GOD: THE GOOD COP?

16th September 2007 : Pentecost 16 : Year C
9:30am Westfield
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 : 1 Timothy 1:1-2, 12-19a : Luke 15:1-10

It doesn’t matter which TV channel we watch – every one of them has some sort of “cops n robbers” show. The ABC has excellent programs like The Bill and Cracker, among others; the commercials serve an unending platter of American and, occasionally, Australian fare. We can even tune into SBS and see the marvelous Inspector Montalbano capturing crooks in smooth Italian.

As expressions of the heresy of dualism – good versus bad, right versus wrong – these shows continue the trend we can witness even in holy scripture. Not, of course, cop shows as such; rather, the good guy triumphing over the bad guy – the more blood and violence the better!

Little wonder that we cast God in the role of the Avenger, the Super Cop, the Great Police Commissioner in the Sky, with Chief Inspector Jesus on the ground to hunt down the remaining bad guys and train up a crack squad of Sinner-Seekers.

And boy does this seem to be the case first-up when Jeremiah smacks us in the chops with a divine soliloquy outlining God’s anger at Judah’s faithlessness. This is God Super-Cop in action, the Punisher, the Revenger – the One who visits pain and suffering upon all who fail to conform to the divine design.

They say the devil is in the detail. In this case it’s the divine in the detail, in one small clause that signals hope and something of the true nature of the Living God:

yet I will not make a full end

Yet I will not make a full end, sez God. In other words, God will not eradicate Judah, not wipe them off the face of the earth, erasing every record and social security number as if they never even existed.

Yet I will not make a full end signals God’s intention to find a peaceful and merciful resolution. Judah has chosen a particular course of action and, as I suggested a week or so ago, God ensures divine control over the situation by accepting full responsibility for what will happen.

Over the centuries and still today Christians have gleefully purloined passages in the Hebrew scriptures as somehow being predictive of future events, especially Christ-events. Yet I will not make a full end could become one of those chrystal ball phrases even though it refers only to the ultimate restoration of the Jewish people centuries before Jesus.

Even so, when we DO encounter the times of Jesus we find a truer, far more accurate picture of the God of mercy, love and compassion than the projections of the Hebrew scriptures. Paul gives us these straightforward statements to ponder:

I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me,
because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I
was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I
received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of
our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.
The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came
into the world to save sinners--of whom I am the foremost. But for that very
reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might
display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to
believe in him for eternal life.

Paul contrasts his human behaviour – his violence – with that of the Living God, who displays qualities of mercy, love, grace and faithfulness, doing so with “utmost patience”. Here suddenly is the true nature of our God, the One who “will not make a full end” but will wait patiently for the opportune moment, when the people are ready to understand and receive God’s mercy.

This is very important. While we continue to act out of fear – while our behaviour and attitudes and endlessly-rewound tapes reinforce again and again and again and again that fear – we will continue to conceive of and portray the Living God as a ruthless persecutor who is out for revenge. Needless to say, being otherwise rational creatures, we will also continue to run away from such a God.

And rightly so. Because that ISN’T our God.

The fear we’re talking about is sheer terror. Fear as in the Dave Allen sketch: “Admiral! There’s fifty French froggy frigates on the horizon!” “Thank you, Mr Hardy. Would you kindly fetch me my brown corduroy trousers …”

We shouldn’t confuse this fear with the very appropriate awe and speechless amazement that the word fear indicates in many biblical passages. That’s entirely different.

This fear of the God of revenge keeps us running, keeps us hiding – and it’s often the final barrier God gently removes before we come to an understanding of God’s true nature.

What does Paul say? “Christ came into the world to SAVE sinners …” Jesus is not a bounty hunter. He’s the full human expression of the divine love, mercy, compassion and yearning for relationship.

And as the gospel confirms and emphasises, Jesus isn’t out there looking for sinners. He’s searching, patiently, for those who are lost.

