The Minister's Sermons
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"Who Are You God?" by Revd Bruce Waldron - 4th September 2005
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Who are you God? The way we answer that question "Who are you God?" is really critical, because our answer often says more about us as than it says about God. Both Moses and the disciples found that out, dramatically, because the answer they settled on revolutionized their existence and the lives of the people around them. I'm thinking about some of the answers to that question "Who are you Jesus?" that have come out of our culture over the last few years. I'm just old enough to remember when Von Daniken wrote his blockbuster money spinner in the late 60's, "Chariots of the Gods." Von Daniken argued that many of the great ancient monoliths that humans have constructed were impossible, given their size and weight and incredibly accurate geometry and orientation. And most of the great religious experiences of the ancients were not what they seemed. What they were having was encounters with extra terrestrials. Elijah being taken up in a chariot of fire, Jesus being resurrected, it was really a case of beam me up Scotty. After a while, the academic world started to realise how many millions of people were taking the book seriously, and they started to refute the claims, point out the inaccuracies, articulate the false assumptions and flawed logic. It didn't matter. Academics don't usually write best sellers and they don't get publicity. Jesus was a spaceman. Von Daniken had proven it. Those who argued against him were part of the conspiracy of silence about extra-terrestrials. Shout conspiracy and who can prove you wrong? I remember a couple of decades ago, reading Barbara Theiring's very lucrative proposals about the Dead Sea Scrolls. She argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls were written in Pesher, a type of code, and that this code also permeates the Scriptures. She gave many examples, and they proved that Jesus was a teacher of the Essene community by the Dead Sea. After the crucifixion, a coded way of saying he was excommunicated, he was resurrected, a coded way of saying that he was accepted back into the community, and his church (code for family as he had married Mary Magdalene) increased. Jesus had a big family. Thousands upon thousands jumped on the bandwagon, and I still remember one teacher saying to me in the staff room at Castlemaine High School, "Jesus was a teacher of the Essene's. That's all there is to it." And this chap was an intelligent man. It didn't matter that Thiering's dating of the Scrolls was wrong. It didn't matter that her assumptions about the Essene community were wrong. It didn't matter that she built assumption upon assumption upon assumption and used circular reasoning. She spoke the truth and those who disagreed (almost the entire academic world who argued she was wrong) were part of a conspiracy of silence about the truth of Jesus origins. Over the centuries there have been many theories about Jesus, all of them exposing some "truth" hidden by conspiracies of silence. * Jesus was a mythological figure, perpetuated by the Roman upper class as a symbolic icon in opposition to the moral decay of Rome. * Jesus was a Jewish Rabbi who was ousted by his colleagues for heresy. * And you've heard it from Matthew, that Jesus was a reincarnation of Elijah, or Jeremiah, or John the Baptist. I can imagine Jesus and the disciples having a bit of a laugh about those. Every new claim about Jesus reveals a lot more about the culture that spawns the invention than it does about the person of Jesus. Von Daniken's theories told us a lot about a culture that was in the grip of the space race, and the sudden realization that we could slip the surly bonds of earth. Space was in the imagination. Barbara Theiring's theories told us a lot about a culture that had lost confidence in its own spirituality. This culture had no confidence in God and had so long been captive to the myth of clinical rationality that it was impossible for Jesus to be divine. There had to be a logical explanation. It was impossible for God to be one of us, to care about us. It was, like our own present culture, far more ready to believe an unlikely conspiracy theory than to think that there may have been an encounter with God. A little while ago, Dan Brown wrote a brilliant murder - mystery adventure called The DaVinci Code. The gist of Dan Brown's book is that the Catholic Church had for centuries been involved in a conspiracy of silence to hide the truth, that Jesus was just a man and that he had married Mary Magdalene. According to the conspiracy, he never died. He was revived after the crucifixion. The church, at the Council of Nicea in 325, made a pact to deify Jesus. The church hid his marriage to support celibacy and to protect the myth of his Godliness. Now if people see the book as a really good mystery thriller, which it is, its great. The problem