THE GOD OF NON-VIOLENCE - Easter Sunday A

27th March 2005 : EASTER SUNDAY : Year A
9:30am
Acts 10:34-43 : Colossians 3:1-4 : Matthew 28:1-10

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am indebted to the following source for insights into Acts 10:34-43 in particular:
Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary
http://girardianlectionary.net/index.html
Rev. Paul John Nuechterlein

Especially:
EASTER DAY -- YEAR A
Last revised: March 25, 2005
http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/easter-a.htm

One of the ironies of the Easter story is that the accounts of the reactions of the disciples are so thoroughly human …

Hang on a mo, I hear you say. Of course they’re human! What else could they be?

I’m glad you asked because resurrection, which is what this Easter business is about, also involves the Living God – intensely so! And the “Godness” of Easter is what challenges us humans and offers the way forward into something that is truly new and truly new life.

We may find it something of an embarrassing and awkward truism to say that God looks at this world and its people differently from humankind. We say it easily enough because it’s an easy-enough thing to say. But what are the implications of such a statement? And how do those implications impact on matters like the resurrection of Jesus and human behaviour – especially the kind of violence which killed Jesus, has plagued our world for all of recorded history and continues right now with little sign of stopping?

We see the human side of the matter clearly enough in Peter’s speech to Cornelius’ household. Peter, still a torah-abiding Jew as well as follower of Jesus, had required a little persuading by God to share the good news with these Gentiles. God had to remind him who was the boss and that the boss had the right to explain what the rules really meant.

But Peter, in addressing the Cornelian gathering, cannot move past the confrontational, antagonist language of Us versus Them:

They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third
day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen
by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one
ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.

It’s the same line as Pete’s Pentecost preamble, which is even more aggressive and blaming:

"You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man
attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did
through him among you, as you yourselves know-- this man, handed over to you
according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and
killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having
freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.

These are early days for Peter and the Church. They still have a human mindset which seeks to apportion blame and implicitly demand revenge, though they would no doubt have used the euphemism “justice”. Peter’s words, though somewhat restrained by eschewing an explicit demand for satisfaction, nevertheless bristle with the violence which led to and caused Jesus’ execution, which saw Judas handing Jesus over to the religious hierarchy and occupying forces acting out Operation Israelite Liberation, er, Freedom, and which gave rise to the desertion and denial of the male disciples.

Peter – and, we presume, the Church – have not yet grasped what the Living God has done in the resurrection – taken a situation played out on a human stage and recreated the entire aftermath in Godly terms – but still well within the human arena.

In other words, the Father, surely the One most hurt and grievously maltreated in the torturous death of the Son, responds, not with the kind of violence that wiped out Jesus, but with a negation of that violence. By refusing to be violent, God destroys violence as a legitimate answer to violence. So instead of death, God brings life. Instead of retribution acted out in rage and bitter fury, God raises Jesus from the dead on the third day and sends him into men and women’s hearts saying, Peace, and Do not be afraid.

Jesus for his part has to reassure the terrified first witnesses of the resurrection. … Partly because it jolly-well IS terrifying. I don’t know about you but the last time I was walking through the local cemetery and an angel of the Lord screeched down like a meteorite and plonked himself all blazing-white and sizzling on a tombstone, I was pretty alarmed … I can well understand the guards playing dead …

Matthew spares us little of the cosmological terror of the resurrection: Temple curtain mysteriously ripped in two; solar eclipses; the dead walking the streets of downtown Jerusalem. And then this just-about-kamikaze angel. Stephen King, eat your heart out!

And it’s terrifying because somehow the women who go to the tomb realise that the Living God is with them once again – but this time in a way which they have never before experienced, in a way which defies belief and shames the disciples’ betrayal of hope. God’s presence always strikes fear and awe.

But perhaps a later terror will come with the realisation that the resurrection means change. The God who steadfastly and faithfully refuses to allow humankind to cast the divine in a human image, changes the whole ball-game in the resurrection.

We have already considered God’s refusal to repay violence with violence. Death – the ultimate violent act - becomes life. If we want the prophetic foreshadowing and understanding we need look no further than the words of those prophets who remind us that God desires, not burnt offerings, sacrifices and ceremonies, but mercy. In the words of Isaiah:

learn to do right!
Seek justice,
encourage the oppressed.
Defend the
cause of the fatherless,
plead the case of the widow.

