GOD'S PRAISE AND MONEY

21st March 2010 : Lent 5 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Isaiah 43:16-21 : Philippians 3:3-14 : John 12:1-8

One of the contentious issues that has clung to the Church over the centuries is its use of financial resources. For instance, when I was training for the priesthood a bequest of one million dollars was made to the cathedral for restoration work on the organ. When that figure became public knowledge a great controversy arose: how could the Church spend such a sum on an organ when so much need existed, even in a relatively prosperous city like Perth?

To say that the bequest aroused considerable scandal would be an understatement. Here was the Church yet again squandering money on material possessions while people went homeless and hungry or lived in circumstances of considerable deprivation and hardship. Self-righteous moralists, outside and within the Church, condemned this situation even though, because of the nature of the bequest, the cathedral was legally bound to use the money for no other purpose than the restoration of the organ.

We can ask any number of questions about this or any other issue where obscene amounts of money are spent on the broadly material fabric of either Church or society. How many people can a cool mill feed or house or train? How many hospital wards could that money open or keep operational?

It’s not an obscure picture. We all get it. And even if our sympathies stray towards the organisation that benefits from that kind of lucre, we still have an eye on the underprivileged and the echo in our ears of all those ethical questions and issues that have sprung up, well, at least since this Mary in John’s gospel cracked open a jar of nard and poured the aromatic fragrance over a mere man’s feet instead of selling it and giving the money to the poor.

Ultimately, these are pointless questions. The causes of poverty and human and environmental degradation are complex and not solvable simply by, as they say, hurling cash at them. We’ve seen how effectively such a strategy has brought justice and dignity to our aboriginal populations. It hasn’t.

Holy scripture on the other hand makes it clear that a primary responsibility of people of faith is to worship and praise God. This is one of the justifications that the Church advances for seemingly materialistic spending: we produce art, architecture and music of excellence as a sign to the world of how significant God is in our lives. We do not take short-cuts or offer God what is second-best but seek out the best, the most excellent, the most worthy – in honour of this Being whose standards we can barely comprehend.

In Isaiah God speaks of

the people whom I formed for myself
so that they might declare my
praise.

In his letter to the faithful in Philippi Paul repudiates material, social and religious status on the grounds that they cannot compare to the wonders of God:

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of
knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all
things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ

What Paul is saying is that when we assess the value and worth of Jesus everything else becomes meaningless and worthless.

And here begins the clue to what this is all about. First, what the faithful offer God is never a match for what God offers the faithful. By comparison to God’s grace and favour all material, social and religious trappings are without value. But second, what we can offer God is the best that we have.

Thus, Mary makes an offering of hugely-expensive aromatic oil. It is not valid to compare the offering to God with the gift made to, say, the poor, because they are not the same in quality. It’s like trying to compare an apple and a grain of sand. How do we do that? What value can we find in such a comparison?

When we shell out a million bucks on a musical instrument in a cathedral we are making an offering of the best we can be and do and in effect giving back to God what God has given us in the first place, so that we might declare God’s praise, a la Isaiah.

We are not actually lavishing money on God and therefore depriving the poor of the undoubted benefits of such a sum. What we are doing is praising God by acknowledging God’s worth and value in our lives. We are demonstrating our faith in God as the ultimate arbiter of justice and trusting this same God to continue working to eradicate the many horrors that beset any community or society in which humans live.

We are also acknowledging God’s sovereignty – God’s power to effect change. At one level, yes, we do this at the expense of the poor, whom we will always have with us.

However, at a more profound level, we are paradoxically doing more to benefit the most needy in our world when we surrender our own notions what is best for them and instead place our primary focus on God. In this sense, Mary is hastening the ability of Jesus to complete his work by anointing him as prefiguring of his own final conflict with the powers and sources of violence and injustice.

We surely know that anything we do, we do in God’s name. Anything we do, we do in the power of the Holy Spirit. Anything we do, we do with and to and for Jesus.

