Whispering the lyrics

Jimmy Reed was a musician – a black musician. In the late 1950s and into the 60s, Reed was one of the most influential blues guitarists in the United States, a black man shaping the future of white music. One of Reed’s biographers draws attention to the fact that on recordings of his music there appears to be an unidentified voice, a voice so quiet as to be indistinguishable. While Jimmy Reed sings, another voice murmurs in the background.

There are a number of explanations for the mystery whisperer, but the most likely appears to be that it is the voice of his wife. You see, sometimes Jimmy Reed would become so caught up in his playing, so consumed by making music on his guitar, that he would forget the words to the song that he was singing; and his wife would have to stand beside him whispering the lyrics to remind him of what he had to sing next.

His wife was whispering the lyrics.

When I first heard this story I was struck by the power of that image. Whispering the lyrics… words that Jimmy Reed had sung a hundred times before, words that he himself had written, yet even so he needed someone to whisper the lyrics.

When Jesus tells his disciples, “the Father… will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever”, he is speaking of the coming of the Holy Spirit. In two weeks’ time, we will be celebrating the great feast of Pentecost. Pentecost – when we remember and rejoice in the gift of the very Spirit of God given to those who seek to walk the way of Jesus.

In some churches – the Pentecostal churches – much is made of the extraordinary powers of God’s Holy Spirit: powers to cure illness, to prophesy, to speak in unknown tongues. But the reality seems to be that, while the Pentecostal church focuses upon some manifestations of God’s Spirit, they seem to neglect the most significant and extraordinary gift of all: the Holy Spirit comes so that we might know that God is with us.

Can there possibly be a more important gift? What use is it to speak in the tongues of angels if we forget who it is of whom we speak? How can we dare to prophesy if we do not know the presence of God with us?

Jesus says to his friends, ”If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” How is it possible to love Jesus if we do not experience him with us day by day? And keeping his commandments is only possible if we are grounded in, immersed in the reality of the presence of God in our daily lives.

In Jesus’ time, one of the most unfortunate things that could happen to a person was to be an orphan. It wasn’t a particularly unusual thing to happen, after all life-expectancy was very short. But to be left an orphan was to be left without kin to care for you; to be left without a family to belong to at a time when families were the primary mechanism for the structuring of society. Honour and shame, status and privilege were all tied to family membership, and so to be an orphan was to be cut adrift in a hostile world.

But Jesus does not leave his followers orphaned. Instead there is a family to belong to: the body of Christ; and there is a parent to guide the children in the hostile world: the Spirit of God.

The vast, vast majority of the Christian Scriptures are all about helping the followers of Jesus to find their way, to live out their calling as disciples of the Christ. Where the Jews had the Book of the Law, the followers of the Way had the gospels and the writings of the apostles.

But there are some problems with being a follower of Jesus. Our problems are somewhat different from those of the early church: no-one is going to feed us to the lions for professing our faith; no-one is going to crucify us for not worshiping the gods of the world; we are unlikely to be persecuted just because we go to church on Sunday.

Our struggles are different. For us, we are surrounded by a world which offers us an easy way. We have food to eat, clothes on our backs, a level of security almost unheard of in Jesus’ time and still extraordinary for the vast majority of people in the world today. Our problem is not persecution but sublimation. We are far less likely to be persecuted than we are simply to forget that there is anything different about us as Christians.

Do you know what we need? Do you know what would be really, really helpful for us as we try to live out our faith in twenty-first century Australia? What would be best of all would be if we just had someone to go with us through our days whispering the lyrics of the gospel.

As we go about the daily business of our lives, we need to be reminded of the lyrics of our faith. When we are consumed with the ordinary tasks of day to day life we need to hear what it is we are really called to be doing. It is so easy to become entangled in the web of modern life that we forget who we belong to and how we are called to respond to our God. We are not so very different from Jimmy Reed lost in the moment; like him, we have the power and the opportunity to shape the world around us. But we cannot do that if we forget the song we are called to sing.

