Saturday, April 21, 2007

Easter 3

I remember back in about 1970 or 1971, going with a group of young people from our church to Perry Lakes stadium for a crusade – at that time I was pretty sure I didn’t want anything to do with this church stuff, so I remember being just a bit apprehensive about the world-famous evangelist’s powers of persuasion.  It was certainly powerful stuff – for a start, as big a crowd as you could muster for an Eagles vs Dockers Grand Final – we sat somewhere up near the back, looking down at the stage across a sea of heads – and the preachers were state of the art – the personal testimonies, the polished arguments and the inevitable emotional appeals all leading up to the high point of the evening – the altar call – where it seemed hundreds and hundreds of young people made their way forward to the stage, accepting the invitation to give their lives then and there to Jesus – all this, however, was lost on me – not that I didn’t feel the emotional pull or the persuasive suggestion to get up on my feet and go down the front to give my heart to Jesus – the problem was that I recognised that that was all it was – no euphoria of conversion for me that evening, no Damascus road encounter with the risen Christ.

Even in everyday speech we use the term ‘seeing the light’ as a shorthand way of talking about an experience that completely turns us around, makes us see everything from a new angle, changes our views on something completely. 

It’s a story that starts – not in the first dramatic weeks after the resurrection but perhaps as early as two or three years later.  Christian Jews haven’t yet decisively separated from mainstream Judaism – in fact that wouldn’t happen for decades yet - but amongst the immigrant communities, the Greek-speaking, foreign-born Jews in and around Jerusalem problems were on the way.  The synagogues had always welcomed a few non-Jewish guests, Gentile ‘God fearers’ – and it was this lot, when they started to hear and respond to the Christian message, that started all the problems.  If Gentiles wanted to be Christian, did they have to become Jewish first?  Did they have to be circumcised, did they have to follow the Torah and obey the food laws?  Arguments like these seemed to be behind the events that led up to the stoning of Stephen and the immigrant communities’ rapid exit from Jerusalem that we read about in Acts, chapter 8.  It’s an argument that Paul finds himself right in the middle of, an argument that basically comes down to the age-old problem of faith communities everywhere during times of rapid change – how do we protect ourselves against the loss of our distinctive culture?  And Paul, and others like him, would have felt they were fighting to preserve what it meant to be Jewish – the right attitude towards scripture, the Torah and the temple. 

What happens to Paul on the road to Damascus is not only one of the most dramatic turnarounds in history, it’s also one of the best documented events in the Bible.  Not only does Luke – writing I guess a generation or so after Paul’s death – tell the story no less than three times - here in chapter 9, then twice again in chapters 22 and 26 – but Paul himself, in his own letters to the churches in Corinth and Galatia, agrees in all the essential details – Paul, the highly educated Pharisee, driven, passionate and single-minded in his determination to wipe out the sect of Jesus Christ, becomes Paul the highly educated Pharisee, driven, passionate and single-minded in his determination to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles.  It’s the backflip to end all backflips, but what it’s not, is the result of some first century Billy Graham crusade.  Paul doesn’t get convinced by some particularly fiery preacher – in fact it seems Paul already knows a fair bit about Jesus and the sect of the Christians, he knows about it and opposes it – what’s made the difference, according to Luke’s version and according Paul’s own account as well, is that he’s bumped into the actual Jesus as a very much alive reality.  Luke does make it sound like a sort of heavenly vision, not quite so impressive as the risen Jesus appearing to shocked disciples in the days and weeks following that first Easter Day.  Paul himself insists – in his letter to the Corinthian church – that this is not just a vision, not just a flash of insight or a fancy mental breakdown – encounter, not persuasion, not hallucination, is what it takes to turn the direction of Paul’s life around 180 degrees.

So what’s the point?  We know, of course, that this brilliant, argumentative, conflicted man goes on to be the most effective missionary ever of the Christian church.  In fact, without Paul, it’s hard to say whether there would even be a Christian church today.  Without Paul’s brilliant ability to adapt the gospel of Jesus to the pagan cultures he encountered, it’s hard to say how Christian understanding of Jesus might have developed.

But, what’s important for us right now about how St Paul comes to have faith in the resurrected Christ of faith? 

