Lent 4                                                                          3 April 2010

John 12. 37-46

A number of years ago Gloria and I lead a workshop with the elders and stewards on the role of welcoming. We were exploring how to try and best be when we are in the foyer and in the role of making people, especially new people and visitors, feel welcome. So we spent the few hours we had together doing some playing and trying to loosen up our bodies and minds. We played some role play games and had some conversation together about what it means to welcome – especially in the foyer of the church. I especially wanted us to reflect on who we think we are when someone new comes through the door. Gloria and I invited people to be a bit self aware of who we are and feel and how we behave toward others when we meet someone new who has come to church.

Most churches like to pride themselves on being a welcoming church; sometimes it’s not quite as straightforward as this. Do we greet people in the foyer like we would greet them in the street? Do we welcome them like we would welcome them to our own home? Or do we welcome with a sense of: what the heck are you doing in my space; I hope you don’t sit in my seat?  Do we welcome with enthusiastic joy, and without expectation of what their visit might be about?

And so to try and get under the surface a bit I asked the question of the group: why might people want to come to church? I wanted us to explore why we thought they might have got out bed on a Sunday morning, when they could have stayed curled up under  the covers, and instead have been prepared to run the gauntlet of a whole lot of strangers in order to take part in what is, nowadays, not a common way of being together in public. Why might people want to come to church? Well I got all sorts of high falooutin answers like: because they felt that there was a gaping hole in their life and they knew that God was the only one could fill it; they had suffered the death of someone close to them and wanted comfort; or that they had finally come to their senses that Christianity was the right way and they were coming to our church to stake their claim. Strike, I thought, we’re not getting anywhere here. I suspected that I was getting the answers they thought I wanted to hear. I thouht, if this is true these people think they’ve got the good oil and, if this is what they think it means to be Christian, will greet visitors with sanctimonious superiority –we’ll never see them a seconf time.

You see what I wanted to try and get to was how to simply  welcome people with a little bit of uncomplicated human kindness – not rocket science, but we do struggle to do it. So I thought quickly, how do we get past this belief that we need to put on a sort of institutionalised Christian veneer. It’s some thing I have certainly experienced in most church foyers.

How can we get welcomers to just be themselves as they might be in the supermarket or at the footy or golf. Where do we go with this I thought to myself? I was a bit flummoxed. So I asked instead: why might we want people to come to church? Why might we want people to come through that door and join us? The first question had elicited a whole lot of pious sentiment about being nice Christians – which most of the community finds a big turn off. I was aware that in most church foyers there is a  lot of anxiety when someone new comes through the door. So, why might we want people to come to church? There was a long silence. I could hear the starter motors turning but here was no ignition. Then Rosemary said – quite tentatively – So that we mightn’t feel so irrelevant. Oh dear, I thought. Maybe that hits the nail on the head.

You see, for a little while,  about a millienium and a half, the church has had a conversation with itself about knowing the truth about God; having the good oil about the meaning of life; heaven and hell and the whole damned thing. But as generations have slipped away from the church we are left holding the deflated hide of that great beast that was Christendom. And if most of society doesn’t accord us the status of being the possessors of the truth any longer, but we think we are, then of course we’re going to probably feel, besieged, or maybe smug in our ecclesiastical isolation, or just simply quite irrelevant. I heard this in what Rosemary said : we want people to come through the door so that we wouldn’t feel quite so irrelevant.

One of the catch cries of many in the church is that we must be relevant. Most conversations about worship style and content features this wringing of the hands sentiment. What relevant might mean and entail, though, I have no idea – but surely it comes from a deep  sense that we are not. But in a world where we are shouted at every day about being relevant – and being relevant means being  sexy, attractive, desired, envied, doing the latest thing – it’s difficult not to feel irrelevant. Do not fear we’re not alone in feeling this way and under siege. The question is whether we choose to listen to this clamour, and shape our personal lives, but also our communal life as church, by this incessant, restless demand. When we feel irrelevant we have to begin to tell ourselves stories about ourselves. Have a conversation about who think we are; or who we think we are not. How we think others think about us becomes the basis of how we behave. Not a good basis for contentment or a healthy self-esteem – or a healthy world view.

The gospel of John is a gospel written in a situation of quite extreme hostility. As a result of this hostility this community had begun to develop a conversation about themselves. While the particular situations of this hostility for the community are not described very often it infuses so many of the interactions in John. It’s especially there when we read between the lines. This hostile atmosphere is the air we breath when we read John.

Three things shaped the community for which this gospel was written. The first is the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. We know about this. It is the context of Matthew and Mark and Luke, although John, being the latest of the gospels and further from the event, contains less reference to it. The second thing which is the context of John’s gospel is that these Jewish followers of Jesus, who have been members of the synagogue, have been now thrown out by the synagogue authorities – again in today’s passage we hear of the fear which the Pharisees had instilled in others. (This is probably more a reference to John’s community than to the actual events of Jesus’ life). So the “Jews”, as they are so spitefully labelled by John, are always severely antagonistic toward Jesus. And the third thing is a question about apostolic authority in the life of their community  - who’s got the truth? In John there is regular reference to one who is simply known as “the beloved disciple”; never named. It seems that this one with whom Jesus clearly had a very tender relationship – sometimes running to the homo-erotic, this beloved disciple is the source of this community’s connection to Jesus. Not Peter, who is less prominent here, but this shadowy, nameless figure – who lies in the bosom of Jesus at the supper the night of Jesus betrayal.

