What Makes A Person A Person?

John 15:9-17

We were standing on the top of a high dam wall outside Inverell. I was there as part of a large military training exercise, providing welfare support to the contingent of soldiers, engineers and other auxiliary staff.  In front of me, a soldier was being placed in a harness ready to abseil down the dam wall which seemed to fall away into oblivion from where we stood. As the soldier started his descent, the Captain in charge of the exercise turned to me and said, “What about you Sir, are you going over?” I could feel every head turn toward me, waiting for my reply. I was twice her age and right then felt way older than that. Going over the wall was the last thing I suspected I would be doing when I rose that morning. I took a deep breath and said, ‘Sure, I’ll go over.’

 

Have you ever had a moment when you agreed to something and immediately regretted it? Well, I did then. I was put in the harness and I crawled over the edge.  Out there it seemed further down than the started 113 metres (371ft) On command I began the most terrifying few minutes of my life to the bottom of the dam wall. When I finally gained the ground I was possessed with a mix of sheer relief for having survived and a sense of achievement to have overcome my fears and stepped out into what seemed impossible only a few minutes before. Although I was quick to say no to going down upside down when they asked me back up on top!

 

It was a thrilling and scary experience I was glad to have done right there in front of the young soldiers. The young Captain gave me a big high five and a grin as wide as the dam wall and after that we were best of friends with her. As a result I was welcomed as one of them by the soldiers who were there and those who heard the story, and let me tell you, every one heard the story.

 

Last Sunday we suggested that Christianity was a progressive religion. In other words, faith is where our journey in Christ begins, and faith is the engine which propels us to grow and become one with God. We never stand still. Faith takes us into places, experiences and relationships we had previously thought unattainable or highly improbable. Faith propels us out into the open, beyond the protection of our fears and need for control. We are opened up to the possibility of God hidden in the ordinary life.

 

John Spong suggests that this passage is about the transformation of the open, not the redemption of the fallen. In this passage we have begun to move beyond our initial experience of God’s saving grace, from the joy of salvation into the joy of being fully alive. No longer are we enslaved to the power of ego, sin, we are opened up to the transforming journey of life lived in relationship with God.

 

Rene Descartes offered one answer to the question of what it means to be human when he wrote: “I think, therefore I am’. Merton, Eckhart and other modern Christian thinkers such as Desmond Tutu and Pope Francis offers an alternative answer, I am in relationship….therefore I am.’ The Zulus of Africa have a concept called Ubuntu: a person is a person through other people. A person is a relational being means, according to Anthony Howard, ‘implies that you become more fully a person – or all that you can be – in relationship with other people’, with the other. We are hard wired to be in relationship with the other.

 

If we are open we step into the very same relationship with God that Jesus had, a relationship in which we move from strangers to friends, from servants to companions, from one who does not know the mind of God to one who is trusted with the bringing in of the kingdom of God. Life takes on a very different complexion when we are opened up, and open our selves up to an intimacy with God we could never have imagined, in fact we may have feared, was possible.

 

Fear closes us down. Faith opens us up. Fear builds walls where there is no need for walls. Faith finds ways to dismantle the very walls our fear constructs. Faith is found and finds its expression in and through love. The love that we receive from God through the human touch of a Christ who fully lives out his humanity, even unto the cross.  His expression of love for God and humanity was such that he placed no limits on how far it would take him. And he went there because he was willing to obey the commandments of God.

 

These were not laws or rules of spiritual purity and righteousness. They were the commandments that come packaged in God’s dream for the world, a dream for world in which love, justice and peace reigns supreme over and above the law of fear. They were the commandments given to those who had stepped into a transformed relationship with God and were counted as friends, not servants, not people who simply did what they were told to without question or thought. Servants are those who do the bidding of someone they fear. They hide behind statements like, ‘I’m just doing my job’, ‘it is legal therefore it must be ok’, ‘I’m just taking orders’. 

 

The history of the world attests to the horror down to others by servants. The holocaust, prison camps, genocides and killing fields of the world speak eloquently to the violence of the servant.

 

Jesus says our faith takes us to a very different place. It takes us into a relationship where we are accepted as friends, a part of an intimate interaction where we know the mind of God and play an active role in the implementation of God’s dream. We are co-creators of the kingdom of God in a way that brings joy and fulfilment, not only to a divine plan but to ourselves.  We become engaged in a project bigger than our ego self and expand to include others in our life and our dreams. We no longer just do what we are told but use our intelligence, initiative and capacity to build love, peace and justice in our world, both in our immediate world and the world outside and beyond our boundaries.

 

John expresses this idea clearly in this passage as he has Jesus explain our journey on three different levels:

 

·      A journey from servants to friends – from law to love

 

·      A journey into friendship by choice, his choice, the providence of God’s grace

 

·      A journey into love and joy, a complete-ing of our true self and of the kingdom of God.

 

Today we have the opportunity to live into the possibility of faith through gratitude to the unfailing goodness of God. God calls us to step beyond our fears and to take the step into responsible faith, responsible for how we value our friendship with God and how we actively live out that friendship in the world around us. Do we do it as servants who simply follow instructions or do open ourselves up to become co-creators with the Trinity of  a just an peaceful world.  The choice is ours and here, today is a good place to start.

