2nd May 2008 : Lent 4 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
1 Samuel 16:1-13 : Ephesians 5:8-14 : John 9:1-41

It’s many years now since I, my kids and the world enjoyed the fascination of the Where’s Wally? phenomenon. For those who missed it, Wally was a dorky guy who sported a beanie, thick glasses and a red-and-white horizontally-striped jumper. He was then inserted into a more or less complex picture containing dozens upon dozens of other faces and bodies – and you had to find him. Thus – Where’s Wally? For a while Wally became so popular that even a TV cartoon show came into being. Wally was an engaging character – and a miraculously harmless piece of entertainment in what even then was a violent world.

These days I still enjoy pitting my eye and brain against pictures that appear strange, absurd or impossible. Like those very clever creations that depict two or more faces or people or horses or houses or whatever in the one picture. Mind you, it doesn’t even have to be as sophisticated as any kind of optical illusion – I continue to enjoy “spot the difference” pictures.

It’s all, of course, about looking and seeing, or not seeing, as the case may be. Which is what we have in today’s readings.

Exactly like the difference between hearing and listening, looking at someone or something does not guarantee, even for a lifetime, that we will ever see who or what is really present.

At the risk of sounding like a foreign film caricature, we have a saying: He can’t see the wood for the trees … Looking but not seeing.

In our everyday world, the world of physical “reality” or experience, the spiritual constantly intersects or is simply present in ways that elude our ordinary perceptions. We look without necessarily seeing. Not always because we’re oblivious. Sometimes we know the spiritual reality is within reach but we try too hard or we input the wrong data or run software that’s inappropriate for the task at hand.

Samuel was doing that when God commissioned him to select the new king to replace Saul. Sam basically went for a Saul look-alike, using a pre-determined formula based on assumptions about what a king should look like. So he looked at the handsome, hunky sons of Jesse and time after time sed to himself and God, Yep, this is the guy. Just look at those pecs! Ooh, I can just see the oil glistening on those muscles ..

And God hit the WRONG!!! buzzer and told Sam to look again. God lets Samuel know early enough what the score is but it’s still a process fraught with more error than success. And what God sez, as we might suspect, gives it to us pretty precisely:

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.

The LORD looks on the heart.

It’s this ability of the Living God to see beyond appearances that leads to the choice of David as Saul’s successor, even though Dave is the youngest son and considered so insignificant and unlikely that he’s left out in the paddock looking after the sheep.

But isn’t that a significant little fact? Looking after the sheep. Isn’t this the persona of the true king of Israel? The shepherd, the one who ensures the safety and well-being of those in his care? “The Lord is my shepherd” is not a sentimental, throwaway line but a profound theological and spiritual insight.

Throughout the pages of the Hebrew scriptures the Living God chooses the unlikely to lead and care for God’s people and we can safely say that these choices come from God’s habitual and unerring practice of “looking on the heart”.

We can turn all this into a neat spiritual game, turn God and the spiritual into a sort of divine Where’s Wally – Where’s Yahweh?. And let’s face it, no self-respecting spiritual director or anamchara, soul friend, would be without the question, Where’s God in all this? in their spiritual toolkit.

And that IS a useful – even essential – thing to do, don’t get me wrong. We DO need to ask ourselves, constantly, where God is in all our experiences, especially because we find it so easy to look without seeing.

The writers of the Christian scriptures saw the matter in terms of darkness and light. We are unable to see because we are looking in darkness. But Jesus has brought light into the world so that now we CAN see, if not exactly clearly, at least with greater insight than before. This is where Paul comes from in the passage from his letter to the “worshipping community” at Ephesus.

And it’s the essential spiritual point that emerges from the well-known story of the man born blind in John’s gospel.

In neither case are we wrong to think or speak of spiritual blindness or darkness. It’s part of our reality and something we have to work at either overcoming or dealing with through the surrender and impoverishment of deep, silent, attentive prayer, sitting in the presence of the Living God – what Brother Laurence famously called “the practice of the presence of God”.

But it’s so easy for this to become another throwaway line, a self-conscious and self-deluding excursion into another world separate from empirical reality. As Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Mind-Based Stress-Reduction Clinic points out, “There is not a single one of our senses that CANNOT be fooled.” So much for empirical reality.

But part of our desire for faith and heart for Jesus is the experience of the spiritual intimately involved with the ordinary, daily lives we experience. Is this not the very basis of that question, “Where is God in all this?” …Because we DO believe that God is in “all this”. And yet it’s a belief constantly tested, and rarely more so than when tragedy becomes a personal experience.
Because of the prayer chain messages that have wended their way through our Parish since Friday many, possibly most of us will be aware of the car accident outside Southern Cross involving very close friends of one of our parishioners. Three young men are in Royal Perth Hospital with injuries more serious than initially suspected. Hard against that came the news of a mother, Anita, whose 14-month-old son was on life-support in Princess Margaret Hospital after falling into a home pond. The life-support system was to be turned off last night. Anita is the work supervisor of another parishioner, the first parishioner’s sister, who has developed a close bond with Anita.

And it’s not that long ago that E died, then Allan’s mum and dad within a week of each other.

Arguably, we all fear or have faced these kinds of unimaginable events at some point, exactly the kind of lived reality that demands that we see beyond the thing we are merely looking at, where finding the spiritual in our present-moment reality is not a game but an essential demand to which we need to pay attention.

So often we are left watching and waiting, feeling totally helpless because of it. But that is not true. Watching and waiting are among the noblest and most selfless actions we ever pursue. Remember the courageous faithful who watched and waited silently, even helplessly, at Jesus’ cross. Watching and waiting bear witness not only to our concern but to our love, which expresses itself in our willingness to stop our busy and burdened lives to think about someone else.

