All Things Seen and Unseen

Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, Body and Blood of Christ—this time of year is like a sanctuary for endangered species with strange and exotic theological mysteries huddled together in one place for easy viewing. Easy viewing doesn’t make for easy preaching though, so I was delighted to discover a tidbit about “Manna” that at least got me started: to our ear the word Manna sounds like a well-behaved noun but apparently it originates in Hebrew from an exclamation. Something like “What is this stuff?!” … I have this vision of unruly Israelites standing round in the early morning shouting at Moses—”You expect us to eat this stuff?” … The same incredulity and rising disgust can be heard in the Gospel as well —”He’s going to give us his what to eat?”

So, on the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, we have a question—what is this stuff? What’s going on here?

The first thing I notice is that though each of the readings this morning is meant to be about Eucharist there’s not a word about priests. In fact, despite the focus on bread and wine, the central point of the texts isn’t about any thing but about memory.

“Remember,” says Moses; “Do not forget the God who brought you out of slavery, who gave you water in the desert, and fed you in the wilderness with a strange food.” “Remember!” But why remember? Not for entertainment, not for nostalgia, but so that the people might remember who it was that made them a people, and remembering might love—love God and love each other. We believe this text is part of an ancient liturgy in which the Israelites every year gathered to remember where they came from and how, and remembering, committed themselves once more to each other.

The same thing is going on in Paul’s letter too. By sharing a cup and a loaf the people—the little community in Corinth—remember both who it was that made them a people and just who they have been made to be. One human body broken on the cross: one loaf of bread broken and shared: one community broken open for all. “Remember,” says Paul; “Do not let yourselves be divided … do not forget who you are.”

Jesus, too, in John’s gospel, conjures up a memory—a memory of manna and that strange, humiliating feeding in the desert that made his people long ago. But he gives it a twist and, in the face of complacency, restores the shock of the memory with his own disgusting language. Just listen, and hear it afresh: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you.” This is the stuff that got John’s people thrown out of the synagogue—Jesus as messiah had some possibilities—but not this revolting blasphemy of blood and guts. “You expect us to eat this?”

John’s people became a people when they made their own exodus—from the synagogue, from their homes, from their comfort—carrying only the memory of a death with its spilt blood and agonised flesh but still insisting that this death, this flesh, this blood, meant for them life and love and the end of death. It is this memory which made them a community and, over and over, re-made them as they remembered and committed themselves to be who they were.

So we have Moses’ community in Israel, Paul’s in Corinth, John’s who-knows-where, and ours in Oakland—each made by a disturbing memory into a community of life. We who share in the one cup and eat the one loaf are made by memory into the flesh and blood of Christ. Yes, in the comforting sense of being kin, being family, being bound by bonds of blood to God—but also, in a shockingly literal way that takes us beyond metaphor into the “icky” realm of flesh that is muscle, meat, guts; blood that is warm and sticky and wet. How can there be life there? “You expect us to eat this?”

Jesus says, “see me and you see the Father,” then in his going passes that witness on to us, so that as we gather today we have to say, “See us and you see Jesus.” It is Jesus we remember and Jesus we become. His flesh, his blood. That question—”What is this stuff?” only finds its answer here, in our gathered flesh.

I hope you’ll forgive me if I end on a personal note. When I first came here—just over two years ago—I knew I wanted to learn to be a deacon and I knew that I would only find out how if you were to teach me. Two years later I can honestly say that you have done that—and more—with your kindness and your tolerance, your encouragement and your love—with your blood and with your flesh.

In a day or two I fly off to England and in July will be ordained priest—but in my flesh I know that you have already done that for me. Begun to make me priest. And when I return in the Fall my wish, my request to you, will be—is—”teach me to be a priest”—teach me to stand up here, at ambo and altar, and not get in the way of what you are doing; as you celebrate Eucharist, as you remember Jesus, as you call God to be here in flesh and blood, to make us all, once more, into God’s own body.

“I will not leave you orphaned,” says Jesus in today’s gospel. “I will not leave you orphaned; I will come back to you.” He is going away.

Jesus went away a first time in his death on the cross. And though he came back from the dead, he came back changed. He didn’t just come back to life, he came to a new life that kept startling the disciples. In our Resurrection stories Jesus is always coming and going through locked doors, appearing and disappearing, and his own friends don’t quite recognise him or are afraid to ask who he is. And yet he’s quite real: he eats fish, and holds out his hands to touch and be touched. Above all he is present with a job to do—a simple job—to console his friends.

