easter 7 year C

Acts 16: 16-34 NRSV text
Psalm 97 NRSV text
Revelation 22: 12-21 NRSV text
John 17: 20-26 NRSV text

“Jesus died for the kingdom, and we got the Church instead!” That’s a common ironic remark, and at it’s heart is an incredible sense of disappointment. We look at the Church and feel short-changed. The Church ahs never appeared on anyone’s list of Wonders of the World, has it? Quite the contrary: there are lively debates going on in all sorts of places at the moment about whether or not religion is a bad thing, and whether it’s at the root of the worst of society’s problems (particularly terrorism, intolerance and violence).

Let’s face it: the Church has a pretty shocking track record! Okay – that’s putting it mildly, but then, I’m learning about English understatement after 23 years of living here! Let me put it far more starkly: for the most part, the Church is about as relevant to the majority of people as the local train spotters’ club. And at its (all-too frequent) worst, it’s clearly part of that from which the world needs saving!

I remember a conversation I had with David Bosch (the South African missiologist) in his home. It was 1989, and things were very bad indeed in South Africa under the State of Emergency. The Apartheid regime was in its death-throes, but it wasn’t going without a fight and it was taking a whole lot of people down with it. The Dutch Reformed Church was engaged in a huge propaganda offensive, pillorying people like Desmond Tutu, Allan Boesak and Frank Chikane and labelling them as ant-Christian Communists who were betraying Jesus Christ, the true faith and the Church by opposing Apartheid. We were sitting drinking wine and lamenting the state of the Church in South Africa. I asked, “How come the Church – which is supposed to be the sign of all that Jesus preached and promised – has become this monster that needs removing? When did it all go wrong?” His response was interesting. Quick as a flash, he said, “313AD. That’s when the Christian Church left the tent of Moses for the court of Pharaoh!”

His point was that the Church is an institution and actually behaves like other institutions. Now that in itself isn’t to shock or to be lamented. It’s neutral. It’s how it is – because the Church is us and – unsurprisingly – “behaves” as all human collectives behave … institutionally! But the guts of his comment is that the Church has historically allied itself with the powerful, rather than the weak – and so it has become an institution that acts with the sort of cruelty and ruthlessness that characterises groups of people who wield power over others and hang on to it at all costs. The problem, as he saw it, is that the Church has cut itself off from its roots – severed itself from the places from which it draws its life-blood and nourishment. Small wonder that it loses its way. Small wonder that it is so frequently a sign of the opposite of the kingdom that Jesus preached and lived and died for.

When the Church loses its connection – its rootedness – in God-in-Jesus, it becomes one of the most unlovable of institutions. It becomes inhuman and inhumane. Faith becomes religion, with all its self-righteousness and self-satisfaction. It becomes an end in itself rather than a sign of a new world, sucking up obscene amounts of money, time, energy and resources, and demanding that people serve it rather than the other way around. The servant becomes the slave-owner – and it can be as tyrannical and ruthless as any slave-master.

Roots & connections (John 17: 20-26)
How different a picture is painted here in today’s gospel! This is a vital passage, because John is writing so much later than the other evangelists. Here is a developed meditation on the Church, which he puts on the lips of Jesus in this extended high priestly prayer. John has Jesus die on Thursday at the moment when the Passover Lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple, so he cannot have the Last Supper as the institution of the New Covenant (see Easter 5). What we have instead is an extended three-chapter discourse by Jesus on the Church. It’s about the Covenant Community – the community that is brought into being by Jesus’ death and resurrection.

For some commentators, John reads as remarkably ecclesio-centric – as though John is uncritically obsessed and satisfied with the Church. I think that’s to get him wrong. John, remember, is the theologian of Incarnation. This three-chapter discourse is what the New Covenant means for John on the ground. He’s less interested in ritual, in other words, than he is in the meaning of it – the Truth-on-the-ground. John, on this reading, is passionately concerned with the congruence between word, sacrament and life.

In today’s gospel passage, part of Jesus’ prayer for his disciples, we’re going back to roots. Read today’s passage too quickly (aloud, especially!) and your head will begin to swim: “You in me and I in you and them in us …” – it sounds archaic and philosophical and frankly both unintelligible and unbelievable. Or, if we can make sense of it, we want to ask, “But does it matter?”

John’s answer is that it does – enormously! If you want to put it in theological terms, John’s model of the Church is the Extension of the Incarnation. It goes: God sent Jesus, Jesus sent the apostles, the apostles sent us. Of course, this is where we get all the stuff about apostolic succession from – or at least, one of the most useful set of “proof texts” to justify it! But note what is going on. It isn’t about reproducing the Church but about extending the saving mission of God! And secondly, it’s about reproducing faithful discipleship: just as Jesus followed so faithfully the will of the Father, so we are to follow faithfully Jesus’ own practice (“A new commandment I give you – love on another in the same way that I have loved you”). We ought to bear the hallmarks of Jesus, just as Jesus bore the hallmarks of God: “By this shall everyone know that you are my disciples: because you have the same love for one another that I had for you!”

