"by faith..."

A reflection on Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16 and Luke 12: 32-40

I had breakfast yesterday morning. This is not, in itself, particularly remarkable. I have breakfast most days; but yesterday I had breakfast with friends, and what is remarkable about that is how we talked with one another. The food was fine but unimportant; the coffee was not up to the usual standard but that too is unimportant; what we wore and where we sat and how much the bill was at the end of the morning were all unimportant. What was important, indeed remarkable, was how we talked with one another.

You see, these friends of ours insist that we are honest with one another. They insist that, when we gather around the table, we share not just food but our very selves; we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, open, and honest.

And what happens then is that we are given the rare privilege of insight into one another’s lives – into the joys and the sorrows, the triumphs and the failures; we are given access to one another’s souls. And that is truly remarkable. We are invited to join with one another on a journey, the journey of life. We become, not observers of one another’s faith, but fellow travellers in the wilderness.

Abraham was a traveller on a journey, as was his wife Sarah. Moses and his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam were all travellers on a journey. Jesus and his disciples were travellers on a journey. Paul and his friends were all travellers on a journey. And they were all travellers who journeyed by faith. Just as my breakfast friends are travellers who journey by faith.

And “faith is the assurance of things hoped for”; faith is a journey towards a destination, towards something which is not yet in existence. Faith is predicated on the understanding that we have not yet arrived: as Abraham journeyed in search of the Promised Land, and Moses and the Hebrew people journeyed towards the Promised Land, we understand that faith is leading us somewhere. We cannot be truly faithful unless we are on the move.

The kingdom of God has not yet become the reality in this world and so, until that day arrives, we are always on the way towards that promised end. Having faith means we choose to live as a pilgrim people.

And herein lies a problem: way back in the early days of the church, a well-meaning Christian invited us to stop wandering in the wilderness and instead to sit down under a palm tree beside an oasis. And we did that, and we have found it hard to get up and get going again. I am, of course, talking about the Roman Emperor Constantine. Poor old Constantine who constantly seems to get the blame from people such as me who don’t know a whole lot about church history but who are looking for someone to blame for the church losing its identity as a people called to take great risks on a journey through the wilderness.

What’s Constantine’s story? Well he was the Roman Emperor who became a Christian and who made Christianity the religion of the empire, which meant that Christians were no longer to be persecuted for their faith, at the margins of society; now, they were to be at the centre of their world, safe, secure, at home in the Promised Land rather than on a journey through the wilderness.

And that is how it has been for most of the following sixteen or seventeen hundred years. The civilised world has been synonymous with Christendom. Yes, we had the Crusades and the Reformation and world wars and struggle and strife, but Christendom has been the dominant order of the day.

It’s hard to journey by faith if you believe you have already arrived. It’s difficult to be a pilgrim people if we have everything we need right where we are. But the central motif of the Christian life is the journey in the wilderness – from slavery to freedom, from crucifixion to resurrection. And so, over time, we began to tell the story differently: the Christian life, instead, became fixed upon the journey not towards the kingdom of God here on earth but towards the kingdom of heaven.

Now something quite remarkable has happened in the last few decades. In an incredibly short period of time society has moved on and moved on without us. We no longer live in the world of Christendom. The church is no longer at the centre of our society. Faith in God and in Jesus Christ is no longer of any particular significance in Australia in the twenty-first century. And not just Australia – try visiting Europe, once the proud centre of the Christian faith but now filled with people who no longer have any religious conviction and filled with churches which stand empty. Try visiting the Middle East or Asia or much of Africa: Christianity is certainly not the dominant voice in those places.

As the church we struggle to come to terms with that fact. Still, every census, every National Church Life Survey, almost every aspect of our society reminds us that the life of Jesus Christ is not the thing that determines what we will do and how we will do it. Our society no longer lives by faith.

