You never know what's around the corner

“I am expecting the end of the world tomorrow!” 

With these words a visiting preacher began his sermon at the North Perth Church of Christ.

You might be able to imagine how stunned we felt when he said that.  We weren’t the kind of Christians who dwelt heavily on the “end of the world” stuff let lone setting a date for it.  In fact I think most of us rather felt that life would go on pretty much as it has been for a very long time – and if that was 40 years ago, maybe we were right.

Now, as it turned out, the preacher wasn’t really expecting the reverse of the big bang to happen the following day.

Firstly, I think he was wanting to get our attention – as I was by using this story.  But I think he had a deeper message that has stuck with me all these years and which I think is at the heart of the two little gospel stories we have considered this morning.

The state of our relationship with God is the most important consideration we can have in this life.  Getting this right is our most urgent priority.

In our guts I think we all know this, and sometimes this gets us into all sorts of almost superstitious difficulties:

1. 1.      Like the Christian people who wanted to say that the mass-killing at Sandy Hook School in Connecticut was God’s judgement on the USA because of its slack stance on abortion and gays and lesbians; or
2. 2.      Like the woman whose husband and daughter are killed in a car accident caused by a drunk driver and in the depth of her grief she demands to know from God what she has done to deserve this sort of judgement or pain.

When sudden and tragic things happen we want to attach some sort of meaning to them, and the meaning we most generally like is something selfish – self-righteousness if it reassures us that we are better than those people who got it in the neck, or self-centredness if it beats up on ourselves asking “What have we done to deserve this?”

The people Jesus was referring to had been confronted with similar sudden and tragic events – Pilate had killed innocent people mercilessly, and a tower had fallen killing innocent people as well.  Jesus makes the observation that the people who died were basically no more or less sinful than the people who survived – implying that we should not try to attach judgemental meanings to such events.

But what does he go on to say?

Jesus agreed with Job.  Happiness or misery could not be simply equated with goodness and badness.

Here we see Jesus taking up two news headlines of his day and as usual with headlines, it was bad news:

1/  Do you think that those Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices were worse sinners than other Galileans? 

Pilate was an intemperate and arrogant ruler, and he had his soldiers massacre some Galilean men as they were making sacrifices in the temple.  Did that mean that those Galileans were worse sinners than other Galileans who stayed at home and minded their own business?  Were they were being punished by God?

Jesus gave his verdict:  I tell you, NO!

2/  Or those eighteen men who were crushed when that tower in Siloam fell, do you think they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?

You can easily picture this construction accident. Builders’ labourers toiling on the erection of a tower near the pool of Siloam.  Something goes wrong; the tower collapses and eighteen men die.  Were these builders’ labourers scum that deserved to die?  Worse sinners than the other residents of Jerusalem?.

Again Jesus gives an emphatic verdict: I tell you, NO!

This old superstition is a lie.  The old gods of retribution and reward who lurk in the dark corners of our minds, are false deities.  The world of the God that Jesus called "Father" doesn't work by giving blessings and good things to those who are good, and heaping punishments and "bad luck" on those who are bad.  Dismiss this superstition.   You have Jesus’ word on it.

Ah! But I have not completed the statement of Jesus have I?  So far I have left something out.  I must not be allowed to get away with that, eh?

After describing each incident and giving a resounding NO! Jesus went on to say:

      But unless you repent you will perish as they did.

      But unless you repent you will perish as they did.

Now I am sure that some of you will see that word REPENT there and think that Jesus is telling us we have to stop being bad people, or stop sinning, or else we will perish like those people.

I want to suggest that Jesus had a much deeper understanding of both human nature and the meaning of REPENTANCE. 

At its deepest level, the Good News that Jesus came to proclaim was that even though there wasn’t a single person whose life was good enough to merit God’s good favour, God reaches out to us and invites us into relationship with him.  When we turn-around in response to that – stepping into the relationship – that is REPENTANCE. 

There are two prongs to this:

Firstly there is a clarion call for us to enter into that relationship with God right now.  Don’t wait for some future day – you never know what is around the corner.

