Rampant Lions: Confusing Gods!

A sermon on Psalm 121 preached at Cromwell College UQ

As you came into the Chapel this morning, if you looked back, you may have seen the Cromwell College logo on the end of the dining hall.  I can remember on more than one occasion looking up to that symbol during my years as a resident here at Cromwell.

Now as I prepared for today’s service the image of the Rampant Lion got me thinking about Oliver Cromwell, the so called Lord Protector.  The person the College is named after.  It was this that led me to the sermon theme, “Rampant Lions: Confusing Gods”. 

But a sermon is not a history lesson but as I said before is an opportunity to reflect on God speaking to us through the words of scripture.  So, as I was looking at the readings set down for the day, I kept coming back to Psalm 121 and its very first line:

I lift up my eyes to the hills— from where will my help come?

This line has some powerful ancient imagery associated with it.

This Psalm is one of a group of the Psalms known as the Psalms of Ascent.  What this means is that, this Psalm is one of a group of Psalms that were sung or recited, as the Jewish people travelled to Jerusalem for the festivals at the temple: maybe, Yom Kippur or Pentecost.  They were sung to prepare people’s hearts and minds for the religious event in Jerusalem.

The reason this first line of the Psalm comes as a question is not surprisingly because that is exactly what it is: from where will my help come?

Anyone who has travelled through southern Europe and the Middle East may have noticed what is on many hills in those regions.

Temples!  There are temples to the Greco-Roman Gods to Mars and to Venus, to Aphrodite, to Zeus and to Apollo and shrines to other minor deities.  You can imagine the dusty travellers literally looking to the hills, seeing the plethora of belief systems of gods on offer:  I lift my eyes to the hills – and there is Apollo and there is Zeus! ‘From where will my help come?’ they ask.  In response to the alternatives they are reminded of their faith and their history.  Will my help come from any of these no, “My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

This statement is loaded in its spiritual and theological meaning. The Hebrew people told a different story about creation to other ancient cultures.  They wrote down their story during the time of the Babylonian captivity, over 600 years before Christ.  It is a story that stands in contrast to other ancient world views about a single unoriginated God who made everything.  It seems logical somewhere back there is one single coherent cause of all things, an ultimate truth: God.

This is the God in whom the pilgrims put their faith and it is the same God we come to worship on this day.  It is also the same God made more fully know and present in the world by Jesus.

Yet, despite this allegiance to the creator of all things how we think about that God and how we might follow that God are certainly questions which are up in the air.  As human beings there is always a limit to our comprehension of god and the world we live in, so it is that more often than not our portrayal of God is unhelpful.

To given an example of this let me return to Oliver Cromwell and his symbol, the rampant lion.  What kind of God is found in the legacy of Cromwell?

Cromwell was a puritan and a devout man: he opposed the celebration of Christmas; he shut down theatres; he was deeply concerned about drinking; he prayed fervently; and, he certainly had a sense he had been called by God to what he was doing.

Yet the rampant lion reveals something of his understanding of God, the creator of all things, as a God who supported violence and war.  Cromwell was involved in the English Civil of the mid 1600s, where he rose through the ranks to become a leader.  He was involved in decision to execute the King, Charles I and he led campaigns in Ireland and Scotland.

The negative impact of his life is still felt today.  Just the other night I was down at the school chatting about my weekend with a couple of parents who just happen to Irish, so I mentioned Oliver Cromwell.  Immediately, the both declared “To Hell or to Connaught” and went on to explain how hated Cromwell was in Ireland and how he is still held responsible for much the angst and anger of the Irish against the English.  Almost, 400 years later this negative legacy holds.

Just to fill in a tiny glimpse of his Irish campaign Cromwell led the English army into Ireland to subdue the Irish, especially the Catholics.  It is reported at the siege of Drogheda and of Wexford his army committed massacres killing somewhere around 6000 people.  Among those killed at Wexford were many women and children.

After Drogehda Cromwell famously said, “I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.”

When we look to the hills, as the Psalmist invites us to, and see the alternatives and when we are presented with Christian history in which we encounter such images of people that followed God like Cromwell what do we do?

Is this the God of whom the pilgrims sang? A God that condones violence and bloodshed and even encourages it?  A God who could very well be represented by a rampant lion?  After all Psalm 137 finishes with these disturbing words:

“O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

Happy shall they be who pay you back

what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones

and dash them against the rock!”

