May our unity with others draw people to the Source of all unity

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Sunday after Ascension, 2^nd June 2019

Sometimes people equate being Christian with being good, even using the terms interchangeably. Someone may have nothing to do with church, but be described as a very Christian person. To see Christianity like that is to get things around the wrong way. Hopefully, being a good person is a consequence of being Christian, but to make them the same thing makes trying to be good the core activity of Christianity, and it’s not.

Theologically speaking, by ourselves, we are incapable of being perfectly good, because we’re not God, so making ‘being a good person’ the goal of your life will only result in a constant sense of failure. Yet sometimes churches have turned the gospel into a drive to be good. In doing so, faithfulness becomes equated with living up to particular standards, in the same way that in Jesus’ time, upholding religious practices, enshrined in laws, became equated with faithfulness to God. This easily leads to the same abuse of power experienced in Jesus’ day, whereby those who decide what ‘being good’ entails, dictate how others should live. And that makes the church into an instrument of control, blocking people from life, rather than being a channel through which people may connect with God.

Today’s gospel passage from John suggests that the core of being Christian is union with God, and everything else flows from that. This passage marks the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, a time when churches remember Jesus’ prayer that we may all be one. Taking that prayer in the sort of legalistic way that I was talking about before results in the brow-beating that sometimes goes on at this time, with church leaders confessing our failure to become one church. But we’re getting things around the wrong way if we make becoming one church the reason for Christian unity.

Jesus’ desire for our unity is for a more significant purpose, which is so that when others see it, they may be drawn to God. It’s not a desire to recruit numbers, but is the natural expression of divine love, which is to share itself. Communion in love is the key sign which reveals God. This is the point being made by Jesus in his prayer, of which we read a portion in today’s gospel reading.

Union with God and fullness of life, are the same thing. That is significant for our prayers, for it means that underneath all that we ask for, is our need for union with God. Our blindness to that often results in our feeling that God doesn’t answer our prayers. Say, for example, a person is depressed and they pray for God to take away their depression. Nothing happens, so they feel let down by God, but the only way God has let them down is by not doing what they asked. That doesn’t mean God hasn’t answered their prayer though. If the true answer to all our needs is union with God, then the way that God will answer our prayers will be by leading us further into union with him. That may be by opening our eyes to the union we already have with God, or by making us aware of how we are blocking ourselves from it, or perhaps by moving away from us, so that our desire for union with God grows. But if our expectation is for something else, we won’t see any of that.

One reason we don’t see God answering our prayer can be that we expect God to speak or act from outside of ourselves, which means we’re expecting an experience of something apart from ourselves acting upon us, or in our lives. Taking bible stories literally can encourage that attitude, for they usually present God as a kind of external agent acting upon a situation, or in the life of an individual. But that’s just presenting God’s action ‘out there’ in more or less concrete terms, so that we can understand something that is really intangible and not necessarily obvious at all.

Another reason we can expect God to speak to us as if God is something out there separate from us, or act in our lives as some kind of agent out there and apart from us, is that we forget how different God is to us. It is because God is so utterly different to us that God is able to speak within us and act within our lives, without at all needing to be something out there that is not us. I’ll put that another way: with other people, because they are like us, they can only speak to us as someone else, someone other. If they act in our lives, it can only be as someone else coming into our space. If I’m sweeping the footpath and someone else comes to do it, the only way I can experience that is by them taking my broom, pushing me aside and beginning to sweep. I cannot sweep the exact part of the footpath with the same broom, if they are. For them to sweep the footpath, I have to stop. For them to have the broom I have to give it up. I will experience them as imposing themselves upon me, infringing upon my space and my activity. But with God, it’s nothing like that. God isn’t like me, God isn’t another version of what I am, so God does not compete with me, or supplant me, when God acts or speaks. God doesn’t take up space in the way I do. For this reason, my love is also God’s love. God loves people through my love, and yet it is still my love.

Writer in spirituality, Henri Nouwen, says that discerning God’s activity requires the discipline of listening to God’s voice in the midst of our concerns, and intentionally allowing time with others to become a space for God. The discipline of listening to God’s voice, involves letting yourself experience communion with God through accepting the way things are. God loves you as you are, so it is through acceptance of what you are that you meet God.

The second discipline required is intentionally allowing time with others to become a space for God. If unity with others is the flip side to unity with God, then engaging with others in ways that bring you together, will therefore provide space for God to be creative in. A simple example of that is a group of people who listen to each other and are willing to share their opinions. One of the best things about such a group is being surprised by what can come out of it.

If union with God is the source of union with other people, then one of the clearest signs of union with God is feeling no animosity towards others. We may want to change them, (if their actions are unjust for example), but we are free of animosity. We are at peace with them. And the same is true regarding ourselves. Peace with ourselves is also clear sign of union with God. Jesus’ wish is that such personal acceptance and peace draw people to the source of all love and life and unity in our universe and that is the very life of God.

Divine recycling

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Festival of the Ascension, 30^th May, 2019

Years ago when my son was young, he had a friend and his sister over to play. My wife was in a fun mood so asked the kids if they wanted to make some slime, which they did. A plastic groundsheet was brought out and the kids slid on it, in the slime. As usually happens when you do things like that, they were eventually so covered in slime that the visitors had to borrow some of our kids’ clothes to go home in. When it was time to go home, my son’s friend said that that day was the best day of his life. And years later he still had fond memories of that day.

Certain events in our lives remain in our memories and we can enjoy reliving them. Photographs are a great aid to that, so that when you look at a photograph of something you were involved in, you re-experience something of that event.

It’s sad when someone you shared a significant event with no longer has the capacity to remember the event. Losing your memory is losing your past. That’s not all bad of course, for example a woman I knew who loved going on outings from her retirement village because she forgot she hated them. But we do keep the past alive and value the past through our memories.

When we face the prospect of our own death we might wonder what people will remember of us. Unless someone builds a statue of us, or we leave some other lasting monument or legacy, it’s unlikely we will be remembered after people who knew us die. Knowing that, can lead us to asking what the significance of our lives is now, if in years to come, we mean nothing to anybody. Are our lives no more significant than a flower which blooms, dies and returns to the earth as compost? The answer is definitely not, and in fact, the significance of the flower too, is far greater than its short life and return to compost. That’s what we’re celebrating today in the festival of the Ascension.

In my humble opinion I don’t think the church has really grasped the significance of Jesus’ ascension to heaven, because all the prayers I could find avoided any reference to Jesus’ bodily lift off. Rather, they focus on Jesus’ arrival at his destination, which is heaven. So I’ll just say a bit about that, because it does offer us something worthwhile, and then I’ll go back to the business about his body rising up to heaven.