But Jesus went away a second time, too. This time not through death. He went away to be with the Father. His friends, full of the strange joy of his Resurrection, must have felt that second leaving terribly. John’s gospel says that if we loved him we should be glad he has gone, gone home to make a home for us. But we need Jesus to be present to us—with us. We don’t do well on our own. Today Jesus tells us that though he is going he will not leave us on our own. He will come back to us in another way. We are not to be orphans. He has left behind someone else to be an even more intimate presence. This presence, this spirit, remains to continue to do for us all that Jesus did—and more. The spirit remains to bring joy, to bring health, to bring hope, to speak with gentle reverence. The spirit is brings life where there was death, and above all love where there might be indifference.

Which faces us with a challenge. If life and, above all, love are the mark of the Spirit of Jesus, do we bear that mark? Jesus says, “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” Do we know that? Or have we been left as orphans?

According to John’s gospel, the way to tell is through love. “This is the command I give you, love one another as I have loved you.”

How do we love one another? Particularly when, in our world, love is so often praised and so rarely encountered. How can we love each other when so often we don’t even like one another. Perhaps we can manage to feel positively about most people. Maybe. But there are always some who, try as we might, we can barely put up with, let alone like, let alone love.

But Jesus commands us to have a special kind of love—the love that he has had for us. Love shows itself, not so much in feelings or words, but in deeds. We love each other, and reveal the presence of the Spirit, when we do what Jesus did: lay down our lives for each other. Love happens when we give what we have to someone who doesn’t. Love happens when, even though we might not understand someone, even when we might dislike someone, we still offer them the hospitality of our lives.

The Community of John discovered this sort of love among themselves and because of it they believed that though Jesus had gone away he hadn’t left them orphans.

It’s fitting that on Mother’s Day we should have the Holy Spirit being described as a Mother. It is because of Her we are not orphans. She is the living presence of Jesus in our community. She is both the sign of that presence and she is what makes that presence possible.

Love is not easy. We all know the sort of love that sweeps us off our feet and carries us away. If we’re very lucky it lasts a lifetime and is deeply productive. But often such dizzy love fades and has to grow into a love that can last. Romance is not the best model of love we have. The Holy Spirit is not our Lover but our Mother. A mother’s love lasts a lifetime. It is deliberate and protective. It persists through pain and struggle. It would gladly lay down it’s life for it’s child. Mother’s day often drips with sentimentality. But the strange truth is that Mother’s don’t choose their children and children don’t choose their parents. A Mother learns to love what God has given her. Sometimes the learning is a hard one. Sometimes the love a mother has continues even when she has begun to dislike her children. Although the feeling of love can vanish altogether what cannot vanish is the relationship. It is in the blood. It is in the genes.

This is the love we are commanded to have for each other. For the person next to you, and the one in front, and the one way over there. A love that lasts and is shown in deeds.

If it is possible at all—if Jesus is with us at all—it is because we have the Holy Spirit, like a Mother, so that we will never be orphans.

You should all be glad that you haven’t had to live with me for these last couple of weeks because I’ve done nothing but moan about this gospel reading. I do not like it. In fact, I hate this reading! It troubles me, it irritates me. Well, since I’ve had to suffer it, I thought you should too.

So what’s my problem? It’s not just that I’m allergic to wool (which I am) it’s something more. This gospel gives me double-vision: I keep coming back to the scene at the empty tomb where Mary Magdalen met the Risen Jesus and setting it alongside today’s gospel. One is full of touching, down-to-earth humanity and the other seems like high theological speculation. One is an involving story about real people and the other is a barely coherent mix of images and allegory. That’s my first grievance —Bring back the Resurrection!

My other complaint is with the particular image of Jesus that comes with all these sheep—not Jesus the shepherd but Jesus the sheepfold. Underneath the pastoral language there’s a picture of Jesus as a boundary, as a wall, as a marker of who’s in and who’s out. All the language echoes with division and separation and even violence. They’re “our own” and there’s the stranger—the wolf, the thief, the marauder. In John’s vision you are either in with us or you’re out—and not just out, you’re out to steal and kill.

I cannot stomach the vision of Jesus as a barrier, even when it’s a barrier that can be opened to let me in. Someone is being kept out. I can’t take the language of exclusion—it has done so much harm.

Now, from what we can reconstruct of John’s community such language makes a lot of sense. We think they were a Jewish group who had come to believe in Jesus as Messiah and were eventually thrown out of the synagogue as a consequence. They go it alone. They are intensely aware of separation and of Jesus as the one who sets them apart. Their response to being excluded seems to have been to put up their own theological barriers to mark them off very sharply from the synagogue across the street. We all know what a split in a church congregation is like.