If this is the God we believe in, the God that Cromwell believed justified the violence of his troop’s actions, then I wonder what hope there is for the church.  And I am little surprised when most of my contemporaries look to the hills and see other options as far more palatable.  Not so much other Gods but other choices about the worldview they well adopt.

It is little wonder that the inheritors of the work of thinkers like d’Holbeck and Marx and Nietzsche people like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, and A C Grayling have so great an appeal. 

The conundrum that I am speaking of, which we are participants in, might be more simply expressed in the fact that our congregation has too many vacant seats on a Sunday and that chapels like this one are rarely used for worship.  Churches are closing in Australia and only around 6-7% of Australians actively engage their faith by involvement in regular worship.

Can we here still look to the hills and choose to put our trust in the Lord who made heaven and earth?  I think the answer is yes and I believe the door has been left open even by the new atheists to look to the creator of heaven and earth.

A few years back atheists in England took out advertising on buses in England.  On the bus are the words, “There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”  ironically, by saying ‘probably’ ‘ they leave the room for the possibility that there might still be a God.

The answer is yes but I also believe it is an answer which comes with humility.  We must admit that there are times we do not know and cannot express the fullness of our creator and, more than that, that through our history misinterpreting this God has led to much heartache and pain.  we need to listen carefully to the story of this God and shaping our understanding of the creator of all things is the story of Jesus.  The appearance of Jesus in our human history and in our lives is undoubtedly a touchstone for us.

In the few verses I read from the New Testament we heard what for many is a well know phrase in the words of John 3:16.  It is a phrase grounded in this God’s love by sending Jesus into the world and we are told that this occurs because: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The creator’s intention, the one to whom we look, is a God not interested in condemnation, and might I dare to suggest punishment and violence against others, but in salvation.  This God is about all people living in the fullness of life and in the gift of community within the creation.  In Jesus there is a vision and an encounter with the maker of all things which gives us hope because we believe, ‘in him all things in heaven and on earth and have been reconciled’.  This is a message of hope for everyone.

The other day I was talking with the young woman who was making my coffee at Briki.  Many of the congregation know of my regular visits across the road for my caffeine hit!  She asked about the Commencement Service for the University that we just had and she wondered whether people her age were interested in religion.

My answer was to ask her did she think her friends were interested in questions like; where does the world come from, or how should people behave, or what is the meaning and purpose life.  Of course she answered yes for herself and she admitted other young people think about these questions too.  These are spiritual questions and I shared that for me the church is a place in which we explore these very questions.

She was right to point out the many different places people can explore these questions.  When people look to the hills there are many options but for me logically there can only be one creator of all things.  And, for me, the church and its faith are a place in which the exploration of who that creator is takes places.  More than that, it is the place in which we encounter the story of that creator walking among us in the man Jesus from Nazareth.

It is this story that shapes our hope and helps us as we explore the ambiguous images of God handed down to us by Christians through the centuries.  Oliver Cromwell believed in God and believed he was called by God to do what he did.  His faith was deep but looking back I am deeply troubled by the way he understood that God.  And maybe this is a reminder all of us only see a glimpse of the truth.

But as I come to the end of this sermon with the confused images of God we have encountered I am also reminded of a scene from the “Life of Brian” where the People’s Front of Judea are meeting and asking what have the Romans ever given us: clean water, sanitation, roads, education, peace...

Despite the ambiguities of Christian history when we ask what the church has ever done for us, a bit like the skit, we might begin to expand our vision and see how the story of God has been active: a sense of community, universities, scientific methodologies, schools, hospitals, social welfare, spirituality, a framework for our lives and the list goes on.

I believe this is good news for any person any person young or old and worthy of sharing in their search for meaning.  Yes, there are many choices but lurking behind them all is a single story, a single truth. It is a truth revealed in ancient words:

I lift up my eyes to the hills— from where will my help come?

My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

And sent his son among us not to condemn the world,

But in order that the world might be saved through him.

The world does not know us

By Peter Lockhart

“The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” (1 John 3:1)
On the Monday night following Easter I made a conscious decision to avoid watching Q & A which had invited Richard Dawkins and Cardinal Pell to be panel members. Both are dogmaticians and crusaders for their chosen beliefs, yet neither has much to say which appeals to my thinking or understanding about life, the universe and everything. I anticipated the show would produce the same tired diatribe between atheism and fundamentalism and contribute little to furthering humanity in our relationship with God or each other in any way.

