Lent 5 – Sunday 25^th March 2012

Readings:  Jeremiah 31: 31-34,  Psalm 119: 9-16,  Hebrews 5: 5-14, John 12: 20-33

Jeremiah has a reputation of being a rather gloomy prophet, and when you read some parts of his prophecy it’s not difficult to understand why.  But not this morning’s few verses.  It’s a quite calm and lovely passage in which God, through Jeremiah promises a new covenant.  Now, you’ll recall that God’s covenants have been very much to the fore in our readings from the Hebrew Scriptures in this season of Lent.  So what has happened that there needs to be a new covenant.

Perhaps we might do a bit of “revision”.  The first Covenant we encountered was God’s covenant with Noah on the First Sunday in Lent.  God makes a commitment to Noah and all humanity, and not only humanity, but also “all the animals” with them that never again will God wreak the kind of destruction symbolized and made actual in the great flood.  The human side was to be “fruitful” not only biologically, but also spiritually.  Humans were to use their God given gifts of creativity and skill to share with God in the on-going work of creation.  Creation was restored from the wreckage caused by corruption and violence.

This purpose was refined and given a perhaps more specific focus in the covenant with Abraham and Sarah, the subject of the reading on the Second Sunday in Lent.  The human side was to “be blameless,” and to walk before the Lord. Humans were to strive for integrity especially  with respect to the  divine aims for right relationships of mutual well-being.   The divine side was to make Abraham and Sarah the exemplars or role models from whom many peoples and nations would inherit a blessing in place of corruption.

The third covenant, about which we read on the Third Sunday in Lent was with Moses and the Israelites.  It focussed the covenant process even more, singling out one people whose relationships were to show a special degree of faithfulness with each other and with God, spelled out on the human side in the Law and the Commandments and on the divine side with the identification of God as the one who frees the people from oppression and danger.

Last Sunday we saw that there could be serious consequences when the people strained badly their side of the covenant – a covenant based on trust and faithfulness on both the human and divine sides.  Yet the people, you may recall, failed to live out to the full the trust that God expected of them, and we were introduced to the idea of transformation and healing being made possible through the means of a symbol of evil and death.

Well, Israel’s history since last week’s episode in the desert showed that they hadn’t really learned.  The history for the most part from then until Jeremiah’s time was one of repeated episodes of rebellion, followed by repentance and restoration, and then they’d start all over again.  The covenant was so badly strained that the people were exiled – taken in captivity from the land that God had promised.   Jeremiah was a prophet of the exile, and as he saw it, he looked forward to a new covenant – not a new Law – but a new covenant.  And this new covenant would not rely on external symbols, but would come into existence and continue because of an inward transformation of the heart that would allow the people to “know” God intimately, to come into a close relationship with him.  And in this restored, transformed relationship, the human and divine sides of the covenant could be expressed quite simply and quite beautifully “I will be their God and they will be my people.”

To know the Lord in the sense in which Jeremiah uses the word in that sense is more than possessing head knowledge, but in the Hebrew use of the word it means a deep and life-giving relationship. The new covenant of which Jeremiah speaks will be the fulfillment of the covenant process begun with Noah, in that it addresses the dis-ease of the human condition at its root, in the human heart, and offers transformation of the heart and right relationships for all. Jeremiah seems to have expected that this new covenant would be established with the Return from exile.  That didn’t happen.  But as Christians see the new covenant established in Jesus and offered to all in the gospel.   And in last week’s Gospel, Jesus spoke of “believing” in the same sense that Jeremiah speaks of “knowing” today – a deep relationship of the heart.

So when some Greeks – people who were, according to Jewish tradition, outside the covenant – come to the festival and say “we wish to see Jesus”, I wonder which Jesus they wish to see.  Do they wish to see the Jesus who many believed would bring the great military victory over the Romans and restore the golden age of the people.  Do they wish to see the Jesus who many wanted to make King.  Jesus, when he was in places where he heard such talk, left them immediately.  Do they wish to see the Jesus who performs signs and wonders – his fame rapidly spread on this account.  But Jesus himself would often despair of those who wanted just to see another sign.  Do they wish to see the Jesus who is a wandering story teller who uses common every day examples from life to speak of spiritual truths.  Maybe.  Or do they wish to see the Jesus who brings to fulfillment and life the ancient promises of God for God’s people given expression in the covenants – the Jesus in whom they can place their trust and experience an inward transformation of the heart that would lead to a new and deeper life in relationship with God.  Who knows for sure?  But they surely must be surprised by the answer of Jesus who speaks of death – again in language everyone can understand.  He uses the image of the grain of wheat – but who can forget childhood experiences of putting dried peas against blotting paper and wet sand in a bottle and watching the transformation slowly unfold as that which is seemingly lifeless grows into something new and fruitful.

