What are the real evils we need to face up to?
Sermon by Andy Wurm, Pentecost 20, October 27th 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!