Or, in our helplessness, we say, “I can only pray”. I know I’ve heard myself utter those words at times. But, really, ONLY?? We say it as if it’s inconsequential, that it doesn’t do anything to help – and beneath it lies the dark and desperate demand for the divine Mr or Ms Fix-it to swoop down and magic it all away.

That’s not prayer. That’s wishful thinking. It’s better to think of what prayer does than what it might be. And what prayer does first and always is put us in God’s place. Prayer, as with watching and waiting, takes us from the realms of mere dispassionate spectators, and puts us in God’s place. In the relative frailty of our humanness we may not be able to see very clearly beyond what we’re looking at but the more we make the attempt, the clearer will become our sight.

In our anger and fear and panic in the face of life’s innumerable injustices we may well demand to know where God was on such-and-such a day, between the hours of this-and-that. What we end up with is one of the classic cases of looking and not seeing.

Where was God at Southern Cross? Where was God when Anita’s baby fell into the pond? God was in the hands and feet and bursting hearts of the people who brought aid, rushed to hospitals, picked up the phone. And God is now in the hands and feet and bursting hearts of those who wait and watch and pray; in the skill of the surgeons; in the compassion of the nurses; in the kindness of the tea lady; in the arms that hold Anita; in the care and thoughtfulness of her loved-ones and friends.

These are not accidental things. These are God present, here and now.

And perhaps as we desperately seek a fix or an answer, it’s disappointing to hear all this. That’s okay. But we do need to understand that just as classically this is where we do precisely find the presence of the Living God – in these apparently mundane and ordinary things, events, people.

May we not only look upon the tragic moments of our lives but also see the love and compassion of the Living God within and beyond them.

TRANSFORMATION!

17th February 2008 : Lent 2 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Genesis 12:1-4a : Romans 4:1-17 : Matthew 17:1-9

Today we get a second dig at Matthew’s version of the Transfiguration story. It gives me an opportunity to reflect on something that struck me after our celebration of the Transfiguration on the last Sunday before Lent – the notion of transformation as a third dominical sacrament.

I had better explain that the Anglican Church recognizes seven sacraments, the standard definition of which is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. In other words, the Church does something that is plain and visible for all to see but the internal changes are God’s action and business. For instance, in Holy Baptism we use water and oil and candle light as the outward and visible signs of what we believe is a divine action that bestows both the Holy Spirit and gifts of the Spirit upon the person who is baptized. We see the water but we don’t see the Spirit …

Of these sacraments, two are specifically labeled Dominical – Holy Eucharist and Holy Baptism – because the Church believes that Jesus himself took part in them. We know, for instance, that Jesus celebrated a so-called Last Supper and commanded us to “do this in remembrance of me”; we know that John the baptiser baptised Jesus at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.

So, what about this “third dominical sacrament”?

It seems to me that Jesus invites us all into sharing the same experience of transformation that he underwent, though we will change far more slowly and over a far longer period than did Jesus!

I should point out here that transfigure and transform are the same word in the Greek text. The authors of the Christian scriptures obviously didn’t feel the need to distinguish between the two.

As with Baptism the Christian scriptures do not record a direct statement from Jesus commanding us to embark on this journey of transformation. However, other passages, in the Letters, do counsel transformation or becoming Christ-like.

That said, the whole idea of undertaking a spiritual journey at the command of the Living God finds several obvious examples in the Hebrew scriptures. The Abraham Saga, so-called, is perhaps the greatest of these – and we happily get a glimpse of this seminal journey’s beginning this morning.

Abram and his wife Sarai and their extended family set out from Ur in what is modern-day Iraq at God’s command, with the promise of blessing and growth ringing in Abram’s ears. Abram has no real idea where he is going but he places his life and that of his family into God’s hands and sets off on what will become a great adventure that eventually leads to the foundation of the Hebrew people and their settlement in Canaan.

Abram himself never sees the fulfillment of any of God’s promises but he journeys on nevertheless. Centuries later, Abram’s remarkable act of faith cause Paul to uphold him as the great example of faith – a faith that led to the Living God considering him to be in relationship with God.

Abram learns much about the Living God during the course of his journey – but, again, he never sees the end that God apparently promised.

But that’s not the point of a spiritual. It’s not about getting somewhere or achieving something. It’s about traveling and learning about God along the way.

I’m reminded of the words of a song Art Garfunkel sang several decades ago called Wo-ya-ya:

We are going, heaven-knows where we are going;
We’ll know we’re there.
We will get there, heaven-knows how we will get there;
We know we will
…

It will be hard, we know,
And the road will be muddy and rough
But we’ll get there –
Heaven-knows how we will get there:
We know we will …

Our journey following Jesus into transformation is like that, as was Abram’s journey. We don’t know where we are going but we will know when and if we arrive; we don’t really know how we’ll get to where we are going but if we continue in faith, returning again and again and again to the Living God despite the pot holes and detours and avalanches and quicksand and whatever else, then we know we will arrive.

And in the process of journeying, Jesus will transform us. The transformation will happen inwardly but the fruit of that transformation will be apparent in our lives. It – we - will be an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. A sacrament.
But how will Jesus transform us?

The best clue is in the words of the Living God on the Mount of transfiguration:

"This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!"

Immediately we have a reminder of Jesus’ baptism when the voice spoke almost exactly the same words – “this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased.” Here, however, we have the all-significant additional imperative – Listen to him!

And that’s the clue – Jesus transforms those who take the time to listen to him. Jesus will transform those who listen to him because they will form a relationship with Jesus.

Just as our own human relationships crucially depend upon our willingness and ability to listen to another, whether a friend or husband or wife or anyone else with whom we seek a relationship, so too our relationship with the Living God, with Jesus the Son, requires the same attitude of attentiveness, and desire and willingness to listen.

