Jeremiah 31:27-34, 2 Timothy 3:14 - 4:5, Luke 18:1-8
In our modern Western world
we have drunk deeply from the well of the Enlightenment and our capacity to
understand things, to build things, to solve problems, to heal one another has
lead us to worship at the idol of ourselves.
We have a deep and abiding sense that we are in control; that we can do
whatever we set our minds to. This
illusion of control is particularly so in Australia which has perpetrated this
myth through its isolation from much of the rest of the world because we are an
island continent, and because our great wealth has provided most of us with
opportunities that the majority of the world’s people simply do not have access
to.
Whilst having goals and
visions may not be a bad thing, in and of themselves, we have a predilection to
promote self-belief, time management and goal setting as the rituals and
liturgies for our individualistic culture.
As a culture we have moved from the revelation of God “I am who I am,”
to the Cartesian dictum “I think therefore I am,” to the solitary life of “I
am”, “I”, “me”. As we have moved in this
direction we have bought into the lie that we are in control. At the same time as this we have become
buffered, shielded, and protected from the divine. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor
traces this journey of demythologising of the self in his tome “A Secular
Age”. We have traversed the way from the
porous receptive self to the buffered self.
In the world of management
and leadership we have reduced our teaching to infographics and memes, like the
poster I have made for you today. It
reads how to be in control of your life: manage your time, believe in yourself
(deliberately the central idea), and set goals and plan to achieve them. We hear the catch phrases and though they may
sound logical and good we have little understanding of the history of how they
came to be. All that matters for many of
us in the culture is here and now, and my happiness.
Yet the reality is that we
are not happy. Darrin McMahon in his
book “The Pursuit of Happiness”, which is an echo of a line in the American
Declaration of Independence, begins with these fate filled words, “Happiness is
what happens to us, and over that we have no control.” In a culture obsessed with individuals carving
out their own life the idea of not being in control is anathema. And this infiltrates our faith and theology
in so many ways. The idea that God is in
control, that God is in charge, that God is powerful, that God is sovereign,
alongside the idea that we are contingent, is not simply uncomfortable for us
it is downright offensive. Trends in
Christian liturgy and practice often wrest the sovereign control away from God
in favour of us being in control of our spiritual experience. Worship so often is about our self-expression
or about answering “what’s in it for me?” as if it is another product to
consume.
Yet, when we listen, when we
deeply listen for the word of God speaking through the scriptures we hear that
even our faith comes to us as a gift.
Consider for a moment the language of the prophet Jeremiah that we hear
this day.
“The days are surely coming,
says the Lord, when I will sow.” God sows!
“Just as I have watched over
them.” God watches!
“I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” God promises!
“I took them by the hand to
bring them out of the land of Egypt!” God leads!
“I will put my law within
them.” God implants!
“I will write it on their
hearts” God writes!
“I will be their God, and
they shall be my people.” God is!
“I will forgive their
iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” God forgives! And, God forgets!
It is God who acts. God who acts to create this world. God who acts to give us life! God who reveals “I am who I am” to us! God who draws us into relationship and into
community! God who forgives! God who
teaches! God who saves! God how loves!
Our modern instinct rails
against this possibility of God’s gracious, loving and sovereign control.
Like the prophet, the
Psalmist understood where his knowledge of God and life came from. He understood where he was to draw his hope
from, he declares to God: “you have taught me.”
In this modern world, in this
era obsessed with the individual’s right to self-determination, in this time
when we have become buffered to the notion of the divine, to enter into the
truth and life of God which is already within us involves an act of
surrender. We must give up the myth that
we can control life, that we can control the world, which we can even control
God and we are called to surrender to God’s presence.
The remedy to our malady
offered in today’s readings is twofold:
To meditate on the law of
God; and,
To pray, to pray, to pray
with persistence, and to pray!
When Paul writes to Timothy
encouraging him to accept the worth of the scriptures Paul is affirming the
writings that we know as the Old Testament.
It is unclear, but he may even have been affirming the books of the
Bible that we Protestants removed. The
so called deuterocanonical books found in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. As Christians we also understand the
recognised books of the New Testament as part of this corpus of writings.