And God sends us another Advocate to whisper to us the lyrics of the gospel; to remind us of God’s love for us and God’s love for all the children of God; to sing to us of commandments of love – love of our God, love of our neighbour, love of ourselves, and even love of those who do not love us.

This is the Spirit of Truth, the Holy Presence whispering the lyrics of love. Amen.

Throwing stones

I can hear, very clearly, my mother telling me not to throw stones. I loved throwing stones. I still do love throwing stones. Well, actually, it’s not throwing stones I love; it’s throwing anything: cricket balls, boomerangs, Frisbees, sticks, discuses, anything, anything at all. If it can be thrown, I like throwing it.

And my mother was always telling me not to throw things. Somebody might get hurt.

I remember, one day, watching two boys who were usually friends throwing stones at one another. They had had a disagreement and so they stood some little distance apart throwing stones at one another. I think the correct term was “pegging rocks” at one another. And I was horrified. These two boys were genuinely trying to hurt one another. These “friends” were now enemies and their weapons were stones. Their aim was to hurt, to maim, to kill.

When I threw stones it was not for these reasons. I threw stones for fun; to see how far I could throw or how accurately I could throw, just for the sheer exhilaration of feeling my arm turn over and loose some projectile into space. But not to hurt someone, not to maim, and most definitely not to kill.

This morning we hear of stones, stones turned loose to kill. We hear of Stephen proclaiming his Lord and dying his death: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them. Father, forgive them; they do not know what they do.”

Stephen, of course, is the church’s first martyr, the first of countless followers of Christ to suffer and die for their faith.

What are we to do with Stephen?

I ask this question because I have a small problem: it seems to me that Stephen is sometimes held up as a yardstick against which we should measure our discipleship. Have you been stoned for your faith? No? Then perhaps you’re not a true Christian. Have you suffered for Jesus? Have you carried your cross? That kind of thinking.

This morning I want to tell you that I do not subscribe to a Christianity which claims that suffering is the mark of the Christian. I want to say that pain is not God’s way of testing our faith. I am going to insist that the God I worship and love is not in favour of “pegging rocks” to sort out the true Christians from the false.

I asked my wife, “Is suffering ever good?”

Her answer was, “It depends.”

 Now, I ask you, what sort of an answer is that? It depends! It depends … on what?

And Carol’s answer is, “Context.”

She gently reminded me that I have three wonderful children. And there was some suffering involved in that. I was there for all three births and so I know that there was some suffering. It’s not called labour for nothing. It was jolly hard work! And Carol worked hard, too.

When something good and beautiful and downright wonderful comes out of it, then hard work, a little suffering may well be worthwhile.

But what about when nothing good or beautiful or wonderful results: is suffering okay then?

This, of course, is a very twenty-first century question. The people of Jesus’ time would never understand this question. The people who surrounded Jesus could no more have made sense of this question than we might understand Aramaic.

Jesus and his disciples lived in a world where ninety percent of people lived from hand to mouth. Peasant farmers survived on their meagre crops, as long as drought and warfare did not decimate them; medicine was little more than witchcraft; life itself was fragile in the extreme and suffering was inevitable. It was the norm and not the exception.

The possessed and lame and blind and bleeding people Jesus met were not rarities; they were commonplace. It was Jesus’ compassion and gift of healing that were exceptional. Jesus’ actions suggested, against all the odds, that suffering is not God’s way.

Stephen was not stoned because that is God’s way; Stephen was stoned because that is humanity’s way. God offers healing not stones.

I say again, “Suffering is not God’s test of our faithfulness.”

Jesus said,

      God has anointed me

           to bring good news to the poor.

            He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

            and recovery of sight to the blind,

           to let the oppressed go free,

          to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour

 

And the very next thing Jesus does is go to Capernaum and heal a man with an unclean spirit, and then he goes to Peter’s mother’s house and heals her. Suffering is not God’s way.

