In Your Ears

Luke 4:11ff

We live in a world of words. Words come at us from every quarter, the radio, tv, conversations, advertising hoardings and more. We constantly have to make choices about what words we listen to, what words we respond and how to decide which words are worth our effort and which are not.

Human beings are wordy people. We write books, songs, poetry and propaganda. We believe intrinsically in the power of words. We use words to say I love you, I hate you , I don’t believe you and what’s for dinner; often without taking a breath. We pay millions of dollars each year to copy writers, advertising gurus and spin doctors to find the right words to entice, cajole and bully others into doing, buying or following what ever is the most expedient for us.

We use words to labels others, to excuse behaviours to convince others of the rightness of policies, programs and lies. We use words to designate who is in and who is out, who is acceptable and who is not and who are the reason for the situation we find ourselves in.

We understand that words do more than simply communicate an idea, that words are in fact the most powerful tool we have at our disposal. Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating were great orators who knew the power of the word to make a case for an idea, an idea that generated response and action. Powerful men, powerful words.

We may have once said ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but names (words) will never hurt me’ but we now know this for the lie it was. Words hurt and words inflict, encourage, and incite harm beyond imagination.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie wrote in his Orders to Soldiers in 1816, ‘All Aborigines from Sydney onwards are to be mace prisoners of war and if they resist they are to be shot and their bodies hung from trees in the most conspicuous places near where they fall, so as to strike terror into the hearts of surviving natives.’ The consequences of that statement were felt across the colony up to the late 1800s.

Today we have refugees who arrive by boat labelled as illegal and placed in offshore detention (prison) camps for a decade, and in some cases more without recourse to the legal system, work or appropriate living conditions.

Words are not neutral and call from us the best and the worst, dependent upon who is using them, how they are used and what they are used for. Spend a week watching the commercial tv news and scan the transcript of the words used to introduce and describe each news story. You will be surprised at what you hear.

In today’s Gospel, those gathered in the synagogue, the house of meeting, were surprised by the words they heard, spoken by the living word of God – Jesus. Jesus was the word God spoke into the world to act out of the mystery of the Godhead. The idea of Jesus as the word is made clear to us by John in the prologue to his Gospel – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” Jesus was the creative word spoken at the beginning of all creation and as spoken word, was a verb, the word that brings action, doing, into life.

For those who read the Jewish scriptures there was no separation between the word and action. One was the result of the other. One called the other into being. Without a word, a saying, a name, nothing existed or would exist. There is no tree or variety of tree until we give it a name. There is no individual person until we have a name to call him or her. There is no emotion until we have a created a name for it.

Luke has Jesus introduce God’s mission plan, naming it very clearly and laying it baldly before his audience. The idea of God’s preference for the poor is based heavily on tis text. Yet it is not simply a statement of what has long been known by his listeners, the text he uses was one used by Isaiah many centuries before and would have been know by those listening. They would have nodded agreement and muttered their approval of the text of the day. They had heard it before as the readings from the Jewish scriptures were akin to our lectionary, following seasons and festivals with readings appropriate for each.

What surprised the listeners were the words he used just before he sat down. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Or more literally ‘in your ears” and therefore in your knowing and acting.

It has been suggested that the text, written in the past tense, refers to something that has being and is to continue to have being. In other words, this has happened, it is not wishful thinking it is real, then, now and eternally. And you, having heard this are obligated to ensure it occurs. You have heard the word, you are give life to it, bring it into being, making real the words you have heard.

You and I are obligated to make real now what has already happened in the eternal scheme of things. What is real in the spiritual is to be real in the material.

No wonder they asked who he was and imply, how dare he impose such obligations on us? They began to look for reasons to sidestep their responsibilities, something Jesus returns to often in his dialogue with the religious leaders.

We live in a world where, according to recent Oxfam report, 61 people have between wealth equal to that of 50% of the world’s population or 3.7billion people. In 2013 there were 10.2 million people in prison with almost half in USA, Russia and China. In the last major study on homeless there were 100 million people homeless worldwide. Another study suggests that 35% of women worldwide suffer some form of domestic violence. Some 168 million children are caught up in child labour, over half of them in hazardous work.

It appears we are slow to put the word into action. Yet we are not exempt from the obligation to do so. As a result of hearing the will of God for the world it is up to us to make it real, as a nation, a church and individually.

How do we do this?

• ·      By being conscious of how we use words and labels to describe others, are we adding to the violence by the way we speak?
• ·      By critiquing the words we hear used in the media, by politicians and those who wish to control our actions and rejecting any language designed to coerce, manipulate or appeal to our baser emotions.
• ·    By being aware of words that appear rational and reasonable which are used to incarcerate, marginalise and enslave others such as progress, development, economies of scale and more.
• ·      By supporting words that are life giving and empowering such as rights, opportunities and respect for the dignity and life of each of God’s created words (creation) in the world.

These are broad suggestions. The task we share with Jesus is to discern the practical ways in which we can make them real. Jesus did it through obedience, dialogue, respect and experience.

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Go and make it real. Amen.

Who Feeds Us?

