Corporate Sin

(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

'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

Combatting amnesia

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NT)
Sunday, December 2^nd, 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.

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