But, understandable or not, Jesus is being used. … Jesus is always being used for someone’s purposes. You see it in each of our readings this morning. We have a fact to contend with—Jesus is risen—but what on earth do we make of it? The story of the Resurrection demands to be made sense of and incorporated into the whole of our lives. But, in the making sense, the original story, the original encounter, can so easily get lost. And then Jesus gets used.

He is used in the first reading to inspire guilt—”this Jesus whom you crucified,” says Peter. And Luke, the writer, is using this whole episode to paint a rosy picture of the golden age at the beginning of the church to encourage his own congregation to quit squabbling!

Jesus is being used in the second reading too. All the suffering that Peter’s talking about isn’t voluntary—the community is being persecuted for its religion. So Peter presents Jesus as the one who already suffered for them to make their present suffering holy and worthwhile.

In its own context, each passage makes sense—Jesus is being used to speak to where people are. But out of context that use becomes abuse—abuse of Jesus and abuse of those told to suffer.

How do we get from that delicate encounter at the empty tomb to these Jesus-es? And, more urgently, how do we put our own delicate encounter with Jesus into our own context—Who is our Jesus, if he’s not playing on guilt, if he’s not inviting us to suffer, and if he’s not standing as a boundary between ourselves and those we fear?

Who is your Jesus? What difference has the Resurrection made to you? Or to me?

I made a promise when I preached on Easter morning that in this season the Risen Jesus would come to each of us, friend to friend, as consoler. One who knows our grieving, one who knows what to do to draw each of us to new life. Has that happened to you yet? Are you being consoled? Or are you still nursing a death, still hanging around an empty tomb?

We preach to ourselves, as you well know. But we only see it with hindsight. In my own prayer, in these weeks, I’ve discovered that I prefer Jesus dead to Jesus alive. That I prefer to hold his broken body and weep rather than accept his comfort and his life. He wants me alive but I’m afraid of what that life might mean. When I close my eyes in prayer, the choice between those two Jesus-es is always there—one dead and bleeding; one so gently and passionately alive. … And I have a choice, each day: which one will I spend my time with? Who will I let him be in my days, and in my dreams?

This is where theology gets done. Not in Berkeley, not in Rome, but in the hearts and minds of each of us. Yours and mine. We each have a dead body to account for and an empty tomb and a new life … a new life.

Each day we write, in blood and breath and bone, our own scriptures. Each day we tell ourselves and our world who Jesus is and what his being alive means for us. Oh, let us pray that his voice will sing clearly through ours. Let us pray that his life will be abundant in our own.

At the end of the film “Terminator” Arnold Schwarzenegger—part-man, part-machine—is finally dying after being crushed, boiled and baked. Stripped right down to his metal skeleton he utters his last words—”I’ll be back!”

Schwarzenegger was the bad guy, but it’s the same for the goodies. At the end of another film—”Aliens 3″—our hero, Ripley, gives her life to finally rid the universe of an awful alien creature. She is gone for good—or at least she was, for I hear that another film is planned in which by some ingenious device she comes back to life to fight again.

Resurrection is very popular these days. There’s always the possibility of a sequel (or two) to milk some more cash from the movie-going public. Well, it may be a popular theme but it’s not the way to look at what we celebrate here this Easter morning. This is not the sequel. The Resurrection of Jesus is not a repeat performance of his life. This is not “The Nazarene Strikes Back” nor is it “Son of Son of God.” For one thing, sequels are never as good as the original —the hero returns and does all the same things over again with not one element of unpredictability. What we celebrate here is altogether unpredictable: a new life has been born.

But the birth wasn’t easy. If you listen to Mary’s story today you see how difficult. You realise how exhausted she must have been. And, if we ourselves have entered into the story, as we’ve retold it together in our three days of prayer, we will probably feel just as drained. For Mary, and for us, it has been a succession of intense feelings: a last and disturbing meal with a dear but doomed friend, betrayal and arrest, the waiting, the watching, and his suffering, his dying, and yet more waiting by his dead body in the tomb. And now it is all over, all done, all finished, Mary of Magdala is exhausted and distraught. And now, at the open tomb, her weeping is even more desperate than before because it seems they have taken away even the corpse and left her nothing to cling to, or mourn over.

If we have travelled with Mary these days, we too have been mourning—grieving for Jesus but also grieving for all his death evokes in us, all that seems dead in our own lives, all the failed hopes, the lost opportunities and dying dreams. We carry our own tomb with us—within us—and we don’t know why it is empty.