Our Lenten journey is about this process of coming to know and believe in the God who frees and transforms us.  But coming to “know” and “believe” in the senses which Jeremiah and John use them takes time to develop that deep and intimate soul relationship with God.  That’s why we have the Lenten disciplines of prayer and study of the scriptures, fasting, alms giving.  Not so we can feel some sense of Lenten achievement that we’ve managed to last six weeks without chocolate or whatever, but so we can have time.  The Lenten disciplines can free us from the busyness and din that seems to beset us.  Making time for prayer instead of being caught up in all the demands of the clock, fasting – symbolically freeing ourselves for a short time from self-indulgence in possessions or pleasures – giving of alms – concentrating on the needs of someone else rather than our own.  All designed to draw us to a renewal and refreshment of the covenant relationship with God through Jesus – a relationship in which ultimately Jesus “comes to this hour”; his being lifted up in crucifixion and resurrection.  Even though his soul is troubled, he does not waver and is faithful to God – and in that faithfulness and endurance God transcends death for him – and for us all.  The symbol of the cross becomes the sign of the new covenant – Jesus lifted up to bring new life, and new purpose.  You quite often see lapel badges which have a rainbow and a cross – signs of the old and new covenants.

So as we come to this hour, the beginning of the last week of Lent, may we make time to renew and deepen that deep relationship with Jesus of knowing and believing – a relationship of the heart, and so prepare our attention for the events of Palm Sunday, Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter Day to come.

Lent 3– Sunday 11^th March 2012

Readings:

Exodus 20: 1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1: 18-25; John 2: 13-22

You never quite know what the next phone call will bring.  I was in my office the other day; the phone rang, and it was someone asking about pre-nuptial contracts.  I tried to explain that while it may be possible to have one drawn up,  pre-nuptial contracts were something I was most uncomfortable with, that I didn’t want to be involved and certainly the church did not become involved in pre-nuptial contracts.  My only real experience with pre-nuptial contracts is watching a movie called “Intolerable Cruelty” which starred George Clooney as a lawyer who comes up with a supposedly foolproof pre-nuptial agreement.  It’s very funny – poignant in places – and, if you’ve seen it, shows up some dangers associated with playing trains.  Back to the phone call.  I said the reason that I thought it was not appropriate for the church to be involved was because we approach Christian marriage from a completely different premise.  Christian marriage is a covenant, not a contract.  A contract is a legal document in regard to provision of goods or services which has clearly defined conditions, is for a set period of time, and has penalty clauses for poor performance.  A covenant is none of these things.  It’s relational, concerned with trust, it’s unlimited, not closely defined.  Marriage is a covenant because it images the covenant love of God, an unconditional self-emptying, forgiving love, in which God promises to be with us for all time and not to give up on us, a love in which God is always willing to welcome us back when we stray.

Our readings from the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament) for each Sunday in Lent so far are about God’s covenants with God’s ancient peoples.  The covenant with Noah, the subject of the reading on the First Sunday in Lent embraced all humanity, and not only humanity.  If you re-read Genesis 9, you will see that God’s covenant is not only with humans, but “every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth” (Genesis 9: 9-10)  On the Second Sunday in Lent,  the covenant with Abraham and Sarah extended to a multitude of nations and peoples.  Today, the Third Sunday in Lent, God’s covenant with Israel delivered through Moses, the third in the series of covenants narrows things down even more: the covenant through Moses is with one nation, one distinctive people, who are called to a distinctive way of life in the world.