Interestingly the ripples of the debate echoed through the Global Atheism conference held in Melbourne last week into this week’s episode of Q & A. A young woman from the audience asked the question, “Given that 76% of the participants from last week’s qanda-vote agreed that religious belief does not make the world a better place, does the panel believe that religion's blatant discrimination against members of the Australian community has finally become an unwelcome part of Australia's politics, policy & society?”

It would have been interesting to have the atheist author of “Religion for Atheists”, Alain de Botton, answer this question, but even if he or anyone else can prove that religion is good for the world it misses the point and reduces faith and belief to a function of our humanity.

Almost 2000 years ago the infant church was receiving a far more hostile response to its presence in the world. As the earliest witnesses sought to theologise the problem John wrote these insightful words, “The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.”

It should be of little surprise to us 2000 years on “the world does not know us”. No logical argument can prove God, mind you neither, at least in my humble opinion, can any logical argument disprove God. The great theologian Karl Barth writing in the mid 20th century saw it was not simply a pointless exercise to engage in debate with atheists about the existence of God it was actually counter-productive inasmuch as it gave validity to their position.

No amount of logical and reasoned debate will lead people into a realised and enlightened relationship with God. This comes to us as a gift.

Again John writes, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”

We are children of God by virtue of a gift from God. I will not deny there is exclusivity to this gift, to do otherwise would be naive and the struggle about why some respond to the message of grace whilst others reject it remains a mystery to me.

Having said this I do not necessarily think there is a direct correlation between belief and salvation as if it was our belief in God that saved us. No the action of salvation comes from its author not its recipients, “See what love the Father has given us.”

Through the centuries this has been a real conundrum for Christians of all different allegiances because when any of us respond to God we are more likely to think it is the way that we do this that counts. We have a tendency to define our response and our understanding as the only right one. The result is of course the shattering of the church into the scattered fragments we see strewn across the world today.

It is a shattering and dissension that makes us an easy target for atheists and presents us with another paradox. A paradox that is found in John’s letter, “You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.” Once I move beyond the personal confrontation with my own impiety and consider I am yet to meet someone who does not sin, even amongst my most pious of friends, I wonder what John was playing at. Is he simply setting the bar too high? Especially, that given elsewhere in his letter, he seems to be expecting the people within the church will sin.

Maybe Martin Luther’s explanation of Christians at one and the same time sinners and righteous may help us with this reality is that we can see sin and its consequences all around us. Yet despite this reality John’s words confront us with the paradox of what our lives maybe should be. There is no glib acceptance of sin as the way things should be.

Living within the conundrum and paradox of Christianity can make people of faith, no matter how pious and well meaning, appear as hypocrites and meddlers in the lives of others so what is it that we should be doing?

As sons and daughters of God, those who have been the gift of insight into God’s love for the world, we listen for Jesus and his instruction to the disciples.

In his appearance to this disciples following his death we are told by Luke Jesus, “opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.’”

The task of we who believe is to be witnesses to what God has already done in Jesus.

Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations.

The messages of repentance and forgiveness of sins are not easy ones to share in a world that is hostile to even the notion of God’s existence, yet this is our twofold task.

Let me tackle each of these notions separately.

First, the idea of repentance. Repentance is one of our well worn pieces of Christian jargon that we can easily forget is a completely foreign concept to those who are outside the church community.

What does it mean? Well literally turning back to God, turning our faces and our life’s directions towards the one who made us.

As I have said this is a strange concept for anyone but a person who already believes that there is a God. No amount of logic or reason can help us argue this to a person who does not believe or see any necessity for belief in God.

This means that engaging in debate about God’s existence is pointless our task rather is to simply find ways of declaring the faith and hope we have, trusting that God may speak through us.

Let me give one example. The act of saying sorry to the indigenous people of Australia, in particular to the stolen generation, can be used as a parable for what it means for us to be people who turn back to God. We believe in a God who seeks renewal and reconciliation for all people on earth, for the healing of lives and of communities.

In the act of saying sorry to indigenous people the Australian government owned the wrong done and created new possibilities for community and a future together. As imperfect as this may have been and continues to be to me this is what living towards God is about: creating pathways to new possibilities in community via reconciliation.

