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“A Crowd – not this crowd or that, the crowd now living or the crowd long dead, a crowd of humble people or of superior people, of rich or of poor, etc. – but simply a crowd, in its very concept is the untruth.”

Who said it?  Soren Kierkegaard, in a short book entitled “The Individual”, and those who know me at all, know that I named my son, Soren, after the great Dane, which reflects my degree of reverence for the man’s work, and indeed this short quote is a good example of why I revere him as I do.

Kierkegaard goes further:

“There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there also is the truth, and that in truth itself there is need of having the crowd on its side.  There is another view of life which conceives that wherever there is a crowd there is untruth, so that (to consider for a moment the extreme case), even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth, yet in case they were all to get together in a crowd – a crowd to which any sort of decisive significance is attributed, a voting, noisy, audible crowd – untruth would at once be in evidence.”^[1]

Kierkegaard is remembered, of course, as the father of existentialism, and indeed any number of other writers and thinkers have followed him in his suspicion of all things that happen en masse!

Nietzsche took up a similar polemic to Kierkegaard, employing the more derogatory term ‘herd-man’. Herd-man has no identity of his own but simply adopts the views and identity of the herd. Heidegger likewise later spoke of ‘das man’ – that anonymous, semi-human entity that floats in and out with the tide of public opinion, having no identifiable individual soul.

The issue for all these men was not any fear of crowds as such, of course, but rather a loathing for the way people behave when they are in a crowd, and who people become when their individual identity gets absorbed into a greater corporate identity.

People do things in mobs that they would never do as individuals! The social psychologists call this ‘deindividuation’ – that bizarre phenomenon where normally quiet and civilised people go on rampages when in a group – vandalising property and lynching blacks or whites or Muslims or Christians or whatever minority group is being scapegoated at the time.

They do it as a pack! They would never dream of acting like this as individuals. Kierkegaard would say that this is because each person involved divides his or her degree of responsibility by the number of people in the crowd.

Perhaps that’s right?  Either way, as I contemplate returning to Syria, I think of the atrocities that have been carried out (and that continue to be carried out) by groups like DAESH (ISIS) and any number of other groups, and I know that these groups can only do what they do because they do it together.

I’d suggest that’s the main reason why we don’t see any real terrorist violence on our own soil here in Sydney. It’s not because there aren’t any number of angry young men wanting to strike back at the violence of Western imperialism. It’s because they need the boys around them.  They need to be able to move with a group that has one mind and one ideology and one intent, and so they travel all the way to the other side of the world to find their herd, so that they can be one with the movement.

For a movement that it completely one can do just about anything, and that’s why when I read Jesus’ words of prayer – that we may be one – it leaves me feeling rather ambivalent!

Jesus prays to the Father: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:22-23)

It’s a very pointed prayer from Jesus, asking the Father not only to unite us as one but claiming that it will be our oneness that will testify to the rest of the world as to the veracity of the claims of Jesus concerning His relationship to God!

The connection here doesn’t seem immediately obvious to me. The Third Reich were one (at least for a time) but this hardly testified to their divine origins! Lynch mobs, as I say, are one, but that doesn’t make them any less demonic!

Of course, not everything about acting in unison is bad either (pace Kierkegaard), and I appreciate that I’ve been painting a very one-sided picture, for, in truth, we can accomplish a great deal of good too when we’re working as part of a greater team.

I think it was Elizabeth Achtemeier (or one of the great feminist theologians) who, when asked why she continued to work with the church, said “there’s only so much you can do without access to a photocopier”.

It’s true – you can’t do much on your own, and indeed, if you want to do a lot of good, you generally need a lot of people to help you do it.

I remember when I joined my first Christian group when I first attended University in 1981, I went away on a weekend retreat where I listened to Rev. In Myung Jin of the Urban Industrial Mission of South Korea, and he told us of the most magnificent stories of group action by churches in South Korea.

Evidently the church in South Korea is so large that when all the Christians there act as one they can exert enormous influence! I remember Rev. In telling us that at the time someone in South Korea was maimed or killed in an industrial accident every 30 seconds, on account of there being no occupational health and safety laws  to protect workers.

The response of the church, apparently, was to organise boycotts of factories and companies that were the worst offenders, which apparently meant that millions of Sunday-School-aged children would suddenly stop buying a particular brand of candy! Because there were millions and millions of church members acting as one like this, it did make a real difference, and there would be an immediate response.

The first response, mind you, was normally to arrest Rev. In, who had spent many years in prison by the time I met him. Over time though, these actions by the church did lead to tangible and lasting reforms!

We can do a lot when we act together. We only have to think of the gains made by the Civil Rights movement in the USA in the 1960’s to think of the enormous difference that people can make when they act in unison for a good cause! Those civil rights marches were followed by the peace marches of the 70’s, which indeed played a key role in bringing the horrific war on Vietnam to an end.

Good people can accomplish an awful lot of good when they act together for a good cause, and I do so wish that the church could come together today when there is so much good that could be done if we could just coordinate ourselves.