Yes, the stories in this chapter of Luke do equate “the lost” with sinners and sin and sinful behaviour. But as the third story in the series – the lost son and the prodigal father – indicates, God isn’t hunting us down in order to punish us.

God is painstakingly searching for us in order to LOVE us fully. And such is God’s joy when we return, when we come out of our fear-based hovels and chuck out our warped, perverted fear-based distortions of God, that full-blooded celebration is the only option.

God sez, I’ve found Big Al – let’s PAR-TAY! Whoo-hoo!! And God becomes the divine DJ at the divine disco, out-boogey-ing the best of them.

Where does that leave us in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Westfield? First, let’s do a reality check of our picture of the Living God. Are we terrified this disturbed deity is gonna get us and get us good? Or are we secure in God’s love – secure enough to speak about it and share it with confidence and authority?

Second, we have to remember that the Jesus business isn’t just about warm-fuzzies. It’s also about sharing this good news with everyone else who is lost, wounded, damaged, broken. If we’re still fear-based then we don’t have no good news to share. If we’ve come to trust the faithful love, mercy and compassion of the Living God, then boy do we have a good news story to tell and share!

And that’s the question –do we have bad news of a vengeful punisher? or good news of the ever-loving, ever-living Living God? And if we do – then who’s hearing it? Who heard it yesterday? Who’s gonna hear it today? Who’ll hear it tomorrow and the day after and the week after that and next month and next year and … You get the picture …

Alistair P D Bain

Rector, Anglican Parish of the Holy Spirit

Westfield -:- Western Australia

RESURRECTION FORGIVENESS

Sunday, 15th April 2007 : Easter 2 : Year C
9:30am Westfield
Acts 5:27-32 : Revelation 1:4-8 : John 20:19-31

At sunset yesterday the Jewish holy day, Yom Hashoah, began. Yom Hashoah translates as The Day of the Holocaust, as western Gentiles call it. But Bishop Mark, in an address at the clergy conference in Mandurah, pointed out that Shoah really has the sense of calamity or catastrophe: "holocaust" is a mediaeval term coined from a couple of Greek words, meaning a whole burnt offering, or a sacrificial offering wholly consumed by fire.

It was out of the horrors of Ha Shoah, from the Auschwitz death camp, that the following prayer of forgiveness apparently came:

O Lord,
Remember not only
the men and women of good will
but also those
of evil will. And in
remembering the suffering they
inflicted upon us,
honor the fruits
we have borne thanks to this suffering
--- our
comradeship, our humility,
our compassion, our courage,
our generosity,
the greatness of heart
that has grown out of all this;
and when they come
to the judgment,
let all the fruits that we have borne,
be their
forgiveness. Amen.

It’s a prayer that we can well imagine on the lips of Jesus himself, who even from the torture chamber of the cross sought forgiveness for those responsible for his agony. The post-resurrection outpouring of forgiveness confirms that those words were not the delirious rambling of a man near death after suffering barely-imaginable torments.

It’s part of the scandal of the cross that even after it’s all over and God achieves the ultimate victory over what Paul calls the "last enemy", death, God does not react in a way that humankind might expect, least of all in the manner that humanity has chosen century after century, decade after decade, year after year …

After all that brutalising and torture, God does not come out fighting, hurling thunder-bolts at the major players in the drama. No all-encompassing earthquakes or tsunami swallowing or sweeping away innocent and guilty alike. In short, no acts of vengeance, even though the God who can raise a Son from the grave would have no trouble at all in sorting out the villains in a very seriously permanent way indeed!

But that’s part of the point. We humans like to scapegoat, point fingers, blame and accuse. That’s how Jesus got himself the best view at Golgotha, hammered onto a couple of pieces of wood.

But not God. Jesus began his ministry preaching forgiveness, he demonstrated that forgiveness throughout his ministry, he preached at the most dire moment of his waning life – and after resurrection he’s still urging us to exhibit the attitude and behaviour of the forgiving spirit.

