Born Again? (a sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent)

Raise your hand if you’re a Christian … Now raise your hand if you’re a “born-again” Christian … Just as I thought: a disparity. Which disappoints me hugely, but doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been asking the question to congregations for 35 years and the results are always the same. Instead of being a term with which all Christians can and should identify, “born-again” has become a phrase that some Christians are hesitant to claim for themselves, while others claim it for themselves with a sense of exclusive ownership, both fervently and vehemently, in a weaponised, “Gottcha!” sort of way.

In the US, you get this phenomenon at its worst, because it is associated with evangelical Christians who have an ultra-conservative cultural and political agenda. You’ve heard of the Religious Right, with its idolatrous identification of America as “God’s own country”, its twinning of faith with patriotism, its hardly hidden racist agenda, not to mention its election-winning support for Donald Trump. Fortunately, the UK has been spared this kind of distorted nationalist, nativist faith. Unfortunately, we have not altogether been spared abuse of the term “born-again”.

Above all – yes – the way the term is used by some Christians to make themselves feel more Christian and others feel less Christian. Apparently it is not sufficient to say (as Jesus himself rephrases being “born again”) that you have been “born of water and Spirit” (John 3:5), that is, that by baptism and faith, the gift of the Holy Spirit, you have been incorporated into the church. No, to be a “real” Christian, you’ve got to have a special conversion experience, usually dramatic, often dateable, and frequently expressed in public “testimonies”, punctuated with proof texts from accredited Bibles. Otherwise you’re suspect.

And then there is this: because the focus is on personal experience, our theology of mission, which includes God’s global work of reconciliation and liberation, becomes truncated. Evangelism is reduced to Christian cloning – inducing the “born-again” experience in other people and directing them to so-called “Bible-believing” churches; salvation is marketed as “fire insurance” (“Turn or Burn”, as the bumper-stickers so invitingly put it), or at least as the spiritual “equivalent to a healthy retirement fund” (Beverly Gaventa); while a commitment to justice and peace, as well to ecumenism, is completely marginalised.

The huge irony is that all this is quite unbiblical, for justice for the poor, peace among the nations, and a passion for the unity of God’s people – these are fundamental, not negligible, let alone expendable, biblical themes. Justice/Peace is the central message of all the great prophets – Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah. And the theme of the ministry of Jesus is – what? The “kingdom of God”, which is a corporate concept and refers to the establishment of shalom, not just in souls but in bodies, not just for individuals but for communities, and not just for some after-death or post-apocalyptic future but for the here-and-now. Or do we need reminding of the manifesto of Jesus, proclaimed in his inaugural sermon in Nazareth (no altar call – the congregation tried to kill him), his “mission statement”:

God’s Spirit is upon me:
God has chosen me to preach good news to the poor;
to announce pardon for prisoners and sight for the blind;
to unchain the enslaved and emancipate the oppressed;
to announce: “This is salvation! Right here! Right now!”

And St. Paul, following Jesus’ great prayer “that they may be one” – again and again the apostle fervently pleads for a common purpose among Christian communities.

That is what mission is about: not about saving my butt and getting sinners, via my church, out of the Pit because “the Bible tells me so”, but about witnessing to the fact that in Jesus Christ God is renewing, reconfiguring the whole universe, inviting people to join in his cosmic programme of reconciliation, and encouraging churches to demonstrate God’s shalom by embodying in their life what Jonathan Sacks calls the “dignity of difference”. Each of our experiences of coming to faith – these are no doubt different. But this vision of the one church and the new creation – that is what binds us to Christ, to each other, to the world.

So to be “born again” – well, let’s look – closely – at the famous text in the encounter of Jesus with Nicodemus in John 3.

First, observe how Jesus begins by pointing Nicodemus to the “kingdom of God”. Right from the get-go we’re not talking about personal salvation and getting to heaven, we’re talking about the new world that is God’s work in progress.

Second, Jesus tells Nicodemus that “no one can see the kingdom of God without” (John 3:3) – without what, exactly? In the Greek text, “without being born anothen”. Anothen may certainly mean “again”, but it more commonly means “from above”. So the question is: what does anothen mean in this context? Nicodemus obviously takes it to mean “again” – hence his bewilderment at the idea of entering a womb twice. But what if we take anothen to mean not “again” but “from above”? Then what Jesus tells Nicodemus links perfectly with what John tells us in chapter 1, where we read that Jesus, the incarnate Word, gives to all who believe in him the “power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man but” – of what? – “of the will of God” (John 1:12-13), the God who, in John’s up-and-down heaven-and-earth cosmology is “above”. And then what Jesus tells Nicodemus also links perfectly with what John tells us at the end of chapter 3, where in a single verse (31), he refers to Jesus as “the one who comes from heaven” (v. 31c) and “the one who comes from” – you guessed it! – “anothen” (v. 31a), which clearly means not “again” but “above”. Thus not “born again” but “born from above” turns out to be the better translation of anothen – as, in fact, many Bibles in English now acknowledge.

But look, I’m not the word police! By all means let us speak about being “born again”. Paul never does in his letters, but the First Letter of Peter does (“born anew”). Rebirth is actually a quite fantastic image. It speaks vividly to the point that Jesus is making to Nicodemus, namely that faith is, well – “Wow!” – like a new-born emerging from darkness into daylight, a new world alive with possibility, because (as the mysterious Mr. Smith declares on arriving from London in the small 18th-century town of New York, in the cracking Francis Spufford novel Golden Hill) – because “what I am is all in what I will be”. To speak of being “born again” is not a problem unless you make it a problem by reducing its meaning to a specific experience that all Christians must have. Being “born again” or “from above” – they are both powerful metaphors of transformative faith. But the how of faith is not important.

Only two things are important. Firstly, the that of faith, which finally demonstrates its authenticity not in our personal experiences and “testimonies”, however compelling – we are, after all, notoriously unreliable narrators of our so-called “inner lives”, and Christians have form in being rather egocentric about salvation – but in the outward, public, and often costly practices of grace and actions of love. “Only a person who obeys believes,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Christianity without discipleship is Christianity without Christ.”

And, secondly, the object and the content of faith around which the that of faith orbits. The object of faith: Jesus, of course, but Jesus “my personal Saviour” only insofar as he is identical to Jesus the strange, disturbing, feral figure that stalks the pages of the New Testament, the one with a fondness for those who aren’t in my gang, otherwise he is simply the Jesus of my personal fantasies. And the content of faith: the quite specific teaching of Jesus – for an overview, that Nazareth Manifesto, and, for more detail, the radical demands of the Sermon on the Mount and those subversive tales-of-the-unexpected we call parables. It’s no good crying “Lord! Lord!” or claiming Jesus “lives in my heart” unless that Jesus and what he teaches actually matches the person and project of the Jesus of the Gospels.

Finally, remember that the new birth is just that – a birth, a beginning; but discipleship – that’s a daily departure from the safety of the neonatal unit and a lifetime of growing up, leaving home, taking risks – like old Abraham and Sarah, whose road trip from Haran to who-knew-where, further and further, is the defining journey of biblical faith.

So the next time someone asks you if you’ve been “born again”, don’t feel intimidated and don’t be shy; rather modestly but boldly say, “Of course – I’m a follower of Jesus! But following Jesus – and keeping up – that’s the arduous journey of a lifetime. Are you too on the way?”

The gift of weakness: a funeral homily

(Myra was a 79-year-old former primary school teacher, keen golfer, and faithful church member who spent the last 7 years of her life in a nursing home before dying of a dementia-related illness. One of her two sons, John, gave the eulogy. The lesson from 2 Corinthians 4:7-18 was then read, and the homily followed.) 

What can I add to John’s tribute to Myra? With a portrait so rich in detail and colour, not much! The focus on family – devotion to Graham, pride in her boys, delight in her grandchildren; the importance of friendships; the vitality – and that smile; the practical faith visible in attention to others and service in the church (at Bethel, on the Social Committee): that’s the Myra we knew in Sketty. But not the only Myra. For the Myra finally overtaken by dementia was Myra too. And God may have something to tell us through Myra in her weakness as well as Myra in her strength. After all, isn’t that the way God worked through Jesus?

Dementia has now replaced cancer as the illness that embodies our deepest fears. Pitiless and inexorable, it seems to threaten our very identity as human beings. Memory evaporates as the past splits from the present like an iceberg cracking from the inside out. Recognition blurs, relationships pale, self-care crumbles.

But how much of this appraisal simply reflects our own visceral fears shaped by a culture captive to the idols of autonomy, productivity, and control? How much of our default evaluation of dementia as a “living death” is simply a projection of unexamined assumptions about selfhood? Are we ever masters of our own experience? Are we not always strangers to ourselves? Isn't all that we have not a secure acquisition but a fragile gift? And isn't who I am finally determined not by what I achieve but by how God sees me?

What if we stop assuming that dementia is solely an affliction that takes us into a bad place and consider the possibility that it might even be a grace that moves us towards a new place? Perhaps the truly awful thing for people with dementia is not so much that they forget – for memory is a collective enterprise, something we do together – but that they are often forgotten.

Certainly Myra was not forgotten by her own family, and if my own experience rings true, amidst her frailty and helplessness, and your loss and pain, there were moments – holy moments – of intimacy, tenderness, humour, and love, a love which the pathos of the situation only served to clarify, deepen, and sustain.

In Wendell Berry’s wonderful novel Hannah Coulter, the elderly twice-widowed heroine, reflecting on life and loss, observes: “I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be a story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while…. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold you. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.”

