structure, and will be followed in the next scene by his promise to ‘tear down’ the whole corrupt edifice. The question we must ask, as our religious institutions teeter on the brink of financial collapse, is whether this too might be the work of the Spirit, stripping away our Linus blankets and throwing us back on the justice and compassion that is the heart of the gospel message
Saturday 3 November 2012
Possums in the headlights of history
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, November 4th, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 31)
Readings: Ruth 1.1-18
Psalm 146
Hebrews 9.11-15
Mark 12.13-17, 28-34
As we reach towards the end of the liturgical year and its sometimes slightly eccentric ordering of the gospels we find ourselves if not at the pointy end of Mark’s gospel – we were there before Easter – then certainly at the pointy end of his portrayal of the teaching or public ministry of Jesus. In the telling of the gospel story the disciples are increasingly obtuse and obdurate (or if you don’t like my little cascade of o-words, dull-witted and stubborn), increasingly not getting it. It’s probable that to some extent Mark wanted to convey an important message with this portrayal, related to the remarkable power that he engenders with his famous original ending, when he closes his narrative with the women standing, mesmerised at the tomb, possums in the headlights of history: ‘and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’ (16.8). Yup, and yet they overcame their human fear, and you and I heard the message, along with millions of others: he is not here, he is risen. The frightened women and the obtuse men … yet the message reached us, and God willing, may even, even in the 21st century, reach others through us. For it is not on our intelligence or our bravery on which the gospel depends, but on the Spirit of God.
So we are at the – or a – pointy end of Mark. The questioners are making no pretence of engaging with Jesus, now. Like Nicodemus, who in John’s gospel account comes to Jesus in the dead of night, the dead of darkness (but gets it oh so right by the end of the gospel-story) these interlocutors of Jesus are not in a frame of mind to ‘get it’. They want only to trap Jesus. Rather than looking at the testimony of his own life of love and justice and compassion they look at him only through the prism their own fears and hatreds, and will no longer hear his summons to love and resurrection hope. They come with questions, but these are hostile questions, and hostility is the opposite of openness to compassionate love.
Let us not pretend that Christians are not in some way prone to narrow minded hostility. I remember only too well the young convert that I once was, attending every visiting speaker’s seminar at my undergrad university, armed to the teeth with hostility and self-righteousness, determined to bring the speakers down so that those gathering to hear them would hear nothing but my version of the gospel. Thank God my arrogance was soon eroded, and rather than seeking to undermine those who came I learned, at least some of the time, to listen, to learn, to adapt and utilise the wisdom they often brought with them. One in particular, recently deceased Māori activist Hone Kaa, was to become one of the single most influential figures in the formation of my faith, once I had stopped futilely attempting to argue with him, and agreed instead to listen. He taught me much about the gospel and colonialism, and I will never regret it.
I suspect we have all seen it from time to time, and seen it, too, amongst those who purport to bear the name ‘Christian’. I have many times since my own belligerence was bashed out of me (metaphorically and verbally) by Hone Kaa seen similar Christians, attending a meeting only in order to spew their own preconceived formulae, and to attempt to silence those who hold opposing positions. To some extent politics will always be politics, but there is a difference between life-giving engagement and the narrow-minded and hostile debating that seeks only to trap others. It is possible to win a debate and miss the faith, and far too often it seems to me that the fruits of compassion and love are not in the arsenals of the clever people, but in the baskets of the gentle. This is hardly surprising of course, if we seek to follow the Jesus who said blessed are the meek, the humble, the peacemakers, and added, on another occasion, by their fruits shall you know them.
In the end I will tend to look at the love-quality of the people I encounter. Love of course will not always be a mere warm fuzzy feeling, but entail too a dimension of justice-seeking struggle, a striving to proclaim in action then word the characteristics of the reign of God embodied in the life and teachings of Jesus. I am utterly aware of my own inadequacies in that direction, but can pray that by the grace of God the rough edges of my inadequacies will continue to be chipped away. Around me I will see individuals, both within and beyond the apparent parameters of the Jesus community, who utterly reflect the compassionate and loving justice of God. I will see others, both within and beyond the apparent parameters of the Jesus community, that utterly fail to do so. I have met mean-spirited Christians and Christ-spirited atheists (though either might not thank me for the description), and know that the Spirit of God is at work far beyond the boundaries of my or the Church’s expectation.
To say this is both to state the obvious and paradoxically to sidestep myriad theological questions. So let it be. Once more as we are confronted by the bad guys in Mark’s gospel-account we must ensure that we are not amongst them, dictating terms to the divine, limiting the possibilities of God. The disciples are obtuse, we can acknowledge, but ultimately they are striving to serve God and God’s values, and ultimately, like the frightened women, we know they got it right. It is our task to ensure, in all our weakness, that we do too, surrendering ourselves to the transforming Spirit of God, surrendering to the texts of our faith, our liturgies, surrendering in prayer and worship. The God who is love will continue to transform willing human hearts into hearts of love. Our task is to ask God to transform us, too.
