Eu-catastrophizing the Beatitudes
1 John 3:3-4:
For this is the love of God: that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, because everything that is born out of God conquers the world (as it is). And this is the victory that conquers the world: our faithfulness.
Matt 5: 1-12
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You know what it’s like in a very thick fog? What’s it like? Cold. Cold chills my brain too. I become sluggish and anxious. Partly because of the cold, partly because I become disoriented, just getting by from one visible thing to the next. You have to dip your headlights and so you can’t see very far ahead. Short-sighted travelling.
I want to say that for a wee while now I have been descending into a kind of fog of uncertainty. Most of the time its been fine. But sometimes there’s just too much happening at once, and its hard to focus, so you end up going from one thing to the next, content perhaps not to see too far ahead. Sometimes that’s fine and necessarily, and other times I get tense and discombobulated.
Monday was one of those times. Sermon preparation wasn’t helping. I almost ran a red light. I looked in my rear vision. The guy behind me shook his head. I reversed out of the intersection a bit. When the light went green put my foot down and ended up moving backwards rather than forwards (I was still in reverse). The guy in the car behind me shook his head again. I knew there was too much going on. My whole body felt tense. Too much happening. Too much fog – particularly around moving house.
It’s been nearly eight years now since I started out as Community Minister in Berhampore and made a very deliberate decision to spend as much of my life as possible among those here who are in social housing, who live from week to week (cause they often don’t have the discretionary income to look too far ahead), who are pretty powerless in our society, who have no hope of getting on the property ladder, who have no interest in maintaining the status quo – because the status quo has given them a shit deal. So 8 years ago when Jesus said blessed are the poor, I believed it. And Jan and I have been welcomed into the good life of social housing flats and most of my friends are there now. These are the people Jesus was thinking about when he preached around Galilee about God’s glorious hope.
But if, like Jan and I, you are already on the housing ladder, and you have your own apartment, you can’t really pretend to be in the same boat as those who are poor. For people like us it’s easy to get used to the status quo, we can save a little, plan ahead and so on.
But right now it feels like the season is changing again for us. Jan quit her job a few weeks ago so she could teach at a place called Te Puna Reo o Ngā Kākano – a maori language preschool in town. She started on Monday. This will be meaningful and challenging work but also financially quite a drop (stepping outside the Kindergarten Association – Whanau Manaaki). By Wednesday she learnt that her new Early Childhood centre is in danger of closing down cause they can’t find a new venue. It’s unsettling.
About a month or so ago the opportunity opened up for us to co-buy a slightly larger house along with our daughter and her husband and our grandchildren – multi-generational living. It’s a big change and a big mortgage again. It gives them space to survive the Winter and not live in a small truck at Tapu Te Ranga marae through another winter. It gives us a garden. It’s a joy seeing them relax into that space. In the long term there will be other benefits for us. But it’s a very risky move financially. So right now we need our old apartment to sell – like yesterday.
And the other change is that my funding – the grant money that allows me to work half-time in social housing – is coming to an end. I need to find work of some kind, if I am going to be able to continue to support the social housing complexes in some way.
So there’s a fog of uncertainty. And I really have no idea how we will survive into the future. Somehow we have made these decisions that make sense in the light of faith… but deep down we are struggling not to panic. Don’t get me wrong, I am not having a breakdown. Sometimes it is better than others.
In one of the more stressful time over the last few weeks one member of our new household told another member to stop catastrophising – taking minor problems and treating them like disasters. So the word catastrophe has been bouncing around in my brain.
I was reminded that JRR Tolkein once invented a word – ‘eucatastrophe’. Anyone heard it before. It’s a combination of the word “catastrophe” with the Greek prefix eu meaning “good”. Like a catastrophe its a sudden or unexpected event that changes everything but it changes things for the good – rather than the way we normally think of catastrophes. It’s a good catastrophe.
So these last few weeks I have been stepping back from the beatitudes and looking at them as a whole, as blessings for people who live their lives in vulnerability and uncertainty, who don’t have power, but are invited by Jesus to hang onto the eucatastrophe that Jesus kept telling them about. The kingdom of God is coming it will be their home. It will be a eucatastrophe, revolution, a great shake up… and that will be a good thing not a bad thing. It’s an interesting way to imagine your life. Terrible things are happening, but it will work because you’re leaning into the future. Investing in the future. What might appear from here to be total upheaval will in fact be the ‘best thing’.
You might say he is reframing the world… you have all these troubles he says, but really your life is good, because you are making yourselves at home in the world that is coming, that will overturn this one.
The kingdom of God reframes their world by placing around it this eu-catastrophe from God… And, as the beatitudes say, it means that those who are poor, the powerless will be at home in the rule of God brought in in eucatastrophe, it means that those who mourn will be comforted in hope, it means that those who are gentle will not rely on violence but will nevertheless ‘inherit the land’, it means that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will get what they desire, it means that the pure will see God, that the persecuted will also belong in God’s eucatastrophe, rather than being cast out.
The thing is these were Jesus people. His audience almost all the people who gathered and listened and lived with Jesus were poor, or ‘poor in spirit’ (remember Nathan translated it poor in ruach, or powerless). Jesus lived among those who had no interest in the status quo, they lived from week to week without security, at the bottom of society (admittedly the large majority of society was at the bottom – what’s changed – it’s not like they were a small minority). And Jesus gave them courage to trust that the good life was theirs and at hand, because catastrophe was coming – a good catastrophe.
When I think about my own situation at the moment in the fog of uncertainty, I think, maybe it’s just crazy planning (or lack of planning!). Maybe it only makes sense if our imaginations are formed to expected a eucatastrophe. Maybe God will provide to enable us to continue in the world as it is. And even if this is so, maybe more important than survival in this sense, is the need to lean into the world as it will be, catastrophe and all, regardless if it turns out badly, because the good thing is yet to come.
As the beatitudes say… The good life belongs to the poor, the powerless and so on.
So stepping back to look at the Beatitudes as a whole, the general drift of the beatitudes… I see a hopefulness for those who are vulnerable and struggling. Hopefulness in the face of uncertainty, vulnerability. God will bring this fog of chaos to a good conclusion.
Perhaps rather than catastrophising we can learn the art of eu-catastrophising. Which is…? Stretching Tolkein… Well, I reckon it means, instead of seeing a disaster in every small problem, looking out for the small signs of hope and instead of dismissing them as kiwis are prone to do, understated as we like to be, maybe it means catching onto these small signs of hope and rejoicing in them and remembering them as anticipations and hints at God’s greater work that will eventually be all in all. Maybe it means, with that operating system running in the background, seeing an opportunity for change, for learning, for preparation. Let’s eucatastrophise together.
I invite you to hear this blessing: Blessed are you hopeless, helpless, vulnerable followers of Jesus for you are onto something, and something is onto you.
Amen
Short Easter Reflection 2024
(based on Herbert McCabe’s Good Friday sermon)
For our reflection this morning I am going to begin by reading an extract from famous Good Friday sermon by someone I regard as one of the 20th century’s greatest Christian thinkers – Herbert McCabe.
It’s a longish quote but worth it.
Why did Christ die? This tries to answer the question: What had the death of Christ to do with us; why is it important to us? One such answer which has been very influential in the past is that by his death Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of the world. The idea, I’m sure you will remember, was that sin had offended God and since God is himself infinite such an offence has a kind of infinity about it. It was within the power of the human creature to offend by disobedience to God but it was not within our power to restore the balance of justice by any recompense we could pay to God. So God the Son became man so that by his suffering and death he could pay the price of sin. This seems to be based on an idea of punishment as a kind of payment, a repayment; the criminal undergoing punishment ‘pays his debt to society’, as we say. It takes a divine man, however, to pay our debt to divine justice.