And that makes it all the harder for us to live by faith. When all around us are living as if they have arrived in the promised land, how do we continue to point to that which is not yet real – the kingdom of God here on earth?

The sad truth is that our society and our church want us to be settled – not “on the way”. It is human nature – at least in this 21^st century - to value security, certainty, and guarantees above all else. Sadly, time and again, we look for outcomes that are about being settled and secure.

But this wasn’t the life of Abraham or his descendants:

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents … For he looked forward to the city … whose architect and builder is God. By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old--and Sarah herself was barren--because he considered God who had promised faithful. Therefore from one person and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, and all of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.

Now we would suggest that anyone who set out on a journey (literally or figuratively) not knowing where they were going were at best foolish and at worst mad. And we might say well, that was then, but now is different. Yet this story is one way that God speaks to us today: calls us to journey today. And we find it very difficult to be satisfied with seeing from a distance – we want to achieve our goals now. But to be satisfied with goals we can achieve is to be satisfied with less than that which God promises. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

We must not, cannot, settle for anything less than a city (or a way of life, or a world) whose architect and builder is other than God. God calls us to be a pilgrim people, always on the way. And we, too, will probably end up only being able to see God’s city here on earth from a distance. But as for Abraham and his descendants so too for us – from a distance will be enough, for God is faithful and we are a pilgrim people always on the way to the promised goal. So let us live by faith. Amen.

Where to begin?

A sermon preached at West End Uniting Church on Sunday, 5 August 2007

In 1994, I spent a fortnight on a little island called Futuna, one of the islands of Vanuatu. 400 ni-Vanuatu people, 6 villages, 7 churches and one white person, me. I was there to do some English teaching in the local primary school, but I was the one who did the learning. Among my more memorable experiences was going to church.

In the 1800s, Vanuatu became a Christian country, primarily through the missionary work of the Presbyterian Church, and so it was that on my first Sunday on the island I worshipped in one of the six Presbyterian churches. Worship, Futuna Presbyterian style, meant men, women, girls and boys all sitting in different parts of the building; it meant singing old Presbyterian hymns unaccompanied in four part harmony; it meant the whole of the service – prayers, bible readings, sermon and singing – all conducted in the local language.

The following Sunday, I was invited to worship in the one church on the island which was not Presbyterian. Just what brand of church it was I am not too sure, except to say it was a recent arrival from Australia, a jazzed up Pentecostal expression of the Christian faith. And worship meant everyone sitting together; it meant singing, not unaccompanied but with an electric guitar, a keyboard – both somehow magically powered by the only car battery on the island – and a drum kit; and it meant the service being conducted in an interesting mixture of local language, pidgin and English.

Now, I don’t want to say anymore at this point about that experience, but I want you to hold the story in your memory until I return to it.

Let’s jump forward from 1994 to yesterday. Yesterday I read A church of passionate disciples … rethinking church membership, a discussion paper from the Uniting Church National Assembly published in March of this year. The opening paragraph of the discussion says this:

God in Jesus Christ turns our lives upside down. As we follow Jesus, God’s Spirit re-centres our lives. Instead of being focussed on ourselves, our security, our comfort, our influence in the world and values which serve mainly ourselves, Jesus commands: “Love God. Love your neighbour.” … Jesus invites us to be counter-cultural, to have different values and to have different goals and priorities from those which may come naturally, or those which may be promoted by our society. In this way, our lives are actually turned the right way up!

Is this not precisely what Jesus is saying in this morning’s gospel story of the rich fool?

God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.

Is this not precisely what our reading from Ecclesiastes is saying?

I, the Teacher… applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven… I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.

Whenever we are focussed on ourselves, our security, our comfort, our influence in the world and values which serve mainly ourselves, then we are fools and our deeds are in vain. Instead we are called by Jesus to love God and love our neighbour, both of which are truly counter-cultural, because these are different values, different goals and priorities from those which are promoted by our society.

