Seeing Differently

Mathew 3

Grand Canyon by David Hockney

Today we meet the hermit from the bush. The bloke who ignores the social requirements for appropriate dress and, by the smell of him, for the use of water for something other than drinking, a man who is on the outside looking in, John The Baptist, so named after the rite he made his own.  It is interesting he wasn’t called John Camel Hair or John Who Needs A Bath or John the Vegan, but he wasn’t. He is John the Baptist.

 

John is also remembered for his aversion to sin. His baptism was predicated on repentance, the recognition of sin by an individual who then takes steps to repent of that sin through the cleansing and renewing act of baptism. Now sin got a bad name when I was growing up. It seemed to include everything that was enjoyable – eating too many lollies, drinking too much soft drink, getting your sibling into trouble, dipping the pigtails of the girl who sat in front of you in the inkwell and many more mortal acts. The last may very well have been mortal if she could run faster than you at recess!

 

Sin has been trivialised to many normal and ordinary acts of being human and it seems it is still in that place. Yet John the Baptist’s idea of sin was much expanded on that of our parents, nuns and the morality police of our youth. John refers to the systemic sins maintaining the status quo, the sins of entitlement due to right acting, of doing what was expected of you and reaping the rewards. It was the sin of identifying clearly the status of each individual, their rights and their responsibilities. It was ensuring those born into privilege maintained that privilege. It is about exclusion of others from the benefits you have based on class, skin colour, health or otherwise, gender and age.

 

²“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” In other words, the possibility of instituting the promised kingdom does not belong out there, to others or to the future. It belongs here, in you and now. It is calling you and I to make it real – to put love into action and respond to the covenant requirements of kindness – respect, justice and compassion. It is not a task of people like John or even those whom he spoke harshly about; the first is just one man and the latter group won’t change until they have no choice. It is up to you to ensure they have no choice by you own love in action for yourself, others and the world.

 

John wasn’t interested in who stole the cookie from the cookie jar, but who stole the cookie jar and who allowed the cookie jar to remain stolen. He was particularly tough on those in privileged positions and saved his strongest words for them, but he didn’t let the ordinary folk off the hook either. John’s expectation was that is if you recognised your complicity in this corporate sin, then you needed to show evidence of a change of heart, mind and action. He says: “⁸Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

 

Bearing fruit can be as little as sharing the troubles of those who live next door, advocating for a fairer share of society’s wealth for all, ensuring those who on the outside get to come in side. There is no prescription for bearing fruit and there is no particular type of fruit – love, justice, compassion, kindness, advocacy, giving and more – all work if that is what the situation needs.

 

Ben Witherington suggests: "Repentance, or metanoia, to use the Greek word, refers to far more than a simply being or saying one is sorry for past sins, far more than mere regret or remorse for such sins. It refers to a turning away from the past way of life and the inauguration of a new one, in this case initialised by an act of baptism."

 

And this isn’t easy. Those who describe the Christian life as easy and a cop out haven’t tried to live it! It is incredibly difficult to live in such away that each day is a further step toward wholeness and another from stuff we have held onto and has held onto us. It is being prepared to shed our previous static identity and accept the uncertainty of unfinished business.

 

Crabs and other crustaceans do not grow in a linear fashion because of their hard outer shell. Up to 20 times in its lifetime a crab moults, in effect moves out of the old shell and grows a new one. This happens 6 times in the first year. It is a difficult and excruciating time, not to say a vulnerable onee. If your shell is your protection, wandering naked around the sea floor is not a comfortable place to be. Yet it must happen if it is to grow into maturity.

 

Repentance requires we shed our tough and hard formed identities both as a society and as individuals. What served us well in another time and place no longer does. What we have come to accept as the way things are, no longer is appropriate and we have to change structures, ideas, ideologies and religions.

 

John the Baptist calls that the coming near of the kingdom of God – the ever evolving recognition of a new way of seeing. David Hockney, the wonderful English artist, paints what he sees but what he sees in isn’t always what is physically there. He suggests we see two ways – physically and psychologically; physically by recognising objects, like a camera. Seeing psychologically is different. If we look at a scene we will focus on one particular element that takes our eye in that scene. Because we do, that tree, face, animal, colour becomes clearer and larger in our view and seems to be larger and more significant than the rest of the scene. There are a whole lot of reasons why this happens but we rarely if ever see what is there. We see what we see.