Then the vigil comes and, overnight, darkness is transformed into light and death becomes life. Suddenly he who was dead is not dead, but alive. But, if we have any heart at all that good news is hard news to take. It takes time to absorb. It can’t just happen with the lighting of a candle. So there she is, bewildered, hanging around the tomb, when these two snotty angels say to her “Woman, why are you weeping?” which is a stupid question. Because, of course she’s weeping! Jesus might have moved from death to life but, as yet, Mary hasn’t. It takes time to grieve and time to accept that life is alive. Mary has to be coaxed out of her own tomb. She hears another voice ask the question: “Woman, why are you weeping?” and she doesn’t recognise it—yet. So she tells her story again, holding onto the familiar hurt of it. Until that voice, his voice, speaks her name and lets her unclench her fingers from her burden of death, to receive again the gift of herself, tenderly given, and with it a mission, a call, to be an apostle to the apostles, to touch them too with life.

Jesus, the one death could not hold, is back—not to destroy his enemies but to console his friends. We will see this pattern over and over again in the next days and weeks: Jesus comes to meet friends who are hurting, and to do for them exactly what they need to bring them back to life. Peace to the frightened disciples in the upper room, hope to the couple fleeing to Emmaus, faith to the friend who cannot believe, and, here, comfort for the comfortless Mary. Jesus comes as a friend to bring a friend back to life.

Coming back to life takes time, which is why the Church gives us time. The Church counts this whole coming week as one day—Easter day. And after it forty more days of Easter—a whole Lent’s worth—to unwind the way to Calvary and slowly get the message that Jesus is not dead and neither are we.

It may have happened already—it may take some time—but, however it happens, this Easter Jesus will come to each of us as a friend, to console us, to make us happy, to share with us his own joy. He knows what stands in the way of our joy and he knows how to get round it. No need is too big for him—or too small—in fact, this is the only job the Risen Jesus has to do! Every single Resurrection story we have is a story of consolation—there is not a one of judgement or revenge—not a one. Jesus lives that we might live. And we, brought to joy by his joy, have nothing else to do but befriend the world, and, through our care, console its grief.

It’s tough being dead—until you get used to it—though it’s a damned sight better than what goes before with the mess and the blood and the battle for every breath. Not to mention my sobbing sisters, wailing away—at least Mary—she’s never been one to hide her feelings. Martha’s different—she knows the strength in sparing words and getting on with it. Both beautiful in their own ways. Hard to leave them!

But strange, in those last moments, even with them there—and God knows how many else—I was lonely. In the end there’s just you as you drift alone into the dark. Strange too how the pain leaves you near the end—though it doesn’t make the going any easier—you can be weary as hell—and ready—but giving up the ghost is a struggle. To live! —right up to the end I wanted to live—to breathe one more breath—to cherish one more heartbeat.

Hard on Martha and Mary too. They never gave up hope —right till the end—that Jesus would turn up, unannounced, as he had so many times, and put things right in that easy way of his. Now, there’s someone so full of life. I just kept hoping he’d come to say goodbye.

Such a friend he’s been to me—did you know we both share a passion for the night sky? We do. Did. Sometimes, on a warm evening, we’d lie out on the roof for hours and star-gaze. And talk. The dark brings out secrets, you know, and you see another side of people. I think I was the first he told of his growing fear that all this was going to end in nothing. That all the hopes and all the cures and the fire in his bones and the passion in his heart … was going to come to nothing. He’d tell me, in those dark times, about the confrontations with power, the battles with blindness, the plots to trap him, even the risk he felt from his followers.

“All ahead is darkness,” he said. But with still a strange yearning to go on and go through it. To trust to God. Like a father to him, it sometimes seemed.

He even joked, there on the roof, with the sky like a black bag above, and offered odds on whether it would be the Romans that got him or our own people.

Yes. It’s tough being dead. But life can be harder. A second shot at it anyway. I remember dying—finally letting go of life. Then next thing the sharp stink of rot, and cold going through me like a knife, and the tangle of winding cloths, and a thought in my head—”I’m dead”—even as I knew I wasn’t—not any longer.

A sound of stone on stone grated through my confusion, and a shaft of light with dust dancing in it. Oh, and air that smelled of life and green things and growth. Flooded, I was, with fear and delight and surprise—every feeling you can imagine and none at all.

Then I heard his voice call my name: “Lazarus.” Yes, that’s me, still me. Can I move? Can I sit up? Does everything work again?

Again, “Lazarus,” this time more sharply, “Come out!” So sweet to me, that voice out of the light—calling me out of the dark, out of the cold. A friend’s voice, full of emotion. I lay there trying to guess the feelings in it. Grief, hope, doubt? Not really. A joy, an exultation, but fierce! I had to see his face and see the look on it. That’s what got me to move finally into the light—to see him better, and feel his warmth and smell his life.