The rich man begins in the wrong place, by placing his needs and desires first. The person in the crowd who asks Jesus the initial question begins in the wrong place, by placing his needs and desires first.

On Friday morning, I went to the Greek Club to listen to the English Christian writer Steve Chalke. Steve Chalke is the founder of Oasis Trust, a Christian social justice organisation which is involved in quite an amazing range of activities around the world. He was here in Brisbane to encourage us to think about how we transform and empower our local and global communities in an increasingly secularized environment.

In the midst of saying a number of interesting and challenging things, the one thing he said which stopped me in my tracks was this: He said, “Our theology must drive our missiology which must then drive our ecclesiology.”

Or, to put it another way, our starting point must be with God – who we understand God to be – which will then determine how we are to respond – what it is we are called to do with our lives – and that will then shape the kind of church we need to be.

Theology is how we understand God. Missiology is how we understand the mission of the church. Ecclesiology is how we understand the shape of the church. “Our theology must drive our missiology which must then drive our ecclesiology.”

Unfortunately, Steve Chalke suggests, too often our starting point is in the wrong place – we begin with us, rather than beginning with God. Just as the questioner in the crowd begins with himself and the rich fool begins with himself, too often the church begins with itself.

We know what our church looks like, so that then determines what we are supposed to do, which then leads us to identify a God who agrees with what we have already decided

Let me explain all of that by returning to my original story – the churches of Futuna in Vanuatu. A question: why did the Pentecostal church in Australia feel the need to send missionaries to Futuna? Answer: because the church which already existed there, which had been there for over a hundred years, it didn’t look right. The Pentecostal church did not recognise what was happening there as real church, real church as defined by their church, by what happens in their church here in Australia. They started with themselves, their church.

And, because the church didn’t look right, then they had to do something about it: they had to send missionaries to Futuna to convert the Presbyterians into their brand of church. Their ecclesiology drove their missiology.

And now comes the interesting bit: their actions, their mission, then shaped God! The God originally introduced to the ni-Vanuatu was a God for all people, not to be restricted to just one culture, but alive in all cultures. And worship in the little Presbyterian churches reflected that understanding: worship in the local language with local practices, worshipping the universal God.

On my second Sunday, however, I encountered a different God: not a universal God, but “God for us and for us alone”, a God of division and strife, a God dredged up from the bible, mistakenly found in Jesus’ words,

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one's foes will be members of one's own household.

Matt 10:34-36 (NRSV)

Instead of God shaping mission shaping church, they began with a church which believed that how it was shaped must apply to everyone, which led to a mission which imposed itself upon an already Christian culture, and which then argued a God who supported their case and who justified their actions. God is created in the image of the church.

Now this morning’s sermon is not one of my shorter ones, and there is a reason for that: I think that the story of the rich fool and the words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes are incredibly important for us, not as individuals, but for us as a community of faith, for us the people of West End Uniting Church.

We are increasingly recognising that the world around us is changing. No longer is this church or any church the centre of our community. More and more society is moving away from the teachings of the church and the practice of religion. How are we, as God’s people in this time and place to respond? What are we to do?

We have choices, any number of choices if we think creatively and energetically, but each and every one of those choices depends upon our starting point.

Our starting point could be ourselves. We could say to ourselves, “We know what the church is meant to be like. We’ve been practising being the church in this place since 1885; we know the language of the church; we know how to behave in church. We’re okay in here. It’s those out there who have the problem, and if they just came in here with us, then everything would be okay.”

Or, we could start with the church, but in a different way. We could say to ourselves, “Uh oh. There aren’t that many of us any more. Why aren’t we successful like all of those really big churches like Hillsong? Why don’t we do what they’re doing, and then we’ll be full to overflowing and everything will be okay”?

But if we do either of these things, we are starting in the wrong place. We are not to start with the church. If we do, we are labouring in vain. Even if we toil with wisdom and knowledge and skill, it is nothing more than chasing after the wind. Even if we were to be successful by the world’s standards – church packed to the rafters, so that we had to build a bigger barn and an offering so big that we could all eat, drink and be merry – we would be fools.