We do our very best, most effective listening by coming into God’s presence in silence, putting aside our almost natural desire to regale God with our wants and needs – or even the world’s wants and needs. This silence is never easy. But the out-working of our faith is our returning again and again and again to God despite the extraneous material that surfaces while we are doing our darnedest just to listen.

Silence isn’t something we’re used to or comfortable with at the beginning. That’s okay. We do it a bit at a time. You’ll have noticed the silence following the sermon and after Communion. It’s a small but important opportunity to absorb what we have just received, to be conscious of God’s presence.

In that small moment, are we listening to God? Are we willing to create some space and time in the daily round of activity to sit similarly at home and just be silent with God?

Perhaps we even need to ask ourselves a very serious prior question – do we want Jesus to transform us? If the answer is, Yes, then we need to start listening. If it’s, No, or we’re not sure, that’s okay. Maybe it isn’t the right time. But if not, then we need to think about what will make the time right, knowing that we will never enjoy the depth of relationship with God, through Jesus, if we cannot begin to listen to what God has to say to us.

We are going, heaven-knows where we are going;
We’ll know we’re there.
We will get there, heaven-knows how we will get there;
We know we will …

But we won’t find those answers on the back of the proverbial Weeties packet. We’ll only know if we’re listening. Silently, faithfully listening. Silently being transformed in the continuing journey of the third dominical sacrament.

INSECUIRTY

Sunday, 10th February 2008 : Lent 1 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 : Romans 5:12-21 : Matthew 4:1-11

A man was granted three wishes. Because his wife was nagging him mercilessly he
said in a moment of frustration, “I wish my wife was gone!” Poof! She was gone.
After a week or so the man realised he missed his wife and so he said, “I wish I
had my wife back again.” Poof! She was back. He now realised that he had only
one wish left and that he had better use it wisely.

So he consulted
a friend, who told him to wish for money. “You can buy almost anything if you
have the money,” said the friend. But another friend said, “What good is money
if you haven’t got your health? I’d wish for good health if I were
you.”

Confused, the man went to see the Enlightened One, who said,
“Ask to be contented no matter what you have …”

This story could illustrate several themes but the pertinent one for today is security and insecurity. We live in a society that constantly bombards us with the hissed whisper that we can never be secure enough. We need to plan for the future. We need more “super” – and we get enough advice on television alone to thoroughly confuse us.

We’re told we can’t be content or secure unless we have the biggest or the bestest or the rightest. If our cars don’t rate enough stars we risk serious injury or death, one advert implies. Or if we don’t ask for and insist on ESC then we might skid into a bus because our car won’t be able to re-adjust immediately.

All over the place we covet security. All over the place the disembodied voices tell us we don’t have enough of this, that or the other. We need more. And we are definitely NOT content with what we have. We know we are not content because the voice on the TV or radio told us. Or we read it in the newspaper or any number of magazines.

What a contrast, then, to hear Jesus calmly knocking back the first-Century ad-guy, popularly known as The Devil, among other names. I have long-imagined that Jesus, after forty days of fasting, had something of a struggle, especially when tempted to do magic tricks with the rocks and hoe into some freshly-baked bread. No doubt modern cinema has helped with that!

But reading this now we see a Jesus who is assured and in control of his desires and needs. His first – and apparently only – thought is about the Living God. Clearly those forty days were not wasted!

So even after extreme physical deprivation Jesus shows that relationship with God remains possible. Mark’s gospel is rather light on details but Luke reflects Matthew in showing an assured Jesus dealing with the Devil’s temptations with apparent ease.

What underlies Jesus’ assurance is his security in the Living God. Though he might be hungry he won’t damage the natural order simply to satisfy a human need, however understandable it would be if he did. Far more significantly, Jesus does not bite – he does not even nibble – when the Devil insinuates that he is not the Son of God. Jesus knows exactly who he is and does not have to prove anything to anyone. I reckon most of us would just about kill or do some pretty serious damage to share that equanimity and personal security – I know I might!

So the Devil tries it on again, upping the ante by inviting Jesus to play loose and fast with his life and God’s forbearance. Maybe Jesus just wasn’t into bungee-jumping without a bungee but it’s far more likely that, as before, he simply didn’t need to prove to anyone, let alone the Devil – whatever that might be – who or what he was.

At this point yon Devil sounds uncomfortably like our ego playing one of the thousands of miles of negative tape we all have going through our heads. You’re not good enough. You need to prove yourself. Who do you think you are? Show us, then! Go on – do something to prove it!

But Jesus doesn’t take the bait. Nor does he snap at the offer to rule the world. Nowadays we tend to scoff at such notions and we satirise the notion as insane, emanating from the twisted minds of characters like Dr Evil. But in Jesus’ time it was a real aspiration. They weren’t that far in history from Alexander the Great, the legend who “wept because there were no more worlds to conquer”. It was a great age of empires and empire-building – and here was Jesus declining the opportunity to rule the world.

We don’t know for certain what Jesus knew or believed about God but we can say that he seems to have drawn his security from his relationship with the Living God because that was not only far more important but far more stabilising. When we imagine the good Jesus could have done as ruler of the world, the global justice he could have introduced, feeding the hungry, curing the sick of every land – when we imagine that and more, it’s quite a thing he refuses.

But that’s always the way it is with insecurity. In the words of John Kabat-Zinn, founder of the University of Massachusetts Mind-Based Stress-Reduction clinic, “The mind likes to hang out in the future.”[1] If our minds are not constantly making plans to shore up our fundamental dis-ease and secure the mythical future, then they’re wading woefully through the past, filled with regret and guilt and anger and bitterness over opportunities squandered, tasks unaccomplished, injustices perpetrated against us …

Jesus advises us: Give us today our daily bread. Live in the present moment. Here and now is the only place we can live, here and now is the only place we can find everything we need to get us through to the next moment. And as Laurence Freeman, a Benedictine priest and Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation, puts it: “God is here and now. I am here and now …” Can any of us have a better chance of connecting with the Living God than in each present moment of our lives?