TLBWY
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, November 4th, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 31)
Readings: Ruth 1.1-18
Psalm 146
Hebrews 9.11-15
Mark 12.13-17, 28-34
As we reach towards the end of the liturgical year and its sometimes slightly eccentric ordering of the gospels we find ourselves if not at the pointy end of Mark’s gospel – we were there before Easter – then certainly at the pointy end of his portrayal of the teaching or public ministry of Jesus. In the telling of the gospel story the disciples are increasingly obtuse and obdurate (or if you don’t like my little cascade of o-words, dull-witted and stubborn), increasingly not getting it. It’s probable that to some extent Mark wanted to convey an important message with this portrayal, related to the remarkable power that he engenders with his famous original ending, when he closes his narrative with the women standing, mesmerised at the tomb, possums in the headlights of history: ‘and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’ (16.8). Yup, and yet they overcame their human fear, and you and I heard the message, along with millions of others: he is not here, he is risen. The frightened women and the obtuse men … yet the message reached us, and God willing, may even, even in the 21st century, reach others through us. For it is not on our intelligence or our bravery on which the gospel depends, but on the Spirit of God.
So we are at the – or a – pointy end of Mark. The questioners are making no pretence of engaging with Jesus, now. Like Nicodemus, who in John’s gospel account comes to Jesus in the dead of night, the dead of darkness (but gets it oh so right by the end of the gospel-story) these interlocutors of Jesus are not in a frame of mind to ‘get it’. They want only to trap Jesus. Rather than looking at the testimony of his own life of love and justice and compassion they look at him only through the prism their own fears and hatreds, and will no longer hear his summons to love and resurrection hope. They come with questions, but these are hostile questions, and hostility is the opposite of openness to compassionate love.
Let us not pretend that Christians are not in some way prone to narrow minded hostility. I remember only too well the young convert that I once was, attending every visiting speaker’s seminar at my undergrad university, armed to the teeth with hostility and self-righteousness, determined to bring the speakers down so that those gathering to hear them would hear nothing but my version of the gospel. Thank God my arrogance was soon eroded, and rather than seeking to undermine those who came I learned, at least some of the time, to listen, to learn, to adapt and utilise the wisdom they often brought with them. One in particular, recently deceased Māori activist Hone Kaa, was to become one of the single most influential figures in the formation of my faith, once I had stopped futilely attempting to argue with him, and agreed instead to listen. He taught me much about the gospel and colonialism, and I will never regret it.
I suspect we have all seen it from time to time, and seen it, too, amongst those who purport to bear the name ‘Christian’. I have many times since my own belligerence was bashed out of me (metaphorically and verbally) by Hone Kaa seen similar Christians, attending a meeting only in order to spew their own preconceived formulae, and to attempt to silence those who hold opposing positions. To some extent politics will always be politics, but there is a difference between life-giving engagement and the narrow-minded and hostile debating that seeks only to trap others. It is possible to win a debate and miss the faith, and far too often it seems to me that the fruits of compassion and love are not in the arsenals of the clever people, but in the baskets of the gentle. This is hardly surprising of course, if we seek to follow the Jesus who said blessed are the meek, the humble, the peacemakers, and added, on another occasion, by their fruits shall you know them.
In the end I will tend to look at the love-quality of the people I encounter. Love of course will not always be a mere warm fuzzy feeling, but entail too a dimension of justice-seeking struggle, a striving to proclaim in action then word the characteristics of the reign of God embodied in the life and teachings of Jesus. I am utterly aware of my own inadequacies in that direction, but can pray that by the grace of God the rough edges of my inadequacies will continue to be chipped away. Around me I will see individuals, both within and beyond the apparent parameters of the Jesus community, who utterly reflect the compassionate and loving justice of God. I will see others, both within and beyond the apparent parameters of the Jesus community, that utterly fail to do so. I have met mean-spirited Christians and Christ-spirited atheists (though either might not thank me for the description), and know that the Spirit of God is at work far beyond the boundaries of my or the Church’s expectation.
To say this is both to state the obvious and paradoxically to sidestep myriad theological questions. So let it be. Once more as we are confronted by the bad guys in Mark’s gospel-account we must ensure that we are not amongst them, dictating terms to the divine, limiting the possibilities of God. The disciples are obtuse, we can acknowledge, but ultimately they are striving to serve God and God’s values, and ultimately, like the frightened women, we know they got it right. It is our task to ensure, in all our weakness, that we do too, surrendering ourselves to the transforming Spirit of God, surrendering to the texts of our faith, our liturgies, surrendering in prayer and worship. The God who is love will continue to transform willing human hearts into hearts of love. Our task is to ask God to transform us, too.
TLBWY
Thursday 25 October 2012
Dancing with cadavers
Some of us in Darwin were privileged last Wednesday to sit at the feet, as it were, of an outstanding communicator and biblical scholar (the two don’t always go hand in hand). To my shame I hadn’t heard of Paula Gooder when + Greg told me a year or so ago that she was coming. Since placing the final full stop on my doctoral dissertation two years ago I have lost touch with the constellations of scholars out there, and while Paula was publishing well before I finished she somehow slipped under my radar. She won’t do so now, and I shall add happily to her 50p of royalties.
She held in wondrous balance that ability to engage with and critique the texts of our faith (what Anne, borrowing from L.T. Johnson, refers to as dissecting the cadaver) with the reverence and joy that comes from knowing that these are the texts in which our encounter with the risen, living Christ begins (or, if not begins, for that beginning can be in liturgy and fellowship, then continues and is anchored). Dr Gooder wove introductions to the inordinately difficult realm of biblical-critical methodology with faith-radiating encounters with the Christ in the text, and did so in such a way that as far as I could see all present, across the conservative-liberal spectrum of faith, and across a vast range of academic interest and experience, were engaged and energised. She danced with her beloved, to cite Anne’s L.T. Johnson reference again, rather than merely dissecting a cadaver.