So many faces—shocked, horrified, disbelieving, frightened, even some angry, of all things. But in the middle of it all, him. With a smile that spoke my name and drew me out to be unbound, to let my fingers curve around an offered cup, and arms embrace the weeping sisters.

…

Death changes you. But so does life. I remember the look in his eyes even now—and know now that a bargain had been struck, an exchange made, and gladly. I see that now—after the parties, after the laughter and dancing, after the story has been told a thousand times, after catching his eyes across the firelight. I see that now, now that they’ve arrested him—their people and ours—I should have taken his odds…

He knew that raising the dead was the last straw. My God! even coming here, near Passover, when he did, was a risk—let alone such a dramatic gesture! He knew what he was doing when he gave me back my life. He was buying his own death. I understood that look in his eyes when they took him, bound, and the smile on his lips.

Oh, they’ll kill him, there’s no doubt of that. They’ll have to have their way. “Better that one man should die than the rest suffer”—that’s what our people’ll say, making it a Passover bargain—a lamb for a life.

What more can you do for someone you love than trade your life for theirs? But what a gift to have to receive! Where does it leave me—to have been loved that much and to know the cost and, while he dies, to go on living?

It’s tough being alive. But it’s the gift he’s given me, an expensive gift, and one I’ll not refuse and I’ll not waste. We have traded places, he and I. I know his gift was freely given—hard to understand!—and I know the gift can only be returned.

Lent is a time to be selfish. And the problem we have is that we don’t really know how to be selfish. Selfishness just doesn’t come all that easily to us. We are not good at it!

In the spirit of election year I’d like to take a straw poll: Hands up those of you who are really selfish — See! — we are not good at it.

Each of the readings today speaks of blessing, and glory, and grace —and life — life promised to Abram, life given as gift through the gospel, and life shown to us in the transfigured body of Jesus. This Lent we are — each of us —promised the same blessing as Abram, we are — each of us — offered the same gift of life as the early disciples, and we are — each of us — being invited into the presence of the same glory as that seen by Peter, James, and John.

Three enormous offers of life … and we hear them as we’ve heard them so many times before, and hurry on past. Life, yeah, yeah, yeah … What is it that keeps us from grabbing this offer wholeheartedly? Do we not trust it? Do we think it too simple or too naïve? Is it that we don’t know what’s good for us? I think it’s simply that we are not selfish enough. You would think that if you were given a choice between something good and something bad you would choose the good. That would be simple selfishness — even laboratory rats can do that. But in human beings there is a mysterious streak of self-denial that runs through our nature so that given the choice between life and death we often settle for the easy familiarity of death rather to the risky pleasures of really living.

For example, I spend a lot of my time listening to people talk about their prayer. Let me give you a vignette — this is Carole talking: “there was a moment last week when I walked around the corner and saw the sky and my heart suddenly lifted and just for a second I thought ‘I’m alive and I like it.’ Stupid thought, I know but it seemed just then that God was smiling. I smiled back. Then the mood passed.” Where did it pass too? “Oh I found myself worrying again about the kids…”

Why doesn’t Carole stay with the moment of life? She enjoyed it. It lifted her heart. And then she went back to worrying. I’m sure its the same for us. Why don’t we stay with the life?

We find ourselves always in a mixture of life and death. Some things in us are thriving, are growing, are bearing fruit. Some things in us are drooping, are fading, are shrivelling up. And for some stupid reason we get mesmerised by the death and let the life skip by. We seem to think the death is more real than the life, more to be trusted, more fitting for humble people. But the words of the epistle go to the heart: “Jesus has robbed death of its power and has brought life.” It’s a matter of life and death. Lent is a time for life — if only we could grasp it and take it and hold on to it — if only we could be really selfish. Instead we find ourselves hanging onto death.

What is God doing in you this Lent? Is there something unlikely being blessed? Some gift being offered that just seems too risky to believe. Is there something that God is wanting to say to you, some way God is wanting to be for you, that seems unbelievable or too good to be true. Give yourselves permission — for a moment — to be selfish, to prefer life over death. Is there some deep desire being planted and nourished by God? Just for a moment, take it an hold it, and cherish it and gently set aside whatever gets in it’s way. What would life be like if life came to you this Lent?

Don’t let so-called realism blunt that. The readings today offer their life fully aware of the prospect of death.

It is Abram at seventy-five and childless who sets out on this ridiculous journey to new land, new family, and new life. Timothy knows only too well that the promise of life is made in the middle of the hardship that the gospel entails. And Jesus stands on a mountain top, glowing with glory, alive as no one had ever been before, precisely between prophesies of his death. The same Jesus who will at the end of his Lent go to his death and in it and through it find life for us all. “He has robbed death of its power and has brought life into clear light.”