For Jesus to make it back to heaven after completing his earthly mission and then sit upon his throne, represents Jesus’ supremacy. There are various ways it’s expressed, such as calling him king, ruler or Lord of the world. Hence St. Paul describes Jesus as being above all social, religious and political power. As Paul sees Jesus as the embodiment of love, he therefore means that love is the supreme power in the world, and nothing else can overshadow it. This means we can trust that ultimately God’s love will win out over oppression and injustice. It is also liberating because it invites us to trust the power of love in our own lives and not be intimidated by those who seek to dominate and control. For this reason, Jesus’ name is above all other names, says St. Paul.

The idea of Jesus rising to heaven to sit at God’s right hand is a way of saying that Jesus is victorious. He’s been given top spot (even his own throne) as a vindication of all that he stood for in his earthly life. Or to put it another way, God awarded Jesus his own throne to say that he was right and good and godly. It’s a sort of divine knighthood, or glamorous way of saying that love is supreme.

Let’s return to the part about Jesus’ bodily rise to heaven, and here we find that the most ridiculous

and hard-to-believe part of the ascension story is the most important part.

Someone asked me whether Jesus took his clothes with him to heaven when he ascended. If not, his disciples must have had a bit of a shock as he rose, but if he did, how could his clothes exist in heaven? These are the sort of questions that arise from the notion of Jesus rising bodily into the sky as he ascended into heaven. I remember once someone preaching about this and telling a joke about Jesus’ disciples hanging on to his feet as he rose in the air, so there was a whole group of them rising up. Strangely, this even more ridiculous idea is an even better representation of what it’s about.

What we have to keep in mind here is that this is a myth. It’s a story, told to convey an idea, and as silly as the story is, it’s the best way to convey what it’s trying to convey, which is that Jesus’ body goes to heaven, meaning it is received into God’s life, and as God is eternal, it means Jesus’ body is plugged into all that means. And what is the body? It’s everything we are, apart from our spirit. As Jesus didn’t leave his spirit behind as he rose to heaven, the myth is saying that everything about us returns to God.

Jesus’ ascension means that the human Jesus returns to God and becomes part of God’s life. As supremely loving, God is absolutely open and therefore receives Jesus into his life, which, if it really is absolutely open, then affects God! Jesus’ humanity therefore becomes part of God, and God is affected by that.

But it’s better than that, and this is where the image of Jesus’ disciples dangling on his feet comes in, Jesus as the one who embraces all humanity, and so takes us all with him. That’s why some of the old hymns speak of us being seated with Jesus on his throne. (We’ve all got our thrones too.) We shall be with him in heaven.

As this a myth, it’s not time-bound and therefore is not just about what happens when we die, however, when we die, our life on earth is complete, so we can say that our life as a whole then is received into God’s life and becomes part of God, but it’s really going on all the time. So the funny image of Jesus rising bodily into heaven is really saying that all that we are and all that we do is constantly being received by God, taken into ‘his’ life and becoming part of God, which then God gives back to the world for God’s purpose. It’s a sort of divine recycling.

What this means is that Christmas, Good Friday, Easter and Ascension are all part of one thing. In fact, it starts with creation. God created the world, so that eventually it could return to God and become part of God, which God would then give back to the world. It’s all one thing. We divide it up into different celebrations so that we can enter into each aspect in slow motion, but it’s about one thing: God’s love creates the world in order to receive back into ‘his life, be affected by it and give back, eternally.

This means that nothing we do is ever lost. Nothing fades to nothingness, because it all is drawn back into God’s life and is thereby given new significance. It’s all reused in some way that is beyond our grasp. This means that that great day of sliding in the slime will never be lost. In some way it will always be part of God and contribute to the world.

A few years ago the American company Disney re-released the film Snow White, which was made in 1937. With the DVD comes computer games using the old footage. Who in 1937 would have thought that such a thing would be possible? No-one would have even imagined such a thing, because DVDs and computers weren’t invented. That’s a really simple example of what the myth of Ascension represents.

Once I received a phone call from someone whose wedding I had celebrated 16 years previously. She wanted to say, on behalf of her husband as well, how much it meant to them and still does, because of what I did for them then. I was just doing my job, but so much more came from that than I realised. This is just an example of what I am talking about, but an ‘earthly’ example, in other words, one limited to this time and space, which God is not.

Sometimes we wonder about the significance of our contribution to the world, and especially those things we do that no-one notices, because they’re not part of our job description, not part of any plan, or our child is too young to even understand what we do for them. Such actions may seem to have no lasting significance, but they do. And if God can receive Good Friday into his life and ‘reuse’ it, and therefore also every other evil action, think how much more God can use the good and loving things we do! Everything about our lives has an eternal significance. Isn’t it nice to think that nothing of those we love who have died has been lost either?

Jesus’ ascension to heaven is even more encompassing than this. Remember the funny image of Jesus’ disciples dangling on his feet as he rises to heaven. Now consider that from an ecological perspective and you end up with the whole of creation hanging on to those who are hanging on to Jesus, because we are connected and are one with all creatures with whom we share our evolutionary history, and even beyond that is the earth from which we sprang, and the solar system and galaxy, back to the big bang. Jesus doesn’t just take us into heaven. He takes everything into heaven. Everything is received by God into God’s life and thereby given an eternal significance, which transcends the present and is wonderfully beyond our comprehension. Not even the flower I referred to earlier is lost. Remember Jesus says that God knows every hair on your head and every sparrow that falls to the ground. And what God knows, God experiences and is affected by.

The Holy Spirit changes our perspective to that of Jesus

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Easter 6, May 26^th 2019

Conversion flows from a changed perspective. A really good example of that is what happened following the release of a photograph taken by an astronaut aboard the first spacecraft to leave the Earth and fly around the Moon (in December 1968). The photograph showed the earth rising above the horizon of the moon. It was the first time human beings had seen the earth from the perspective of outer space. Astronaut Jim Lovell remarked on the contrast between the stark, cratered surface of the Moon, and the Earth, 360,000kms away, saying ‘the vast loneliness up here of the moon is awe-inspiring. It makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space’.

Within 18 months of that photograph being taken, in the USA, the first Earth Day was organised, then followed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and its counterparts in many other countries.

Looking at that photograph can take you through something of the transformational process which resulted in those initiatives. Looking at the earth, appearing as a beautiful blue marble, set against the utter darkness of space and contrasting with the barrenness of the moon, you notice there are no borders. It’s just a whole planet. One home, one shared home. It becomes obvious that we share life with each other, and not with just human beings, so we have to get on with each other and we have to look after the non-human part of life. Something so beautiful and precious shouldn’t be taken for granted. It is no wonder people were inspired to take action aimed at preserving what’s here and enhancing the life of all – including other species of life.