The tapestry that is each of us: this side of death I think mostly we see the back side with its loose ends and knots and messiness. But on the other side, the side of resurrection: there the stitches shine like gold, the pattern of our lives – the pattern of Myra’s life – completed, perfected, glorious, woven by the God of creation and recreation we see in Jesus.

Field of dreams: a sermon on baseball and redeeming the past

I’m a psychoanalyst’s dream: I rarely have sweet ones. Usually something of a nightmare. Two in particular I’ve been having for over 50 years. In one I’m being chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex: very Jurassic Park. The other concerns a baseball game, the 1965 Suffolk County Final, my own Huntington High School versus West Babylon High School. The score is tied and the game is now well into extra innings. It’s a swelteringly hot day, and the umpires almost decide to call it a draw lest we youngsters drop from dehydration, but they decide to let the game continue one more inning. With a runner on third base but two outs (three outs to an inning), I come up to bat against an all-star pitcher with an evil fast ball. I take (don’t swing at) the first two pitches, curve balls, because they’re out of the strike zone. Now he’s got to come in with the third, and it’s got to be his best pitch, and I’m ready for it. Sure enough, it’s a fastball, belt-high and right over the plate. I swing the bat. Crack! The ball soars into center field. Never have I hit a ball so well or so far. The crowd rises to its feet. The runner on third base trots home and watches. I round first base and also watch, for surely the centerfielder will never reach the ball in time, and we will score the run we need to win the game. But he’s off like a jackrabbit and at the last moment he leaps, stretches, and tumbles to the ground, rising triumphantly with the ball lodged firmly in the webbing of his glove. I am in despair. I wake in a sweat. But not only because I came within an inch of winning the game, but because I know what happened next – can never forget what happened next – in West Babylon’s last turn at bat: I made the error which let in the run which lost us the title. From nearly hero to bleating goat in a matter of minutes.

I know, I know, it’s only a game. But it’s also a metaphor for a fundamental fact of life: there are no what Americans call do-overs; what’s done is done and cannot be undone. You can’t rewind the tape, edit it, and then fast-forward to the present. As the poet (T. S. Eliot) says:

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.

But the world isn’t speculative, it’s concrete and unforgiving, and failure is a weight you just have to bear like Sisyphus with his irremovable load (but probably without his imperturbable smile). Or is it? And do you?

Let me tell you another baseball story, Field of Dreams (starring Kevin Costner), perhaps the most magical film of the merciless 1980s. Ray Kinsella is a novice Iowa farmer with a wife and small daughter, struggling to make ends meet. One evening, alone in his cornfield, a voice whispers from the heavens: “If you build it, he will come.” Build what? Who will come? In the days ahead Ray continues to hear the voice, and finally he sees a glorious vision of a baseball diamond set in the field. Now Ray knows what he must do. To the astonishment and derision of his neighbours, he destroys valuable cropland to build a baseball field, the “field of dreams”. The “he” – at least the initial “he” – who “will come” turns out to be “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, from the infamous Chicago “Black” Sox, who was accused of taking a bribe in the 1919 World Series and was subsequently banned from the game. Now, on the “field of dreams” that Ray built, this disgraced man gets another chance to play ball.

But Ray soon learns that it’s not just for Shoeless Joe that he has been called to be an agent of grace. For the voice speaks to him again and sends him on a journey east to “ease his pain”, the pain, it transpires, of Terence Mann, a once famous but now neglected and embittered writer, who as a child dreamed of playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Ray finds Mann in Boston, takes him to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, during which he hears yet another voice telling him to “go the distance”, the “distance” of meeting another might-have-been, an old GP, Archibald Graham, who played just one game in the Big Leagues. Doc Graham doesn’t return to the farm with Ray and Mann, but on the way they do pick up a young hitchhiker named, in this enchanted world, Archie Graham, who is still dreaming.

But that’s still not the end of Ray’s journey of faith, for one other figure finally appears on the “field of dreams”: Ray’s own father, though now dead, as a young man. John had wanted Ray to live out his own dream of becoming a baseball star, but their relationship had soured after Ray vilified Shoeless Joe, one of his father’s heroes. Ray now sees his dad sympathetically as a complex composite human being, both sinning and sinned against, and sees himself as that man, everyman, too. In a moving final scene, father and son are reconciled, as we now realise that John is the ultimate “he” who “will come” for Ray to “ease his pain”. Cue an iconic American cameo: father and son playing a game of catch on the “field of dreams”.

Well, for Brits who think that baseball is glorified rounders when cricket is baseball on Valium, perhaps you’re thinking what’s the big deal? What’s the matter with Kim this morning? What’s with the nostalgia? Is he homesick? Yes, I’m homesick. But not really for the Huntington Blue Devils, or for the Major Leaguer I never was, or even for my late and lovely dad who played catch with me. No, but for the home, the poet (T. S. Eliot again) observes, we all start from, leave, and long to return to. Banished from the Garden, exiled from the Promised Land – these are the archetypal biblical images: we are all exiles and strangers, wayfarers and pilgrims, lost and searching, homeless and homesick, longing for homecoming, paradise regained. We all, deep down, have a sense that somewhere, sometime, something went wrong – we went wrong – and if only we could go back, get another chance, we’d get it right, or right the wrong, and all manner of things would be well.

Perhaps, as in Ray’s case, it was a relationship that broke down, with a parent, lover, or friend. Or perhaps, as in the case of Terence Mann, it was a painful rejection that made us withdraw from the world, nursing our wounds. Or perhaps, like Shoeless Joe Jackson, it was some mistake we made for which we’ve never been forgiven – or perhaps for which we’ve never forgiven ourselves. Oh to be able to go back and restore the relationship, to follow the road not taken, to receive mercy, to make amends! Is it true that alienation, defeat, failure, disgrace, finally confirmed by death, have the final word? Are second chances only the stuff of cinematic fairy tales? Is the past irredeemable?

It is interesting that in Field of Dreams there is no mention of God or Christ. Indeed at the time of its release, a Scottish church leader read the film simply as a “monument to obsession”. Well, I guess his neighbours called Abraham obsessive when he heard the call of God to “Go!”, and he went. And I guess their friends called Peter and Andrew obsessive when they heard the call of Jesus to “Follow!”, and they went. Perhaps you yourself have been thought obsessive if you’ve had a flash of insight or recognition and felt the quickening of your spirit compelling you to do something that to all the world looks daft or insane, but you just knew you had to do it because it gave you the chance to recover something precious you’d lost, or to find the one thing needful for your life to make sense. For this particular obsessive and dreamer – obsessed with the Nazarene, dreaming of the kingdom – the film stands as an unforgettable parable, a celluloid sacrament, that taps into the deep hole in our hearts, which we need to discover and acknowledge, which the gospel tells us need not remain empty but, by faith, can be filled with redeeming grace, so that our restless hearts can find their rest in God.

We usually think that we live our lives forwards, towards the future, but the Christian life is also lived backwards, towards the past. Whatever mess we may have made of it, however distressing our memory of it, by grace both mess and memory can be transformed, such that we can review the whole of our lives without bitterness or despair. St Augustine, in his ruthlessly self-critical autobiography the Confessions, is our teacher. “In the act of remembering his own life, he discovers the ever-present grace of God – a grace that was never apparent at the time … but has now become the meaning of everything that happened”; discovers that because “God dwells in memory, the past is not fixed and finished. It can be converted. It can be attuned to God’s presence” (Ben Myers). We can look back and see a trajectory, a tipping point, a revelation. Everything falls into place, works for good.

No, neither guilt nor shame, neither failure nor defeat, not even death itself have the final word in our lives. Because God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, my past and my present – what my past is doing now – have a future. Crane your faith: can you see it? The day dawning on the “field of dreams” we call the new creation, when (so to speak!) the ball drops safely, the runner scores, and – thanks be to God! – victory is ours through him who loves us.

The Parable of the Two Good Guys

A young man who knew his Bible, could cite chapter and verse, was sent by his pastor to question this new teacher in town, name of Jesus, to see if he was “sound”. “Jesus,” the lad was told to ask, “how do I get eternal life?”

“That looks like a Bible you’ve got there, young fella” Jesus said.

Waving the black book to which Jesus had pointed, the lad declared, “Yep, it’s the inspired and inerrant Word of God, infallible and perfect in every way.”

“Sorry?” Jesus said.

“It’s the inerrant Word of God,” the lad repeated.

“Let me see,” said Jesus.

The lad handed the Bible to Jesus, who took it, opened it, shook it, smelled it, then returned it to the youngster. “Who says it’s inerrant?” he asked.

“God says,” the youngster replied.

“Where does God say that?” asked Jesus.

“In the Bible,” the youngster replied.

“But that doesn’t answer the question,” Jesus said, “it begs the question. It’s circular reasoning to say that the Bible is inerrant because in the Bible God says that the Bible is inerrant. What you claim to be true you’re assuming rather than proving. Which is a logical fallacy, which is bad apologetics, which shames our faith.”

“You what?” said the lad, completely discombobulated. “Are you trying to trick me?”

“Of course not,” said Jesus. “It’s just that you’re brandishing that book like it’s an assault weapon rather than a surgeon’s scalpel, and I suspect that you read it rather unimaginatively, one-dimensionally, as if it were a cook book rather than a love story, and listen to it as if it were a collection of notes rather than a magnificent symphony. You search it for answers, but you don’t allow it to probe you with questions. You look for closure when you should pray for critique. God certainly speaks to us through the scriptures, but interpreting the Bible is rarely a simple matter, let alone an open-and-shut case. We should expect to be surprised and disturbed, to have our fixed views challenged – and our settled selves changed.”