• I dream of the day when Christian people from around the world will take to the streets to proclaim that we refuse to buy into the hatred of our Muslims brothers and sisters, and that we refuse to be involved in any more wars on majority-Muslim countries.
• I imagine us, as people of faith, mobilising in our hundreds of thousands to overturn our government’s policies on refugees and asylum seekers! That would indeed surely be a testimony to the divine origins of our movement!
• Just imagine if we could band together and with one voice oppose the materialism of our corporate sector and banking system. We could insist on affordable housing for every Australian!

We could do a lot of good if we acted as one, and it is rather depressing to recognise that the most inspiring moments I can think of where the church has acted as one all happened in my father’s generation, not mine.

How is it that as the ‘Now Generation’ died out we made this transition into what is often referred to as ‘the age of acquiescence’, where there is so little effective resistance to the principalities and powers that run our society.

‘If only we could act as one’, I often say to myself, and then I stop myself and wonder whether our lack of unity is in fact a good thing! For we don’t have to look too hard into church history to recognise that on most of the occasions where we, as the church, did band together and act with one mind – in wars and crusades and inquisitions – the outcomes were toxic!

And it’s not as if the Bible as a whole upholds unity and single-mindedness as virtues to be pursued. Yes, Jesus prayed for unity towards the end of his earthly life, but if you go back to the very beginning of the Bible, you find quite another take on unity!

I believe the first mention of humans acting with common purpose in the Bible takes place in the book of Genesis, chapter eleven, in the story of the Tower of Babel! Here we are told that human beings come together for the first time to ‘make a name for themselves’ (Genesis 11:4) by building a city with a great tower, and God comes down and says “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do” (Genesis 11:6).

The fact that these people ‘are one’ is a basis for dread, according to the book of Genesis, and so God, we are told, deliberately sets about the task of dividing these people into smaller groups by confusing their language! How odd that by the time we reach the other end of the Scriptures, we find Jesus praying that we might all transcend these smaller groups and be one again!

Of course it’s not really odd because the oneness that we find Jesus praying for in the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel is a very different sort of oneness to that which is on view in Genesis chapter eleven, and this is clear in the passage itself.

“The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one,” (John 17:22-23)

The oneness that we are supposed to have with one another is a oneness through Jesus. Whatever spirit united the tower-builders of Genesis eleven, it is the spirt of Jesus that holds us together now – “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one!”

Unity through the spirit of God – this is the unity Scripture upholds. Indeed, it is the only sort of unity that the Scripture upholds, and yet it is completely unnatural to us!

What is natural for us is to form community with people from the same demographic. Birds of a feather flock together. We naturally gravitate towards people like us – people of the same social standing, and of the same gender and skin colour and cultural background, who share a similar level of education, etc.

What is natural for me as a fifty-four-year-old white, Christian male is to have other fifty-something-year-old white, Christian men as my friends and key support people. That is what you might expect of me, and yet if you came to the Syria fundraiser last night you would have noticed that most of my key support people are actually Arabic Muslim women! That suggests to me that the Spirit of God must be involved!

This brings to mind again my first meeting with my friend Muhammad Reza, who was sitting on the other side of a hotel foyer in Tehran during a meeting of our peace delegation, and staring at me! He came up to me after the meeting and said “I really want to meet you as I see that you are someone very special!”  I said to him “no, brother. It is simply the Spirit of God in you recognising the spirit of God in me.”

It is the spirit of God that binds us together. It is the spirit of Jesus – He in us and we in Him and God in Him, etc. And that’s why the most important fellowship meal we can ever share is the Eucharist – a meal that we share through Him, leading to a oneness that we share through Him.

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with sharing a meal with your mate who is roughly the same age and background as you, whose skin-colour is the same and who speaks with the same accent. There’s nothing wrong with having that guy or gal as your best friend. It’s just not what Jesus was praying for, and it’s not what we’re on about as a Christian community. It’s when we form bonds through Christ, and become one with people whose language and culture befuddle us and with whom communication is difficult, that the world looks at us and says “Hey! God is for real!”

[1]                 S. Kierkegaard, ‘The Individual’, published along with ‘The Point of View’ by Harper Torchbooks, 1962.  p.110

First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 8th of May, 2016.

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“When Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, ³saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” ⁴Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, ⁵“I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. ⁶As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. ⁷I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’” (Acts 11:2-7)

When I was a younger man, and part of a Christian youth group, I was encouraged to read the Bible as if it were a personal letter from God to me. That made sense with passages like “Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy laden” (Matthew 11:28) which I assume was written specifically for me. Such an approach fits less easily though with passages like this one from the book of the Acts of the Apostles, detailing Peter’s dream.

Acts 11:7 – “Get up … kill and eat!” – has never been anybody’s favourite memory verse I suspect. Indeed, a dream based around an exhortation like this sounds more like a nightmare to me, and not only because I am too squeamish to actually kill the creatures I like to eat but also because the context of the command is a world that is completely alien to me!

Peter’s concern in the dream is not with whether he should kill but with what he should kill, because he is a good Jew and because good Jews don’t kill and eat certain animals, the most well-known to us being pigs.

