Judgement as liberation, not threat.

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Advent 2, 8^th December 2019

Some years ago a film was made called The Matrix. The story of the film is as follows: the life that human beings think they are living is not real. Their entire lives are imaginary, generated by a computer programme, into which their brains are plugged. The reality is that their bodies lie in cells which keep them alive so that they can generate electricity to power machines which now rule the world. The computer programme which generates the imaginary lives of human beings is called the Matrix.

The film revolves around human beings who have been freed from the Matrix and those who have been born outside of it (in a city named Zion!) Liberating individuals from the Matrix, so that they can then live an authentic life, is a difficult challenge, because they must first face the shock of realising that their entire life until that moment has been artificial. Their muscles must be electrically stimulated in order to learn how to work, because up until then, they have never actually used their muscles.

One of the main characters in the film, named Trinity(!) tries to explain the reality of the Matrix to Neo, who turns out to be a Messiah character. One of the best lines she delivers is to tell Neo that ‘the Matrix cannot tell you who you are’. There are some wonderful parallels between this film and Christian spirituality, and that line is one of them. As we heard today, it’s central to the message of John the Baptist: the life you live is not as authentic as you think it is. And what you have allowed to tell you who you are, cannot tell you who you are. Which means that you don’t really know who you are, and therefore you don’t really know how to live.

John the Baptist takes individuals through the shock of realising that the world isn’t quite what they thought and neither are they. That’s what his baptism by water is – a washing away of their past mindset about the world and themselves.

John the Baptist is to be found in the desert. The desert functions like the room Jesus tells his disciples to go into to pray, where they can engage with God ‘in secret’. It’s free from distractions and destructive voices, which lead us astray. The desert is a place where people can face their inner demons and cleanse their soul. It is where they go to shed the accretions of life and get back to the essentials. More than being in the desert, John is the desert personified. He embodies the Jewish tradition of repentance through being realistic about oneself and the world, and changing one’s behaviour as a result.

The human heart is clever and even willing to deceive itself if it feels threatened, so it needs others to guide it. There have been great figures down through the ages who have carried this role, for example the prophets Elijah and Ezekiel. Wearing clothes made of camel hair, John ‘channels’ Elijah, harasser of kings who were unfaithful to Yahweh. It’s why he eats locusts and honey. The locust was the means by which Yahweh tried to wear down Egypt’s Pharaoh to set his people free, so it became a symbol of God’s judgement – judgement which was never vindictive, but always only to bring about positive change. Eating honey refers to an occasion in which the prophet Ezekiel, in a vision, was instructed to eat a scroll upon which God’s judgement was written, but when he ate the scroll, in his mouth it became honey. The idea being conveyed in this is that our experience of God’s judgement, which calls us to change our hearts and behaviour, depends on our perspective. If we don’t wish to change and instead justify our present mindset and behaviour, then God’s judgement will be experienced as punishment – like a locust trying to devour us, whereas if we allow God’s judgement to show us how we are deluded and clear the path for change, then it will be experienced as honey, sweetness – something enjoyable.

Our experience is usually that judgement is both, but we won’t mind the pain if we have the gain.

One of the questions that John throws at the religious officials (Pharisees and Sadducees) is ‘what warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ This is a key question that we must answer if we are to

change our life for the better. In other words, what fears hold you back?

Behind that fear, lies acceptance of a mindset given to us, which we have adopted as the truth about the world and about ourselves. It may be a mindset imparted by a culture that says you are defined by your achievements, or by how others see you, or it may be a mindset that you have adopted in a hostile environment, such as a childhood in which your worth depends upon pleasing authority figures. From the mindsets that we take on from environments such as these, our identity and resulting behaviour can be driven by fear, so we become a particular person, act in a certain way, to be a somebody. We fear being a nobody, unrecognised, unacknowledged by others.

As the Matrix cannot tell those plugged into it who they really are, neither can ‘the world’ tell us who we are. And I mean ‘the world’ in the sense that it is used in John’s gospel, which is the world in all its ungodly aspects, driven by profit and power at the expense of human beings and the rest of creation.

People went out into the desert to hear John and accept his baptism, because they knew in their heart that he was right. They wanted more out of life. They felt they were made for more. This is because human beings are made to desire to live as God intended, but this desire gets smothered and redirected.

John’s role is to name and expose. He unmasks the powers in society which smother and redirect, and the desires and values in the heart which do it too. There is more here, though, because behind John is ‘one who is more powerful’, more powerful because he can give the life we are meant to live. John can only prepare the way. Jesus waits for John to do his thing and then he arrives on the scene. All that is required is to follow what John directs, in order to become open, so that the divine life within us can express itself.