So if turning back to God is one part of the story what does it mean to proclaim forgiveness of sin?

Well the first thing it means is to deal with the issue that many people do not particularly like the concept of sin nor do we understand it that well.

The word sin is another of those inaccessible jargon terms that can evoke all sorts of responses.

On the ABC Religion and Ethics website one person commented something along the lines that telling children that they were sinners was tantamount to child abuse.

Depending on how the child is told this, when and by whom the person who put the comment up may in fact be right but this does not mean that sin is not a pervasive and difficult issue that all of us, including children, face as human beings.

For me sin is about being in discord with how we are meant to live in God’s creation with one another. Often we reduce sin to the things we do wrong but this glosses over the depth of the problem. The things we do wrong are more like the symptom of the bigger problem.

Declaring forgiveness of sin then to people who do not understand the concept invites into the world of parables again.

Consider the story we are constantly sold in our Western culture that if we have more money and own more things we will be happier. In his book, The Great Disruption, Paul Gilding quotes a number of studies that indicate that this is not actually the case and says that once people have reached a certain level in which their needs are met having more money and more stuff does not actually make us any happier. Moreover, this continued delusion that having more will make us happier has negative consequences on the environment and the culture.

This is what sin is. It is about living in ways which deceive us to what our lives are about. It is always easier to talk about sin as those gross things that other people commit, like theft and murder, than deal with the complexity of our lives which are almost constantly out of kilter with God.

The hope of Christianity that we are called to declare is that in Jesus we are forgiven for our inability to live constructively and faithfully as God’s people in this world and that this forgiveness is to be is “to be proclaimed in his name to all nations”.

None can put parameters on the extent of God’s grace, all we can do is proclaim this good news as we have been called to proclaim it and place our trust in God.

The answer as to why some will respond to the proclamation of God’s love and others do not, does not seem to have any logic to it in my mind, it remains a mystery. A mystery that should be no surprise to any of us because for 2000 years there have been people who simply do not know us nor know or understand anything about the God we proclaim.

Yet this does not mean we simply take a back seat and leave our faith on idle for we are witnesses to this God who loved the world so much that in Jesus he became one of us and who has opened our minds so that we too might share the good news and mystery of our faith, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

Minister’s Desk: Living with Hope
By Rev Peter

I am currently reading one of the best books I have read in a long time. It is called “Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus continuing in us” by the Czech theologian Tomas Halik. Halik presents an interesting thesis that the issue of atheism is an issue of impatience: impatience with a seemingly silent God. He asks:

“Are we to dread the age of secularism, atheism, and the ‘cooling of many people’s faith,’ or can we perceive it as a mysterious contribution of historical time to the Easter drama, to the silence of Holy Saturday, when on the surface nothing happens?”

Going on to describe his own spiritual journey Halik describes his experiences in Czechoslovakia:

I live through a period in my country’s fairly recent history when religion and the church were virtually eradicated from public life. State atheism, civitas terrena, the ‘secular city’ seemed to have triumphed. I first encountered a living church when I was at the threshold of adulthood. I sensed that ‘something was happening’ in some of the churches still, that they were not all simply museums, and that somewhere something still survived of the world of believers.

It was in this context that Halik encountered the God of Jesus and found faith and so from his experience he is able to speak with hope for us all who face difficult times as the church. He is not so concerned for the future of the church saying

Whenever I see a church in decline somewhere – in whatever sense – I do not despair. After all, I personally have lives through a great deal, and Christians in the course of the twentieth century saw and lived through much more than I have. I don’t shrink from the holes left in the church roof by some tempest or other. I recall that it was through those gaping holes that I first glimpsed God’s face.

These come as words of comfort to me as I consider some of the issues we face at Kairos. Issues that are far bigger than what is going on just our little congregation and the possibilities we may face a limited future in our current arrangement.

Halik’s book reminds us all we need to draw back and get a different perspective, to cease worrying about “our” church and find faith in God’s work in us, among us and around us. We still have so many resources available to us to engage in Christ’s ministry! We believe in God’s faithfulness that even from death new life can emerge! We can trust that whatever happens to our properties God’s plans are bigger than our personal desires. We can find hope that people can catch a glimpse of God even in ramshackle churches devoid of images and in people who still have something present in their memories or subconscious of the God who loves us and in of Jesus who call us by name.