 

In art this works well, in community and individual life here is a glitch to be aware of. What we think is the case may not be so because we are seeing, hearing, engaging with it as we see the world – focusing on what is important to or has a specific meaning or interest to us. We may miss what is really happening. We are not called to see physically or one dimensionally as a camera but we are to be aware of the psychological pre-determinants affecting our response to the world.

 

John the Baptist calls us to confront society and ourselves to engage in the very difficult process of moulting, like the crab, and to recalibrate our seeing. In this way we begin to recalibrate the world by helping to break it out of its restrictive shell and welcome in relational wholeness empowered by love - the kingdom of God.

 

Oh and this won’t get easier when Jesus enters the picture. It gets harder, because he increases the requirements and calls more from us. “¹¹He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Seeing through the eyes of Jesus changes everything.

 

John’s repentance is the ongoing reassessment of self and society required of all who profess faith. It requires action and outcomes and can’t be avoided. It is our vocation. How will you see differently when you leave here this morning?

Who is The Villain?

Luke 18:9-14

 

One of the criticisms the teenagers in my chapel would make is that all Christians are hypocrites; that is they say one thing and do another; that they make demands on others they are unable to keep themselves. They got a shock when I agreed with them and stated very clearly that I too was a hypocrite.

 

At my peak I am very ordinary, and I am not at my peak at the moment. This is something I remind myself of daily. I am a work in progress and like all works in progress I am not complete and I am working toward that day when I will be as close as possible to average as I can be.

 

In todays Gospel we are given another insight into prayer which is too easily trivialised as the distinction between the righteous and the sinner here represented by the Pharisee and the tax collector. We always seem to come down on the side of the tax collector and disparage the Pharisee as the villain of the story.

 

The Pharisees are always the villains, not necessarily in the parables as Jesus tells them but in the retelling of the parables by Christians after the birth of the church. We always need villains, some one to blame and in our modern society this has become an art form. We have replaced Pharisees with “them” who ever we wish them to be. They are always the reason everything is going to custard. It is never our fault.

 

John Meier suggests an interesting insight:  “Jesus would have interacted more with them than with any other Jewish movement or party (because) both Jesus and the Pharisees shared a consuming desire to bring all Israel, not just an esoteric sect or a privileged elite, to the complete doing of God's will as laid out in the Law and the prophets. Jesus and the Pharisees agreed on many basic points: God's free election of Israel, his gift of the Law, the need to respond wholeheartedly to the Law's demands in one's everyday life, God's faithful guidance of Israel through history to a future consummation involving the restoration of Israel, a final judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and perhaps some sort of eschatological or messianic figure as God's agent in the end time. At the same time, disagreements were inevitable”. They were not the villains but became so because of how the stereotype of the Pharisee (and the adjective, "Pharisaic") has played out in Christian history. This can be seen in the way that Jewish faith has been represented by Christians as legalistic and hypocritical, in contrast to the heartfelt and authentic faith of Christians."

 

 

What is the Pharisees sin as portrayed in this story? William Loader suggests "The message of Jesus is quite sharp: bolstering one’s sense of identity by disparaging others (even when they are terrible sinners) so easily leads to illusions of grandeur and a failure to see ourselves as we really are." Are the Pharisees alone in this or is there a sense that the story, as retold by the Gospel writer or editors joins in such a sin? Are they not disparaging the Pharisees to make a point? That point being that one should see oneself for who one is – a sinner, a hypocrite as my students would say, for we are all in the same leaky boat.

 

The difference here is that the real villain in the story is the tax collector. According to Kathleen Corley, “ tax collectors are connected in Greco-Roman literature with those who trafficked in prostitution and slavery, particularly to brothel keepers and pimps, those responsible for supplying women and slaves for banquets”. This particular tax collector is self aware and honest, at this point any way, about his situation. The challenge for him and his cohort is what happens next. Do they remain part of the problem or become part of the solution to the systemic injustice they are a key part of? Our eagerness to condemn the Pharisees gets in the way of a realistic response to the entrenched behaviour of the tax collector and his acquaintances.