But the young man had that impatient, I’m-not-listening-to-a-thing-you-say look on his face. “Just answer the question,” he demanded: “How do I get eternal life?”

“Ahem,” sighed Jesus (not “Amen”). “Let’s turn to the Bible then. What do you say it says?”

“It’s obvious,” replied the youngster (rather smugly, it must be said): “You must love the Lord with all your heart and soul, mind and strength, and you must love your neighbour as yourself. Leviticus 19:18 and Deuteronomy 6:5. End of.”

“Excellent. So all you need is love,” said Jesus, pretending to be impressed and persuaded. For he suspected that the lad had an agenda, that he would try to embarrass and expose Jesus as an unreliable teacher. And Jesus was right.

“Ah,” the lad said, “but who is this neighbour I must love?” Of course he knew the answer: according to Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the neighbour is my fellow believer. But rumour had it that Jesus was mixing with all sorts, pervs and quislings and folk of other faiths, so how would he answer the question?

But Jesus didn’t answer the question, or at least he didn’t give a straight answer. Instead he told a story. “One night a man was walking to town when he was attacked by some thugs. They beat him up, took his wallet and iPhone, then ran off, leaving him half-dead. A minister happened to be walking along the same road, but when he saw the man, he checked his watch and hurried past him. A priest followed a few minutes later (he and the minister had been at a conference on theological ethics). He also saw the man, left some change, but stepped around him. Then two strangers to the area, oddly dressed, came upon the man, and when they saw the state of him they were overwhelmed with pity and compassion. They held him in their arms, stopped the bleeding, called a cab, took him to a local public house, and stayed with him all night. The next morning, they gave the landlord £100. ‘Look after him,’ they said. ‘Call a chemist and get some bandages, Savlon, and Ibuprofen. We’ll be back in a few days and reimburse you for any extra expense.’ Now,” concluded Jesus, “who were the good guys?”

The youngster was nonplussed. “The ‘good guys’? What’s that got to do with getting eternal life?”

“I’ll get to that,” Jesus replied. “But first, answer my question.”

“Well, the minister and the priest – what denominations were they?”

“Who cares?” said Jesus.

“And were they born again?”

“Does it matter?” asked Jesus

“And those two other guys – are you sure they weren’t gay?”

“And if they were?” said Jesus.

“And why didn’t they call 999 for the cops and the paramedics?” the youngster continued his third degree. “Had they been drinking? Were they on drugs? They sound like foreigners. Were they migrants, even illegals?”

“What is this, a sketch from Life of Brian?” suggested Jesus.

“And the man who was mugged – where was he going, what was he doing? It all sounds very suspicious to me.”

“I …” began Jesus, quite flabbergasted.

“And …” interrupted the youngster.

“Look,” counter-interrupted Jesus, “Leviticus and Deuteronomy don’t have the last word on defining ‘neighbour’, and eternal life isn’t a matter of your church, theology, or religious experience, nor do you ‘get’ it, you live it, starting now, with simple human decency: being truthful and thoughtful, kind and generous, acting justly, practicing mercy – and not just to your own, to fellow citizens and co-religionists, but to anyone in need, especially strangers, whatever their ethnicity, faith, or sexuality. If they’re hurting, they’re your neighbour, and if you help them, you’re their neighbour. We are called to help even those who hate us, and one day you might find someone you hate helping you. Eternal life is another life, but it’s hidden in this life.”

“Well,” harrumphed the youngster, “I’ve heard enough. You’ve said nothing about getting saved. You’re clearly unsound.” But feeling sorry for Jesus, he added, “I’ll pray for you.” Then he handed Jesus a leaflet and started to walk away.

Suddenly, however, he stopped, as if struck by lightning. But the sky was blue, though a cottony cumulus cloud had just passed the sun, which winked, flashed, then glowed benignly, like a huge egg yolk, on the two people below. The young man turned around: “I’ll think about what you said.”
Jesus waved and picked up his fishing rod.

God’s Selfie: a sermon on Rublev’s icon of the Trinity

Icons. Nowadays “icons” are mega-celebrities of one sort or another: pop idols, movie stars, royalty: Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana – they are modern icons par excellence. In his brilliant reflection on contemporary culture, Lost Icons, Rowan Williams situates this “iconography” “in the complex realm of public presentation … [and] the marketing of personalities.” It is a travesty, he observes, of the “traditional icon of the Eastern [Orthodox] Christian world,” which “is never meant to be a reproduction of the world you see around you.” Rather, “the point of the icon is to give us a window into an alien frame of reference that is at the same time the structure that will make definitive sense of the world we inhabit.” And many Western Christians have also discovered that, prayerfully contemplated, these exquisite, evocative paintings of holy figures may awaken our spiritual senses and grace us with glimpses of God.

Here is one of the most famous of all icons. It was painted in the late 14th century by Andrei Rublev, a monk at the monastery of Zagorsk, near Moscow. It’s called “The Hospitality of Abraham”, narratively based as it is on the story in Genesis 18 about the three mysterious figures entertained by Abraham and Sarah who announce to them the birth of Isaac. But what do you suppose this icon is really all about? Here is a hint: its more common name is – “The Trinity.” But I reckon you could call it “God’s Selfie.”

But let’s take a step back and first ask how on earth – how on earth – can you picture the Trinity? Well, you can have a go at the Son – at least he becomes incarnate in the man Jesus. But what about the Father and the Holy Spirit? Perhaps an old man with a beard for the Father, and a dove for the Spirit? That’s been the tradition in Western art, the best of it quite sublime. But a dove lacks the “personhood” of the Holy Spirit, and while such imagery might tell us something about God’s work in creation and redemption – God as God reveals Godself to us (what theologians call the “economic” Trinity) – it tells us virtually nothing about God as God is in Godself (what theologian call the “imminent” or “eternal” Trinity).

Any other possibilities? Well, there is the venerable tradition of biblical interpretation known as typology, which re-reads the story of Israel in the light of the story of Jesus, hearing echoes of the former in the latter. It sees connections and explores correspondences between persons, events, and themes in the Old Testament and persons, events, and themes in the New Testament: sees the Old Testament prefiguring the New Testament and the New Testament reconfiguring the Old Testament. For example: in Romans 5 Paul writes of Adam as “a figure of the one who is to come”, namely Christ, the Second Adam; and in 1 Peter 3 the author sees the floodwaters in Noah’s day as anticipating Christian baptism in his own day.

Now: back to this strange tale in Genesis 18 about Abraham, Sarah, and the three mysterious visitors. Rublev is by no means the first Christian to have taken this story as a foreshadowing of the Trinity. It is certainly a strange story, full of suggestive ambiguity. Are there really three visitors, or only one? The text jumps between both possibilities. And who are these travellers? Are they human, angelic, divine? Certainly they bring the promise of the miraculous birth of a child. You can see how the story resonates with trinitarian themes. Perhaps, then, you can understand why it became the basis of attempts by Eastern Orthodox Christians to create a compelling visual aid to help us understand and worship God as Trinity.

So Rublev focuses our attention on these three persons imaged as angels – you can tell they are angels because they’ve got wings! (Abraham and Sarah don’t appear in the picture, although the tree rising over the left wing of the central angel reminds us of the oak of Mamre, where they entertained their visitors.) The angels are linked together by their common blue garments – blue, the colour of the sky, the heavens, and therefore symbolic of eternity. (The building above the angel on the left probably represents the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem.) And the whole scene is suffused with regal gold.

The angel on the right, introducing us to the Godhead, represents the Holy Spirit. His blue robe is covered by a green cloak – green, the colour of life, because the Holy Spirit (in the words of the Nicene Creed) is “the Lord, the Giver of Life”, including the earthly life of the Son through the Virgin Birth. The angel in the middle represents the Son. His blue cloak overlays a dark red robe – red, the colour of earth, the colour of blood, symbolising, respectively, the incarnation and the crucifixion. And the angel on the left represents the Father, his blue robe covered with a translucent cloak, symbolising the eternal divine glory.

What else? Observe that a circle can be traced around the angels, emphasising their divine unity and perfection. Note that each angel has a halo, symbolising their co-equality, and that each has a staff, representing their co-authority. And observe that they are sitting around a table, not round but rectangular, representing the world of time and space. But more, the table is clearly a Communion table – there is a chalice on it. And the angel of the Son is pointing to it with two fingers on his right hand, reflecting his two natures, human and divine, and yet, at the same time – such is Rublev’s artistry – also pointing beyond the table to the Spirit on his left, the Spirit sent by the Father through the Son. And in the chalice, though it is almost impossible to make out, there is a lamb: Behold the Lamb of God! – slain on the cross, but also slain before the foundations of the world.

Now look closely again at the three figures. They are certainly three distinct figures. But look at the way they are sitting, angled towards each other. And look at the way they are gazing – the Spirit on the right at the Father across the table, the Son in the middle at the Father to his right, the Father on the left at the Spirit across the Table – or is it at the Son to his left? The ambiguity is no doubt intended. But look too at the family resemblance – they could almost be triplets – no old man, young man, and a bird! – which suggests not only their equality but also their indivisibility. They seem to be giving themselves to each other, absorbed in each other, living in and for each other – one-in-three, three-in-one, the perfect expression of love. And the Son is central – why? Because he is the key that opens the door to the reality of God as Trinity, as it was by reflecting on his person and work that the early church came to understand and express that God is Trinity.