Now, I can make no literal sense of this idea, whether you apply it to criminals or to Christ. I cannot see how a man in prison is paying a debt to society or paying anything else at all to society. On the contrary, it is rather expensive to keep him there. I can see the point in the criminal being bound to make restitution to anyone he has injured when that is possible; but that is not the same as punishment. I can see the point in punishment as something painful that people will want to avoid and so (we may reasonably hope) something to encourage them to avoid committing crimes; but this is not paying a debt. It is impossible to see Christ on the cross as literally engaged either in making restitution or in serving as a warning to others. If God will not forgive us until his Son has been tortured to death for us then God is a lot less forgiving than even we are sometimes. If a society feels itself somehow compensated for its loss by the satisfaction of watching the sufferings of a criminal, then society is being vengeful in a pretty infantile way. And if God is satisfied and compensated for sin by the suffering of mankind in Christ, he must be even more infantile…
Well, then, did the Father want Jesus to be crucified? And, if so, why? The answer as I see it is again: No. The mission of Jesus from the Father is not the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be human. Any minimally intelligent people who are proposing to become parents know that their children will have lives of suffering and disappointment and perhaps tragedy, but this is not what they wish for them; what they want is that they should be alive, be human. And this is what Jesus sees as a command laid on him by his Father in heaven; the obedience of Jesus to his Father is to be totally, completely human…
Jesus had no fear of being human because he saw his humanity simply as gift from him whom he called ‘the Father’. You might say that as he lived and gradually explored into himself, asking not just the question ‘Who do men say that I am?’ but ‘Who do I say that I am?’, he found nothing but the Father’s love. This is what gave all the meaning to his life—the love which is the ultimate basis and meaning of the universe. However he would have put it to himself (and of this we know nothing), he saw himself as simply an expression of the love which is the Father and in which the Father delights. His whole life and death was a response in love and obedience to the gift of being human, an act of gratitude and appreciation of the gift of being human…
So my thesis is that Jesus died of being human. His very humanity meant that he put up no barriers, no defences against those he loved who hated him. He refused to evade the consequences of being human in our inhuman world. So the cross shows up our world for what it really is, what we have made it. It is a world in which it is dangerous, even fatal, to be human; a world structured by violence and fear. The cross shows that whatever else may be wrong with this or that society, whatever may be remedied by this or that political or economic change, there is a basic wrong, persistent through history and through all progress: the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist.
The fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist… think Israel-Palestine, think Ukraine, think NZ. McCabe captures what I preached about 6 weeks ago. The crucifixion of Jesus is the judgement of God that exposes the world – the judgement we have already undergone.
So what is today, resurrection Sunday? McCabe helps us interpret resurrection. Jesus lived to be fully human. To live out the gift of being human that he received from his Father. The Father did not want the Son to be crucified, nevertheless, the only way to be fully human in our world is to suffer like this. So in a secondary sense, in a collateral sense we might say it is the will of God, it is unavoidable. If you love those who hate you… your political enemies, your national enemies, your cultural enemies… you are creating in your own life and your own body a new world, a new society, a new humanity.
What then is the resurrection?
How to we interpret this life that is given to Jesus beyond death? How is it different from modern near-death experiences, or the raising of Lazarus in the bible? What does it mean?
Jesus final prayer, Father forgive them. Not make them pay for their sins, not ‘make me the payment for their sins’. Jesus final prayer, ‘Father forgive them’ is answered on resurrection day. The resurrection of Jesus is first of all an act of forgiveness. God’s act of forgiveness. God our creator refuses to take No for an answer. The gift of a truly human life, lived by Jesus, is the future that God has prepared for us all. So God gives us Jesus again. God gives Jesus again and thus for-gives. We are again given (post-crucifixion, post judgement, we have been judged and exposed) we are again given the opportunity to live a fully human life.
Christ is risen. Death has been defeated, drained of its power to rule us through fear. In the light of divine judgement we can be fully human.
Thanks be to God
Herbert McCabe on Christ’s Death
(extracts from his Good Friday Sermon – h/t Chris Green)
Why did Christ die? This tries to answer the question: What had the death of Christ to do with us; why is it important to us? One such answer which has been very influential in the past is that by his death Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of the world. The idea, I’m sure you will remember, was that sin had offended God and since God is himself infinite such an offence has a kind of infinity about it. It was within the power of the human creature to offend by disobedience to God but it was not within our power to restore the balance of justice by any recompense we could pay to God. So God the Son became man so that by his suffering and death he could pay the price of sin. This seems to be based on an idea of punishment as a kind of payment, a repayment; the criminal undergoing punishment ‘pays his debt to society’, as we say. It takes a divine man, however, to pay our debt to divine justice.
Now, I can make no literal sense of this idea, whether you apply it to criminals or to Christ. I cannot see how a man in prison is paying a debt to society or paying anything else at all to society. On the contrary, it is rather expensive to keep him there. I can see the point in the criminal being bound to make restitution to anyone he has injured, when that is possible; but that is not the same as punishment. I can see the point in punishment as something painful that people will want to avoid and so (we may reasonably hope) something to encourage them to avoid committing crimes; but this is not paying a debt. It is impossible to see Christ on the cross as literally engaged either in making restitution or in serving as a warning to others. If God will not forgive us until his Son has been tortured to death for us then God is a lot less forgiving than even we are sometimes. If a society feels itself somehow compensated for its loss by the satisfaction of watching the sufferings of a criminal, then society is being vengeful in a pretty infantile way. And if God is satisfied and compensated for sin by the suffering of mankind in Christ, he must be even more infantile…
Well, then, did the Father want Jesus to be crucified? And, if so, why? The answer as I see it is again: No. The mission of Jesus from the Father is not the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be human. Any minimally intelligent people who are proposing to become parents know that their children will have lives of suffering and disappointment and perhaps tragedy, but this is not what they wish for them; what they want is that they should be alive, be human. And this is what Jesus sees as a command laid on him by his Father in heaven; the obedience of Jesus to his Father is to be totally, completely human…
Jesus had no fear of being human because he saw his humanity simply as gift from him whom he called ‘the Father’. You might say that as he lived and gradually explored into himself, asking not just the question ‘Who do men say that I am?’ but ‘Who do I say that I am?’, he found nothing but the Father’s love. This is what gave all the meaning to his life—the love which is the ultimate basis and meaning of the universe. However he would have put it to himself (and of this we know nothing), he saw himself as simply an expression of the love which is the Father and in which the Father delights. His whole life and death was a response in love and obedience to the gift of being human, an act of gratitude and appreciation of the gift of being human…
So my thesis is that Jesus died of being human. His very humanity meant that he put up no barriers, no defences against those he loved who hated him. He refused to evade the consequences of being human in our inhuman world. So the cross shows up our world for what it really is, what we have made it. It is a world in which it is dangerous, even fatal, to be human; a world structured by violence and fear. The cross shows that whatever else may be wrong with this or that society, whatever may be remedied by this or that political or economic change, there is a basic wrong, persistent through history and through all progress: the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist.
Living in a Good Story: judgement and exposure
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21 (see below)
“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up, that everyone having faith in him might have the life of the Age. For God so loved the world as to give the Son, the only one, so that everyone having faith in him might not perish but have the life of the Age. For God sent the Son into the world not that he might pass judgement on the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever has faith in him is not judged; whoever has not had faith has already been judged because he has not had faith in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgement: that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds were wicked. For everyone who does evil things hates the light and does not approach the light, for fear his deeds will be exposed; but whoever acts in truth approaches the light, so that his deeds might be made manifest – that they have been worked in God.”
Shout out to Rev Parry… I’m enjoying his reflections on the beatitudes (the good life). Blessed are the ‘poor in spirit’ meaning something like ‘blessed are the powerless’. The powerless have a good life. Why? Because of how the story is going, because of hope and anticipation. The good life, it seems has everything to do with what God is doing and how the story will end. In short the good life is the life lived in a good story.
This is not a common way to think in our society. The common way to think is that the good life is when you set your own goals and achieve them. Jesus way is about living within God’s goals and God’s action.
So I’m taking a break from the Beatitudes to talk about The Good Story… what it means to live life in a ‘good story’. The Christian word for that is ‘gospel’
Today’s reading from John 3 is so popular, because it is a gospel story, it gives us a story to live in. God loves the world so much that God does something? The key question is ‘what is God up to?’
6 weeks ago I did John 1 – “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” That’s the indestructible creative power of God. And the ‘logos’ of divine light (the word) John says, becomes flesh. Today I’m excited to take this idea of redemption a step further. Here we are dealing with the idea that the human condition might not be a lost cause for God. And that is what God is up to.
So here we are in chapter 3 of the gospel and John tells us (in the words of Jesus to Nicodemus) that God loved this world so much (in spite of everything), that God gave ‘the Son’… this is code talk for Jesus. For John, Jesus is at the centre of sorting out the human condition.
The section we read for today started with an obscure reference to the Old Testament about Moses lifting up the snake or serpent in the desert. We’ll come back to that, cause I think it’s a fascinating reference, a fascinating metaphor for the impact of Jesus. But first let’s look at Jesus as the vehicle of God’s redemption.
For God so loved the world, as to give the Son, the only one, so that everyone having faith in him might not perish, but have the life of the Age [God wants everyone into the life of God’s kingdom] for God sent the Son into the world, not that he might pass judgement on the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever has faith in him is not judged, whoever has not had faith has already been judged because he has not had faith in the only Son of God. And this is the judgement: that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light, for everyone who does evil things hates the light and does not approach the light, for fear his deeds will be exposed, for whoever acts in truth, approaches the light so that his deeds may be made manifest – that they have been worked in God.
