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
Showing posts with label Rene Girard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rene Girard. Show all posts
Monday, January 07, 2008
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
LIFE OUT OF DEATH
10th June 2007 : Pentecost 2 : Year C
1 Kings 17:8-24 : Galatians 1:11-24 : Luke 7:11-17
The late comedian Dave Allen, as those of us who remember him and/or enjoyed his humour will recall, liked to send up the Church and anything or anyone else that took themselves a little too seriously. Thankfully, it’s one of the healthiest spiritual activities available to us because if we can’t laugh at ourselves and our strange and idiosyncratic ways then we’ve drifted far from the possibility of transformation through Jesus: we take on an aspect of certainty that precludes faith and God’s ability to influence us in whole and healthy ways.
But that’s another sermon. Cut back to Dave Allen and his penchant for, among many other things, funeral sketches. I remember one in which two funeral processions are on their way to the graveyard. When they become aware of each other’s presence they begin a Keystone Cops-like descent into slapstick absurdity as they fight to get to the cemetery ahead of their rival. Dave Allen was poking fun at the Irish superstition that if two people are buried on the same day, only the first gets into heaven: the second one has to wait till the next day …
I was reminded of that sketch when I began perusing the gospel. No, we don’t have competing funeral processions. Just the one. But one was enough to ring in the associations. And I can see the point of the website, Girardian reflections on the lectionary, which asserts that Jesus crashes headlong into the funeral procession.
I hope the point will become clearer before too long because although Jesus doesn’t literally come into physical contact with the procession what he stands for, what he’s about, certainly does.
It’s one of those points that seem quite obscure until someone mentions it or explains it – and then it becomes so obvious you wonder why on earth you couldn’t see it in the first place. At least, that’s how it was for me.
The “crash” is between death and life. Life, AKA Jesus, collides with death – the funeral procession of a man whom the town clearly held in some regard, given the large crowd. It’s quite possibly a loud and noisy event, with wailing women and percussive noise-makers giving death a centrality and importance in human culture and thinking that is totally at odds with the view of the Living God.
Well might the people mourn, especially the mother. She’s a widow, therefore reliant on her only son to provide her with sustenance. This was social security in Jesus’ time – and even now in many countries of the world. Without her son the widow may have had to resort to begging on the streets in order to live. She was a woman with very bleak prospects indeed.
Enter Jesus and we know the rest – the only son of God brings back to life the only son of the widow of Nain. Death and life clash with each other and life wins.
Happily the story – unique to Luke – echoes the story of the prophet Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. Unlike the uber-cool Jesus who simply issues a command to rise, Elijah engages in one of those weird roundabout exercises that result in more questions than answers.
But the result is the same. The sons live and the widows get to enjoy life in a new way, a way that the Living God now infuses with energy and hope.
These parallel stories are not, of course, mere happenstance. It’s not as though our intrepid lectioneers chose the gospel for today and then came across Elijah and the widow of Zarephath by accident. Chances are Luke has modelled his story – found only in his gospel – on the passage from the First book of Kings. He’s already done something similar with Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel and the Magnificat in his infancy narrative.
What it suggests in both cases is that what Jesus does in his own gospel days is not so much unique as the full and proper outworking of the Living God’s desires that have existed for all time and will continue to exist for the rest of it.
In other words, God offers us life. God will not allow us to descend into the closed-off world of death and the creepy boredom of the shadowland, Sheol, where no one can praise God’s name.
And for us as we enter the period after the Easter season with these Sundays after Pentecost, it’s a reminder that life emerging from death is NOT just a groovy jaunt reserved for the Son of God, but is available and promised to all of us, any time, anywhere.
Life clashing with death and being victorious is the ultimate meaning of the good news.
But as Paul’s letter to the community of faith in Galatia reminds us, we can and should see the same dynamic at metaphorical levels also. For Paul, he was in the dead-end business of persecuting the infant Church. Every indication is that he yearned to eradicate the new Jewish sect that had sprung up from the chaos of Jesus’ execution.
Paul was himself a purveyor of death and violence, a complete Hebrew scriptures dude who clearly believed that he was doing God’s work in persecuting the Church. The same Living God turned that around by introducing Paul to Jesus, the peaceful purveyor of life, and so Saul the persecutor became Paul the preacher, and the rest is pretty much as they say …
But the point remains the same: out of death the Living God creates or recreates life. God offers that life to us as a free gift, available with every proclamation of belief and act of faith. I suspect the only reason we don’t get steak knives and fries with that is because the gift of life is probably pretty much secure at the top of the tree.
What, then, are the situations of death we find ourselves battling in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Westfield? I suspect those situations are plentiful. But the question – as we know - really isn’t how many death-dealing and violent places we find ourselves in but whether we have enough faith to accept God’s gift of life.