The knack is to respond to John whenever we hear his call to change our mindset or behaviour. The way we do that is to pay attention and respond to whatever or whoever is exercising the same function that John the Baptist does, which is to challenge and offer to wash away mindsets and behaviours which suffocate and oppress us, making us less than we can be, for ourselves and for others.

When other’s generosity makes us realise we are less generous than we could be, ask ourselves what is behind our selfishness. Are we are clinging to what we’ve got for a no good reason? When our busyness makes us frantic, let the resulting stress be God’s judgement, inviting us to consider whether we are smothering something within ourselves, perhaps avoiding something painful, but in the process, only half-living. Suppressing suffering goes hand in hand with losing passion. Do we find it hard to say no to people? Let the resulting stress be God’s judgement inviting us to be more courageous and choose only what God calls us to, not whatever is asked of us. What are the core desires that drive us? Do they put us in touch with the Ground of our Being? Are we physically grounded? – in the sense of our bodies embodying good values as much as our thoughts and actions.

John the Baptist is the voice of good conscience and that which challenges anything in us that makes us less than we could be. Not all voices which challenge us are good though. We also hear voices which tell us we’re not good enough, that we SHOULD do this and that, voices which hammer us with guilt for past mistakes, tell us we are incompetent, should be afraid and are powerless. That is not what we hear from John the Baptist. One of the titles for the devil is ‘the Accuser’ and that is just how we experience him. He’s not an individual spirit who comes to taunt us, but can feel like that. He is, rather, the sum total of critical assertions and half-truths, which are ONLY negative and destructive. It’s important to differentiate between challenges which set us free to be more loving, generous and creative, and those which diminish us. One type makes us feel uplifted, the other drained. Being fully alive, is allowing the inner fullness (that we call Christ) to overflow in us. It means not being defined by the world or others, but being open to God.

Violence and conflict as signs the world is changing

Sermon by Andy Wurm, 26^th Sunday after Pentecost, 17^th November 2019

A group of people who worked in an office went out for a farewell lunch for one of the staff who was leaving. There was an air of sadness to the lunch, because he had been a great member of the team, but couldn’t cope with the boss’s bullying any more. At least it was a chance for others to express their appreciation for his contribution and also how much they valued one another. As the discussion went on over lunch, there was a lot of anger at the boss expressed by a number of those present, to the extent that many of them would like to see their boss gone. There was a strong feeling of unity in being united against her. But one office worker felt uneasy at the growing resentment against the boss. While she could see what lay behind what others were saying, she thought it was important to remember that there was more to the office than the boss, – there was much that was good about what they did and there were good people too, so if they focussed too much on the boss, they would lose sight of all that. Then she encouraged others to stand up for themselves with the boss’s bullying, such as if someone felt they were being bullied, it was appropriate and legitimate to request the presence of a support person. It is behaviour such as this refusal to gang up on another or seek revenge, yet to stand up to aggression, that Jesus is referring to in today’s gospel story, when he says ‘by your endurance you will gain your souls’. The opposite, to gang up on the other, even if they are engaging in bullying behaviour, or to engage in revenge, will result in losing your soul.

How can we be people who gain our soul, or keep our soul, and not get caught up in revenge or other aggressive behaviours? We can do that by believing in and living the Kingdom of God, and what helps with that is knowing that the Kingdom of God is both coming in the future and also here in the present.

The Kingdom of God can be understood within the context of history. Apparently, the ancient Jews invented the idea of history. By that I mean they thought that life doesn’t just keep going around in circles, with the same things happening over and over, but things develop and people build upon events and achievements of the past. They also believed that history had a direction or purpose, which was the coming to fruition of God’s plan for creation, in which humanity flourished and was a blessing for the earth. Humanity has strayed from that, however, in that violence has become central to the way we relate to one another, but God is working to overcome that. God is determined to accomplish God’s good creation. For Christians, Jesus is the centre of that, but also he is the model of the new humanity that God is bringing into being. For us then, history is a movement through which eventually, all humanity will be like Jesus. That’s what we call the Second Coming of Christ. And it’s what we profess to believe and commit ourselves to living into, when we say ‘Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again’. Christ will come again – humanity will be a blessing to the world and all of humanity will flourish. Not just the rich. Not just the powerful. All humanity. No more segregation. No more poverty or hunger. No more exclusion. No more war. No more bullying. This will be humanity finally as it was meant to be: as the image of God. When this new humanity comes into being, then the humanity that lives by violence, will come to an end. It will be the end of ‘this time’, or in a sense, the end of the world as it now is, with fallen humanity. The religious term for this end of the world is the eschaton. An eschatological view of the world then, sees the world is moving towards this transformation, or new creation.