The Genesis story offers one explanation for how the “lie” of the future came into being, via the duplicity of a talking snake – not identified as the Devil, by the way – and the insecurity-fuelled gullibility of humankind. And suddenly the two child-like adults, Adam and Eve, become street-wise earth-people, literally disconnected from the Creator.

But Paul reminds us that Jesus restored the connection. All that talk about justification and righteousness is relationship talk. Though we use two different words in English – justify and righteous – they have the same root in Greek and convey a totally related meaning.

That meanings is relationship – restored relationship. What righteousness and justification mean is being back on speaking terms with God. After centuries of living in fear of God, regretting the stupidity of listening to talking snakes, or planning for a future that never seems to arrive, this Jesus comes along and shows that our security is here and now, and that God-with-us, here and now, STILL yearns to hold us, cuddle us and share the security that only the Living God can provide.

So we think that what we’ve done in the past is too awful even for God to deal with? Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. Jesus is God’s gracious – free-given, no-strings-attached – love and welcome every day of our lives. As far as we who follow Jesus are concerned, Jesus is the only security we can know or need. And it’s a daily gift.

But we have to be in a place, mentally and spiritually, where we can receive this gift. This means focusing on God, and focusing on God means spending time in the kind of prayer that does not make demands of God – demands that too often emerge from our insecurities rather than an authentic desire to commune with God.

We need to spend these crucial moments in silence, in God’s presence, asking for nothing, while past and future fly through our minds, letting go the “stuff” and returning faithfully, again and again and again, to God. Whether we call it “meditation” or “contemplation” or “silent prayer” or some other name doesn’t matter. What does matter is spending the time with God, entering the Mystery that is God, into which God invites us.

Out of this silence we find our moment of security. And it is only a moment. But it is a God-given moment. And God’s moment will always seem to last a lifetime.

May our prayer this Lent be deepened immeasurably as we draw closer to God through focused prayer that seeks to listen rather than tell or demand, that is content with the security of God’s presence allowing us simply to be.

[1] Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness meditation. CD.

27th January 2008 : Epiphany 3 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 9:1-4 : Matthew 4:12-25

I must confess I like candles. I’m not exactly sure what it is about them that I like but I do know that I’m not alone in my fascination. Perhaps it’s their utter simplicity as a means of providing light – and maybe in an age that has not slowed down its discovery and development of technological miracles candles remind us that simplicity remains a powerful and yet vulnerable force in our world.

I suspect also that people who lived in the ages before electricity understood things like fire and light and candles and torches far better than most of us do today. Nevertheless we still know that what the part-time wise person sez is true – that in a pitch-black room the striking and lighting of a single flame floods every corner with light, to some degree at least.

It’s perhaps a minor miracle that in the 21st century we still understand the simplicity of flame and out of that understanding can recognise the power of Isaiah’s imagery when the prophet speaks of a light that shines in darkness and deep darkness. Maybe we’ve all had more than a few doses of night-time power-cuts and know the inexpressible gratitude we feel when we lay hands on matches and a batch of humble household candles!

Over the centuries many have insisted that Isaiah is talking about Jesus as this light that shines in the land of Zebulun and Naphtali. That’s not very likely even thought Matthew’s gospel also wants to point us in that direction.

What’s more likely is that Isaiah is using a powerful counter-pointing image. The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali were not well-regarded. If location, location, location is the key to getting a good price for your dwelling then a mansion in Zebulun or Naphtali would sell for considerably less than the exact same mansion in Jerusalem. Fast-forward to century 21 Western Australia and we’re talking the difference between Balga and Lockridge on the one hand, and Peppermint Grove on the other.

So this is a deep deep darkness Isaiah is drawing to our attention – so deep that the introduction of light is not just welcome but completely life-changing, mind-altering, hope-bringing.

By the time Jesus came along the social and spiritual power-cut in Israel had lasted a long, long time. Foreign troops occupied and controlled the land and religion had gone to pot. This was deep darkness.

So what does God do? Send in a brigade of gig watt-bearing rescue-teams from Jerusalem? I don’t think so. Would you believe a hundred Synergy technicians with authority to reconnect the main grid? No? How about a boy scout with a battery-powered torch?

No, of course not. God doesn’t send rescuers from the centre of power but instead has a child born in an obscure village, part-raised in non-Jewish enemy territory and brought up in a place that the rich and famous despise, a place that as far as they are concerned is the heart of darkness.

This guy is Jesus and he becomes the match struck in the pitch-black room. He becomes the prime and leading example of how God operates in our world, using the simple and unlikely, the weak and vulnerable and powerless to do mighty deeds.

We know that Jesus had a few unfair advantages that we don’t seem to have – like being Son of God. But here’s the thing. Jesus sed back then and he continues to say it right now, here, today – You guys and gals, you go and live like me, you go and do what I did. Heal the sick and stuff like that. But above all be light in deep darkness. Bring hope where people have forgotten what hope is.

It’s been going on for centuries now. People following Jesus, doing what he did, bringing hope. And all the while the deep darkness has followed, trying to smother the light at every turn, sometimes with remarkable effect.

But again and again the Living God calls people to follow Jesus and bring that light into the pitch-black rooms of the world. And that’s precisely what we’ll see in a short while as S, G and L are baptised.

They become in this small ritual that uses very ordinary stuff like water and olive oil and candle light signs of God’s continuing presence and above all the continuing light illuminating the deep darkness of our world with hope.