On that mountain-top Jesus trusted life and trusted what God was doing for him. This Lent, our mission should we choose to accept it, is to learn to be as selfish as Jesus — to learn to trust life the way he did.

The apocryphal story being told at breakfast this morning in my community is about Pat Buchanan. Apparently, so someone says, Bob Dole had been talking again about his humble origins in Kansas, how he started with nothing, and how he’s had to work hard for everything he has. On which Buchanan supposedly comments: “if he’s a self-made man it’s sad to see such shoddy workmanship.”

Today we come together to celebrate our humble origins—and to wear their mark. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Dust, ash, dirt—earth. We are earthlings, creatures formed from the dust and the spittle of God. “Adam,” before it was the name of the first human, was a description—”H’adam”—earth creature, created from dust.

We are made of earth. We are made for earth. Earth is what joins us, what marks our common creation. The soil links us to each other, to every other creature of earth, to this very planet, and even to the stars—since every atom of our bodies is the from the dust and ashes of long dead suns. Even here on earth, every atom of our bodies has been used before, countless times, in other bodies; other humans, other creatures. There is something of Jesus in all of us—and something of the slime-mold!

This is humility: to be humus, to be human. To be human, to be humble, is to be someone made, someone well-made, someone made from the same stuff as all other things. Made from dirt, we are yet God’s work of art, made for a purpose we only half know. We are the soil singing a song of reconciliation for all creatures.

So today we begin our Lent, marked on our foreheads with the sign of our origins, which is the sign of our hope. We are made—we are not self-made—yet somehow our future, and the future of all things, is in our hands. And God is calling to us, pleading with us, to get back to the basics of our creation, to get back to our roots in the earth.

In this season we offer ourselves to God to be made again—to be converted—to be made into something new, yet something we have always desired to be.

To let God’s work of prayer and fasting and charity to be done in us and through us, for all things.

To get back to basics. The humility of our origins. The glory of our calling. To remember we are dust and to dust we will return.

At the beginning of a new year and with Lent just around the corner we are faced today with the urgency of the command: be holy. It is a command spoken three times in the scripture today. Not a request, not an option, but a command. And not just for some, not just for a few but for all of us.

Which is all very well … but to obey that commandment we need to know what it means and that’s not easy.

What is it to be holy? What do the readings say? First of all we hear this: do not hate; do not seek revenge; love your neighbour as yourself. These all seem pretty reasonable conditions for holiness. But Paul’s letter is more mysterious: we are each a temple of the Holy Spirit and we must not destroy this temple; we had better be fools rather than wise, because to this world God is a fool. Finally, in the Gospel, Jesus preaches this powerful list of instructions in holiness: offer no resistance to injury; let yourself be struck rather than fighting back; give up your goods if someone wants them; love those who hate you. These are hard sayings. It is hard to hear these things and think they are for us. They might be ideal ways to live but they don’t seem practical—not if you’ve a job to do, mouths to feed, children to raise. In fact they sound down right dangerous. You would have to be a fool to really live that way. And it doesn’t even sound that ideal. Does God really want us never to think about ourselves, does God wants us to be walked all over, all the time, with no self-respect, no dignity? How can we be temples of the Holy Spirit and let that temple be ruined by other people with no defense. Is this what holiness is all about? And what about the others, the ones doing the striking and the taking, does God want the vicious and the violent to get away with their crimes? . Is this what holiness is all about?

I don’t think so. I think the list of do’s and don’ts is not the point at all. The real point is repeated in each of our three readings: we are to be holy because God is holy. More, we are to be holy because the holy God is present with us, now and always.

The holiness of God takes us back to a sense of the word holy that we can forget when we think mainly about ourselves. The holiness of the Old Testament God was awesome. Dangerous. The presence of God was something to be adored and to be worshipped and even to be feared. Something powerful: like high-voltage electricity or nuclear radiation. Something wonderful, but also pent-up, contained, which if unleashed would blind, and burn, and scour. No one could see the face of God and live, they said. And the reason the Israelite’s gave for this was that God is holy but they were not. This is the reason for the cult and the worship and the sacrifices and all the laws—not to bargain with God or keep God quiet or to get from God what they wanted—but to channel this power, this energy. To let it flow through the nation without tearing it apart. God dwelt with his people. A powerful God, and dangerous, and beautiful, and holy. And the only way to live with such a God was to be holy in turn.

All the rituals and laws and demands for holiness were not about individual piety or personal goodness but about a community were God could dwell and God’s awful power be made known. The command to be holy was as much as anything about safety, about handling that incredible power.

Holiness is dangerous. The demands we hear in the Gospel today, that at first sound so ideal or so stupid should be understood against the background of this danger.