Being captured by this hopeful vision, the early Christians believed that soon the world would end and

Jesus would return: the new creation was imminent. Others considered it long in the future, but there

was another view, which we get from the writer of Luke’s Gospel, who thought that the end of the world, and the second coming of Christ, is coming in the future, but is also breaking into the present. This is not God playing with time, but is like the way Christmas, while a month and a half off, is ‘breaking into’, or ‘reaching into’, our present, because we are starting to get stressed, beginning to buy gifts and so on. This is prevailing view of the New Testament. So, we have this hopeful view of the future, but also the present and with it comes implications for how we live.

The reality is though, often I am shocked by the violence I see in the world, so watching the news leaves me feeling hopeless. Well, says Jesus (in today’s gospel passage) don’t be shocked. Be outraged, because it’s tragic, but don’t be shocked, in the sense of being surprised, because this is the beginning of the end. In fact, expect this sort of violence to occur. Now, this is not like those people who say that these events reveal the end of the world is near, so you better join Jesus’ team, or you’ll burn in hell. What it means is that these events are the consequences of what Jesus has brought about. Or to put it another way, as the kingdom of God breaks into the world and begins to transform it, new forms of violence will emerge, for Jesus has deconstructed the way that violence shaped much of human life.

In today’s gospel story, Jesus points out that the temple would eventually fall. It would fall because it manifested the old way of ordering human life through sacrifice, and Jesus’ death would dismantle it by exposing the true nature of its violence. Examples of ordering human life through sacrifice include stoning a woman caught in adultery, picking on the class weakling, throwing a gay university lecturer into the River Torrens to drown. This violence was the means by which groups of people reinforced who they were – “we are not like that person or group of people. They are ‘bad’, they are not one of us, and by sacrificing them, we prove we are different and thus restore goodness to our community”. But really this is nothing more than ganging up on others to sure up your sense of who you are. That’s why Jesus was killed. His crucifixion therefore exposes this accepted means of ordering society as the strong dominating the weak. The more conscious of that we become, and the more we refuse to accept it’s the way things are meant to be, the more we free ourselves from it.

As ways of sacrificing others becomes increasingly rejected (or dismantled, like the temple of Jesus’ day), unless people relate to each one another in love and with justice, other forms of violence will emerge as means by which to maintain order, to take their place. For example, Jesus speaks of ‘nation rising against nation’, indicating that as sacrifice within the community no longer works, the need to establish who we are and where everyone fits, will be directed outwards to larger groups (such as nations) who are different. People will define who they are by making other races, or religions, or refugees, the enemy.

In all this, Jesus says, we must be careful who we follow, because people will arise who claim to have the answers to our problems, but who are, in fact, part of the problem. They may actually make

tensions between people worse. The danger of these people is that they just offer a new way of

dealing with difference through violence. Jesus says don’t follow them.

We live in in-between times, between when sacrificing others provided the means of establishing who we were, and when we no longer live in rivalry with one another. That is the future, but it is also breaking into the present, and is doing so through us, and others. That is how God is changing the world. And integral to that coming about, is the endurance Jesus speaks about. That is how we shall gain our souls; that is how humanity will gain its soul.

Endurance is not being controlled by what is happening, not letting it determine your world. How do we do that? Well, we have no control over much of what occurs in the world, but we do have influence over how we respond. We have a say and can influence the conversation at an office farewell, at committee meetings, over a drink with a friend. We can refuse to use violence as a means to sort things out, and as a means to establish who we are. In this way, we are the channels through which this future kingdom breaks into the world and begins to transform it.

Christ has died – yes humanity has embraced death to create order, but God raised Christ to life. Everything hangs on that – the future hangs on that. And the future is hopeful – Christ will come again. There will be a new humanity. God has promised to bring that about and will do so, as we live it out. We live in and are subject to the ‘kingdoms’ of this world, but we don’t believe in them. We believe in the Kingdom of God and the more we live it, the more we can believe in it, but it won’t come without a fight from those with much to lose, so we and all who work for this better world, may suffer as it comes into being through us, but that suffering will be for something good.

Resurrection is life where death means nothing

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Pentecost 22, 10^th November 2019

Today’s gospel story about Jesus being challenged by a group of Sadducees, with their dilemma about what happens in the afterlife, shows they have no idea what they’re talking about. In response to their question Jesus shows that for God, death is not what it is for us, but we have access to what it is for God.

Is resurrection just to do with life after death? If so, then Jesus’ appearances after death were to prove God could overcome death and there was life after death. It would seem not, though, because God could have achieved the same result simply by raising from death ordinary people who had died. No crucifixion complicating things. However, before looking at an alternative, if this were the case, that Jesus’ resurrection was God’s way of showing us he could overcome death and make us alive again, then it would imply a particular meaning to his statement that ‘those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who believes in me will never die’. What Jesus would mean by that would be that people who give their assent to me, will get life after death. Those who vote for me, those who join my team, those who agree I am the Saviour etc., will be raised to life after they die.