…Because our faith is relational. In other words, it’s about going out and being with people in that Spirit of love and generosity that comes from the Living God. As I’ve already suggested, simply doling out money is not an effective solution to the complex problems that create and sustain poverty and degradation. Far better to seek the Living God and venture forth trusting in the divine power and meeting other human beings as fellow humans, relating and building relationships rather than dealing in paper, plastic and metal.

It’s much easier to do that, of course. But we have to ask ourselves: do we want this rather lazy option? or do we trust the Living God enough to guide and strengthen us as we seek the lost and wounded of Camillo?

PRODIGAL FORGIVENESS!

14^th March 2010 : Lent 4 : Year C

9:30am Camillo

Joshua 5:2-12 : 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 : Luke 15:11-32

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now. Or maybe two things. The gospel reading we have just heard is NOT about the prodigal son. This may come as a surprise because we have become accustomed blithely to letting the phrase Prodigal Son enter our minds without invitation and equally the same phrase has intruded into our consciousness without asking permission to do so.

When we look at chapter 15 in Luke’s gospel we see that he has organised it on the basis of three parables – first, the lost sheep; second, the lost coin; and third? the lost son, the parable that concludes with the words, “he was lost and has been found”.

Certainly Luke creates tension and suspense by building up to the crucial story, the real story by throwing in two smaller, bite-sized vignettes. He wants us to see the importance of story 3 – but that doesn’t undercut the plain fact that story 3 is the climactic episode in a three-part mini-series about being lost – and then being found again.

Our traditional, historical focus on the prodigality of the son is largely, let me suggest, a function of our own avoidance of culpability. In other words, we point the finger at the wayward son so that no one will notice that we are not exactly squeaky clean.

It’s reminiscent of the scene in the movie Stalag 17, in which the William Holden character, whom most of the prisoners despise, recalls being beaten up because the POW’s think he’s spying for the Germans. Holden comments that the real spy, the real traitor would have been the one punching and kicking the hardest.

Well, folks, the lost son is William Holden and we are the POW’s of Stalag Camillo. It’s called scapegoating. Which is to say no more than that this is human behaviour, not at its ugliest, but not in its most worthy and honourable manifestation. And we legitimise the behaviour when we pour our own hurts and anxieties and woundedness onto another – even a fictitious character – instead of facing up to our need to seek healing.

If we really need to fling the prodigal word into the story – a word that comes from the reviewer’s quill, not the author’s – then we would serve ourselves and posterity better by looking at the father rather than the son.

If the father is meant to represent God then Luke’s Jesus wants to draw our attention to another nuance of the word prodigal: extravagant; generous beyond belief. This is how the father behaves. This story in Luke is one of the sources of our theology of God’s abundantly generous nature.

But it’s a hard generosity to accept – especially if we are playing the guilt-ridden scapegoat-herds who secretly “know” we deserve punishment and even more secretly wish that God were rather more punitive than forgiving and loving.

And of course, if we accept the prodigal father then where does that leave our vicarious self-righteousness with regard to the lost-and-forgiven son? Let me suggest that we don’t want the son to be forgiven.

We want him to remain forever prodigal because we unconsciously recognise something deeply disturbing about the divine economy in this story.

What we notice is this: the father lavishes his forgiveness freely, generously and extravagantly; and most scandalously of all, he lavishes this free, generous and extravagant forgiveness NOT on the basis of the son’s confession of moral turpitude and general depravity but because the son exercises true repentance – the metanoia of changing his mind and returning to the father.

Of course repentance in this scriptural sense implies renunciation of clearly immoral behaviour – but what activates forgiveness is actually coming back to God. …Because what is at issue is not the busy and overworked minutiae of moral impropriety but the separation that of necessity occurs when we indulge behaviour that is, for want of a better word, “ungodly”. What actually makes such behaviour ungodly is not any preciosity about the actual deed or thought but the fact that it treats other human beings and created things with disrespect and dishonour, as objects we use rather than those with whom we share a unique and genuine connection.

Immorality, when we can actually isolate it from within its spectacular arrays of grey, disrupts and sometimes shatters that connection. Is it mere coincidence that we sever our connection with God as well?