What does all of this mean for us?

I said last week that this week I would say something about the Close the Gap campaign.

What were you doing at 9am on Wednesday, 13 February? Do you recall Prime Minister Mr Rudd delivering his historic apology to the Indigenous people of our land? Do you recall him pointing out the gap in life expectancy between Indigenous Australians and white Australians? Do you recall his promise to help close that gap?

The Prime Minister was not the first person to identify that the original peoples of this continent die on average 17 years before their white counterparts. Nor was he the first person to elucidate the educational, material, social and other disadvantages which daily confront and daily harm one significant part of our population. While we acknowledge the ills of the past and express our regrets about some of those things, it is the present ills which we can do something about.

The Close the Gap campaign is about making a commitment to establish, for the first time in two hundred and twenty years, equality between the first peoples of this land and those who settled here and who made for themselves a country of great wealth and advantage, but who did so at the expense of others.

When our gospels are so full of stories of Christ reaching out to people in need, what do you imagine his response would be to our social injustices? Would Jesus reach out a hand to touch and heal an Indigenous person? Would Jesus weep at the death in custody of a young black Australian? When Jesus says, “I go to prepare a place for you”, can you hear him making that claim for aborigines every bit as much as for you and me?

And what are we, as followers of Christ, to do?

Here is another stone throwing image: have you ever seen a stone thrown into a pool of water? Can you see the circles of ripples spreading out from the point of entry of the stone, spreading further and further, reaching out to the very limits of the pool?

That, for me, is the image I want to take with me when I think about closing the gap. The little stones of conscience that each of us can toss into the pool of indifference in our society can spread like ripples, touching and influencing far beyond the limits of our imaginations.

Where Stephen spoke out to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ to the people of his time, we too can proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ for the Indigenous people of our time. Where Jesus brought life to those he touched, we can seek to bring life through our support of the Close the Gap campaign.

Where Stephen suffered as a result of thrown stones, we can work to reduce suffering through casting stones of love to create ripples of compassion throughout our community. Amen. Let it be so.

Catching up

For anyone who might be wondering why this site hasn't changed in a long time:

Towards the end of last year, I changed computers. "So what?" you ask. Well... for some reason or other, the new setup doesn't want to hold formatting when I copy material into the blog, which then makes the new blog very, very difficult to read, and very, very strange to look at.

From time to time, I try again. Who knows, perhaps it will work next time!

Mustard Seed Faith

A sermon preached on Sunday 7 October by Rev'd Dr David Pitman, Moderator of the Uniting Church in Australia, Queensland Synod: based on 2 Timothy 1: 1-14 and Luke 17: 5-10.

David Bussau, founder of Opportunity International, was in Brisbane a few years ago and spoke at a function that I attended. In his address, David made reference to the fact that he owned 67 slaves, and he told us this story.

He was on a visit to Pakistan on one occasion and was taken to a brick kiln. There he found a number of desperately poor families, all of them in bondage to the owners of the kiln, bound by generations of debt that they would never be able to repay. Every child born to those families began its life already enslaved by that same debt.

The bricks were made in the same way they were in the time of Moses. Mud was mixed with straw and dried in the sun. Parents and children together worked in the mud to make the bricks under a broiling sun. There was no shelter to give them shade as they worked. David saw one father, who was very ill, lying on a stretcher and propped up in such a way that he could still reach out and mix the mud and straw. Then, before his own eyes, David saw a baby die. The mother took the little body to one side, dug a shallow grave, buried her baby, and returned to work. She knew that she would have to produce another child as soon as she could in order to mortgage it to the owner of the kiln as further collateral for the debt they could never hope to repay.