And of course the issue isn’t really about food either (or certainly not just about food) but about being Jewish, or rather, about being godly, and about whether one needs to be Jewish in order to be godly.

Either way, however we reconstruct the context in which this dream takes place, the point is that the issues dealt with in the dream, and the issues that the early church was consequently forced to face, are issues that are not issues for us!

Do we need to be Jewish in order to be true believers? Of course not!

Do we, at the very least, need to follow the Jewish ceremonial food laws and have our male children circumcised in order to be genuine believers? NO! How could anybody ever seriously ask such questions? Aren’t the answers self-evident? What were these people thinking?

It all seems so obvious to us, especially to us who are male, middle-class and white, as we have probably never experienced real prejudice in any way, shape or form, and yet the reality is that if we were able to somehow transport ourselves back into the first century and locate those disciples in those early days when they were still fishermen, they would not have wanted to have anything to do with us!

We could try as we might to strike up a theological conversation with them but they would almost certainly refuse to talk to us, seeing us as their spiritual inferiors, and that’s tough to take!

They say that all truth always emerges in three stages:

• At first it is written off as ridiculous
• Secondly, it is violently opposed
• Finally, it is seen as self-evident.

Yes, of course we see the equality of all peoples of all races as self-evident. How could anyone believe otherwise? It is so obvious! And yet we know full well that it has not always seemed so obvious!

A generation or two ago the very idea that dark-skinned people could in any way be considered the equals of white-skinned people seemed ridiculous (to white-skinned people, at any rate).

“there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

Who said it? Abraham Lincoln –the great emancipator of African Americans! Indeed, I believe he was a genuine opponent of African-American slavery but that’s not to say that he believed in the equality of the races!

As I say, these truths emerge by stages – transitioning from being laughable to being deeply offensive to being self-evident.

Not long ago that the idea that women should be considered the equals of men seemed ludicrous! What? Are we going to give women the right to vote? Next we’ll be allowing them to preach and to lead countries!

Of course there are some enclaves where it still seems ludicrous to consider women as being the equals of men. For most of us though the equality of the genders seems so obvious to be self-evident and does not need justification. Indeed, the very idea that we should have to somehow prove the equality of male and female seems itself highly offensive!

We are at a similar point in history now in this country with regards to how we perceive people who don’t fit traditional norms with regards to their sexuality. For most members of our church community, the equality of gay and lesbian people and their right to equal treatment under the law seems self-evident.  Others still aggressively oppose this. Some still see the whole concept as ridiculous! And the point is that to our spiritual forefathers and foremothers who were our Lord’s contemporaries, the very idea that non-Jewish people like us could be considered to be their spiritual equals did not in any way seem self-evident. On the contrary, the very concept seemed outrageous!

I find this hard to accept as when I read the Gospels I feel an affinity with the disciples. I know they lived a long time ago but they seem like such affable characters, and I always figured that if I had been their contemporary, we would have been mates, and not that they would have crossed the road in order to avoid me lest they be contaminated!

The context of racial superiority out of which these sisters and brothers operated is something I find difficult to come to terms with, and the only thing I find more difficult than their apparent racism is the way they got out of it. The early disciples of Jesus change their minds completely about the whole race question and they do so on the basis of what? … a dream!

“There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. ⁶As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. ⁷I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’” (Acts 11:5-7)

This is the dream, and one might think it’s open to interpretation. Moreover, however you interpret it, it’s just a dream!

I can imagine how it would go down if I announced to the church one day “I’ve changed my mind about marriage again!” I’m sure people would be interested to hear what I had to say, right up to the point where I said “Well, you see, I had a dream …” at which point I can envisage expressions ranging from obvious discomfort to outright horror sweeping across everybody’s faces!

Now you might say “well, sorry Dave but that’s because you’re you and not St Peter” but I really don’t think it would matter who it was! Can we imagine the Pope or (higher still) the Archbishop of Sydney standing up in the pulpit of the Cathedral and saying “I’ve decided that gay marriage is the way forward! God told me this in a dream!” Even those of us who would want to enthusiastically support him wouldn’t know quite what to say!

Now you may be thinking, “well, they used to take dreams a lot more seriously in those days than we do now” and no doubt that is true. Even so, I’m pretty sure that some dreams back then were the result of indigestion, just as they are now, and I can’t imagine that everybody assumed that every dream was a message from God. Moreover, however seriously people considered dreams, we need to balance this with the seriousness of the belief system that was being called into question by this dream! For there are dreams and there are dreams, and this dream called into question some serious beliefs that were part of a serious belief system!

I heard a helpful analogy recently that compared belief systems to the game of Jenga. For those who don’t know Jenga, it’s a game where you start with a tower made up of 54 wooden blocks piled up on one another, and then each player takes a turn at removing one of the blocks while attempting to maintain the structural integrity of the tower. The difficulty of doing this depends entirely upon which block you try to remove. Some blocks near the top can be removed without affecting the integrity of the tower while attempting to remove other blocks threatens to bring the entire edifice crashing down!

