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Sermon: The Day of Pentecost(C) - 23rd May 2010
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 10am
Readings: Acts 2:1-21
Living in a Church without Walls
Do you see me? As I really am, not as the world sees me. Flawed and faltering, yes, but full of possibilities. Hurt, even hateful sometimes, but I also have my hopes. I so much want someone to really see me.
God of grace and clarity,we pray for people who are overlooked, unnoticed, even hidden away by policy in the corners of our minds, in the corners of our society: beggars who embarrass us with their shamelessness and homelessness crazy people, confronting us with our own better-disguised chaos people whose illnesses arouse our deepest fears of blood and mortality people battered by the abuse of power, reminding us of our complicity with violence. We pray for your grace and clarity among us and within us.
And we bless you, and give thanks for the people who look us in the eye who do not flinch at our humanity who do not turn away from our vulnerability who really see us with the eyes of love that different way of seeing.
It is a great pleasure to be with you and within this sermon to have the opportunity to share a fragment of life as an inner-city priest. This has been both a social and theological journey with the street as the catalyst between both. I began this last parish commitment after years of frustration with the sexual and gender debates of our Anglican diocese and thoroughly distanced by its doctrine of blood sacrifice. I concluded formal ministry with a philosophy largely drawn from Emmanuel Levinas where God dwells in the hidden places of life yet is seen in the face of those around us.
Zen and Sufi mysticism captured my imagination. In the ten years that have followed I have continued to work with homeless and unemployed people across Australia and have met Indigenous people close up in remote parts of the continent. Life has been an exploration of change; faith has been gathered into values and has underscored the importance of ‘living and working in a church without walls’: I intend to spend the rest of my active days crossing boundaries set by difference, and being embraced by people of many traditions and life-styles.
The past twenty years living and working with street people, sex workers and Indigenous people in remote communities has challenged my sense of self. It has also challenged the way I view religion and spirituality. The street converted me but it also taught me my limitations. In the broadest sense theism has given way to humanism.
That may sound to you as the most distant beginning to a sermon on the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles – the text set for today’s celebration of Pentecost. I begin with the two opening chapters of Acts and conclude with what are almost the final words of the Epistle to the Hebrews: ‘Jesus suffered outside the city gate… Let us then go to him outside the camp … for here we have no lasting city’. My interest is no longer in their purely religious interpretation; they are the heart of my political and social agenda.
Today’s text says of the early Christian community: ‘they were all together in one place’. What clearer instance might there be of a community locked into self-concern, oblivious of the outside world?
But pause on these words ‘all together in one place’. We need to travel some distance in Acts before the word ‘church’ is used – chapter 5 and verse 11 if my memory serves me correctly. In these opening chapters the author Luke is intent on showing the agony and uncertainty of people trapped by doubt and grief, suddenly exposed to a hostile and uncaring world.
The text is more than a diary of events: it uses a story of human loss and inner discovery, of devastation and the possibility of transformation, as a key to understanding the political world early Christians found themselves in. The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles reach beyond stories of past events and missionary journeys; they are the Christian claim to live the life-awakening values of Jesus in secular society. These opening words remind us that the Acts account is not primarily about walled churches: here is the life-impelling record of people impelled by the Spirit to cross the boundaries set by difference. They discover that being ‘all together in one place’ means embracing those whom culture, ethnicity and language would otherwise have excluded.
It was Christmas Eve 1990 and I had been invited to a party in the Catholic Presbytery. Suddenly the door flung open and a religious sister announced that the baby Jesus had been stolen from the Christmas crib. She broke the anxiety by saying she would get him back before the midnight Mass: she had offered a reward among the street people of a case of beer. Almost immediately word came back from the street, ‘Add a carton of cigarettes.’ She agreed and within the hour the baby Jesus was back in his crib with Mary, the animals and shepherds, but when we looked more closely the baby’s little finger was missing. Street wisdom could live comfortably with mythology but would always reframe it.
The experience proved to be a parable about ministry. Tread softly you are a stranger in other people’s territory; be careful about judgement; understand that you live in a tension where many of the categories of right and wrong, good and evil do not apply; learn to be playful and to accept challenges to your own sense of importance; and most of all, listen before you talk. You are not in ‘church’ with like-minded people; you are placed in the rough and tumble of human experience.
