2014 Ressurection Sunday sermon

Visions Beyond the Veil

I have entitled this morning’s talk, ‘visions beyond the veil’ after a book by a missionary H.A Baker to China in the early to mid 1900’s. In this book, Baker writes about the visions orphaned children in China had of heaven, angels and so on.

It resonates with the readings this morning concerning the resurrected Christ. Peter in Acts 2:32 declares, concerning the resurrected Christ, that they, the disciples, are ‘witnesses to this fact’. The gospels give us at least 2 accounts where they encounter the risen Christ; one in the upper room and one where Christ reinstates Peter.

What impact would experiencing the risen Christ have on you? Is it something you desire or pray for, ‘God reveal yourself to me’?

In visions beyond the veil, these orphans experience very real visions of another reality. In another book published in 1975 entitled, ‘tell it to the mafia’, ex-mobster Joe Donato tells his story of being encountered by the risen Christ and as a result coming to faith, he turns his back on his mobster lifestyle. Similarly published in 1978, Bilquis Sheikh in her book ‘I dare to call him father’ tells her story of a changed life after encountering the risen Christ. These and many other stories from around the world speak of encounters with the risen Christ.

But what if this is not our story? What if this will never be our story?

The reading from John 20:29 encouraging says, ‘blessed are those who have NOT seen and yet have believed’. So too the reading from 1 Peter 1:8 which says, ‘Though you have NOT seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy’.

I want to pause here and look at a few aspects in this verse. Firstly, even ‘Though you have NOT seen him, you love him’. What Greek use of the word love is being used here? Conditional love? If you do this for me, I will do that for you? Or put in the context of this verse, if you conquer death, I will believe in you? No, on the contrary it is agape love that is used her…unconditional love.

Secondly, in the second part of this verse, ‘even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy’. The ‘do not see him now’ is a present participle meaning continuous.  It indicates an understanding of continuing not to see i.e. things will never change and you will never see.

And so thirdly, note the use of the word ‘now’ in this passage, ‘Though you have NOT seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him’. The opening verses help us understand the reason for the use of this word ‘now’. They are struggling, they are facing persecution and in the midst of such suffering the hope so explicitly linked to the resurrection seems dislocated and untenable. In many ways we could re-name the title of this talk, ‘living in the absence of the resurrection’.

Perhaps a story could illustrate this challenge better. I read from ‘How (not) to speak of God’ by Pete Rollins (p80-81)….

Augustine asked, ‘what do I believe when I believe in my God’? I don’t discredit the stories of people encountering the risen Christ, as reading them encourages our faith but for most of us this simply won’t be our experience. We are the ‘not seeing’ in 1 Peter and yet, nonetheless, without seeing we still believe, we still hope with joy. Why? How?

May I suggest one possibility? Paul in his letter to the church in Corinth says, ‘and these three things remain, faith, hope and love and the greatest of these is love’. I’d like to suggest a link or connection in these which have an impact on our understanding and experience of the resurrection, of hope. The writer of Hebrews says, ‘faith is being sure of what we hope for, certain of what we do not see’. Note the connection between faith and hope and the connection to our readings of ‘not seeing’. In Paul’s letter to the church in Rome he says, ‘and hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our heart through the Holy Spirit’. Again note the connection between hope and love and in the days to come towards Pentecost the link to the Holy Spirit. I suggest the reality of the resurrection, of hope is experienced for the man on the street through the experience of God’s unconditional love.

The ‘Blessed’ (all that is good) as used in the passage from John is an aorist participle in Greek which is used to express any time; past, present and future. In other words believing without seeing may mean we experience the blessing of God immediately, or perhaps later or perhaps now and until later. The point is, it is not conditional…if you this, you will that. This relates back to the story I read.