 

Neither of the protagonists get off easy. Both have some work to do. Both have to have a realistic look at their behaviour towards others and neither can claim the moral or spiritual high ground.  

 

Yes, the Pharisees and those of us who see ourselves as privileged and entitled need to get it into perspective – at our peak we are very ordinary and we are rarely at our peak and therefore can not claim to be better than others. The tax collector reminds us that we have indeed behaved badly, more than we often wish to see, in ways that have diminished others and need to admit such before both God and others.

 

• Prayer is about honesty – about being honest with ourselves and with God – but with ourselves first. Then and only then can we take the steps to put right what we put wrong and continue to strive for the best.

• Prayer is about enough – in this case about the fact that our ordinary efforts to live out the way of Christ is enough. We do not have to disparage others to bolster our own standing. We are enough, even with all our faults we have many positive moments where we do get it right.

• Prayer is about being ok – I’m  O.K – You’re O.K. despite the fact we are conflicted with passions and wounds, loss and  grief and a history that speaks into our life today. The Pharisee was O.K. and didn’t need to disparage another; the tax collector was O.K. but he had some more work to do.

• Prayer is about humility, but it must be an honest humility. The Pharisee and those like him are challenged to be humble and the tax collector is challenged to prove his humility is real. It is not enough to say I am a sinner, one must take steps to conversion, the complete change in behaviour required as part of such humility. 

• Prayer is about God’s grace – God knows and understands us, and although God seeks us to be the best we can be, is able to work with our humanity. That is the great truth of the incarnation. God so trusted the human form that God became one with it in the form of Jesus of Nazareth.

 

This parable is another difficult story and is as relevant to the church today as it was to the religious of Jesus time. The church, you and I, is being asked to stand where the tax collector stood, moving away from the position of the privileged and the powerful as we were in the past, and to admit that our arrogance has been responsible for great sin.

 

Like the tax collector we are to recognise this and be transformed into the body of Christ, the disciples of the way. Amen.

Repentance as a Response to Randomness

Luke 13:1-9

Today’s Gospel brings us three disturbing images and a deep sense of the fear and dread felt by the religious faithful who had gathered around Jesus.

The first involved the leaders of a group of Galileans who had been at a feast in Jerusalem and may have been involved in some insurrection against the Roman government, whom Pilate had killed right in the temple courts where the sacrifices were going on. Jesus comments on the incident, but not as the reporters had expected. Instead of denouncing Pilate he turned it into a parable for their own conduct in the uncertain times they were living in.

 

In the second, Jesus also refers to the collapse of a tower at Siloam where many people died simply because a construction accident occurred.

 

The third involves a fig tree, which has not born fruit and deserves to be cut down. The gardener, who pleads for it to have just one more year to prove that it can be fruitful or else it will be forcibly removed from the vineyard, saves it.

 

The fear and dread felt by those around Jesus, and who are reflecting the concerns of the wider community, is simply the big question of the seeming randomness of life. How does bad things happen to ostensibly good people? In trying to come to grips with this disturbing question, they suppose that those involved have sinned, are sinners, have been responsible for breaking God’s law in some way.

 

Gary M. Simpson suggest that like them, "We moderns (and post-moderns) are also adept at externalising. In addition, our contemporary affection for the adequacy of causal explanations escalates our use of diversionary tactics." We need a reason a cause for the bad things that happen to us. We need a diagnosis, a pre-existing genetic fault, a pin-pointed experience, an identified causal agent to explain why we do or experience bad things. We seek labels and become victims to our reasonable reasons for who we are and why we behave the way we do.  No less than the people of Jesus’ time, we are imprisoned by sin – the motivation resulting in our bad behaviour or outcomes.