In Jesus, these things happened.

But the irony of it is that the change the resurrection demands is not a complete recasting so that something physically different comes into being. Rather, it’s a change of heart, mind and soul; a willingness to reflect on and absorb a newness that is internal but reflected externally.

So, when Judas hands Jesus over in Gethsemane he uses the standard Greek greeting, Cairete! It’s exactly the same word Jesus uses when he appears suddenly to the Mary’s on their way to tell the disciples about the empty tomb. Cairete! sez Jesus. …But now it is a word of hope and life, not a prelude to a death.

Similarly, both the angel and then Jesus tell the Mary’s to tell the disciples to go to Galilee: “there they will see him”. Galilee, the place of Jesus’ early ministry. The northern, marginalised, low-socio-economic hicksville peopled by dodgy characters who dressed funny and spoke funnier. Exactly the kind of people it’s easy to pick on and ridicule – or crucify – when we want to feel better about ourselves. Like today’s gays or disabled or Middle Eastern or different religion or denomination.

So we see Jesus working God’s business on the edges of polite and proper society, among the oppressed and the fatherless and the widow, putting in the “hard yards”, the way many professionals do when they’re on their way to the top.

So what happens when God raises Jesus from the dead? What a climactic victory, eh? That’s one mighty finger in the satan’s face. God rules, OK. So does Jesus get the keys to the Executive Loo? A promotion? A better class of parish where he doesn’t have to spend his time worrying about whether his people will rake up enough cash for his next stipend?

That’s way we humans might think.

But Jesus goes back to the edge. He returns to Galilee. The place where he began God’s work and the same place where he gathers the faithful to send them out to continue God’s work.

So, what’s new? What’s changed? What has resurrection effected? Certainly not a change in the external landscape. But maybe that’s the point – a point we miss when we go hunting for the empirical evidence of a literal resurrection, the eye-witness reportage, the plausible arguments, the minutiae that “prove” what we are supposed to wrestle with and come to as an act of unprovable, undemonstrable faith.

We humans demand evidence of the change and the Living God gives us the same and sez, I’ve been here all the time. Yes, God DOES do something new in raising Jesus from the dead. But it’s not quite the New Thing our human minds initially think it is.

What’s new is that WE begin to realise that God is NOT made in our image, God does NOT think like a human being, God responds to human violence with the non-violence of unrestrained, unremitting love, and God sends us out, Jesus being our example, to every Galilee within our reach to show in our lives and words and deeds the same grace towards others that Jesus showed in his own life and words and deeds.

By raising Jesus from the dead, God shows us definitively that love and peace are God’s ways, not violence and retribution. And this is why we are sent to Galilee, to meet the Jesus who continues to work in the unloved and the victims of violence, that he might send US out again and again to bring, in love and peace, resurrection to those who know no other reality.

See you in Galilee!

NO CHANGE, NO MIRACLE -Lent 5A

I’m looking at a painting of Lazarus stirring from the grave, about to climb out of a sarcophagus. It’s a painting by Vincent van Gogh, one which it has taken me 45 years to discover …

The scholars of art say Vincent, then recovering in a mental hospital from a breakdown, portrayed himself as Lazarus, thus the red hair and circumspect red beard, and used the painting to suggest his own sense of recuperation and returning to life in the world outside the hospital.

It’s a dramatic but colourful depiction, full of the yellow which scholars also say symbolised for Vincent the pulsating, radiating love of God, seen here as the sun – a vigorous yellow, orb-like eye watching, we presume with approval, the unfolding event below.

What strikes me most, however, is the distraught look on Lazarus’ face and the even more distraught visage of a woman who may be Martha, her sister Mary in shadowed prayerful piety ironically hidden in the foreground. This Martha’s arms are outstretched in shock, her mouth gaping in a cry of horror. She looks as if she has run to the tomb upon seeing her brother stirring.

I’m struck, also for the first time in 45 years, by the absence of the joy and celebration I had tended to read into the story. John in fact tells us little about the emotions of the event, other than Jesus’ famous lacrimosity, giving rise (no pun intended) in some translations of the Christian scriptures to the shortest verse in the bible: Jesus wept (in the NRSV translated as Jesus began to weep).