But what about others? How do they experience hope, particularly those of no faith using my understanding of the connection between faith-hope-and-love? Well you will remember the time Jesus said, ‘many will come to me on that day and say lord, lord did we not this and that in your name and…yet he will cast them away for he did not know them…while to others he will say come into my kingdom for when I was thirty you gave me something to drink, when I was ill you visited me and so on. You see if hope means anything in a real world, it needs to be really true in the midst of suffering as the passage of 1 Peter is describing. And it is you and I as we serve the poor, thirsty and sick, that represent hope, that represent the resurrected Christ for as we do these to the least of them, we do it unto Christ. I suggest Christ is not only encountered in visions beyond the veil, but also and possibly even more profoundly in our and others sufferings, in the realities of a torn veil, in the absence of seeing.

May you know the hope of Christ even though you do not see. May you be the hope of Christ, even though others do not see.

Another 2014 Pre-pentecost sermon

Faith beyond Religion.

 

The readings this morning are very interesting. As we progress towards Pentecost Sunday in a few weeks’ time, the reading from Acts is already chronologically after Pentecost and yet the gospel reading is before Pentecost and is pointing us towards it. The readings feel slightly out of sync. But that conflict, that dissonance is actually what has inspired my title this morning, namely, faith beyond religion.   

 

Acts tells us the story of the stoning of Stephen. We read it nowadays with a sense of disassociation, a cool objectivity. In fact we often joke about it saying it is not a story about being stoned on drugs. But it was cruel and savage way to be killed. It was a cruel and savage way to kill. Just recently I saw a similar real life example of just such savage and cruel behaviour. It was a video taken in my birth country of South Africa of a women being stamped and beaten upon by a mob of people while large crowds stood by watching. Without going into the graphic and really disturbing details, I was shocked at how humans can treat one another without a sense of guilt or remorse; how people who kick someone helpless on the ground do this without hesitation or restraint. Some even lunged themselves into the air so as to land upon this lady with both feet and their full body weight. This blood covered women lay helpless on the ground. I stopped watching when a man approached her with an axe and proceeded to use the back of the axe on her head.

 

Human beings in this story in Acts, with malicious intent, picked up stones with the aim to cause another human being grievous harm. As we read, this harm caused the death of that human whom we know to be Stephen. He was brutally killed for his religious convictions. In the video I watched recently, which I sent to Amnesty International, it seems these actions of the mob were politically motivated.

 

Verse 58 here in chapter 7 of Acts says, ‘the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul’. This act of brutal violence was religiously motivated. Surely that is a contradiction? Surely here too there is conflict and dissonance? Surely such violence is not the true intent of religion? Surely any such violence towards humans by humans, religiously or politically motivated is unjustified?

 

If you have been watching the news recently, you will know of the actions of a religious fundamental group that have kidnapped girls in the north of Nigeria and liberated them because they have converted in fear to Islam. Surely this is not what religion is? Surely Christianity as a religion is not like this? Surely us here on a Sunday expressing our religion are not like that? Surely there is no dissonance, no conflict in our religion?

 

Pete Rollins in his book ‘Insurrection’ says, “the person who affirms God through fear of persecution makes the claim in order to convince another, while people who affirm God through fear of hell or meaningless seek to convince themselves” (p10). What I suggest is being implied here is the difference between religion and faith. Saul was driven and motivated by his religion and was zealous and driven for that cause but he did things that could not be justified. Our passage from John this morning especially verse 6 has been used in the same way in different ways throughout history and still today within our religion. This is where I suggest religion and faith differ.

 

Paul Tillich the theologian said that the kingdom Jesus came to proclaim was transreligious, thereby no justifying any religion credence over another or insolence towards that which is different. Karen Armstrong in her chapter about a second axial period says, “every theological statement should be paradoxical, to remind us that when we are speaking about God we are at the end of what thoughts and words can do and that the divine cannot easily be contained within a human system of thought” (p27). Faith therefore as Geering explains is that which “refers to the personal attitude of trust and hope which we humans manifest as we interpret the world in which we live and respond” (p33). It is a position which surrenders control especially control over others and replaces it instead with wasteful generous love. It is a position which places action as a result of the faith it holds to respond to the world in love and in many cases it is love that directs our actions against injustice.