We live in a society built on the ideology of scarcity. What, you might think, is he talking about? Never has there been so much available to us, never has there been so many choices for us to consume. According to Choices Magazine there are more than 80 different brands and types of milk, some 23+ washing powders and over 14 coffee brands on your supermarket shelf.

In terms of banks, mortgage providers and finance brokers the choice is now much more than the big 4. Buying a car is a mire of maker choice and then, if you happen to find the make you want, there are up to a dozen or more choices of model and style. And I haven’t even thought of nail polish and hair colour!

Yet we live wedded to the ideology of scarcity. Enough is never enough to satisfy us. The issue, according to theologian Walter Brueggemann, is whether there is enough to go around - enough food, water, shelter, space. An ideology of scarcity says no, there’s not enough, so hold on to what you have.

An ideology of abundance is just the opposite and is often the ideology of those deemed the poorest in our society. Appearances notwithstanding, there is enough to go around, so long as each of us only takes what we need.

It has always interested me that when I spend time with families who are indeed poor, the willingness to share what little they have, to turn what seems to be a meager supply of food into a banquet of exquisite quality and quantity is overwhelming. There is always enough.

And food and table play a great part in the abundant life. Having grown up in an extensive extended family with 21 aunts and uncles and their partners and their children meant that family get togethers were massive in terms of numbers and catering. In my childhood none of these families were wealthy but the women involved knew how to make a little go along way and how to produce monumental feasting tables. We would all grab a chair and sit around a long series of trestle tables and eat until we could eat no more.

Conversation and laughter filled the air and where there had been conflict or difficulties they seemed to disappear in the convivial atmosphere. Family remained family despite what may have happened. The covenant was repaired and life moved on.

Isaiah 55 takes the prominent place of food and meals in the Bible as a tool for bonding and belonging, of remembering who you are and whom you belong to:
“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 3Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.”

The prophet invited the Israelites, living in exile in Babylon, to come to a lavish meal and receive renewal of covenantal blessings. Isaiah is warning against the very real danger that they would become obligated to or assimilated into the culture of their captors and present benefactors, and adapt to the bread of Babylon. Being assimilated into a foreign way of life and forgetting their roots. Brueggemman again, “Whoever feeds, owns.” Food, he says, comes with a price. “Eat royal bread and think royal thoughts. Eat royal bread and embrace royal thoughts.”

Isaiah reminded the Israelites that who fed them and what they ate were no small matter. Why should they continue with food that did not nourish? The Israelites were a people of different bread, another way, a bread that came as a gift.

In our modern world there are many who offer to feed us; the people we associate with, the ideologies we are exposed to, the pervading culture of consumerism, the idea that God is dead and there are now no rules, that we are special and the centre of our world and more. It is almost inevitable, say the realists, for us to abandon the Greek, Roman and Christian heritage on which western civilization was founded and simply run with the ‘I am god’ pack.

Charles Taylor suggest we have moved from a time and a society in which “belief in God is unchallenged and,…unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”

Stanley Hauerwas agrees, ‘the situation we find ourselves in as Christians is at once a threat and an opportunity.’ He continues, and I agree, “For if you believe as I do that there is an inevitable tension between the church and world,then a world in which belief in God is unchallenged may be one in which Christians too readily assume that they can be at home in the world. So the world in which we find ourselves (today) may be one in which we recover the difference a Christian should make.”

The lack of concern for others, the lack of boundaries and moral assumptions in our children’s (and their parent) lives, the inappropriate behaviours of adults and children, the bullying which is rife across all ages and classes, and the simple mantra of ‘if I say it’s ok for me, it’s ok’, the personalism which rules thinking abroad; all challenge those who hold to the Christian ethos.

Thomas Merton, writing in the early-‘60’s, referred to that age as the post-christian age. I suspect we have moved deeper into this age for we are insatiate consumers of Babylon’s bread, even within those bodies and disciplines such as the church, education institutions, the body politic and the arts, previously critical commentators on Babylon and its ways.

In each Eucharistic service the invitation is given to come to a lavish meal, the well set table of Jesus’ body and blood where we renew the new covenant of love set in place by Jesus death and resurrection. We are reminded in this meal of our heritage, for it looks back to the Old Testament covenant God had with Israel, it takes us into the act of love which Jesus gave us in the New Testament covenant, and leads us forward into the eternal relationship we will share with all the saints who have gone before, in heaven.

At this table, just for a few moments we stand in the eternal space, touching the past present and future, and are reminded who feeds us. It is an ideology of abundance, not scarcity, there is sufficient for all our needs no matter how the circumstances and the voices of this world may suggest otherwise.

It is a theology of difference, for the body and blood of Jesus welcomes us into a new way of seeing the world and puts us firmly in the place of tension, the space-in-between this world and its appetites and the kingdom of God – there but not yet.

We are not fed by this world and we are called to remain true to the One who feeds us. That is the meaning of our dismissal from the table at the end of our service. We are reminded to ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’, not Babylon.

Isaiah challenges the Israelites to return to the covenant table and be fed. We are challenged to do the same.