This is a complex passage… and a more literal translation like this helps us see it with fresh eyes. What are some of the clear things:
- The purpose of Jesus life (as the light of God) is not to pass judgement on the world. Passing judgement is what the judge does at the end of the court process, sometimes translated “condemn”. That is not God’s plan.
- But we have a problem, our life is perishable, like rotten fruit we are in a process of perishing that needs to be arrested. God doesn’t want anyone to perish.
- In order that we don’t perish another kind of judgement comes into play. There are two interesting things about this judgement
- Firstly it has already happened (past tense)
- Secondly, it is defined by John as a kind of ‘exposure’.
“And this is the judgement: that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light, for everyone who does evil things hates the light and does not approach the light, for fear his deeds will be exposed,
Our deeds are exposed. Our perishing processes are shown for what they are. It’s like when you go tramping and get to the mountain hut and need to go to the loo. Where do you go? (Longdrop). It’s like a light shone down a long-drop. It is the exposure of things we do not want to see. Jesus life shines a light down the long-drop. Judgement is what God’s goodness feels like or looks like when you don’t want to see it (say that again). What we get from Jesus is not future destruction but an exposure that has already happened
6. Faith is knowing the shame but walking towards the light. Judgement is a kind of shaming of human society and human beings (strong word). And what you get from that shaming/exposure is two kinds of people. You get people are still avoiding the light. And you get people of faith who have come to love and walk toward this light – they know the mess we are all in, but they still walk towards the light
In short God is not willing that we destroy ourselves or our planet so God gives us what we often don’t want to see – truth. God exposes Godself to us in a way that exposes us to the truth about ourselves.
In summary, there is a very different kind of judgement coming from God. The judgement of God is not the destruction of anything. The judgement of God that Jesus brings is a kind of meeting place, the meeting of light and darkness. It is not the beginning of death (as we might imagine from coming from a judge passing sentence at the end of a trial) instead it is the beginning of truth. It is the turning point of the world.
But what is John talking about here? How did this judgment happen? What did it look like?
For this I think we need to go back to the “serpent in the desert” as I promised earlier.
Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up
If you don’t know the story it is about a plague of snakes killing the people. They are saved from perishing because Moses lifts of up another snake for them all to look at. Paying attention to this snake is what saves them. The last thing these people are going to want to look at is another snake. It’s an odd story. And John picks it up and uses it as a metaphor for the kind of exposure we need but don’t want.
He’s talking here about the death of Jesus – the crucifixion. The death of Jesus is an act of exposure. But here’s the beautiful and deep irony, the naked man on the cross is not the one who is really exposed. The real and deep truth here is that Jesus is the moment at which the world around him was exposed. Jesus might be naked on the cross, but it is the world which is exposed
What they are doing in killing Jesus, is the kind of thing that lies at the rotten root of a perishing world, this is our serpent, our violence towards our scapegoats is killing us and we don’t know it, we think our violence is necessary and justified, we have convinced ourselves that our enemies are bad and that we need our violence.
God knows, Jesus knows, that we need to see God on a pole, scapegoated by us before we will see ourselves truthfully.
We need God to shine a torch down the long-drop of human society/history, and only then will we turn towards the light.
We talk vaguely and generally about sin in the church, but John’s vision of how Jesus on his cross shines light on sin, says something much more specific about the sin which is destroying the human world, it is not first of all pride, or rule-breaking or even selfishness (it is all of those things) it is violence. All of those things produce big and small forms of violence. And it is violence that unites us against victims, the ones we scapegoat.
Where are we judged? We have already been judged when Jesus was crucified. There we saw the truth about ourselves that we rather wouldn’t. And now we either walk in that light or we try and avoid it.
Our other reading for today, from Ephesians 2, describes us as ‘children of wrath’ (who nevertheless are being created for good works). I’ve thought a lot about that phrase over the years. It suggests to me how deeply our life is rooted in violence… not just those occasional extreme events that become news items, but that we are born into a long history of traumatisation and patterns of violence and scapegoating.
Hannah Arendt (famous post-war philosopher) responding to the way particular people had become the focus of the wrath of society after the holocaust, famously put the case that evil, in the Nazi world and in ours is woven into everyday life, in that sense it remains evil, but she called it banal. Perhaps the very reason we are so interested in the particularly dramatic representatives of evil (sometimes to the point of obsession) is that we don’t want to look at how our own lives are shaped in the everyday… children of wrath. A bit like our desire to point the finger at Donald Trump or Christopher Luxon, or Elon Musk or the owners of big oil companies rather than the way our everyday lives do battle with the planet we live on.
John says that our salvation begins when we do contemplate that… when we see the snake on the pole and are shaken out of our blind comfort and moved deeply to believe in the Son of God, a new way.
So, to tie this together. Our readings today are the kinds of readings Christians over the centuries have read and reread under the heading of ‘gospel’ – a good story. I want to finish by trying to tell John’s version of the ‘good story’ in a few sentences.
God loves the universe – it is a good place to be and God is the artist who moves it. But God is close to it all, and even this small planet is close to God’s life. God does not want human life on this small planet to perish in the violence we seem addicted to, violence against each other and the planet we live on. God takes on this violence by an act of exposure. In the drama of Jesus life, vulnerable self-sacrificing love meet our scapegoating violence. Light meets darkness. Truth impacts life. And in the resurrection of Jesus we are able to see that this love is the deeper reality, the more powerful reality, the one we can live hopefully within.
This good story makes our powerlessness, our mourning, our meekness (all those beatitude things which would otherwise seem terrible or hopeless) in fact parts of a good life, spaces of blessing, because God is redeeming it and redeeming us. Exposing the violence of our world and giving us the courage to leave it behind.
This is the Gospel of Christ.
The Logos and the Darkness: a sermon on John’s Prologue
John 1:1-18
A friend of mine who is struggling with mental health issues and sometimes exhibits quite a strong paranoia was trying to persuade me that there are evil people in the world. You’ve probably had conversations like this. I was trying to tell him that, evil is a part of all of us, and God loves all of us, even the one’s we think are totally evil.
It got me thinking about the mass slaughter going on in Palestine and the brutal war in Ukraine. Then the out-of-control climate change and the way I manage to screen the burning planet from my eyes to make life easy for me… the way I think we all do, to avoid paying the cost, to avoid changing our lifestyles and our economic habits. At the beginning of 2024 evil is both glaringly obvious, and so much more complex than the idea that there might be some evil individuals out there to get us.
Maybe evil has always been embedded in systems and habits, in ways of perpetuating violence and treating others as less than human. Maybe evil has always been, at base, a set of cultural habits. Evil has a history among us. I think so. Among all cultures… but with particular shapes and particular ways of escalating at different times.
In today’s reading from John’s gospel these habits and systems are called ‘darkness’, a darkness that renders the ultimate goodness and structure of the universe invisible. Greed and violence produce first of all blindness to reality. Darkness. The more we seek to own and control and dominate the world we live in the less able we are to see it. We live in darkness.
But, says our passage for today, at the deepest level the world is not darkness. Darkness is not the deepest truth, it is not there in the origin of the world. This strikes me as a good place to being 2024…somewhere other than the darkness, pausing from the flood of darkness. Not to ignore it, but to put it in its place. We really do need to reflect on and understand and resist the darkness. But if we are going to resist the darkness we need to begin with the light.
Two weeks ago Steven at the Baptist Church was encouraging us to begin the year and appreciate the presence of God in creation around us. Last week Nathan was thinking about dreams. About how God might be at work communicating in our own minds when we are not in control, like when we dream.
In the origin there was the logos
John 1:1
Today John introduces us to the enemy of darkness, a thing he calls Logos. Verse 1: “In the origin there was the logos”. Where we might begin… “once upon a time”. John tells us that once upon a time is never the real beginning. Before time there is an origin. Before every moment of time (not just the first moment) there is the origin. Some religions are very focussed on the past, the distant past of the ancestors perhaps (Maori tradition might be an example). Some are not that interested in the flow of time and are more interested in the now (like Buddhism). For John’s Gospel the flow of time as it shapes the present and opens up futures is meaningful. It has direction. It is not just a random set of events. But it is meaningful in the light of the origin and the logos.
This is a Greek way of thinking. And as a Christian, John finds it useful. Modern translations hide the Greek background and translate In the beginning was the word (like the KJV translates it). It sounds simple. The word Logos could be used for a spoken or written word. But it had also come to stand for something much bigger – and clearly it does here.
