STRUCK BY DISASTER, TOUCHED BY GRACE.Sunday 15th February, 2009

There is nothing like a sudden and terrifying disaster to bring out the worst and the best in people.

So it has been with the tragic bushfires of last weekend, with a death-toll expected to exceed the present 181, and other losses of a magnitude to difficult to calculate- homes, wildlife, dreams obliterated.

Extreme situations bring out extreme responses. One young woman, whose home was spared while all around were destroyed claimed that God had protected her home with a ring of safety.Another, who had the opposite fate, resigned herself to the conclusion that God must have had a reason for taking her house.

These are human responses to extreme, traumatic events. As such they are completely understandable. We have to ask WHY! We want reasons.We need to rationalize outcomes- anything but accept that we are fragile, vulnerable people, at risk in the face of chance and circumstance.Anything but accept that our own choices are sometimes part of the reason for the outcomes we experience. In the middle of the crisis it is too hard to stare such reality in the face.

In the end though, we have to think about what we are saying.What do such conclusions about God picking and choosing victims and survivors say about the God we worship, and in what way, if any, does this God resemble the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ?

The next level down of inappropriate irrationality is demonstrated by the self-serving blamers- people like Wilson Tuckey; quick to point a finger at politicians of a different persuasion to himself; and journalist Mirada Divine, who indulges herself in an irrational and untimely rant against the Green movement for supposedly being responsible for the lack of controlled burns.

Worst of all, and right from the basement of indecency, comes the outburst of Pastor Danny Nalliah, of the ironically named "Catch the Fire Ministries" claiming divine authority for the assertion that God is punishing Victorians for their new laws that decriminilise abortion. This is reminiscent or another recent claim, that Cyclone Katrina was the breath of God's wrath for the sexual immorality of New Orleans, and an earlier claim by Fred Nile that the AIDS epidemic was the wrath of God released on homosexuals as punishment for their sexual orientation.

It only takes a few moments thinking with half a brain to see these outbursts as cruel, crass and self-serving. Sadly, every time it happens, more and more damage is done to the credibility of the Christian Church, turning away genuine seekers, and providing fuel to the fire of atheist opponents and inviting the ridicule of humanists.

Yes, there are a few places in the Hebrew Scriptures which insinuate that in the process of holy raging and the extracting of revenge, God tolerates the suffering of innocent humanity that get in the way of divine fireballs. On the other hand, there is far more extensive evidence, in and beyond the Christian scriptures, that God is not like this; and God certainly does not willingly afflict God's people or grieve God's children (Lam. 3).

My 'why' question is this: why is it that, when we ask the question 'why', we come up with the incredible, the bizarre, the downright crass, and fail to state the obvious:

Like, some people enjoy living close to nature, and take a risk when they do so.

Like, nature is unpredictable, and can strike quickly and with lethal force

Like, temperatures are rising, and just before the worst of the fires, the record was exceeded by 3 degrees

Like, we are warming the earth through our industries and lifestyle and are unwilling to make the sacrifices required to correct the trend.

Like, a fallen powerline may have caused the Kinglake fire, and it may have been because of poor maintenance by the private contractor from overseas.

Like, there are deranged people out there, and people with a huge chip on their shoulders, who light fires.

It does not mean that we stop having compassion.It just means that we are willing to face up to logical consequences for human choices, and try to take responsibility for the lives we live. We try to stop blaming all in sundry, including God, and used our God given brains to try and work it out.

Would it not be more helpful, while the crisis is on, we stop asking 'why' and start asking 'what'. Two good 'what' questions are; "What is God really like when it comes to natural disaster?", and "What can we do that mirrors the image of God that we see in the face of Christ?"

One survivor tells the story of the man who was walking down the road in his socks, having fled the fire.A car pulled up beside him and another man got out to help.Seeing the walker had no shoes, the driver took off his own boots and socks and gave them to the man with no shoes! Does that remind you of any of the stories that Jesus told of what God is like?

Many similar stories of compassion and self-denial show the best of what God gives us at times like these: firefighters, Red Cross, volunteers, political leaders all going on with little sleep for days on end to try and ease the plight of those who are suffering.What is God doing? This is what God is doing; and God's spirit will continue to stimulate the generosity of the community until what can be rebuilt of peoples live is rebuilt.