In John’s Gospel, this process of changing perspective is called being born of the Spirit. In today’s gospel passage, we hear Jesus telling his disciples that the Father will send the Holy Spirit, who will teach humanity ‘everything’. This teaching will work in the same way as the astronaut’s photo of the earth worked to transform people, through imparting a new perspective. In fact we can say that that photograph was the work of the Holy Spirit. Seeing the Spirit in this way, helps us get away from a sort of mechanistic understanding of the Spirit’s work, where the Spirit acts like a puppet-master, pulling strings to make things happen. Another way we can describe the Holy Spirit is that it’s the perspective of Jesus. The Spirit therefore transforms the world through imparting the perspective of Jesus into the world. People are changed, as the perspective of Jesus takes hold of them and they begin to see themselves and others in a new way. For the writer of John’s Gospel, the Spirit has set in motion a spiritual revolution, which will eventually change the entire world, in the same way that Jesus’ disciples were changed by his death and resurrection. However, because this occurs at glacial speed, it’s easy to feel that since Jesus rose from death, nothing much has changed.

This week and last week, we have been reading passages from the Book of Revelation about a Holy City coming down from heaven to earth. This strange vision contrasts with what is generally thought to be the Christian view of life after death. Popular thought would have us believe that after we die, we go off to some other place or existence, free from the restrictions of physical life. Here, though, we are given a vision of God transforming the earth, thus bringing to completion the incarnation. It’s about earth and heaven becoming one. It’s a profound concept, but we’re not given any details, just a description of the character of this new world. Rather than trying to figure out exactly what it involves, the best way to take it is like when you set a date to get together with a friend, without knowing

exactly what you’ll do or where you’ll meet. Knowing you’ll get together strengthens your friendship.

The other thing we can take away from the vision of a new earth is that it means the earth, and our whole physical existence in some way, acquires an eternal significance, in the sense of being valued by God and always part of God’s life. Some Christians reject any need to care for the earth and other creatures, on the grounds that the faster we wreck the place, the faster God will remove us to another existence. That view fails to get the point of the biblical visions, which is to change our perspective, so that we allow ourselves to see the earth and its creatures in a new way, from the perspective of Jesus, which is always the perspective of love. So, even though the biblical visions of a new earth seem to be out of this world, they are not. They are about transforming what is, not escaping from it. In this way, the Spirit is seeking to transform us from within, so that we want to be involved in transforming the world.

As an example of how ‘worldly’ that transformation is to be, last week’s passage from the Book of Revelation finished off with the promise of free water for all. There are two meanings to that. One is that everyone gets what they need. The other is that the economy is open for all to earn a living from. At the time of writing, the Roman Empire controlled trade across the water (specifically the Mediterranean Sea). In place of that, there will be free movement of trade for all, so the vision includes economic equality. These visions therefore are holistic, in that they hold all aspects of life together. As we try to deal with today’s problems, it is apparent that the Holy Spirit has begun to transform the world, because more and more we are seeing things as a whole, and how what occurs in one part of the world affects other parts of the world too, or how one aspect of life impinges upon another. More and more we are taking into account how the economic, social, religious, political and environmental aspects of life are all connected. That is the perspective of Jesus: love, which embraces all and every aspect of life. We still have a way to go though, for example, our treatment of refugees: we can just protect ourselves from being overrun by desperate people, or we can see it as a worldwide issue, which all nations need to cooperate on. Simply diverting people elsewhere doesn’t solve the issue.

Jesus also describes the Holy Spirit as an Advocate. One way to understand what he means is to contrast it with its opposite role, namely, the Accuser, which is what the Satan means in scripture. The Satan accuses people of being bad – as against God, against others, against what is right. So the Satan is the perspective which sets us apart from others. To see it in action, we just have to look at ourselves when we see ourselves as good and others bad. It can also work the other way around though, so that we see ourselves as bad. One of the most personal ways we can experience that, is to live according to others’ expectations, or what we perceive their expectations to be. Sometimes life is busy and demanding, because we live in a world with so much going on, but sometimes we’re trying to achieve too much because we’re living according to others’ agendas. We feel bad if we haven’t done everything that’s expected of us. That’s the message of the Accuser – that we are not worthy, that we are failures. Contrast that with the voice of the Holy Spirit, which is the voice of Jesus, the voice of love. The Spirit never says we are not good enough, instead, the Spirit tells us we are accepted as we are, loved as we are. Do you know there is no version of you that God would love any more than God loves you now? Therefore, you should relax into God and enjoy being yourself. Share in God’s enjoyment of you.

As Psalm 23 says, love and goodness is pursuing us, all the days of our lives. The Holy Spirit is pursuing us, working in the world, working within us, to transform our perspective, so that we see others and see ourselves as God sees us, and as God sees them, thus our actions become more and more cooperation with God’s action in the world.

The nature of the world derives from the nature of God as communion

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Trinity Sunday, 16^th June 2019

Christmas Island is home to about 90 million Red Crabs. They are a ‘keystone’ species, in that they eat seeds, seedlings and other things from the floor of the rainforest, keeping it clear, so the rainforest flourishes under their ‘management’. A few decades ago, scientists discovered the crabs were dying off, because Yellow Crazy Ants were killing the crabs. As a result, weeds and other plants growing on the rainforest floor increased, having a detrimental effect on the trees. Also, in return for sugar they produced, the Crazy Ants protected the scale insects which sucked on the tree sap. The scale insects increased in number, so the population of Crazy Ants grew, and so on, and then the trees began to die off. Along with that, without the Red Crabs to eat them, the numbers of invading Giant African Snails increased. This all shows that relationships between creatures are integral to their flourishing or not.

It’s not clear how Yellow Crazy Ants got to Christmas Island. They may have got there through human activity, but whether or not, they do remind us of the affect introducing a species to an ecosystem can have. We do well to pay attention to those verses in today’s psalm (8) which say ‘..you (God) have made us little less than gods..you have given us dominion over your handiwork and have put all things in subjection beneath our feet’. As elsewhere in the Bible, having dominion means using your power to care responsibly. An example of that is Kirsti Abbot, an ant specialist, who has worked with many others on Christmas Island to counteract the damage from the Yellow Crazy Ants.

Interestingly, Kirsti Abbott also worked in French Polynesia to help eradicate Crazy Ants. Her experience of going there shows that relationships are also integral to who we are as human beings. Kirsti went to the islands as a young scientist from New Zealand. The islanders welcomed her, but they struggled to relate to her as a single individual, away from family. As her boyfriend accompanied her, the islanders decided she was his wife. When she took her mother, on a later trip, she became ‘Peg’s daughter’. For the islanders, there was no such thing as an individual in their own right. Kirsti was only a person in relation to others, something we tend to forget in our individualistic culture.

The last American election campaign provided a perfect example of individualism, in Donald Trump, who prides himself on his own achievements, as a self-made man, while ignoring all those he has relied upon to get him where he is. The truth is we all depend on others to be what we are. Think of those who make it possible for you to do just what you’re doing right now, in terms of providing this service, providing your food, clothing and so on. No-one is really self-made or a pure individual.