It has been observed that “this image of God does not always square with our understanding of personal relationships, whether with God or with each other. Often we do not link together the person on the one hand and the relationship on the other, because in modern western societies when we say ‘personal’ we usually mean ‘individual’ without any necessary sense of mutuality, interdependency, and inseparability. The Holy Trinity is not personal in our western sense at all. The personal nature of God, God’s very being, is relatedness, is Father, Son, and Spirit in the unity of communion. And so, in turn, for us to have a personal relationship with God is not a matter of two separate individuals, creature and creator, becoming ‘pals’. It is much deeper than that. It is a matter of being caught up into the very life of God, which is always personal but never individualistic. The Trinity reminds us that Christianity is not about having a one-to-one relationship with an isolated God, nor is it about having a private relationship with God to the exclusion of others. No, from start to finish Christianity is about participating in the trinitarian life of God, and it’s about participating in the community of the church, its human reflection” (from James White, The Forgotten Trinity, much adapted).

One last look at Rublev’s astonishing icon. I’ve left something out. I’ve missed what’s missing. Can you see how the scene, reversing the perspective we’re used to in Western art, seems to beckon towards us? Observe the empty space at the front of the table: the perfect circle is also an open circle. Could it be that Rublev is inviting us, the observers, to stop being observers and step into the frame, to approach the table, to share in the holy communion of Father, Son, and Spirit? For is that not the meaning and purpose of worship, of being church, of being Christian – to be drawn into, to indwell, the very life and being of God, as we lift up our hearts to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit? Yes, it is so. It is certainly so.

Finally this. Observe – none of the figures is speaking, they sit in silent, prayerful contemplation. So let us, like them, be quiet for a moment – in silent, prayerful contemplation …

Paul's personal greetings: a sermon for Easter 6

Texts: Acts 16:9-15 / Romans 16:1-16

Do you like the Marx Brothers? I love the Marx Brothers. The humour is so clever, chaotic, and subversive. Duck Soup is undoubtedly their best film, but At the Circus gives you a wonderful vaudevillian show, including Groucho singing about “the most glorious creature under the sun”:

Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?
Lydia the Tattooed Lady.
She has eyes that folks adore so,
and a torso even more so.
Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-pidia,
Oh Lydia the Queen of Tattoo …

Well, you get the, er, “picture” of this illustrious illustrated lady.

I don’t suppose the Lydia of Acts 16 had any tattoos – Leviticus bans body art – but she was certainly a lady who knew how to make an entrance and leave an impression. An affluent Greek living in the Roman colony of Philippi, Lydia was a business woman, a seller of posh purple textiles. She encounters Paul and his missionary companions, has a conversation with them, and, moved to faith, she is baptised. Then to wet the lady’s head, she invites the boys back to her home for a meal. How I would like to have been a fly on those walls! The first convert to Christianity in Europe, Lydia is recognised by the Church as a saint, and the Orthodox Church has even given her the title “Equal of the Apostles”. Wow!

Of course, Lydia (“Oh Lydia!”) was not the only woman who left her mark on the early Church, as the passage we’ve just heard from Romans 16 demonstrates.

Let’s start with a critical principle for reading: always pay attention to beginnings and endings. So, too, in letters, with salutations and valedictions. The way we sign on and off may be mere boilerplate – “Dear So-and-So” and “Etcetera, etcetera”. On the other hand, they may have a significance disclosed to close and attentive reading. Perhaps that may be the case with Romans?

Another fundamental principle in approaching any text is to note its genre. Romans is, er – a letter! But for much of its history, readers have ignored this fact and treated it as a kind of mini-systematic theology. And it’s true that in Romans, after two decades of ministry, Paul is bringing it all together and writing it all down – about Jesus, I mean. Still, Romans is a letter. It’s what scholars call “occasional”, that is, it’s written to particular recipients in a specific context. Whatever the theology of the letter – well, theology is made for people, not people for theology.

But who are these people, people Paul knows by name? That in itself is interesting. For Paul had never visited the church in Rome, yet he is acquainted with quite a few of its members. How so? Presumably he has met them on his toing-and-froing around the Roman Empire – and in the early church, there was a lot of such to-and-froing. So you can understand why Paul begins the “Personal Greetings” section at the end of his letter by commending to the Roman church one Phoebe, who is acting as a postwoman between Corinth, where Paul wrote the letter, and its destination in the imperial capital. But Phoebe isn’t just a gopher, she’s a valued church-worker, indeed church leader, who has been of immense assistance to Paul.

Nor is Phoebe the only woman mentioned by Paul. There’s Prisca, or Priscilla (as she is called in the book of Acts). She and her husband Aquila were outstanding missionaries who risked their lives for Paul. Jewish Christians banished from Rome by an edict of the emperor Claudius, they worked abroad in Ephesus and Corinth, but Claudius is now dead and they have returned to their home church. The astonishing thing, however, is that Prisca is mentioned at all, since normally only the husband was named in greetings to a married couple. But Paul not only calls Prisca by name, he names her first, indicating that she is the more important of the two.

And the list of women continues. There’s Mary, and Tryphaena and Tryphosa (probably sisters), and Persis and Julia, as well the mother of Rufus and the sister of Nereus. And then there’s the peculiar case of Junias – or is it Junia? The manuscripts vary, but what may have happened is that, as women became more marginalised in the church during the following centuries, certain scribes replaced a woman’s name with a man’s, thus airbrushing Junia out of history. But in the original text, women account for fully a third of the people Paul greets, which is an astonishing statistic about leadership in the early church, and a shaming indictment of even the 21st century church whose members are mainly women but whose leaders are – still – mostly men. We have yet to get our heads around Paul’s revolutionary manifesto that in Christ there is neither male nor female.

And, for that matter, neither Jew nor Gentile. That’s another thing about the people Paul greets: many of them are Jews. Like Paul himself, they are Jews who have become Christians. In the Roman church there are also Gentiles who have become Christians. And it turns out that the two parties have been quarrelling. The Jewish Christians think the Gentile Christians are too liberal and treat them judgementally. The Gentile Christians think the Jewish Christians are too conservative and treat them with contempt. Sound familiar? Interest groups, lines drawn, exclusions, walk-outs – what else is new? But my opponents, Paul insists, are they not also my siblings whom the Father has given me to love, and who therefore have a non-negotiable claim on my consideration and care?

“We are,” observes Rowan Williams, “regularly undone by a form of inattention – the failure to see what other people really are – which in turn gives rise to inappropriate forms of harshness.” And the more power we have, the greater the temptation to treat fellow believers with intolerance and discourtesy. In Rome, power was shifting to the Gentile Christians, who unsurprisingly were getting what Pauls calls “boastful”. Is that why the apostle forefronts so many Jewish Christians in his greetings, even though, with his own theology of freedom, he is closer to their critics? Is he reminding the Gentiles of the debt they owe to their Jewish brothers and sisters, of how Gentiles are but honorary Jews who must use their freedom with sensitivity and respect? Is not Paul here subtly brokering the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile – of traditionalist and progressive – that is at the heart his gospel?

Male and female, Jew and Gentile – sexual and religious divisions – Paul also seeks to overcome the social divide of slave and free: all are one in Christ. And what do you know: we find that a few of the people Paul greets have names commonly used for bonded and freedmen. So we can be sure that that the church in Rome included not only men and women, Jew and Gentile, but also the wealthy and the poor, the educated and uneducated. Which leads me, finally, to make a rather astonishing observation, and to pose a quite urgent question.

In his famous commentary on Romans, Karl Barth wrote this: “The possibility that Tryphaena and Tryphosa and other ordinary people would not have been able to understand the letter does not seem to have been considered [by Paul]. That is, there was once a body of men and women to whom the letter … could be sent in the confident expectation that it provided an answer to their questions; that somehow or another it would be understood and valued. [That for these people] … theology – theology! – was THE living theme.” Ordinary folk who just could not get enough of thinking and talking about God. Wow!

Think about it. We can all read and write. We’ve all got some education, some of us a lot of education. Yet we find Paul’s theology demanding and difficult. Why is that? It’s not because we’re stupid. So why? It’s because Paul’s theology is difficult and demanding! It was difficult and demanding for the Roman Christians too: to the uneducated because it was learned; to the Gentiles because it was steeped in the Jewish scriptures; to the Jews because it subverted their cherished traditions. But they wrestled with the letter because of that “confident expectation that it provided an answer to their questions”. The BIG questions: the meaning of life, the purpose of history, creation and redemption, how to live creatively with conflict, how to make a difference as public witnesses to truth, compassion, and peace in a world of mendacity, self-interest, and violence.

Can we say the same? Are these BIG questions – and not the “Can Christians wear tattoos?” kinds of questions! – are they still the themes that draw us to faith and fellowship, that challenge and inspire us, that we can’t stop thinking and talking about? In Emily Dickinson’s striking image, is God “still the Tooth / That nibbles at the soul”? In Philip Larkin’s famous phrase, is the church still “A serious house on serious earth …, / In whose blent air all our compulsions meet”? May it be so – for each of us and all of us – A, B, C, D, … and all the saints at Uniting Church Sketty!

Paul concludes his greetings (the translation is mine): “Cwtches all around!” Not a bad way to conclude a sermon – and head towards the sacrament!

