May 25, 2014

Clay Nelson

Easter 6     John 14:15-21

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As I won’t be back up here for a while, today feels significant to me. I do fear you might expect that considering that I should say something particularly wise or insightful or inspiring or memorable. But don’t get your hopes up.

In an effort to give it a go, I Googled “last words of famous people” for some clues. 

Julius Caesar was good at casting guilt, “Et tu, Brute?” Churchill, a master of using the English language to inspire, yawned, “I’m bored with it all.” Film-producer Louis B. Mayer must have just watched a lot of his old B-movies.  His final credits were, “Nothing matters. Nothing matters.” Elizabeth the First wasn’t ready to go, “All my possessions for a moment of time.” Oscar Wilde wins the gong for the funniest exit line, “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” Charles Foster Kane was more mysterious. “Rosebud,” he whispered. Jesus, depending on the Gospel, had several closing lines “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” or “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” or “It is finished.” But Pancho Villa was most helpful, by setting my bar low, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

It isn’t easy to sum up a long journey, be it a lifetime or the last nine years at St Matthew’s, in a few words.  In today’s Gospel John gives Jesus four chapters to do it with his disciples. We call them his Farewell Discourses. We know Jesus said none of it.  There are none of his hallmark pithy sayings and parables in John.

These discourses are John’s effort to summarise what he sees following in the Way of Jesus is all about.  It is a new vision of Christianity when it is clear the old expectations that Jesus would return shortly in glory to redeem them are not in the cards.  While Jesus is speaking to his disciples, in truth John is speaking to his community 65 to 70 years after the crucifixion.  They are struggling with the reality of persecution.  They are experiencing the pain of separation, not only from Jesus by that point in history, but perhaps more poignantly from the synagogue from which they have so recently been excommunicated.

This community could not begin to envision what the church would become.  That it would some day build cathedrals and basilicas.  Have dominance over the empire.  Become the cultural norm in large parts of the world. They were living in a time where past hopes of their faith had not been realised and were wondering how to understand their faith in light of the new reality that Jesus wasn’t coming back soon or later.

John wants the community to hear a word from Jesus about a new understanding of a god who seeks transformation not redemption.  His message is God is part of you and you are a part of God.  This mystical and mutual indwelling is creating a new understanding of what it means to be human.  Mutual indwelling is not to be understood as an authority-subject relationship, a master-slave relationship or even a saviour-sinner relationship.  It is rather a startling, new way by which we are to understand the divine and our selves.  John abandons God from above the sky.  That God has now entered life. We know because we met the divine in Jesus.

We who have met Jesus now understand the divine resides in us as well.  John has Jesus beseech us not to cling to him as the only source of the divine, but to look inwards.  We are no less divine than he is. Claim our oneness with God and let that guide us.

In today’s reading, which the church is using to foretell the coming of the Holy Spirit to establish the church on Pentecost, was not about that at all.  It was a statement of how we live henceforth knowing we are in God and God is in us.  John is telling his community to rise to a new level of responsibility, a new maturity.  The man Jesus isn’t going to rescue you.  All of you are lives in whom and through whom the divine can live and work.  Jesus simply showed you it could be done.  Claim and engage that divine within you and new doors will open leading you into all truth.  You are the bread of life, you are the living water, you are the good shepherd and you are the source of resurrection.  Grasp the spirit and share it.  Be who you are and in the process free others to be who they are.

In reflection on these last words I wondered what John might have Jesus need to tell us today?  Would it be different?  Yes, it is nearly 2000 years later and a lot of dogma has flowed under the ecclesiastical bridge since then.  Jesus has subtly been transmogrified from being a doorway to understanding our own divinity to being the gateway to sharing the godhead with him.  We have been convinced that control of who gets through that gate is in the hands of the church.  This Christ has become dominant and we must be submissive.  We are no longer the body of Christ; the institution we call Church with all its trappings of power is.  We must submit to its rules and authorities to be part of something John’s Jesus tells us we already are.  Of course, some don’t even have the option to submit to be acceptable, if the institution deems them beyond the pale, as we were reminded last week with the General Synod’s failure to fully accept the LGBTI community.

The world has changed a wee bit since John’s Jesus’ last words, and so has our knowledge of it.  While in some ways it seems more civilised and in many places more democratic and freer, powers and principalities still oppress us.  The oppressors are multi-national corporations who are now able to sue or control by economic leverage sovereign states for their profit.  They are the 1% who rig the game so they can control 10% of this country’s wealth while the bottom 50% control only 5% of it. They are white males who deprive women of the rights to control their bodies or earn an equal wage for the same work.  They are those who demonise unions and make it more difficult for them to organise for fair and just wages.  They are those who blame the poor for their plight while depriving them of the means to change it.  They are those who think it is acceptable that 275,000 Kiwi kids live in poverty while they send theirs to the best schools. They are those who discourage us to vote while they buy our representatives.  But most importantly, they are those who think it is their God-given right to dominate and they are those of us who think it is acceptable to submit to them.

This week I have been following the Sir Douglas Robb lectures at Auckland University. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson have spoken about what their research tells us about the effects of income inequality on all aspects of society. Not surprising, it is clear that the more inequality that exists in a society the greater its health and social problems are.  But what struck me most is the spiritual consequence of inequality.

Dr Pickett pointed out that the naïve view of income equality says it “only matters if it creates poverty or if income differences seem unfair.”  But she argues that a more accurate view “is that inequality brings out features of our evolved psychology to do with dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority, which affect how we treat each other.  Inequality increases status competition and status insecurity.  It increases anxiety about self-worth and intensifies worries about how we are seen and judged – whether as attractive or unattractive, interesting or boring, etc.”  It creates anxieties that keep us from being still and knowing that we are God and so is our neighbour.

So no, I don’t think John has to change his message.  We just need to claim and own our oneness with the god within and frankly we’d better do so pretty soon. If not, as with climate change, we may reach the point when it is too late to reverse its devastating effects.  Whenever we submit to oppressive powers or institutions out of fear or hope of temporal gain we betray our divine nature, each other and our planet.  Jesus showed us a different way: Strive not to dominate or submit but to be fully who we are.  It is the only way.  It leads to loving wastefully and living abundantly and perhaps to a more equal society. And that is my last word. I hope I have said something.