There are two flaws in this thinking. The first is to do with what belief is in John’s Gospel. Belief, in John’s Gospel doesn’t mean holding to an idea, e.g. that Jesus is the Saviour of the world, or that a particular snake is not venomous. Belief, in that case, would involve something like patting the snake on the head. Belief in Jesus means committing oneself to follow him, in the sense of being like him, doing what he does. Similarly, when Jesus says he is the way, the truth and the life – he doesn’t mean truth in the Greek sense, of what’s correct and can be objectively verified, such as ‘Steven Marshall is the Premier of South Australia’, but truth in the sense of something which is gives true life and can only be verified by giving yourself to it.

This is reflected in our eucharistic prayer when the priest recites the words of Jesus to ‘do this in remembrance of me’. Jesus didn’t just mean solemnly break some bread and lift up a cup to re-enact what he once did, although doing so is part of it. What he means is do what I do, be like me, with your whole life. We are being invited into his life, even to become our own version of him – Jesuses, or Jesi.

This also happens to be the path to knowing God, for when people asked him to show God to them, he said just look at me, and if you really want to be close to God, be like me. That’s why philosophizing about God will only get you so far. You can discuss all sorts of theories, but the best way to know God is to mimic Jesus by loving others. The way to God is to love, more than assenting to propositions.

If we take believing in Jesus to mean living like him, in love for others and so on, then it gives a different interpretation to what I mentioned before, to say that those who believe in Jesus will never die, but will experience resurrection. That makes resurrection something that happens now, or at least something that can happen now, rather than something that only happens after you die.

I said there were two flaws in thinking that believing Jesus is your Saviour is just about gaining life after death. The second flaw is to do with death. God didn’t overcome death in raising Jesus to life from the tomb. He didn’t conquer death, because that implies God is more powerful than death. For that to be the case, death would have to be something that God has to do something about, because death gets in the way of God doing his thing. Death would therefore be something which challenges God, competes with God. If not, why would God have to do anything about it? Why would God have to overcome it? And in fact, that’s what death is like for us. Death is a challenge, a problem, it does get in the way of us doing our thing, such as living. So of course we assume that by raising Jesus from death, God is doing what we would do, if we could. God is making Jesus alive, so he’s no longer dead, which from our point of view is a much better situation to be in. However, remember I said before that if God merely wanted to show he could give people another life, God would have raised a variety of people from the dead. So there’s more going on here.

Jesus taught that death was not a problem for God, but knew the only way for his disciples to understand what he meant, was for him to go through it. When he came back from death though, what had occurred was so profound that it took most of them awhile to comprehend it. While it would have been remarkable if Jesus had simply been resuscitated so he was back as his old self again, his disciples would have understood that – it would have meant God had overcame death. Great news for all of us, because one day we’ll die too. But Jesus came back with all his wounds remaining – the wounds which killed him. In other words, he came back as a dead person – a walking dead person. If that were written as a Monty Python script, people would have said to Jesus ‘you’re back , you’re alive, and yet you’ve got all your wounds still’ and Jesus would have said something like, ‘oh, yes that’s just death, don’t worry about that, it’s nothing. What’s for morning tea?’

The only way a dead person could be fully alive is if death was nothing to the One who raised him, which is the case. For God, death is not a threat, a challenge, not something which competes, or gets in the way. That’s what’s behind Jesus’ description of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as being alive to God (in the gospel story). Death is nothing to God.

What does that mean for us then? Especially when we think of our own death, or the death of someone close to us? That’s something for you to think about. I’m not sure Jesus actually says a lot about that, because he was more concerned with life before death than life after death. ‘Those who believe will live’ then, means those who live like Jesus will be fully alive and will know God, NOW. And if God is with us now and when we die, then what happens to us later must be something similar. In other words, we can infer something of life after death from whatever being fully alive now involves.

There are a number of people in the gospel stories who get this, but only one who gets it before Jesus dies and that’s Lazarus’ sister, Mary. When Jesus raised Lazarus from death, he was demonstrating that death was nothing for God. Mary didn’t get it, until he returns a few days later, when she’s worked it out, so she anoints him with expensive perfume, as an act of extravagant love. She has come to realise that in Jesus there is a presence of life-giving love, so unique that it transcends everything. It is utterly profound in that nothing threatens it, nothing competes with it, nothing can ever take it away. Soon she will see that even death will mean nothing to it. But for now, in its presence, she can only respond to it in one way, which is with lavish love, for love is the best response to love.

