Divisions & Unity

There is an ad on tv for a bank called ME. The ad comprises a lot of little yellow circles with the word ME in it bouncing around our screen singing me, me, me! The voice over cements the image by saying we are a bank that understands you. Welcome to the narcissistic 21st century.

Today’s readings are not for the faint hearted nor for those seeking consolation and comfort or for the narcissistic 21 st century. All three readings take us deep into the darkness of sacrifice and division, a long way from the blessings we see in such passages as the Sermon on the Mount.  If we are reading the scriptures honestly we will note that this is not an isolated case, the Bible is often a disturbing, violent and challenging read, but read it we must.

The reading from Matthew 10 hardly relieves the doom and gloom ...:

• Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
• ….whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.
• Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth ...
• Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me...
•  ... and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
• Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Comfort and safety are the watchwords of our generation. “I am entitled to be comfortable and to feel safe at all times” seems to be the mantra. Governments and political parties try to out do each other with more and more unlikely promises to deliver a world in which all danger and threat is eliminated.  Churches and faiths of various sorts promise us wealth and happiness in return for obedience and faith, quick solutions to issues and problems that have taken years to come into being.

Our world is an uncomfortable and dangerous place most of the time and the major division is between those who see and accept this and those who refuse to accept that is so. And it has always been so. Matthews Jesus is railing against those who want to be in control and who want to be able to lord it over others, including God.

Matthews Jesus poses an interesting conundrum –when we allow the need to feel safe and comfortable to rule us we instantaneously divide and separate ourselves from others, God and creation. Jesus is conscious his very incarnation brings about such conflict and sets up the possibility of conflict at all levels of our existence. The intention is, it seems, to unify but the effect is to divide. Why? Because we always choose the prominent place for ourselves in opposition to others. We are unable to see that unity can only come about when we let go of the need to be safe and comfortable; that unity can only come when we let go of the desire to possess Jesus for ourselves. That is idolatry.

We increase security, identify others as the enemy by race or faith, marginalise people because of their ethnicity or history and by their past acts, big or small. We do it on a world scale and we do it with in communities and families. The lie we are told is that by so doing we are unifying our world, nation, community and family by definition of values, world-view, faith and family ties. The result? The world becomes a more divided, less safe and a more uncomfortable place.

Perhaps Jesus is challenging us to understand that if the world is to be safer and more comfortable for all, then we have to let go of our sense of being entitled to our own personal safety at the cost of others value and existence. Jesus knows his message is an uncomfortable one; compassion and mission through sacrifice; the going out into the world to engage with it as it is, not as we believe it should be; the letting go of our own particular prejudices and personal wants in favour of a shared understanding of wholeness and belonging.

Jesus is challenging us to look at a much larger world view than the one we generally focus on. Do not be preoccupied by the trivial – there are much bigger issues to be addressed. Do not live in fear of others but live mindful of the greatest threat within us, those desires and needs which can kill our soul, deaden our compassion and divide us off from the unity of creation. And this is the hardest to do. Jesus is not saying families, peace and unity are not important, they are. But what is more important is the sacrifice required to secure such for all.

God’s kingdom is not personal. Stepping up to the task requires us to take a realistic look at what is important and making decisions that will cost us materially, emotionally and relationally. It will separate us from friends, family and others because the kingdom of God is about inclusion and it will not include those who exclude based on friendships, families, relationships or material greed.

The challenge for us is to let go of the sense of privilege we have as Christians in a first world nation and begin to grapple with the divisions allowing us to enjoy such privileges. Jesus makes it clear to do so will put us out of sync with the dominate culture both within and without the church and place us at risk of danger and threat. But that is the price of discipleship. Is it a price worth paying? Yes if we wish to change from me to us.

Doubting Thomas - Living in a Blurred World.

John 20:19-31

Today’s Gospel recounts the story of Thomas, known popularly, although not accurately, as Doubting Thomas. Whatever the origins of this story, it is both a challenging and hopeful story, one which asks some important questions and leaves the door chocked open by the naked doubt of Thomas. 

Michael Palmer suggests, "The rise of Donald Trump in American politics speaks to the depth and influential nature of our national and international fear. We're a people afraid, and that fear has trapped us. Like the disciples in those early moments after Jesus' death, we've locked ourselves in an upper room, waiting for the other shoe to drop."

Like the disciples who locked themselves away in fear of reprisals and the unwanted knock on the door, western society is in the midst of a similar phenomenon. The daily reports of violent actions by extremists such as the bombing of the Easter festivities in a park in Pakistan or the recent bombings in Yemen, Istanbul and Brussels fill us full of fear. The reports of violence in suburbs just like ours here in Melbourne cause us to double lock doors and think twice about going certain places at certain times. As for the church, clergy are now questioning the practice of wearing clergy collars when they are just ducking down the street in case people respond inappropriately to them.

Fear of others and doubts about our place in the world is indeed trapping us and keeping us reticent and impotent. How do we react in a world gone mad (if it has indeed gone mad)? How do we live out our convictions and faith in a world that appears to be hostile and dismissive? Do we lock ourselves away and become a hidden sect, secretive but safe?