Our starting must always be with God. Jesus says, “Love God”. And when we do that, we then discover that God wants us to love our neighbours. Our theology drives our mission. And then, and only then, does our church take shape; we become the people of God, shaped by God to love others.

Let me finish by reading again from A church of passionate disciples:

God in Jesus Christ turns our lives upside down. As we follow Jesus, God’s Spirit re-centres our lives. Instead of being focussed on ourselves, our security, our comfort, our influence in the world and values which serve mainly ourselves, Jesus commands: “Love God. Love your neighbour.” … Jesus invites us to be counter-cultural, to have different values and to have different goals and priorities from those which may come naturally, or those which may be promoted by our society. In this way, our lives are actually turned the right way up!

Amen.

The better part?

A reflection on Luke 10: 38-42, preached on Sunday 22 July 2007 at Goondiwindi Uniting Church

Mary and Martha: a protest

Once again, Jesus of Nazareth,

you offend

our Aussie sense of a fair go.

Martha’s our preferred saint,

not your friend

Mary who sits like a drone

when in the end

the boring work must get done.

Once again, Jesus the troubler,

you make light

of all those extra hours

your Marthas still put in

late at night,

while your ‘precious’ Marys make

it their right

to smile and hand round the cake.

Once again, Jesus the prophet,

you confuse

our sense of right and wrong.

It’s tough enough now, when

we must choose,

without this little side show

that you use

to dismay our righteous ego.

© B.D. Prewer 2000

“You confuse
our sense of right and wrong.

It’s tough enough now,
when we must choose…”

That’s quite an accusation to make against Christ, isn’t it? That Jesus confuses our sense of right and wrong?

But that is actually what happens so often in bible stories: people are confused, either by what Jesus says or does.

At West End, in our congregation, we have been following the lectionary gospel readings in recent weeks, and we find time and time again that Jesus does the unexpected thing or says the unexpected thing and, as a result, confusion reigns.

Last week it was the story Jesus tells of a man set upon by bandits who is saved, not by the righteous priest or the respected Levite but by the despised and unexpected Samaritan. Salvation for the unfortunate depends upon being willing to be helped by the very person one doesn’t want to be helped by. Confusing? Yes.

The week before it was seventy disciples being sent out as missionaries, but being sent out without purse or bag or even sandals for their feet. Being a follower of Christ means letting go of independence, letting go of being able to sustain oneself in favour of putting oneself at the mercy of strangers who may or who may not provide what is necessary. Off you go, without purse to pay your way, without bag to carry what you might need, without even the veneer of dignity afforded by footwear. Confusing? Yes!

That’s how it is with the gospel: the adulterous woman is dismissed with kind words; the prodigal son is welcomed home while his brother who does no wrong is castigated; the Pharisees who keep the law are challenged but tax collectors and prostitutes are welcomed. Confusing? Well, if it’s not confusing, it jolly well should be.

And here’s the problem that I struggle with: I’m not confused. I’ve heard these stories so many times; I’ve read them, seen them dramatised, listened to children’s talks, sung them in hymns and choruses and cantatas and rounds; in the end, they are so familiar that I know the answers, or think I know the answers, even before I realise I am being asked a question.

I began with the poem by Bruce Prewer, and I did that because it helps me to see that there is a question here, an important question: Mary or Martha? It’s not just a simple “Mary does the right thing by sitting at Jesus’ feet” because, after all, providing for the visitor – doing what Martha does – was a crucial aspect of life for the first century Jew. Providing for the visitor is what made it possible for the seventy to go out and proclaim the good news. Providing for the stranger is what saved the man who fell among thieves. It’s not simply a question of sitting down to listen to nice words from that nice man Jesus who does all of those nice things for all of those nice people.

