SERMONS

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Sean Gilbert – 12/6/11 (Pentecost)
Christ Church

"Force of Life: Enemy of Apathy"

Whatever we may say about all the metaphors in John associated with Jesus and spiritual life, we must say this - never are they used in the passive voice or should they ever be interpreted in self protective or exclusivist ways. Light, love, water and life, but to name a few, are outgoing, active, fertile, forceful even. For here lies an unapologetic energy for life; a redemptive presence within the human experience that will not be and cannot be ultimately ignored. As our opening prayer strikingly states;

Like strong grass pushing itself upward
between thick layers of concrete sidewalk, or the sun refusing to stay behind the clouds.
Like the push of water in a flowing spring
or the urgent, pressing contractions of childbirth.
Like the stubborn oak leaves of last autumn
shoved off by springs burst of life.
So are You spiritual vigor and
strong energy, O God,
forever present within our hidden selves,
sustaining and growing us into deep love.

During the week a joint statement was released by a group of non-government agencies, the Uniting Church in Australia included, concerning the federal government's revamped refugee (boat people) policies.

It begins:

The Australian debate about asylum policy has now degenerated to the point where the central argument seems to be about which inhumane policy will cause the least suffering. Neither indefinite detention in the Pacific nor sending asylum seekers to uncertainty in Malaysia can be presented as a just or credible response to the needs of people seeking refugee protection in Australia.

The inconvenient truth for Australia's political leaders is that the majority of asylum seekers who have entered Australia by boat have been found to need protection from persecution. Today, in Australian immigration detention facilities, there are asylum seekers who bear the physical scars of torture, children and adults who have witnessed family members being killed and many people who have had direct threats against their lives. The vulnerability of many asylum seekers must be a primary consideration in any government response to people movement.

Like strong grass pushing itself upward
between thick layers of concrete sidewalk
or the sun refusing to stay behind the clouds…
Yes, indeed.

Lest we think then that the flames and wind of Pentecost are obscure or irrelevant symbols associated only with a quaint religious fervor, the biblical context always sees such activity of Spirit as earth shaking, soul shifting, radical re-arrangements of human values and priorities; a violent and disturbing wind, no less, not in terms of destruction, always in the hope of reconstruction, reconciliation.

Jurgen Moltmann, a theological mentor and hero of mine, admittedly writing these two paragraphs fourteen years ago, gets to the very heart of the matter, I think.

In (those) traditional forms of Christian mission the terms in which we saw the sending of the Spirit and the new life were (evidently) too narrow. Of course a Christian life style, the community of the church, and the decisions and experiences of personal faith are all part of it. But the mission of the Holy Spirit is the mission of new life, and that is something more. We must find ways that lead 'from religion to the kingdom of God, from the church to the world, from concern about our own selves to hope for the whole', wrote Christoph Blumhardt, the Wurttemburg revivalist preacher a hundred years ago.

For us today that means that instead of spreading a Christian civilization or the values of the Western world we have to build up a universal 'culture of life' and resist 'the barbarism of death' wherever we are, as Pope John II put it in his recent public declarations. In our Western European and American countries the affirmation of life has become the main problem. We have long since lost the hubris of earlier world conquerors. Our feeling about life has become 'tristesse'. We seem to be paralyzed by a chilly apathy. Our social coldness towards the poor and strangers shows that we have no love for their lives. We see the misery in Bosnia and Rwanda on the TV screen, but it no longer touches us. Knowledge doesn't mean power any longer. Knowledge means powerlessness: 'after all, there's nothing we can do about it' - so we hold our tongues and stay mute. Humanity is likely to die of apathy of soul like this before it founders in social or military catastrophes. We need nothing so much as the mission of life so that we can again affirm and love life so much that we protest against death and all the powers that disseminate death. What we need is not a new religion, or new peace between the religions. What we need is life - whole, full, and undivided life. Isn't this the essence of the gospel: God, the eternal, infinite God, is so close to you that he loves you, and in his love, accepts you just as you are?

People who feel the faintest spark of this love become conscious of their own dignity, get up and walk upright and live with heads held high. Even when we are loved by another person, our energy for living awakens, and we trust ourselves to do more than we would ever have dared before. How much more is this the case when God looks at us with the 'shining eyes' of his love and his pleasure in our lives! That is why part of this message of life is the comforting of the sad, the healing of the sick - the healing, too, of memories - the welcoming of strangers and the forgiving of sins. That is to say, the message of life means saving threatened and impaired life from the powers of annihilation.

Heady, soulful and dramatic stuff, and yet the apathy at play in our own society - certainly with me at times - bears Moltmann's words out as to the true; piercing, troubling, truth because they are words of regenerative Spirit and life. In me, they find their way between the, excuses, the rationalizations, the self absorption, comfort and ease of being a white, educated male, Medicare card and even concession card holder. Relatively speaking, very few people in our world are so lucky. And so in the face of such inhumanity which ultimately only panders to political realism, what will people of this forceful, constructive and re-creative spirit do? Will they allow their faith experience to be so emasculated, so removed from the centre of life, that it informs and forms little of any human and social consequence, or will they flow outward with it, will they allow it to be the very enemy of apathy or the reversal of entropy that gave birth to the Christian church in the first place? That injected hope into resignation, zeal into laziness, compassion into cynicism and love into loathing; a revolution within the human spirit, in other words, not simply a warm and fuzzy feeling but genuine and lasting renovation. A new way of seeing and being in the world.

An old friend on Friday put me on to a visual image of this principle and with it I will conclude; a unique painting from the Belgium surrealist Rene Magritte - There the artist composing through his right hand a beautiful bird, a white dove I think, and there at his left hand his real life model, his subject matter; an egg no less.

This is the potential experience and call of Spirit for us individuals, a community and a global community. Not to simply print or live the pattern, the framework laid out for us (and to fall asleep in the process) but to see and seize the possibility of life in its fullness/completion and its equal embrace of all. This is in our own small way our daily calling. This is our privilege and vocation as people of Spirit and life.

Let us take a few moments to prayerfully consider such important matters………….