Is there no balm in Gilead? (So long, and thanks for all the fish)

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD

FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)

ORDINARY SUNDAY 25 (22^nd SEPTEMBER) 2013

final sermon at the Parish of the Good Shepherd, Fred’s Pass and Batchelor

Readings:        Jeremiah 8.18 – 9.1

                        Psalm 79.1-9

                        1 Timothy 2.1-10

                        Luke 16.1-13

 

If a first-comer were to pick up the books of the New Testament and read them from the opening pronouncement “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ” of Matthew to the closing “amen” of Revelation, even though these are not in any sort of chronological sequence, the reader would be hard pressed to miss gleaning something of a sense of urgency. Mark’s gospel-account is particularly urgent, as the author tells the Jesus-story in the shadow of what he considered to be the imminent return of Jesus. Can we or even should we still do this two millennia later?

For that matter, can we maintain any such sense of urgency even in the small time-frame of our own lives? Scholars used to say that there was a diminishment of apocalyptic urgency in the writing of Paul, occurring over a period of less than a decade. That is a less popular view these days, and I think it is more likely that his expectation of the triumphant apocalyptic return of Jesus came and went in waves of circumstance, and was gradually overtaken by his expectation of meeting Jesus (again) in his own forthcoming death, but the case remains:  his writings are full of apocalyptic urgency. But can we – should we – maintain that urgency?

For centuries that apocalyptic dimension of Christianity was suppressed. I do not mean it was suppressed in a Da Vinci Code sort of manner, but simply that it was put in the too hard basket of Christian teaching. There were moments of apocalyptic fervour: the lead-up to the end of the first millennium was one such moment, and the events of the Reformation led to another, but on the whole apocalyptic ferment was left neatly filed under “I” for ignore or “E” for excruciatingly embarrassing. In particular it was embarrassing to perpetrators of state religion – unfortunately deep in the DNA of Anglican Christianity – and even in my 1960s exposure to Christianity any notion of a second coming was seen as quaint and embarrassing. It’s no coincidence that it’s only since the detonation of the bomb obscenely named “Trinity” in the Jornada del Muerto desert on July 16^th, 1945, that any notion of apocalyptic has escaped the clutches of the idiot fringes of Christianity and returned to the mainstream (which, despite appearances to the contrary, does not indicate that the millennialist idiot fringes were or are not idiotic after all, for their focus remains deeply askew). Apocalptic has drifted very slowly into Anglican thought, so we have been deeply embarrassed when Jesus appears to teach that we should have so great a sense of urgency that we should behave like a rotten and corrupt farm manager. Jesus clearly was not terribly Anglican.

Yet this strand of New Testament thought is deeply important. If we lose it, then we run the risk of becoming precisely the sort of visionless Christianity that has often dominated our history. We run the risk, and this is deep in the essence of Anglicanism, of believing that civic leadership is the ultimate expression of divine will: as our formative Book of Common Prayer tended to express it, God appoints kings first, then magistrates, then bishops, then mere clergy, and last of all you, hoi poloi, whose task it is to do exactly what you are told, and ensure no boat is ever rocked. It is a miracle that Anglicanism has ever produced figures the likes of Trevor Huddleston, or his protégé Desmond Tutu, or the current ecclesiastical leadership who tend to be more prepared to critique corrupt or self-seeking governments. For a doctrine of apocalyptic, at the very least, reminds us that God is, as the Veggie Tales so aptly put it, bigger than the boogie man, bigger than corrupt or myopic governments, as well as being bigger than the calamities that may devastate our individual existences.

I would not want to suggest that Jeremiah lost sight of God: far from it! The abject heaviness of heart that characterises his world view is a direct result of his critical analysis of the corruption of the leadership of his day. I make no secret of my belief that our own civic leadership deserve the same scorn, as they use asylum seekers as cannon fodder in games of political one-upmanship, though I would add that our church leaders, too, have been utterly self-seeking as they spent decades hiding corrupt and exploitative predators within our own ranks, desperately attempting to avoid shame and fiscal horror of exposure to the powerful scrutiny of the law. For that matter we would do well to remember, as the Fitzgerald Enquiry reminded us a decade or two ago, that the law itself is not above corruption: and so the cycles of human sinfulness continue.