 

There must be a reason for this situation to have occurred, and if we can identify that reason we can reassure ourselves that we have nothing to fear. For those around Jesus that was sin. “It was undoubtedly their fault, and we know we have not sinned and therefore we are ok.” And then they look to Jesus for confirmation and get a rebuke, unless you repent

 

Matt Skinner suggests that "Repentance becomes less interesting when people mistake it to mean moral uprightness, expressions of regret, or a "180-degree turnaround." Rather, here and many other places in the Bible, it refers to a changed mind, to a new way of seeing things, to being persuaded to adopt a different perspective."

 

In another article he adds, "The word translated as 'repent' is, at its root, about thinking and perception. It refers to a wholesale change in how a person understands something. It implies an utter reconfiguration of your perspective on reality and meaning, including (in the New Testament) a reorientation of yourself toward God."

 

Now this ups the ante. It is no longer about the little things we do, we feel guilty and regret over. It is not about running a red light, having a naughty thought or saying a bad word! It’s not about secretly wanting to throttle your partner or hire someone to shoot your most hated relative! It is about shifting the focus from self as the centre of the world, the place of entitlement, from being assured of immunity from bad things happening.

 

It is a recognition that life plays out according to randomness we do not control, and we may assume God does not control. Why? Because nowhere in this discussion does Luke put in the mouth of Jesus a defence of the Divine. Jesus does not attempt to absolve God of the responsibility for these things happening. He seems to accept that life will play out the way it will and that we are to simply be in awe of its mystery. Awe not fear.

 

Awe or praise should bring from us a complete reorientation of ourselves to God. No longer do we see ourselves as being deserving of God’s good will, expecting God to always make life easy and safe for us just like we are entitled to for we worship God, on a Sunday.

 

Over the last week or so I have read and heard a great deal of doom and gloom regarding the future of the church. I have heard speakers struggle to find ways to give hope numbers attending church will rise, speaking about mission and evangelism as if there was some magic formula by which people would return to the finding reasons to our form of church.

 

The truth is simple; the church as we knew it no longer exists, and neither does the world in which that church existed. Jesus says we need a new orientation of ourselves to God if we are to be ready to deal with the interruptions to our comfortable worldview.

 

How does that happen for us today?

• Stop saying that people are no longer interested in faith just because they are not here. It simply isn’t true. They are interested in faith and the church but have lost faith with the image of the church they are presented with in the media or have experienced in the past.

• Stop expecting people to be like us, to like the things we do, our worship and style of faith. They will bring with them their own interests, likes and dislikes and we will be enriched and enlivened if we make space for them in our place.

• Stop saying that is the way we do it here. That may be nice for the small number who are here, but is it appropriate for those who would like to be here but find the way we always have done it confronting and out of touch? 

Anglican Theologian Stephen Pickard suggests three reorientations the church is to undertake. It is to be Fresh, Local and Organic. Mark Davis Jr calls this subterranean, having its roots deeply embedded in place and time.

• Fresh does not mean contemporary or even guitars and drums. It means that when we come to worship, however we express it be it through church, social justice, ecumenism and more, with fresh eyes each time. Full of awe and wonder at the possibilities abounding for us. It is not to be routine, ritualistic or pedestrian. When you come to worship do so knowing you worship the creator of the world who is available regardless of the circumstances.

• Local implies a response to people, place and time where you live. It does not matter what others are doing in other places, it only matters how we live and relate to those around, how we experience the shared challenges of living in Glen Iris/Ashburton. Our church cannot be, as it has been for many years, a remnant from the past, or as the church in Australia has been, an out post of the Church of England. Find the local problems and issues, find ways to help address them and then it is possible, just possible people will join you.

• Organic means it grows down and up out of the whole community. Organic growth is slow, requires hard-work tilling the soil and clearing the weeds and needs a constant presence. We cannot impose ideas, pre-packaged formulas or what we believe to be the solutions. They will grow if we are patient. 

Angela Reed suggests that "In this season of Lent, the church has an opportunity to seek restoration and renewal through the discipline of confession and heartfelt repentance." Confession of existing in isolation and repentance in orientating it self to be fresh, local and organic.

 

On that note I invite you to join us in the local coffee shop in the courtyard, meet the locals, get involved in the fresh engagement with the schools, explore your expression of faith with others and be in awe as God works organically amongst us. Amen.