For the Greeks the changing flow of the universe was suboptimal. God kept out of it. The divine was somewhere else. And so the universe arises only when God/the divine creates a kind of second-tier deity whose job is to shape the universe – they called this second-tier deity – LOGOS (from the word for order or reason or word).
I think what John loves here, is this Greek sense of the beauty and order of the universe – it’s the Greek way of referring to what science pays attention to. Science is trying to understand LOGOS. John loves that better even than the Greeks. For him it is not second-tier. It lies in the he art of God. It is with God, it is divine. Unlike our modern imagination, the universe is not a random mix of dead material that somehow seems machine-like. It is more like an organism. It flows together purposefully out of the heart of God. So the Logos is the organiser of the world organism and the LOGOS is (in some sense) God.
The Logos is the organiser of the world organism (the universe as organism)
At the origin of all we see and hear and interact with every day, in every person, whether we might judge them good or bad, virtuous or vicious, at the origin of each moment and each individual is this ‘beautiful purpose’ that God is working out. All things are structured towards goodness. There is nothing that is absolutely evil. No the light of God’s logos shines in the darkness and the darkness does not conquer it
the light of God’s logos shines in the darkness and the darkness does not conquer it.
Perhaps that is the first good news for the beginning of the year. God’s creativity is indestructible life.
But you might say… that the fact that we, mere humans cannot destroy the structure of the cosmos, tiny inhabitants of a tiny planet that we are, is cold comfort. Cold comfort if we are apparently successfully destroying the biodiversity of our planet and in the process making life miserable for the lives of all but the 1% (starting with the poorest) and possibly wiping out human life in the process.
I mean, sure creation itself will continue, but somehow this seems like a failure nevertheless.
So as if to anticipate this concern, John changes tack. This time he does start with “Once upon a time….”
Once upon a time, “The logos (of God) became flesh”.
“There was a man sent from God. His name was John… and so on. We have moved from cosmos to time, from science to history. Once upon a time, “The logos (of God) became flesh”. The LOGOS, he says, enters the flow not just of the universe as a whole, but at the location of darkness, human history. The LOGOS dwells – the language is evocative – its the same word for setting up a tent. It’s a fragile moving dwelling. It’s a tent among other tents. In the midst of the flow of culture and community.
It’s as if John is suggesting, not only is darkness failing to overcome the work of the divine logos, but the work of the divine LOGOS is beginning to overcome the darkness.
To move from science to history is to move from looking at the world to acting in it.
To move from science to history is to move from looking at the world to acting in it. The tent of course is flesh and blood.
When we celebrate the incarnation of God every Christmas we celebrate that in the life of that wandering, mystical peasant, that pacifist, the prophet, the disturber of the politics of oppression, the truth and goodness and the origin of all things flooded into the darkness, as through a tent flap.
The organiser of the universe organised itself into a human life, reorganising human life around light rather than darkness. If darkness is that blindness to God’s creative LOGOS that arises from our violence and greed… our attempt to control the world and centre it around ourselves and use it for ourselves – a process accelerated by fossil fuels, maybe we see in Jesus of Nazareth an opening up of our human history to the beauty to be enjoyed in the world and in our neighbour, a fundamental hospitality towards all creation, especially but not exclusively our neighbours.
This week I went into the NZ bush in the Orongorongo valley with 9 friends and we soaked ourselves in the diversity of the flora and fauna. It was a great time. We had a sense of opening our eyes again to the world and to one another.
It was a glimpse of what seems to hard to see sometimes.
It’s 2000 years since that bright flame shone in Palestine… and in that time the light of that flame got co-opted by empires, used to justify domination and colonisation and enslavement, coopted by industry to dominate the natural world and destroy the ecosystem of the planet. This is the challenge: to not only see God in nature, but also in history. And not only to see, but to act, to participate in God’s action in history
This is the challenge: to not only see God in nature, but also in history.
John’s gospel has two things to say to us today. Firstly, if we are to resist the darkness in 2024 (and we must) we need to look for the goodness of the divine logos everywhere, under every stone or tree or friendship. We need to practice receptivity, to receive the world as a gift of God, of grace and truth and so to receive with it the beauty of God
Secondly, we are not simply receptive. We are not simply observing the world. We have lives to live. We have things to do with our lives, limited though they might be. God communicates not just in science but in history. Here too resisting the darkness matters. And here resisting the darkness means reorient ourselves, our plans our careers, our habits, to the grain of the universe of God’s LOGOS by taking the way and life of Jesus of Nazareth with complete seriousness. The life of Jesus, strange and radical as it might seem, is our life. Here the logos comes to liberate us from darkness.
May God bless you in 2024 so that we become the people who resist evil, together making light of the darkness.
Parihaka Sermon: Jesus and the Untitled
Joshua 3:7-17, Matthew 23:1-12
I looked back on my preaching routine over 7 years and noticed that my 6 weekly preachment has fallen on All Saints/Parihaka Sunday on 5 or the 7 years.
Quite often I preach end up preaching on Te Whiti o Rongomai, the NZ saint who quoted Jesus ‘those who live by the sword will die by the sword’ and then went and put his life and the life of his people on the line for that kind of pacifist conviction.
When we see what is happening in the middle east right now, we wish there were another Te Whiti to repeat the message, those who live by the sword will die by the sword. It just goes on, massacre after massacre, generation after generation. It was only a matter of time till Benyamin Netenyahu quoted the Bible (as he did this week), “‘there is a time for peace and a time for war,’ and this is a time for war.”
Some would say, perhaps in support of Netenyahu, that those who don’t live by the sword also die by the sword. But the question for a conservative Christian like myself is not whether we are more likely to live or die, but whether we are following Jesus or not
Alongside the memory of Te Whiti we also acknowledge the memory of the people of Parihaka for whom the sacking of their town, the raping of the women the imprisonment of their men is a tragedy whose impact is still being felt today. I wonder how they feel about Te Whiti’s faith in the resurrection, his confidence in his ultimate vindication as a man of peace? What do they feel about that after the tragedy that came to their place and to their hopes?
If this (for some of us) is a celebration of a saint (warts and all), it is also the sad memory of a war waged by colonisers on indigenous people… a chapter in land wars, in wars of capitalism, created to take land that that was a source of life for hundreds of years and bring it into productivity within the pakeha economy. It is also a race war – a war waged by people who believed themselves to be superior who wanted to civilise and absorb people they regarded as uncivilised and incorporate them into their culture and world
It’s a war of race, it’s a war of capital. It was also a war of technology. Those who had the technological power, using their power to create a world that they believed was superior and more civilised. After all they thought (as they often do), if science and technology opens up more power to us, of course we should embrace it.
And like every other war is was a simple perpetuation of violence.
One of the readings today remind us that it was in a straightforward sense also a war of religion. It is a narrative of conquest from the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian Bible which records the violent wars of conquest as the Hebrews invaded Palestine as a divinely mandated war. These stories of religiously justified conquest are part of the Bible that the European colonisers brought to this land.
To all of these wars Te Whiti o Rongomai and Jesus of Nazareth both said No. They both rejected an eye for an eye, they both rejected the life by the sword, they both created communities that sought to live out that rejection, they both rejected the notion of God the warrior
“The lions rage . . . I will go into captivity, and the lions will dwell upon the land; then there will be no more war . . . I cannot contend with such. Christ did not, but [was] crucified for the sins of the world. He is God. I will be a god. I sacrifice myself that peace may be . . . I am here to be taken! Take me for the sins of the island. Why hesitate? . . . Though I be killed I yet shall live; though dead I shall live in the peace which will be the accomplishment of my aims. The future is mine, and little children when asked hereafter as to the author of peace, shall say—‘Te Whiti’—and I will bless them.”
NZH. 3/11/1881 and Rusden 1895:292.
Jesus of Nazareth and his follower Te Whiti o Rongomai both say no to wars of colonisation… whether it be the colonisation of the Canaanites by the Israeli tribes or the colonisation of NZ by the British empire. These guys have elected that the cycle of violence stops with them.
The gospel reading that comes up for today reminds me that both of these two gathered people around them, disciples, a community of learners in the way of peace. And todays instruction of Jesus to his disciples is one that has always intrigued me
“Don’t let yourself be called Rabbi; for there is no one who is your teacher and you are all brothers. And do not call someone one earth ‘Father,’ for there is one who is your heavenly Father. Neither let yourself be called instructors, because your one instructor is the Anointed.”