There are two sides to God’s covenants; the human and the divine.  For the people of Israel, the human side was the Torah or the law, which was summarized in the Ten Commandments.  The commandments contain the divine side as well mostly in the “asides” and comments or notes to the commandments. In the first place, the God of this covenant is “the Lord,” YHWH, who identified to Moses as “I am who I am” or “I am the one who is It is this being who covenants to be “your God,”  Moreover, this is the God who brought the people “out of the house of slavery,” creating new possibilities for freedom out of the evil of bondage and oppression; God is a God of freedom and transformation.

The divine side of this covenant also includes future provision for the people: this is the God who is “giving” the people a land in which their “days may be long” and their prosperity empowered. Also for the future, the divine side of the covenant commits to “punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

One commentator suggests the note of punishment sounds harsh to modern, progressive ears.  But even ancient ears wrestled with it as well.  Ezekiel in his prophecy wrestles with the idea of the sins of parents being visited on the  children and comes to the conclusion that “ a child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be their own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be their own” (Ezekiel 18: 20).  Ezekiel has a curiously modern ring – that we take responsibilty for our own behaviours – not blaming someone or something else. But we should be under no mis-apprehensions – to reject God’s love, or to flout  or ignore or break our side of the covenant does have consequences, and severe consequences.  But God is not some vindictive martinet just waiting for an opportunity to punish us.  The promise of steadfast love is orders of magnitude greater than the threat of punishment.

There is a core value in all of these ten commandments; and the value is fidelity or faithfulness. The human side of the covenant, is designed to guide the transformed people in building relationships with God and with each other that are faithful, steadfast, just, and reflective of the integrity of both self and other. The prohibitions on murder, theft, adultery, falsehood, and covetousness are not just principles for social regulation, but are specific ways of regarding the integrity of the others as people of value, and not depriving the other of the things that are essential to that integrity; in other words, the commandments  are instructions for being faithful to God and to each other, or we can think of them as ways in which our faithfulness to God and to each other can be shown in our lives.

In this way human relationships are meant to mirror God in relationship, whose steadfast love sustains the people, and whose love is respected in worshiping God and no other,, in refusing to limit the divine with images, in honoring the divine Name, and in keeping the Sabbath as a remembrance of the goodness of all God’s creation. The covenant with Israel through Moses, with its human side in Torah and its divine side in being the God of Exodus and Promised Land, is both more exclusive and more revealing: exclusive in that it is meant for one chosen people out of all the families of the earth; revealing in that it gives a much more detailed picture of the character of God’s steadfastness and the qualities of human faithfulness that can represent God’s steadfastness. Now, all of that was for the chosen people, but one of the consistent  themes of the New Testament is how that revelatrion is again widened to include all peoples.  In the passage from First  Corinthians, the good news about Jesus extends to all.  One of the names for Jesus in the New Testament is the “New Covenant” – he is sent from God to give new and fresh expression to the covenants made by God in earlier times. This new covenant in Christ is available to all — both Jews and Greeks — who are “called” and are “being saved.” This call is not specified to a single ethnic or cultural group, but is extended to anyone who can set aside their own expectations and give their heart to the proclamation of Christ.

So the call to us in Lent is an examination of our own lives – to set aside our own expectations and recommit ourselves to our relationship with God, to recommit ourselves to the new covenant given expression and made real in Christ.

Lent 4 – Sunday 18^th March 2012

Readings:  Numbers 21: 4-9; Psalm 107: 1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2: 1-10; John 3: 14-21

I wonder if you can recall your first experience of seeing a snake?  The snake may have been coiled, but did you recoil?  I remember my brother and I certainly did – we’d head off on a Saturday sometimes and go down a track called the Zig-Zags at the end of our street in Toowoomba – it was a track down the Toowoomba range.  That’s where we saw our first snake – it was a black snake from memory.  We were probably taught that snakes were to be feared, and it was only later in life that it began to seep slowly into our consciousness that snakes are probably more afraid of us than we are of them. But for many of us, I suspect, there is still a  residue of fear when we encounter a snake.  Of course, deep within our spiritual DNA from the creation stories in the Book of Genesis is the belief that snakes are evil.