Paul writes: All scripture is
inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for
training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be
proficient, equipped for every good work.
Reading these ancient and
unusual texts remains a doorway into the divine relationship, and so also into
the revelation of God. Lest we make the
Bible itself an idol we should understand that the words of the Bible
themselves are not God. They are a
witness to God. The Basis of Union of
the Uniting Church reminds us the scriptures are the unique, prophet and apostolic
witness in which we hear the word of God and through which our faith and
obedience are nourished and regulated.
On Thursday morning this week
I was discussing the place of the Bible within our Christian faith with a young
adult and the notion of the primacy of the Scriptures was raised. This is a peculiarly Protestant notion that
comes to us as a handed down doctrine from the Reformation when the Reformers
were seeking a justification for their actions outside the Magisterium, which
is the collection of accepted teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. One of the catch cries of the Reformation was
sola scriptura, by scripture alone.
To blindly make the
Scriptures prime or first without an understanding of this history and context
may cause greater harm than good. I have
often heard the words of scripture used like a blunt weapon flailing at the
world. Or we can be left with our heads
buried in the sand like Ostriches, ignoring that the Spirit of God is at work
in all things, and using the scriptures as a set of historical and scientific
facts rather than an invitation to enter into the deeper task of listening for
the eternal speaking through the scriptures.
The Reformers also cried out
alongside by Scripture alone, sola fide, sola gratia, sola Christi, sola Deo
Gloria. By faith alone, by grace alone,
by Christ alone and to the glory of God alone.
Our approach to the
scriptures is not for us to wrestle them into submission as if we can tame them,
using the tools of this Secular age, but our approach should be to enter into
them gently and reverentially and with the Psalmist to mediate on them, ruminating
and listening for God speaking to us through them.
When I was in the midst of
doing my training for ministry I can remember my spiritual director constantly
challenging me to stop reading the scriptures for understanding and to start
reading them to encounter God. To
mediate on them is to pray them.
Which leads me to the second
remedy for our buffered lives which is to pray constantly. Jesus tells a strange story about a
persistent widow and an unjust judge. A
cursory reading of the tale might indicate we are to pester God until God gives
in. But the layers of separation between
the power of the judge and the woman could be easily glossed over. One of the inferences in the story is about
exactly the issue that was raised at the beginning. It is God who holds the capacity to change
our human realities.
Last weekend most of you will
be aware that I attended a retreat. The
whole focus of the retreat was around teaching about the discipline of centring
prayer. It is an approach to prayer
which is focussed on simply being present to Christ who already prayers within
us. It involves silence and stillness
and listening. Among the group who
gathered were Christians with more experience and life in the faith than me and
together we learnt what was for many of us a new discipline of prayer.
As an outcome from this
weekend a group of us who met, some as strangers, are coming together this
evening to encourage one another in our persistence in prayer and in our
seeking for God.
Persistence in prayer is not
just about badgering God expecting immediate results but is about entering into
the relationship we have with God that has already been offered to us as a
gift.
Through these last few months
I have encouraged you as a congregation to enter more deeply into your own
prayer life and I continue to do the same.
To spend more time with God, whether the expected results come or not.
Just like happiness,
spiritual experience and the revelation of God, are not products we can
control. In a utilitarian culture where
vision, goals, and strategies dominate our inability to dictate when God will
do what we want God to do is more than a little inconvenient.
The comfort and encouragement
of Jeremiah, the Psalmist, Paul as he writes to Timothy, and in Jesus’ own words
it to persist in our seeking after God.
To read the scriptures and to pray and most of all to trust. To trust that even when we do not understand
or hear or experience or encounter God that God is and that God acts.
God is and God acts whether
we know it or not. God is and God acts
whether we experience it or not. And what God does is not simply about you or I
as individuals, though it might have incredibly intimate and personal
implications, but is about the reconciliation of all things in Christ.
God who made all things, who
sustains all things, who loves, who forgives, who invites is here.
So let us in silence give
thanks for God’s presence and meditate on what he might be speaking to us this
day.
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