The people who are suffering through this enormous tragedy do not need our religious rationalizations, our defence of a so-called god who picks and chooses who will live and die. What they do need is a tangible reminder of what God is like, as best we understand from the life and teaching. They need our money. They need our blood. They need our prayers. They need our towels and our toys. They need love in the best way we can give it over the distance that separates us. Then they will know that rather than having been struck by the hot cruel hand of divine caprice, they have been touched by Divine grace in human form.

Somewhere in a church somewhere in England, after the Blitz, a statue of Christ on the cross was damaged by a bomb. Both hands of the statue had been blown off. On the wall below the statue someone had taken a piece of chalk and written these words: HE HAS NO HANDS BUT YOUR HANDS.

What?

HE HAS NO HANDS BUT YOUR HANDS!

Brian Brown

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FROM PASSION TO VIRTUE: SEVEN PATHWAYS OF TRANSFORMATION

Good Friday three-hour Service. Hamilton Broadmeadow Uniting Church. 21/03/08

INTRODUCTION

The Cross of Christ symbolizes the intersection of human passion and divine virtue. In the person of Jesus we witness the perfect engagement of human passion in the cause of divine virtue.

For the rest of us though, a transformation has to occur. For as we seek to defend ourselves, and survive the real and imagined threats to our wellbeing, we habitually engage the energy of our passions in service of what Pope Gregory in the sixth century listed as Seven Deadly Sins: anger, pride, sloth lust, gluttony, greed and envy.

Today I am calling these sins ‘passions’, firstly because they lead us into suffering, but secondly because they contain energy which, when rightly directed, becomes transformed into virtue; serenity, humility, right action, innocence, sobriety, non-attachment and equanimity.

As today we reflect on the human passions that put Christ on the Cross, I invite you to consider how they continue to fuel unnecessary suffering in our lives and in our world.

Further, how with Christ as our example, we might experience the transformation of our passions into virtues.

1. FROM ANGER TO SERENITY

Anger, the red hot passion, is not in itself a sinful energy. As St Paul once said “Be angry but do not sin. Do not let the sun set on your anger”. The problem, as the writer of Ecclesiastes says, is when anger “lodges in the heart of fools”.

The implication is ‘Do not let it lodge in you. Do not let it take up residence’.

Jesus looked with anger and grief at those who set out to trap him. The passion of anger gave him the energy to drive the traders from the sacred precincts of the Temple.

Moving in us, anger can fuel passion for justice.

Lodged in us, anger drives us in cycles of violence

Denied in us, suppressed in us, it builds and bursts in volcanic eruption, often burying relationships in hot lava of hate

Turned in on ourselves, it can bring depression and self-harm

The worst of our anger arises from the fear that we are no longer in control; in men especially, from a sense of powerlessness.

I invite you to take time to reflect on your personal experience of anger. Feel where it lodges, experience where it hurts, and if you need to, offer this hot passion to Christ that it may be transformed into a force for peace.

SERENITY

From a human point of view Jesus has every right to lash out with the hot passion of anger; to call down legions of angels to smite his enemies. Pinned hands and feet, he could have been driven mad by a sense of powerlessness and failure; driven wild with grief at the loss of friends and family.

Instead, with serenity, and with the deep love of transformed passion, he looks upon his mother and his beloved disciple, and thinks of them, and cares for them in their need: “Mother, behold you Son…(and to the disciple) …behold your mother”

When human passion is transformed into divine virtue, the heat that can burn and destroy become the balm that cools and heals.

You and I have surely seen that serenity in those special people from whom it shines like a beacon. Such people are tranquil while making no apparent effort to display what we so clearly see in them.

The potential for serenity is within each of us. The Cross of Christ is the point of conversion of human passion to divine virtue; anger to serenity.

2. FROM PRIDE TO HUMILITY

Pride is the elevated passion, and therein, says the Proverb, lies the risk!

What is often not readily understood is that pride is often driven by the need to be needed. The passion pushes people to try and make themselves indispensable. The elevation is this: “They cannot do without my help”.