Then there is some sense of discouragement for us all from adding a sense of judgement to the tragedies and stories that happen around us – it only encourages our own self-righteousness or our self-mortification depending in the nature of the tragedy.  Neither response reflects the nature of God and our relationship to God.

This discouragement of judgementalism leads us nicely into the second story that is part of the text we considered today.

Nine or ten years ago I was on a work related trip in the country and as I was about to leave Wongan Hills I drove past a Nursery that was closing down.  There was a scruffy sign declaring huge discounts on citrus fruit trees.

I turned around and went in to see what they had.  I came away with a Mandarin, Grapefruit, Tangello and Navelino.

The Navelino, struggled and died over the winter. But the Grapefruit and Tangello settled in and went gangbusters.

That left me with a Mandarin that didn’t look like it was stressed or dying, but just didn’t seem to flourish.  Every spring, with it still showing no signs of vigour, my wife would say shall we dig it out and get a new one?  And I would say “Give it one more year, then we might pull it out.”

This past winter into spring has seen that Mandarin finally starting to flourish.  The central branches are shooting forth and maybe next year it will flower and set some fruit.

My story and Jesus’ parable both remind us of God’s grace and willingness to wait. 

It is very easy for us to nurture a judgemental attitude towards people who aren’t the flourishing Christians we think they should be, and we write people off and condemn them as lost. 

But in truth we are all lost.  Jesus calls us to follow in his way – out of our lostness and into a deep relationship with God – and each of us is at a different mile-peg along that road.

When I was working with Scripture Teachers for YouthCARE I used to spend a lot of time encouraging new Teachers to try and avoid that subtle attitude we often have that looks down on people who are not IN – who don’t believe and/or don’t go to church.  Kids will get those subtle messages even if we are trying to avoid passing it on.

I said to them, “Never write off a kid, no matter how hard they might be.  You don’t know the end of their story yet.”

And the same is true for you and me and everyone we come across in life.  If we write someone off as having been cut out of the Kingdom of God I think we are in danger of putting ourselves in more jeopardy than they are.

These two stories are, for me, an invitation to allow God to be much bigger than we generally allow him to be, and welcome others into our company as children of God all in need of God’s grace and acceptance.

And there is a sense of urgency in the stories – we don’t know what is around the corner, so let’s make sure our lives are connected to God right now.

The Real Jesus - The Real Me!

Epiphany has rather sadly slipped out of our everyday vocabulary but the BIG IDEA for this season is REVELATION or DISCLOSURE. 
So, during this season we should be asking ourselves “What do I need to take notice of here that reveals something special about who Jesus was and is and what he’s about?” 

This becomes the filter through which we listen for the word of God as we read our sacred scriptures and even other texts – devotions and the like.  And so we come to this amazing story.

 As Jesus was praying, the look on his face altered, and his clothes became radiant white........... and a cloud came over them, and a voice  spoke out of the cloud: “This is my own Son, the chosen one; listen to him.”                                           Luke 9:29 & 35

If you reckon the story of the transfiguration is a bit way out, then you are definitely on the right track.

If your mind gags when you try to understand it, then I think Luke would be delighted.  You should mentally gag, you should puzzle over the picture that Luke frames for you.  You should feel out of your depth, because you are out of your depth!

Luke, in telling the transfiguration story, is attempting to convey the confounding mystery of Christ Jesus.  A mystery which in the final analysis is: “inaccessible to human mind and tongue.” (To quote one of my favourite New Testament commentators, Eduard Schweizer.)

It is a story of revelation.  That is why some churches use this Gospel reading at the end of the Season after Epiphany – a fitting climax to the Season.  But I will explain a bit later why it is also a fitting starting gate for the period of Lent leading up to Easter. 

What Luke wants us to take notice of in this story is this:  “We have seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

And that has to be Good News.

But this shining “otherness” which they saw in Jesus of Nazareth, was not a one-off event.