If this relational interdependence that is integral to nature and humanity is overlooked, there is a price to pay, and we see that in the suffering of many people and creatures. Although you may have not been fully aware of the situation of Yellow Crazy Ants on Christmas Islands or the cultural ways of establishing identity in French Polynesia, what I have highlighted probably isn’t all that new to you. The reason I wanted to draw your attention to that is so that you can see how human nature and the rest of the natural world, exhibit something which for Christianity is at the heart of life, namely mutual relation. Today’s celebration of Trinity Sunday is about that. Not only do we remind ourselves that God is the power of mutual relation, but we also recommit ourselves to living in ways that reflect that in the world.

If we look to the life and teachings of Jesus, we see a wisdom there, in which human flourishing depends on mutual relations. Not only do we need each other, but we thrive by sharing resources and contributing to the common good. This morning’s reading from the Book of Proverbs speaks of this same wisdom as being present from the very beginning of the world.

Belief in God as Trinity is a central idea in Christianity. It sums up everything we believe in, but it’s incomprehensible. Superannuation is also incomprehensible, but only to the average person. If you apply yourself, you can actually understand it. The Trinity is not like that – and that should come as no surprise, because it’s God, who is incomprehensible, because God is not a ‘thing’ that can be grasped, but is underneath or behind all that can be grasped and is actually reaching out to ‘grasp’ us, which is what the formula describing God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is saying.

Jesus referred to God as Father. In his time, the level of biological knowledge meant that the Father was considered the source of one’s life. The mother was thought to be merely a container for growing the life the father had implanted. But the term father also implied intimate loving care and for a male, inheritance, both genetic and material (which in sum, meant the whole of the father’s life was passed on to the son). All this was reflected in how Jesus talked about God, as creator (i.e. as behind all that is and all that is becoming), as caring (i.e. as loving the world and trustworthy) and as intimate to him, but also to everyone and everything (i.e. therefore as accessible). As Jesus talked about God as Father and demonstrated a specially close relationship to God, the early Christians spoke of Jesus as the Son of God. It also reflected their experience of Jesus as the flesh and blood presence of the Creator, which meant they didn’t see him as a representative of God, but actually God, so they called him God the Son. That’s like a star and the energy coming out of the star. They’re kind of the same thing, but different. We also talk about Holy Spirit, who may be considered as the energy within and between us, which makes us act and see things as God does. We can speak of the Holy Spirit as that which empowered Jesus, and we can also speak of Holy Spirit as the expression of the Creator’s will. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, therefore, represents God our source, God alongside us and God within us.

Although mysterious, God is not an impersonal force. We speak of God as three persons, meaning God is personal, but not in the sense that you and I are persons. In fact, the term person, as applied to God, means what it meant in ancient Greek culture, which refers to the mask an actor wore. In a way then, to speak of God as three persons is misleading, but it’s the best definition we have. The point is that when talking about God as Trinity, every definition begins to break down at some point and become misleading. The point of those definitions is to give our experiences of God a label, and to help us know what God is like for us. The Trinity is not an exact representation, but a model of God, which explains why we experience God certain ways, and why particular ways of relating to one another are life-giving, but others are not. For example, if life flows from God, and God is not an isolated entity, but a communion of three, then there will be more life in relationships that are of a mutual nature, than in relationships in which power is unequal. In countries run by dictators, in families run by fathers with absolute say in what goes, in marriages where decisions are not shared, in churches where ‘Father knows best’ – with those types of power arrangements, life will be diminished, even suppressed and deprived. That is why St Paul speaks of the necessity of interdependence between members for churches to be life-giving. And that’s supposed to be a model for humanity.

If this communion, community or dance, which we call God, is at the heart of all that is, then nothing and no-one exists in and by itself, or themselves. Everything exists and is interdependent, within this relationship called God.

The great gift of the Holy Spirit is love

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Pentecost, 9^th June 2019

Imagine being able to love your enemy, or at least be able to get on with them. The Holy Spirit makes that possible. Imagine being able to work with someone who rubs you up the wrong way, or be civil to someone who hurt you. The Holy Spirit makes that possible.

The great gift of the Holy Spirit is the ability to love. The Spirit enables us to love in situations where love seems impossible, because the Spirit is not driven by what stands in the way of love. It is absolutely different to the spirit which dominates the world, driving us into rivalry and setting us apart from each other.

Today we read the account from Acts of the day of Pentecost. It began as the Christianisation of a Jewish festival which celebrated the emergence of new crops from the earth. For the early Christians, it became a celebration of a ‘new’ spirit – especially manifesting itself through the energy which drove them out of hiding after the crucifixion of Jesus, to take their story out into the world.

Their mission was not to make everyone Christian. It was to set them free from what dehumanises, and therefore, free up God-given creative energies, such as the passion for loving relationships, compassion for the needy, and joy at creating life.

Pentecost is special because it represents a turning point in discipleship for those who followed Jesus closely. They went from bumbling idiots to inspiring leaders. When I say they were bumbling idiots, I don’t mean that in an intellectual sense. It’s not that their IQ’s were too low. The gospels kind of present them that way, as often they just don’t get what Jesus is on about, but it’s not about lacking brains. Similarly, often their commitment to Jesus’ Way was weak. Peter is the classic example, promising Jesus he’s with him 100%, but when the crunch came, he ran away. It’s quite normal though. We are like that too and that’s why woven throughout the gospel stories, there’s a mixture of failure and success when it comes to Jesus’ disciples. The point is that before the crucifixion, they didn’t really get what Jesus was on about, but afterwards, they did, which means often the stories can be read from both points of view. The reason Jesus’ disciples didn’t get what he was on about, was that their understanding was formed by the very thing Jesus was trying to dismantle. Until it was dismantled, it would keep shaping the way they saw things, their values and behaviour. They would never get Jesus and would never really be able to follow him, least of all take his message into the world, until the dismantling. And that’s what his crucifixion was.

Jesus’ crucifixion was a double revelation. It was a revelation about the nature of humanity and about the nature of God. What it revealed about humanity was that humanity was driven by rivalry. By showing us that about ourselves, Jesus sets us free from it. Just like when someone points out some silly way you’re behaving and you stop – you’re set free from it. The important thing is that the rivalry we are driven by is an entire perspective, and therefore it’s not so much the way we see things, but what determines the way we see things. It’s like if you put sunglasses with brown shades on, everything looks different. Looking at the world through the perspective of rivalry shapes everything, even the way we feel. To see that, consider two similar situations: one experienced through one perspective and another through a different perspective. The first is a two year old who refuses to share her cake with me. I consider her young and still to learn about sharing, so I am not personally offended. In fact, I find her selfishness amusing. Compared to that is the situation of a forty year old bloke driving his car in the lane next to me, but slightly behind. Flashing my indicator, to show I want to move into his lane, he speeds up and won’t let me in. He makes me feel angry. The joy I feel when he gets trapped behind a car turning right, as I zip ahead and into his lane, shows that he has become my enemy, or more accurately, I have made him my enemy. Similar situations, two people acting selfishly, but not only do I think of them differently, and behave differently towards them, but I even feel differently about them. All because of the different perspectives with which I approach them. As far as I am concerned, that bloke should more considerate. What I don’t realise is that his wife died yesterday, and he’s not able to think of others at this time. The point is my perspective makes all the difference.