is, people take it historically seriously. They don't question the so-called historical facts which are often simply not true. Common logic says Brown's fiction is just that. It is an historical implausibility. His story about what happened at the Council of Nicea flies in the face of every piece of historical evidence. His story about what Christians believed before Nicea is part of a good story, but it isn't true and there are stacks of ancient documents to prove it. His story tells how Jesus married Mary Magdalene and the secret was protected by the Catholic Church for millennia. But that is not an historical reality. Many of the leaders of the early church were married and celibacy only became popular during the monastic movement four centuries later. It didn't become mandatory for Western clergy until the 12th Century, and then only in the Western church. The eastern church, the Orthodox church have always had married priests. There was no reason for it to hide anything. Like Thiering's book, no amount of logical refutation will deter those who want to believe it, because it fits, it feels right. What it does is accurately reflects our own cultures subconscious position. If people believe that Dan Brown is re-writing history rather than writing a good yarn, it says a lot more about those who think choose to believe in such a story than it does about Jesus. We are in the midst of a culture that wants to believe that there is a great truth hidden from us. We have a sense of something important missing. People all over the western world are searching for some great truth, hidden in history, hidden in conspiracy, hidden in mysticism. I think there is a hidden great truth, but Dan Brown hasn't got it. He simply wrote a ripping yarn. What we do instinctively know is that we live in a culture where something really critical is missing and people want proofs, and security. The question that Jesus put in this morning's readings from Matthew's gospel, and the responses given to that question, are very significant, because while those who didn't really know Jesus were looking for an explanation based in their history, their culture, the old brought back to life, it is the person's really close to him, who know him, people like Peter, who say "No!" He's not the old brought back. He's not a re-run of our cultural expectations at all. This is God doing something quite new. People then were so much like us, looking for God to do something in a way that was culturally familiar. Elijah reincarnated. Jeremiah reincarnated. John the Baptist reincarnated. We so often look for an answer that conforms to our world view, and we so often deny God's capacity to do something completely unexpected. The people who knew Jesus closely, his disciples who shared his life, they knew that there was something about this man that left them in no doubt that he was not a comfortable culturally appropriate idea revived, but was, in the flesh, God amongst them, transcending all their boundaries, all their presuppositions, and telling them, above all else, that they were loved by God who had come to them. Now Peter didn't really understand what that new thing was. He hadn't arrived, but his basic intuition was right. God was at work in a new way. Peter was ready to see it because he had spent the time with Jesus. He knew him. Is there a great truth hidden from us like von Daniken and Thiering and Dan Brown suggest? Yes, but it isn't going to be found by reading an old conspiracy theory re-written in a new way, or by running off to find it in some eastern mysticism that has all the answers. These have wisdom to teach us, but the great truth is hidden alright, right in our own faith and our own culture, almost forgotten by a community that has locked itself into a nice safe culturally comfortable form, rather than being prepared to encounter the reality of a living God. The great truth is hidden by familiarity, not by conspiracy. Its like a person who goes overseas and raves about the beauty "over there", but remains oblivious to the beauty in their own country. When Moses encountered God in the burning bush he wanted a name, so he could know the God he was dealing with, a God that would fit into his culture. But God gave him a verb: "I am." and as my old primary school teacher Mrs Campbell used to say, "Bruce, a verb is a 'doing' word." What Moses had to work with was faith in this God who acts and couldn't be defined by a name. All Moses could do was take one step at a time knowing that God was with him. He had to act as though what he had heard was true, and in doing this, he found it was, and it transformed his life and his community. The disciples, like Moses, came to understand that they too were dealing with the "I am", a verb, not a noun, and they too were called to follow in utter faith and commitment. And in that they found not a secret, hidden conspiracy but a truth that they wanted to shout from the rooftops. May we do the same. |
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