 

Amen 

Is Christianity A Progressive Faith?

John 15:1-8

Do you remember when sending a letter by post was not called ‘Snail mail’ and when a human being said ‘you’ve got mail’ they meant something in the mailbox (remember them)? Today the post box at the post office sends you an email to let you know there is mail waiting for you. Cars were once only powered by a petrol driven motor, now you can buy a car that runs on batteries - the Tesla has recently been released in Australia. Why some people would say that the only constant is change and hint that change is not always progress. I would suggest that humans are wired for change and progress. Even in their faith.

Christianity is a progressive faith. It is never stagnant nor regressive. It’s very essence is to move into life not into death.  Each action, comment and teaching of Jesus is about transformation and resurrection.

 

We do not, cannot, must not, stand still.

 

For many years my father worked in a vineyard. He worked in the cellar nurturing wine for the winemaker. His product was a growth industry. The grapes grew on vines that had been well pruned and cultured. Then the grapes found their way to crushers separating the skins from the juice and then the juice sat in large vats sitting on top of the skins for colour and taste. This was a  journey and process of transformation that began with the secateurs of the vineyard staff.

 

Jesus uses the very same image here and it is a positive image. This is not about punishment and reward. If you fail to bear fruit you will be pruned and left to fall barren to the ground. Pruning is an imager of encouraging and enhancing transformation. What is dead is let go, what is alive is encouraged to be more alive, more fruitful. The pruner looks for the signs of life and ensures that it is given all it needs to produce.

 

In Jesus the vineyard worker is interested in the here and now. What is going to bear fruit in this place and time. It is earthy realism. Life lived in the present world. That is the Christian faith. It is about bringing justice and peace, God’s dream for the world, into being right where we are.

 

Over the years Christianity has, like other religions, been focussed on the other world, heaven in what ever words used to describe it. Early Christians saw it as their duty to be martyred so as to go and be with the Jesus in heaven. For many this was the goal up until relatively recently in historical terms. For some fundamentalists this is still the goal. To go and be with Jesus as soon as practicable.

 

Unlike Christianity, Islam is other world focus. As a result of the strict adherence to the Quran, history stopped with the death of the Prophet. Therefore there is nothing to live for here. Everything is focussed on their understanding of heaven and of martyrdom. In this sense, Islam is not a progressive religion and will, without a major reformation always struggle to be one.

 

For Christians, faith is an embodied experience lived in the here and now. Incarnation is key to a disciples understanding of the world. Faith is not an escape but an invitation to live here & now, in & of people and creation for that is what God did in and through the life of Jesus. The incarnation of Christ values our humanity. Jesus became like us so we could become like God.

 

The idea of working out our salvation here on earth is that we become more and more God-like and less and less ego-like. It is not that our works save us, but that our works validate and authenticate our status as children of God. Our works give evidence to our faith. We are on the journey to becoming one with God, what Julian of Norwich calls –‘one-ing’. Our lives are combination of little deaths, transformations and resurrections every day.

 

We grow and change, live and die to experiences, make mistakes and endure failures to learn and grow. Thomas Merton suggests that the only person who is inconsistent is the person who is all was consistent, whose views never change, whose perspective on the world always stays the same. He suggests we should not trust such a person because they have never experienced life or have experienced life and failed to reflect, contemplate and process what they have experienced.

 

This is the process of the vineyard John has Jesus use here. Life, in all its joys and sadness, success and failures, slowly cuts away the dead wood in our lives to allow us to leave behind the false self of the ego and to discover the true self of God within us. Marcus Borg suggests that the word repentance refers to going beyond our mind, the mind we have at this moment.  This idea suggests that sin is in some way attached to how we see the world through our ego, that it is all about our self.

 

What was seen as the norm in the past no longer is because we have gone beyond the mind, the thinking we had then. The world is round, not flat, the world orbits the sun, not the other way around, slavery is wrong, women are to be treated the same as men and more show us we have repented and continue to do so.

  

The events of the last few days in Bali point to the fact that this process is continuing and needs to continue. Some 52 countries in the world, including the US practice the death penalty. Nowhere in Australia does but there is still such a statute on the books in NSW. How we treat others who are different to us and come to this country for refuge asks us to repent and go beyond the mind of fear and control.

 

A life lived in Christ:

·      Values past experience – builds on the past, is grateful for what has been done by  and the example of  Jesus

 

·      Focuses on the now – values self, others & the experience of love in the present moment

 

·      Welcomes the future, but lives fully not dies gradually, for it.

 

Each Sunday, in the Great Thanksgiving we remind ourselves of the mystery of our faith, which is not exactly a mystery. The so called mystery of faith reminds us that we are a people of the past, of the present and of the future, not as separate categories but as a whole.  God’s time or kairos breaks in on us, not in a linear or horizontal way, but vertically, cutting through all categories of experience at once. We know Christ has died to deal with the fear of death in all its forms, that Christ is risen and present giving life and resurrection now, and that he will come again to herald in God’s dream for the world, the just and peaceful realm of God.

 

Let us repent and take on the mind of the incarnated God who through the life and death on the Cross embodied the dream of God in this world. Amen