So it’s an irony, I guess, that for 20 years, I wore this cap badge – the badge of the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps.  Central to it is the snake on the staff.  It’s called the Staff of Asclepius (or Aesculapius in Latin).  Asclepius was the Greek God of medicine and healing.  According to Greek mythology he had a number of daughters among whom were Hygieia, the goddess of cleanliness and sanitation – hence our word “hygiene”; and Panacea, the goddess of universal remedy.  We still use the same word in English.  In Greek religion, a cult of Asclepius began around 300BC.  The rod, or staff of Asclepius or Aesculapius, a snake-entwined staff,  remains a commonly recognized symbol of medicine today.

Now, you may think this is all todays piece of inconsequential trivia, but I think it’s interesting, even fascinating, that we have the same image from deep within our scriptural tradition as well.  From Greek mythology and from  it must be said, earlier scriptural tradition, is the concept of the animal that strikes fear into people’s hearts being recognized as a sign or symbol of healing and transformation.

Now, in our pattern of Old Testament readings over the last three Sundays, each of which you may recall was about God’s covenants, we might expect the fourth in the series, the covenant made with King David  Instead, we have this incident from Israel’s desert wandering.  Here the people are nearing their goal of the land of promise, but first they must detour around the hostile territory of the Edomites.  On the way they become impatient, and in their impatience they grumble against Moses and God.  So God sends poisonous snakes to attack them.  They then come to their senses and  Moses heals them by forging a bronze snake effigy and displaying it on a pole. The symbol of fear and evil becomes a means of healing and life. In its context with the other readings for today, the snake story seems to serve two purposes: it provides a specific example of the covenant process, and it sets the stage for the Gospel reading.

You might recall from last week that God’s covenants were a two way thing – God promises to be a God who frees, liberates, transforms and to be there always.  The people have certain obligations as to how they must live, given expression in the Law and commandments.

There is a pattern to this story which follows a pattern that is repeated throughout the accounts of the forty-year wilderness experience of the Israelites.  The people complain, God punishes them, the people repent, and God restores them.  Now it’s not like complaining children being sent to their room, later on appearing all contrite and all is forgiven.  Nor is it about God as a petulant, vengeful old man who gets angry and punishes those dependent on him almost on a whim.  It’s much more subtle than that. The people’s grumbling is not simply the breaking of a rule or a fit of pique or disrespect, but a straining of the covenant relationship. The basic covenant relationship is that God will liberate the people from oppression and danger, and the people will shape their lives by the teachings of God given in the Law; both the human and the divine sides of the covenant are based on a fundamental trust and on faithfulness. By grumbling against God the people are breaking — or at least straining very badly — their faithfulness to God; they are not living out to the full the trust in God that is expected of them.  Weakening their relationship to God who liberates them from danger then exposes them to danger, represented here in the form of the snakes.

The biblical language for God frequently uses personal imagery for God side by side with more transcendent language. God isn’t a person in the sense that we are persons.  So the story about the snakes could illustrate less a personal petulance on God’s part and more a kind of action and consequences sequence.  If I climb on to the roof of a high building and jump off, I can expect dangerous consequences because I’m straining against the law of gravity.  Similarly we can expect dangerous consequences if we strain against faithfulness to God.  – if we don’t live out to the full the trust that God expects of us – and Lent is a time when we reflect on times where we don’t live out that trust.

So in this grumbling-punishment-repentance-healing pattern throughout the wilderness period the people gradually learn how to keep the human side of their covenant with God, how to live in faithfulness to God who is faithful to them, how God can bring renewal and transformation out of the most desperate of circumstances and brokenness caused by sin.  What the people learn in this story is the transformation of the object that endangers them into a sign of renewed trust in the saving power of their God.