It’s a question: Mary or Martha? Martha or Mary? And last week the answer was Martha, and this week the answer is Mary. Confusing? Yes! Indeed, yes.

But we don’t like to be confused. At least, I don’t like to be confused, and so I find ways to avoid being confused. I come up with answers to how these stories are understood, answers which make it all neat and tidy. For example, the good Samaritan becomes a story about how to help others, ignoring the fact that it is really about how others help me. For example, the prodigal son becomes a story about going home and begging for forgiveness, rather than seeing it as an indictment of stay-at-home self-righteousness. For example, Martha becomes a figure of scorn because she protests when she should be sitting down, although Jesus himself is happy to accept her hospitality, is happy to eat the meal she prepares, to sleep on the mattress she provides, and to dilly-dally around when her brother Lazarus is dying (although that’s another confusing story and we really shouldn’t lump the two together).

Prewer suggests that Jesus uses this as an occasion “to dismay our righteous ego”. And surely that’s a good thing. Because when we have all of these Jesus stories all nicely sorted out, suddenly having the rug pulled from under our feet, confusing us is perhaps the only way to get us to think beyond ourselves to what God might really being saying to us.

Prewer, in that last verse, also says, “It’s tough enough now, when / we must choose” There is a great deal of insight in those few words: we must choose.

I don’t think Bruce Prewer is going all holy and religious on us here. I don’t think he’s talking about the spiritual choices we have to make for salvation, redemption, forgiveness and so forth. I rather suspect that he means the daily choices of life: the decisions we make each day at work; the choices we make in relating to others; the ordinary, everyday business of working out what do we do next and how do we do it. We must choose, and there are good choices and there are bad choices, there are choices which draw us closer to God and closer to our neighbour, and there are those which don’t.

Sometimes those choices are Mary and sometimes those choices are Martha. Confusing? Yes.

But we must choose. Choose wisely.

Jokes - old and new

A reflection on 2 Kings 5:1-14 and Luke 10:1-11, 16-20, preached Sunday 8 July 2007

Question: What do you have when you have seventy preachers buried up to their necks in sand?

Answer: Not enough sand.

I think I have mentioned before that the Bible is not renowned for its jokes.

What is a joke? What makes a joke?

In my experience, a joke is a joke because the answer or the punch line is not what you expect. Jokes are rarely funny the second time because you already know the answer or the punch line. It is when the line is not known, unexpected, that we respond with laughter.

If that is the criteria for a joke then the Bible is actually full of jokes; it’s just that we have become too familiar with the punch lines to recognise the humour. Today’s reading from Kings is a classic example.

Throughout this reading there are punch lines coming one after the other. To a person of the Ancient Near East, hearing this story for the first time, it may well have seemed like one long glorious joke.

For a start, who would expect a foreign slave girl to offer medical advice to the wife of the great and famous Naaman? Who would have expected Naaman to take that advice? Who could have guessed that, not only would Naaman’s king send him to the king of Israel, but that he would have loaded him up with ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments? A king’s ransom for a healing?

And then of course the jokes multiply once Naaman arrives at Elisha’s doorstep: bathing in the muddy trickle of water known as the Jordan River? You must be joking! What’s wrong with the mighty Arbana and Pharpar rivers?

Mind you, the best joke is saved till last: Naaman is healed.

It seems to me that God plays these sorts of jokes all the time. It’s almost as if the point of so many stories is just to show us that God gives us what we don’t expect: we don’t expect our Saviour to come as a baby, do we? We don’t expect an old, old man and his old, old wife to parent a nation more numerous than the stars. We don’t expect Rahab the foreign prostitute to bring victory to the Israelites. We don’t expect the greatest persecutor of the Christians to become their greatest champion.

Time and again, God pulls the rug from under our feet. You were expecting a triumphant Saviour? Well, guess what? He’s heading off to be crucified. He’s dead and gone? Guess what? He has risen!