Sermon for Lent 3: A heads-up from Jesus on the mystery of evil

It’s awesome, though it shouldn’t be surprising,
that God still speaks to the church through the scriptures;
that the Gospel stories, written so long ago,
address contemporary issues and troubling questions.

Take our reading from Luke (13:1-9).
A number of Galileans offering sacrifice at the Temple
had been murdered by the local Roman police.
(Pilate was a particularly petulant and pitiless prefect.)
In another, unrelated incident in south Jerusalem,
a building, the Tower of Siloam, had collapsed,
crushing to death 18 people.
Don’t events like these happen all the time?
Does a week go by when, somewhere, there hasn’t been a mass murder,
or a gas-explosion or a house-fire suddenly extinguishing human life?
People just going about their daily business when –
bam! – thunder from a clear blue sky.
Why do bad things happen to ordinary people?

Some folk claim to have an answer, an explanation,
just as those who spoke to Jesus had an explanation:
calamity is a punishment for sin, personal or collective.
Some religious people offer the same kind of explanation today.
When Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans in August 2005,
destroying roads and buildings, devastating the economy,
and killing nearly 1,500 people;
or when a magnitude 8 earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010,
destroying 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings,
and killing over 300,000 people –
some church leaders knew exactly why these disasters had happened:
they were God’s righteous judgement –
in New Orleans, on all the drinking, gambling, and prostitution,
in Haiti, on the island’s practitioners of voodoo and demon-worship.
(Never mind the rather careless divine targeting.)

And as for people killing people – 9/11, for instance –
well, some American church leaders at the time said
that God was using the terrorists as agents of his anger
against atheists, liberals, feminists, and gays.
(Never mind – what’s the euphemism? – the “collateral damage”.)
No doubt some pious pundits said the same thing
about the November terrorist attacks in Paris –
when they weren’t scapegoating asylum-seekers
or demonising the entire community of Islam.

But why stop there?
Ordinary adults are one thing –
but what about children,
what about the massacres of innocents?
The 16 shot dead at Dunblane Primary School in March 1996?
The 20 shot dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2014?
The 500 killed in Gaza, in their homes, in hospitals,
during the Israeli offensive in the summer of 2014?
The thousands killed in Syria since the start of the civil war in March 2011?
Pray tell, what is the explanation for their deaths?
Did they get what was coming to them?
Or perhaps it was the fallout from the sins of their parents?
I mean, God was surely gunning for somebody, right?

Wrong!
This whole idea of offering a theological explanation
for such terrible events –
is it not a callous and repugnant response to horrendous evils?
And the idea that to explain such evils is somehow reassuring –
how do you work that out?
If, for instance, my child dies of a malignant disease,
and I am told by someone that it is all part of a providential plan –
is that supposed to make the tragedy easier to bear?
Is it not rather just the opposite?
For am I not now confronted with an even more horrendous evil:
God could have and might have intervened to save my child –
but he didn’t –
does this not turn God into a monster?
And this sociopathic deity I am supposed to worship and adore?

These are the kinds of issues that Jesus confronts in our reading.
He tells the crowd very clearly that this kind thinking –
drawing conclusions about divine retribution on human sinfulness
from catastrophes and atrocities –
it is not only arrogant and ignorant, it is toxic.
Those people who were offering sacrifice,
those people who were at the tower –
they weren’t killed because of any wrong-doing,
they weren’t being punished for their wickedness,
they weren’t getting what they deserved.
As the Clint Eastwood character William Munny says in the film Unforgiven:
“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
As Hamlet puts it to Polonius:
“Use every man after his dessert, and who should ’scape a whipping?”

Jesus impatiently dismisses this kind of populist theology.
And why?
Because it assumes that God is basically just like us
(only infinitely bigger and more powerful) –
an idol whose mind we can read and whose purposes we can plot.
Because it is inevitably and conveniently self-serving –
a deity who endorses our own personal and religious agenda.
But, above all, because it is morally unintelligible,
because it expresses a grotesque distortion of the character of God,
the God we know not in natural suffering or human evil,
but in Jesus –
the one who is never vindictive, vengeful, or violent,
the one who is always gracious, merciful, and peaceful,
the one who would rather absorb than inflict suffering,
the one who would rather die than kill.

The theology of that crowd in Jerusalem,
the theology of mouthy church leaders with a hotline to heaven –
we can respond to it only with contempt and derision,
and to them with exasperation and pity.
There is simply no way to get from the Gospels to their God,
who, in fact, is an image of the devil.
The God of whom Jesus is the image –
he is not a cosmic micro-manager of malice – zap! –
he is a God who loves creation into being,
lets creation be in freedom,
and acts in creation as – and only as –
a God who preserves and sustains.

And then the second half of our reading.
After his discussion with the crowd, Jesus tells a story:
the parable of the fig tree.
(Do you like figs?)
At harvest time, the owner of an orchard comes to collect the fruit.
(Date and fig bread, sticky cinnamon figs, fig and blue cheese tart – yummy!)
One year, two years, three years the orchard-owner comes …
But no figs!
“What’s going on here?” he says to his gardener.
“This tree is a waste of space. Chop it down!”
The gardener pleads, “Please, sir, let’s give it another year.
I’ll loosen the roots, throw on some compost, throw in some TLC.
Who knows? Maybe next year …”

Doesn’t this story speak to us?
Jesus looks at us, and what does he see?
He sees that often we are dry, barren, fruitless.
But chop us down? No! He gives us time.
He is patient with us, very, very patient with us –
though he does tell us that Harvest time is coming,
so we should “repent”. That is:
“Quit judging others; mind your own business!
Examine your hearts!
Redirect your lives!
Reimagine the world!”
Because the Lord can use all the hands he can get
to help gather the ginormous crop he’s growing,
to prepare a mega-feast to feed the world.

And as for those perennially vexatious questions –
Why do bad things happen to the ordinary and the innocent?
Where does evil come from? –
Jesus doesn’t answer them.
Which is rather a heads-up, isn’t it?
Because if Jesus doesn’t answer them,
why should we presume to answer them?
With Jesus, we should simply get on with our practices of TLC
wherever we find people hurting –
whether saint or sinner, whether Christian or Muslim –
because such distinctions mean nothing to God.

Not that we shouldn’t ponder the problem of suffering –
and even ask, desperately, “Why, O God?”
We most certainly should.
But not as a question expecting an answer,
rather, as a prayer, a prayer of lament
(check out the Psalms – they are our teacher here),
which though they look like demands for an explanation,
are actually, deep down,
articulations of pain and protest,
and appeals for comfort and strength.
Such prayers will keep us honest, humble, and compassionate –
honest about our bewilderment at the experience of suffering,
humble about our impotence to probe the origin of evil,
and compassionate towards others in their anguish and grief.

Finally, this.
While the teaching of Jesus provides no answer
to the problem of suffering,
it does answer another question:
Why is it that, along with all the ugliness –
why do we find so much beauty in the world?
We talk about the mystery of evil –
but what about the mystery of good?
Where could it possibly come from?
It comes from God, of course!
The Reformers called God the fons omnium bonorum,
“the fountain of all good”.
The gospel of God is the gospel of God’s prodigal goodness.
If people do bad, does God love them any less,
and smite them from a height?
No!
If people do good, does God love them any more,
and give them special privileges?
No!
God is love, from all the way up to all the way down:
a love as inexplicable and indiscriminate as suffering,
a love as immeasurable and inexhaustible as goodness,
and a love that, finally,
will clarify the obscure,
fix the broken,
and renew creation.

The Widow’s Might: a sermon for Pentecost 24

Ah, bless – the story of the Widow’s Mite. Isn’t it sweet? Don’t we just love it? Don’t we just love her – this dear little old lady, poor as a church mouse, who yet gives what she has for the upkeep of the church? Isn’t that how the traditional homilies go? Or – taking out the pensioner and generalising – it’s not how much you give, it’s the spirit in which you give it – isn’t that the moral of the story? It’s just the passage to preach on a Gift Day, or, even better, when you’re trying to whip up enthusiasm for the Building Fund when your church is undergoing some serious renovation because of the crumbling fabric or those blasted new “health and safety” regulations. And the subtext, of course, is, “Hey, mate, you’ve got more than a mite, give generously.”

And now you’re thinking, “Uh oh, Fabricius is going tell us that that’s not what the story is about at all.” Who, moi? …

First – as always! – context, context, context! According to Mark, this is the last episode in the Holy Week teaching ministry of Jesus in the Temple, where he has been going daily to stir up trouble with his good news – telling challenging stories, deftly sidestepping awkward questions, astonishing everyone with his charismatic authority, and, above all, infuriating the religious elite with his anti-establishment rhetoric. In the passage immediately preceding the story of the Widow’s Mite, Jesus warns the crowds about the teachers of the law – the biblical scholars and theologians. He mocks the way they walk around in fancy clerical dress, bask in the obsequious public greetings and flattery of the hoi polloi, reserve high-table seats at civic and religious functions, and – a separate sentence – how they “take advantage of widows and rob them of their homes” under a pretence of piety (12:40).

Widows getting ripped off by the managers of religion – that’s the set-up for the story that follows. And to emphasise the importance of what Jesus is about to say, Mark not only has Jesus sit facing the Temple treasury (12:41), the customary position from which to make definitive declarations (i.e., ex cathedra), he also reintroduces the disciples to the narrative, as Jesus calls them from the wings where they’ve been waiting since the end of chapter 11 to stage front and centre (12:43).