This life-giving love is here with us now, calling us to follow, to become like it, to live it and so to know it as our Source, holding everything together. I see that love in people, who transcend the death that judgment brings by not excluding people from their friendship. I see that love in those who do not fear the death of their worth by a lack of other’s approval. I see that love when people forgive, when people don’t have to be right, or be best, or have things their way. They don’t have to conquer anything or anyone, because they know that nothing really dies when things don’t go their way, or others aren’t what they want them to be. That is resurrection from death, here and now. Those who believe, those who mimic Jesus, have life now.

Those who have died are with us as witnesses and givers of hope

Sermon by Andy Wurm, All Saints’ & All Souls’ Day service, 3^rd November 2019

The first parish I was parish priest for was Jamestown, in the mid-north of South Australia. One of the first people I met was Adrian, who owned a nursery on the edge of Caltowie, half-way between Jamestown and Gladstone. One of my favourite stories about Adrian concerns the day when a bloke in Caltowie reported to his wife seeing a pig in their backyard. As he had been drinking, his wife thought he was imagining it, but it was later discovered to be true, because Adrian had a pig, which he was fattening up for Christmas dinner, and it had escaped and wandered into Caltowie. So, it really was in that bloke’s back yard.

The reason I tell that story is because it’s about a real person and today, as we celebrate All Saints’ Day, I want to affirm that we are celebrating real people, or people in our own time, not just people from long ago.

This past week the church has celebrated All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, and much of what they each represent overlaps, so I’m combining something from each today.

The celebration of All Saints involves remembering saints. We remember the ‘great ones’, but also the not so great ones. And we aren’t just talking about people who have died either. In the New Testament, the term saints refers to all Christians. And, in the spirit of God’s love, we can include people who were not or are not Christian, but live their lives according to the pattern of Jesus. In that I would include well-known people like Ghandi, for example, but also unknowns, such as Adrian of Caltowie. When Adrian died some years ago, there would have been much sadness throughout the tobacco and alcohol industries, for Adrian was one of their greatest supporters. He was also very fond of calling upon the name of Jesus, but not for religious purposes. However, Adrian spent his entire life, in whatever enterprise he was involved in, doing things for others and being generous. So, for me, he is one of the saints.

When someone dies, is that it? Is Adrian now only a memory? And when we celebrate the life of someone like that, are we just looking at the past? In the Christian view, there is much more than that. When speaking of saints and all who have died, when we use words such as celebrate and remember, we don’t mean what those words mean in everyday use. In the secular world, to celebrate the life of someone who has died means to appreciate what they were and what they achieved. To remember them is simply to recall thoughts about them.

To get the Christian perspective on this, we have to look at the beliefs behind All Souls’ Day. All Souls’ Day is a day of remembering those who have died. At the heart of it lies the belief in the communion of saints. The communion of saints is the companionship of those who have died, united in God. The nature of the communion of saints then is determined by the nature of God. Sometimes only those who were Christian were thought to be a part of the communion of saints, but that goes against the nature of God. God is infinitely inclusive and loving, so it doesn’t make sense to think God would only include those who were Christian into his eternal life.

The resurrection of Jesus is described in the New Testament as the first instance of God’s plan to resurrect the whole creation. It’s also described as a ‘New Heaven and New Earth’, so we’re talking about everything being refashioned into something new. And of course, God’s inclusivity is not limited to human beings, so it really is everything: living and non-living. So, in a way that I cannot possibly comprehend, Adrian’s pig will be in heaven too. The detail of what that means or how, is not what matters. What matters is that everything and everyone will eventually come together as one, within the life of God. And in God, only what is good can exist, so all shall be shaped by love. That means that there is no place for enmity or division. It also means that the tension between individuality and connectedness will be reconciled. In other words, we shall be our perfected individual selves, but only in unity with others.

Anyway, back to remembering those who have died. In the Christian faith, the meaning of remembering is to do with bringing together into one (to re-member). Remembering those who have died then, doesn’t mean calling their past to mind, but acknowledging their connection with us now. It means becoming aware that they remain joined with us, through God. In that way, they are ‘present’ with us. That’s why in places where people have been killed for standing up for the poor, as part of their worship, Christians have called out their names in remembrance, with the congregation responding ‘present’. They are present, because they now live within God, who is always with us. And that means whenever we are close to God, we are close to them.

For this reason, some people pray to those who have died, or ask them to pray for us. The reason we can do that is not because they are closer to God than we are. Rather, doing so is a means for us to enter into the communion we share with those who have died. It’s about going deeper into our connectedness.