This is the place where people live with courage and imagination. They make the most out of little and have discovered beauty in simplicity. I shared there the lives of street people and saw the depth of their divinity and my own. With them I learnt the meaning of what I had taught for a generation in theological college that we are most divine when we are most human.
An observation of Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the great lyric poets of modern Germanyawakened my sensitivity to this theme. He wrote in 1904 : “True love is where two solitudes protect and border and salute each other” . That simple quote continues to stimulate my urgency for ministry. And it offers a fresh direction – to live and love beyond the walled church.
THE PASSION OF MEETING THE OTHER
Twenty years working on the margins of society’s values introduced me to warm, fragile, creative people who shared their life with me. They helped me cross my own barricades of solitude and distance.
I recall an evening when a storm was threatening, so I hurried to finish my purchases and speed home. But the heavy rain kept me confined under a shop awning where I, and a homeless street man I knew well, sheltered. He opened his umbrella - his treasured possession - and offered its protection. This was a moment of profound transformation.
We stood together, two ‘solitudes’ with our separate life histories and independent existence, for a moment sharing his generosity. I was the parish priest, he was a homeless man - both of us had totally different identities and life experiences. There was no room in this space for any sense of difference that mattered. He offered protection under his umbrella. In that moment of standing shoulder to shoulder we were no more than two solitudes in need of each other. The street man blessed me with protection. In the same moment, he would also salute me and call me by name, as I would call his name. This was a relationship that had no judgment in it about the other.
Neither of us saw the need to serve or meet the other through pity or sentimentality or religious definition - our humanity alone bonded us. Under the protection of his umbrella we two solitudes bordered and saluted each other. And nothing more was necessary; it was as if life for both of us had its supreme moment in a simple act of acknowledgement.
So, in the Acts text read this morning, a miracle of listening and seeing took place. People crossed boundaries set by different cultures: ‘ Parthians, Medes and Elamites’ and a vast array of others heard, and made their own ‘the wonders of God’. The preacher that day was already touching on the great theme of Acts that to be a disciple of Jesus was to stand you in the market place away from the walled religions of Jews and Romans. Christianity was about a Spirit transformation where solitudes might border and salute each other. To the world around them they would teach and live ‘salvation’ which in its broadest sense means a recreation of humanity. This would lead them to live the values of Jesus and to have a vision for human transformation.
LEARNING TO LIVE WITHOUT JUDGMENT
This is Rilke’s urgency. His own dark life haunted his letters and poetry. They signaled the radical sexual and relational changes that continue to mark our generation: they questioned the busy intrusive God of classical theology. You sense in his writings the profound yearning of the human spirit to be free. That spirit breaks through the dark side of his own emotions and he tells his truth that we ignore at our peril: ‘true love consists in this; that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other’.
Rilke means precisely the debate about gender equality that currently storms our society. Ten years at Darlinghurst-Kings Cross and further years working with a Charity exposed me to the tragedy of human isolation. They brought home to me the need for a more values-open society. But Rilke’s urgency runs more deeply than this: his passion is for the freedom of the human spirit - freedom from dogmas that paralyze, freedom where each of us can own as valid the yearning of our spirit for hope and wholeness. Or to use the sense of Acts, to live and love in the play of the Spirit.
This same urgency runs deeply through Australian colonial history and remains unresolved. In 1889 Ibsen 's Doll's House played to packed audiences in Sydney’s Criterion Theatre. Crowds poured into the streets debating the play into the early hours of the morning. The sensation made headlines in the daily press. This was a play that seemed to be born out of time.
The play evoked stresses about restrictive marriage and divorce laws. It highlighted the plight of women in a repressive patriarchal society. The heroine Nora turned her back on household comfort, family responsibility and male indoctrination to find her own ‘solitude’. Judged by modern norms the play is melodramatic and contrived, but to its first audiences it was a revelation of a world yet to be born.