Belief systems are like that. Some beliefs can be discarded without causing any collateral damage while others play a far more significant role for us. Hence I can imagine myself announcing “I had a dream that it’s going to rain at the church barbeque” and while most people might think me a bit quirky, there may be some who think ‘ok. I’m going to pack an umbrella!’ Either way, whether you take my dream seriously or not, it doesn’t make much difference. Peter’s dream, on the other hand, threatened to make a lot of difference!

If Peter’s dream really were a message from God, did this mean that the Scriptures weren’t true? For it says very clearly in the book of Leviticus “The pig … is unclean for you. You must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.” (Leviticus 11:7-8).

It’s all there in black and white! It is written!

‘Peter, are you saying that God changed his mind? Are we really supposed to take your word for this over the word of the Torah? If you’re right about eating pork, does this mean that none of the other laws matter anymore either? What about our holy practice of circumcising our male offspring? And what about the ten commandments – are you saying that they are defunct now too? Do we no longer have to worry about remembering the Sabbath Day and keeping it holy? And what about the adultery law? Is that passé now too?’

As I say, they may well have taken dreams more seriously in those days than we do today, but could they really afford to take this dream seriously? Taking this dream seriously was like pulling out one of those Jenga blocks that lies really close to the base of the tower! It meant jettisoning a belief that was intricately connected to a whole web of other really significant beliefs, and it must have felt to some of the early Christians that abandoning these beliefs would bring the whole tower crashing down!

Of course we know in retrospect that extracting those beliefs, no matter how central they seemed, did not bring the whole tower crashing down. On the contrary, what happened when they took up the dream was that the church began to make a remarkable shift from being a sect within Judaism to being an inclusive community for all nations!

Within a few short years the early church jettisoned the old food laws, abandoned the practice of circumcision, relaxed on the issue of the Sabbath, and made every effort to accommodate people coming from different background and cultures and language groups with their distinctive cultural practises and idiosyncrasies, even though this meant abandoning some laws and practices that were clearly mandated in sacred writ.

And it’s not obvious that the early church operated according to any straightforward logical formula by which they determined which elements of the old faith to keep and which to jettison. Sometimes there would be extensive debate and prayer before decisions were taken. At other times, a dream was all that they needed to set them on a new path, and at other times, when they really needed to know the will of God, they cast lots, which was the first century equivalent of rolling a dice!

None of this is to say, of course, that there isn’t room for solid logic and sound argument, and indeed the New Testament contains plenty of the Scriptural analyses of St Paul where he deals with exactly the same question that Peter raised through his dream. Paul argues for the inclusion of non-Jewish people into the community through a logical reworking of the ancient texts – the very same ancient texts that the new inclusive church seemed to be disregarding!

It’s worth keeping in mind though that when St Paul himself changed his mind over the whole issue of ethnicity, it actually had nothing to do with any of the arguments he later put forward to justify his position. Paul’s change of thinking came when he fell off his horse and had an experience of Jesus!

And so all this inevitably leaves us with the disturbing question: ‘how can we be sure?’ If God can still speak to us through dreams, and yet dreams can also still be the result of acid reflux, how can we know for sure when a particular dream is from God? How do we separate (as Father Eugene Kennedy put it) ‘the grain of inspiration from the gravel of human impulse?’

And the answer to that is that I don’t think we can be sure – ever. I don’t think we can ever have any great degree of confidence in our ability to fully grasp everything God is saying to us, but that’s OK, and it’s OK because while we can’t have confidence in the powers of our own spiritual discernment, we can have every confidence that God will move us forward anyway!

One of my favourite stories related by Garrison Keillor in his ‘Prairie Home Companion’ is of a time he was walking through the centre of town and saw a beautiful woman walking down the opposite side of the street – possibly the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. So he crossed the road to be nearer to her and pulled up on the pavement a little bit ahead of where she was going, and to gently disguise his motives he stood next to the big Cadillac that was parked there and examined the parking metre, and then took a coin out of his pocket and put it into the metre. To his delight, the woman stopped when she reached where he was standing, looked at him, smiled, and said ‘thank you’ and then got into the Cadillac and drove away.

The church is not our Cadillac – that’s the point. We think we are the ones in control and we certainly act as if we own it but (thanks be to God) it’s actually not us in the driver’s seat at all!

And I think we do see that when we look at the history of the church. We see it in the Book of Acts and we see God continue to drive us forward still today! Despite our miserable performance on so many occasions, we have moved forward, on the issue of ethnic inclusiveness, on slavery, gender equality and even in the area of sexuality. We have a good distance to go, but God is driving us slowly forward in spite of ourselves, and we can be confident “that he who began a good work in [us] will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6)

First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 24th of April, 2016.

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But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. (Luke 12:1-3)

I always find it somewhat bewildering how, when we come together each year on this special day to celebrate the miracle of Jesus of Nazareth being miraculously resurrected from death, our central Bible reading for today tells us nothing about the resurrection as such and, in this case, doesn’t even feature Jesus!

Today – Easter Day – is all about Jesus. Even so, in the wonderful account of this triumphant, holy day that we get in the Gospel according to St Luke, Jesus doesn’t make an appearance. Instead we get two unidentified men who proclaim triumphantly ‘He is not here!’, and that’s a funny sort of catch-cry, if it is intended to convey tidings of comfort and joy!