I hope and pray that this inspirational lecturer, whose impact in and on the English Anglican Church is quite considerable, continues to maintain the energy and integrity she demonstrated here, and that something of her enthusiastic reverence for the texts of our faith continues to rub off on those of us called to teach and live the faith of Jesus Christ.
(Unfortunately, on the next day I managed a linguistic mishap, that Paula characteristically dubbed phraseological dyslexia, as I spoke of the enjoyment of 'dancing with cadavers' ... perhaps given Paula's love of 1 Corinthians 15, we might agree that this is an image of serendipitous insight!)
She held in wondrous balance that ability to engage with and critique the texts of our faith (what Anne, borrowing from L.T. Johnson, refers to as dissecting the cadaver) with the reverence and joy that comes from knowing that these are the texts in which our encounter with the risen, living Christ begins (or, if not begins, for that beginning can be in liturgy and fellowship, then continues and is anchored). Dr Gooder wove introductions to the inordinately difficult realm of biblical-critical methodology with faith-radiating encounters with the Christ in the text, and did so in such a way that as far as I could see all present, across the conservative-liberal spectrum of faith, and across a vast range of academic interest and experience, were engaged and energised. She danced with her beloved, to cite Anne’s L.T. Johnson reference again, rather than merely dissecting a cadaver.
I hope and pray that this inspirational lecturer, whose impact in and on the English Anglican Church is quite considerable, continues to maintain the energy and integrity she demonstrated here, and that something of her enthusiastic reverence for the texts of our faith continues to rub off on those of us called to teach and live the faith of Jesus Christ.
(Unfortunately, on the next day I managed a linguistic mishap, that Paula characteristically dubbed phraseological dyslexia, as I spoke of the enjoyment of 'dancing with cadavers' ... perhaps given Paula's love of 1 Corinthians 15, we might agree that this is an image of serendipitous insight!)
έ̉ν Χριστω̣̃ – (Fr) Michael
Saturday 13 October 2012
Exit, Rich Dude
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF ST FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
Sunday, October 14th, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 28)
Readings: Job 23.1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22.1-16
Hebrews 4.12-16
Mark 10.17-31
Too often in conversations and even in sermons I have heard expositions on the Rich Young Man’s encounter with Jesus that take the form of ‘isn’t it sad that he didn’t rise to the call, but isn’t it great that we did?’ Sometimes there is a sort of browbeating included, a bit of tut-tutting about rich people or people who are obsessed with financial advancement – after all this is the same Jesus who said terrible things about those who store treasure on earth – but on the whole that is the end of the level of textual analysis that is made. As I said in addressing the powerless child a week ago, such a superficial analysis really skirts around the deep and disturbing challenge of the way of the Cross. This approach, when presented with the famous “Then who can be saved?” tends to take a sort of cosy comfort in the answer of Jesus, “for God all things are possible.” The equally famous ‘there but by the grace of God go I’ is shared around conspiratorially, and the conversationalists or members of the congregation go away deeply comforted and self-satisfied.
There is a degree of parody here, but only a degree. There is a degree of truth in the ‘there but by the grace of God go I’ response, but only a degree. There is comfort in the gospel, always, but of course never self-satisfaction, and that is almost certainly where we end up going wrong. None of us, not one, shares the righteousness of Job, yet we all too often behave as if our immense satisfaction with our hard-won standing with God was our own doing, a kind of right, though we may protest loudly about our un-meriting nature, and even seek to demonstrate that we are even more un-meriting than the person next to us. I suspect the Protestant doctrine of ‘assurance of salvation’ or ‘blessed assurance’, a somewhat suspect mis-reaction to some of the extremes of Medieval Catholic doctrine, has much to answer for. In fact I suspect that all Christians need to listen carefully to the polemical but wise Tridentine statement
If any one saith, that he will for certain, of an absolute and infallible certainty, have that great gift of perseverance unto the end, unless he have learned this by special revelation; let him be anathema
We need to listen to that if only because there is a whole spectrum of Christianity whose membership live in a state of cosy complacency about the state of God’s world, while rejoicing in the knowledge that they will spend something called ‘eternity’ frolicking on the clouds with harps. We could learn much from Ernst Käsemann, who observed: It ought to disquiet us when Christianity has nothing more to offer here than the fulfilment of pious or carnal longings for the conquest of the grave.[1] This in part has led to the image of the West as selfish and disinterested in the suffering of God’s earth, and no matter how hard some mission agencies work to ameliorate the plight of the poor of God’s earth, that image is deeply entrenched in our history. It is not I might add, merely a Protestant nor a Catholic nor an Anglican problem: it is a problem of communities and individuals who have forgotten the stern nature of the judgement of God and decided it applies to everyone but them.