SO the air we breath as we read John is one of constant background hostility. The community is in a defensive stance; marking themselves out in opposition to the synagogue and others, sometimes in explicit terms, almost always implicitly. This climate of hostility has deeply infected the church. We assume life threatening theological-hostility  is the status quo. We have been preoccupied with theological correctness right from the very beginning; so much of Paul’s writings are in this same atmosphere. And the life of the church has been riven by schisms, and corruption, reformations, revivals and divisions of all kinds where one group has, in what is often a spirit of self-righteous hostility, fractured itself off from other followers of this one we call the Prince of Peace. Why do we get it so wrong?

With all this background of hostility in John, culminating in the crucifixion of Jesus, we seem to have scriptural mandate for, being defensive, being suspicious of others, for drawing the line when we find ourselves at odds with others, or at personal risk. We hear from the prophet Isaiah in today’s reading:

He has blinded their eyes
   

and hardened their heart,


so that they might not look with their eyes,
   

and understand with their heart and turn

—
   and I would heal them.

Some, it  seems, are destined to not understand – let’s separate and protect ourselves from them has been the sort of culture we have inherited in the church. It’s a strange thing. It’s a bit like the painting. On the surface the painting seems to simply be telling the story of Jesus clearing the temple; but at a deeper level it’s telling a story which was part of a much bigger story which fed into the holocaust. And with John it’s an equally complex mix of light and shadow. John, so concerned with love – they will know you are my disciples by your love for one another – but at another level there is this deep animosity to those outside. Also feeding into the holocaust.

What I suppose I’m trying to get to in my rambling is that whoever we are, whatever our time and place in history and the world, we have a conversation about ourselves, and our place in the world. And it’s a human trait that we take on this identity, as though it’s the real us, and project it outwards as either a sort of PR project in trying convince others of what we’re like – or we adopt a sort of defensive stance – if we’re not sure of how others might think of us. We do this personally and we do this as communities.  As we take on a persona we project it into the world; it’s the mask we present to others: maybe about being right and the protector of the true faith; or the constantly renewing church. John’s community was projecting an image of being under siege – and certainly they were – but it doesn’t mean that this is the way things always have to be in the church.

As we get older we hopefully get a bit wiser and less defended; our boundaries soften; our blood pressure doesn’t go up so readily when our hard and fast positions on something are challenged; and we realize that some things are just not worth losing sleep or friendships over. Hopefully we gain a bit of wisdom, become a bit more mellow and realise that when we say that God is one and that God is in all things that we mean it. Step by step, experience by experience, thought by thought, we come to realize that God is present in our light and our shadow, our understanding and our misunderstanding, our love and our fear, our kindnesses and our rage – and in all these things God is seeking to bring us to wholeness and that peace which passes all understanding. If we are involved in the project of defending the faith we will never be open to growing into a wisdom which leaves us free to be content as child of God. We’ll be too big-headed to go down that birth canal in order to be born again.

In our Lenten study we have been dipping in and out of some texts around the climate crisis, our rampant consumption as humans and the question of what it means to be human; asking ourselves questions about what is it that gives our lives meaning; what makes us truly human. Does all we buy, possess and do make us happier, more content, more fulfilled – or are these ways of plugging a gaping hole in our souls. All of us in the group seem to be struggling with what feels like a tremendous tension between how to live personal lives with humility and a sense of the sacredness and unity of all things, and the terrifying knowledge that the way we humans are living is threatening the well-being of the planet along with the lives of billions of people and thousands of plant and animal species.

Theologian, Sally McFague, suggests that what we as people of faith need to do in order to meet the challenge of our time is to “internalise vulnerability”. To make ourselves vulnerable to the terrifying knowledge of what we are doing – and in so doing to be different people. Yes, to live differently in terms of making changes to the way we do things day to day, but most importantly to internalise this  deep tension to the extent that it causes us in our human-being to be changed people.

Now vulnerability is not a very sexy call in a world where nations’ first economic call is on military might; where we glorify the stamina and strength of sportspeople, and align ourselves with one belligerent political leader over another. Vulnerability is seen to be about weakness, about failure, about lack of boundaries and will.

We proclaim that Jesus internalised the vulnerability of God in going to the cross. In sure and certain hope Jesus went with determination to his hour where God glorified this act of abandoning certainty in order to find true life; resurrection life; eternal life – life rooted in the heart of God.

This is our calling as people who seek to live by the death-transforming, the culture-of-death-defying way of Jesus.

So when we feel irrelevant, we are need to remember that in following Christ and seeking to walk in his way of vulnerability all things become ours. Our being can become characterised by a self-love which comes from the knowledge that this is so and that as one of John’s letters encourages: perfect love cast out fear. And as Paul writes to the Corinthians: For all things are yours, all belong to you, ²³and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

So the way we can be with others is one of self-assured vulnerability rooted in the knowledge that Julian of Norwich had come to:

All shall be well,

and all shall be well,

and all manner of things shall be well.

Andrew Boyle