That’s a big ask for a toddler and a couple of young children. But they don’t have to make it happen immediately. They will have the Holy Spirit to guide them and equally importantly their parents and godparents – and the members of this congregation. In the words of Sean Connery in Entrapment “it’sh imposshible – but doable - ” so let’s do it!

20th January 2008 : Epiphany 2 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 49:1-7 : 1 Corinthians 1:1-9 : John 1:29-42

One of the questions that frequently excites my curiosity is this: If Jesus were to appear today or tomorrow or any time walking down Lake Road, or Westfield or Ypres Road, or any one of the labyrinthine streets and thoroughfares of our Parish – would I recognise him? Would I, as does John the Baptiser in this day’s gospel, be able to announce with the same certainty, Look! The lamb of God!?

I don’t know that I could do that. I could claim in my defence that John had a huge advantage that I don’t have – namely an explicit statement from the Living God describing, not the physical details of the man who would come, but his special and particular spiritual character.

These spiritual characteristics are so important that they take precedence over Jesus’ actual name. We learn that the descending and remaining dove-like Holy Spirit will identify him. We learn that Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, recognises him as the Messiah, the Christ. This gospel implies that in common with John the Baptiser and his disciples, Andrew and Simon are expecting him, looking, watching, waiting, maybe even actively seeking him.

But John accords Jesus another title – lamb of God. And he says it twice. First it’s, Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And then simply, Look! The Lamb of God …

It’s no mere honorific because towards the conclusion of John’s gospel Jesus becomes the sacrificial lamb of Passover, crucified, in John’s gospel only, on the day of preparation, that is, the day the lambs “without spot or blemish” were slaughtered. In other words, John does not have Jesus sharing a final Passover, as do Matthew, Mark and Luke. Instead, the Romans execute the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world and they remove his body before Passover begins.

What John’s gospel achieves in that one phrase – the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world – is to bring together succinctly and brilliantly two different pieces of biblical anthropology.

Taking the second one first, we have the notion of the scapegoat. The scapegoat was an animal – a goat, duh! – that, once a year, had symbolically laid upon it the sins of the Hebrew nation. They then drove the goat out into the wilderness to fend for itself. But the point was that the goat took away the nation’s sins in what was paradoxically both a symbolic and literal manner. It was a moment of catharsis in which the Hebrew people freed themselves of their sense of guilt, individual and communal, for another year, until the next year. The scapegoat was – nor could it ever be anything but – an imperfect and limited solution to corporate and individual sin.

When John’s gospel gives us the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world we finally have a permanent answer. But John tweaks the scapegoat anthropology very significantly.

First it’s no longer “sins” – acts of sinning – but sin. Singular. This is like the main pod from which all the other minute spores of sinfulness spew forth. Jesus the Lamb of God provides a definitive answer to the whole question of sin and sinfulness by cutting out the middle goat and dealing directly with the source. And second it’s no longer about a single and particular people but extends now to the whole world and every people. The Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world, not just the sins of Israel.

But the divine solution isn’t the removal of sin as such from the world, or individual sins. It’s more elegant than that. It allows us humans to retain our free will to choose God or not-God but in the event that we choose not-God and therefore sin we now have recourse to an ever-present solution when we change our minds and return to the Living God.

That solution, quite simply, is grace. Gone is the delusion that we ourselves can deal with the sin thing – because we can’t. Instead God devises a way through that Jesus mediates through the Holy Spirit: every time we wander away from and then return to God, God simply forgets whatever it is we feel guilty about. And that’s grace.

And it’s worldwide. It’s nation-wide and people-wide and religion-wide. You heard me. It’s not restricted to Christians. If it was, then it wouldn’t be grace. It would be some kind of client-centered favour doled out to particular people, to some but not others. It would mock and make a foul lie of Paul’s assertion that God has no favourites. So let no one live with the cruel delusion that Christians are better or more favoured than anyone else in God’s universe. We aren’t. Because if we were then grace would not be grace!

Jesus the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world.

And that’s the second part of John’s exquisite conflation. As the Passover Lamb, Jesus becomes the living symbol of God’s salvation. The Passover is about liberation from bondage to the promise of freedom – a freedom not exactly handed to anyone on a platter, silver or otherwise. Rather, it’s a freedom we have to work for, if only to that extent that we consciously choose to seek it and accept it.

But the point is that for each one of us Passover through Jesus now becomes a global phenomenon also. Liberation is available to all who choose it, through exactly the same mechanism of grace.

But wait! Let’s remember that the lamb is generally a gentle creature. Jesus isn’t the Lion of God who takes away the sin of the world. He’s the Lamb. And the Lamb not only refuses but actively negates the violence implicit in the whole scapegoat thing by absorbing that violence on the cross and showing us how possible it is.

We see the shift from a single people – Israel – to a universal plan as early as Second Isaiah:

He made my mouth like a sharp sword,
in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me a polished arrow,
in his quiver he hid me away.

Perhaps God toyed with the idea of allowing Israel to meet violence with violence. But even in that intermediate phase God puts the sharp sword and polished arrow on the back burner and then decides that the way to go is global:

"It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."

God decides to give Israel a shot at being the agents of a new, redemptive, non-violent approach.

Ultimately the new approach failed. Israel simply could not do it. No nation could have done it. So, in Johannine theology, the Living God sends the Son, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

It’s still universal. But this time it succeeds. This time we have a lamb of freedom instead of a violence-smothered goat. This time the solution to sin is ongoing and timeless. Through the grace and, as Paul rightly adds, peace of Christ, the Lamb who absorbs the violence in every human heart.

