MORE THAN MAYHEM

5th December 2004 : Advent 2 : Year A
Isaiah 11:1-10 : Romans 15:4-13 : Matthew 3:1-12

In the hospital world – and it doesn’t matter whether it’s public or private – patients often use the state of the world as a metaphor for the turmoil they are feeling and experiencing as they lie in their beds waiting for the next set of observations, the next visit from their doctor, the next test result, the next pill, the next needle – or that stoically-dreaded procedure from which they will awake possibly in great pain.

It matters little whether the concerns are global, local or historical. “It’s a tough world to bring up kids,” the patient sez. “Look at all the drugs.” “So much unemployment.” “It wasn’t like this when I was growing up.” “All this terrorism …” they might say, with a shake of the head.

What they mean is: My world is a mess right now and I’m terrified.

Of course, much of this pseudo-sociological discourse is quite true. The world we live in – if we knew our neighbours intimately maybe we could even say The street we live in – is hardly harmonious. Even if we read nothing but Australian newspapers, listen to or watch little but Australian radio and television, we’d know that global, national, local and economic and social mayhem exist on a level which is deeply disturbing.
Yet we sit here today as mostly silent witnesses to a sometimes tenuously-held belief that more than mayhem exercises our thoughts and indeed our lives. Our belief has a name – Jesus. That belief is held within the often-tense relationship we constantly seek with the Being we call God.

We do not need to live among rubble like so many human jellies waiting for the next shriek from the sky - we do not have to concern ourselves about anything more serious than tomato sauce or red wine stains, while others routinely stain their already-soiled garments with the blood of their dying children because an unseen enemy has destroyed their local hospitals and clinics – we can generally feel secure that our children will arrive at or return safely from school because we do not live in neighbourhoods where snipers routinely “accidentally” target school children …

So we have the much harder task today of grappling with a notion which most piquantly pricks the skin into life of those who really know the minute-by-minute desperation of wondering what the next moment will bring. Even if we never had to think about bombing raids, loved-ones bleeding to death or dead children, we’d need to understand that the world into which John the baptiser came as a spiritual icebreaker for our Jesus WAS such a place of terror, insecurity and desperation.

It was the world of the prophet Isaiah.

And the only reason it was not Paul’s world was because he had grasped the notion of Jesus and fashioned a belief system whose genius transcended human suffering while still seeking to articulate human experience.

I am not wanting to devalue our own Westfield experiences, many of which will be and are as devastating in their own way as those of Fallujah, Ramallah or Kabul.

Anyone here who’s seriously done the hospital thing, complete with catheter and needle-wielding nurse, will readily appreciate the desperation to hear that something more than this present suffering makes today bearable and tomorrow viable.

This is essentially what John the baptiser is trying to say – that Jesus is our viable tomorrow, that Jesus is our hope for more than mayhem. The message is the same as Isaiah’s – exile and occupation do not define his people. What defines them is their faith in the hope of the Living God that harmony will replace uncertainty and terror.

Isaiah is not talking about Jesus – he couldn’t possibly have known, and he wouldn’t have dreamt of befouling his soul with that kind of witchy-pooh chrystal ball-gazing – but he did know the Living God, who is timeless and ageless, whose entrance into our history from the beginning speaks of care and concern for all creation, whose presence and power human beings have always sensed and still do.

We tender, however, to fall upon the shell and ruthlessly and thoughtlessly devour it, discarding the core – a process which leads to literalism, fundamentalism and extremism, leaving a bitter taste and an even more bitter legacy.

Our task in our sitting and waiting is to taste and savour the core – the Living God’s love of all creation – and to proclaim boldly in our lives, our thoughts and words and deeds that more than mayhem guides us, that tomorrow IS viable – not because it’s a gritty piece of wishful thinking we can’t dislodge like leftover food stuck in our teeth – but because paradoxically what we show TODAY is the foretaste of that tomorrow.

And the viable tomorrow is not dependent on what this day brings or threatens or promises to offer but on whether we live NOW as if it were already THEN. The foretaste of tomorrow we waft towards Westfield will inevitably be imperfect but the point is not perfect reproduction of a notion that can only be grasped imperfectly anyway.

The point is authenticity. Do our deeds match our words? If we say God is loving, do we show love ourselves? We say God forgives, but are we forgiving also? We claim a God of mercy: are we too merciful? We believe God cares for the poor and oppressed, but are we involved in the lives and struggles of the oppressed and poor of Westfield? We reckon God heals the sick and makes whole the broken, so are we ourselves participating in that healing and wholeness?

Isaiah, Paul and John today speak of the hope of God’s viable tomorrow. Our deeply-traumatised world – whether of bombed cities or hospital-bound procedures or family crises – needs as desperately as ever to believe in that tomorrow. But unless we ourselves, in Westfield and beyond, live today the viable tomorrow we’ve just encountered through holy scripture then why should anyone believe our message?

All they will see is bits of sticky shell stuck to our lips … But when our words and deeds align, when what we say meets what we actually do, then all our worlds and all the people of Westfield and beyond can indeed begin to believe that despite the terrors and insecurities of this today, what lies beyond is indeed more than mayhem.