There is something else about the presence of those who have died, and it’s obvious really. It is that they are not present as we are, i.e. in an ‘earthly sense’. And we have to keep this in mind when we open ourselves to their presence. To do so is not to ‘bring them down to earth’. Rather, we are opening ourselves to their reality, which exceeds what we can comprehend and are capable of experiencing in this earthly life.

The difficulty that presents for us can be seen in the resurrection stories of the New Testament. How could Jesus’ disciples experience within time and space, the presence of a person who has transcended time and space? It was only possible therefore, for Jesus’ disciples to experience his presence in a limited sense, even though, he was actually more present to them than ever. Similarly, those who have died are present with us now more fully than ever before, but we can only experience that to a limited degree. We are bound by the limitations of our mortal, earthly existence. So, connecting with the communion of saints then, is not about them coming to us (they are already ‘here’), but about us entering more deeply into their presence.

We can only experience their presence in a mystical sense then. However, doing so provides a sense of hope, that we, and all creation, will one day be raised to that renewed life. If so, then the chaos, dysfunction, evil and suffering of this world, will one day be resurrected by God and transformed into good. And all the good that we do, and all our loving, will be our gift to that new life. It will become part of God’s life for eternity.

Remembering those who have died then, takes us beyond our present and connects us deeper with all other people, and in fact all creation, now, in the past and the future. Among other things, that should influence how we live in regard to our natural environment and plants and animals, giving the creatures we share life with a special significance, that surpasses their value as being only resources for our use. Hence, in our Eucharistic prayer we affirm that we worship God, with angels, archangels, and the whole company of heaven. It means we join with all the living and non-living as companions in one giant relationship together, with God.

Those who have died are witnesses for us, in that they are examples for us, fellow companions who have tried to live as fully as they could. They show us, inspire us and encourage us, not only with their great achievements, but also how they have coped with failure and suffering. We recall all that, but also, knowing they now live in the presence of God, and therefore us too, they hold before us the eternal significance of what we are and what we do. It means that our striving for love and justice here and now is part of something much greater, and we are not alone in our efforts.

What I do here and now is connected with what Adrian of Caltowie did and was, in the past, and yet in an eternal sense, also now. None of you are able to know him as I did, and yet, he is one of billions and billions, who through our bond with God, is present now with us as a companion, in the communion of saints.

What are the real evils we need to face up to?

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Pentecost 20, October 27^th 2019

I’d like to begin with a question: is there racism from white people towards indigenous people in our country? To answer that question, I’ll begin with myself. I am not a racist. I don’t have any problems with aboriginal people. I worked for three years with an aboriginal priest as his training priest, and got to appreciate more and more about his culture and ways. One of my favourite television shows had an indigenous actor as one of the lead characters. I love Jessica Mauboy’s singing. I believe in land rights and I think there is a lot more we could learn from indigenous culture and its spirituality. I believe indigenous people have been very badly treated in the past, and we have still not righted all the wrongs. I’m sure I don’t even know anyone who is racist. Is there racism towards indigenous people in our country. There is. Am I a part of that? Absolutely. The reason is that racism is not an individualistic sin, it is a systemic sin. It’s what the New Testament refers to as one of the ‘Principalities and Powers’ of the world – a form of power which manifests in tangible and intangible ways. It is created by us and yet it also influences us. Whether racism and its associated denial of privilege exists in our country is only partly related to the attitudes and behaviour of individuals. The real answer to that question is found in levels of poverty and education and percentages of people in prison.

Last week our gospel passage included a story by Jesus about two men praying: one was a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector. The Pharisee thanked God that he was able to be such an excellent person, helping the needy and abiding by the rules. The tax-collector prayed ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner’. To Jesus, he was the one who was right with God. Now, how do we judge those two men? The usual approach is to say the Pharisee is bad because he was self-righteous, whereas the tax- collector was honest. Jesus saw things differently.

The reason he praised the tax-collector was that he was honest about himself and correct about God. He was a man who was imperfect and needed God’s help. That’s what he was acknowledging. And the same goes for us when we say our confession each Sunday. We are imperfect. We make mistakes, we fall short, and therefore we need healing, help, forgiveness, setting free or whatever else you want to call it. We’re also acknowledging we need each other and depend on each other – because we’re interdependent – with each other and with non-human life. It is acknowledging that we are not islands to ourselves, and it frees us from pride – living as if we are in charge of the world, or even just our own part of it. God is interested in this, only because it concerns our wholeness.

The introduction to our Prayer Book Confession refers to God as ‘infinite in mercy’. In the Bible, the word for mercy is related to the word for womb, so the biblical notion of God’s mercy is to do with God acting like a mother towards the child in her womb. This means in confessing our sins, we do so assuming God will care for us. We also address God as judge in our prayer of confession, but the point of that is to say that all other judges are not our judges – the humans who condemn us don’t count, for God is our true judge, and God does not judge us. God forgives, or sets us free from sin.