And so we find Peter proclaiming the message in the temple and John reinforcing it, albeit in different form, in the Book of Revelation. Equally, the risen Jesus gives a clear, though ambiguous, instruction to the ten apostles skulking in their locked room, to be agents of God’s forgiveness.

Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

It’s no accident that Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on the apostles before giving them the instruction to forgive sins because no human can achieve the kind of blanket, no-matter-what forgiveness that Jesus espouses by invoking mere will-power.

We can squeeze our eyes tight enough to pour with sweat or concentrate our forgiveness energy hard enough to give ourselves the mother of all migraines but without the Holy Spirit we will never get to the kind of radical forgiveness that, in the post-resurrection world, is the mark of Jesus’ good news avalanching upon the whole creation.

But here’s the problem and this why Jesus’ words are ambiguous. Priests in our tradition and those who’ve attended enough ordinations know those words very well because they’re an integral part of a priest’s ordination: .If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

Almost immediately, it sometimes seems, we translated that statement into exactly the kind of power-playing, authoritarian weapon that Jesus spent so much time trying to destroy. For centuries the Church has used this power over people to terrorise them, to fill them with guilt, to blackmail and extort, to control.

Priests and bishops took Jesus’ words as a gifting of well-nigh ultimate power even though we knew that Jesus clearly forbade his followers to exercise what Richard Rohr calls "dominative power". Jesus’ terminology is more familiar – he called it "lording it over others", and he wasn’t planning to make exceptions when he told his followers, You are NOT to do that.

So that’s exactly what the priesthood did! You’re all a bunch of wormy, totally-depraved sinners – but don’t worry, chasps, just see me after the Service and I’ll take it all away from you. Until next time. (I reckon a statement like that ought to conclude with eerie church-organ music and a manic laugh!)

But here’s the good news – remember the good news? the stuff Jesus came to disseminate in wildly extravagant, prodigal container-loads? And it’s this, an interpretation I came across only recently.

It’s a reading that is exactly in keeping with the God of peace, the God of non-violence, the Jesus who refused to fight back, the Risen One who did not seek revenge for his maltreatment but offered forgiveness instead.

According to this reading, forgiveness is what I like to call the "normal and natural" demeanour of all followers of Jesus. Forgiveness is to be our hallmark, one of the qualities that distinguish us as Jesus’ own people, truly following Jesus because we are doing exactly what Jesus himself did.

For all of us it’s an enormous power. I suspect that many Christians regard forgiveness as a nice idea but deep-down nurse a suspicion that it’s actually a sign of weakness. In a sense, of course, it is – in a worldly, secular sense. Think of tough-guys like John Wayne throwing away tough-guy advice like, "Never apologise, son. It’s a sign of weakness."

Then consider Jesus’ words and realise that something apparently simple and free that we puny humans do on this planet can have a corresponding effect in heaven, however we define heaven … Consider also that if forgiveness is the normal and natural behaviour of all of Jesus’ followers, then the only way we and heaven can retain sins is if we actually FAIL in our task to spread and practise the good news of forgiveness.

Seen in this light we have an action – forgiveness – that is unquestionably consonant with Jesus’ message and behaviour from beginning to end – even on the cross, which may be the most powerful exposition of the message Jesus ever made. When we retain sins – when we do not forgive – then, far from exercising a rightfully-given power, we are actually and very illegitimately confounding and preventing the good news and the kingdom from operating.

It is only by making the authority to forgive universal, in other words, allowing all followers to access, exercise and participate in the spreading of this good news, that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection make sense and can begin to move towards accomplishment. When the authority becomes part of the power-package of a discrete sub-class then it defeats the purpose of Jesus and mangles the message something terrible.

Who in our lives, who on those streets out there, in Westfield and beyond, needs to hear a message of authentic good news today? Something to ponder deeply; something to offer prodigally. The authority is ours: let us use it with love in all places, at all times, for all people!