In the second instance, with the forty year old bloke, my perspective was one of rivalry – competition, survival by excluding the other. Jesus’ crucifixion reveals this as the basic perspective which drives our thinking, feeling and behaving. We’re a bit familiar with the crucifixion, so let’s look at similar circumstances. An often-asked question is ‘How did a Christian nation, such as Germany end up doing such horrendous things during WW2?’ or we might ask ‘how can a caring world let a little boy fleeing from the war in his homeland end up drowned on a European beach?’ It’s exactly the same mechanism at work when we find ourselves satisfied to be ahead of some inconsiderate driver on the road. It’ s the same mechanism at work when we find ourselves comparing ourselves to how well others are doing, or whether our clothes are up to their standard. Or when we worry about being inferior to others. It is the perspective, the mechanism, or ethos, underneath all that, which is put out there for us to see in Jesus’ crucifixion. It’s God saying ‘this is what you do’. And if you look at Jesus, you’ll see what it does to others and what it does to yourself. That’s what I mean by Jesus trying to dismantle the perspective of rivalry.

The disciples still don’t get it though. When Jesus dies, they interpret that through the perspective of rivalry, which means they see it as him losing the fight. When he is raised from death, they are embarrassed, because in their weakness, they abandoned him, leaving him without support, and so they played a part in him losing the fight. It is only when he tells them that that doesn’t matter, (in other words, he forgives them) and he has never held that against them, that they finally ‘understand’ that there was no fight, and that is what Jesus has been trying to teach them all along: there is no fight, no battle, no rivalry in him. Life is not about that. In experiencing that being forgiven, Jesus’ disciples gained a new perspective – the perspective of Jesus, which is what we call the Holy Spirit. It is what drove Jesus all along.

Pentecost celebrates that acquiring of the new perspective by Jesus’ disciples – from then on, they would see how much humanity was driven by rivalry, and with that way of seeing, could begin to let themselves undo that way of living and tell others about it too. They weren’t trying to make everyone like them – that would be continuing to operate out of rivalry, where you need people to be like you, or do as you wish. No, they had been ‘taken hold’ of by a Spirit which was totally opposed to that.

In the account of Pentecost from the Acts of the Apostles, those gathered are able to understand one another, despite speaking different languages. The reason is they share the same perspective. It’s just like when two people get married. They are different individuals and yet work well together because they share the same perspective, which is of love, not rivalry. Notice that the people gathered, do not need to give up their distinctiveness. The Spirit energises distinctiveness. Rivalry smothers it. Lastly, in the Acts account, we hear of the Spirit pouring out and being like a fire. What we should take away from that is not to see it as like a substance that you can get a certain amount of, but as energy, which creates, through setting free, affirming, inspiring, igniting passion, in short, through the gift of love.

Loving is more valuable than believing

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Easter 5, 19^th May 2019

Some years ago in Melbourne there was a terrible tragedy when a wall collapsed and killed some people. Seeing footage on the news, something that stood out was that lots of people passing by rushed to help. The same was true the following week, when a clothing factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing hundreds of people.

All of those people united to act together. Compare that to if you got all those people together and asked them where they stand with regard to one another in terms of their beliefs. Even after years, they probably still would not have worked it out.

In the church we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that our beliefs matter most and what we do is secondary, yet, if on the receiving end of help, we aren’t too worried about why someone helps us. If a hungry person receives food from someone, I doubt it would concern them whether the giver is motivated by belief in Allah or Jesus, or no-one, for that matter.

Today from John’s gospel, we hear some of Jesus’ farewell message to his disciples. He leaves them with one instruction: love one another. Nothing about what they should believe. (It should be noted that throughout his gospel, John lays great emphasis on believing in Jesus, but he means giving oneself actively to Jesus, in the sense of living his way, which is love.)

Jesus says that people will know we are his disciples if we love one another. To me that suggests that anyone or anything is one with God, if there is love.

We can also understand Jesus to be saying that it is proper for his disciples to live in love because it is consistent with the one they follow. In the same way, it was proper for Jesus to live in love, for it is consistent with the One he incarnated. This is how we end up with our beliefs of Christianity – they are extrapolated from experience and actions. Jesus told his followers what to do and that implies certain things about him, which implies certain things about God. Hence, for example, the belief that God is trinity is nothing more than an extrapolation of Jesus’ commandment to love. If we are to love, it’s because God is love.

I’m telling you this to show that while beliefs are important, they are secondary to actions. Living in love is more important than believing that God is love, but believing that God is love sets parameters, or shows us in which direction to look for God and therefore to know how to act. This means we don’t have to get too worried about whether we believe the correct thing or not, and our beliefs, dogmas, creedal statements, words we pray etc. are secondary to the fact we are praying or opening ourselves up to the divine life that is reaching out to us.

Some churches define themselves in terms of their beliefs. On their websites they list their beliefs. (I think if we did that on our parish website we might need a number of pages to contain all the differences.) Such an approach to Christianity defines what you are by what you believe. You stand with others who hold the same beliefs and stand apart from those who don’t. In contrast, a different approach is to define yourselves in terms of relationship: you are defined by whom and what you are in relationship with. In an immediate sense we are in relationship with other Christians, perhaps first of all, in relationship with other Anglicans, but then in a wider sense we are in relationship with all other human beings, and wider still, we are in relationship with all creation. At the heart of it all is God, who sets the parameters.

To me that is a much better way of defining who and what we are, and more in keeping with Jesus’

commandment to love, or live as God is. If God is love, or communion, then so are we, if we are true to what God creates us to be.

Back to belief then, if belief is secondary to the call to love, we should treat our beliefs more lightly than we sometimes do. For a start, if they don’t lead to loving others and loving ourselves, then there’s something wrong. We haven’t arrived at the correct understanding, and so need to work more at it (with help), or let it rest for awhile. So, for example, if the belief in the virgin birth doesn’t lead to greater love, then perhaps we don’t need to worry about it, or leave it be. The important thing is to remember that like all our beliefs, they aren’t ends in themselves. They are all to lead us closer to God and so to love. Whether or not Mary was a virgin has no value in itself, when it comes to faith.

I saw a cartoon on Facebook recently, in which Jesus was speaking to a group of people, saying ‘the difference between you and me is that you use scripture to determine what love is, whereas I use love to determine what scripture is’. Making public statements about who is going to hell would be an example of using scripture to determine what love is. As followers of Jesus, we should pay heed to the lesson he provides to two disciples on the road to Emmaus on Easter Day. As they walk together, he teaches them that love is the key to interpreting scripture. If a text of scripture does not reveal that God is love, then it needs to be interpreted in a wider sense than is immediately apparent.