Now: lights, camera, action! Picture thirteen trumpet-shaped chests in the Court of Women, just inside the Court of Gentiles – it’s Israelites only here. And no elders taking the collection in the Temple, rather people throwing their offerings into these huge ornate coffers. Or even more likely, Jesus is facing the treasury itself, where sits a priest to whom the worshippers declare the amount of their offerings – no discreet little envelopes, everything visible and audible – before tossing them into the chests.

Remember, the Temple wasn’t only the house of God, the central sanctuary for worship, it was an economy in itself. There were literally thousands of people employed there, from priests at the top to builders, repairmen, cleaners, moneychangers, and the numerous other functionaries required to keep this micro-economy in the business of sacrifice ticking over. And the Temple treasury – it served as the central bank of Jerusalem, and it held enormous assets, funded by the regular collection of taxes.

So there Jesus sits – and watches the scene like a hawk, noting every detail. First, there are the rich folk who drop in loads of money. And then along comes a “poor widow”. That dear little old lady? Probably not. People just did not live that long in first-century Palestine. Women married in their early teens and were lucky to reach fifty. And widows – they were part of Israel’s underclass, stereotypes of the powerless and oppressed, and in a patriarchal society, a man’s world, they had to be tough just to survive. The younger they were, the more they were considered a danger to the community, perennial temptations to the married family man, so social exclusion often compounded their personal vulnerability. And with no guaranteed inheritance, money was always a problem, not least because of their exploitation by unscrupulous scribes, the teachers of the Law whom Jesus has just condemned.

Just how dirt poor this woman was is suggested by her offering – the two copper coins are Greek lepta, the smallest currency in circulation. Nevertheless, measly as her offering is, Jesus says (in the words of a modern translation, The Message): “The truth is that this poor widow gave more to the collection than all the others put together. All the others gave what they’ll never miss; she gave extravagantly what she couldn’t afford – she gave her all” (12:43-44).

Of course the traditional interpretation of this passage – that in this woman we have a model of costly, self-sacrificial faith – is not wrong. “Blessed are the poor” – indeed. But that’s not the point. Nor is it wrong to see here an attack on the affluent – Jesus was always having a go at the moneyed classes: “Woe to the rich!” – indeed. But that’s not the point either. It’s the institution, the system, that Jesus has in his sights, the way the Temple systemically fleeces the poor – the system and its suits, the professionals, the managers who ensure that the system runs smoothly; fleeces the poor, and worse, humiliates the poor, taking not only their money but also their dignity. For remember, the transactions occur in the harsh glare of public scrutiny.

The Director of our Windermere Centre Lawrence Moore imagines the scene as the widow reaches “the head of the queue. A public argument begins. ‘You’re winding me up, aren’t you? This won’t buy you anything! What? This is genuinely all you have? Well, for once, I’m going to make an exception. Seeing as you’ve nothing more to give, I’m going to accept your pitiful offering. I’m far too generous for my own good.’” The woman is shamed. Nothing could be worse, not even indigence, in a culture where honour is all. It was bad enough that the widow left an act of worship without any money, but that she left it without her pride …

And a final, terrible irony – context again! – what happens next? Jesus leaves the Temple for the last time, storms out, no doubt shaking the dust off his feet. All the disciples, as obtuse as ever, can say is, “Hey, Jesus, wow! What an awesome cathedral!” They haven’t learned a thing. Jesus replies, “Impressed, are you, lads? Take a good look then, because soon it will all be a heap of rubble” (13:1-2). All that money – and for what? A condemned building! Rather like buying stock in the Titanic. Lawrence draws the conclusion: “Beware the building fund” – that is, when we forget that the church is a people not a steeple, and that mission, not mortar, is the reason for our being, for then these bricks become a blot on the landscape rather than a blessing for the community.

Finally, this. John F. Kennedy famously declared, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Jesus, you might say, inverts this declaration: “Ask not what you can do for the Temple, ask what the Temple can do for you.” Which for Christians becomes: “Ask not what you can do for the church, ask what the church can do for you.” Not now the walls but what goes on within the walls. People like me – ministers – are always banging on about what you should be doing for the church. Of course! But perhaps we all need to stop and ask, “Just what kind of church are we being told to be doing it for?” More precisely, just what kind of church are we?

Is it a church that does what it been called by God, sent by Jesus, and empowered by the Spirit to do – to be a sign of the kingdom, a witness to truth and peace, a mediator of grace and mercy, a contributor to human well-being and flourishing – and an in-your-face protest to any power that would deny or thwart the loving-kindness of God for all people, for all creation?

Or is it a church that has sold its birthright for a mess of pottage: a therapeutic church that massages our self-esteem; an anti-intellectual church that stifles critical thinking; a managerial church that is obsessed with its own institutional survival; an otherworldly church in the business of hawking afterlife insurance; an I-vow-to-thee-my-country church, or a church resigned to its marginalisation by the state, a church that openly or silently colludes in government lies, injustice, and violence? Are we a church obsessed with saving our souls, let alone with saving our buildings, or are we a church dedicated to expending ourselves on those who are not with us, and may even be against us, prodigal with our love, imitating the self-expenditure we see in Christ, who, as Paul wrote, “rich as he was, spent it all on us, becoming poor so that we would be rich” (II Corinthians 8:9)?

Rich or poor, our true wealth is in God. Many or few, our true strength is in God. Old or young, our true vitality is in God. Is that what our being Christian, and being church, means to us and communicates to others? That is indeed a cause – the cause of Jesus – for which, like the widow, to give our all, such that mite becomes might, as the power of God is perfected in human weakness.

The Bartimaeus incident

A sermon for Pentecost 22

This is the second time in Mark that Jesus heals a blind man. Both healings come at pivotal points in the narrative. The first occurs at the midpoint of the gospel, just before the critical incident at Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”, and then reveals his messianic identity. So the first healing acts as a bridge between the two halves of the gospel. Mark is not a careless writer. He does everything for a reason. “Pay attention!” he is saying.

The first healing happened in Bethsaida. It’s a town on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. In John’s gospel we learn that Peter, Philip, and Andrew lived there. In Mark’s gospel, it’s the town to which the disciples set sail while Jesus went into the hills to pray. You may remember that a strong wind suddenly blew up and surprised them, that they strained at the oars, and that when Jesus appeared walking on water, they freaked out, and were rebuked for their fear and faithlessness. They never got to Bethsaida.

Eventually, however, they did get to Bethsaida, to witness that first healing of a blind man. But there was a hitch: Jesus’ first touch was only partially successful – the man mistook trees for people – so Jesus had to lay his hands on the man’s eyes a second time before his vision was fully restored. And then what happened next at Caesarea Philippi? How interesting: Peter answered Jesus’ question correctly – “You are the Messiah” – but he did not “see” clearly the meaning of Messiah, did not “see” the kind of Messiah that Jesus is, not an all-conquering hero but a nonviolent and vulnerable servant. Still, at least some progress had been made since the fiasco on the lake: the vision of the disciples was fuzzy, but they were not altogether sightless, not after Jesus instructed them about his coming suffering and death.

Which brings us to today’s text, the Bartimaeus incident, the second healing of a blind man – and the last healing miracle in the gospel. Not at Bethsaida – via Caesarea Philippi Jesus has moved on toward Jerusalem, and now he is at Jericho, a suburb fifteens miles from the capital. But this healing too happens at a pivotal point in the narrative: it’s the last event before the Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday. Again, Mark is saying, “Pay attention!” Indeed, pay particular attention: the blind man has a name, and Mark rarely tells us the names of the characters in his gospel. And the name Bartimaeus – in Hebrew it means “son of the unclean”.

Remember the story of the haemorrhaging woman (Mark 7:24ff.)? She too was “unclean”. Clean-unclean, pure-impure, righteous-sinner, us-them – the distinctions mean nothing to Jesus. He healed that woman. And he told her that her faith had made her well. Jesus also heals Bartimaeus. And guess what? He tells him too that his faith has made him well. Do you think that’s coincidental? And the “crowd” – in both stories there are crowds. And in both stories they are a hindrance, indeed a threat. The woman had to force her way through the crowd; the crowd heckles Bartimaeus and tells him to shut up. Crowds. Public opinion. Soon they’ll be waving palm branches and cheering Jesus into Jerusalem – and soon after that they’ll be baying for his blood. Crowds and public opinion: fickle and feckless, weathervanes, not compass needles. Never trust them. Vox populi, vox Dei? Not.

There is yet another story with a connection to the Bartimaeus incident. Remember the rich guy (Mark 10:17ff.)? We heard about him a fortnight ago. He encountered Jesus (the text says) “on the way” (10:17). Mark uses the exact same words here, but while the rich guy turned away, Bartimaeus follows Jesus “on the way” (10:52). And Bartimaeus is a poor man. The rich man could not part with his possessions, but Bartimaeus throws away his only means of making a living, his cloak – beggars spread out their cloaks, like buskers put out their hats, to receive a coin or a crust from passers-by. And “the way” – we’re not just talking the Jericho Road here: “the way” was the first name Christians used to describe their faith: they were people of “the way”, the way of Jesus, the Via Crucis. And some scholars suggest that the reason the name Bartimaeus was known to Mark is that he became a prominent member in the early church. Rich man–poor man: the first slipped to last, the last jumped the queue. So many connections. Coincidental? Yes, Mark is a clever writer. Mark was a genius.