But that’s not the only thing we notice about the transaction of return-and-forgiveness in this story. Something is missing. After all this talk of creating a scapegoat of the son – where is the go-between who intervenes on the son’s behalf and pleads his case, thus satisfying the father’s thirst for “just” retribution?

Hark! Did someone say, “But the father doesn’t seem all that interested in retribution and vengeance?” And did I hear someone else say, “The father seems right chuffed just because the snotty-nosed brat came home!” Oh; and was that someone else saying, “Um, I can’t find anyone in the story pleading on behalf of the son.”?

All true. Where’s the sacrifice? None exists. Who’s the scapegoat? No one. What form does the father’s just and righteous vengeance take? Er, what “just and righteous vengeance”? Dad just seems, well, awesomely pleased – for no other reason than the return of his son.

The reality is that we are the ones who want vengeance. We want retribution. We want a neat, dualistic system in which everything adds up and all the negatives balance against the positives and vice-versa. We want it clear, cut and laid out on racks in the baking sun to dry.

Unfortunately, the divine economy does not operate like that. God’s forgiveness is for those who return to God. Almost certainly, we will still be trailing behind us our sacks of garbage, our lifetime’s worth of damage and woundedness that continue to require the grace of God to address.

And God is more likely to do that through the services of a psychiatrist, psychologist or psychotherapist, and/or by chemical means, than through the use of natural-rule-defying pyrotechnics. And God will use communities of faithful, loving people. And sometimes that will include the church.

A

nd what of the son’s brother, the scowling, aggrieved son who demands retributive justice? He’s the guy calling his bro prodigal, who cannot bear the prodigality of his father. Many of us secretly admire this dude because we’re thinking the same.

We’re thinking the same because we, like sour-puss, operate through the heresy of dualism, where everything is black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. Where the books have to balance; where the columns and rows, where up, down, across and every-which-way must arrive at a neatness and exactitude that would shame a Sudoku square.

Ironically, we call that “reconciliation”, but on God’s planet reconciliation actually means something different. It means “my sons and daughters were lost but now they have come home again. Whoo-hoo! Let’s par-tay!”

LONG-TERM/SHORT-TERM - GOD'S GRACE AND HUMAN ENTITLEMENT

7th March 2010 : Lent 3 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Isaiah 55:1-9 : 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 : Luke 13:31-35

All week I have wrestled with the gospel reading. It’s my usual practice but what was difficult this week was my inability to remember what the reading was about!

The other readings were straightforward enough. Isaiah presents a scene in which Yahweh offers the people of Israel an abundance of nourishment. It is a moment of God’s grace. It is an offering of the things that are essential for life – water and food, with a few delights thrown in, like milk and honey.

It’s not an extravagant gift – it is simply the things that humankind needs. But the whole is given a spiritual cast. This is special stuff. It’s no mere meal, not even a banquet. It is, quite simply, enough. But because it is the gift of God’s grace, even “enough” is more than any human can imagine in their wildest dreams.

And needless to say, only the Living God can provide this sufficiency. And it is only available to those who seek out God and accept the invitation. It’s not a huge demand. It’s not a demand at all.

It’s worth remembering that God does not and will not make demands on any of us. God always invites – and it is always a gracious invitation.

And if it were that easy then perhaps we wouldn’t be here this morning. Perhaps the world would be in a state of peace and harmony, sharing resources of every kind, from food and water to skills and technology.

No. It takes a considerable act of will to abandon the old and familiar – especially when they are damaging and destructive, paradoxical as that may sound. …Because in some ways we become more familiar with our enemies than with our friends. We seem to invest more in hating them, more in gaining knowledge of their ways, of nursing and nourishing old wounds and grievances.

This is clearly an unproductive practice, however comforting it may seem. Ultimately, it is the way of dusty death. The Living God, on the other hand, offers life in all its fullness and it is an abundant offering, made by the ultimate philanthropist – a delightful word whose meaning is lover of humanity.

In contrast to the Living God’s exuberant prodigality – God’s limitless generosity – is the unruly, myopic attitude of human beings.