The problem with belief being considered more important than love comes to the fore in our worship, where it seems to acquire greater importance that it deserves. For example, when we say the creed, it might seem that we are expressing who we are and what we are on about through what God is like, but that’s not what it’s meant to be. It’s meant to be a putting into words our experience of God as love and God’s call to us to live in love too. The trouble is that we keep using words and phrases that were appropriate a long time ago, but which we wouldn’t use today, to say the same things.

Today we don’t hear Jesus telling us to love everyone, but to love those in our faith community. Elsewhere he tells us to love everyone and it’s implied anyway. But here Jesus directs us to start with those around us. It’s easy to love humanity in general. Harder is to love those we actually share our lives with (family, friends, neighbours, work colleagues etc.) We also don’t get instructions on exactly what loving others entails. Jesus leaves it for us to work that out.

If we give our heart to our faith, it is because we see value in doing so, and it is natural to want to share that experience with others. That is the work of evangelism or seeking to convert others. Maybe we feel uncomfortable admitting we want to do that, but I think we do want to convert others, for what we’re talking about here is not getting people to hold particular beliefs, but to make love the centre of their lives, or to realise that the love which is at the centre of their lives is precisely what Christianity is about. Beliefs, dogmas and creeds are just attempts to express that, and none of them are perfect.

Jesus calls us not to orthodoxy, which is right belief, but to orthopraxis, which is right practice, or living out the truth, and as Jesus tells us, the truth is that love is the way to life and to God, because it is of God and from God.

Identity and Renewal in Christ

Reflection for Easter 4 2019 based on John Bell Workshops

The title for the Seasons of the Spirit material for this Sunday is Identity of Resistance. The authors explain the theme in this opening paragraph:

“Scripture links our identity to the identity of God. If we are made in the image and likeness of God, as Genesis tells us, then the image we have of God matters a great deal. If we perceive God as a controlling patriarch, this ideology shapes our identity. If, however, our image of God is of one who overturns the status quo, disturbs the tower builders and those who insist on a monolithic language and culture, we are more likely to develop an identity that resists systems that oppress. The resurrection of Christ is God’s response to the domination of Rome and therefore shapes the character of all who live as faithful disciples of Christ.”

At first I felt a bit uncomfortable with that radical and political view of the resurrection, and with the title Identity of Resistance, which I modified to “Identity and Renewal in Christ”. However, as I think about the uncompromising statement of Jesus that he and the Father are one, which leads to people wanting to stone him as a heretic, I admit that the courage to state one’s identity in relationship to God and in resistance to no belief or mistaken belief, is an important aspect of what it means to follow Christ. In the early church, even the proclamation that “Jesus is Lord,” challenged the view that the Roman emperor was the sole authority and divine. The very word “gospel” was taken from the propaganda announcements of empire, and its use was subverted to imply that here is the real good news, deliberately counter-cultural to that of empire. Are we as followers of Christ called to maintain our identity in the face of rejection and the pressures of culture, just as Jesus, Stephen or Paul were prepared to face the stones thrown by their opponents, and the punishments meted out by the Roman empire?

The issues of identity, resistance and renewal were key themes of the workshops John Bell gave in Adelaide and that Katrina, Sonya and I attended. Using those themes as a focus, let me tell you some of what he said and what we all sang. I think John Bell would agree with a lot of the statements made by the Seasons of the Spirit commentators. There was a very thought provoking segment in the workshops called “Singing our way into and out of belief”, in which John was showing that we believe what we sing, and the effect of what we have sung early in our lives hangs over into later life, if we don’t question the images those songs planted in our memories. He told us about a man who had trouble coping with the idea that Jesus was indignant in a Scripture story. John pointed out various places in which Jesus spoke angrily, but the man couldn’t seem to get past the picture planted in his mind from childhood hymns. The man had grown up with hymns that promoted the image of “gentle Jesus meek and mild”, a Jesus who was passive and silent, as in one hymn with lines that read: “yet no ungentle murmuring word/escaped thy silent tongue.” Even Away in a Manger talks about “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes”, while Once in Royal David’s City has a line in the original that reads “Christian children all must be/mild, obedient, good as he.” Such a passive Jesus unwilling to express human emotion isn’t an image of someone fully human, and modelling ourselves on such an image would surely lead to unhealthy repression. Such an ethereal, emotionally distant Jesus would be very much at odds with the way in which the Celts valued so highly the incarnation of Jesus into the earthy ordinariness of lives like theirs, as John described in the section on Celtic spirituality. No wonder John Bell writes words like these:

Jesus Christ is raging,

raging in the streets,

where injustice spirals

and real hope retreats.

Listen, Lord Jesus,

I am angry too.

In the kingdom’s causes

let me rage with you.”

That verse clearly makes the point that our identity as Christians is linked to the identity of Christ, and if we have a wrong impression of his identity, our own sense of self is affected, potentially robbing us of the ability to be transparent about our emotions, and reducing our motivation to act for justice.

Justice was an important theme in most of the sessions. The Wednesday night began with a session entitled Jesus, Justice and Joy. We sang an early song which begins with the verse Heaven shall not wait

for the poor to lose their patience,

the scorned to smile, the despised to find a friend:

Jesus is Lord:

he has championed the unwanted;

in him injustice confronts its timely end.

Justice for women, refugees and the environment all featured in that first session. One of the most moving songs, entitled If, and as yet unpublished, confronted the unwillingness of the British government to find places for Syrian refugees, drawing a parallel between their situation and that of Mary with her child Jesus forced to seek asylum in Egypt.

The second half of the Wednesday night session was entitled Sing with the World, and included the poignant song from Mexico which we sang before the gospel. I chose it because it seemed to fit with the story of Tabitha, the woman devoted to good works and acts of charity, who died but through Peter’s prayer was returned to life to continue her ministry with the widows:

When we are living, we are in the Lord,

and when we’re dying, we are in the Lord

for in our living and in our dying

we belong to God, we belong to God.

Each day allows us to decide for good,

loving and serving as we know we should;

in thankful giving, in hopeful living,

we belong to God, we belong to God.

John Bell suggested that we need to look at why we sing the songs we do, and whether we should sing songs that give a mistaken image of God or Jesus from an earlier cultural perspective. In fact, he challenged us in general to be more aware of who we are and why we do what we do. He challenged us to be more self-critical about our consumerism, to make conscious choices for the good of all, not to go along mindlessly with consumption which is inflated by advertizing for the sake of economic growth, but which is achieved at the expense of poor workers and the environment. He urged us to be transparent about our use of money and described the commitment made by members of the Iona community to tithe, but also each year to get together with a group of other Iona members and talk about their choices in the use of money during the year, so as to be accountable for what they have done, and to make decisions that will benefit others in the future. He asked us to consider why money is such a difficult issue to have a frank conversation about, both in social circles and in churches. He asked why churches attended by relatively well-off people still see themselves as financially inadequate. He challenged us not to believe or spread rumours about ourselves, such as “We’re struggling, or we’re ageing.” As he said, who would then want to join such a church? He also said that God doesn’t practice ageism – look at Abraham and Sarah.