There’s still more. Back to the disciples. Immediately before the Bartimaeus incident, John and James had approached Jesus, and Jesus had said, “What can I do for you?” When Bartimaeus approaches Jesus, Jesus replies with exactly the same words. But how different the requests! John and James, the so-called “men of thunder”, asked for the big seats next to Jesus in the kingdom of God. But Bartimaeus – Bartimaeus is sick of sitting and simply wants to see. From their request, it is quite clear that the thoughtless Thors didn’t see at all.

The promise of Caesarea Philippi, when the disciples had at least begun to see, albeit myopically – it had come to nothing. The disciples had reverted to thinking of the Messiah in terms of power and privilege, not meekness and servanthood. Jesus did not, could not, grant the request of James and John, but he grants Bartimaeus’ request. Indeed Bartimaeus sees even before he sees, sees deeply who Jesus is even before he sets eyes on the no doubt not-much-to-look-at Galilean who has just healed him. While still blind, he cries out, “Son of David!”, a messianic title, just as Peter had cried out, “You are the Christ!” But, of course, Peter didn’t see who Jesus is with any more insight than James and John, old Dumb and Dumber. And how interesting: unlike all the other people Jesus heals in Mark, Bartimaeus doesn’t go home, doesn’t return to his livelihood, no, he abandons it all and, yep, follows Jesus “on the way”, with Golgotha just around the corner.

Mark – what a great storyteller – simple, plain-speaking, but as skilful as they come, weaving together people, themes, and even phrases to make a pattern – and to make a point. And what is the point? Discipleship – that’s the point – what it means, what it entails. Discipleship means transformation, beginning with a radical perceptual shift. Everything Jesus says and does, his actions and his teaching – they are all an invitation to a different way of seeing – seeing Jesus – and in the light of Jesus seeing the world and your life – what are you going to make of it, what are you going to do with it? Jesus is not interested in inculcating a set of beliefs, or inducing warm feelings or emotional highs. Notwithstanding Bush’s terminological bathos, it is indeed a “vision thing”. It’s about seeing the world as broken, yes, full of stupidity and greed and violence and pain, but a world that God loves and cares for and graces with possibilities of intelligence, generosity, peace, and healing.

And then it’s about action – acting on what you see, by becoming an apprentice of Jesus and doing what he does, as part of a community of apprentices, mutually supportive and encouraging, dedicated to the disciplines of worship and witness that shape Christian character so that we may be a people of truth, mercy, and reconciliation, people who are free, joyful, and bold in the face of what is oppressive, depressing, and scary, regardless of popular opinion and what the world calls sensible, useful, or relevant.

So the Bartimaeus incident leaves us with several pressing questions. Are we willing to buck the crowd and critique the conventional? Are we willing to reach out to folk who don’t fit and welcome them into community? Are we willing to recognise that outsiders may actually have more insight about Jesus than insiders? Are we willing to throw off our cloaks, the things that protect us and behind which we hide, and fearlessly and faithfully follow the Lord wherever he leads? In short, are we willing to be disciples, which means “learners”? And are we willing to go on learning how to be Christian in ever new contexts in ever new ways?

Almost 30 years ago I bought a book. I revisit it so often that the pages are falling out. It’s called What Prevents Christian Adults from Learning. There is, the author suggests, a constellation of obstructions to learning: the need to be right, the fear of being wrong, the security of the known, the pain of un-learning, the work of re-thinking, the disturbance of dissonance, the ubiquity of distraction. A rebuke of a book, yet with an agenda for the church that is both challenging and promising. As a teacher – a Professor of Christian Education – the author had been working at it his entire career. He died in July. His name was John Hull. The thing is: John Hull was blind. But John Hull saw. How about that, Lord: the blind leading the blind out of a ditch rather than into one!

Dumb and dumber: a sermon

Oh dear. James and his little brother John. The sons of Zebedee, known as the “men of thunder” (Mark 3:17). What dudes! But as Mark Twain said: “Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work.” But lightning – enlightenment – is just what, in James and John, is conspicuous by its absence. It did no work, it was unemployed. The “dudes of thunder” were Dumb and Dumber. Astonishingly so. Come along, let’s follow them following Jesus in Mark.

Recall that James and John, along with Simon and Andrew, were the first folk that Jesus called (Mark 1:19-20). They were with him from the get-go. From kindergarten they sat at the front of the class, teacher’s pets. On the occasion when Jesus went to Jairus’ house and healed his daughter, the only disciples he took with him were Simon, and James and John (Mark 5:37). When Jesus went up the mountain and was transfigured – a sneak preview of the resplendent resurrection itself – again, the only disciples he took with him were Simon, and James and John (Mark 9:2). So far, so good.

But then the next we hear of John, speaking for his big brother too, he’s boasting to Jesus about how they got heavy with a freelance ghost-buster, telling him to stop his exorcising and bugger off because he wasn’t in “our” gang (Mark 9:38). How dare an outsider use Jesus’ name! But Jesus gave short shrift to such a monopolistic claim on miracles (Mark 9:39), a claim that was especially ludicrous given that just a few verses earlier the disciples themselves had failed miserably to heal a boy with an evil spirit (Mark 9:17-18). “Anyone who is not against us is for us!” Jesus exclaimed (Mark 9:40). James and John – the first anti-ecumenists, the prototypes of all Christians who think they have exclusive rights to name the Name.

So the stage is set for things to go from bad to worse – in our passage (Mark 10:35-45). Before, it was in-group resentment at “outsiders”; now it is rivalry among the “insiders” themselves. James and John want a favour from Jesus: they want him to give them the “big seats”, to his left and right, in his glorious kingdom, to appoint them (if you like) Foreign and Home Secretary in the Prime Minister’s cabinet. An invidious request, to be sure – and reflecting so poorly on the pair that Matthew, in his version of the event, puts it in the mouth of their mother (“They’re such good boys, Jesus”).

But it’s worse than embarrassing when you look at the passage immediately preceding ours (Mark 10:32-34). It is the third and final prediction of the passion, the third and final time Jesus has spoken of what’s going to happen when they get to Jerusalem: his betrayal to the Jewish authorities, his condemnation by the Roman administration, his torture and his death. James and John have just heard this, Jesus’ explicit renunciation of social and political power, and yet they ask Jesus – for social and political power! Imagine our Lord’s irritation, exasperation as he listens to two-thirds of his inner circle.

Characteristically, Jesus answers their question with a counter-question: “Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink? Can you be baptised in the way that I am going to be baptised?” Again, he is speaking of his death. But how interesting: in doing so Jesus takes James and John back to where it all began, just before he met them and called them – to his baptism; and then forwards to where it will all end, just before he leaves them – to the Last Supper, to the cup he will drink – to the dregs. Can they take the dip? Can they take the sip? “The question is of course rhetorical, but Mark cannot resist [the] sarcasm. Oh yes, say James and John; no problem” (Ched Myers). And, actually, forwards even further – from bitter sarcasm to bitterest irony – Mark is such a clever writer: for who and where will there finally be one at the right and one at the left of Jesus? The two condemned criminals hanging on either side of his cross. Some throne, some distinction.

But that’s not the end of this episode. The other ten disciples hear about James and John trying to gazump them, and they’re troubled. So, kudos for them? Hardly! For they are not cut up by the request itself – oh no – but at the fact that James and John have tried to put one over on them. They are envious. Their cry isn’t “Don’t be stupid!” but “It’s not fair!” All twelve want the trappings of privilege and power. All twelve want the key positions on the front bench. None of them has his mind right, his head straight. None of them feels Jesus. Dumb and Dumber speak for – and take the rap for – all the dummies.

Jesus settles them down and tries again. Yes, it’s all about power. In the world, Jesus says, people in authority throw their weight around. Look at any government, any organisation. Is it not so? People take positions of leadership and what happens, always and everywhere? They get a little power, it goes to their heads, and they want more. And more. Power is a drug, an addiction: you’ve got to have it, and inevitably in bigger and stronger doses. It takes over. It corrupts. You think you have the power; in fact, the power has you. That’s Jesus’ analysis. Is it not so?

But, Jesus says – emphatically – that’s not the way it is in my community. First, as we’ve learned, the boundaries of the Jesus group are porous, permeable, not patrolled and policed. And second, the Jesus group is not authoritarian but egalitarian. But here’s the thing – and here is where Jesus’ analysis gets really interesting: equality is actually a very unstable relationship. It’s like a seesaw: just as you get to a balance, up goes one end and down goes the other. So how to keep the “equal” in “equality”? Counter-intuitively, by each ceding authority to the other. Jesus says: You must be a servant – literally, a “slave” – to each other. It is not that there is to be no leadership in the Jesus group, but it is that it will be a leadership not of domination but of subordination. Politics as usual? No, politics as radically unusual. As unusual as the Servant King himself, who came not to be served but to serve, to the point of laying down his life for his friends – and for his foes too.

Do James and John, and the other ten, do they finally get it? Well, what happens next? The incident of the healing of a blind beggar on the approach to Jerusalem (Mark 10:46-52). Bartimaeus cries out for Jesus to take pity on him. The crowd – which includes the disciples – tells him to shut up. Jesus tells him to speak up. He asks Bartimaeus, as he asked James and John, “What can I do for you?” But whereas Dumb and Dumber asked for positions of privilege and power, which Jesus denied them, Bartimaeus asks simply for his sight, which Jesus gives him. Then Bartimaeus follows him. Is not the point clear? Only if we renounce the will to power – that is to say, only if we recognise our spiritual blindness and seek true vision, the vision of majesty in meekness, of worthiness in weakness – only then do we have the mind of Christ.