So the stage for the Gospel reading by introducing the bronze serpent effigy.  This was a traditional fixture of the Jerusalem Temple and Jesus reinterprets it with reference to himself. Jesus uses the bronze serpent from the Numbers passage, and from later Temple practice, to signify himself being “lifted up” on the Cross and from the grave. The image of an object of fear bringing new and transformed life finds its way to the crucified Jesus who in his “lifting up” brings the possibility of healing and transformed life.  The serpent effigy that Moses lifted up brought healing to all who saw it; when Jesus is lifted up, those who believe are given eternal life. This contrasts “belief” and “sight”.  Believing does not mean some intellectual process.  If it did, those who couldn’t give intellectual agreement – like babies, or older people with dementia would come outside God’s purposes.  For John “believing” is more than an intellectual act of agreement with propositions; “believing” is a kind of perception, a knowledge derived from deep involvement. When Jesus, or John talks about believing, the word is more closely related to the word translated as “faith”.  It’s about an alignment with God and God’s purposes on a much deeper level than what goes on in our brains.  It’s about where our heart is.  Jesus speaks about those who believe in him, or, more accurately “faith in him, being granted eternal life.  Jesus speaks of eternal life, not the after life.   We tend to think of life in “clock” time terms.  What happened yesterday is in the past, what is happening now is the present, what happens tomorrow is the future and so on.  Eternal life has nothing to do with clock time.  I believe one of the most important verses in the Gospels is John 17:3 where Jesus prays “And this is eternal life, that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”  Eternal life encompasses our past, our present, our future and not just when we die.  It’s multi-dimensional and is about faith and relationship and the possibilities available to us of a rich and deep life  if we live out in full our covenant relationship of trust in God.  It’s living in the light of God. We all at times are selfish, or petty or even hurtful.  When we are that way we have slipped out of the light into darkness. It can be easy to live in the darkness – we can be anonymous, unseen.  When we’re in the light, we can be seen by everyone. When we slip into the darkness then we are condemned as Jesus said.  We aren’t condemned by God.  We condemn ourselves by our actions. Straining the covenant has consequences, and we’ve all been there but eternal life waits for us in the light, the light of love, joy, peace and patience.  The Gospel tells us that “God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world.”  This whole Gospel passage is about God always being there to gently nudge us back into the light.

So as we come to this mid-point in Lent, the readings set the scene for what is to come -  how the evil and fear symbolized in the reading from Numbers by the snakes, evil and fear reinterpreted and given a universal application in the Cross and suffering of Jesus is redeemed and transformed by God to bring us out of our darkness into his glorious light.

Epiphany 6 – Sunday 12^th February 2012

Readings:

2 Kings 5: 1-14; Psalm 30; 1 Corinthians 9: 24-27; Mark 1: 40-45

Leprosy can still stir strong emotions.  The Leprosy Mission has a great ministry in not only treating the disease, but restoring people.  When I served at Murray Barracks in Port Moresby in the early 1970’s, there was an island in Fairfax Harbour which housed a leprosarium – many sufferers were segregated there.   More of that later.  At that time Libbie was an Army Nursing Officer serving at Taurama Medical Centre just outside Port Moresby.  There they treated a number of cases of leprosy among soldiers, both Papua New Guinean and I recall, one Australian who was there for a couple of months.  He’d contracted leprosy while serving in Vietnam and was sent to PNG for treatment because they knew how to do it there.

Illness can be a great leveller and is no respecter of persons.  We have two stories this morning, from First Kings and from St. Mark’s Gospel about people afflicted with leprosy – or what is called leprosy in the scriptures.  I’ll call it leprosy today, but it’s often a generic description for skin diseases.  But whatever the exact nature of the affliction was, those who suffered from it in Jesus time became almost no persons.  They were ostracised from their communities, shunned by their families, banned from any participation in communal life, or in the religious rituals that were the foundation of the communal life.   One writer describes them as corpses haunting the edges of communities they could no longer enter.  Their plight was awful.

There are differences with Namaan’s story – he was from what was then called Aram – modern day Syria.  He had military power and position and authority and influence, but none of these things could prevent him contracting his disease from which he longed to be healed.  There were probably not the same restrictions attached to leprosy sufferers as there were in Jewish society – Namaan seems to be quite free to travel for example.  The story of Naaman is both ancient and modern and has great insights combined with great humour.    Namaan’s disease affects him so much that he does what many modern day very well off people who become seriously ill do – he seeks a cure in another country.  In fact so serious is his disease  that he enlists the help of foreign political and religious leaders with whom he’d been in conflict. When the general comes to Elisha’s house, after giving a great gift to the King, he expects the royal treatment. He expects to see the great prophet himself, not some functionaries who tell him to dip seven times in the nearest river. He assumed he’d get a complex and expensive treatment, the best money could buy, but he is given the simplest directions: what you need to be healed is right in front of you, follow the directions, and you will be well.