The people who heard Jesus preach were poor and ordinary working people trying to live however they could surrounded by the soldiers of an occupying army. Israel was under Roman military rule. If you belonged to one of the ruling families you could survive because you had money and influence to smooth things over. If you didn’t mind your own people hating you, you could make a living by collecting taxes for the Romans. If you had a suitable temperament you could be a terrorist and fight the Romans that way. But the people listening to Jesus probably had none of those choices. They simply had to work hard to make a living and feed the family, and pay their taxes and just get by. And all the while they bore the brunt of angry soldiers and uncaring officials and their neighbours troubles. It is to these people that Jesus speaks a dangerous message about how to live under a foreign army. If they strike you on the right cheek, offer them the other. If they take your shirt, give them your coat. If they force you into labour do twice as much as they ask. And after all they have done, and will do, love them, greet them, pray for their well-being.

Why? Why do this? Because God does the same. God whose sun rises on the good and the bad alike. Whose rains fall upon both the just and the unjust.

There is life in this vision. Life and power and energy. It is not an ideal to be grudgingly followed day by day. It is not a burden to grind down the passion of life and leave people dry and petty and holier-than-thou. Instead it is a way of life that refuses to be beaten by oppression, and hangs on to freedom in the teeth of fear. It is heroic and dangerous. Maybe it is even attractive.

The challenge for us is not the living of that way of life from 2000 years ago but the struggle to know what it would mean here and now. How can one live with freedom and integrity and honour and passion— not under an occupying army but in a foreign land? What do Jesus’ words say to your situation? Vietnamese in America, trying hard to make a living and feed your family, and pay your taxes and just get by. What are your particular challenges? What is the danger of holiness for you? It’s a new year … Lent is coming. What does Jesus say to you?

Salt used to be a good thing — now it just raises our blood-pressure. Once packaged foods delighted in their saltiness — now they vie for the label “low Sodium.” Like “no fat” and “caffeine free” what we once sought out for pleasure, we now avoid for long life.

Salt used to be precious—Roman soldiers received part of their pay in salt—their salary. Any of you who are on enforced low-salt diets know just how precious salt still is. Things need taste. We need to be saved from blandness. This, says the gospel, is our communal vocation —to give the world some flavor. But will this low-sodium world thank us for it? I doubt it. But, in fact, our ambivalent feelings about salt offers a good image of our ambiguous relationship to the nation we are part of. We—church—as we lend a little flavor, should also be sending the blood-pressure of the world soaring. The people of Oakland shouldn’t know what to do with us or without us.

Jesus’ message is that, like it or not, we carry the flavor of the reign of God. You cannot take away the taste of salt. Like it or not, the world tastes us, and through us tastes God. We cannot hide the way we taste. So how are we doing? How annoying are we? How salty?

Take this nation, America. The US sees itself as a beacon to the world, a place of freedom, hope, refuge. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” That once meant something. America saw herself as a God-given experiment in holy politics. A City set on a hill. America is certainly that. There is no hiding America on the world stage. But how does that light shine? What do other nations think of this country? What about today’s immigrants? Do they see the Kingdom of God? Or Oakland’s poor and homeless? Do they taste the gospel?

Which brings me to ourselves? Are we salty enough to give taste to the American stew? Do we taste just the same as the rest of the dish. How does our taste stand out?

I want to mention three ways that come to mind this morning.

First off, take our gathering here. There is something very odd about spending a Sunday morning the way we do? When you could be sleeping in … Or going out … Or reading the papers. But we come here. With nothing in common, but the following of a common criminal, from a foreign land, and a distant time. We come and we pray together and we eat a frugal meal together and we do it rain or shine, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer. Those who study culture say that mainstream America has lost its middle: we yearn for intimacy in personal relationships and the imagined golden days when everyone knew each other and we were all friends and people were decent—and everything that isn’t private and personal has become political. They say that Americans don’t know any way of being together that isn’t at one extreme personal and at the other political. Gone is the whole middle ground of the public square. But we have it here. We have a genuine community of the middle. We are not all friends and we are not a political rally. We are a community of memory, searching together for a way of following Jesus. That’s why Renew, which starts again soon, is so important to us. The Renew small groups aren’t about making new friends or sharing sudden intimacies, nor are they about theory and organisation and action. These groups help each of us fill the middle ground between private and political. They help us, this larger community, to be a real community. They are another way to let Jesus search us out and surprise us.