And maybe that’s the answer to my question. Maybe we should all, as we leave here today, be truly attentive to those people casually strolling about out there on Lake Road or St George’s Terrace or wherever we happen to be during the week. Maybe what we’re looking for is someone who exudes grace and peace, someone whose demeanour speaks of love and invitation and welcome, no matter who we are or what the colour of our flesh or the manner of our encounter with the divine.

Who knows? maybe someone out there might see one of us and quietly and hopefully think to themselves, That person reminds me of someone … the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world …

Grace and peace be with you all -

25th December 2007 : CHRSTMASS Morning : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 62:6-12 : Titus 3:4-8a : Luke 2:1-20

To love is not just to do something for others, but to reveal to them their own
uniqueness, to tell them that they are special and worthy of attention. We can
express this through our open and gentle presence.
Jean Vanier

Jean Vanier was the founder of the L’Arche communities, which are faith-based communities centered on people with learning or developmental disabilities. Now an international phenomenon, the first Western Australian L’Arche – the French for “Ark”, as in Noah’s Ark – is due to open in the near future.

Vanier’s words speak eloquently of the rationale and guiding principles of L’Arche. That the profound, abiding basis for their actions comes from the Living God is clear because Vanier could just as easily be speaking about God’s love for humankind and in particular God’s basis for deciding on the Incarnation as the means for bringing salvation to the earth.

Hear the words again:

To love is not just to do something for others, but to reveal to them their own
uniqueness, to tell them that they are special and worthy of attention. We can
express this through our open and gentle presence.

I don’t know whether Vanier had such thoughts in mind or whether the Incarnation – the birth of Jesus – held any inspiration for them but we truly see in his words the action of the Living God in engineering and executing Jesus’ coming to be among us.

First, God’s loving initiative in sending Jesus is not “doing something for us”, as if it were some kind of über-magnanimous gesture on the part of the Being who wrote the manual on generosity. God is not doing us a favour, a superior being rescuing a bunch of hopeless losers – yet again.

Rather, God is using the divine generosity to extend the riskiest invitation of all time – an invitation into relationship, as equals. Remember the last supper in John’s gospel? Jesus sez, “I do not call you servants any longer … but I have called you friends …”

What Jesus comes to do is to lead us back to God. Again, this is not some kind of physical journey, but a journey of the spirit, towards a discovery of the kingdom within and among us.
That discovery is one we have to move towards ourselves. God cannot do it for us while we continue to possess the grace of free will. Out of the same self-imposed constraint, God encourages us to recover a lost confidence in our ability to tap into the inner resources that will enable us to advance in this journey.

To do otherwise would be to treat us with contempt and, at the very least, disrespect. God knows that we are capable of embarking on this journey – because God gave us those inner resources in the first place.

The second point would be that the birth of Jesus is itself a powerful sign of God’s deep love and respect for humanity. The Word – Jesus – did not become a single-cell organism, an amoeba, and insinuate itself into our bodies via our nasal passages as we went for a dip in Lake Galilee. The Word did not become a dolphin or a chimpanzee even though they are among the most intelligent creatures on the planet.

No, the Word became FLESH. A human being, an act that shows us how valued and esteemed and worthy we are in God’s sight. Jesus then shows us what humans are capable of doing – and better, being. He shows us that we CAN be human AND have a valuable and authentic spiritual life, one that enjoys a close relationship with the Living God.

This why the Christian scriptures exhort us to become Christ-like. Not so that we can impress the gullible, win friends or influence our uncles, but in order to experience the fullness of relationship with the Living God. If only we realised that the only qualification for such an experience is one we already possess – being human!

And so the incarnation tells us this: that precisely because we are human, which in biblical terms means created in the image and likeness of the Living God – precisely because we are human, we are “special and worthy of attention”.

Again, we need no extraordinary qualifications for being, in God’s eyes, special and worthy of attention. We ALREADY have everything it could possibly take, simply by being human.

The third thing is the unobtrusive manner in which incarnation unfolds. Maybe with twenty-twenty hindsight, we might think or ordinarily expect that momentous events should attract a great deal of publicity and attention.

But it doesn’t happen that way. At least, the publicity machine is a bunch of shepherds, in those days considered ratbags and unreliable. Hardly the sort of respected dignitaries to convey news of an event so momentous.

Instead God and scripture treat us to the open and gentle presence of a baby born in a stable. The paradox is that God’s power resides in such a vulnerable being – a baby who is defenceless, unable to repel an aggressor, totally dependent on the love and good will of others, primarily his mother.

It’s as if God wants us to know that from the very beginning this is what it’s about – openness and gentleness, presence, quietly “being there”. No self-serving, self-seeking fuss. Just being, attentive to what’s around us.

The good news is that this open and gentle presence doesn’t have to leave us when, as or just because we happen to grow up! For what I suspect is the majority of us, though, by the time we’re physically and emotionally adults, we’ve receive so many blows, experienced such trauma, become so wounded and scarred that we have a huge task ahead of us to return to life as an open and gentle presence.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t recover or heal. It’s difficult work. Fortunately, “difficult” isn’t “impossible”. And as we heal and recover, we find ourselves drawing closer once again to the open and gentle presence of the baby born in Bethlehem so many centuries ago.

So here we are again, making time to spend with God, expressing the desire to allow God to shape, re-shape and transform us into open and gentle people whose presence speaks again of God’s love and respect.

This is where the submerged meaning of the incarnation speaks with the Spirit within us. This perhaps is the inner work Mary was doing when Luke tells us she twice “pondered” the meaning of the great events of which she had allowed herself to be a part.

Her head had all sorts of logical or seemingly-logical answers thrust into it. But her heart needed more. And wisely she permitted the process to claim her attention. We see the fruit of that work when she stands at the foot of her son’s cross, open and gentle, a presence of love bearing witness to the worst of human actions at the same time as she exemplifies the Christ-like qualities that emerge in the incarnation, available to all of us, simply because we are human beings.

