The Texts
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38I wonder if you have ever been in the sort of situation where you have to do something really important but very difficult – a paper to write for your professor, a letter to your mother in law to compose, an appointment to make with the bank manager about your overdraft, or a heart to heart chat with one of the children. Then you suddenly realise that you can’t possibly do it before you have cleaned the house or tided you desk or done the ironing. A counsellor would describe what is going on as a displacement activity; a placing of effort and energy into doing something that will delay you from facing the real task that you should be doing.
I believe that something like this is going on in the church around the world at the present time. An enormous amount of spiritual energy is being engaged in discussing the role of women and homosexuals in the church. Money is being spent on law cases about whether religious ideas should or should not be taught in science classes across the border. The church throws itself into defending neo-patriotism by its words and actions, and consumer ethics by its lack of words and actions. I am not sure that some of the issues being hotly debated in and between other religions do not have a similar function in the life of our society.
If I am right about seeing these things as displacement activities, then let me tell you what I think are the real issues we should be addressing. We should be considering how we can understand faith and religious discourse at all within a world view dominated by scientific method and knowledge. (And the more I think about that, the more I think there are no easy or facile answers.) We should be trying to understand what is the relationship between different faith responses, Christian Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, animist, among many others. We should be asking how we can understand any call to a belief in absolute truth in a world where faith is diverse and where relativity holds sway in almost every other area of knowledge.
I have to say that I feel that we who would think ourselves part of a progressive or liberal (or whatever you want to call it) view of religion have been enticed in to throwing energy into those other issues by people who are using them to avoid the real issues of our time. If we faced our real task in the 21st century, then discussing whether women are real people, whether Gays and Lesbians are fully human, or whether the world is really just six thousand years old would be as important and relevant as discussing how many angels could dance on the head of pin (or is that sit on the head of a pin?)
Each of our Biblical texts today tells a story about people facing unbelievably enormous change. The old man Abrham and his wife Sarai have already been uprooted from their home and tribe in the fertile crescent, and been sent off to make a new home among the less than friendly peoples of the eastern Mediterranean hinterland. Today they are being asked to take on board a totally new understanding of God, not a God of the sky and desert wind, but a God who enters into a personal and contractual relationship with them. Not only that, this relationship is going to be continued through the unthinkable progeny of this old and barren couple, and just to rub it all in, their names are arbitrarily changed, They will now be known as Abraham and Sarah. And we thought we had trouble adjusting to the Book of Alternatives services?
St Paul was a Jew of the pharisaic persuasion. We tend to think of the Pharisees as the conservatives of their time, but this is probably not a correct reading of their history. The Pharisees in past centuries had been the progressive thinkers, probably importing into second temple Judaism belief in resurrection, heavenly beings, and other things they had encountered in the time of exile in Babylon. But nevertheless, central to their belief system was the covenant God had made with his chosen people, the seed of Abraham, and the need to justify participation in this covenant relationship by strict obedience to the demands of the Mosaic Law. They were also among those who believed that God would send his messiah to restore the chosen people to their rightful place in the world by freeing them from the hegemony of the Roman Empire, and setting the world to rights. And now, on the road to Damascus, Paul the Pharisee has met the failed messiah who was crucified, and whose followers he had persecuted, and has been sent off to spread the news about to the gentiles, those who were not of the seed of Abraham. Not only that, as he has travelled through the cities of the Roman Empire, he and his message have been rejected by his fellow countrymen, and accepted by Gentiles. He has had had to reshape his entire belief that acceptance in God’s Kingdom is based on descent from Abraham, and he has had to see that it is something to do with a previously rarely heard of idea, faith. And we have trouble with new ways of understanding and interpreting the texts of the Bible?
In Mark’s Gospel story, the disciples are quite firmly convinced that they have found the Messiah and that he is going to set up his kingdom in Jerusalem, and that they are going to form the next government. Now they have to come to terms with a Jesus who tells them they have got it all wrong, that the future is death not glory, rejection not success, defeat not victory. And we have trouble letting go of Christendom?
You may have noticed that, as I often do, I have looked at our Biblical texts as narrative, as stories. I have not asked “Did this really happen?” for, as in the case of most stories, that is irrelevant. Nor have I said, or ever do say about the Scriptures, “God wrote them, and they are absolutely true and accurate”. You only have to read the scriptures to find that there are many inaccuracies and inconsistencies which can only lead us to a view that however important and inspired they are, the writing is by human hands. But I believe that treating the scriptures as narrative, stories which ask us to think about God, about ourselves, about our relationships with others and about our place in the world, is a way in which we can value not only our own, but also the scriptures of other religious traditions. This is a major change in understanding the role of scripture which only a few in the church have up to now been able to accept.
Secondly, you may have noticed that there are two themes across our scripture readings today, covenant and change. In this, I would go so far as to say that they are typical of the whole of our scripture. God is a god of change, who is involved in change, who enters into a relationship with us which requires us to change. The world always has been a world of change. But today the pace and volume of change is not only inconceivably larger than any of previous generations could have imagined: both the volume and the pace of change are growing exponentially.
As I have progressed through these thoughts I have hinted at some of the changes which have happened or which I believe are needed in both church and society. Let me end by summarising and listing in point form what I believe we really need to be grappling with at this present time.
• The end of the alliance between faith and political or social power.
• The end of seeking comfort in a fixity of faith and absoluteness of scripture which our tradition does not warrant.
• The end of believing that ours or any faith is the only true faith, and the end of defining ourselves by our religion rather than by our humanity.
• The end of the fracturing and instability of world society which is brought about by our failure to take on board these changes.
• Finding a way beyond the almost inbuilt human tendency of dividing the world in to us and them and, increasingly today, between me and everything else.
• Discovering a way of understanding God, faith and religion, which will do justice both to the knowledge about the world and universe which we have gathered over the past 500 years, and to the diversity of both faith and humanity.
None of this is easy, but then that is not what the Gospel promises us.
For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.
Let us try to pull ourselves and our church away from the displacement activities into which we so easily fall, and for the sake of the world and humanity, tackle the real issues of our present time.
The Very Rev Michael J. Pitts, Dean and Rector