‘He is not here!’ These words, I remember, were emblazoned across the communion table in the old chapel at Moore College (the seminary I attended), and they seemed rather out of place there too! Our hope when we come together for prayer and worship is generally that He is here! How is it that we come to so victoriously proclaim His absence?

Indeed, the whole scene at the empty tomb that we remember and retell in word and song every Easter Day is unmistakably one of confusion and mixed emotion. We come to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, yet Jesus cannot be found!

There is no Jesus and there are minimal details as to exactly what has happened to Jesus. All we get is this challenge from the two peculiar men: He is not here! Evidently this was confusing for the women at the tomb and, in truth, I still find it confusing!

I read a book recently about how the brain works, entitled “Your brain at work” by David Rock. As many of you know, I’m a prolific reader of sorts. I say ‘of sorts’ because I haven’t read an actual paper book in about twenty years but I listen to my audio books every day (while I drive, while I jog, and while I clean the kitchen at night) which gets me through about a book per week, and I got so much out of this book that I read it twice!

I learnt a lot from “Your brain at work” including how you can only hold a maximum of four things in your conscious mind at any one time, and only then if three of them aren’t too complex. Holding four words in your head simultaneously isn’t too hard but four sentences is a struggle unless three are familiar slogans.

I learnt that there is a complex relationship between stress and mental focus – that too little stress can be as bad too much stress when it comes to giving your complete attention to a particular task. This is something that boxing had taught me already, mind you. I know that if you’re too relaxed when you enter a boxing ring it’s as dangerous as being too tense. In order to avoid getting knocked out you need to take just the right amount of stress with you into the ring!

And the other thing that this brain book reinforced for me was the degree to which our expectations of events determine how we feel and what we think and how we experience those events.

The book detailed how we get increased dopamine levels in our brains when something exceeds our expectations – when we get, for example, a much better mark in our exam than we had expected, or when we receive an unexpected award or get an unexpected promotion at work!

The other side of this, of course, is the emotionally devastating effect of dealing with events that don’t live up to our expectations, which led the author to recommend that we try to maintain generally low expectations most of the time since, if we have low expectations as to how things are going to turn out, we will get a pleasant rush every time things turn out OK and, conversely, we won’t be distraught every time they don’t!

I didn’t take well to that particular recommendation in the book as it reminded me of those odious fellow-students at school and university who would always exit an exam bewailing how miserably they had performed, and yet you knew that when the results came in they were going to be amongst the highest achievers!

Even so, I found the chapter on the effects of expectations to be extremely enlightening, most especially in detailing how our expectations shape our perceptions – how we see what we expect to see and fail to see what we don’t expect to see, and indeed sometimes manage to refuse to see things that should be extremely obvious simply because we did not expect to see them.

When I look at the Gospel reading this morning – the story of the women at the tomb and the subsequent meeting that takes place between these women and the male disciples of Jesus – I see a lot of these elements at work. People are dealing with failed expectations and are not only confused but are blinded to certain realities because things are not turning out as they expected!

If we start where today’s story starts, the women who come to the tomb are expecting to find the body of Jesus there, and they don’t know what to do or what to think when their experience does not align with their expectations.

The expectations of these women were, of course, reasonable. They had been with Joseph of Arimathea only two nights earlier when he had laid the dead body of Jesus in that tomb, and they knew that nobody would have moved it, and they knew that dead bodies don’t move themselves, and so they had every reason to expect that the body of Jesus would be right where they had left it, and yet … He is not here!

The two odd men are there with clothes that (according to the literal meaning of the text) ‘gleamed like lightening’, and I have no idea what that is intended to convey as lightening is not a colour but an activity. Is this meant to suggest that the men were wearing outfits that were flashing with mysterious electrical activity, or does it simply reflect that from the very first retelling of this story there was a significant degree of confusion as to what exactly had happened?

Recognising the confusion, I think, is the key. It helps us to understand why the women didn’t have the presence of mind to quiz the two men a little further – to find out exactly who they were and exactly what they knew about Jesus. The behaviour of the women is entirely consistent with that of people who are confused because things are not turning out as they had expected!

The dialogue between the female disciples of Jesus and their male counterparts exhibits a similar degree of confusion, I think, that has behind it a similar conflict between experience and expectation. In the case of the men especially, I think, the backdrop that we need to keep in mind is the extent to which the whole life and ministry of Jesus had failed to live up to their expectations. As two of these disciples later say of Jesus on the road to Emmaus “we had hoped that he was the one to deliver Israel.” (Luke 24:21)

As twenty-first century Australians, we look at verses like that one with a degree of disbelief, I think. We have read the teachings of Jesus. We have heard the same things from Jesus that they heard. We know what Jesus taught them through his parables and preaching. How is it that these men managed to hang on to the belief that Jesus’ whole purpose was to deliver Israel from Roman rule?

And the answer to that of course is expectations. They were expecting God to send someone to deliver them from the Romans. Jesus had clearly come from God and so they expected Him to deliver them from the Romans, and so, regardless of what He said, their expectations shaped what they heard, to the extent that Jesus died being as misunderstood by His own disciples as He was by those who crucified Him!