Biblically, pride is seen as the virtual ground of sin itself. Pride comes not only before a fall, but before The Fall, because people try to take the position of God. For this reason the Tower of Babel must be demolished. In the Magnificat of Mary, it is the proud who are brought down, while the humble are raised up. Jesus told the parable of the Pharisee and the tax Collector “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and regarded others with contempt”. St Paul says that if we are going to boast we must be sure to boast of what God has done, not of what we have achieved. This passion drives the need to focus the spotlight on oneself.

The risk of course is that we overreact. False humility is not a pretty sight!

Jesus would have also understood what we often do not, that underneath the cloak of pride beats a heart unsure of whether or not it is truly loved!

HUMILITY

The proud person needs to learn what it is that they truly need- what is genuine self-care and self-respect.

Jesus perceived and lived his own needs. He could let the crowds go even if some were not yet healed. He withdrew when he needed rest and prayer. He welcomed the anointing with precious perfume. He took final refuge in Gethsemane.

The transformation from pride to humility is not self-abasement. It is true servanthood, based on a clear perception of what others need, and what we ourselves need also. St Paul in Philippians says that Jesus did not count equality with God a status to be grasped, but humbled himself…” He himself said that he came not to be served but to serve. In true humility, he washes the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper.

Matthew Fox reminds us of the root of the word humility- ‘humus’ the earth. For him…’to be humble means to be in touch with the earth, to be in touch with our own earthiness’. Our Indigenous people can teach us a lot of what it means to be in touch with the earth, if we have the humility to learn from them!

Jesus is crucified between two criminals. The one who comes to a sober estimate of who he is finds in Jesus a Saviour who does not go ahead of him, but walks beside him: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise”.

The Cross of Christ is the point of conversion of human passion to divine virtue; pride to humility.

3. FROM SLOTH TO RIGHT ACTION

I always try to be careful about accusing someone of laziness. People who present as slothful can appear as such for other reasons. The depressed person is usually not helped by being adjudged lazy and told to get up and get on with it. De-motivation from long-term illness or unemployment is not easy to shake off. Sometimes the driven high achievers judge others unfairly from their excessive Protestant work ethic. To see someone resting content with what they have drives them mad!

Sloth can be a little more subtle than apparent laziness. It can manifest in the unwillingness or inability to decide on a course of action. The slothful person is continually weighing options, but failing to commit, perhaps out of a sense of inadequacy. This does not seem like an energetic passion, but the energy is in fact being wasted. As Helen palmer sees it “By keeping available energy siphoned off into essential tasks, a kind of holding action develops in which there is never enough energy in the system to fact the conflict that surrounds going after personal desires.”

Sloth can be dangerous. We can fall asleep at the very time when we most need to stay awake. As one person wrote of their experience in Nazi Germany: “They came for the Jews but I was not a Jew so I did nothing. They came for the disabled but I was able-bodied so I did nothing. They came for the Gypsies but as I was not a Gypsy I did not object. The came for the Homosexuals but I was not gay so I stayed quiet. Finally when they came for me, there was nobody left to speak out!”

That helps us to see fear at the root of sloth. In Jesus Parable of the Talents, the servant accused of sloth is the one who hides his talent in the ground. His defence is that he was afraid of his master.

“Could you not watch with me one hour?” Jesus asks his disciples in Gethsemane. In sloth we fall asleep at the very time we most need to stay awake; but we do not need to stay that way. The love of Christ for the world is our wake-up call!

RIGHT ACTION

The love of Christ is our wake-up call. And so the writer to the Ephesians exhorts “Awake, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

The virtue that corresponds to the passion of sloth is not ‘action’ but right action; action that is focused on what is needed. Jesus was not frenetic. He was focused. He made his choice, paid the price, and walked the path to the end. He understood that the people who crucified him did so not because they were inherently evil, but because they were asleep.

“Father forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.”

When Jesus rises to life, so to do his followers. No longer afraid, they are energized, motivated, focused, compassionate.

The Cross of Christ is the point of transformation from human passion to divine virtue; sloth to right action

4. FROM LUST TO INNOCENCE

When they hear the word lust, most people think of sex! This misses the primary point. Lust is essentially about power. Its passion is to dominate. Its fear is that if it does not overpower it will itself be overpowered. Its motto is ‘get them before they get you’! The psalmist describes this energy as ‘wanton craving’. It is this human urge that Satan tries to exploit when he tempts Jesus to bow does before him, and so receive dominion over all the kingdoms of the world. Such temptation is not easily resisted!