David went away from the kiln deeply troubled and prayed for a way forward. And this is what he did. He bought some land, enough to develop a brick kiln and build a number of houses. When everything was ready he went back to the original kiln and bought the 67 slaves, paying off their debt for the equivalent of a few hundred Australian dollars. He then employed them at the new kiln and paid them wages.

The families built houses for themselves on the land provided. Shade cloth was erected to protect the workers from the hot sun. A Child Care Centre was established to look after the younger children and the older children began to attend school.

Free of debt and able to earn an income, those families embraced a whole new way of life. Once they were well established, David set about redeeming another group of slaves and starting the whole process again just for them.

I think this story helps us to understand what Jesus meant when he said:

If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. (Luke 17:6)

There are various references to mustard seeds in the Gospels.

Firstly, as in our text for today, the mustard seed is used as an illustration of the exercise of faith.

If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.

Matthew offers a slightly different version (17: 20-21):

If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there; and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.’

The fact that Matthew refers to moving mountains, and Luke to planting trees in oceans, makes no difference to the meaning that Jesus intended. He wanted to emphasis the difference that faith makes in our lives, not by literally moving mountains and planting trees in oceans, but by encouraging us to believe in the possibility of doing and achieving more than we ever thought humanly possibly!

George Müller (1805-1898) was a Prussian-born English evangelist and philanthropist. A man of faith and prayer, he established orphanages in Bristol and founded the Scriptural Knowledge Institution for Home and Abroad. He once said: “Faith does not operate in the realm of the possible. There is no glory for God in that which is humanly possible. Faith begins where human power ends.”

Regarding these verses, Bruce Prewer, Uniting Church minister, writes:

“Planting trees in the sea sounds a clownish exercise. It appears ludicrous! I reckon that is exactly how Jesus meant it to sound. We miss the point of this mini-parable if we look at it with solemn eyes. It is cartoon he is creating. Think of it in cartoon terms: imagine a bloke standing up to his waist in the sea at Southport, or Coolangatta, or Mermaid Beach, trying to plant a tree. Like any clever cartoon, behind the picture there is a serious point.

In this cartoon Jesus is challenging those who would follow him to start attempting the hard and clownish things. The teaching of Christ is for many, impractical nonsense. But not for the disciple; for the disciple it is the way to go.”

Secondly, the mustard seed is identified as a symbol of the Kingdom of God. Its enormous potential for growth from tiny seed to large tree, points us to the dynamic nature of what God does in the world through the power of the Holy Spirit.

(Matthew 13:31, Luke 13:9, Mark 4:31)

I saw an interview in “Enough Rope” on Monday night between Andrew Denton and Juan Mann. Let me tell you his story in his own words:

“I'd been living in London when my world turned upside down and I'd had to come home (June 2004). By the time my plane landed back in Sydney, all I had left was a carry on bag full of clothes and a world of troubles: no one to welcome me back, no place to call home. I was a tourist in my hometown. Standing there in the arrivals terminal, watching other passengers meeting their waiting friends and family, with open arms and smiling faces, hugging and laughing together, I wanted someone out there to be waiting for me: to be happy to see me, to smile at me, to hug me.

So I got some cardboard and a marker and made a sign. I found the busiest pedestrian intersection in the city (Sydney) and held that sign aloft, with the words "Free Hugs" on both sides. And for 15 minutes, people just stared right through me. The first person who stopped, tapped me on the shoulder and told me how her dog had just died that morning. How that morning had been the one year anniversary of her only daughter dying in a car accident.

How what she needed now, when she felt most alone in the world, was a hug. I got down on one knee, we put our arms around each other and when we parted, she was smiling.”

Juan estimates that since then he has hugged about a million people. Initially the City Council and the Police tried to ban him, but public opinion supporting him was so strong he has been allowed to continue. The “Free Hugs” campaign is now a reality in many countries around the world.

Jesus is trying to teach us through these images of moving mountains and planting trees in oceans that faith encourages and motivates us to leap from the safe, sure, familiar ground into places and situations we wouldn’t normally choose to go.