And so the male disciples of Jesus dismiss the report of the women as nonsense. Peter goes one better than his male peers by checking things out for himself, but he experiences the same clash between expectation and experience which leaves him befuddled too, and so our happy Easter story ends with the followers of Jesus experiencing a variety of emotions ranging from disillusionment and anger to confusion and fear. Hallelujah! Happy Easter!

There is one moment of clarity in our story this morning, mind you, and it comes when the women remember what Jesus had said to them.

The two men, we are told, say to the women “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” (Luke 24:5-7)

And we’re told that the women do remember! The author of my brain book refers to this as an “um duh experience” as against an “aha experience”. In other words, this isn’t so much a moment of fresh insight as one of those times when you realise something that you actually should have realised a whole lot earlier.

An ‘um duh experience’ is thus inevitably a humbling experience, as it means recognising the extent to which our perceptions had up to this point been distorted by our expectations. The women manage this, but the men can’t get there, and so for them the penny still fails to drop!

Things do improve, of course, though it takes not hours but days and weeks before the entire band of disciples is fully on board with the new reality – Jesus is risen, and this changes everything! Even so, it all sunk in quite gradually, and so perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves if it takes us a while to get on board with the new reality too.

This is the common testimony you hear from church people all the time – that ‘I was brought up in a Christian household and believed all the right things and then one day it really hit me – Jesus is alive and this changes everything!’ And the basic issue is always the same, I think – it’s one of squaring expectations with experience.

I have no idea what expectations people bring with them when they turn up to church on Easter Sunday morning. I expect we come with a variety of expectations, and most of us are probably reasonably confused. Not many of us, I suspect, come expecting to meet the risen Jesus!

We surely should expect to meet the risen Jesus. If we could remember what He has said to us then we would expect to meet Him here (and all over the place). Even so, I doubt if many of us do come with that expectation, and so when we do meet Jesus it tends to come as a hell of a surprise!

He is not here! That’s more in line with what we expect, I think, and generally we do find that our experiences line-up with our expectations, even if that means failing to recognise Jesus when He’s standing alongside us!

I said at the beginning today that I still find it bewildering how today’s story of the resurrection of Jesus doesn’t feature Jesus at all, and it is bewildering. At the same time though it is a powerful reminder of how the Gospel narrative is a story that is shared amongst peers!

Unlike the Islamic belief that the Qur’an was dictated to Muhammad by God in a way that by-passed all human agency, we recognise the Gospel stories as human stories that have been passed down to us by our brothers and sisters in the faith who tell us of their own experience of Jesus. This is not to discount God’s involvement in the retelling of these stories but it is to say that what we get in the Gospels is God as experienced by us.

Yes, God speaks to us through the Scriptures, but I hear our brothers and sisters in the faith speaking to us through today’s Gospel reading too, as what we have here is their record of their experience on that confusing and disturbing Sunday morning that followed the crucifixion of Jesus.

I hear the voices of our mother and fathers in the faith speaking to us through this story. The fog of their confusion still permeates their testimony at every point and yet I can hear them saying to us as clear as a bell ‘expect the unexpected!’

We come burdened with our own history of disillusionment and pain that colours our expectations and distorts our perceptions and yet, through the fog of our confusion … He is not here. He is risen! Remember what he told you. Let the penny drop. Everything has changed! Nothing is as it used to be. Be amazed and embrace the new life, for He is risen indeed!

First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 27th of March, 2016.

Click here for the video.

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While I drink my beer the Gospel runs its course
John 12:1-11

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. ²There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him.  (John 12:1-2)

I heard tell of a dinner party that took place to celebrate a particular couple’s 50^th wedding anniversary! All the family and friends were there, including the couple’s only daughter – a middle-aged woman herself – and as the evening progressed and as speeches were made, the daughter was struck by the way that her dad always referred to her mum as ‘dear’ or ‘sweetie’ or ‘honey’. When she got a moment alone with him she said to him, “Dad, I want to tell you that I am really touched by the way you always refer to mum using those affectionate terms – ‘sweetie’ and ‘dear’ and ‘honey’”, to which her father replied, “well … it might be different if I could just remember her damn name!”

Things are not always as they appear. This is something that we are all familiar with. I don’t mean that we are all familiar with forgetting our partner’s name (though if you’ve been hit in the head as often as I have you may struggle) but I suspect we are all familiar with those sorts of dinner parties where things are warm and friendly on the surface but where there is seething cauldron of emotion lying below the surface.

Not every party is like that. I was at Bill’s 60^th last night and I wasn’t aware of any deep undercurrents of hostility or passion lurking beneath the surface, though that may only indicate that I didn’t know the people there well enough! Either way, I suspect we have all been at parties like that. We may have been at church gatherings like that! 