LIFE FINDS A WAY

9th December 2007 : Advent 2 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 11:1-10 : Romans 15:4-13 : Matthew 3:1-12

In the film Jurassic Park the chaos theoretician, Dr Ian Malcolm, delivers some of the most pointed and insightful lines. Horrified at the thought of theme park scientists reproducing dinosaurs, Malcolm is also sceptical about the long-term effectiveness of the apparent safeguard of genetically engineering the beasts’ DNA so that every dinosaur born at Jurassic Park is female, thus ensuring that they cannot breed.

At one point an exchange between the chief scientist and Malcolm goes like this:

Henry Wu: You're implying that a group composed entirely of
female animals will... breed?
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way.

Life … finds a way.

That’s eventually what happens in Jurassic Park: some of the dinosaurs begin to breed.

But long before Jurassic Park our scriptures were running this theme in various ways. We can think of Sarah in Genesis, Elizabeth in Luke, and the all-surpassing example of Mary the Mother of Jesus, who apparently conceives without human intervention.

Life finds a way.

Except of course that life here means the Living God and we might prefer to say that God finds a way – a way to ensure humankind’s movement from circularity and despair to forward movement and ultimate hope.

The story of John the Baptiser – the one known as the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodox tradition – is another example of God finding a way to bring life and hope to a humanity digging itself into a deeper and deeper hole as it wanders aimlessly in circles substituting rules, methodology and religious formulae for a living relationship with the Living God.

John stations himself on the outskirts and in doing so he forces the people of “Jerusalem and all Judaea” to leave the familiarity of their current life-nullifying homes and workplaces and religious institutions to journey to the borders of the wilderness.

In that sense these people come to meet John where things are pared back. They’re returning to some kind of starting point in order to discover a new beginning – a place where God can encourage them to receive the gift of new life, a place where life, paradoxically in the environment of wilderness, bare natural elements and essentials, finds a way.

And this is exactly what Matthew tells us –

"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.' "

At least, that’s what Isaiah sez in the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures. In the actual Hebrew version the quote is

The voice of one crying out:
In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord …

I used to think the misplaced comma didn’t appreciably alter the meaning of the text. But now I’m not so sure.

I think it IS especially significant that God has John preparing the way of the Lord in the wilderness. I think it IS especially significant that God causes life to find a way in a place where life is hard, dangerous, unpredictable – and even unlikely.

And as we know a little later on the dude from Nazareth rocks up, gets done in the Jordan and then, instead of heading straight to the Big Smoke to enact his reforms, the Holy Spirit drives him right into the wilderness. And it’s from the wilderness that Jesus emerges. And he emerges from the wilderness preaching exactly the same message as his cousin, John the Forerunner.

Now this may surprise us. Shouldn’t Jesus have a new message? Isn’t he the New Thing? Doesn’t he have a New Take on the Old Story?

Yes and no. Because the Story doesn’t change. The Story is about getting back to God.

As Joni Mitchell archetypally wrote and sang in early 70’s

We got to get ourselves back to the garden …

The garden – the place where humankind first meets and forms a relationship with the Living God. A garden that becomes blasted and withered and barren – a wilderness where God continues, in a sense, to reside.

Human searching for the garden is humanity searching for God – the God who causes life to find a way.

And so we have the same message from both John and Jesus:

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!

That one word - repent – encapsulates everything that Jesus was about.

And it’s NOT, as we so commonly suppose, a moral demand. It’s bigger – far more outrageously humungous than that. Repentance is not about moral sins but about spiritual redirection and return to the Living God in a way that gives life.

Again, it’s about life finding a way through the distractions and distortions of rules and religious red tape. It’s so easy to reduce Jesus’ message to a set of moral imperatives. The rational mind copes best with these neat niceties: good, evil; right, wrong; black, white.

But the call to life and the call of life – life finding a way under the loving prompting of the Living God – is a call to the spirit within us. As Paul reminds us, the good news is for all people, for Gentiles as well as Jews.

This is the merging, in one sense. It is the end of the dualism that the human mind enjoys so much. It is the unifying and reconciling of opposites. This is the ultimate goal of life finding a way.

Repentance, then, is not at all about sorrowing about moral transgressions. How much simpler and easier it would be if that was what it was all about and nothing else!

Repentance, however, is about this return to God. In its English form it means re-make. God calls us into the new life, the life that finds a way in Jesus, by allowing us to accept a total spiritual makeover. This is not easy and it’s not painless.

How much more straightforward it is simply to take the moral and dualistic path! I do wrong. I say, Sorry. I do right. Here’s the thing. I can do all that, all the time, my entire life, without ever changing, without ever coming even one tenth of a millimeter closer to God. Even hardened criminals know the difference between right and wrong.

So don’t imagine for second that hardened Christians are truly closer to God just because they know a few moral imperatives.

Remember, the message is repent. Change. Come back. Return. One-on-one. If we’re thinking Greek it comes out as “change your mind”, or as we might say today, “change your mindset”, change your way of thinking about God. See God, not as a terrifying school principal with an unbreakable cane, ready to give you six of the best every time you break one of the rules – but as the welcoming, inviting, loving Creator who yearns for reunion.

In other words, change your thinking about the moral tyrant so that you understand the loving giver of life, the One who causes life to find a way into our hearts and converse softly and gently with our own spirit.

It’s by no means an easy task. But, as ever, we don’t have to do it alone. So are we prepared to take that risk? Will we – can we move from the safety of the known world of dualisms and set out for the border country, the outskirts of both civilised religion and the wilderness where the Living God dwells? Can we set out to meet the Forerunner – and ultimately find Jesus, in whom life finds a way?