Remember that John’s story of Jesus is about God’s mission of salvation: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order to save it through him” (John3:17). The Church is the community of Jesus’ brothers and sisters (children of God) who carry on what Jesus the Son started. There are two things going on here that matter – for the Church, in the same way that they mattered in Jesus’ mission: presence and practice.

Look at v22: “The glory that you have given me, I have given them, so that they may be one as we are one”. In other words, the members of the community of Jesus are to be united in mission both to one another and to Jesus (and therefore to God). “Glory” is John’s term for the divine revelation in Jesus. The signs in the gospel are the revelation of Jesus’ glory – his origin in God, his union with God, his divinity and his identity as the agent and means of God’s salvation of the world. This is what John refers to in the Prologue as “We have beheld his glory – the glory as of the only begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14).

Jesus now prays that the community of faith will receive the same glory – ie manifest God’s presence in the same way as Jesus did. This is possible because of (a) what Jesus has done and (b) the union of the community with Christ (v25). But how will this glory be evident? Firstly, simply through Christian presence. When everything is “working” as it should (ie when the community is living by the very Life of God through Jesus), then the community of faith (the Church) is the sacramental and recognisable presence of God on earth! Just as to see Jesus was to see the Father, so to see the Church is in the same sacramental sense to see God. God “takes flesh” in and through the Church. Secondly, through Christ-like acting (ie mission). Again, union with Christ is not about some blessed state of bliss, but about being shaped by Jesus, acting like Jesus and making God’s salvation real on the ground.

If this all sounds deep and complex, it’s because John is trying to probe the mystery of Incarnation. For him, being the Church is to be connected to God. That is what it means. He has no time for the Church as institution, cut off from these roots and manifesting its own glory. It may call itself the Church, but shows itself to be false to its own faith. It is not being the Church! John, in other words, is trying to make an indissoluble link between the experience of salvation in Jesus (which makes the Church the community of faith) and the practice of Jesus (which ought to characterise the Church). The Church must be recognisably linked to Christ. People should see the Church and say, “Ah! There’s Jesus!”

John, therefore, has an incredibly powerful understanding of the Church as not only sign of the Kingdom but the sacramental presence of God on earth that is engaged in saving the world. That’s what was happening in Jesus, he tells us. And that’s what it means to be the Church!

Not for Sale! Sunday (Acts 16: 16-34)
Here’s an account of religion, and interestingly, on Not for Sale! Sunday, it involves a slave girl. Look at what happens. Firstly, we have a slave girl who is being exploited economically. She is “owned” and brings her owners a great deal of money by fortune telling (16:16). She’s not a charlatan: she’s the real thing. She has a spirit of divination.

Let’s not do our 20^th century rationalist stuff here (and I deliberately use 20^th rather than 21^st century because we postmoderns are far less trapped in the modern prison than we were during the last century): there is reality to spiritual forces beyond ourselves – both good and evil, helpful and harmful. We mustn’t try to demythologise what Luke is telling us. This is a woman who is possessed by something that has supernatural knowledge and wisdom. The point, though, is that she enslaved by it. She is powerless to prevent it being there, and it is the reason for her enslavement by her owners. She is doubly a prisoner.

What we have in the story is a re-run of Jesus and the demons in the gospels. Here, the spirit within the girl recognises the identity of the apostles. Note the irony in her proclamation: “These men are slaves of the Most High God!” She herself is a slave of a destructive spirit; Paul and the others are actually free in Christ! To be in Christ is truly to be free. Of course, Paul himself uses the image of being enslaved to God – but does so ironically! This is joyful service of the Living God, not slavish obedience to some tyrannical overlord! God is indeed an “overlord”, but one who desires the freedom, life and flourishing of all creation.

There is another subtle point: the slave girl declared that the apostles were proclaiming a way of salvation, rather than the way (ie in Jesus). The point here is not whether or not there are different ways to God which are all equally valid. That’s an interesting discussion, but Luke is emphasising something else. They are in Philippi, a Roman city, and Paul and the apostles are Jews (cf v20). What the slave girl is saying is that they have come, with a Jewish version of salvation, to a Roman city which has its own ways of salvation. The implication is that what Paul and the others say can be discounted as “merely Jewish” – as though salvation was some tribal matter, with each tribal deity providing its own path of salvation.

What Luke wants us to understand is that this is precisely not what is happening in Jesus! The “Jesus difference” in Luke’s gospel si that Jesus precisely breaks out of a narrow, tribal view of God’s salvation. Paul was expecting that God would redeem Israel; after meeting Jesus, he understood that God, in Jesus, was redeeming the world! The Good News of Jesus is Good News to Gentiles. It is Good News to “the uttermost ends of the earth”! What the spirit in the slave girl recognises is true – but hopelessly inadequate.