If you’ve ever watched a session of Parliament on TV, Parliament is always like that! I often think that with political gatherings, their dress-code, which is always so conservative and sophisticated, must be designed to counter-balance the primitive and often violent nature of the underlying emotions!  Parties are often like that too, with everybody making an effort in the way they present themselves, and speaking pleasantly to each other and smiling politely, while beneath the surface …

I have a Facebook friend who lives on the shore of Loch Ness in Scotland and I’ve seen amongst her pictures numerous images of the calm waters of the loch. I don’t know whether she’s ever seen the legendary monster that apparently lurks beneath the surface, but if it’s there at all, it is clearly pretty good at staying out of sight.

That’s how most parties work too. If there are monsters lurking beneath the surface they generally do a good job of staying out of sight, but then sometimes you get an incident, where all the pretences of sophistication and serenity suddenly evaporate, and I guess it should not surprise us to find Jesus at the centre of such an incident!

Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. (John 12:3)

This is one of those incidents that the host could not conceal! If you’d been standing in another section of the room, chatting away and making new friends, you’d have noticed a deathly silence fall over the whole house! Someone shrieks and drops their cocktail glass! You wonder what is going on and then the smell of nard hits you!

This incident completely transforms the party! What did Mary think she was doing?! In terms of appropriate behaviour for a hostess, her actions are as difficult to excuse as they are to explain.

This story of a woman anointing the feet of Jesus and wiping His feet with her hair turns up in all four of our Gospels, and no wonder it stuck in the minds of each of those who recorded the stories of Jesus. The incident is outrageous!

It would still be outrageous if it happened today.  I won’t bother trying to depict a similar incident taking place at one of our church barbeques, with some local girl coming up and pouring ointment all over my feet (or, better still, over the feet of the Archbishop when he visited us) but, in truth, it is ridiculous to think that such a thing could ever happen!  Do you think it was any less ridiculous in first century Judea?

What was Mary thinking? We are told that Mary had around half a kilo of ‘real nard’, which is intended to distinguish it from the fake nard that you could pick up at the Bethany markets for a couple of shekels. Real nard apparently came from the mountains of northern India which explains why it was so expensive, and it’s suggested that the amount Mary poured out that night would have been worth the equivalent of a year’s wages for a normal working person!

Mary’s action is outrageously extravagant, though at the same time it’s all a bit cheap, or at least she seems to be cheapening herself in the way she performs – falling all over Jesus, wiping his feet with her hair! As I say, it would be outrageous were this to happen at one of our gatherings. Can you imagine how this would go down in a culture where women weren’t permitted to let their hair down in public?!

I remember a couple of years ago that they had to re-route the Palestinian Marathon so that it by-passed Gaza as the Hamas authorities in Gaza, being conservative religious souls, would not permit men and women to run together! They weren’t permitted to run together in Jesus’ day either! They weren’t even permitted to speak together in public in those days, and they certainly weren’t permitted to fall all over each other in public and rub their feet with their hair!

In Luke’s retelling of this story (or, at least we assume it is a retelling of the same incident) the woman is unnamed and simply referred to as ‘a sinner’ (Luke 7:36) – the assumption being that she is a sex-worker. This would be the natural assumption you would make if you saw a young woman behaving in this way!

And what is Jesus doing while this woman is putting on her performance – potentially destroying His reputation along with her own? Is he wildly objecting and desperately trying to fend her off while lecturing her on propitious behaviour for single women, and perhaps threatening to file a sexual harassment claim if she doesn’t desist?  On the contrary, Jesus is lying back and enjoying every second of it! You can see the smile and hear the groan of contentment as Mary massages and anoints His aching joints and pours out her affection on Him!

Was this something that happened spontaneously? Surely Mary hadn’t planned on behaving like this? Was it just her gratitude to Jesus for having restored the life of her beloved brother or was it more than that? Was she besotted with Jesus?

The latter explanation seems intuitively attractive of course, and it fits with the earlier story we get of Mary (in Luke 10:38-42), sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to His teachings. We can imagine her sitting there, starry-eyed, besotted. Poor thing! She was only young. How could she resist falling in love with Jesus? Even so, surely she could have shown a little greater self-control in the way she expressed that love.

Now I appreciate that I am starting to speculate, and perhaps we shouldn’t make too many assumptions about Mary’s emotional state. Even so, Mary’s actions are hard to understand, and the only thing harder to fathom here than Mary’s outrageous expression of love is why Jesus doesn’t put a stop to it for the sake of Mary and for the sake of the rest of her family, even if He’s not worried about His own reputation!

The reaction of the disciples is a little more predictable. Judas is credited as being the one to voice disapproval but I imagine that each one of Jesus’ disciples would have been squirming in his seat. Judas – ever the one for political correctness – makes no reference to the sensual nature of Mary’s actions but only refers to her extravagance: “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (John 12:5)

Judas’ comment once again reveals that there are things going on beneath the surface of this dinner party. There are tensions between Jesus and the disciples, and there were obviously tensions between the disciples themselves!

The Gospel writer adds a parenthetical comment of his own at this point, explaining that Judas didn’t really give a damn about poor but was interested in keeping the money for himself, and this comment does indeed help fill out the picture of greed and betrayal that was underlying the happy party-scene. Even so, this should not distract us from the fact that Judas’ question in and of itself was a pretty good one! Indeed, if it hadn’t been for John’s comments and for Jesus’ response you’d be forgiven for thinking, ‘hey, the disciples are really starting to get the message!’