Then I begin to realise, Of course this is not the gay and carefree event so many assume it to be. This is the penultimate power of the Living God in action, as it were before our eyes. (The ultimate act of God’s power will be the resurrection of Jesus himself, the event which this raising of Lazarus foreshadows.)

To experience the power of the Living God is to feel unspeakable awe, the “fear” which strikes us mute as our scrambled brains, filled with empirical knowledge, try to come to terms with what is taking place. …For at the same time as God meddles with the supposedly natural order and obliterates our preconceived and pre-experienced notions of it, yet we are forced to continue living in this world, but now with additional information which defies everything we have ever seen or learned before.

Just imagine looking out the window and seeing someone we knew and love who has died, walking up the drive. How do we greet such a person when they knock on our door? What do we ask them? How do we establish their true identity? Much doubt (Darn, I knew I shouldn’t have had that last tequila sunrise) and many, many questions before we get anywhere near throwing a par-tay.

John is quite clear about the reason God raises Lazarus. It is so that all who witness not just this miracle but every miracle of Jesus, the Son, might come to believe in Jesus, in and through whom we find our salvation from the cul-de-sac of eternal death.

That’s a theological proposition.

But God never acts gratuitously. God is not into party tricks simply to impress people or get something really impressive on the divine CV. Nor is God into one-way, authoritarian relationships. Any miracle in which we recognise the presence and power of the Living God calls us into an action based on what we have witnessed or come to believe.

Certainly, God may be giving us yet another free gift, bestowing yet another blessing, but either or both are meaningless if we ourselves do not begin surfing the bottom line in response to God’s action.

That bottom line is simply to change our own lives. Chances are, that change will have a flow-on effect in the lives of the people and world around us.

Prosaic and challenging as the notion may be, if we are able to witness any miracle of the Living God and subsequently fail to change, then NO MIRACLE has actually taken place! All God has accomplished is indeed a party trick - a pretty impressive one, most like, but nothing worth so much as a text message.

Perhaps, then, part of the initial horror and strickenness of witnessing or participating in a miracle is the subliminal realisation that it will demand personal change. Because God is Spirit, as John reminds us, and therefore invisible, it’s easy enough to cruise along without anything more than cursory reference to the divine. But when the divine acts without ambiguity then suddenly we have to climb out of our spiritual hammocks, fire our life-coaches and begin to get real with God.

The real gift, however, in any miracle we witness is not the miracle itself but the realisation that the Living God invites us, in much the same way as those pulsating crescents of yellow in van Gogh’s painting, into God’s love. Again, we are not simply the passive recipients of God-action but people drawn in by God’s love arc-ing out from the center.

Such a gift in turn allows us to realise our inadequacy to respond fully. And the real miracle happens when we seek the life-giving Spirit who dwells within us and begin to use the Spirit’s power to effect the changes within ourselves which lead to changes in others and the world around us.

This remains the import of Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, given fleshly form and spiritual life in order to give hope to the exiles in Babylon. But that hope – and the promise of return to Israel – are not for the purpose of reclaiming dirt and rebuilding dwellings. They exist in order to change the people, and that change in turn exists in order to change the world – for the better.

But when we accept the gift and the miracle without invoking the Spirit to help us change, we end up with situation Paul describes: a focus on human things, leading to our own and others’ death.

The Spirit, however, is lifegiving, precisely because the Spirit fills us with and at the same time leads us into the source of life.

Our own worlds are filled with miracles, divine gifts and blessings. How many do we recognise? It’s easy enough to measure – all we need to do is calculate the amount of change we have undertaken or become aware of consciously participating in.

The raising of Lazarus is so much a part of our tradition that it has become dead theatre and we sit back and politely applaud at the right moment. We know how to respond – but do we know how to change?

Every miracle of the Living God calls us to change in the power of the Holy Spirit. And we can posit a simple formula: miracle = change. No change, no miracle.

As we enter some challenging times, we need to start recognising some of God’s miracles within our own lives and our community. Let us be on the look-out. What miracles will we experience this coming week – and beyond?

DIVINE SIGHT

I have to admit that John’s gospel leaves me begging for less. I’m not one of those arch-sentimentalists from whose lips the cliché sublime inevitably and thoughtlessly drips whenever anyone mentions the work of the above-named evangelist!