Rome is a slave-owning society. If you own people, you can treat them as “things”. It becomes natural, habitual and entirely unremarkable to treat people as objects and means to an end – the greater good and prosperity of those who own them! Not only is the slave girl treated as a commodity (who reaches her use-by date when Paul exorcises the spirit) but Paul and Silas are likewise treated by the criterion of how they affect the financial viability of the Philippian community!

To threaten the financial stability of a slave-owning society is to court personal disaster and deep-seated, blind, rage-filled resistance. It happens to Paul and Silas. They are set upon by the mob, tried, flogged and unjustly locked in prison. The justice system protects the slavers. Those who free slaves are punished.

Of course, there’s the wonderful story here, too of the Philippian jailer. He, too, is a prisoner in his own jail. Not for Sale! Sunday is marking the 200^th anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act by focussing on our contemporary slavery in which women are trafficked to the west for sex. In that context, I want only to note one thing about this story: what has been noted and documented by sociologists and liberation theologians (to name but two groups) is the phenomenon that a society based upon delivering benefits for the few at expense of the many is always in trouble. The victims are imprisoned in a system that is skewed against them and that uses and abuses them. But the perpetrators, too, are imprisoned: imprisoned in their greed, their fear and their blindness and deafness to God, to Love and to Life – to salvation, in other words.

We become blind and deaf to salvation because we are blinded to the humanity of those who are slaves. When we stop seeing other people as human beings like us, we begin to lose our humanity. “Humanity” is what connects us to one another in society and to God – our shared divine image. When we lose that connection, or cut ourselves off from it, we lose track of who we are and who God is.

That’s when the Church becomes that from which society needs saving, rather than the sign of the Kingdom and the visible, active, saving presence of God on earth. That’s when the Church can be deeply involved in the Slave Trade and justify it biblically and theologically. That’s when a justice-Church like the URC will find it difficult, 200 years on, to apologise for the Slave Trade. It’s when we will tolerate a sophisticated, lucrative and systematic trade in the lives of Eastern European women, lured, tricked, kidnapped, raped and forced to become sex slaves within our cities and communities.

We tolerate it by regarding these slaves as something other than what they are. So instead, we call them whores and slappers and prostitutes – suggesting, presumably, that these are immoral women who have deliberately chosen this existence! The point is that they are less than human (after all, they’re for rent!) and therefore do not “deserve” our compassion or action. If they are slaves, they need liberating! It is our duty to free slaves; it is our message that God is the God who hears the cries of the slaves and who acts to deliver them. . We can speak of God as “Almighty” – as long as we follow a key insistence within the biblical texts that “Almighty” means having the power and desire to liberate human captives! To be “Almighty” means to be able to stand up to the slave-owners – Pharaoh, Babylon, Rome and Satan – and free their captives. In other words, we cannot claim to be followers of Jesus Christ while we are silent and apathetic about this fundamental evil that is happening in our own society. We are imprisoned in blindness and apathy, ignorance and lack of compassion, unable to see the world through God’s eyes and to learn what our mission is.

We need to re-connect with our roots – that radical union with God – and will only be able to do so effectively when we take on board the plight of these women in our own time whose liberation is both their and our salvation.

Thirsting for God (Revelation 22: 12-21)
Again, we are presented with thirst – the thirst for the right things! Thirst is the proper response to recognising the problems we face – both in the world and in the Church. We’re in a different place from the Seer of Revelation. For him, it was easy: the Church was under persecution. The Church was in slavery to Rome. What we hear in Revelation are the groans of a beleaguered, oppressed, tortured and abused group of people, clinging to their faith in Jesus Christ in the face of enormous pressures to recant and deny their allegiance to Christ.

Today the problem is a different one. Now the Church is among the powerful. It is one of the groups in society whom vulnerable people often have cause to fear. It has a bloody, troubled and remarkably faithless history (faithless, at least, in John’s terms!). The “us” (Church) and “them” (them out there) distinctions of the New Testament context don’t apply today because the configuration of power has shifted.

Today’s challenge to the Church is to take sides – and to take the right side! How might we know whether we’re on the right side, if it is true that the Church can be on the wrong side? One question to ask is, “What is it that I thirst for?” Note that the Seer talks about thirsting for the Water of Life. Life – for all. When we’re concerned about people who do not have Life in all its abundance, then we’re on the right track.

Life in all its abundance does not necessarily equate with being part of the Church. It does equate with having all that is needed for life here and now. If people in our society – local and global – have less than we do, we cannot rest content. We need to thirst for the world in which slavery is a thing of the past – because people will not tolerate regarding anyone as less human than they are. And if we thirst for it, then we have to work for it – because we pray daily for the coming of God’s kingdom here on earth.

Amen.

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