November 29, 2015

John Bluck

First Sunday of Advent     Luke 21:25-36

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I would be hesitant to tell some people I know and love just what I was doing this morning. Going to church? Well, most of them have guessed I still do that. At St Matthews in the city? Well, for the hipsters and the people who know a thing or two, that’s not so bad if you have to go anywhere near a church.

But on Advent Sunday 2015 to be reading a story about the Son of Man, whoever that is, coming down on a cloud, well, I ask you.

And to try and take that story half way seriously, for a contemporary metro Auckland man or woman, is seriously delusional territory.

The verses that follow the cloud bit do offer a little more resonance with today’s life and times. On the eve of the climate change summit in Paris, a crisis meeting for which failure is not an option if you are among the hundreds of millions who live at sea level around the globe, the gospel words are highly topical: “Nations stand helpless, not knowing which way to turn from the roar and surge of the sea; people faint with terror at the thought of what is coming upon the world..”

Okay, okay. But the Son of Man coming down on a cloud? What are we going to do with that? And not on any old day, what’s more. But on this first Sunday of the church’s year, where we set ourselves up for Christmas and Easter and the whole long procession of living out the Christian story. This is one text, on one day that we somehow or other, have to take seriously.

I could crack a few more jokes about the things that come down on clouds and make some links to the new season of Star Wars and the latest James Bond, but that won’t help us engage with this inconvenient text whose time is out of joint.

And why do we have to deal with it on Advent Sunday? Well, it is the season when we’re asked, pre-Christmas, to do a stocktake on our lives. Not just a personal health check, physically and spiritually, but a 360 degree review of our life and the world around us.

And as we start to do that, we find ourselves in a curious bind. On the one hand, for not all but many of us, things are going along OK. As I sat at home in Pakiri, trying to prepare for this morning, the sun was shining and the roses outside were blooming in their early summer glory, and the green lawn shimmered, and there was no cloud in the sky.

New Zealand is in complacent mode. We’ve got the Rugby World Cup safely locked up for four years, even if the Aussies are venting their spleen by locking some of us up in off shore detention centres. We haven’t had a terrorist attack, yet. Business confidence is up, mortage rates are way down and chances are we’ll jog our way into Christmas inside a consumer spend up haze of happy hedonism.

God’s in heaven and there is a lot right with the world. Except it’s falling apart. That’s the other side of the bind we’re in.

There’s a new global crisis to report every night on the news. Isis terror, unmanageable numbers of refugees, climate change wreaking havoc, basket case economies in Europe and Africa. Add to that the corruption in athletics, football, the scandals of abuse in churches, schools, hospitals, police forces. Institutions that are meant to protect and heal and unite us too often alienate and divide.

And under all of that, the weight of suppressed memories of earlier tragedies that went unspoken and unresolved. I listened to a radio programme last week where survivors of Gallipoli spoke of their time at Chanuk Bair and Pyne’s Gap, living for weeks with dysentery, horrific infections, amidst rotting bodies, under sniper fire, following pointless orders. If their mothers had known what was happening to their sons, said the interviewer, the war would have ended immediately.

But they didn’t know and it didn’t end. It only got worse. Sebasatian Faulk in his new novel “Where my heart used to beat” says humankind did an about face in that war. The survivors who trailed home were different from the 19th century men who had first gone out. There was probably a day, a single hour, a moment, (in the midst of some unspeakable horror at Ypres or Verdun or the Somme when a soldier) was chest deep in gore and “in his heart had a new and terrible knowledge. That we were not what we had thought we were – superior to other living creatures. No. We were the lowest thing on earth… The legacy of those years is that they legitimised contempt for individual life”.

It‘s a contempt we’re still breeding, not only with Isis, but right here at home. In our own parliament two weeks ago, women members stood to try and tell their own stories of family abuse to challenge the casual accusations of rape being bandied about. We live on a thin crust of normality that covers a hidden landscape of history we have yet to own and talk about. Our take it easy, she’ll be right Kiwi culture has a low pain threshold.

The Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggeman calls this dysfunctional, desperate face of the world the “terrible ungluing”. The things that once held us together are falling apart, the inequality gap between rich and poor, hungry children and well fed, haves and have nots keeps growing and our ability to address that, engage with that, let alone solve that, keeps diminishing.

The Son of Man on a cloud may not be the best image to describe this, but the idea of “heaven and earth will pass away” still works for me. You have to reach up to the top shelf of all the language available to even begin to tap the enormity of what is happening to us and our world, right now. The measure of the crisis is almost beyond any words.

But we have to try.

Because the vocation of every Christian in a time of crisis is to say what’s happening, out loud, over and over. To speak the truth, even if it’s deemed unspeakable, unbearable; to uncover what is hidden, even if it’s inconvenient, disturbing. We have an Official Information Act to help us do that, but more powerful still, we have a gospel that says the truth will set us free and calls us to be alert to the kingdom, the reign of God that is breaking in all around us, even in the midst of the crisis.

The old images of a God that comes in from the outside, on clouds or whatever don’t work for us because our world view has changed so radically. Angels don’t peep through the stratosphere, in-between the airliners. The God we know in Jesus Christ is the one who works from inside not outside the crisis, as participant not observer, as the one who shares in the suffering because it is God’s suffering. What happened to Jesus happened to God. What happens to the victims of abuse and oppression and pollution happens to the God in whose image we are made and in whose life we find our life and being, each one of us, Christian, Muslim, Jew, whatever.

And for that reason, for God’s sake as much as for our sake, we have to talk about what’s happening, find words to name the injustice, to unmask the lies. When we demean and do violence to each other, when we treat people who are different from us as less than us, especially right now if they are Muslim believers, we demean and do violence to God.

The only way to deal with this “terrible ungluing” that haunts us through this Advent season is to keep looking for words and then actions that will name the terrors that face us and share in the pain and confusion and the point to the ways through the troubles ahead. There are words and thoughts and lessons that are waiting for us to find. But we’ve got to reach for them. Listen to these words of the poet and priest Malcolm Guite:

I cannot think unless I have been thought,

Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken.

I cannot teach except as I am taught,

Or break the bread except as I am broken.

In this Advent season, within this marvellous community of St Matthews in the heart of this chaotic city, our vocation as people becoming Christian, however slowly and uncertainly, is to give each other the strength and permission to think and speak about the things that the world around us would rather avoid, and to risk being broken ourselves by sharing the weight of the broken people around us.

That sounds like a heavy order. And it is. But in the midst of delivering it, Jesus tells another story, right after about the warnings of the son of man descending.

He tells us to look at the fig tree sprouting. As soon as it does, and it is right now, then you can see for yourselves that summer is near. The signs of trouble also hold the seeds of promise. If you are able to take the heat and stand in the middle of the grief and trouble, to find some words to describe honestly what’s going on, then “stand upright and hold your heads high because your liberation is near.

In the middle of the storm there is a curious calm. When you let yourself be really engaged in the suffering around you, there is an extraordinary freedom to be found.

Be alert, says Jesus, pray for the strength to pass safely through all these troubles, and you will find yourself standing in the presence of God.