The “Foolishness” of Christ’s Apostles
Psalm 31.1-4, 7; 1 Corinthians 4.1-17; Matthew 13.44-66

A sermon for the induction of Craig Thompson into the congregations of Auburn and Kew, Melbourne.

To almost every contemporary observer, no matter whether they be sacred or secular, the promises Craig shall be making tonight (and in a very public manner) shall represent nothing more than, at best, a laughable naivety with regard to how things really work in the world or, at worst, a sadly delusional form of religious mania.  Or, if I may quote that view in its more vernacular form, “Mate, you’d have to be a dickhead to do what you’re doing!  What, are you crazy or something?”  Now, the really scary thing is this:  that there’s a kind of truth in that observation.  Craig is, indeed, being a bit of a dickhead tonight, a bit of a religious nut.  Yet, and this is what I should like us to meditate upon tonight, Craig is embracing this unhinged life, this vocation of foolishness if you like,  WITHOUT APOLOGY.  Yes, Craig is, in fact, unhinged, crazy.  But, and this is of crucial importance, Craig is quite aware that this is so, and doesn’t mind one bit.  Why?  Because Craig belongs not to himself, but to Christ; and it is Christ who has called him to be a fool, a fool for the sake of Christ’s gospel.

If you haven’t followed up until now, if you can’t quite see what is so nutty about becoming a parish minister in Auburn and Kew, Melbourne, let me spell it out for you.  We live in a society and culture which values and believes in almost anything else except those things which Christ believed in, and taught his followers to make real in their lives.  Let me give you a couple of examples, some metonymic signs that testify to the truth of what I am saying.  Christ taught that a sense of safety and security in life came from a deep faith and belief in the gift and promise of unfailing love and care from God, the one whom Jesus called ‘Father’.  But the lifestyle programmes on channels 7 through 10—which, because of their amazing popularity, I take to represent a very popular view—say just the opposite.  For them, safety and security comes not as an unmerited gift from God, but as the meritorious product of sound investment, hard work in the gym, and keeping up with the latest trends and fashions with regard to clothes, home renovation and entertainment.  The other night I was listening to a financial advisor on the radio.  She said that in order to retire happily, and without anxiety, I would need to not only own my own home, but also have around a million bucks put away by the time I was sixty-five.  ‘Why so much?’ said the naïve radio-jock. ‘Because most Australians, when they retire, not only want to have a roof over their heads and enough food to eat;’ replied the financial advisor,  ‘they also want a holiday house, enough money to roam the world when they want to, and a really classy new car.  You need a million dollars in the bank to be able to do all that.’  Scarily enough, none of the callers who rang in after that questioned this financial adviser’s assumptions about what would make us feel safe and secure.  Every caller wanted to know how to get that million bucks.  Conclusion:  our society and culture believes that safety and security are a consequence of what you can earn and produce by the sweat of your brow, and by the shrewdness of your investment strategies.  I put it to you that this view if completely incompatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ, which Craig is come amongst you to preach and to model in the way he lives his life.