Next stop, last stop, Jerusalem. There Jesus will again speak specifically to James and John (with Andrew and Peter), about the future, about the Big Trouble to come – “Be prepared, lads!” (Mark 13:3ff.). Dumb and Dumber, I imagine, are as dumfounded as ever. For, finally, after his last meal, Jesus will take them (with Peter) to Gethsemane, looking for their encouragement and support in his hour of need and anguish. No imagination necessary here: they fall asleep (though I imagine them snoring). And then, when the cops arrive, with the rest, Dumb and Dumber do a runner.

Yes, oh dear. And now here we are, the descendants of Dumb and Dumber. And what dire straits we are in: a church in decline, even freefall. Once the national church was a powerful institution; once the local church was at the centre of the community. Now look at us: marginalized, ignored, aging, tired. We feel vulnerable and powerless, yes? Allelulia! God be praised! Vulnerable is exactly what Jesus calls us to be, for it’s in situations of powerlessness that God does his thing. Only those who haven’t been paying attention and listening to Jesus can be dumb and dumber enough to think that God is working his purpose out in the corridors of power, that it is nations, armies, and the Fortune 500 that are the agents of God’s will in the world, or indeed that it is the mega-churches with their CEOs and performance-enhancing gospel that are the kingdom’s final hope in a post-Christian culture. Don’t you believe it!

Just be faithful. Do what Jesus did and what he tells us to do. Forget greatness. Didn’t Jesus? Redefine power as vulnerability. Didn’t Jesus? Reject the ways of manipulation, coercion, certainly violence, and the speed that is often the fuel of violence – festina lente. Didn’t Jesus? Welcome the stranger and work with the willing, however odd or outlying. Didn’t Jesus? Be kind, gentle, and patient. Hasn’t the Lord been kind, gentle, and patient with you? Yes, just be faithful, faithful to Jesus. What he did and tells us to do – it’s not rocket science. Even Dumb and Dumber, tradition tells us, finally got it. Kingdoms will rise and fall, churches will come and go. But Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. So tell me: what’s the worry, what’s the hurry? Go slow, keep faith! Remember: “Winter under cultivation / Is as arable as Spring” (Emily Dickinson).

The past is not dead; it is not even past: a sermon on Augustine and the Donatists

Have you read True History of the Kelly Gang, the Booker Prize-winning novel by Peter Carey? It’s about the eponymous Ned Kelly, a sort of Robin Hood figure in the turn of the 19th century Australian outback. It’s a dazzling read. Not only because of perennial themes wonderfully, comically, tragically woven into a riveting narrative – social exclusion and desperation, personal loyalty and honour, judicial cruelty and corruption – the stuff of legend; but especially due to the voice that Carey gives Kelly – it speaks to us passionately and personally, fusing the horizons of yesteryear and today. The epigraph on the title page is so apt, from William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.”

Reflecting on the parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13 is what brought Faulkner’s statement to mind. It also triggered a memory that confirms it. I recalled one of those defining moments in church history, defining not only in the sense of setting the course that the church would take, but also in the sense of encapsulating a controversy that would re-emerge again and again along the way. No, indeed, “The past is not dead. It is not even past.”

Come with me to North Africa in the early 4th century during and after what will come to be called “The Great Persecution”. The emperor Diocletian has issued an edict declaring that all churches are to be destroyed, all worship forbidden, all sacred vessels confiscated, and all Bibles and sacred texts surrendered to the Roman authorities. Some of the church’s leaders give in to the demands, others resist and suffer for their faithfulness. Not surprisingly, the rigorists in the church consider those who buckled under imperial pressure to be traitors and apostates. Things come to a head with the disputed election of one Donatus as bishop of Carthage, an able, eloquent, and charismatic personality who, despite sustained opposition from church and state, will remain at the helm for the next 40 years.
What was at stake? According to Donatus and his followers, the church itself. The presence in it of those clergy who had bowed to pagan demands, they argued, compromised the integrity, tainted the purity, disrespected the martyrs of the church. Indeed they contaminated their congregations with their unforgivable crimes and must be removed from office.

Things got very nasty. The issue of the nature and constitution of the church aroused such passions. Subtract the violence and you could almost cry “Amen!” for such theological seriousness. The basic question was this: What is the connection between the unity of the church and the holiness of the church? The Donatists were adamant that the unity of the church is based on its holiness, and that the holiness of the church is constituted by the holiness of its members, particularly its ministers. The church, that is, is a community of saints, not a school for sinners. So the Donatists circled the wagons around the vineyards they planted, to protect the “true” church from the pollution of the world, and drastically to prune its own vines.

Opposing the Donatists was Augustine, bishop of Hippo (200 miles west of Carthage). Augustine and his followers were confident that the church could interface with a hostile world without fear of losing its identity. They insisted that the church is not a bolthole from the world, rather the church exists for the sake of the world, a world in pain and need. The church should not fear defilement either from pagan corruption or from Christian sinfulness, because its purity does not depend on its members and ministers but solely on its God. The church is not a community of the perfect, it is the community of the broken, those who live by God’s grace alone. It is therefore, inevitably, a “mixed” community, comprising quite bad people as well as pretty good people. Above all, said Augustine, the church is a fellowship of love – it is the love of Christ that constitutes its unity – a love that is patient and does not rush to judgement. And Augustine’s text? As the famous harvest hymn based on our parable has it: “Wheat and tares together sown, / unto joy or sorrow grown”.

I wish that this were a story of good guys and bad guys: Donatus – “Hiss! Boo!”; Augustine – “Hooray! Look out, he’s behind you!” – but it’s not as simple as a Christmas pantomime. Both sides in the conflict, in fact, did terrible, shameful things. A militant wing of the Donatists, the Circumcellions, plundered the homes of peasant farmers, robbed their granaries, kidnapped opponents, blinded them, murdered them. Augustine, in turn, if reluctantly, endorsed counter-measures including, eventually, state coercion and violence. When it comes to deeds, there were no winners in this schism. But in terms of ideas and principles? “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Donatus and Augustine continue to argue and battle for the soul of the church. Where should our sympathies lie?

Absolutely with Augustine, for one profound if rather obvious reason: if Donatus were right, we wouldn’t be here to discuss the issue, because if Donatus were consistent, there would be no church, just a sect. For where will you ever find a community of morally blameless people? Augustine himself was quite up front on this issue, even lurid. One who enters a church, he said, “is bound to see drunkards, misers, tricksters, gamblers, adulterers, fornicators ... The same crowds that press into the churches on Christian festivals also fill the theatres on pagan holidays.” And yet some Christians today would get their knickers in a twist about, well, me saying “get their knickers in a twist”. How we love a good moral panic! We’re a long way here from Augustine, or – better – Martin Luther, Augustine’s heir, who once advised his earnest young lieutenant Philip Melanchton to “Sin boldly – but believe even more boldly!” Augustine and Luther, you see, recognised that the gospel actually redefines the very meaning of “holiness”, translating it from the realm of moral purity to the sphere of grace and mercy.

Nor does one have to be a moral relativist to recognise how fluid and changeable is our understanding of what is right, seemly, proper. Calvin saw dancing as “a preamble to fornication”, while the English Puritan Richard Baxter considered it “a sinful sport”. In the time of my own ministry, what used to be called “living in sin” has become for most people – I dare say most Christian people – an acceptable, perhaps even desirable, prelude to marriage, or even a tolerable arrangement in itself. And if – heaven forbid! – I were a betting man, I’d wager that in a generation the vast majority of Christians will look back on gay partnerships as we look back on inter-racial marriage. In any case, the essential point that Augustine made is this: that “in the final analysis the difference between Christians and others lies in one thing only: the former are members of the church, the latter not” (David Bosch). What binds us together is not an agreed code of ethics or practices but the love of Christ working through the mutual acceptance and forbearance of his members, members who are called to welcome diversity, exercise tolerance, and practice what has been called “interpretive charity” (Stephen Fowl) in our judgement of others.

And this goes not only for personal behaviour – the issue at stake between Donatus and Augustine – but also, I would suggest, for personal belief. Or are we to weed the tares on the basis of TC – “theological correctness” – and shun the “unsound”? All I can say is God help me if I am ultimately judged by my theological convictions and consistency. The rule of “interpretive charity” should govern not only our behaviour but also our beliefs. The crucial thing in theological disputes is to recognise the intention of faith of those with whom we disagree, keep the conversation going, never be the first to walk away from the Table. Against contemporary Donatists, we must resist, says Rowan Williams, “the temptation to seek the purity … of a community speaking with only one voice and embrace the reality of living in a communion that is fallible and divided.”

Augustine, with penetrating spiritual insight, saw that nothing is harder to avoid than self-deception, particularly when, assuming that the church needs protection, we don the mantle of “defenders of the faith”. Augustine also saw that defining yourself by what you are against is the symptom of an obsessive personality that clings to legalism and dogmatism. And he saw too the ultimate tragedy of this “absolutist attitude” (Reinhold Bernhardt): that in desiring to legislate and exclude, and in rushing to premature closure, we become angry, bitter, loveless. As we learn from the parable of the Wheat and the Tares, we are simply not capable of carrying out judicious separations; they must be left to the Judge in the fullness of time. “Till then, all false zeal must be checked, the field must be left to ripen in patience, the net must be cast widely, and everything else left to God in faith” (Joachim Jeremias).

“The past is not dead. It is not even past.” And the future belongs to God.