Which is really the problem of the young man who approaches Jesus. It should not be forgotten that in Mark’s hands he is following a series of characters whose approach to Jesus is not one of respectful engagement by which to grow closer to God, but whose approach to Jesus is in order to entrap Jesus. This man does not seem to be entrapping Jesus, but he is obsequious in his approach, and his question is utterly self-centred. Jesus is not particularly interested, it seems, in accommodating this man’s game-playing, and the conversation soon has the man heading away, saddened, and no doubt keen to be amongst those calling for the blood of Jesus in his final week of suffering. So much so-called evangelism, ironically, is of the ‘where will you spend eternity’ approach: on the whole Jesus is very little concerned with eternity and individuals’ enjoyment of it, but with food for the hungry and clothes for the naked. His question to would-be followers is not ‘how many people did you convert’, ‘but did you feed, clothe, liberate those in need’.
Yet of course I have to acknowledge that I stand condemned by the demands of this encounter. We of the global North, or the West as we used to be called, should almost all slink away, saddened, with the Rich Young Man. I know my sin: I know my cavalier attitude to international greed, to the selfish lifestyle that sees the gaps between the haves and the have-nots growing if not exponentially then at least tragically. I know that it is into the gaps of life-expectancy and financial opportunity that extremists of Islam and other religious cultures have leapt. I know that I have crept around, secure and arrogant in the cosiness of my encounter with the redeeming Christ, and have done only miniscule amounts in the genuine service of the gospel of feeding hungry, clothing naked, and proclaiming Jubilee. I will again and again seek God’s forgiveness, but one day perhaps, as God the God of judgement watches, I may have to seek the forgiveness, too, of those whose food I ate and whose life-opportunity I consumed.
At the beginning of Luke’s account of the gospel we hear the all-unsettling Song of Mary, the Magnificat, that sees the world through God’s eyes and is deeply threatening to those of us who, simply because we dwell with the tiny percentage of the world’s population with food on the table and money in our accounts, stand if not condemned at least torn down by God’s perspective. As Jesus in Mark’s account first takes abused and vulnerable women, then a powerless child, and finally a Rich Young Man into the centre of Jesus’ ministry he is revealing his own understanding of the Magnificat lenses through which Jesus judges and will judge the world. These should be unsettling passages that at the very least disturb our complacency and challenge our cosy reliance on some blessed assurance based on the happy experiences we have with Jesus.
In the end, I suppose we can fall back on that grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that Paul offers even his starkest enemies in the service of the gospel. But the stories of abused women, powerless children, and an obsequious and complacent Rich Young Man in Mark’s gospel account should at the very least remind all of us that we very truly better mean the sorry-words we say when we tell God that we have sinned in thought, word and deed.
Only when we have grasped the magnitude of that culpability can we reach out and say once more, Lord Have mercy on me, a sinner, and say it not just once but over and again until we see him no longer through a darkened glass but face to face.
TLBWY
[1] Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom , 67.
THE CHURCH OF ST FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
Sunday, October 14th, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 28)
Readings: Job 23.1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22.1-16
Hebrews 4.12-16
Mark 10.17-31
Too often in conversations and even in sermons I have heard expositions on the Rich Young Man’s encounter with Jesus that take the form of ‘isn’t it sad that he didn’t rise to the call, but isn’t it great that we did?’ Sometimes there is a sort of browbeating included, a bit of tut-tutting about rich people or people who are obsessed with financial advancement – after all this is the same Jesus who said terrible things about those who store treasure on earth – but on the whole that is the end of the level of textual analysis that is made. As I said in addressing the powerless child a week ago, such a superficial analysis really skirts around the deep and disturbing challenge of the way of the Cross. This approach, when presented with the famous “Then who can be saved?” tends to take a sort of cosy comfort in the answer of Jesus, “for God all things are possible.” The equally famous ‘there but by the grace of God go I’ is shared around conspiratorially, and the conversationalists or members of the congregation go away deeply comforted and self-satisfied.
There is a degree of parody here, but only a degree. There is a degree of truth in the ‘there but by the grace of God go I’ response, but only a degree. There is comfort in the gospel, always, but of course never self-satisfaction, and that is almost certainly where we end up going wrong. None of us, not one, shares the righteousness of Job, yet we all too often behave as if our immense satisfaction with our hard-won standing with God was our own doing, a kind of right, though we may protest loudly about our un-meriting nature, and even seek to demonstrate that we are even more un-meriting than the person next to us. I suspect the Protestant doctrine of ‘assurance of salvation’ or ‘blessed assurance’, a somewhat suspect mis-reaction to some of the extremes of Medieval Catholic doctrine, has much to answer for. In fact I suspect that all Christians need to listen carefully to the polemical but wise Tridentine statement
If any one saith, that he will for certain, of an absolute and infallible certainty, have that great gift of perseverance unto the end, unless he have learned this by special revelation; let him be anathema
We need to listen to that if only because there is a whole spectrum of Christianity whose membership live in a state of cosy complacency about the state of God’s world, while rejoicing in the knowledge that they will spend something called ‘eternity’ frolicking on the clouds with harps. We could learn much from Ernst Käsemann, who observed: It ought to disquiet us when Christianity has nothing more to offer here than the fulfilment of pious or carnal longings for the conquest of the grave.[1] This in part has led to the image of the West as selfish and disinterested in the suffering of God’s earth, and no matter how hard some mission agencies work to ameliorate the plight of the poor of God’s earth, that image is deeply entrenched in our history. It is not I might add, merely a Protestant nor a Catholic nor an Anglican problem: it is a problem of communities and individuals who have forgotten the stern nature of the judgement of God and decided it applies to everyone but them.