Two things, I think.  Firstly, that it’s about more than just conversion.  Certainly it starts with the psychological experience of finding a whole new meaning to your life, but it goes further than that.  Because what we see in Paul’s experience – as in the experience of Peter in our gospel reading today – is that the transformation that comes from bumping into the risen one has got some strings attached.  Not just the warm glow of having a personal Saviour but the urgency of realising you’ve got something important to do with your life.  Running into the risen one is less about conversion than about call.  Peter and Paul both demonstrate the reality that Christianity is not just a feel-good consumer option – not just a belief system but an encounter that’s got some implications for how you live.  What brings us to faith is not persuasion but relationship – for us, 2,000 years later, the encounter with the risen Christ takes place within the context of the faith community – we see the risen Christ in and through one another – and how we live out our faith brings us into new forms of relationship with others.  For Paul, of course, it meant recognising that what had seemed so important – the institutions of temple and Torah that defined the difference between Jews and pagans – were of no importance at all compared to the new community of Jews and Gentiles living together as people connected with one another because of the new life experienced in Christ.

Which brings us to the second point, which is that Paul’s new self-understanding based on encountering the risen Jesus – in a sense he sees his own life as being submerged in the death of Christ and re-awakening to a whole new way of being in the resurrection – it changes his orientation from the past to the future, from defensive and inward-looking to adventurous and outward-looking.  It becomes less important for him to protect the boundaries of tradition, more important to recognise the newness of what God is doing, the welcome of God that is now extended to Gentiles as well as Jews, and to let go of anything that might stand in the way of that.   

The resurrection changes everything – if we take it seriously we become people who are prepared to cross boundaries, people oriented towards the future, not the past – oriented towards new relationships and new possibilities, no longer anxious about protecting our traditions or preserving our sense of identity.  It’s especially important, I think, because in a sense the church finds itself today in a similar sort of bind to the Jewish communities of Paul’s own time – living in a cultural environment that’s leaving us behind, changing so fast that we can’t build bridges any longer between our own traditions and the community around us.  There’s a temptation to withdraw into defensive isolation – to feel threatened and to blame the secular world for not coming to church in droves like they used to – but I don’t think that’s the resurrection option.

The resurrection option that St Paul shows us is to recognise that relationship comes first – our encounter with the Christ of faith makes possible new and life-giving relationships with one another and encourages us to trust that God is also showing us new possibilities in the world outside the four walls of our own tradition.  Like St Paul – who remains for the rest of his life a Torah-observant Jew - we can learn new ways of proclaiming the gospel without losing touch with the life-giving source of our own faith and spirituality.  Our Open Space conversation yesterday shows me that I’m not alone in thinking that the way forward is to engage with the community around us on its own terms, to focus on building relationships with the community around us because it’s in relationships with one another that we encounter Christ, it’s in commitment to a shared vision of the future that the risen Christ comes into focus.  I’m excited by the depth of thinking, and by the passion in this congregation that our conversation yesterday revealed.  Let’s do it!

 

 

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Easter Day

 

3

 

So the women came running in with a story that Jesus was risen.

Admittedly, the story must have been a bit garbled.  It’s not that they’ve seen him, they’ve seen, more to the point, where he isn’t.  The stone rolled away – more, I imagine, to allow the women to see the evidence of where Jesus wasn’t, than as a means of exit for the Risen One himself who, as the following days will reveal, has become remarkably good at sudden entrances and exits.  They’ve seen where Jesus isn’t – the empty tomb which all four gospels emphasise as the ground zero of resurrection faith.  Something has happened here.

They’ve seen where Jesus isn’t, and they’ve heard some startling news.  Two messengers in white, Luke wants us to notice, probably because in the law of the land at the time, two witnesses make a case.   

But the apostles, the ones on whom it all depends now, the founding fathers of our faith, wouldn’t have a bar of it.  Hysterical nonsense, wishful thinking.

There’s a tension, isn’t there, between hope and realism.  No doubt, here, the disciples are being realistic.  They’ve seen the evidence, Jesus is as dead as a door-nail.  No point holding onto a dream once it’s been punctured.  It was good while it lasted, the heady days of walking and dreaming in Galilee, the mind-twisting tales of widows and shepherds and landowners, the idealistic stories about God’s kingdom in which beggars are lifted up and rich folk turned away, the meals with simple folk, the arguments with cunning priests and lawyers, the luminous moments of healing and forgiveness.  But when a dream’s gone, you still need to get up the next day and earn a living.  Realists take the world as it is and try to work out how to manage it.

Hope begs to differ.  Hope puts the dream first, and wonders how reality can be changed to make it happen.  Hope leaps at possibilities and puts two and two together to make five.  What if it just could be true?