Another example.  According to Christ’s gospel, all that we are and all that we enjoy in the world is a gift of God’s grace.  We do not earn the good and pleasant things that come our way, nor do we necessarily deserve the difficult things that come our way.  God’s mercy and favour is in no way dependent upon what we do, or do not do.   We do not, therefore, have any ‘rights’ as such.  Rather we have responsibilities.  Our primary responsibility, according to the gospel, is to give after the manner and pattern in which we received.  That is, to take the deeply costly mercy and favour given us by God in Christ crucified, and pass it on to others as a deeply costly gift from both Christ and ourselves.   I say ‘costly’ because any genuinely faithful imitation of God’s mercy will have a cruciform character about it.  In order to give what God would give, we are told in Paul’s letters, Christ had to relinquish what he had received as a gift from his Father—not only his possessions, his knowledge and his wisdom, but also his very life.  These he relinquished, we are told, not into nothingness, but into the church, the community which receives its life as from another, from God.  What Christ gave up, we now are.  We are his body; in the Spirit his Word of salvation is with us.  But if we take seriously the mode and pattern of God’s giving, we can never claim to own or possess what we have received as a right.  We are called to imitate Christ in giving what he gives again, to pass on what all that we are and all that we have to other people, the people all around us whom the Bible names, variously, ‘the neighbour,’ the ‘poor’ the ‘demon-possessed’ and the ‘blind’.  Note that we are never told to give what we have received back to God in return.  We are told to give it to another, imitating (rather than mirroring) the ever-outward movement of God’s mission.  To give ourselves away, we are taught in the gospel, is to die.  But we are also taught that such giving, such passing on of what we have received, it also the mode by which we become empty enough to receive what God never ceases to give us, from his infinite wellspring of fecundity:  life, resurrected life, life in all its fullness.  There are no greater symbols of these mysteries in the Christian faith than the gifts of the bread and wine in the Eucharist, and the dying and rising that are figured for us in baptism.  By receiving the bread and the wine, we become bread and wine for others.  By dying with Christ in baptism, we become children of God who are able to give even our lives for others.

Now, again there is a serious problem if we compare this gospel teaching with the dominant ideology of our time:  that of exchange economics.  For the dominant economic theories of our time are not only about the flow of international capital and the distribution of goods and services within a common market.  They are also a very old, even pre-Christian, philosophy of life that all of us have imbibed with our mother’s milk.  Exchange economics says that for everything that is given, something must be given in return.  I give the chap in the newsagency ten dollars, which then obligates him to give me a lottery ticket.  You give me a card at Christmas time, which then obligates me to give you a card in return.  I invite you over for a meal, which obligates you to invite me over for a meal in return.  To this way of thinking, which has colonised us all, there is no such thing as a gift, actually; for every gift carries with it an obligation.  I only give in order that I may also receive.  For if I were to give without thought of return, if my left hand were to give in such a way that even my right hand would not know about it, I would eventually impoverish myself and disappear into nothingness.  And there is nothing we fear so much—according to Levinas, Fromm, and a thousand other witnesses—as nothingness itself.  Conclusion:  this philosophy of life, this set of assumptions about how the world works, is again completely incompatible with the gospel that Craig to called to preach and embody here in Kew and in Auburn.  Again Craig is called to contradict, by what he says and what he does, so many of the principles and values by which we live our lives.  

And there is no sense in pleading, as some of you are doing quietly right now, that we do not believe and practise these assumptions in the church.  Of course we do.  If we really followed Christ, for example, we would have blown our Christmas monies and energies on Natalie Dixon’s work with sufferers of schizophrenia, or on a television programme which tells the story of Christ’s birth in such a way as to awaken faith in the lonely and lost people of our city.  We would not have gorged ourselves silly, given presents to people do not need them (with the expectation that we, ourselves, would receive the same) and retired to enjoy our second or third houses at the beach.  As a great many Uniting Church people did, just recently.  No.  Being members of the Uniting Church is Australia certainly does not make us immune to the hugely powerful cultural forces that shape our values, beliefs and attitudes.  They have colonised us, very often without our even knowing it.

The beliefs and values I mentioned just now are just now are very powerful, very subtle, and very pervasive – even in the church.  They are so pervasive and powerful, in fact, that you would have to be a fool to question or contradict them.  But that is what Craig will promise to do tonight: to come amongst you as one of Christ’s fools, like the Apostles of old who (as Paul says) paraded like a freak-show before the watching world, becoming ‘weak’ where everyone thought they should be strong, attracting ‘dishonour’ from their contemporaries instead of honour, undergoing great trials of hunger, thirst and persecution for the sake of Christ’s costly gospel, while their peers looked on with a mixture of bewilderment and incomprehension.   In all this, we are told, the Apostles held firm to their calling.  They imitated Christ, their Lord, who blessed when he was cursed, endured when he was persecuted, replied kindly when he was slandered, and became like the dregs or shite of the world in order to give hope and good news to the many millions of people whom this world marginalises and counts as nothing.  As Paul said famously, in chapter 1 of this letter,

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame those who think they are wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame those who think they are strong; God chose what is lowly and despised in the world—those regarded as nothings, non-persons—to reduce to nothing those who think they are really something.  All this so that no one will be able to boast of their self-made lives in the presence of God.