 In contrast, religion often is about control.

 

Allow me to illustrate this point about control through another story form the Bible. In Genesis 32 we have the story about Jacob wrestling with God. In ancient society to name something was to have control over that thing. Note God asks Jacob his name and Jacob provides it. As a result, his name is changed by God from Jacob to that of Israel. Jacobs tries to control God by asking him his name but God does not concede. There are 2 significant aspects here in this story. One is that God likes us to wrestle and he blesses that action. Religion often likes to have all the ‘t’s crossed and all the ‘i’s dotted and does all in its power to exert this constant unchanging position. Faith on the other hand is about mystery as defined by Hebrews 11 ‘sure of what we HOPE for’. The second aspect is that of control by naming things. A similar situation can be found in the story where Moses is being sent to Egypt and he really does not want to go and so Moses asks, ‘who shall I say sent me?’ In other words, what is your name? Interestingly God replies ‘I am that I am’ has sent you.

 

Here in John we have the very same reference in verse 6 ‘I am way. truth and life’ and it is part of a long list of ‘I am’s’ such as ‘I am the bread of life’(6:35), ‘the light of the world’ (8:32), ‘the living water’ (7:37) etc. found here in the gospel of John. Bishop Spong says that ‘Johns gospel is so profound so poetic, so skilfully crafted, so dependent on images and concepts out of the Jewish past that it is worthy of the study of a lifetime’ (p189).

 

Faith is so much more than doctrines, rules, control, naming. Faith is about hope and love just as Paul writes in the letter to the church in Corinth chapter 13 saying, ‘and these 3 things remain, faith, hope and love but the greatest of these is love’.

 

I’d like to think that as Stephen lay there on the ground, helpless and innocent, being unjustifiably and brutally killed in the name of religion, his pronouncement of forgiveness to his enemies, the ultimate expression of agape love was a seed of conviction placed within the heart of young Saul.

 

Stephen exemplifies faith, love and hope. As Rollins writes, “This is what love does. It does not make itself visible but, like light, makes others visible to us. In a very precise sense, then, love’s presence cannot be described as existing, but rather is that which calls others into existence; for to exist literally means to stand forth from the background, to be brought forth’.

 

And finally, Bernard Brandon Scott in his chapter ‘from parables to ethics’, says “hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world….and its not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation…it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons…it is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out” (p132).

 

May we truly be Easter people where we do not believe for what value it solely gives us but may we be truly faith people, inspired by our faith, hope and love that the world is transformed by our faith living in the way, that it matters to the world what we believe, that our faith catapults us into loving action against any form of injustice for we seek to live life, celebrate life and life in all its fullness. And may God empower us through the coming of the Holy Spirit in this way.

The ultimate religious sacrifice is to give up God

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think forward

What we believe emanates from who we are. And who we are is not about dogma, or even about moral behavior, but about dying to ourselves. This is part of the conversation between ThinkFwd host, Spencer Burke, and Pete Rollins, author of How Not to Speak of God and The Orthodox Heretic. They explore the ideas of truth and God, of resurrection and insurrection.Truth, says Rollins, is not one extreme or the other; its not the middle of the extremes. Truth is at both extremes. While traditional Christians say, God is present. God exists, and Christianity is true; atheists say God isnt there and Christianity isnt true. These two extremes push Rollins to explore a 3rd position and he likens it to the story of Jesus on the cross, when He felt forsaken by God-- God not present--and yet God was completely present. And so the 3rd position dwells in the very place in between. Rollins says Christians are called to dwell not on one side of the other, but in the very split that Christ opens up: between old and new; between Judaism and Christianity.
- do you live in the tension that is the split?
- how can we live more in balance?
- how can we bring movement towards balance in our faith expressions?