So is there indeed no balm in Gilead? There certainly is not if we either deaden the voice of conscience, that gift of God that inconveniently reverberates around the human soul until we cauterize it, or if we remove any sense of the judgement of God from our life-equation altogether.  We can take these options in a myriad ways, pushing God’s “still small voice” out into realms of irrelevancy, deadening divine scrutiny, making excuses: we can’t afford to be exposed to legal scrutiny in case we are bankrupted by legal proceedings, and how could we carry out our task then? So said the gospel never. I suggest that if we believe that – and I fear we have – then we have set up, like Jeremiah’s people, false gods, and worshipped them. Or, indeed, as Jesus put it: we have served Mammon, not God.

The winds of change are blowing through the church in all its forms. Our infrastructures are being stretched and broken, for I fear we have believed they, not the Spirit of God, would save us. God knows I do it too: anyone who claims perfection is a liar, and anyone who claims it is easy to face a shifting, uncertain future is not really much more honest. Is there no balm in Gilead?

Jeremiah was a miserable old soul, so much so that for a while the name Jeremiah was common parlance for a party pooper. He was far more John the Baptist than party-going, story-telling Jesus, though the prophetic tradition of justice-seeking embraces both of course. In the end though Jeremiah was kept on focus through his dark night of the soul by his constant awareness of the presence of God, a presence far greater than the corruption that surrounded him, far greater than doubt and despair. Such awareness is both a gift of God and, paradoxically, the result of discipline and hard work. I don’t set myself up as an example, but pray God that my life and yours can be a learning curve in that direction.

The author of 1 Timothy’s injunction to “lift up holy hands” is no more than an invitation to pray – the so-called orans position of prayer adopted in charismatic-pentecostal worship was probably the original and most appropriate pose, though I make no secret of my belief we lose bent knees at great peril.  The author’s invitation is neither more nor less than a demand that we work hard at the experience of closeness to God. We need though a reality check: are we worshipping because it brings us warm-fuzzy feelings as individuals?

Our paths have briefly crossed but the challenges put to us by Jesus’ story of a corrupt steward are applicable in all our individual journeys and in our corporate journey as members of faith communities in the service of God: Are we talking about mission and evangelism and justice and other ministries of the Church because we want to prop up shaky institutions? Jeremiah, would have no time for either, and Jesus stands firmly in Jeremiah’s footsteps, even if he has a better sense of humour. Or are we engaging with God because we love God, because our lives are touched and transformed by God, because we want others to know and share this side of the grave the warmth and the magnificence of the One we will encounter in our own personal death or in the final apocalypse of human history, whichever, whatever form that may take? May the answer be the love of God, for you and for me, as we tread the tracks God has beaten for us.

TLBWY*
 

*Please note there will now be a break in sermons until October 20th, after I am installed as Dean of Waiapu in New Zealand

Creative entropy and the shuffling sinner

SERMON PREACHED AT 

THE CHURCH OF ST FRANCIS, BATCHELOR

(NORTHERN TERRITORY)

ORDINARY SUNDAY 24 (15^th September) 2013

Readings:        Jeremiah 4.11-12, 22-28

                        Psalm 14

                        1 Timothy 1.1-2, 12-19a

                        Luke 15.1-10

While getting a hold of meaningful statistics in any field can be like catching shadows, the suggestions are that Christianity is adhered to by about one third of the world’s population – and whilst there may be varying degrees and shades of belief, as belief is strictly a matter between believer and believed I think we can accept that as a basic starting point for reflection. There are then slightly fewer than 2.2 billion Christians around the world, even though some might not acknowledge one another as Christians and there will be some in that number who would be a little reticent to give themselves that title. While in the western world there is some decline in adherence to Christianity, this is not true of the entire world: one of the most “Christian” of nations – though I abhor that combination of words it will have to do for now – is Mexico, where 95% of the population claim Christianity as their faith. At the moment US adherence is around 78% and falling: in Australia the figure is (2006) 61%, though only about 8.8% actually attend church on any given Sunday. Not quite a tithe of the population, not quite the tenth leper on whom the sun shines and who remembers tpo give thanks, to make eucharist, but close enough.

There is much beating of breasts amongst church leadership about the falling statistics of faith adherence and church attendance. While obviously I would love people to experience the joy I experience in the encounter with and worship of God, I am more at peace than many about the alleged falling numbers. Obviously the present models of church, with heavy infrastructure and stipended clergy, may be under threat, but there are many who suspect that very threat may be a movement of God’s Spirit. In a column I wrote for Market-Place many years ago I wrote of the “creative entropy” of the church: as a church that exists primarily for the maintenance of its infrastructure gradually implodes, by the gifting of God’s Spirit newer and wiser models of ministry and of mission will arise from the ashes. To me the infrastructure matters little: what matters is that we continue to be a Eucharistic and a missiological community of hope.