As a minister of Christ, the Word of God, Craig is the inheritor of this ministry and this mission amongst you.  He will come amongst you knowing nothing but the contradictory mystery of Christ crucified: a sign of foolish weakness and failure for most of our world; yet to all who know their need, a sign of the power of God to lift and liberate us from our bondage to the same old thing—those never-ending cycles of guilt, obligation and the deep-down fear that we amount to nothing, save chimeras of shadow and vanity.  Craig comes amongst you as one who will repeat and imitate this theatre of the cross before you in word, ritual and deed.  What you are called to do it watch, listen, and copy:  to receive into your bodies and souls what Craig has received, to imitate his love, his faith and his perseverance, even as he imitates that of Christ.  To become, with Craig, Christ’s fools for the sake of this world whom God loves so truly, so madly, so deeply.

But let me finish with a word for Craig alone, a personal word as from one minister to another.  Craig, you know full well how very hard it is to fulfil this mission which Christ has given, and which the church, in its holy madness, continues to bless in spite of everything.  You know how costly this grace is, for yourself but also for Annette and those you love most.  How could it not be otherwise, with the crucified as our leader and inspiration?  There will be times, in Auburn and Kew, as there have been in other places, when you will wonder, really wonder, if you can go on with this theatre, this spectacle of contradiction before an uncomprehending church and world.  Every part of you will want to give it up, to take on some more comfortable life.   Become a public servant, perhaps?  A research scientist?  Maybe I.T.!  As you know, it’s like that for me every other week!  When that happens, as you know it will, I would counsel you to remember and enact three simple truths; and I say this as one who stand in the place of Christ for you tonight (Christ therefore addresses me, also, in what I have to say):
  1. Remember, first, that God loves you.  Believe this with all you heart, for if God is for you, nothing will stand against you.  Nothing.  Believe this, not only for the sake of survival, but because you are a theologian, and such faith is at the heart of the theological enterprise.  Karl Barth, for you and I amongst the most insightful and courageous theological minds in recent history, was never embarrassed to summarise his living faith in the simple words of Paul in Galatians:  “I have died, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  If Christ loves you, Craig, then anything is bearable, anything is possible.  Live in this love.  It is your refuge and your strength.
  2. Remember, second, that you are not called to this enact this theatre of the cross on your own.  You stand in a great tradition, a great company of fools, from the Apostles of old, to the Slavic Stazis of the Middle Ages, to your friends and colleagues here in Melbourne.  Don’t forget that the law of Christ calls us to bear each other’s burdens, not out of obligation, but out of grace.  I would count it a joy and a privilege to help bear yours.  And there are others, here, who will do the same.  I am sure of it.
  3. Finally, I want you remember that in Christ, failure can be success.  Thank Christ for that, for almost everything I do in ministry seems like a failure.  (See how pervasive the powers and principalities of this world have become!)  For what many regard as fracture and failure, is for Christ the lacuna and womb of grace.  So when you are wrong, or tired, or just can’t do it, for whatever reason, say so:  first to yourself, and then to others.  Allow yourself to be weak.  When you are weak, then Christ can be strong, and often he delivers that strength through the care of others.  Surprising care, sometimes.  But care nevertheless.
So there I finish, except for one thing.  A litany from Paul, in 2 Corinthians chapter 4:

We hold this treasure of the gospel in jars of clay,
so that it may be clear that its power comes not from us,
    but from God.

We are afflicted in every way,
    but not crushed;
perplexed,
    but not driven to despair,
persecuted,
    but not forsaken;
struck down,
    but not destroyed;
always carrying in the body the death of Jesus,
    that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.
For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus sake,
    so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.
So, death is at work in us,
    but life is at work in you.

In the name of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so now, and forever, world without end  Amen.

Garry J. Deverell
January 14, 2004

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