He also challenged us in our churches to think about what our buildings are saying to us and to outsiders, and what we want them to say. He described some congregations who had taken the risk to make conscious changes in how they used their buildings, or sold their buildings and rented space in the community. Congregations started to grow: one because they enabled others to see who they are through pictures on the outside of their windowless front wall, others because their use of space and hospitality encouraged more community and togetherness. He gave a couple of illustrations of how important it is for members of church communities to talk at depth to one another. He told the story of a retreat for church elders he was asked to conduct. When he asked the minister what he wanted him to do, he said, “Just get them talking to one another.” So John Bell decided to encourage shared talk about their faith journeys. He gave an example by dividing his own faith story into 4 sections, and telling a story to illustrate each of the stages. He asked them to jot down on paper their own 4 stages of faith, and make a note of a story that would illustrate each. Then he asked them to go away in groups of 3 or 4 to share their stories. After the morning session, one elder came to him quite moved. He said he was in a group with a man he had always seen as an adversary. As a result of hearing the man’s stories, the elder said to John Bell, “I never knew anything before about his life or his faith. Hearing that has completely changed my attitude to him. I can’t thank you enough for enabling that to happen.”

I wonder what it is that matters most about out identity, and our resistance to the unjust or unthinking behaviours of our society. We know the voice of Jesus, but what is he saying to us specifically. What are we saying to each other and the community? To what new life are we being called and what prayer or awareness or sharing might awaken that life?

Reflection for Easter 3 2019 – Rev’d Barb Messner

Last Sunday in his daily email, Richard Rohr wrote: “The human soul is being gradually readied so that actual intimacy and partnership with the Divine are the result.” Later he qualified this by saying: “It is important not to confuse divine union with human perfection. The choice for union is always from God’s side; our response is always and forever partial and feeble.

Jesus came to give us the courage to trust and allow our inherent union with God, and he modelled it for us in this world. Union is not a place we go to later—if we are good; union is the place from which we come, the place from which we’re called to live now. We wasted centuries confusing union with personal perfection. Union is God’s choice for us in our very imperfect world. Divine Love has no trouble loving imperfect things! That is just our human problem. If God could only love perfect things, God would have nothing to do.”

The stories of Peter and Paul we heard today are revealing examples of Rohr’s statement that “Divine Love has no trouble loving imperfect things!” Peter, after years of following Jesus, and being given responsibility as a leader among the disciples, denied three times that he ever knew Jesus. In that moment, fear and powerlessness defeated all his good intentions to stand by Jesus and lay down his life for him, as he offered in John 13:37 at the last supper. Jesus warned Peter that he could not follow him in what was about to unfold, and that he would deny Jesus three times before the cock crowed. Jesus also said “but you will follow me afterward.” The passage we heard from John 21 today is the beautiful story of how the resilience to follow Jesus even unto death was restored to Peter in that life-changing encounter with Jesus on the beach. Although Peter has experienced the empty tomb, and the resurrection appearances of Jesus to the disciples in the upper room, a more personal and searching encounter with Jesus is needed to lift Peter from his bitter remorse at his weakness and failure. He has suffered a humiliating blow to his ego strength. While he could wave a sword, his courage was high, but Jesus told him to put the sword back in its sheath, healed the wound it had made and let himself be taken without a fight. That left Peter powerless to act on Jesus’ behalf, and without any ability to control the situation, Peter found his fear overwhelmed all that he thought he could do. Even in the wake of the resurrection, Peter seems to have wanted to retreat into an earlier and simpler life, out with his mates fishing, doing what he once could do well. Perhaps he felt as though he had lost the new identity that he forged in following Jesus, and was searching in the past for who he once was. Significantly when Jesus asks three times “Do you love me?” he prefaces each question with Peter’s birth name, Simon son of John, not the identity Jesus gave him, Peter the rock on which the church would be built. In this encounter Peter reclaims this identity by reaffirming his love and commitment to Jesus and being commissioned by Jesus to the new phase of his calling to follow and care for others.

There are so many significant aspects to this encounter that lead up to the crux of it, the three questions that match Peter’s three denials. The companions on the boat are an interesting mix: James and John, the other members of Jesus’ leadership team, are also identified by their family and fishing connection, the sons of Zebedee. Then there’s Thomas who has just had his own life-changing personal encounter with Jesus, and Nathaniel, who features in the first chapter of John’s gospel, and who Jesus recognizes as “an Israelite in whom there is no deceit”. There are two others not named, making seven in all, the number of days of creation. Significantly, the erstwhile fishermen have caught nothing all night, but when Jesus appears just after daybreak on the beach and suggests that they throw the nets to the right side, the nets are filled. Trying to return to the past is empty; only in responding to Jesus will they be fulfilled. This miraculous catch of 153 fish is reminiscent of the incident in chapter 5 of Luke’s gospel, when a similar miraculous catch forms part of the calling of Simon and his fishing partners, James and John. In chapter 21, it is the catch that prompts the beloved disciple to recognize that “It is the Lord.”, the risen Christ, their Lord and Lord of creation Another almost humorous but symbolic detail is that Peter is naked on the boat but puts his clothes on before he jumps into the water to swim to meet Jesus on the beach. This covering up impulse reminds me of Adam and Eve, who, knowing they have transgressed, hide themselves from God because they are ashamed of their nakedness. God provides them with clothes before they are sent forth from the garden. Peter is one step ahead of them in going willingly to meet with Jesus, but he still has the impulse to “cover up”. Peter is embarrassed by his failure, but all Jesus focuses on is his love and commitment, and the renewal of Peter’s calling to leadership in the early church. Failure has not disqualified him for that role; instead it has prepared him to lean on God’s grace, not his own strength.

Paul is another key figure in the early church, but only after he was forced to confront the bankruptcy of all his striving for religious perfection, and the persecution of Christians he had undertaken in the attempt to ensure that perfection. Once again, the life changing realization comes in the form of a searching question from the risen Jesus: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” The naming is significant because it is a name that Paul will leave behind, along with who he thought he was, a Pharisee of the Pharisees. The question brings him up short, forcing him to relinquish all his attempts to make God in his own image and to control others by force when they question that image. One thing I find particularly thought provoking in Jesus’ encounters with Peter and Paul is that Jesus makes no mention of sin, no accusation that they are guilty of weakness or arrogance and should repent. Neither is there any overt offering of forgiveness from Jesus, although it is implicit in his presence with them. As Paul experienced physically on the road to Damascus, Jesus confronts them with a light that enables them to search their souls, and to realize that it is not their imperfection or their search for perfection that matters, but their relationship with the risen Lord, and their commitment to the vocation for which he commissions them. Peter is told to tend and feed the sheep and lambs, in other words to take on the pastoral responsibility for a Christian community. Paul is told “Get up and enter the city and you will be told what you are to do.” How many times in his ministry did he enter a city, knowing there would be those who opposed him and might arrest or attack him, and yet he would do what he had to do. His compelling mission was to speak and write of the light and love that had found him and shaken him out of his sense of worth and power into acknowledgement of weakness and vulnerability made sufficient through God’s grace. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul speaks of his “thorn in the flesh” which keeps him from” being too elated”. When he appeals to the Lord that it would leave him, God says, “My grace is sufficient for you; for power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul responds, “So I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” This is the paradoxical nature of our acceptance of our imperfection: the space taken up by our ego is reduced, and into that space flows God’s grace, which awakens our love and commitment to Christ and is sufficient for what we are called to do.