Why hadn’t this outrageously expensive perfume been sold and given the money to the poor? It’s a fair question, and Jesus’ response is (again) one that makes you squirm! “The poor you will always have with you” says Jesus (John 12:8)

It’s not exactly “let them eat cake” but it does make Jesus look unconcerned about the plight of the suffering poor!

It’s probably helpful, of course, to realise that Jesus is quoting – “The poor you will always have with you. Therefore, I command you, Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbour in your land.” (Deuteronomy 15:11) Taken in this context, the statement “the poor you will always have with you” may not be so much an attempt to dismiss the needs of the suffering poor as it is a reminder of the fact that the poor will still be there requiring our attention when the party is over, but that there is nonetheless a time for partying too!

Jesus evidently didn’t see any tension between pouring Himself out for the poor and partying like there was no tomorrow! That’s not a balance many of us find easy to accommodate. If you’re a workaholic like me, you don’t party much, and in my more self-righteous moments I like to see this as a sign of my deep piety – ‘My Heavenly Father is always working, and so am I.’ (John 5:17) – and yet the truth is that Jesus partied a lot! He didn’t get his reputation as a glutton and a drunkard from nowhere! (Matthew 11:19, Luke 7:34)

It is to my shame, indeed, that I actually left Bill’s party last night to work on this sermon. I have a feeling that, in my situation, the Lord Jesus would have prioritised partying over sermonising, and this despite the fact that Jesus’ parties were to Bill’s party much as Loch Ness is to Enmore Pool!

Mind you, I don’t really mean to compare Mary to a raging sea-monster, though she clearly was a woman of raging passion. Yet there were other monsters there that night, and some of them come to the surface right at the end of the narrative.

“When the great crowd of the Jews learned that [Lazarus] was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus. (John 12:9-11)

This comment from John comes almost as a footnote to our narrative, but again it reminds us of some of the things that were going on below the surface while Jesus was partying. Jesus and His friends may have been having a good time, but in the background there were people plotting on how they would kill Him, and Lazarus too!

The calculations of the religious authorities are cold and clinical – almost Nazi-like – as they make their decisions as to who will live and who must die, and the contrast with the spontaneous passion of Mary could not be greater!  These two figures – the passionate woman on the one hand and the clinical religious authorities on the other – represent two extremes in terms of the response people make to Jesus; the paradox being, of course, that it’s the uncontrollable woman who is our model of godly love, and the pious religious leaders who embody demonic hatred and death.

Between these two extremes float the hapless disciples. Some, like Peter, gradually grow to more closely imitate the saintly Mary, while others, like Judas, demonstrate a growing affinity with the establishment. And between these two archetypal extremes we 21^st century disciples vacillate still!

This is the story within the story that we read today. Behind the relatively superficial story of partying and good times, a far more serious drama is being played out! Just beneath the surface there is a deeper narrative, and yet I believe that the key to really grasping our Gospel reading today is to recognise that beneath that deeper narrative there is a deeper narrative still!

For when we read this story, not simply in the context of the other dynamics that were operating at that party, but in the context of the broader story of the Gospel – of the broader story of what God was doing in and through Jesus at this point in history – we realise that beneath all the turmoil of darkness and betrayal and murder and passion and love and confusion … God is writing His own story!

This whole scene takes place within a fortnight of the crucifixion, and things start to unravel really rapidly from this point on! Judas is going to do what he must do and the authorities are going to have their way and the disciples will flee and the women will weep and Jesus will be killed!

All the hidden agendas are coming to the surface and all the participants in this drama will play their part, but as the human actors each come to the end of their scripts at the crucifixion, we discover that there has been another actor at work, or perhaps we should say ‘another agent directing the action!’ God has been working His purpose out in and through the partying and the love and the blood and the suffering, and it is God’s script that is ultimately going to decide how this story ends!

Things are not always what they seem! This isn’t just true of parties. It’s true of all of life!  You can live life on the surface if you want and just enjoy the good times, but if you poke a little deeper you’ll uncover darkness and pain, passion and confusion, and that’s a scary place to be, but if you look a little deeper again … there’s a light shining in that darkness!

This is the Gospel. This is the Good News! This is the story behind the story, and it’s the story behind our story – our beacon of hope! For wherever our journey is taking us, in the end it will be God who determines how the story ends!

Now the sermon ends at this point. I decided while writing this last night that, rather than work on coming up with a crowning illustration that would effectively drive this final point home, I should return to Bill’s party, and I did, and I had another glass of beer, and my capacity for researching dynamic sermon illustrations was long-gone by the time I returned home. What can I say? It was one of those ‘What would Jesus do?’ moments.

A statement attributed to Martin Luther did though come to mind: “While I drink my glass of Wittenberg beer, the gospel runs its course.”

While we party and while we pray, God is working His purpose out. Through the pain and the passion, the violence and the joy, His will be done. His Kingdom come. Amen.

First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 13 of March, 2016.

Click here for the video.

Click here for the audio.