ADVENT SUNDAY A 2007

2nd December 2007 : Advent Sunday : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 2:1-5 : Romans 13:9-21 : Matthew 24:36-44

Many of us have seen the movie Home alone, possibly even the two sequels. For those who haven’t, Home alone is the highly-unlikely story of a precocious young boy, something of a misfit in his large, unruly family, who is accidentally left behind when sed family goes on vacation. This sets the scene for a series of slapstick antics as the kid proceeds to outwit a couple of would-be robbers, ingeniously using only the materials he has at hand.

The first movie worked well. We didn’t know the outcome. The kid was very cute despite his precociousness. We had tension, we had sympathy. Durn-it-all, we were rootin for the kid from the get-go and his triumph over evil and disaster was OUR triumph over evil and disaster.

Home alone was a masterful piece of cinema manipulation that drew us into acute identification with the poor abandoned brat, ultimately playing on our own deep fears – maybe fears of abandonment also; fear of attack; fear of threats of one kind or another; fear of an assault on whatever it is we delude ourselves into believing fundamentally holds us together as human beings.

Before I continue let me say that I am indebted for much of what follows to the website Girardian reflections on the lectionary[1] The site’s name comes from the anthropologist René Girard, whose study of society and religion led him to conclude that what drives us is desire, which may lead either to cooperation or conflict. It’s far more complex than that so that will have to do for the moment – or until we find someone who understands it well enough to explain it clearly!

Meanwhile, back at the sermon …

The Church has long, though I suspect not “always” played on people’s fears of rejection and abandonment in order to gain adherents and keep captive the fearful faithful. We all want to belong, to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to feel in some way accepted. Such is our desire for belonging and acceptance that we willingly abandon our most fundamental principles and sense of personal integrity – at least in the short-term – in order to achieve it.

As one particular kind of example, this is how extremist groups of every colour, religion and political persuasion gain and retain followers. From the outside these groups may seem obviously dodgy – but offer someone who feels rejected a sense of home, a sense of belonging, a sense of likemindedness – and they willingly become yours. Once that happens it’s relatively easy to manipulate them and keep them for long periods of time.

It’s exactly this dynamic that operates in the conservative dogma of the so-called Rapture, a non-biblical term that has many different shades of interpretation based on selective and sometimes twisted interpretations of a handful of biblical texts. The basis of Rapture theology is that at some point before, during or after the last days – a time of terror known as the Tribulation – Jesus will descend from heaven and lift up the “saved” from earth and meet them in the sky, ushering them into eternity. Those who remain on earth still have a shot at salvation but they will have to suffer some or all of the horrors of Tribulation.

Well … who wouldn’t want to belong to the select group of the “saved”? And who, believing they were “in”, wouldn’t want to do everything they could to ensure they stayed “in”?

As far as that basic scenario goes anyone and any group can play the game – and who hasn’t? The Church is a past master at it. The Church has for centuries set up and demanded adherence on the basis of what Richard Rohr calls “questions of belonging, membership questions; who’s in – and who’s out”.

Part of the problem is that this was never Jesus’ message. He didn’t offer “membership” based on strict and coded principles. One of the reasons the established religion feared him was because he threw out their rule book. He not so much re-wrote their cosy constitution as tore the whole thing to pieces.

How? By allowing anyone and everyone to be members of his organisation! He threw wide the doors. He sed even the blind, the lame, the deaf, the mute – even SINNERS for goodness’ sake!! – could come in and receive God’s welcome and forgiveness. For those of us who like churchy words, it’s called GRACE.

Grace flows freely from a loving God and it sez to anyone who can hear the offer, Come on down!

It’s a totally different – and liberating – attitude from the one that sez These are the rules; you can stay as long as you obey them. If you don’t obey, we kick you out and abandon you to your fate.

Who among us really wants to be “abandoned to our fate”? I know I don’t!

No wonder people likewise are terrified at the prospect of being among those who are “left behind”. It’s what ancient and not-so-ancient peoples did to the elderly and infirm: left them behind under a bush or on an ice-floe or in a C-class hospital (read “nursing home”). No thank you!

One of the problems is that we don’t have to translate the text the way we actually find it. For instance, the word for “taken” could validly be translated as “swept away” or “kidnapped” or “taken by force”. The Latin translation gives us the English word rape and the French version – ravissement – sounds enough like its English equivalent to need no translation.

Is this REALLY what God is going to do to those who belong to the right club, the Salvation Club?

On the other hand, the word that translates as “left behind” occurs commonly in the Christian scriptures, has several different meanings also, and could be rendered forgive. It’s actually the same word sitting ingenuously behind Father, forgive them for they know not what they do; and Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

And when we consider that Noah was “left behind” while the rest of the world was “swept away” in evil and violence we start to get a different picture. And do we really need to guess how topsy-turvy the view is when we look at the most well-known of all people ever to be “left behind” – a certain Jesus of Nazareth, abandoned on the cross, soaked in the violence of humanity, refusing to abandon his faith, innocent victim of the world’s evil – and raised from the dead on the third day by the Living God!

The point is we do not need to fear being left behind. Being left behind may actually be the true sign that we are people of faith, people who maybe do not “belong” according to the rulebook, but people who have accepted God’s grace – the only thing we need to do.

It is exactly the same grace operating as Mary of Nazareth enters the final month of her third trimester. Humankind does nothing – can do nothing – to deserve or warrant the coming of Jesus into the world. God sends Jesus in an act of faith as an act of grace.

We who are left behind to meet him need only ask one question – will we truly receive God’s offered grace this Advent Season and understand it at the Christ Mass?

[1] http://girardianlectionary.net/index.html and http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/advent1a.htm