When Paul writes to the community of faith in Corinth he gives the example of the demanding, puerile attention-seeking misbehaviour of the nation of Israel. They have, says Pauly, spiritual food and drink – the same spiritual nourishment that the Corinth folk possess – but they are not satisfied.

Not because the food and drink on offer are unappetising or lacking in anything we humans need. But because earthly pleasures are too easy, immediate, gratifying. It’s all short-term, of course, which is why people need more and more, seemingly without an end, creating ever-more sophisticated but ultimately hollow and lifeless means by which to access those pleasures.

For Paul, the crux of the matter seems to inhabit the world of entitlement, with its burgeoning suburban sprawl, arrogance. Paul is saying that none of us should take for granted God’s offerings, even though they are graciously made. Nor should we assume that because we are the recipients of such magnanimous favour, we are somehow superior to anyone else. We are not. We have simply fallen flat on our faces and God has rolled us over, and the first thing we see is Jesus, smiling yet profoundly concerned, with a tray of food and drink.

And this, then, is what so wounds Jesus as he gazes upon Jerusalem, the city that is so important in Luke’s gospel – so important that Luke does a straightforward enough editorial on the post-resurrection tradition and has the apostles and disciples hole up in the holy city rather than scatter to their home towns.

He ends with an allusion to Psalm 118 – we bless you from the house of Yahweh – and a full-blooded quote: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of Yahweh!”

When does that happen? It’s a foreshadowing of his entry into Jerusalem on the day we call Palm Sunday. Jesus is aiming for Passover, timing his arrival so that he will be among the crowds of pilgrims. Luke makes his Jesus determined to meet destiny in “the city that kills the prophets”.

But what he also meets is the perverse nature of those who wilfully reject grace. Grace has been and continues to be offered but Jerusalem – a potent symbol of the people of Israel – gives God the finger and goes its merry way.

We in Camillo need to heed Paul’s warning. We pursue our own plans and desires at the expense both of the Living God and of ourselves. Grace is always available. So much so that one of my unfulfilled schemes is to produce a bumper sticker saying, Grace Happens, because that is exactly how it is. Grace Happens!

But we have to make ourselves available to receive it. And understand that it is given, not because we are better, more worthy, purer, more special, more deserving, better bible bashers or superior scripture students, but because God loves us and “doing grace” is where God is at (man). Whoa.

As last week’s study of Mary Magdalene put it – “I am good because God loves me…not loved because I am good.” Or to paraphrase the title of a book I came across recently, we are (potentially) grace-filled “for no good reason”. In other words, we don’t and can’t earn God’s grace. Grace just flows out of God like a fountain in a lake.

Question is: are we secure enough in our faith to accept this wonderful spiritual freebie? Or do we still need to learn that the grace of God is here-now if only we would reach towards God and accept it?

STANDING FIRM

28th February 2010 : Lent 2 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 : Philippians 3:17 – 4:1 : Luke 13:1-9

In the words of the prophet: what do we got here? Today, like. Let’s look at this. First, some really weird stuff going down in the Hebrew scriptures. The seminal episode in which Yahweh promises Abraham – who is at the time still called Abram – that he will have heirs and offspring and descendants. Satisfies the typical male desire to have his name carry on, addressing the male mortality-fear of being the last of his line.

But more than that – we also get the uber-weird bizzo involving animal carcasses hewn in half and a flaming torch and smoking fire pot. This stuff is kind of freaky. Smoking pot indeed! But, for the trivia hounds and houndettes among us, it does explain the Hebrew idiom for “making a covenant”, which literally translates as “to CUT a covenant”, which is what Abe does to the carcasses – cuts ’em in two for the Mysterious Yahweh to move between.

Then we have Paul encouraging the troops in Philippi. Maybe not quite as stirring as Mel Gibson bare-backing a lively pony, wearing Pictish woad, natty hair flying, exhorting the motley crew of Scots clans to fight the invading Sassenachs… But who knows? Best wait for the film before passing final judgement on that one.

And then the godspell. The Guid News. What have we here?