Peter, James and John experienced a brief break-through; they saw the Holy Light in Jesus’ face, but it had been there all the time.  The glory is mostly hidden, but on the mountain they were given a blinding glimpse.

We have been hearing stories from Luke over the past couple of months and this God-light had always been there from the very first.

·         Of course it was there in the star of Bethlehem.

·         It was there when then the boy Jesus went with his parents to the Temple and he ended up asking hard questions of the rabbis.

·         It was present when he was baptised in the Jordan.

·         It was there when he went into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.

·         The God-light was focused in him when Jesus began his public in the villages and synagogues of Galilee province.

And I could go on.  As we have developed our understanding of God with us over the two millennia since Jesus was here we have come to believe that this God-Light has been shining since before the foundation of the universe, and it will still be shining when this cosmos is no more.

But why does Luke want us to take notice of this?

Firstly, and perhaps most clearly, Luke is pointing to what is to be the greatest controversy in human history – that somehow God has dwelt fully in humanity in this man we know as Jesus of Nazareth, whom we proclaim Lord and Saviour.

Over the centuries theologians and heretics have tried to explain how this can be but ultimately it is a mystery.  Science gets you nowhere, logic and reason don’t cut it, and even theology gets caught up in either circular arguments or dead ends. 

What we are left with is MYSTERY.  This wonderful word is what we use in our faith context for those things that we can’t understand or explain – BUT WE KNOW THEY ARE TRUE!

This is not the stuff of fantasy as Richard Dawkins would have it – we are simply saying there are some things that exist outside of the physical and scientific realm we call the real world – and they are still TRUE!

Luke is telling us in this amazing story – here is a glimpse of the Real Jesus.  I don’t think he really understood what he was saying, and here 2000 years later we are still trying to unpack the consequences of it.

But there is another really important thing that Luke wants us to understand out of this story and he has used other stories for the same purpose. In this story we find the essence of why it ended up that Jesus was publicly executed by both the Roman and Religious leaders.

Firstly – the Romans.  You will know that in the imperial theology of the day Caesar wore many titles that are familiar to us – Son of God, Lord, Saviour of the World and the one who brings peace on earth.

Then the early Christians and the Gospel writers gave these titles to Jesus they were engaging in a particularly subversive thing – they were saying that for them Caesar was no longer Son of God, Lord and Saviour of the World.  A new light had dawned in Jesus and he was the only one worthy of these titles.

In this and many other ways the things that Jesus said and did and the things that his followers said about him really got under the skin of the Romans, such that they happily colluded with the Jewish religious leaders to see him executed.

But in this story these things are just hinted at in the voice from heaven saying “This is my own Son.”

I think Luke is really keen for us to understand something very important about Jesus that really got up the noses of the religious leaders of his day.

Jesus was not a priest or a scribe or a Pharisee – in fact he often railed against them and the ways they used religion to abuse and distort what God intended.

Luke wants us to be sure to understand that Jesus speaks to us out of the prophetic tradition – Moses and Elijah were regarded as the two great prophets of Israel, and they were followed by many others who established quite a tradition.

Out of this prophetic tradition Jesus reminds us of the same things that the prophets did – that what God really wants from us is not religious rituals and obedience to a code of laws but:

·         A passion for JUSTICE;

·         A commitment to COMPASSION; and

·         The humility to walk with GOD allowing God to decide.

You see this when Jesus rails against the abuse and oppression of the poor in the name of religion.

You see this when Jesus reaches out in compassion to the lepers and the marginalised in society.

You see this when Jesus says there are some things that ONLY GOD KNOWS.

Living by these three filters – Justice, Compassion and Humility – was what caused Jesus to get into trouble with the religious authorities.

But it was in living by these three filters that we see the Real Jesus – and I dare to suggest that if we learn to live by them people will more and more see the Real You and the Real Me. 

The interesting thing about this, in my view is that as we choose to make these principles more and more a part of our lives, what Luke said about Jesus could also be said of us:

… the look on (our) face (is) altered. 