Faith does not mean abandoning our capacity to think rationally and decide wisely.

But it does mean that we put our trust in a God who takes us beyond the limits of our own human resources and into the realm of the Spirit.

It means we are called to risk for the sake of the Kingdom.

It means we are open to the new challenges and opportunities for mission and ministry into which Christ is constantly calling us.

It means that we tackle tasks that are the equivalent of moving mountains and planting trees in oceans!

The story of the feeding of the 5000 is one that we know very well. Out in the countryside, a long way from the nearest supermarket, Jesus is surrounded by a crowd of hungry people. The disciples have no idea what to do. The need to feed the crowd represents a logistical problem far beyond their capacity to cope. Taken at face value, this is yet another miracle story. Jesus accepts the bread and fish brought by a child and proceeds to feed everyone who is there.

But if we stop there, we miss the main point of the story. Our human tendency, when faced by a problem that seems to be too big and too hard, is to give up or look for an easier alternative. But Jesus wants the disciples to understand the nature of God and how God’s way of thinking and acting goes far beyond the limits of their understanding and imagination.

Many aspects of Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God emphasise the way in which small and insignificant things become truly significant and influential. Five barley loaves and two fish, enough to feed one hungry boy, become a feast for 5000 people, and enough left over to fill twelve baskets.

This year we celebrate 30 years of being the Uniting Church. Of course, before we were one church we were three churches, with a history dating back three centuries. We should never forget that. However, the idea of the Uniting Church began as a “mustard seed”, a possibility in the faith and imagination of a few courageous and visionary people.

In an environment of prayer and respectful conversation the seed germinated and began to grow, nurtured by scholarly papers, formal dialogue and detailed planning. From that process the Basis of Union emerged, the members of the three denominations voted, and the Uniting Church was born!

When you think about all the issues that had to be addressed during that process, all the barriers that had to be broken down, all the formal steps that had to be undertaken, it’s not unreasonable to compare the formation of the Uniting Church with planting trees in the ocean or moving mountains!

The Uniting Church is our reality. But it is more than that. It is also a tangible reminder to the whole Christian church of that greater unity into which Christ continues to call us.

How big is big? How big is God?

When, by faith, we embrace the bigness of God, He can take the little we bring and do extraordinary things with it!

We often hear people these days describing something as a “mind-blowing experience!”

It means that they have been taken in their thinking way beyond where they previously were. The feeding of the crowd was a “mind-blowing experience” for those who were there. But what about us?

How big is big? How big is God for us?

Jesus saw beyond the bread and fish a vision of the Kingdom of God and he wanted to help people take that leap of faith that would liberate their thinking and their imagination to embrace and celebrate the bigness of God, and the bigness of the Kingdom of God, and the bigness of the ways of God.

How big is big? How big is God?

Bigger than we will ever be able to understand!

Did you know that if the sun were hollow we could put 1 million earths and 4 million moons into that space and still have a little bit left over. The sun is 865,000 miles in diameter and 93 million miles from earth. Pluto, still in our solar system, but in the opposite direction, is 2.7 billion miles away. And there are countless solar systems like ours.

The God who brought this vast universe into being, is also the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who came into our world, and beginning with 12 relatively insignificant disciples, changed the course of human history.

Mustard seed faith is not small faith! It is faith that believes in the power of God to do more than we have considered possible in the past. It is faith that recognises the dynamic nature of the Kingdom of God. It is faith that propels us from the past and the present into the future God has prepared for us.

If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.

This is the crucial issue! The more we limit God in our thinking, the more we limit what God can do in and for us. And the opposite is also true.

The more we are able to believe and celebrate the bigness of God, the more God can do in and through us! If we come as we are to God and bring what we have, and offer ourselves and our lives to God, He will do extraordinary things with us also.

Are you willing, in faith, hope and love, to plant trees in the sea for God?

"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.