Matthew 23: 8-10
In my experience it is usually glossed over. It strikes me that it is hardly surprising that a church that has spent most of its 2000 years in various kinds of alliances with nations and empires who ‘live by the sword’, a church that has managed to ignore Jesus teaching of non-violence, might also manage to ignore other awkward instructions about the kind of community Jesus might gather. So I wonder what is it about titles like rabbi, teacher, Father and so on, that cause Jesus to ban them? It seems deeply ironical that priest are called ‘father’ to this day, in spite of Jesus teaching and yet it is really hardly any different from ‘reverend’ (the one to be revered), or pastor, or minister… the point is not a kind of fine grained point about the meaning of the term, nor is it simply about how hypocritical pharisees might misuse titles. Jesus doesn’t command them not misuse titles. He tells them not to use these titles of authority. He directs his instruction not only at the leaders who call themselves by these titles, but at those who might address the leaders by these titles.
Because Jesus goes on to say ‘the greatest among you will be your servant’ most preachers immediate switch their attention to the attitude of leaders… Jesus, on the other hand knows that everyday practices like giving people titles shape our communities, even when attitudes may be invisible and unjudgeable.
And yet we find such titles so useful, so practical in the church these days. I mean how is anyone to know who is in charge, we think. How can we function without someone at the top of the heap with a title? So in practice we just ignore these instructions.
But what’s a conservative Christian to do about that?
Now when I use the term conservative Christian of myself, I must confess to being a bit tongue in cheek. If being a conservative Christian means believing that God wrote the Bible or having a problem with homosexuality (that kind of thing), then I would have none of it. When I call myself a conservative Christian I simply mean that that my bottom line is taking Jesus absolutely seriously, as the incarnation of God and the one who opens up for us a new way of being in the world and living together. Jesus is not just a great teacher, but the only teacher of any absolute significance. The only one our communities should give serious authority to. His way of being in the world must become ours.
So I don’t think we can avoid reflecting seriously on (as opposed to glossing over) Jesus ban on authoritative titles. What’s the deeper issue here? What role do titles have? What might a community without such authoritative titles look like?
My thought is that communities that use such titles have an implicit heirarchy of authority, even if they don’t like to admit it. Knowing who’s in charge keeps the show on the road. It means having an eye to the long-term survival of what we call the institution.
So here’s my radical (albeit conservative) thought. Maybe Jesus had no such eye for institutional continuity. Maybe his hope in the kingdom meant that he was happy for such institutions and traditions as arise among his followers to fade away like the flowers of the field. Maybe he would be happy for us to take our eye off that ball? Maybe its part and parcel of being the community that exists primarily for it’s non-members. Maybe the kingdom is most likely to be found where people don’t care about such things as who’s in charge. Maybe Jesus is wierdly impractical like that.
Don’t let the leaders call themselves leaders or the people give them authoritative titles – such is the path towards a way of being that Jesus is trying to save us from. Maybe?
So that’s my bit of conservative Christianity for your consideration. There is no ‘eye for an eye’, there is no ‘time for war’, there is Jesus the pacifist and maybe even Jesus the anarchist. Some would say there’s a link between pacifism and anarchism, but that’s definitely a question for another day.
Thanks be to God
Sermon: Beggar’s Belief
(3rd September 2023 at IBPC)
Texts: Acts 3:1-8, 1 John 3:16-18
A few weeks ago in one of Nathan’s services we read that passage from 1 John (reread slide)
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions (means of living/livelihood) and sees a brother or sister in need and inwardly closes himself off from him (literally, ‘shuts off his bowels’), how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.
1 John 3:16-18
During the sermon slot we listened to the text lectio divina style. And what stood out for me was how that text speaks to a common experience I have… seeing beggars on the street…
So what does go through your head when you’re walking past Newtown New World or down Lambton Quay and you see a beggar up ahead… maybe he or she sees you and calls out, may not, maybe you get a moment’s preparation?
[talk to neighbour]
Today’s reading is clear. There may be many ways to respond to the beggar on the street, but if we inwardly close ourselves off, if we just learn not to see them, if we become accustomed to walking on by then we are really not part of the Jesus revolution (according to the reading). That’s a hard word to me. There are many times I have closed myself off. Material possessions create responsibility. And the love of God, says our text, creates solidarity between us, especially solidarity with those in great need. Doing nothing is not an option.
Yes, the beggar may not actually be homeless. Yes, the beggar is probably an addict. Yes, your money will probably be spent on drugs or alcohol. I across a meme recently that goes: One day I woke up in a hospital and someone asked me, ‘What’s your problem? And I said ‘I’m an alcoholic and an addict’ And he said, “No, that’s how you have been treating your problem.” All that is probably true… Giving money may be funding the wrong treatment… but if we are followers of Jesus we still can’t close ourselves off.
My friend Stephanie McIntyre who used to be the boss of DCM for many years, the organisation that does the lion’s share of coalface response to the homeless on the streets of Wellington. She was always dead set against giving money to beggars… but she was the last person to give up and walk by on the other side of the street.
Then I remembered the other reading we read today. Peter and John, icons of the first Christian community in Jerusalem, doing what they do every day, going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, seeing the people they see every day. And there is this beggar, lame since birth, doing what he does each day, begging at the Gate called beautiful. Quite an ironic name really…for a begging site
I imagine if this is anything like the usual scene outside the New World Supermarket in Newtown, and if Peter and John are anything like the followers of Jesus I know in Newtown, then Peter and John will already know this man by name, they probably know his story, he’s probably part of their village, so to speak. He is not a stranger. But even if he is not a stranger now, he would have been once. At some point he went from being a stranger to someone they knew, a friend even. I want to come back to that.
The story begins when Peter and John stare at him.
How do you walk down the street? Do you make eye contact with people when you walk down the street? I don’t just mean beggars, I mean everyone. Do you look people in the eye or do you avoid it? How does it feel? Apparently… scientists tell us… releases oxytosis in the brain… at a physical level eye contact builds human relationships, it connects us.
The bible reading makes a big thing about eye contact. Peter and John stared at him. It’s bold eye contact. Then they ask for it in return, ‘Look at us’ they say. It sounds almost intimidating and perhaps it was. It’s certainly intensely personal. Perhaps, partly because they knew him well, and he them. Perhaps this was the outcome of many conversations.
Peter states the obvious, I don’t have any money. (like the vast majority of the first Christians, like it was for the vast majority of people living in the Roman empire) Silver and gold was the domain of the Roman elite. They didn’t have discretionary income. There wasn’t much separating them from the beggar. So it’s a meeting of the poor. Maybe you don’t feel like you have money when you see beggars on the street. These days we have plastic.
“I don’t have any money, but I’ll give you what I do have.”
But notice the next bit. He didn’t just give him something. He didn’t simply say, your legs are healed. This is my gift to you. He gave the man a command. He created the space for the man to choose to take action. He didn’t just give him something and make him a beneficiary. He asked him to do something and be a participant. “In the name of Jesus the Anointed, stand up and walk,” says Peter.
It’s like they are inviting him to take courage from the name, “Jesus”, and go ahead and stand up, straighten his legs. It’s like they expected him to know, perhaps because of previous conversations, who Jesus was.
Peter and John, according to the stories in the book of Acts have been constantly demonstrating enormous courage in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Peter and John have been busy walking everywhere in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, that’s their whole life now. They don’t have money, but they have this incredible courage to act.
And when they invite their friend the lame beggar to join them and have the courage to walk in that name too, he, in that moment, has no guarantee that anything will be different. He just has the invitation of his friends Peter and John, and the knowledge of who they are. He has an invitation to do what seems impossible.
Imagine that moment before the first step. The first step is the craziest one. Maybe you’ve been there too… when you feel like God is calling you to do something the first step is the craziest one.
‘I don’t have any money, but I’ll give you what I have’.
It strikes me that Peter and James were also taking their faith in their hands when they ask their friend to do this crazy thing. Perhaps they had earned the authority to make this invitation, because they had already given him what they had. Themselves. They already had a relationship with this man.
Remember our other reading from 1st John 1 about “not closing yourself off” from those in need. In the verse prior we are told this is how we know what love is, the love that doesn’t close itself off, we know it because Jesus laid down his life for us.
Having material possessions give us responsibility, but that doesn’t mean that giving money is our go-to expression of love… what we have to give (says John) is first of all ourselves, we have our lives to lay down. We too cannot hide behind our $2 coin (or lack of it) as we pass the beggar on the street… what our reading challenges us to do is to open up ourselves to strangers.
I’ve been reading a book by Joe Keohane about how to talk to strangers. It’s called The Power of Strangers: (subtitle, ‘the benefits of connecting in a suspicious world’). It talks a lot about how humans have evolved to be cooperative (more like bonobos than chimps), but how we nevertheless are suspicious of strangers and as populations grew and travel increased we developed codes of relating to strangers. He argues that we are hardwired to be social and there are lots of benefits, culturally and psychologically from talking to strangers, but we are also deeply suspicious about those who are different from us.