The sexual connection is there of course, and it is no coincidence that so many powerful leaders are also infamous for their sexual exploits; from King David to King Solomon, from President Sukarno to President Kennedy. Rape, including rape in war is likewise an act of domination, just as sexual abuse is a misuse of power imbalance in a relationship. Without the sexual connotation, lust can also be used to describe the gratuitous mocking and scourging of Jesus after his arrest and right onto the Cross. It is not enough to convict and to execute. The victim must be abused to elevate the sense of power of the perpetrators, as if to extinguish their doubts about their own virility.

When Jesus preaches about the danger of “looking at a woman with lust” he is not condemning the ubiquitous wandering eye, but the actual intent to forcibly act out the passion. That, says Jesus, is risky, risky behaviour, and it would be better to be without an eye or a hand than to be guilty of enacted lust.

In The Lord of the Rings, lust for total power, lust for complete revenge, is what drives the evil Lord Sauron to breed an army of super-goblins, the Uruk Hai, and unleash them in a driving march to obliterate the innocent of a relatively unprotected world. The passion of lust is shameless. It destroys without pity. Listen as it marches!

INNOCENCE

We should not underestimate the cry of dereliction “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”. This is not a game; a prearranged gambit between Jesus and God the Father. This is the cry of abandonment of the truly innocent, overwhelmed by wanton, lustful, brutish force.

It is also the cry of innocent faith, which under duress falls back on the familiar opening words of Psalm 22. If however we can read on we see the undiminished trust of the Psalmist: “Do not be far from me, for trouble is near” and then “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord”. Childlike faith continues to trust the love of the parent even in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

When we stop seeing enemies at every turn in the road, insinuations in every remark, criticism in every glance; when we become aware of the futility of trying to gain power over everyone or everything that seems to threaten us; when revenge no longer satisfies; then we are moving from lust to innocence. When that change starts to happen, the Cross of Christ is truly the point of transformation from human passion to divine virtue; lust to innocence.

5. GLUTTONY TO SOBRIETY

Gluttony is not just about food; it is also the drivenness for excitement and adventure. Anything but having to face the anxieties of the present moment! The glutton is addicted to adrenaline. The glutton wants to try everything. Life is a taster’s menu; tapis is clearly preferred to a pile of meat and three veg!

Another word for the passion of gluttony is intemperance- always wanting too much of a good thing. A modern expression of this is rampart consumerism. Shop till you drop!

This is sometimes a sign that a person is afraid of missing out; or perhaps substituting consumption for the more painful, and difficult process of working out what it is that we actually need to face for the sake of our physical, emotional and spiritual health.

A moving story of the transformation of gluttony to sobriety is that of Sam Gamgee, close friend of Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings. Sam is a portly fellow whose main focus is the next meal; until a greater cause demands his allegiance and his energy. He and Frodo are dying of thirst and starvation by the time they complete their quest and are rescued by Gandalf’s eagles from the molten slopes of Mount Doom.

It is ironic that Jesus’ enemies accused him of being a glutton and a drunkard, especially given his teaching from the mount: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5); or the more blunt assertion in Luke 6 ‘Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.”

What is it that you really need?

SOBRIETY

Sobriety is the state of being able to continue on a course of action without having to introduce diversions or exciting secondary plans. In Luke 9 we read “When the days drew near for him to be taken up he set his face to go to Jerusalem”. His followers tried all they knew to divert him, but to no avail. No diversions, no distractions. All the way to the Cross where the one who gave living water is forced to the cry of agony “I thirst”.

The transformation is occurring in us when the drive to get more and better begins to be replaced by a single-minded desire to do the right thing; when our focus is drawn in to the sharp clarity of compassion and justice.

For those of us who live in relative comfort and affluence, this may be about the most difficult transformation we ever need to undergo. Some would make the path easier with offers of cheap grace, or assurances that affluence is part of God’s plan for us.

However hard we may try though, there is no way around it. The Cross of Christ is the point of transformation of human passion to divine virtue; gluttony to sobriety.

6. GREED TO NON-ATTACHMENT

Greed is yet another passion that is rooted in fear; a survival instinct that drives us to accumulate and hoard for ourselves.

I am not sure