Which is really the problem of the young man who approaches Jesus. It should not be forgotten that in Mark’s hands he is following a series of characters whose approach to Jesus is not one of respectful engagement by which to grow closer to God, but whose approach to Jesus is in order to entrap Jesus. This man does not seem to be entrapping Jesus, but he is obsequious in his approach, and his question is utterly self-centred. Jesus is not particularly interested, it seems, in accommodating this man’s game-playing, and the conversation soon has the man heading away, saddened, and no doubt keen to be amongst those calling for the blood of Jesus in his final week of suffering. So much so-called evangelism, ironically, is of the ‘where will you spend eternity’ approach: on the whole Jesus is very little concerned with eternity and individuals’ enjoyment of it, but with food for the hungry and clothes for the naked. His question to would-be followers is not ‘how many people did you convert’, ‘but did you feed, clothe, liberate those in need’.
Yet of course I have to acknowledge that I stand condemned by the demands of this encounter. We of the global North, or the West as we used to be called, should almost all slink away, saddened, with the Rich Young Man. I know my sin: I know my cavalier attitude to international greed, to the selfish lifestyle that sees the gaps between the haves and the have-nots growing if not exponentially then at least tragically. I know that it is into the gaps of life-expectancy and financial opportunity that extremists of Islam and other religious cultures have leapt. I know that I have crept around, secure and arrogant in the cosiness of my encounter with the redeeming Christ, and have done only miniscule amounts in the genuine service of the gospel of feeding hungry, clothing naked, and proclaiming Jubilee. I will again and again seek God’s forgiveness, but one day perhaps, as God the God of judgement watches, I may have to seek the forgiveness, too, of those whose food I ate and whose life-opportunity I consumed.
At the beginning of Luke’s account of the gospel we hear the all-unsettling Song of Mary, the Magnificat, that sees the world through God’s eyes and is deeply threatening to those of us who, simply because we dwell with the tiny percentage of the world’s population with food on the table and money in our accounts, stand if not condemned at least torn down by God’s perspective. As Jesus in Mark’s account first takes abused and vulnerable women, then a powerless child, and finally a Rich Young Man into the centre of Jesus’ ministry he is revealing his own understanding of the Magnificat lenses through which Jesus judges and will judge the world. These should be unsettling passages that at the very least disturb our complacency and challenge our cosy reliance on some blessed assurance based on the happy experiences we have with Jesus.
In the end, I suppose we can fall back on that grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that Paul offers even his starkest enemies in the service of the gospel. But the stories of abused women, powerless children, and an obsequious and complacent Rich Young Man in Mark’s gospel account should at the very least remind all of us that we very truly better mean the sorry-words we say when we tell God that we have sinned in thought, word and deed.
Only when we have grasped the magnitude of that culpability can we reach out and say once more, Lord Have mercy on me, a sinner, and say it not just once but over and again until we see him no longer through a darkened glass but face to face.
TLBWY
[1] Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom , 67.
Wednesday 10 October 2012
Barking for Jesus
FROM THE PEW SHEET
My brief experience of Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity as an undergraduate taught me much. The great and unforgivable sin of Mk 3 and Mt 12 was often defined as ‘quenching the Spirit’: that to speak ill of anything defined as a spiritual gift in the church would be to be pushed beyond the parameters of salvation for ever. This was errant nonsense, but it was powerful errant nonsense, particularly useful as a tool by which to maintain order in a church tightly controlled by one or two megalomaniacal control freaks. I left those church circles, but I hope I have retained some of what I learned there.
I hope I have retained my sense of the immediacy and ‘livingness’ of God. For years I moved into a far more cerebral and rite-based faith. I have no regrets, funnily enough about that, either. When Jesus spoke of ways we should love God he included ‘mind’ with ‘heart’: the anti-intellectualism of my charismatic beginnings was neither better nor worse than the paranoid suspicion of emotions that I experienced over my next half decade or more. I found some control freaks in those circles, too: the types that would scowl into non-existence some poor soul who genuflected at the wrong time, or who would glare to a cinder a child in church. In Adelaide I was once told that the strength of one church at which I was a Sunday locum was that there were no children there. I laughed aloud — until I realised that the speaker, a warden, was deadly serious.
Ideally I would love to find a balance. I never again want to hear the silliness that I encountered in another church, where a group of women were crawling around, led by the Holy Spirit to bark for Jesus, probably a useful gestalt but little to do with the Jesus of the Cross. Perhaps my stopping that practice as ‘spiritual nonsense’ was ‘quenching the Spirit’ in the eyes of some. But for all that spiritually silliness, when that group learned to discern the difference between psychobabblingl nonsense and genuine openness to an immediate and active God they became a real engine-room in the life of the faith community. Somewhere in that balance is a message for us all.
My brief experience of Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity as an undergraduate taught me much. The great and unforgivable sin of Mk 3 and Mt 12 was often defined as ‘quenching the Spirit’: that to speak ill of anything defined as a spiritual gift in the church would be to be pushed beyond the parameters of salvation for ever. This was errant nonsense, but it was powerful errant nonsense, particularly useful as a tool by which to maintain order in a church tightly controlled by one or two megalomaniacal control freaks. I left those church circles, but I hope I have retained some of what I learned there.