This is the pathway to the radical kind of discipleship that set the first century on fire and which has flared up again and again in the two thousand years since.

The Fall and the Death of the Earth

I was led to an interesting observation today by these works of the Native American, Seattle, who was chief of the Suquamish people:

“We know that the White Man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on.”

It seems to me that there is an almost universal common thread in the primordial stories of indigenous cultures by which the earth is characterised as the "mother" of the people and they they had "obligations" to care for and nurture the land - on pain of death.


The western world has been founded on many aspects of the Judeo-Christian world-view and when it came upon the period we call The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, I wonder how much these words from the Judeo-Christian primordial stories have shaped the world-view of the White Man described above:

    He told the Man:
    "Because you listened to your wife
        and ate from the tree
    That I commanded you not to eat from,
        'Don't eat from this tree,'
    The very ground is cursed because of you;
        getting food from the ground
    Will be as painful as having babies is for your wife;
        you'll be working in pain all your life long.
    The ground will sprout thorns and weeds,
        you'll get your food the hard way,
    Planting and tilling and harvesting,
        sweating in the fields from dawn to dusk,
    Until you return to that ground yourself, dead and buried;
        you started out as dirt, you'll end up dirt."  Genesis 3:17-19

 From these words I think many have developed the view that the earth is a resource to be exploited.  "The earth is not our brother, but our enemy, to be conquered, and when done we move on."

I recognise some of the deep wisdom in "The Fall" story of my faith tradition, but in light of this observation I can't help wondering if the world would have been in better shape today if we had been given a primordial story more akin to those of our indigenous brothers and sisters who try desperately to care for the land on pain of death.

It's worth thinking about!
   
   

An Inclusive Vision

Now often have you gotten into trouble for doing what you thought was the right thing?

It has happened to me a few times.  As if it was to a be a sign of things to come for me this happened in the first parish I ever worked in.  It was an aging congregation and there was a growing number of young families moving back into the suburb, and we had a kindergarten and a toy library in the church buildings so it seemed natural that a fair bit on my energy would go into gradually including these young families in the church.

I noticed some resistance but pushed on with what I thought was the right thing – I thought they just didn’t like change, but when things came to a crunch and I asked them “Don’t we need to get more people coming from our community to help the church grow?”  Their response was clear cut – “Yes! But we don’t want those kind of people…!”

Some months later I was asked to leave.

I remembered the words that we read from Jeremiah today:

“Now I have put my words in your mouth.

               See, today I appoint you over nations  and over kingdoms,

               to pluck up and to pull down,

               to destroy and to overthrow,

               to build and to plant.”

This text along with a couple of others was for me the voice of God in calling me from my chosen profession of teaching into the ministry – and you can see there that doing the right thing isn’t always going to be what people like. 

Poor old Jeremiah really got into trouble, too.  He ended up being put under a peculiar form of house arrest – he was put down the well, to wallow in the mud at the bottom.  The religious and political leaders didn’t like what he had to say about the best future for Israel.

And so it was for Jesus, again and again.

I remind you again.  Luke tells this story the way he does because he wants us to discover something very important about who Jesus was and is and what he is about.

You may have noticed in this story an amazingly quick turn-around in public opinion by the people:

²²All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.

And …

²⁸When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. ²⁹They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.

It is like a hint of Holy Week a little way ahead – acclaiming him King one week and demanding his execution the next.

So, what are we to make of these texts today?

I wonder what it was that turned the crowd against Jesus on this occasion.

Jesus said something that clearly provoked them.  He challenged one of their foundational beliefs.  He wanted them to begin to understand that God was much bigger than they had ever thought of before.

In the world of Jesus’ day there was a strong sense of national identity linked to the national God.  That is why so often, when an imperial power over-ran a nation they would take the people away – into exile – because they believed that away from their homeland their God would be of no effect to them.

During the period of the Babylonian Exile, the prophets and others had tried to break down this idea that YHWH was geo-stationary, with the stories of Daniel being the best examples of it.  If the God of Israel could protect Daniel from the lions then no wonder King Darius could write to his whole Kingdom commanding them to worship the God of Daniel as the greatest of all Gods.