The book is cool. It ends up offering a kind of set of instructions… a how to guide to the tricky but rewarding business of talking to strangers, how to overcome our false fears that we won’t enjoy (research says we will and so will they), how to understand the importance of small talk as a gateway to more significant things, and how to move beyond small talk by ‘breaking the script’, how to avoid threatening with too many questions, how to make statements that invite response creating a ‘little us’ … in the end of the day, he say, we can create a ‘little us’ with the strangers we meet. “Everyone is interesting,” says Keohane, “but it’s not up to them to show you – it’s up to you to discover it.”
I resonated with the advice. It works in my experience. But I decided not to make this a kind of how-to exercise – as fun as this might be (read the book).
This is a sermon. We are not tourists of the fun conversations. Not that I want to make the good the enemy of the best either (do read the book!). But in the end of the day, it strikes me, walking down the street is a spiritual discipline (a laying down of your life).
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the ability to make people walk. But maybe I have the ability to open myself up to a stranger. Regardless of my abilities… maybe every ‘little us’ is part of something much bigger… the kingdom of God. We are here today not as tourists of the fun conversation. We are here because we have fire in our belly about the kingdom of the one who laid down his life. And every ‘little us’ we find ourselves a part of, is also part of this kingdom. We are here because we want to ‘Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God.’
Walking down the street is a spiritual discipline. Often we are tired, often we just want to get that item from the shops, and that’s OK, we don’t have to be heroes.
But imagine if our morning prayer life gave us this slogan running through our day, imagine if we were primed to: Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly
Justice – seeing the whole of our society in that moment – to see someone begging is to see the pointy end of an unjust society, of a history of violence
Kindness – unable to walk away without being touched in your humanity
Humbly – having no sense of superiority, but rather an alongside-ness and solidarity
Cause when you find yourself in that ‘little us’ you’ll probably find that the beggar has a lot to teach you about those three words.
Let me finish with a story from the street. On night before a Nourish meeting we met a guy… I’m gonna call him Gordon. Jan had already met him in our community garden by the path and chatted with him. But that Nourish night he wasn’t sure where he was… we later learnt his memory was giving him trouble and it was affecting his ability to navigate around the city. It was a freezing midwinter night. So after a feed and a talk at Nourish we invited him to stay at our place for the night. We clicked. He had been a beggar on the street for over 50 years (he was probably a similar age to me). Gordon had stuff to teach us about Justice, Kindness and Humility. As a Maori man he knew what it was like to experience prejudice. He also knew kindness. When he was about 8 years old and on the run from his home where is family wanted to kill him, he was befriended by a white guy, let’s call him Reg. Reg used to sleep on the park bench and Gordon underneath, but Reg looked after Gordon. Reg was in a white power group for a while, but he still defended Gordon against his mates. 50 years later Reg is an alcoholic in a wheelchair in a rest home near us and Gordon wheels him every day down to Taranaki Street to beg. Gordon is trying to look after Reg, even though his own health is failing. Gordon is the master of signwriting. When Gordon writes you a sign for the street he can double or triple your income or more. Recently on the streets of Wellington Gordon wrote a sign for Reg. Unfortunately, when Reg’s income started to increase the would-be tough man who takes a percentage from all the neighbouring beggars got a bit upset. His own team was losing income. Gordon politely reminded this guy about his friends up in Auckland in the headhunters gang. He settled down. Gordon has recently been given a Council Flat. He hates it. He is regularly the victim of break ins, but mostly he hates the isolation from his streetie friends. So he invites them back to his flat. This creates a level of chaos in his life. But kindness dictates, he would say, the old-fashioned law of the streets dictates, that if you have something you share it. Yesterday Gordon rang me to say Reg had died suddenly… and for all sorts of streetie reasons Gordon wasn’t told for several days. I raced round on my bike and we sat in the sun on the footpath and talked for ages
We should expect to learn about Justice, Kindness and Humility from beggars. Because Jesus has told us that’s where we will learn from him. As you have done it unto the least of these you have done it unto me.
Thinking Christianly about Work
Genesis 1: 27ff
‘For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.’
Ephesians 2:10
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.
2 Corinthians 5:18-20
Nathan has been preaching for weeks on Sabbath. So, I thought today I would do the other side of the coin… I want us to think about ‘work’. Lucky you… you get 15 or so minutes from me, a lazy and easily distractible person on the subject of “work.”
As many of you know this is quite personal for me as the future of my work is very uncertain, I’m thinking a lot about work … and then there is my Study Leave project that I shared about before – another exciting discernment about possible good work that has arisen in the last month or two.
But if we go back to the Sabbath for a moment.
It strikes me that when Jesus got in trouble about the Sabbath he did not apologise and move on. He went straight to the big picture. He said ‘My Father is working and so am I’ (John 5) He put work at the centre and sabbath around it. We are not created for Sabbath. We are created for work. God is not on Sabbatical, after having created the universe, now leaving it to tick on randomly (and us trying to prove ourselves by being the best at keeping the Sabbath). God is at work in everything. And so can we be. Sabbath is created for us, for our work, not us for the Sabbath. Sabbath exists to enable us as workers. “My Father is working and so am I”
My Father is working and so am I
John 5:17
So this morning I ask the question, how do we think Christianly about work… and of course about our own work?
So there are three key passages from the Bible I have taken a starting point from this morning.
- Genesis – humans are created for work with and under God. In the Genesis story it’s the work of responsible care for animals and plants – Genesis locates humanity within a kind of ecological work – not some kind of new add-on
- Ephesians – we are created in Jesus Christ. Jesus has somehow inspired in Paul and his communities an extraordinary sense that our work can be meaningful … (I want to say more about why it is so extraordinary in the context) … God’s ongoing creativity is being channelled through the life of Jesus, so we are being created for good works… it is the way of life for which we are created…
- 2 Corinthians – again in Jesus the Messiah, we are created for a work (ministry, service) of reconciliation – a bringing together of what has been broken apart, people from one another, people from the natural world, living world, people from God.
So my big insight today is that it was extraordinary then that our work might be meaningful and it’s extraordinary now. Why so?
Jesus and Paul and their communities lived as peasants and slaves and crafts people on subsistence lifestyles in the midst of the Roman Empire at the height (you could say) of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was officially eternal (aionios). They were officially in heaven. God (aka the Emperor) was at the head of this massive military complex driving a massive system of publicity (with holidays and religious cults making sure you knew you were in heaven). It was one big pyramid but without much of a middle class. 90% of the population had next to no disposable income (subsistence living). Between 2 and 5% of the population consumed 65% of all that was produced. Wealth and power were indicators of virtue. Everyone else was constantly in fear of debt and prison and slavery (a short step from being crucified). How is it possible to imagine having any freedom to do good and meaningful work with the weight of such a system constraining their lives? They believed in the defeat of the powers of death, they saw the cracks in it all. They acted in hope.
In some ways we have a lot in common, in other ways so much has changed.
One thing that seems similar across the centuries is captured if we put that picture of Sisyphus carrying the rock up the hill again and again and we set it alongside a comment by songwriter Tom Petty
“If I can make a person forget about their job for two hours then my job is done.”
“If I can make a person forget about their job for two hours then my job is done.”
Tom Petty
In Paul’s time, and in ours it seems really hard to think Christianly about work? Even to be positive about work. And a lot of the difficulty arises because we have difficulty we have getting a perspective on the system we work within.
In fact there are two areas of difficulty.
- Theological/Philosophical difficulty: difficulty imagining that work is meaningful in the first place, the difficulty imaging that God is in fact at work, rather than just jumping in and fiddling with the universe at times from outside, the universe is the work of God all the time. As creator God is not just the kicker-off, but God is always drawing the universe towards its purpose… because it is created with purpose within it. It is flowing in a certain direction. It is not dead matter, but most profoundly alive. Our work can be meaningful because we can be part of a universe that is intrinsically meaningful. That’s hard to imagine. Largely because for a long time Newtonian physics shaped our thinking and we did think the universe was basically dead matter.
- Historical Perspective: But the second difficulty I want to talk more about applies to both bible times and now… the difficulty of getting perspective on the system within history that we live and do our work in.
In retrospect it’s not so hard for us to get some perspective on the Roman system. But even in the midst of it Paul and his mates seemed to have less difficulty getting perspective than we seem to have on our world. Paul understood the empire as an amalgamation of “principalities and powers” of an evil age. The first Christians realised a spiritual dimension to the systems they lived in. Jesus himself had taught them how hard it was for the elite of the empire, the rich man, to enter the kingdom of heaven.
What about us? Are we able to get this kind of perspective on the world in which we work?