Back to the Pharisee in Jesus’ story. Why do we view him badly? Because he gets God wrong, thinking God will be impressed by his perfect score in terms of religious and charitable behaviour – as if God judges like that. And also because he has the wrong idea about sin. All he sees is his own, personal behaviour and attitudes, but he completely ignores the way his religious system, in which he is a leader, is evil, for it oppresses people. That is the trick of systemic evil – it gets us to focus on individualistic sins, so that we miss the real evil. When we judge the Pharisee badly compared to the tax-collector, because he is so self-righteous, we do what the Pharisee himself does, which is to judge someone according to how well they conform to certain standards, as opposed to God, who does not, but is forgiving and loving. And in doing so, we are blind to the evil of the religious system of the Pharisee.

Remember the woman who threw the banana at Eddie Betts? Do you also remember Sonia Kruger, the co-host of Channel Nine’s Today Extra show – who suggested we stop Muslim immigration, on the grounds that she was scared of them. There was a flood of condemnation, until prominent Muslim Waleed Aly said, hang on a minute, if she’s afraid, she’s just afraid and that’s okay, we should talk about that, rather than just condemn her. But do you see what happened there? The focus was on the individual, and she became the scape-goat for the community. The end result? The real issue is avoided, which is community angst at difference and how we’re going with each other, whether people really are fitting in and being included and so on.

Our Old Testament reading today comes from the Book of Joel. It’s three chapters long and two of them are about locusts! Everything in the land has been devoured by locusts. It’s not a myth. It’s a real event. The crops are gone, all the fruit has been eaten, there is no wine to drink, there’s no grain to sow, the animals are starving, the trees are bare, the rivers are dry, and even the earth is suffering. Joel sees the locusts as God’s way of correcting the nation, for it has done something bad. (We’re not told what that is.) God is not punishing, but correcting the people, for they have gone astray and for their own good, need to be shown the error of their ways, so they will stop and change what they are doing.

To understand this, we must not think in modern, individualistic terms. We must think of the nation as a whole, and not take it literally – as if God actually does this sort of thing. It’s just that in the days of Joel that was the best way to think of such things. The point was if a nation made bad decisions it suffered the consequences. Like with us, if we poison the earth, the earth will be poisoned. And that will come back upon us.

On behalf of God, the prophet Joel calls his nation to repent of whatever it was they did, and then God promises to care for his people, to pour out his Spirit upon them – even upon their slaves. So their repentance will lead to empowerment and seeing one another in new ways. The ‘sun turning to darkness and the moon to blood etc’ is just a fancy way of saying the world as they know it will pass away, in the sense of things being transformed – inequality will be transformed, gender roles shared, wisdom acknowledged in those it previously had not been and so on. The social, political and economic order will change. This is what can happen when real sin is acknowledged and dealt with.

The trouble is that the ‘Principalities and Powers’ of the world, the systemic evil, keeps directing our focus to individualistic sins, which are not insignificant, but are more a by-product of the really serious evil of the world. So as church, we must make sure that we don’t get obsessed with the individualistic sins. Confess them to God, follow Jesus’ direction to the woman who committed adultery (don’t do it again) and then move on, grow, be healed, evolve, mature. But do not give your sins any more status than that, because if we do, we are playing into the hands of systemic evil, which wants to make scapegoats out of others and ourselves in order to avoid the real sins. If we do that, we are more likely to see what really needs to change, and God won’t need to send us any armies of locusts!

Will you use the faith you’ve found to reshape the world around?

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Pentecost 19, 20^th October, 2019

Recently there has been criticism of (Prime Minister) Scott Morrison for encouraging people to pray for rain. Some critics say there’s no point in praying for rain because God doesn’t go against the laws of nature and praying for rain is failing to accept what we can’t control. Praying for rain, or asking God for anything else for that matter, is treating God like Father Christmas. The problem with this criticism is that it assumes there is only one purpose of praying, which is to get what you ask for, but there are other reasons for praying.

If you take today’s gospel story at face value, it seems that Jesus sees prayer about getting something from God, because, in order to illustrate the importance of prayer, he tells a story about a woman pestering a judge until she got what she needed. The pestering seems to imply that the more we ask God for something, the more likely we are to get what we ask for. But that’s not right.

Jesus is talking about how to get justice from God. It is about having prayer answered, but in this case, it’s about having THE prayer answered, as in the big prayer, that his people have been praying for a very long time, which is: free us from our oppressors. Jesus’ people had been oppressed for seven centuries, by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Syrians and finally the Romans. For generations, they had not been in charge of their own land, economy or justice. Jesus was teaching his disciples how to get justice from God, and it had to come from God, because all the military and political means they had tried, which various prophets had condemned, had ended in disaster. In fact, even Jesus’ warnings that resorting to violence in an attempt to free themselves from the Romans would end badly. And it did. In 70AD the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and its temple.