Yet, the idea that the Jews were God’s special people, and that God’s favours were for them alone was deeply ingrained in the people – in their DNA as we might say today.

So, in the context of having just said to the people that the Spirit of God was upon him and that he now had a mission to the poor, the prisoners, the disabled and the oppressed, (which they all seemed to think was pretty good), Jesus reminds them of two little episodes from their history in which YHWH’s good favour was withheld from them and offered to gentile neighbours.

The ministry of the two great prophets – Elijah and Elisha – left Jewish widows destitute and lepers dying of that crippling disease, and yet through them God reached out to the Widow of Zarapheth and Naaman.

By putting these two examples into Jesus’ mouth right here at the beginning of his ministry, Luke wants us all to begin to see that Jesus had a much bigger inclusive picture in mind than could be contained within Israel – that God’s love and grace was to be seen as a gift for all.

It is hard for us to imagine how outrageous this proposition was to the good citizens of Nazareth.  These were good people.  They were in their place of worship as they should have been. 

But what they saw in Jesus that day was not a good fellow-citizen of their beloved town – here they saw a man who had gone off the rails; in fact his scandalous suggestion was almost blasphemy, and he deserved to die – ALREADY.  Remember, this is day one of his public ministry, according to Luke.

And they ran him out of town!

You can see this scenario again and again in the lives of the prophets in our sacred texts as well as in the stories of Jesus. 

In fact, the execution of Jesus by the Romans was a very clear declaration that the state found the things he had to say about our life in God was repugnant – scandalous is the actual word used most often.   The involvement of the High Priests and the Pharisees was also a declaration by the Religious Authorities that the things Jesus had to say about our life in God was also scandalous.

And so it is that when I preach “Christ Crucified” as Paul says, I am not drawing on any allusion to the Jewish sacrificial system, I am drawing attention to the scandalous fact that this humble Jewish carpenter who knew his God better than perhaps any other human being we have known, was such a threat to the “principalities and powers” of his day that they could only respond in one way – “Crucify him!”

It is this humble Jewish carpenter and The Way that he showed us to live in God that I preach – he’s my hero.

And he got it in the neck for speaking out of that simple prophetic tradition I spoke of last week by which he declares that God has an inclusive view of the world in which we are all called to:

            Do justice

            Love compassion

            Walk humbly with our God

When we lose sight of these simple things we are in danger of becoming like the Priests and Pharisees who were more concerned about protecting their positions of power and influence and so could not see that gracious hand of God that was extended to them.

I think that the challenge of our day when we consider this message is how do we give expression to this idea of an inclusive church.  Some of us feel really uncomfortable with the stance of some churches that say emphatically they want to be inclusive of gays and lesbians, and some churches that go so far as to want to be inclusive of people regardless of their religion.

Somehow it offends our sensibilities.  We like to be able to say who is in and who is out (and so has to do the right things to come in). 

Those who promote an “inclusive” idea of church are taking seriously the simple prophetic tradition that Jesus proclaimed by challenging the injustice that people who are “different” so often suffer, offering a compassionate welcome to those who are too often marginalised by society, and being humble enough to allow God to be the one who really knows the heart of people who seek him.

I have enjoyed these three Sundays with you here at St Mary Magdalene’s and it is fitting, I think, that I conclude with these remarks because Mary in the tradition of the Church has been identified with the marginalised – if you consider the 7 demons from which Jesus released her as a sign of mental illness then she stands alongside all those with mental illness who have been shunned by the church and Jesus draws them in. 

I am sorry that a pompous Pope in the 6^th Century took it upon himself, without a shred of evidence, to say that she was a fallen woman – a prostitute – but at least her association with these outcasts, even of our day, declares an incredible thing – that they too are welcome in The Way. 

She should be a symbol and a call for us to be inclusive in our thinking about The Way.  None of us is good enough to be counted as “IN”.  We all stand as equals before God, and every day we are like beginners.