Of course, the great joke is that we don’t get it. When we plan how God will save us, or how we will save our selves, or how God will punish our enemies for us, each time God introduces the divine joke and catches us by surprise.

Naaman’s tale is a salutary one. God heals the very person no-one expected God to heal. God saves the foreigner, the one we don’t expect to be saved.

And what have we to look forward to?

If God comes to the unexpected, will God come to us?

If God heals the unexpected, will God heal us?

If God saves the unexpected, will we too be saved?

Question: What do you call it when you have seventy preachers at the bottom of Sydney Harbour?

Answer: A good start.

So, where is the joke in today’s gospel reading? Where is the unexpected; where is the surprise?

At first glance, this is a little more difficult to see. We have Jesus equipping his disciples for mission, sending them with clear instructions concerning what to do, what to say, what to expect. It appears that we have a relatively straightforward commissioning story – no surprises, no jokes.

But I like jokes. And I’m not convinced that there isn’t one hidden in today’s gospel.

Perhaps there is the hint of a joke in Jesus’ words: See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.

After all, we expect disciples to be sent out in the hope of victory rather than in the expectation of being devoured.

Perhaps there is the hint of a joke as Jesus instructs his followers: Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals…

After all, who would send his friends out without money to pay their way, or a bag to carry what they will need, or sandals to show that they are not the lowest of the low?

But perhaps the funniest bit, the joke that the church consistently fails to get, is that proclaiming the good news, preaching the gospel, saving souls, has very little to do with what we do but has a whole lot to do with what we are offered by the people we go to.

To understand what I am getting at, perhaps we need to ask ourselves, “Why does Jesus mention the city of Sodom?” Contrary to popular belief, the story of the destruction of Sodom in Genesis chapter 19 has nothing to do with homosexuality and everything to do with hospitality. When Jesus mentions Sodom in today’s reading he is citing it as the benchmark for lack of hospitality. And a whole lot of this passage is about hospitality: it’s about what the disciples are to do if they are made welcome or if they are not made welcome.

Jesus knows, you cannot proclaim the good news if you are not first given the opportunity to do so. There must be hospitality extended to those who come bearing good news. And this is the bit the church has so often failed to understand: the first thing that we must do as disciples of Christ is accept the hospitality of those who are not disciples of Christ.

Whatever house you enter, first say, 'Peace to this house!' And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person… Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide… Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you;

The disciples are to accept the hospitality of strangers, just as the man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho had to accept the care of the Samaritan. There’s the joke! Proclaiming the gospel requires us to depend upon the ones we desire to share the gospel with.

That’s why there are to be no purses or bags or shoes. Instead there is to be the humble acceptance of the kindness of strangers.

Ours is the unexpected God. And what God calls us to is unexpected.

Proclaiming the good news is not taking it upon ourselves to carry the word of God whenever and to whomever we decide. Proclaiming the gospel is making ourselves available; it’s about having relationships with others who may or may not want to hear what we have to say; it’s about waiting to be invited to experience the hospitality of strangers. And that’s no joke. Amen.

What's been happening...

It's hard to believe that I haven't posted anything since Easter! Still, there have been one or two things going on which may provide an explanation if not an excuse:

• the death of my father Jack
  
• the very next day, our youngest child Helen's wedding to Adam
  
• a brief holiday
• negotiations over the purchase of a house in West End for us to live in
• packing, moving, settling in
• computer crashing, router rebelling, internet out
  
• helping my middle child Kate, her husband Michael and our grandson William move to Calliope
• a trip to Goondiwindi with some folk from our church

And, around all of that, the usual business of living and working.

One of the resources which sustains me through all the drama and stress of life is the care of those who surround me. It is an acute glimpse into the meaning of the gospel when we are loved into wholeness. Thank you to all those who have cared and continue to care for me and for the people I love.






The wedding!













The holiday









On the way home from Goondi- windi