I hope I have retained my sense of the immediacy and ‘livingness’ of God. For years I moved into a far more cerebral and rite-based faith. I have no regrets, funnily enough about that, either. When Jesus spoke of ways we should love God he included ‘mind’ with ‘heart’: the anti-intellectualism of my charismatic beginnings was neither better nor worse than the paranoid suspicion of emotions that I experienced over my next half decade or more. I found some control freaks in those circles, too: the types that would scowl into non-existence some poor soul who genuflected at the wrong time, or who would glare to a cinder a child in church. In Adelaide I was once told that the strength of one church at which I was a Sunday locum was that there were no children there. I laughed aloud — until I realised that the speaker, a warden, was deadly serious.
Ideally I would love to find a balance. I never again want to hear the silliness that I encountered in another church, where a group of women were crawling around, led by the Holy Spirit to bark for Jesus, probably a useful gestalt but little to do with the Jesus of the Cross. Perhaps my stopping that practice as ‘spiritual nonsense’ was ‘quenching the Spirit’ in the eyes of some. But for all that spiritually silliness, when that group learned to discern the difference between psychobabblingl nonsense and genuine openness to an immediate and active God they became a real engine-room in the life of the faith community. Somewhere in that balance is a message for us all.
Friday 5 October 2012
Suck it up, divorcee
SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, October 7th, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 27/NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings:
Job 1.1, 2.1-10
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1.1-4, 2.5-12
Mark 10.2-16
Every now and again the lectionary’s cycles throw together such a disconnected collection of readings that it’s hard to believe we stand in one heritage at all. It’s a useful reminder that our scriptures are a glorious collection of the Godward thoughts of those who like us strive godwardly through a darkened glass, drawing on wisdom that the Church with time came to recognize as Spirit-filled, yet incomplete, disparate, as all life and all thought this side of the eschaton will be. I will not pretend to draw together strands from Mark, Job, Hebrews and the most excruciatingly self-righteous of the psalms and pretend they share great themes of faith!
The scriptures, even the gospel-readings for which we stand as a mark of respect for the Christ who becomes Incarnate in our midst, are flawed, no matter what the more extreme Protestants may tell us. Yet they are in-filled with divine Spirit in a way no others are: we trivialize them at risk – every preacher should walk in fear between those temptations. The Bible is not the Incarnation, as the bibliolatrists suggest. Nor is it merely some old book or collection of books as relativists suggest. We must approach the text in fear and trembling: this is one of the great loci of the encounter with the Risen Lord. And when Mark records Jesus issuing what appear to be some stern words, words by which I for one, and who knows how many others in this gathering, stand challenged if not condemned, we should be cautious indeed. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. There’s not a lot of wriggle-room there.
On the other hand nor is there wriggle-room when Paul and others demand that women wear their hair long but covered (1 Cor. 11.6, apparently so not as to disturb the angels – 1 Cor.11.10) and not braided (1 Pet. 3.3) .There is no wriggle room when women are told they must not wear ‘gold, pearls, or expensive clothes’ (1 Tim. 2.9 - I will ask the wardens to check later!), or when the scriptures condemn men with long hair (1 Cor. 11.14, suggesting, if most Christian iconography is accurate, that Jesus was condemned as a sinner not only for ‘hanging on a tree’ - and I don't know if any of you have seen puictures of the new Bishop of Wellington!). Nor is there wriggle room when Paul sternly demands that Christians do not bring law suits before civil courts (1 Cor. 6). There were all sorts of fiscal justice elements underlying that issue, but it is an injunction that is often ignored by the very church institutions who claim to be bible-believing.
We could of course begin to play a game of pitting Paul’s words against those of Jesus, or Peter’s or James’ against Paul’s against Jesus, but then, if we are doing that, we are generating the dangerous game of creating a canon within the canon. No person can stand before God claiming they have the authority to do that. In any case, can any of us claim to have lived up to the stern commands of Jesus that Anne addressed last week, to pluck out our eyes and carve off our sin-filled hands?
So the dangers of scripture are at least two fold. One danger is to give the words of scripture a timeless authority they were never designed to have, the bibliolatrous option. The other is to trivialize them as an old book, to say they have no claim on us at all. Is what they say about sin, about integrity and justice just an old and so two thousand years ago tale? Was Jesus’ teaching on divorce to be taken as if it were eternal-Torah (as Paul saw Torah), as letter not spirit, as condemning the divorced to the outer echelons of Christianity for all time? For that matter what about his teachings about children? For years we cheerfully added our amen to the words of Jesus about children as icons of faith, but glared at them if they dared to breathe, much less speak, in church.
Is there a rule of thumb? I will of course always say context is everything – and say too that narrative context, the place in which the author placed a scene in his narrative of faith, is every bit as important as the context in which the events occurred. Is Jesus, who had some stern things to say about burdens and millstones and self-righteous wearers of phylacteries really saying ‘no way, never, forget it, suck it up princess, suffer’ to those who are trapped in marriages that are insufferable hellholes? Is he telling those who have emerged from cess pits of abuse that they can never again experience married love? One might ask the same about the imposition of laws that deny homosexual people the experience of edifying love, based on a verse here and a verse there. God forbid a long-haired man or a pearl-wearing woman enter a church!