What we have is a bit of an idea that will surface later in the twentieth century as “The Shadow”. Said Shadow is the recognition that each one of us has a built-in dark side. A side that surfaces to one extent or another whenever we think or say or do things that are more or less destructive, and diminish the fundamental goodness both of our own nature and of others. The Shadow operates when we indulge in intentional acts that damage any part of creation.

It’s not something we should fear. Rather, we need to accept it as part of what it means to be human. Late in the eighteenth century the English poet and artist and sometime mystic, William Blake, wrote his well-known poem, “The Tiger” – you know, the one that begins

Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night…

It concludes with a question that is difficult to face:

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Is the Living God, the Creator, responsible for this fearsome creature, the Tiger? In the terminology of Carl Gustav Jung, who proposed the concept of the Shadow, maybe the answer is, Yes… We humans are both Lamb and Tiger.

So Jesus in Luke poses the questions:

Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse
sinners than all other Galileans?

and

those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them-- do you
think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in
Jerusalem?

The answer he gives to both questions is: No, I tell you.

He sez: No, I tell you; but unless you repent you will all perish [just] as they did.

First, it’s a recognition that no one can claim to possess a greater level of moral rectitude than anyone else. We are all flawed creatures. AND we are all capable of behaving in destructive – and self-destructive – ways. Don’t let anyone dare doubt that.

I remember still experiencing the craziness of sleep-deprivation when our first child refused to sleep through the night. It lasted two years. I reached a stage where I was terrified of going to bed at night in case no.1 son woke up and cried as soon as my head hit the pillow – and he did it so often that my pessimism had more than ample empirical, measurable evidence upon which to form a powerful fear.

In the throes of sleep-deprived madness I came at times far closer than I would ever want to, to descending into physical abuse of my son. No one is more pleased than me that it never happened – but it left me with a profound understanding of what might drive an otherwise loving parent into that particular darkness of their soul.

That possibility existed within me. I knew it. I could not deny it in any way conceivable. I hated it. But equally I was grateful and relieved that I had never acted on it. What “it” was, was my Shadow self, the part of me that makes me fundamentally no better and no worse than any other human being, and certainly no better and no worse than any parent who actually does cross the awful boundary between dark thought and black action.

But Jesus warns us that we cannot rest with that recognition, however plausible an explanation it may give as to why apparently “nice” people do abhorrently horrifying things – like the man involved in the apparent murder-suicide in Kardinya a few days ago.

But what are we to make of all this? We know from Genesis that God makes extravagant promises. Abram will have descendants more in number than the stars. Yeah, right. At least, a rational person may well scoff. But it is hyperbole – exaggeration for effect. God sez to Abe: Chillax, man. You want your name to continue? It will. Trust me.

On the basis of that promise, Paul tells the folks at Philippi to “stand firm in the Lord.” It’s another “trust God” statement. Don’t let circumstances – or even the perverse parts of our own natures – deflect us from trusting God. And that means, at the very least, God’s presence in any and every circumstance. My sleep deprivation episode, for instance, left me with a secure understanding of God’s grace. I come across stories of people – usually men – who reached a point of uncontrollability and injured or killed their babies and infants, and I understand that that could easily have been me – but for the grace of God, the only thing that stood between me and my son at times. God was with me – and my son - in those difficult times.

But we can become so overwhelmed that we drift away from God as surely as a boat that has slipped its moorings. It’s those times we need to examine the rest of Jesus’ responses: repent. Change our mind, change our heart.

As I have often said, repent is far less about saying sorry than about a fundamental abandonment of thinking and acting that causes us to fly further and further away from God. The further away from God we get, the more distant and tissue-thin seem the promises that Yahweh gave Abram. ...And the harder and harder it gets to “stand firm in the Lord” because of course the Lord is miniscule and the ground is quicksand.

Repentance means first consciously turning back to God. And when we do that, having wandered far off, half-way round our little planet maybe – when we decide to turn back to God, what do we find? We find that God, who seemed so far away and unreachable, is standing right behind us. We turn and our first step causes us to run right into the Living God.

God has stood firm during those times when we were unable to. God has done for us what we were unable to do for ourselves. It is not a new thing either. It is something that is just about definitive. God alone has no Shadow – God alone never fails.