I’m just gonna go ahead and say the ‘c’ word in church. The system we have lived in for the last 200 years is what historians call ‘capitalism’ . (description from Jonathan Cornford) It too, interestingly, is regarded by many as the end of history , the best of all possible worlds (even if it is flawed) . We have reached, some think, a kind of eternal city. It is a trans-national system that links all the nations together . It too creates this ever-increasing gap between the uber-rich and the workers – rewards rise to the top . It is called capitalism because it is systematically structured towards the accumulation of capital (the very thing Jesus knew was a barrier to the kingdom of God). Of course, there has always been capital and there has always been greed. Now we have a system that links the two. Another characteristic is that it commodifies everything . Everything. The system is structured to draw everything into the system of exchange, with a monetary value, that can be bought and sold – from our labour, to our ideas, to our natural environment. Capitalism wants to commodify it so it can be bought and sold. Another aspect is sometimes described as a “great inversion”. Once upon a time the markets of exchange functioned within the constraints of society and human relations. Now it tends to work the other way round. Society and social life are controlled by the financial markets . Everything now has an abstract value (the dollar sign) . Capitalism is ecologically destructive – in simplifying everything into commodities that can be bought and sold it tends to dissolve ecologies, breaking down complexity.
Let’s be clear before we get distracted – particularly those who don’t like my definition. I’m not talking about capitalism as a philosophy, or as simply an economic thing… like with the Roman Empire we are talking about a ‘world-system’ which includes markets and increasingly everything else within it.
Some have called it ‘ungoverned governance’ … There’s no one at the top of the system (even though states and corporations might have people at the top in some sense), there’s no governor we can point the finger at like the Roman Emperor, but the system still governs us.
I think Paul would call it a ‘principality’ or a ‘power’ much as he did his own system. I think it’s an anti-Christian power… it’s not everywhere, it’s not omnipotent … there are pockets of life that are different, but it’s a system that affects everything… especially our work. We could say, we live within the power of anti-Christ. And it’s not going away anytime soon.
To work within our system tends to end up being all about money. We end up working, first of all for the money. It tends to prioritise economic practices of accumulation and commodification with rampant disregard for natural constraints and the natural world – which in our systems tends to be regarded as just another commodity. In our system our work tends to isolate us from others. For all these reasons, our work can feel meaningless – a way to earn money in order to be distracted in the weekend. Work can feel like its one step removed from reality and from humanity. Like we are all just cogs in a machine. Running around like mad things just to keep afloat – a sort of frantic version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
So where are the Christians who realise this is an anti-Christian system? Where are the alternative practices? The pockets of resistance? Isn’t that what church is for? A gathering to nurture pockets of resistance? Where is the awareness that the very system we work in is working against our Christian calling to nurture ecological systems of life, to reconcile human beings to one another and so on. Or do we as Christians let our work be controlled by the system just like most other people do?
To zoom out from our own capitalist system again… to the question that surrounds all of this. “Is God still at work? Can work be redeemed?
As far back as WW2 Archbishop William Temple wrote:
Some young [and we could add, older] people have the opportunity to choose the kind of work by which they will earn their living. To make that choice on selfish grounds is probably the greatest single sin that any young [or older] person can commit, for it is the deliberate withdrawal from allegiance to God of the greatest part of time and strength.
Questions
What does meaningful work feel like?
How often does my work feel meaningful?
Does our work control our time?
How does the cost of housing effect our work and our time?
Can we live with a lesser standard of living and open up new freedom for our time?
How important is household work in the hierarchy of things worth doing?
How connected is your work to the natural environment?
How does it feel if you don’t have paid work and someone asks: “What do you do?”?
How do we value unpaid work?
What space is there for volunteering in our life?
When looking for a job, which questions do you ask and which do you forget to ask?
`What am I good at?
What do I enjoy?
Is the work damaging in any way to people or creation?
What contribution does this work make to the world? Serving who?
Is there space in this work to challenge the powers (speak truth to power)?
Can I forego personal ambition in this work?
Can I stand up for the weak in this work?
Can this work be surrounded by Sabbath?
I invite you to take one question away from today as a focus for your prayer this week
Sermon: Trinity, a name to live in
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20
It’s Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday comes in the church calendar after Pentecost each year. It’s the day the church sets aside to reflect on the nature of God. Sometimes our sermons and our worship move fairly directly to what God wants us to do. Trinity Sunday stops us before we rush into ‘takeaway Christianity’ and makes us pause with the identity of God.
In honour of this focus, the readings set for today are iconic passages from the bible. They are the big imagination shapers: The creation story from Genesis; the Grace (as we call it) from Corinthians; and finally, the Great Commission from Matthew’s Gospel
Let’s begin with the creation story. The idea that there is a singular mystery behind all things, we could call it monotheism. Genesis is the classic creation story about a single divine source of all things, all order and all life. Another way of putting it is that there is a creativity that gives meaning to all things – and it is good. The creative source that gives responsibility to humanity – responsibility for the welfare of the good creation. Humanity is part of the rich tapestry of divine creativity but also responsible to God in a way that no other creatures appear to be. As the Hebrew bible puts it… humans are the image of God. They reflect God’s creative power in their pro-creative life as a binary of ‘male and female’ (as well as in other forms of creativity of course). They reflect God’s creativity in their authority to care for other creatures and the flourishing of those creatures. God’s creatures are good. God wants them to flourish and (as we would say) the ecosystem as a whole to flourish.
So the text for us to think about on Trinity Sunday (Genesis 1) is a riotous celebration of the rich diversity of the created world, it’s a celebration of human dignity and responsibility within this glorious creation.
Sometimes we are struck by the rich glory or creation when we stand back and look at big things this week I was struck when I read from a microbiologist about the mystery of creation in what we think of as the small things – the intelligence of cells.
Everywhere we can observe this proclivity for ingenuity. When a surgical suture is secured with staples, the resulting repair is conspicuous and crude. Within weeks the scar is healed, smooth, and scarcely visible. The cells at the site of the incision have identified the nature of the surgical trauma and have initiated manoeuvres to restore it. Capillaries re-form so that the microcirculation is restored, innervation is reinstated, and the many epidermal layers are properly reconstituted. None of this we understand. These complex processes are invisible to the brain, and are not controlled by cerebral activity, neither are they subject to regulatory intervention by circulating hormones. The cells are the decision-makers … No computer model comes close to emulating the mechanisms manifested by an amoeba, as it seeks its way ahead, selects which food substances are suitable in ingestion, modifies its cell membrane to accommodate the situation and moves on in a direction it has motivationally selected. A team based at Sapporo, Japan, have even shown that amoebae have memory for events. This takes us deeper in to the realities of living cells than current conceptions of memory as the propensity only of cell aggregates. Single cells can take decision, single cells can plan responses; single cells contain memories. [Brian Ford, 2017]
The Genesis story is a distinctive creation story… distinctive in relation to the creation story of Newtonian physics – the story of a dead universe composed of a random collection of dead particles separate objects (atoms) that remain still until moved and come together for no reason and to no purpose whatsoever. In the imagination of Newtonian physics any purpose we imagine, is simply what we read into it. Genesis 1 is a very different imagination shaper it reminds us that we do not live in a universe constructed like a machine out of dead things (building blocks). It is alive all the way down and destined to flourish in rich complexity. Genesis 1 is also distinctive among the creation stories of the ancient world. It’s distinctive compared to the Babylonian stories from the same era, it’s also distinctive compared to Māori creation stories. It’s a totally peaceful image, God is not fighting with creation, the world flows out of God’s goodness and is itself good. There are not multiple gods fighting to attain dominance. It is an image of a peace that underlies everything, underlies the evil and tragedy and pain, a peace that gives meaning to it.
This image of a primal peace ‘in the beginning’ of God’s creating provides a contrast to the hard things in our life… and is the source of a sense of hope. If, in spite of what we are experiencing now, the greater reality is God, past or future or present, then cynicism and despair are not real options for us. We live in the grace of creation.
If we move to the gospel reading for today (another iconic text we call ‘the great commission’) we see the authority that humanity has been given (in Genesis) for the welfare of creation taken up again in Jesus words… all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me… he says. The suggestion here is that where humanity is failing to fulfil its proper role in the world, Jesus is taking up the baton. Jesus has been raised from death to bring creation to its proper life and so he’s gathering people from all nations around him and with him.
At first glance, depending on your life experience, you might see this as a kind of colonial tract – a mandate for domination. Go into all the world to all those people with different coloured skin from you, conquer them, and indoctrinate them so they become like you. Brand them with the name of your God.