My own group really helped me last fall, as I struggled with a decision I felt God was asking me to make—whether to ask my boss in Britain to let me come back here after my ordination in England—they let me talk about the excitement of that and the fear of it, so that it didn’t all stay private — so I didn’t have to carry it all alone. They listened when I fell out with God over it, and felt God’s presence disappear, and just gave me support and still trusted me enough to tell me about they’re own search for God and it’s ups and downs. During those six weeks I think we all deepened our flavor.

(As an aside, the decision I eventually and peacefully made before Christmas was to go ahead and ask. Yesterday morning I heard from England that I have been given permission to stay. So as the terminator said “I’ll be back”)

My Renew group helped me personally. If you haven’t signed up yet I urge you too. If not for its pleasures then out of duty. The duty to lend flavor. It probably doesn’t come naturally to you, but then that’s the whole point. (Pitch over!)

Now, in a few moments we are going to do something else that doesn’t come naturally in this culture. We are going to anoint the sick. Outside this space, the sick are shunned — The ideal American is fit, healthy, and buff. To be sick isn’t just a misfortune it’s a moral failure — it’s an embarrassment that cuts you out of the way of life which society values —until you get better. On top of the ordinary pain and despair of illness, our society adds loneliness, and exclusion. AIDS is the extreme example but we do the same with handicap, cancer, even age.

Anointing the sick isn’t an magical form of medicine, we are not a cheap HMO, and though we do pray for healing what is really going on here is much deeper — it is a prophetic anointing. We do not understand sickness, we would rather do without it, but here in this church we turn that fear and exclusion upside down. We bring the sick people of our community from the margins, from the fringe, and we place them at the centre. You, if you are ill or wounded in any way, are the broken heart of this community. If we have any saltiness left it is because of you. There is an invitation here, a vocation. Somewhere down the line sickness awaits us all, as does death. The joy of life only has any taste because it is seasoned with sorrow. But sorrow doesn’t exclude anyone from this community. We follow a wounded saviour and we do what the world at large can’t do, we carry our paradoxical sufferings together, and we carry them proudly. We are not ashamed of being human, we are not ashamed of being sick, we are not ashamed of each other. We are the salt of the earth — sick and all.

Something is coming. Two voices proclaim the same thing. Hear the voice of a desert herald: Prepare the way, something is coming. Hear the voice of an ancient prophet: A dead stump is sprouting, something is coming.

Two voices, as unlike as day and night, are agreed. Something is coming.

Isaiah speaks softly and soothes his people: things are going to change. Something is coming.

The Baptist rages with threats against his people: you’d better change. Something is coming.

Do you hear the voice? Can you feel the pressure of something coming, something big, something awesome? Can you remember the waiting in your guts after a tremor in the night— is this the big one? Can you remember the hot dry wind that blows before a fire — is somewhere a spark being kindled? Something is coming.

Fools that we are, in Advent we celebrate that feeling, celebrate that something is coming.

Something is coming that will end the way we live and begin a whole new age in our planet’s story.

John the Baptist sees the ending of the old with an awful clarity: the axe is already laid at the rotten roots of the tree.

Isaiah the prophet dreams the birth of the new with lyrics running wild: even now the dead stump is putting out shoots, bursting into bud, springing to life.

Either way, something is coming. Hope for it or hide in dread, it’s on its way. And it will make a change indeed! Greater than the quaking earth, wilder than the fires of fall, something is coming that will overturn all our futures, burn away all our routines.

John has a terrifying vision of the harvest bonfire: the hypocrites, the settled, those with fruitless lives — all are ready for the fire, to be burned away like chaff to leave the grain sheer and clear.

In contrast, gentle Isaiah’s words are consoling: there is going to be justice for the poor, there is going to be help for the afflicted, the is going to be no harm or ruin in all God’s earth.

But there will be change, change of a magnitude we can barely encompass!

• The lion will learn to be vegetarian.
• The snake will lose its venom.
• The predator will make peace with the prey
• Children will be safe on the streets.
• Nations will be one.
• And the earth will quiver no more.

Something is coming that will change the natural order right down to its roots. Not just a change of human hearts — which would be miracle enough — but a transformation of creation all the way down to the smallest sub-atomic particle.

Something is coming and when it does it will break into our world and change it so utterly we will only recognise it in our dreams, in our strangest middle-of-the-night stirrings when the heart refuses to rest.

Something is coming — that’s the promise and the threat of Advent — and, fools that we are, we celebrate.

We celebrate, but we don’t believe! This Christmas we will celebrate our hurried feasts without ever daring to hope or fear what might have been, what could have been, what we only hope in the dark of night may yet be.

Only in that moment after the midnight quake do our hearts open to the possibility. Something is coming.

Only when the fire-winds of fall keep us looking to horizon for smoke, only then do we feel it. Something is coming.

Something is coming — prepare its way.