Let’s not throw the book away. I make no secret of my deep sorrow at those who so denude our scriptures of meaning that they are no more significant for us than the Buddhist Scriptures, Holy Qur'an, the Book of Mormon, Wordsworth’s poetry, or the Agony Aunt column of a women’s magazine. When in liturgy I solemnly intone ‘for the word of the Lord’ I am not trivialising the scriptures of our faith. When the scriptures speak of justice and righteousness and resurrection and eternity I do not trivialize these proclamations. These, though, are the great ur-themes of faith: is there an ur-theme of faith present as Jesus addresses divorce or the rights of children?
Indeed there is. For here Jesus is voicing the wrath of God and the judgement of God at institutions that disempower and destroy human lives. This is not a benevolent conversation about ordinary marriage and divorce – the Pharisees and scribes have already demonstrated by their knowledge of Deuteronomy that they are not interested really in the Old Testament Torah, but are intent on trapping the Jesus who is interested in spirit, not letter of Torah. This is a life-and-death risk conversation about the abusive and exploitative attitudes of the family of Herod, instruments of the Imperium of Rome, of the Caesars who manipulated women and marriage in the interests of power only: this is not about Mr and Mrs Smith whose love ran cold, but about the Mephistophelian Herods and Caesars who have kept women powerless, as instruments of their exploitative greed. John the Baptist was executed for answering this question dangerously: so too will Jesus be, as it is added to the evidence of his insubordination, his disrespect for a corrupt state.
So let us get away from the demonic text wars so beloved in some quarters; wars that pit a text about Corinthian or Roman rent boys against the longings of gay people for edifying love. Texts that tell women to remain silent in church, or not to wear pearls, or how to wear their hair, because of the peculiarities of a context that a biblical author was once addressing. Let us get away from text wars that use these references to silence or oppress women for all time. Let us get away – or perhaps not! – from texts that tell us not to go to court (one text I believe we have cynically failed to uphold, to the benefit not of the gospel but of lawyers).
A woman in a hell hole of abuse, or a man in a hell hole of lovelessness is not condemned for ever to singleness – though nor is marriage the only possible state of human enrichment, and nor is it either to be entered or exited lightly. A gay person is not condemned forever to singleness – though sexuality is not the sole realm of human fulfilment, and no gay person should enter life-long commitment trivially. In both cases celibacy is one, but not the only possible alternative option.
If we are to look for the ur-narrative, let us ask that glorious clichéd question, what would Jesus do? His ur-narrative here is about empowering the disempowered, protecting the unprotected, and breathing resurrection hope into the darkest hellholes of powerlessness – the place where, he will remind us horrifyingly on Good Friday, the encounter with God begins. Jesus is not saying divorce is always wrong or never right, but is in his ur-narrative telling us that exploitation and oppression and the cynical using of other human beings is never, ever right. The exploitation and oppression of children, utterly without rights in first century Israel, is never ever right. The exploitation of rent boys or child prostitutes, as we have seen so disturbingly in news out of Sydney this week, is never ever right.
Paradoxically, it is only when we become so devoid of pretensions to power that we truly become like a child, and are rendered fit to enter the eternities of God. For many of us, I fear, that will only be in that moment when we truly turn to the God of judgement and say at last, no longer through a darkened glass but face to face, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner”.
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, October 7th, 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 27/NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings:
Job 1.1, 2.1-10
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1.1-4, 2.5-12
Mark 10.2-16
Every now and again the lectionary’s cycles throw together such a disconnected collection of readings that it’s hard to believe we stand in one heritage at all. It’s a useful reminder that our scriptures are a glorious collection of the Godward thoughts of those who like us strive godwardly through a darkened glass, drawing on wisdom that the Church with time came to recognize as Spirit-filled, yet incomplete, disparate, as all life and all thought this side of the eschaton will be. I will not pretend to draw together strands from Mark, Job, Hebrews and the most excruciatingly self-righteous of the psalms and pretend they share great themes of faith!
The scriptures, even the gospel-readings for which we stand as a mark of respect for the Christ who becomes Incarnate in our midst, are flawed, no matter what the more extreme Protestants may tell us. Yet they are in-filled with divine Spirit in a way no others are: we trivialize them at risk – every preacher should walk in fear between those temptations. The Bible is not the Incarnation, as the bibliolatrists suggest. Nor is it merely some old book or collection of books as relativists suggest. We must approach the text in fear and trembling: this is one of the great loci of the encounter with the Risen Lord. And when Mark records Jesus issuing what appear to be some stern words, words by which I for one, and who knows how many others in this gathering, stand challenged if not condemned, we should be cautious indeed. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. There’s not a lot of wriggle-room there.
On the other hand nor is there wriggle-room when Paul and others demand that women wear their hair long but covered (1 Cor. 11.6, apparently so not as to disturb the angels – 1 Cor.11.10) and not braided (1 Pet. 3.3) .There is no wriggle room when women are told they must not wear ‘gold, pearls, or expensive clothes’ (1 Tim. 2.9 - I will ask the wardens to check later!), or when the scriptures condemn men with long hair (1 Cor. 11.14, suggesting, if most Christian iconography is accurate, that Jesus was condemned as a sinner not only for ‘hanging on a tree’ - and I don't know if any of you have seen puictures of the new Bishop of Wellington!). Nor is there wriggle room when Paul sternly demands that Christians do not bring law suits before civil courts (1 Cor. 6). There were all sorts of fiscal justice elements underlying that issue, but it is an injunction that is often ignored by the very church institutions who claim to be bible-believing.