This was certainly the case with the church-equivalent of Jeremiah’s time: in a time of arid complacency the people of God turned away into Jeremiah’s version of a valley of dry bones, “and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.” I have no doubt that we are experiencing such a time now, though at what stage we are in the journey into the city of ruins I cannot tell: two world wars, a cold war, the so-called “clash of civilizations” between an increasingly decadent west and the more militant and fundamentalist wings of Islam, not to mention global financial crises and ecological brinkmanship all speak to me of dire warnings from the God who has sent many dire warning before. The beefing up of skittish news stories about Miley Cyrus tewking at a time when for example Syria is plunging deeper and deeper into a human crisis, as we saw a few weeks ago, assures me that our media are by and large slaves of entertainment, not information, and that our populace remain duped not by religion but by the controllers of popular media, most noticeably Mr Murdoch. But that is not to paint Rupert Murdoch as the antichrist: all that is antichristian is antichrist, and Murdoch’s self-serving media is only one pawn in a gigantic and demonic game.

Not to know the warmth and love and security of Jesus is, so far as I can see, punishment, not crime. Too much Christian preaching gives the impression that God is adding up our balance sheets, checking the naughty things we have done, and preparing the flames of hell for those who fall short of the equation. Of course I agree with Paul and all orthodox Christianity that we can never balance that ledger, that we universally fall short of the equations of God. My difference with much Christian teaching – though by no means all – is that I believe that to remain embedded in the shortfall is punishment in itself. To journey through life divorced from resurrection hope, and indeed to travel through death devoid of resurrection hope is a terrible burden. To dwell trapped in the valley of dry bones, the unreal city of Baudelaire and TS Eliot, to live a life of hollow-chested half-existence is punishment indeed. To be enslaved to drugs or sex or power or stock markets or all the pantheon of small g gods that stand as ersatz substitutes to the God of Jesus Christ is to live a half-life, or even not to live at all. God’s wrath, I believe – and I think I have Paul’s opening chapters to the Romans on my side – is revealed in the human determination to live without God. This determination to the negative is something those bearing the epithet Christian may often choose to do, too. I think of Christians trapped in lives of fear, fear of the future, fear of change, fear of all that does not resemble their cosy security: theirs is a shadow form of the way of the Cross, and it can become mine, too, if I do not embrace the wideness and the depth and the generosity of the God of Jesus Christ and the Spirit in whom he is known.

I am privileged. I have, for a start, known life without faith, and can safely say that every day I am aware than my own existence would be far more squalid were it not for my encounter with the risen Lord 35 years ago. I make no apology for that. While I am no angel I know I am enabled by God to blunder along in something vaguely resembling the Way of the Cross. I know that compared to my sisters and brothers in lands where Christianity is, statistically, growing, I am a mere shuffler in faith, but pray God I will continue at the very least to keep on shuffling. I am no greater sharer of faith – there are no conversion notches on my belt! – but am not convinced that, in the traditional sense, is what I am called to be (or maybe that is just my excuse to shuffle, not run the race!). I am called to be a signpost towards God, rumouring resurrection  hope even when it is considerably unsexy in a post-enlightenment world. To that end, I will shuffle on, perhaps showing some modicum of the passion of the widow as she finds her coin: rejoice with me, though I suspect that metaphor breaks down and I am the coin, not the widow, the sheep not the shepherd. God gives us a future: individually and corporately, and it utterly transcends the limited vision of our perspective. We must shuffle on, remembering, like the tenth leper, to turn back and give thanks from time to time.

TLBWY

God in my image?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 23
(8^th SEPTEMBER) 2013

Readings:        Jeremiah 18.1-11

                        Psalm 139.1-5, 12-18
                        Philemon
                        Luke 14.25-37
 

Perhaps the greatest theologian of the last century was Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, whose Commentary on Romans, effectively re-written and republished in the aftermath of World War One, in 1922, changed the face of European  theology and the witness of the church, it seemed irreversibly. In the years leading up to the Kaiser’s expansionist megalomania Christianity had been largely reduced to a tribal or technically nationalistic religion, a convivial agreement on the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood – sisters were largely irrelevant – of man. God was a tribal God, to be rolled out in times of national pride. God was a totem. With God on our side, as Bob Dylan acerbically noted half a century later (and half a century ago) we will “win the next war.”