You might read it like that… in fact given the history of Christianity, especially if you have been on wrong side of colonisation, it would be surprising if you didn’t read it like that. The onus is surely on those of us who are Christians to demonstrate that it is not like that. Regardless of all the good intentions of Christians and missionaries down the ages, our role is not to defend our previous alliances with imperial power and violence. Our role is to make our repentance good by living another mission and by demonstrating a seriously different Great Commission.
‘Go to all nations’ says there is something beyond local political arrangements (nations is quite a modern western word but the translation is not important) there is something beyond blood and soil we might say. These things matter. But … but the Christian vision shares with Genesis 1 a kind of transnational calling trans iwi calling. (God may be calling Israel, but God is not, in any narrow sense Israel’s God – any more than the mountain is my maunga) … God is the good source of all things and is reflected in the good in all things. So we cannot, must not stop at the boundaries of our local political arrangements. We cannot look at them from a distance as ‘other’. Go to all nations. Don’t stay at home.
According to this vision, people from all nations, including our own nation, are to be apprenticed (discipled is something like a university of practice) in this life of Jesus, this divine calling. As we live together, we instruct one another in the life of God. Much of our life is formed in ways that distort us traumatise us, recycle the violence. We all need to learn a new way, to be instructed and to instruct one another in the life of God.
And baptised… washed… in the life of the peaceable God. There is something new for all of us here… Baptism is the cleansing that signifies this newness… whatever our roots, whatever our blood and soil.
When we name the peaceable God of Genesis 1 as Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) we are not naming another local warrior deity.
Nor is this a label that refers to God far away in God’s heaven (beyond our real world, so to speak).
The Trinity is the name that holds together the peaceable creator of Genesis 1 and the ongoing peacemaking of God in creation (sometimes we call that redemption).
The Trinity is a name that launches us (like little boats) into God’s active life in the world. The name is the name of God-in-the-world. We identify the mystery of God by indicating God’s immersion in the created world. Father, Son and Holy Spirit is God with us. This is not the name that launches us into heaven, it is the name that launches us towards other people and other peoples.
Trinity Sunday… to call God trinity is to name the life of God for the peace of the world. The God of Genesis 1, the giver of life, the one Jesus called Abba (Father), the Son who lives God’s peace among us, suffers our violence and takes on the forces of death-dealing that control our life, who leads and includes us in a new way of being, and the Spirit who moves both Jesus and us to not be controlled by fear but to take the everyday path of love.
To believe in this God is to be part of God’s mission in the world. We go to the places of suffering and violence in our neighbourhood because God goes there, and God sends us there.
We live in this name… and our hope… our commission is to enable all people to live in this name… so we go in obedience to this peaceful name, calling others to this obedience until the age (as Matthew’s gospel puts it) is consummated (a cool old-fashioned word).
So, Creation, the Great Commission and finally The Grace… a word that defines us as a people of peace as we gather this morning. Paul says, ‘live in peace’ (kia tau in Māori) and the God of love and peace will be with you (kia tau, ki a tātou katoa).
And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the community (lit) of the Holy Spirit be with you.
In short, the God who washes us, who launches on a voyage towards others who are different, is also the God who forms us in community. This is the Trinity of God in whom we live and move, this is the singular mystery behind all things.
Sermon: The Stone the Builders Rejected
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24 Acts 4:8-12
Today I want to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus with you by exploring this text: The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.
For some of you the main association you have with that phrase might be the song Cornerstone. So I looked it up. It’s a song that celebrates a kind of personal sense of security that faith might give you in bad times.
My hope is built on nothing less
than Jesus blood and righteousness…
In every stormy gale
my anchor holds within the veil
His oath, His covenant, His blood
Support me in the ‘whelming flood
When all around my soul gives way
He then is all my hope and stay
It’s about individual comfort – and that’s not a bad thing. But what strikes me is how far this use of that song is from how Jesus and the NT writers use that text. For them it is a story of revolution and community. The song on the other hand seems to come from a very individualised imagination, from a place where the status quo in the world is imagined to be unchangeable. And when the world is unchangeable, it’s all about me and Jesus.
We live in a world where it’s really hard to think of faith and salvation as anything other than a kind of personal private matter. But today we are faced with a building project.
The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.
Is this all just a matter of youthful idealism and optimism? Let’s hold that question…
It’s a kind of meme in the bible. It first turns up in one of the texts of the lectionary set down for today – Psalm 118. The Psalmist, it seems, is one of the many scapegoats we looked at in our reflection on I thirst and it is finished, especially when we looked at Isaiah’s suffering servant. The Psalmist, rejected by the builders, is in the end, vindicated by the God of Israel. Psalm, 118, is a song of triumph. Much like the words, Christ is Risen. The scapegoat is vindicated … and then… and then becomes a cornerstone. The old building project has mutated into a new building project. It’s a revolutionary meme.
But I am struck by the image that is introduced here – a building site. God is building a human community, a people, a life together.
The meme pops up again in the gospels (Matthew and Mark). There Jesus, in the business of fulfilling scripture (bringing it to its goal, its completion, as we talked about a few weeks ago). And the context is his struggle with the Chief priests and the religious leaders. So he takes up this image of a building site just after he has told a brutal parable about them… about a vineyard, about a landlord who goes away and sends messengers, who like the prophets of the past, are killed by those in charge (the builders). Jesus is very clear. Those who purport to represent God. The religious leaders are those who are destroying God’s building project.
Jesus identifies with the prophets, he expects to be killed, he expects to be the scapegoat of the unstable powerful. And like the prophets he holds out hope for a different kind of building, a different kind of life together. He has hope for a kind of divine building project that no-one, not the religious leaders, not even his own disciples could imagine. So taking on the religious leaders meant taking on the political consciousness of a whole nation.
The wonderful Pentecostal theologian Chris Green writes this:
“Jesus’ life ended as it did, not because the powers of evil overcame him, still less because God forced it to happen for the sake of accomplishing a predetermined plan. No, Jesus’ life ended as it did because ordinary human beings, including the faithful and loving and hopeful ones, could not imagine an alternative to the injustice they found themselves enacting”
(Chris Green)
Enacting injustice … failing to imagine… Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Do we too fail to imagine an alternative to the injustice that we find yourself enacting in the current world?
To those with no imagination Jesus cried out ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they are doing?’ They are letting this insane system continue to do what it does, killing people like me every day. But they can’t imagine an alternative to the injustice they are finding themselves enacting. They do not know what they are doing.
To those who ‘do not know what they are doing’, Jesus submits. It is his passion (passio means to suffer). He has spent his life enacting the way of his Father, building the Kingdom of God, active in a divine building project. Now is the time to be acted upon, to submit. To submit to his Father’s will is to submit to the violent processes that swirl around him. It is only as he refuses to respond in kind, as he submits to what they are doing, as God raises him to vindicate this submission, that those who do not know what they are doing have any hope of discovering the truth and the depth of what they are doing. Only thus will it come to light.
The building project seems like a very active thing, and it is, but bound up with that, enclosed within it is a kind of passivity, a submission, a suffering. In a world built on violence, redemption will involve suffering. Active peacemaking. Suffering peacemaking.
So did the Father answer the prayer of Jesus for the forgiveness of the builders? Yes! That’s what the resurrection is – God forgiving. To give Jesus back to them in peace is to forgive them. You cannot hold God down, you cannot destroy God’s building project. Their great No to God became, in the resurrection just another yes of God to them… another step towards the opening up of their imagination to participate in God’s life, in God’s building life together.
So is the resurrection of Jesus a call to political action? Yes and No. It’s all about the cornerstone. Its all a question of what political action? Indeed what is politics in the first place. To put it another way. What does building life-together look like if the life that God is building has Jesus’ own life as the ‘cornerstone’ of a common future. If it means being crucified rather than resorting to the sword, what does that look like politically. If it means loving your enemies, what does that look like politically?
We come back to that earlier question. Is this just a matter of youthful optimism and idealism?
When Peter and John are dragged before a great array of political and religious leaders… the high priest, the captain of the temple, rulers, elders scribes and tells them to their face that they killed God’s agent and then announces again “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. Is that naivety in the extreme? Is it naïve in a political context dependent on the military and crucifixion and warfare and hierarchy? Is it naïve in a world where suffering must be avoided at all costs? Is it naïve in a world where crimes must be punished rather than forgiven?
Sure…. You could say it’s naïve in any world where the building project is our building project alone. It’s naïve in any political situation where the politics is our work and not God’s work. In that world it’s insane.
But that’s not Peter’s imagination… Peter is speaking to the leaders because God has raised Jesus. God’s politics is re-established. God has raised Jesus, and God is ensuring that he remains present and active in a new kind of community, a new kind of politics and a new kind of suffering.
Thanks be to God.
boo to a goose 