In some sense that is what the disciples were doing. They were going for safety first. Even the occasion of Jesus revealing himself as being alive and present didn’t reassure them. Yes, they had seen Jesus but he had (apparently) to walk though a locked door. When he left the door remained locked. There was no surge of confidence and hope to drive them out into the streets. They remained where they were, out of sight and out of danger.

Thomas on the other hand wasn’t in the room with them. He hadn’t gone for the safety in numbers or in hiding idea. We don’t know where he was, he may have been back home, thinking about what had happened and getting on with life. There is no suggestion he was less fearful or less conscious of the risks he faced, yet he got on with life.

When told about Jesus being ‘alive’ he responded in a pragmatic and logical manner. There had been many stories and rumours going around. They started on Easter morning when the women went to the tomb and found it empty. Then Peter and the other disciple had a look and the rumours abounded. Not too much the gossip afoot in the general populace. For Thomas, perhaps, there was just too much variation in the story, too much too be asked to believe with it any evidence.

It wasn’t doubt in the sense he dismissed it out of hand, but a doubt needing experience to substantiate and verify.

That’s understandable, isn’t it? People tell you how great abseiling, bungee jumping, the Grand Canyon, Alaska or Victoria Falls, Sea World, Dream World or Movie World is but you will always have doubts its quite as good as they say it is until you go. You have to experience it for yourself.

Thomas is no different. He wasn’t there the first time Jesus appeared and there was just too much to believe without something to make it real. In any case, God came in the form of Jesus to experience life and all its challenges so that we could be understood and given the opportunity to experience what God is like. 

Nancy Rockwell writes "Thomas is a Greek name, and it means twin, though his twin, if he had one, never appears, and some suggest we are, each of us, his twin."

An interesting thought but one worth pondering in a number of ways:

How is what we believe influenced by our experience? We often speak as if we all believe the same thing and we all understand God and the Bible and faith in its purest and true form. Yet is it so? Or do we look at God and the Bible and our faith through the filter of our own personal experience? Are we not influenced by what we know, knowing by the experience we have lived though underpinned by our understanding?

People often say I don’t believe in God. I ask them to draw me a picture of the God they don’t believe in. Without question they draw a God I don’t believe in but when we start to discuss that drawing we uncover experiences that have given birth to such an understanding – Sunday School teaching, the disconnect between what a significant other has said they believed and what they did, treatment at the hands of religious people, violence in the world or the death of innocents – have all come together to give birth to the God they draw.

People of faith, you and I are no different. We say we believe in an unadulterated form and think we have it correct but what we know believe is the product of our life experiences as well as the religious teaching we have received in whatever form that comes. Like Thomas, there will be times when what we have experienced is forgotten and we get caught up in life and our lives, other things become more important. And that’s ok. 

In the midst of life there will be moments bringing us back to  the faith we affirm  and evaluate it against our experience and begin to refine it so that it is real for us. This won’t be a faith separate from the community, for as Thomas found out, he shares the experience of Jesus with others, in his case the disciples, in our case, the church. 

Thomas was no denier of the faith, simply one who had to experience it for him-self. In so doing he verified the truth of Jesus and went on to live out his faith in the world, although we know little about how he did that. 

Today, we are asked to live with what we don’t know and what seems beyond us, our doubts and to reflect on experiences, allowing them to lead us deep into the mystery of faith. Amen. 

Being in the mystery

"Being in the know is the booby prize. Being in the mystery is the grand prize", says quantum physics scientist Fred Alan Wolf.

Life is a mystery. What happens next will always surprise us and when we think we have it under control it turns out to be not so. Wolf suggests that when we embrace mystery as the normal shape of existence then we open ourselves up to an exciting and interesting life. But if we settle for what we know, and try and fit life into that narrow and limited understanding of the world, we settle for less. By settling for less we condemn ourselves to always be disappointed and looking for answers.

Wolf challenges us to sit in the mystery of life, to resist the temptation to find easy and comfortable answers and to avoid embracing the modern myths of safety, happiness and solutions through consumerism. All around us we are asked to accept the answers of others, often others with knowledge and power, governments, drug companies, advertisers, multi-nationals, institutions and more. Some how the way we see the world as an ordinary person is discarded for that of those who are deemed to 'being in the know'. Even the church is not immune to this form of consumerism, knowledge and power with some within it claiming to 'being in the know', knowing the will of God for all and having the definitive answers to the problems we face each day.

Yet, the last two Sundays - Pentecost and Trinity - asks us to be open to 'being in the mystery' of creation, redemption and the spirit. To be open to the surprising God whose ways are not the same as ours and whose answers are unlike those we seek. God asks us to empty ourselves of 'being in the know' and be filled with the emptiness of 'being in mystery'. A life of unknowing which, paradoxically, fills us with the knowledge which saves us - the redemptive knowledge of love and truth experienced in the mystery of being alive in this world.

So I agree with Wolf - "Being in the know is the booby prize. Being in the mystery is the grand prize." But some times it is uncomfortable.....