Jesus tells his followers that there is no question that God will grant them justice – for God is love, but God will do it through them. And God can only do it through them, if they want it, which is where prayer comes in. His story of the widow, relentless in her demanding of the judge, shows how it comes about.

In Jesus’ day a widow was a powerless person, because women depended upon their husbands for permission to act and for affirmation of who they were. A respectable woman went about with a veil covering her face. If a woman’s husband died, and she had no sons to care for her or speak for her, she was voiceless, socially isolated and vulnerable to exploitation. The Hebrew word for widow even means ‘one without a voice’, and the Greek word for widow denotes a chasm, indicating separation from mainstream society. There were numerous laws to protect widows because they were so powerless and vulnerable. But in Jesus’ story, we have a judge who ignores those laws. In the end, the woman gets around the judge’s resistance and gets her justice, because she was relentless in her campaigning, but she could only do that because she had been persistent in prayer. In this story, God is not the judge who gets worn down by the widow’s campaigning. God is the source of her power to do so, or God is the One who plants the desire in her, or the One who strengthens her desire for justice.

Before his crucifixion, in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed for strength to endure his ‘time of trial’ – which would include when he faced Pilate, an unjust judge. His disciples still hadn’t got what he was on about, so they slept rather than prayed, and so when the ‘time of trial’ arrived in the form of soldiers to arrest Jesus, they resorted to violence, with Peter wielding a sword. The disciples hadn’t understood that justice cannot be achieved through violence, but only through prayer, which is opening up to God’s Spirit.

The unjust judge for us is not Pontius Pilate, but the judge who resides in our consciousness. The internal judge is the voice or voices we acquire as part of our socialisation and like the judge in Jesus’ story, cares little for what is best or fair for us. When we want something which we’re passionate about, often what we hear from our judges are messages such as ‘that’s wanting a bit much isn’t it?’, ‘what gives you the right to want that?’, ‘it’s best not to want too much, or you’ll be disappointed’, or ‘I shouldn’t want that if I were you’. The point of these messages is to shut down our desire and get us to mask our discontent by falling in line with what others do. This is conveyed brilliantly in Peter Weir’s film Dead Poets’ Society, in which a school and parents have a teacher removed for encouraging boys to let poetry unleash their passion.

We must pray, Jesus teaches, so that God can stir up our passion, our desire, for what we need, for what is good for us, which in the case of this story, is justice. But what Jesus teaches here applies to much more, for he’s really showing us that everything we do can go wrong if we can’t get around the unjust judge. In the case of his disciples, the unjust judge dictated the terms of battle, which was violence – a means of dealing with conflict that has no winners. We too need the ability to get around our unjust judges, which is by having our desires stirred. And that stirring is the action of God. God stirs and our imagination is fired, and the more we imagine something becoming possible, the more our desire for it grows and then we find ourselves able to imagine it even more fully. In this way we gain the vision, and our passion energises us to act.

Some ancient scriptures suggest that God brings justice by destroying oppressors, but we see that view evolve through the bible, as our spiritual ancestors came to see that God’s justice does not work that way, because God loves all people. In the same way, whenever God stirs up our desires to create new things with 0ur lives, it will not come about at others’ expense. In fact, the ways God stirs us up to, relentlessly if necessary, pursue new possibilities, will benefit the wider world as much as ourselves.

The second story told by Jesus in today’s gospel passage of two men praying in the temple, is related to what he says about prayer. The difference between the two men is one of them is run by the desires he has been socialised into accepting, like if a widow is run by the desire of the unjust judge, getting her to be quiet and not pursue justice for herself. The proof that the Pharisee is run by voices outside of himself, is that he compares himself to the tax-collector. In other words, he values himself according to the degree to which he is socially acceptable. His worth comes from others’ judgment.

Rather than being free and energized to follow his desire for whatever is life-giving, the Pharisee has his desire (that is, what he wants) given to him by others, so that he wants, he desires, whatever delivers approval from others, or approval from his religion, which he falsely interprets as approval from God. In contrast to the Pharisee, the tax collector, opens his heart to God, and acknowledges himself to be a sinner, for the purpose of receiving his worth from God and allowing his desire, (i.e. what he wants in life), to be given to him from God. He goes home justified, that is, he goes home right with God, because he is not run by any desire society might want to give him. The absence of any comparison of himself to others demonstrates his freedom from other influences and his willingness to let what he wants in life to be given to him by God, which happens to be the most important purpose of prayer.