Becoming Christ Together
Texts: Exodus 17.1-7;
Psalm 78. 1-16; Philippians 2.1-13; Matthew 21.23-32
Between today and Wednesday of his week the Uniting Church Synod of
Victoria and Tasmania will be meeting at La Trobe University in
Bundoora. The Synod is an annual gathering of representatives
from Uniting Church presbyteries, schools, hospitals, missions and
other agencies from right across Victoria and Tasmania. According
to the regulations of the Uniting Church, the Synod is responsible for
overseeing the mission of the church in presbyteries, the theological
college, other colleges and schools, the selection of ministerial
candidates, and the use of church property and finances within its
bounds. So, from this afternoon we shall gather across three days
to listen to reports and to make decisions about all these matters.
There is a temptation in a church like ours to make decisions as though
we were the Labour Party. Increasingly, the church is organising
itself into factions— liberals, progressives, conservatives—and strong
groups have formed to actively lobby the councils of the church on a
range of ethical issues. Examples are the ‘Evangelical Members of
the Uniting Church (EMU)’, the ‘Reforming Alliance’ and ‘For 84’.
The church climate has become so factionalised, that it is now almost
impossible to turn up to a Synod or Presbytery meeting simply as a
Christian and member of the Uniting Church who wants to discern the
will of Christ in company with others. For now you will find
yourself pigeon-holed before you even get there. Several times in
the couple of years since I began attending the church’s councils I
have seen people assume that I will support or oppose such and such a
proposal because I belong to a group that it variously called ‘the
theological fascists’ or the ‘intellectual mafia’. No such group
exists, as far as I can tell, and if it does, I’ve never been invited
to one of its meetings! But the very fact that a person can be
identified with such a negative fiction represents a very troubling
tendency in the church, a trend in which people decide not to listen to
other people on the basis of a whole lot of convenient assumptions
about what those other people are likely to believe or do, assumptions
that function only to reinforce the ill-conceived prejudice of one’s
own position.
Now, one only has to read the New Testament to discover that this
situation is not a new one for the church to find itself in. The
church has apparently been sinning in this way since the
beginning! The letter of Paul to the Philippians is a case in
point. Why would Paul need to exhort to the Philippians to be ‘of
one mind and heart, in full accord’ unless that were not the
case? The church at Philippi was clearly as factionalised as the
Uniting Church is today. The solution Paul offers for this
disunity is not, however, the one that we are most often encouraged to
adopt, in both church and society. It is not the solution of
so-called ‘tolerance’, where each party simply accepts (or assumes)
that the other can never agree with me, and should therefore be
smilingly gazed at across a great distance. For tolerance assumes
that neither party will change. Neither, of course, does Paul
recommend the George Bush kind of solution, that is, ‘I want them to
agree with me so I’ll use my bigger stick to beat them into
submission’. No. No way.
What Paul recommends is what I, also, would recommend to my church this
morning. That the way to a unity of mind and purpose in the
church has nothing to do with what you desire or what I desire, but
with what God desires. Listen to what Paul says:
Let the same
mind be in your community as was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was
God did not consider equality with God a thing to be exploited, but
emptied himself instead, taking the form of a slave and being found in
human likeness. In that way he humbled himself and became
obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
I could talk about the meanings of this passage all day, but for now I
would like you to note two things only. First, that Paul offers
up Jesus as a model for what and how we should desire as a
church. What we should desire is not our own vision of the world,
but God’s vision of the world. And how we should desire it is by
emptying ourselves of our own desire. Emptying ourselves.
It sounds Buddhist to many modern ears, but it is not. In
Buddhism you empty yourself of desire in order to desire either nothing
at all, or, as Slavoj Zizek has convincingly shown, to desire what your
more powerful neighbour desires. In Christianity, by contrast,
our desires are put aside in order to make room for another desire
entirely, the desire of God.
The second thing I would have you note is a consequence of the
first. That unity of heart and mind in the Christian community
can never be achieved apart from a serious and widespread willingness
to listen and look for the desire of God in the history of Jesus of
Nazareth. It sounds obvious when you put it like that, doesn’t
it? But the point is far from obvious to so many of our church
councils. In part this is so because of sheer laziness and
inertia. Many of us know and believe that the contemplation of
Christ’s story is the beginning of everything that has any consequence,
that we can never hope to act in the world as Christ would act unless
we contemplate his story with regularity and devotion. Yet we
crowd out this devotion by our devotion to other things. So much
so, that when we come to the point of meeting in community to discern
the mind of Christ, we have little of Christ to continue because his
way and will has not had opportunity to sink its roots deep down into
our hearts. But inertia and laziness is not the whole
story. The other reason why we are not inclined to contemplate
Christ’s story as the source of our knowledge of God is because most of
us have been formed by the culture of ‘modernity’, a culture in which
the point of religious faith is certainly not to conform ourselves to
the will of God revealed in Christ, but rather to make God’s ways ‘fit’
our own ways, to assume that God must make sense according to what I
already know about the ‘real’ world. I am glad that this culture
is crumbling, but its influence is still very powerful in the
church. A church that wants God to fit its own agenda is
unlikely, it seems to me, to spend a great deal of time contemplating
the life of Christ.
So what’s to be done? If Christian unity, a oneness of heart and
mind, is a consequence of this contemplatio Christi alone, then clearly
we should spend more time doing that, and at the most fundamental
levels of the church. We should encourage one another to read the
Scriptures and believe in them. We should meet together, in pairs
and groups, to discuss the Scriptures and to wait upon the Spirit of
Christ is prayer. We should put aside the novels, the magazines
and the televisions for a bit, and read a bit of Christian
theology. We should put aside even the works of goodness and
charity for a while each week. Not because Christ is not present
and active in all of these things, but because we shall not be able to
recognise how Christ works through all the business of life unless we
get to know him in the shape of our gospel tradition. The point
of the Christian love of neighbour, you see, is not to become a doormat
for someone else’s desire. It is not to serve the other
slavishly, at the expense of one’s own desire alone. It is,
rather, to serve God first. To recognise that what is best for my
neighbour is what God desires for them. Which requires that both
of us, if we are Christian, contemplate the word of God in Christ
together. Only then shall we be able to serve each other truly.
All of this is true not only for Synods and Assemblies, but also of
congregations. I leave these thoughts with you for your
consideration. Test what I say against the story of Christ, and
if I am wrong, please tell me. Because I too, would rather rather
do Christ’s will than my own.
In the name of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so
now and for ever, world without end. Amen.
Garry
J. Deverell
19th Sunday after Pentecost, 2004
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