After four years of brutal, bloody stalemate and unprecedented and universal loss of life, Barth saw clearly that there was no room for a tame and tribal or nationalistic God. As he turned his attention with renewed energy to the biblical text Barth saw again and again that God is the God who will be neither tamed nor questioned. Barth saw too that God is not a God to whom we can rationalise a way, but is the God who reveals divine selfhood uniquely and solely and even illogically in the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians.

I place my cards on the table: I believe Karl Barth to be the theologian par excellence for our time too.  However unpopular it might be, I think it is very dangerous when we begin to recreate God in our own image. Of course we need to assess whether we are not doing that in subtle and evil ways: have we made God into a European, a male, have we made God racist or sexist or homophobic? Where there are texts that appear to justify these assumptions we need to test them, and we will make mistakes – the Spirit of God is greater than our mistakes! I believe sometimes we need to dig beneath the surface level of the texts, the prohibitions and the black and the white, and wrestle in amongst the reasons and the circumstances really to break open God’s commands. (I should add, for those in the know, that I wrote this before I knew that the Anglican Diocese of Auckland, my previous Diocese, had voted no to same sex marriage: just as I accept the outcome of a national election, so I accept the democratic processes of that diocese!).

What Barth saw clearly, primarily from his reading of Romans, but of course also from Paul’s reading of Jeremiah, is that the pot is not in a position to manipulate the potter. This has huge implications for all of us – and particularly for those of us who dwell in the liberal end of theology (always acknowledging that I speak of me, not necessarily you!). It is a particularly dangerous text for those of us who take the risk of preaching, for it means – unless I happen to be Abraham or Jesus – I have little basis for arguing or bargaining with God. I must accept – though I am human and I will struggle – but I must accept that God’s, not mine, is the divine perspective, and that even the vicissitudes of my own existence are ultimately God’s choice, not mine. It’s a tough call, and I know that this control freak, for one, is unlikely ever to get it right: “not my will, God, yours be done”, these are amongst the hardest words in the biblical text.

This means, too, that we cannot nor should we escape the penetrating stare of God. This of course is parodied in some circles: I doubt if God is particularly interested in our bodily functions – except when we use our drives and energies to prey on and oppress others.  It is there that sexual and other predators in the church have sinned brutally – but that includes those who use the power structures of the church to, as Paul would put it, tear down and not build up, to destroy the human spirit, to turn seekers away from Jesus. Predators and other oppressors within the church must always know that this is the line of responsibility they have dared to cross – and all of us must know we are capable of crossing it, but for the grace of God. God is watching us – but not with the ogling stare of a voyeur, but the caring, compassionate stare of a lover.

Christianity and its God are somewhat on the nose in 21^st century society. It was in fact also so at the time the First World War was building up to its demonic birth, but perhaps those parallels can be pushed too far. Our complex God is parodied as a fairy in the sky and an imaginary friend – though nothing is new under the sun and Christianity has been there before, and for many parts of its history. The parallels though should not be ignored: at the end of the nineteenth century Christians were creating God in their own image rather than in the image of the unpredictable Jesus. The images in which we recreate God in the 21^st century are more to do with personal lifestyle or arguably genetic footprints than the tribal nationalistic preferences of a hundred years ago, but the lesson remains the same: God is not either a national toy or a piece of logical deduction made in the image of our own preferences. God is not gay, green, blue, left or right, but about justice and righteousness and holiness and a whole host of matters that are not necessarily politically chic or even logical – much less convenient.

As Christ-bearers, though, like the Christians of the early centuries, we have a responsibility: we are called to proclaim and to be conspicuous in our service of a God as revealed in the scriptures, a God who cares. God cares for the sparrow that falls. Our God is a God who is revealed in love and justice and righteousness and holiness, not dogma or personal preferences or skin colour or lifestyle (the predatory excepted, which is clearly demonic). We have to make sure that our lives are so opened and disciplined in the awareness and service of that God, in immersion in scripture and in fellowship and in worship and in compassionate works, that we are a part of those creative and justice-proclaiming movements of the Spirit. We need to ensure that by our disciplines of faith we are the Christ-bearers that we long – hopefully – to be. That is to be the house built on firm foundations. None of that inclusion in the purposes of God is a free ride, but application and hard labour.

TLBWY