When in 1892 Sir Alfred Stephen presented his divorce law reform ( Divorce Amendment and Extension Act) into the New South Wales Parliament, he faced hostility across the chamber. The most conservative forces in society, led by the various churches also challenged the Act. They by-passed the legislature and took their opposition directly to the Queen. The press had a field day, with the Anglican Bishop of Sydney firmly in their sights: Nora, and women like her, could be beaten, abused, refused rights and remain without power in society and all to preserve the sanctity of a man-made dogma about human relationships. The ‘solitudes’ were sacrificed to the religion of conformity.
PREPARING FOR THIS NEW JOURNEY
This unfinished story came alive for me when in 1989 I became the Rector of St John’s Church in Darlinghurst. Margaret and I shared ministry in what was then the red-light centre of Sydney. The district is of course much bigger than this definition. The area embraces people of a variety of lifestyles, where religion is mostly marginal.
A small congregation was experiencing a first dramatic growth sprint. With about fifty new members we were experimenting with liturgical change. The time seemed right to shape a Communion service – a simple Eucharist that celebrated nature and work, with bread and wine symbols of the labours of our hands and our unfinished tasks.
The congregation was made up of street people and some upwardly mobile twenty-something year olds, mostly male. We were unlike most church groups both in age range and in intention - many had no church background. We reached across the boundaries of difference to find our common humanity. Mostly that sense of difference gave a special edge to our meeting.
All seemed ready for the celebration. At the last moment I realised I had forgotten to schedule someone as chalice assistant. It seemed a small enough matter to rectify on the spot so I asked for volunteers. There was silence, no one moved, then Dennis stept forward. Dennis was a street man who all his life had suffered a psychiatric disorder. Most Sundays Dennis alternately watered and conversed with the floral decorations; when seated he sang raucously out of tune.
Dennis held the chalice smiling vaguely and moving aimlessly among the audience. In an instant the congregation rippled with suppressed embarrassed laughter. Suddenly everyone was still and quiet. At the same moment we all sensed that this broken man was bearing the chalice of the blood of Christ, the symbols of nature and labour and shared humanity that we had planned to celebrate.
Dennis became our saint. He was the symbol of what we aimed to be – a community that embraced into wholeness people of many backgrounds and lifestyles. We could only be whole people as we reached beyond the conventional stereotypes of good and bad, straight and gay, religious and non-religious, mainstream and edge. We were all people seeking ‘sacred community’ with each other and the world around us. Interaction with difference, the keystone of justice, was the mark of a new spirituality. At the end of the day none of us are straight people or gay people, street people or sex workers, rich people, religious people, indigenous people, black people, white people - we are simply humans on a journey to wholeness needing each other for our fulfilment and awakening.
In this I discover what it means to be a man, to know justice, and live to honestly with my fellow men and women. I learn to embrace the earth and to see nature and circumstance as the root of my spirituality. The old dogmas lack power to motivate me. I need no stories about the supernatural to inspire me, no gods of thunder and lightning to tremble before. The gospel offers me the man Jesus who taught the radical way of bonding neighbour and enemy, and discovering life from the ordinary events of each day.
In the words of Hebrews with which I began, I discover life ‘outside the gates’ of convention and conformity. This is not to be like some adolescent reaction to authority but is a determination to tread the path of vulnerability, imagination and self-discovery. I will always value the art and architecture, the music and liturgy of our church, but I am here as a grateful visitor. Life is about standing in the secular space, talking the language of secular people and sharing what most unites us – our humanity. I have learnt to celebrate what Thomas Berry has described as the essential quality of spirituality:
In its every aspect the human is a subsystem of the earth system, which is in turn integral with the great universe itself. We have no interior life, no soul life, no imaginative, emotional, or intellectual life except what is awakened in us from the outer world of nature … The earth, within the universe, is the immediate sacred community whence the human derives its own sacred dimension.
Bill Lawton
Kathy Galloway, Talking to the Bones: Poems, Prayers and Meditations, London: SPKC, 1996. p.110.
Letters to a Young Poet, New York: Vintage Books, 1987, p.78.
Berry’s introduction to Tom Hayden’s book, The Lost Gospel of the Earth, San Francisco: Sierra Book Club, 1996, p.x.