Our readings today make clear the movement of the Living God in world history and ours. What do we need to do in order to accept the gift of life so that we in our turn can share it with those round about us who so desperately need it?
1 Kings 17:8-24 : Galatians 1:11-24 : Luke 7:11-17
The late comedian Dave Allen, as those of us who remember him and/or enjoyed his humour will recall, liked to send up the Church and anything or anyone else that took themselves a little too seriously. Thankfully, it’s one of the healthiest spiritual activities available to us because if we can’t laugh at ourselves and our strange and idiosyncratic ways then we’ve drifted far from the possibility of transformation through Jesus: we take on an aspect of certainty that precludes faith and God’s ability to influence us in whole and healthy ways.
But that’s another sermon. Cut back to Dave Allen and his penchant for, among many other things, funeral sketches. I remember one in which two funeral processions are on their way to the graveyard. When they become aware of each other’s presence they begin a Keystone Cops-like descent into slapstick absurdity as they fight to get to the cemetery ahead of their rival. Dave Allen was poking fun at the Irish superstition that if two people are buried on the same day, only the first gets into heaven: the second one has to wait till the next day …
I was reminded of that sketch when I began perusing the gospel. No, we don’t have competing funeral processions. Just the one. But one was enough to ring in the associations. And I can see the point of the website, Girardian reflections on the lectionary, which asserts that Jesus crashes headlong into the funeral procession.
I hope the point will become clearer before too long because although Jesus doesn’t literally come into physical contact with the procession what he stands for, what he’s about, certainly does.
It’s one of those points that seem quite obscure until someone mentions it or explains it – and then it becomes so obvious you wonder why on earth you couldn’t see it in the first place. At least, that’s how it was for me.
The “crash” is between death and life. Life, AKA Jesus, collides with death – the funeral procession of a man whom the town clearly held in some regard, given the large crowd. It’s quite possibly a loud and noisy event, with wailing women and percussive noise-makers giving death a centrality and importance in human culture and thinking that is totally at odds with the view of the Living God.
Well might the people mourn, especially the mother. She’s a widow, therefore reliant on her only son to provide her with sustenance. This was social security in Jesus’ time – and even now in many countries of the world. Without her son the widow may have had to resort to begging on the streets in order to live. She was a woman with very bleak prospects indeed.
Enter Jesus and we know the rest – the only son of God brings back to life the only son of the widow of Nain. Death and life clash with each other and life wins.
Happily the story – unique to Luke – echoes the story of the prophet Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. Unlike the uber-cool Jesus who simply issues a command to rise, Elijah engages in one of those weird roundabout exercises that result in more questions than answers.
But the result is the same. The sons live and the widows get to enjoy life in a new way, a way that the Living God now infuses with energy and hope.
These parallel stories are not, of course, mere happenstance. It’s not as though our intrepid lectioneers chose the gospel for today and then came across Elijah and the widow of Zarephath by accident. Chances are Luke has modelled his story – found only in his gospel – on the passage from the First book of Kings. He’s already done something similar with Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel and the Magnificat in his infancy narrative.
What it suggests in both cases is that what Jesus does in his own gospel days is not so much unique as the full and proper outworking of the Living God’s desires that have existed for all time and will continue to exist for the rest of it.
In other words, God offers us life. God will not allow us to descend into the closed-off world of death and the creepy boredom of the shadowland, Sheol, where no one can praise God’s name.
And for us as we enter the period after the Easter season with these Sundays after Pentecost, it’s a reminder that life emerging from death is NOT just a groovy jaunt reserved for the Son of God, but is available and promised to all of us, any time, anywhere.
Life clashing with death and being victorious is the ultimate meaning of the good news.
But as Paul’s letter to the community of faith in Galatia reminds us, we can and should see the same dynamic at metaphorical levels also. For Paul, he was in the dead-end business of persecuting the infant Church. Every indication is that he yearned to eradicate the new Jewish sect that had sprung up from the chaos of Jesus’ execution.
Paul was himself a purveyor of death and violence, a complete Hebrew scriptures dude who clearly believed that he was doing God’s work in persecuting the Church. The same Living God turned that around by introducing Paul to Jesus, the peaceful purveyor of life, and so Saul the persecutor became Paul the preacher, and the rest is pretty much as they say …
But the point remains the same: out of death the Living God creates or recreates life. God offers that life to us as a free gift, available with every proclamation of belief and act of faith. I suspect the only reason we don’t get steak knives and fries with that is because the gift of life is probably pretty much secure at the top of the tree.
What, then, are the situations of death we find ourselves battling in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Westfield? I suspect those situations are plentiful. But the question – as we know - really isn’t how many death-dealing and violent places we find ourselves in but whether we have enough faith to accept God’s gift of life.
Our readings today make clear the movement of the Living God in world history and ours. What do we need to do in order to accept the gift of life so that we in our turn can share it with those round about us who so desperately need it?
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