God wants to reshape our desire

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Easter 3, 5^th 2019

Have you ever come to the realisation that you did something purely because you were caught up in a group mentality? Discovering an old photograph, it would explain why you thought flairs and a crocheted top seemed so cool at the time. Going along with a group trend like that is fairly harmless, but it’s not always harmless, for example, sharing racist jokes. They may be funny within the group, but they perpetuate prejudice.

Despite pressure to blend in with the groups we belong to, in our culture, going against the crowd, or going against the status quo, can also be applauded, and individuals gain a sense of being unique and so special, through doing so. They feel they’re different to others, who need to fit in, but they’re not really. That’s because the process which drives people to act and think alike, can also capture and redirect that desire to stand out, resulting in the individual simply belonging to an alternative crowd.

The reason it’s hard to escape from some form of thinking and acting as others do, is that it’s fundamental to what being human is, and that is, that we are who we are, only by acting as others do. From infancy onwards, we are taught to act and think by others. That’s actually a great thing, because it means every individual doesn’t have to invent being a person for themselves. We copy others, with some of our own variations. It also means that our desires are, more or less, shaped by others. Not our biological drives, but the form they take. For example, my biological drive to eat, is shaped by the group, or culture I grew up in. I don’t desire whale blubber though, because I didn’t grow up in Iceland. I have a biological drive to quench my thirst, but because I become what I am by going along with others, that drive has been directed, or shaped, into a desire for water with tons of sugar and bubbles added. That’s why, I sometimes desire Coke – especially when I’m also desiring the feeling of freedom which comes with having fun at the beach with other good looking young people. The process through which we acquire our desires is neither good or bad, but it’s necessary. What we end up desiring isn’t always good, though. And we are not always aware of that. In fact, the gospels tell us we are generally ignorant of that.

Jesus’ crucifixion reveals to those who killed him, something they are ignorant of, which is that their desires drive them to think and act violently. The gospels tell us that we’re all caught up in some version of the same thing, in other words, much of the way we think and act, leads to violence in some form towards others and ourselves. We don’t see it, because from the perspective of the way we have been formed to think and act, we are good people. We’re caring, law-abiding and kind.

Some people make the mistake of thinking that being Christian is about being good. Most people know that’s fairly boring though. The reason being Christian is not about being good, is that in trying to be good, we just invent an alternate means of being violent. That’s obvious in Christians who condemn others for being divorced, or following another religion, for example. But I can easily be the same. I am very tolerant of divorce and those who follow other religions, but how do I think and act towards those Christians who are not? Even though I do it in very acceptable ways, and after all, it is judgemental, cruel people we’re talking about, I will just be violent towards them in ways that are more subtle, so that I appear, to others and myself, to be different.

Yes, we need to become good, but it’s not our job to become good. It’s God’s business to make us good. The more we take charge of that process, the less successful we’ll be and the more blind to it

we’ll be.

Today we read two stories about individuals (Saul a.k.a. Paul and Peter), whose task will be to take the gospel into the world. The 153 fish caught in the gospel story represent the whole of creation, indicating their mission is bigger than converting people to Christianity. Yes, they are to convert people, but only so they will open themselves to something which will reshape their desires. This is the conversion experience, through which God makes people into good people. Although these stories involve Saul and Peter, they are about us too.

The conversion experience begins with the individual being made aware of their truth, something we don’t find easy. When Peter is fishing and hears Jesus has arrived on the beach, he jumps into the sea to hide – just like the man and woman in the Garden of Eden, who hide from God after eating the forbidden fruit. The truth is we desire the wrong things. We are caught up in a collective mentality which leads us to think and behave in ways that are not good. When Jesus asks Peter if he loves him, it’s partly a rhetorical question. Jesus knows Peter’s love for him is fickle. Saul’s experience of the risen Christ is similar. Jesus asks why he is persecuting him. The gospels assume we persecute Jesus. It assumes we don’t love him, because our desire is off.

Saul’s conversion begins with him being blinded, which reflects his true state –that he can’t see how his desires lead him to a destructive life. Later, when scales fall from his eyes, he begins to see. For Peter, his truth must be exposed to him, like peeling back layers of an onion, a process which Jesus begins by asking Peter if he loves him more than the others present. Jesus is asking him where his loyalty lies, who he loves more. So Peter is having to look from whom, or what, does he acquire his identity? We too need to look at what or who is most significant in defining what we are. What or who plays a role in shaping our desires? Do we desire certain things in life because a group of which we are a part encourages us to? Do we desire certain things because it will win the approval of people we value, or perhaps the approval of people in general? Are we part of a collective, or culture, which encourages us to desire rising above others, or acquiring more than others, in case we miss out? Belonging to such groups is just part of being human, but remaining within them becomes a form of idolatry. We worship them, in the sense of ascribing them great worth and allowing them so much influence on our identity and desires, which plays out in our attitudes and behaviour. Jesus repeats his question to Peter, because he knows that wrenching yourself away from false idols takes time and effort. On the third asking, Peter is grieved, not because Jesus asked him a third time, but because it’s so hard to do so.

Peter always saw himself as a faithful follower of Jesus. He was deluded about himself and so was shocked when his true self became uncovered, as he stood warming himself by the fire in the high priest’s palace. There, three times, he was asked if he was loyal to Jesus and each time he replied ‘I am not’, thus revealing himself as completely opposed to the One who is called ‘I am’ (The divine name revealed to Moses, and also used by Jesus ‘I am the good shepherd, the vine etc..). Until we see that truth about ourselves, until we see just how much we stand opposed to God, we’ll remain stuck. Unfortunately, Peter has to stew in his own mess for awhile, but he does what we all do, which is find something to distract us from the truth about ourselves. Jesus pursues him though. If we are awake to it, we’ll find God will work around our ways of hiding from ourselves. Peter is embarrassed about his failure, but as far as Jesus is concerned, it doesn’t matter. That’s the divine forgiveness of which we are all recipients. Having peeled back the layers of resistance and clinging to false idols, Peter then finds his desire being redirected, which he expresses by saying he loves Jesus. In the end, it’s all about how willing we are to be loved, which will shape what we desire, and therefore, how we think and act.