But every now and then in John I find passages whose clear prose and deft characterisation speak authentically and vividly of real people, real situations, real emotion. At such moments John truly transcends the scratchings of the late first century; he transcends the centuries of scribal copying; he transcends the best, least-fumbling translations of biblical renditionists.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we have one such moment, in the story Tradition has labelled “The Man Born Blind”.

It’s a highly-instructive piece packed with themes and theology, all worthy of investigation, but the centre-piece is the characteristic and powerful Johannine image of light, used here to break open the theological notion of spiritual blindness.

In other words, today through John, backed up by the first book of the prophet Samuel and the letter to the Christian community based in Ephesus, we are invited to consider how clearly we “see” and understand the workings of the Living God and our own role and purpose within God’s world and work.

The story of the anointing of the shepherd-boy, David, as king of Judah in 1 Samuel reminds us of God’s inscrutable ways:

But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.

This is the very stuff of authentic spiritual experience, the ability to see beyond the mundane and commonplace to discover God’s involvement in every aspect of Creation. More than that, God is not only involved but engaged in Creation and for us human beings God does not ignore or abandon any part of the world, least of the human part. Put aside the former notions of the separation of sacred and profane!

But in order to understand this divine involvement and engagement we need to see with God’s eyes, we need to be healed of a certain spiritual blindness we learn from the moment we begin to sense our world in our mothers’ wombs, where the miraculously-empirical is apparently our first introduction to the world we are destined to inhabit.

Seeing with God’s eyes may seem impossible or even arrogant – and the reality is most likely that we only ever see partially or momentarily, in blinding glimpses we call epiphanies – but we can train minds and hearts to unfold the natural order of our soul.

It is no different from any prolonged period of training or exercise. No one becomes a mechanic without spending years beneath a car bonnet. Brain surgeons study for years. Our athletes train, often beyond ordinary limits, for hours per day and years per lifetime.

The common factor in every skill is our own desire and willingness to apply ourselves to the task. I have mentioned many times the primary tools in our journey towards divine sight, spiritual maturity, call it what we will: Prayer; Worship; Bible reading and study; Fellowship; and Ministry.

All five go together. All five legitimately call us to engagement because all five offer different ways of understanding God and our individual and corporate journey with and towards God. We cannot advance very far on that journey without making a conscious decision to attend to all these aspects of our spiritual lives.

In the world of popular music the best guitarists invoke the cliché of playing and practising “till they’re fingers bled”. In other words, they work at their art.

In matters of the spirit our invitation is equally simple: to pray, worship, study, “fellowship” and minister till our very souls are bleeding!

This is how we move from spiritual blindness to divine sight.

Note well, however, that I am not suggesting in any way, shape or form that we EVER undertake this journey on our own, in our own power or strength. We ALWAYS journey with God, in Jesus, inspired by the Holy Spirit. Should we find ourselves alone, perhaps wandering the streets disconsolate and traumatised after the statute-driven authorities browbeat, bully and brutalise us, we have this assurance: that, like the man in John’s story today, Jesus himself will hear of it, seek us out and strengthen our faith and resolve.

But with the promise of Jesus’ care also comes a warning. Just as we must attend to our spiritual health, we can also become willfully blind. Divine sight is not simply about seeing the presence of God in ordinary or even ugly things. It’s very much about CHOOSING a particular path, a particular direction. We can just as easily choose to ignore God – and remain blind.

Equally, divine sight is not just about experiencing a fantabulous spiritual rush. God does nothing gratuitously and Jesus calls us to do all things with the Living God in our hearts. Our seeking spiritual maturity is not the stuff of a feelgood movie but an essential part of God’s work here in Westfield and elsewhere.

As the Ephesian correspondence reminds us,

For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light - for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.

Notice what the writer sez: NOT that we were IN darkness and are now IN light. One we WERE darkness, but now in Jesus we ARE light.

The Living God places an enormous responsibility on our shoulders, within our hearts. We ARE light. We are light for our suburb. We are light for every single person we shall ever meet, in every single place we shall go. We have a responsibility to ensure that our light remains sharp, clear, focussed. And we play our part in that by connection with the Living God through … prayer, worship, study, fellowship, ministry.

In a sense we are all and always born blind. With an appropriate sense of unworthiness and awe we realise that God gains not only from noticing us but also from hunkering down to trudge alongside us, watching the mud sluice away from our eyes, particle by particle, until we – like Jesus himself – radiate light for all who remain in darkness.

May our journey long continue!