Naaman’s servants prevail upon him.  They perhaps appeal to his vanity, but they remind him that he would gladly pay a fortune for relief, when relief can come for free. We don’t know if Naaman ever had faith in the treatment, but he followed the directions, and was restored to health. In the end, it’s a triumph of humility over hubris and arrogance. Sometimes the healing we need is right in front of us.

Jesus is confronted by the man with leprosy, who instead of calling out “Unclean!, Unclean!” as he was required to do, asks outright to be made clean.  Jesus, we’re told is moved with pity, or some translations say compassion, but what is really going on is hinted at by the footnotes which say “other ancient authorities read anger”  The Greek word translated as “moved with pity” means literally “stomach turning.”  You can perhaps pick this up in Jesus words “I do choose.  Be made clean”.  They direct, abrupt – try saying them yourselves a number of different ways with different emphasis.  Perhaps Jesus is angered by what has happened to the man in being excluded from his community.  Jesus deliberately touches him, breaking all the community taboos and the story goes to quite a bit of length about the man’s restoration to his community – which is in the hands of the priests who administer and uphold the community rituals.  So we have three aspects coming together in this story as well – the physical, the communal, and the spiritual; or body, mind and spirit  – and all are crucial in the man’s healing.  They do in a sense in Namaan’s story as well, the spiritual manifests itself particularly in Namaan’s realization that there is on true God – that’s recounted in verse 15.  I like to think that Namaan’s community – his court becomes a better place as he realizes what wise people he has among his servants.

How do we as 21^st century Christians respond to such stories?  It’s useful to reflect on what are and have been the “leprosies” of the era in which we live – illnesses that  result in fear, social exclusion, even loathing, discrimination.  HIV/Aids is the obvious example in our era. Some years ago, it was news around the world when the late Princess of Wales was filmed touching a person with HIV/Aids.   I mentioned the leprosarium in Fairfax Harbour in Port Moresby.  By the time I was back in Papua New Guinea with ABM in the mid 90’s, the leprosarium had closed.  A friend of mine, an Anglican priest, was also the wife of the Australian High Commissioner at the time and found herself on a fairly high level committee looking at HIV/Aids in PNG – the incidence was growing alarmingly.  Some in the PNG Government wanted to round up the sufferers and house them in the old leprosarium.   There have been stories in Australia of attempts to exclude children with HIV/Aids from schools.  The other major illness leading to exclusion in our own era is mental illness.

We tend to adopt a “medical view” of illness and forget about or downplay the other aspects.  My father for many years was an honorary ambulance bearer (as they called them in those days)  I can remember him telling me that often he coped with the things he had to do by just concentrating on the injury in front of him.  In an immediate situation that’s maybe what you do, but there is much more to people than flesh and blood as we know.  The Christian view of healing considers the whole person and their community.  In the story from St. Mark’s Gospel, the community is healed, and that’s just as important as the healing of the individual.  I think our modern day community still needs healing in respect of mental illness for example.  The “medical” view leads us to concentrate on “curing” not “healing.”  In the Gospels, the word often used for healing is the same word as is used for “saving”.  So it means much more than a cure, Jesus brought people to wholeness of body, mind, and spirit.  In the course of my ministry, I’ve seen people both cured and healed, but I’ve also seen people who were healed but not cured, and people who were cured, but not healed.

I am convinced that our touch and prayer can be life-transforming. That’s why we lay hands on people and pray for them in services here.  Nevertheless, many of those we will touch, or anoint, and pray for will continue to live with chronic illness; they may die. This shouldn’t deter us from practicing healing ministry. Healing practices like prayer and laying on of hands and anointing can be crucial among the many factors influencing a person’s health condition. There is much recent medical research which asserts that prayer, meditation, and religious commitments can have a positive, indeed, curative, impact on people’s health.  I believe that our prayers create a sacred space that enables God’s aim at wholeness to be more effective in people’s lives.  And after all, that’s what the stories of Namaan and the man Jesus encounters are really about – lives transformed, lives made whole.  May we claim God’s grace as we journey to being a healed transformed community of faith in which individuals may find healing and wholeness.