Realism interrupts again to suggest it might just be a metaphor, a holy paradigm for imagining the possibility of success after failure, for imagining restoration after disgrace – and it’s true.  The resurrection of Jesus is a mighty metaphor – but it needs to be a whole lot more than that if it’s to have any traction. 

Why Jesus, in the first place?  Why this human figure, in this time and place, this particular young man who loved to eat and drink, who loved telling stories, who was moved by human suffering and tenderness?  Why didn’t God just inspire a few more prophets write a few more books of the Old Testament to tell what God was like, to tell about God’s outrageously indiscriminate forgiveness and love?  It’s because we are human, because the only real way we have of learning about the really important stuff like compassion and tenderness is by experiencing it in our bodies, in the physicality of the lives we share with one another.  The Hebrew Bible knows this very well, in Hebrew there’s no way of separating emotion or spirituality from embodied experience.  We can only really learn what God is like by encountering the one who shows us God’s nature in human flesh and blood.

And that’s why, if you want to grasp the wild straw of hope that the empty tomb and two scary men dressed in dazzling white send rushing through you – hope isn’t hope if it’s just a metaphor.  Too much of who we are is experienced at the level of our bodies, too much of what is really important in our relationships with one another is earthy and physical.  Hope this visceral and this wild needs to be grounded in the physical, in the realm of lived experience.

What’s really happening, here?  For a start, this is utterly consistent with the extravagant and slightly ridiculous God of the parables and deeds of Jesus. Again and again we are confronted with a generous, ‘over-the-top’ God.  A God who doesn’t know when to stop, when enough is enough, when things are beyond hope.  

If the Gospel story has been telling us anything, it’s this: Get ready for a God who does the unexpected and the ultra-extravagant thing. Don’t try to confine God to our little human notions of what seems like common sense; break out from what seems reasonable. God is unreasonably extravagant, gloriously unpredictable. The holy, saving nonsense of God is mightily at work at Easter!

This is the heart of the Easter message. Unpredictable and prodigious. Now is Christ raised from death, the first fruits of the harvest of the dead.

It’s OK not to be to sure about how all this works.  It’s OK to notice, as St Paul does, that the resurrection body must be wildly different from the sort of bodies we have here and now, that resurrection isn’t just the resuscitation of Jesus’ wounded and broken body but transformation into an entirely new kind of life – in fact the evidence for resurrection is not really the empty tomb or even the shadowy and not-very realistic gospel accounts of the post-Easter appearances – the real evidence is the transfiguration of Jesus’ stunned and traumatised followers, the visceral experience of transformation by those who even today dare to report that they have encountered the risen Christ.

So, what does it mean?  It’s the triumph of hope over realism.  The announcement that here and now, God’s logic and God’s way of doing things has broken into human history.  The logic of hope that says God intends God’s creation not for death, but for life.  The already but still-waiting-for-it triumph of self-giving love over despair, the issuing of a blank cheque that just needs us to countersign it, to cash it in and bring it into the here and now.

But what does it really mean?  You hardly need me to tell you, you can look around and see for yourself the bad news of realism in the world we live in.  Does it actually look as though death and despair are on the way out?  The dreary bad news we’ve got so used to living with that we almost accept it – global conflict spurred by religious fundamentalism and competition for resources – the AIDS pandemic that threatens the future of an entire continent – global warming, loss of arable lands and shrinking water resources that threaten the poorest of the world’s poor – loss of biodiversity and mass extinctions – where’s the good news?   

The good news is that we’re resurrection people.  The good news is that the resurrection of Jesus Christ teaches us to face the future with hope, that God can and does reach into the deepest well of despair to draw out of it new life, new directions, new and transformed ways of living.  That doesn’t absolve us from responsibility or from the practice of peace in our own lives.  It does mean that we can place the future in God’s hands, that we can live in the expectation of being surprised, it means that we can and we must take our part in healing our environment – as God’s people we need to take seriously our responsibility for caring for God’s creation.  Go green – dare to imagine a future in which the Canning River isn’t filled with green slime – recycle not because you must but because you can’t help but be oriented toward the future of God’s world.  As a parish, let’s review the ways in which we use water and power, let’s talk about ways in which we can build hope in our community.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is stunning.  It changes everything.  I don’t know why we don’t talk about it all the time – in fact, let’s!  Because it’s a down payment – God is saying to each one of us – this is how much I love you – this is what I intend for you.  God doesn’t do resurrection as a party trick – it’s not rabbit-out-of-the-hat stuff just to impress us or just to prove that Jesus really was who he said he was – it’s a down payment – it’s the first instalment of what God intends for every one of us.

Let’s live as though we believe it.