We could of course begin to play a game of pitting Paul’s words against those of Jesus, or Peter’s or James’ against Paul’s against Jesus, but then, if we are doing that, we are generating the dangerous game of creating a canon within the canon. No person can stand before God claiming they have the authority to do that. In any case, can any of us claim to have lived up to the stern commands of Jesus that Anne addressed last week, to pluck out our eyes and carve off our sin-filled hands?
So the dangers of scripture are at least two fold. One danger is to give the words of scripture a timeless authority they were never designed to have, the bibliolatrous option. The other is to trivialize them as an old book, to say they have no claim on us at all. Is what they say about sin, about integrity and justice just an old and so two thousand years ago tale? Was Jesus’ teaching on divorce to be taken as if it were eternal-Torah (as Paul saw Torah), as letter not spirit, as condemning the divorced to the outer echelons of Christianity for all time? For that matter what about his teachings about children? For years we cheerfully added our amen to the words of Jesus about children as icons of faith, but glared at them if they dared to breathe, much less speak, in church.
Is there a rule of thumb? I will of course always say context is everything – and say too that narrative context, the place in which the author placed a scene in his narrative of faith, is every bit as important as the context in which the events occurred. Is Jesus, who had some stern things to say about burdens and millstones and self-righteous wearers of phylacteries really saying ‘no way, never, forget it, suck it up princess, suffer’ to those who are trapped in marriages that are insufferable hellholes? Is he telling those who have emerged from cess pits of abuse that they can never again experience married love? One might ask the same about the imposition of laws that deny homosexual people the experience of edifying love, based on a verse here and a verse there. God forbid a long-haired man or a pearl-wearing woman enter a church!
Let’s not throw the book away. I make no secret of my deep sorrow at those who so denude our scriptures of meaning that they are no more significant for us than the Buddhist Scriptures, Holy Qur'an, the Book of Mormon, Wordsworth’s poetry, or the Agony Aunt column of a women’s magazine. When in liturgy I solemnly intone ‘for the word of the Lord’ I am not trivialising the scriptures of our faith. When the scriptures speak of justice and righteousness and resurrection and eternity I do not trivialize these proclamations. These, though, are the great ur-themes of faith: is there an ur-theme of faith present as Jesus addresses divorce or the rights of children?
Indeed there is. For here Jesus is voicing the wrath of God and the judgement of God at institutions that disempower and destroy human lives. This is not a benevolent conversation about ordinary marriage and divorce – the Pharisees and scribes have already demonstrated by their knowledge of Deuteronomy that they are not interested really in the Old Testament Torah, but are intent on trapping the Jesus who is interested in spirit, not letter of Torah. This is a life-and-death risk conversation about the abusive and exploitative attitudes of the family of Herod, instruments of the Imperium of Rome, of the Caesars who manipulated women and marriage in the interests of power only: this is not about Mr and Mrs Smith whose love ran cold, but about the Mephistophelian Herods and Caesars who have kept women powerless, as instruments of their exploitative greed. John the Baptist was executed for answering this question dangerously: so too will Jesus be, as it is added to the evidence of his insubordination, his disrespect for a corrupt state.
So let us get away from the demonic text wars so beloved in some quarters; wars that pit a text about Corinthian or Roman rent boys against the longings of gay people for edifying love. Texts that tell women to remain silent in church, or not to wear pearls, or how to wear their hair, because of the peculiarities of a context that a biblical author was once addressing. Let us get away from text wars that use these references to silence or oppress women for all time. Let us get away – or perhaps not! – from texts that tell us not to go to court (one text I believe we have cynically failed to uphold, to the benefit not of the gospel but of lawyers).
A woman in a hell hole of abuse, or a man in a hell hole of lovelessness is not condemned for ever to singleness – though nor is marriage the only possible state of human enrichment, and nor is it either to be entered or exited lightly. A gay person is not condemned forever to singleness – though sexuality is not the sole realm of human fulfilment, and no gay person should enter life-long commitment trivially. In both cases celibacy is one, but not the only possible alternative option.
If we are to look for the ur-narrative, let us ask that glorious clichéd question, what would Jesus do? His ur-narrative here is about empowering the disempowered, protecting the unprotected, and breathing resurrection hope into the darkest hellholes of powerlessness – the place where, he will remind us horrifyingly on Good Friday, the encounter with God begins. Jesus is not saying divorce is always wrong or never right, but is in his ur-narrative telling us that exploitation and oppression and the cynical using of other human beings is never, ever right. The exploitation and oppression of children, utterly without rights in first century Israel, is never ever right. The exploitation of rent boys or child prostitutes, as we have seen so disturbingly in news out of Sydney this week, is never ever right.
Paradoxically, it is only when we become so devoid of pretensions to power that we truly become like a child, and are rendered fit to enter the eternities of God. For many of us, I fear, that will only be in that moment when we truly turn to the God of judgement and say at last, no longer through a darkened glass but face to face, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner”.
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