(What prompted this diatribe about Christmas I cannot remember. I suspect it was the statement of the High Priest of Capitalism referred to in the text. Be that as it may, I continue to be amazed at the patience and forbearance of the Wembley Downs congregation with respect to their Associate Minister.)

Call to Worship

Welcome to our Post Christmas Service. It is a service prompted by the call of John Wesley on Christmas Day 1747 when he “strongly urged the Methodists to renew their covenant with God.” I’ve often wondered why he chose Christmas day to make this call. I think I now know. It is to re-orientate ourselves after all the nonsense and superficiality of what our society calls Christmas, or to be more precise “Xmas” – X being the unknown quality.

Lest I be seen as a grumpy old man, let me make it clear before we proceed any further that there is much of value in the present observance of Christmas.

Firstly, as a festival for children. When we met as a family last week it was a delightful time. Two of our grandchildren are young enough to enjoy the laughter and love of adults whom they also love. They had a great time as did the adults. They opened their gifts with laughter and appreciation. The gifts to the older children and others were either from Fair Trade or were goats and other things for people in Africa. It was a great time – as was Christmas day for Patrick Cosgrove who was overheard to say “I do love Christmas Day”

Secondly, some of the music around Christmas is really inspiring. Songs of Praise last Sunday was superb. Music is a language that speaks to everyone and can both express and lead people to faith. Music highlights the non rational aspect of faith. “Singing is a way of believing “ as I heard someone say the other day. And this was true of the Carols by Candlelight that Margaret and I attended at Darlington. The woman leading the Children’s choir knew exactly what she was doing and did it superbly, as did the children in the choir. The only sad note was the view of some that they wished the evening wasn’t so religious.

I have no problems with Christmas as a children’s festival or a music festival. There is a lot to be said for some of the aspects of Christmas – but the fact remains that it is not a Christian festival. As my friend Frederich Buechner says “The gospel writers are not particularly interested in the fact of the birth of Jesus but its significance …. The birth of the child made possible not only a new way of understanding life but a new way of living life.” This is neither recognized nor observed at Christmas time. Christmas as we know it today, is no longer a Christian Festival and we need to re-orientate ourselves after it.

The first half of our time together this morning is a re-orientation service, a time – if you like – of detoxification, where we recognize and identify that to which we are addicted. Some of you may think that it is not necessary to engage in such an exercise. I beg to differ. Without detoxification the drug of dopiness will continue to control us and exercise its influence upon us. And if you think dopiness is too strong a word, think for a moment of a dopey Treasurer smoking a cigar and saying “Don’t let Santa down. Go out there and spend for Christmas.” May God preserve us from our politicians! The first part of our service will be one of detoxification and re-orientation.

The second part of our service will be an attempt to crystallise and centre upon the real nature of the Christian Faith: commitment to the God we see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. John Wesley called it a “covenant” which is dictionary defined as “an agreement between two or more persons to do or refrain from doing some act.” I prefer the word “commitment” to “covenant” – probably because of a book by Joe Oldham entitled “Life is Commitment”. It is also less legal and more personal than “covenant”. In the second part of the service we will recommit ourselves to the nature and fullness of life seen in Jesus of Nazareth – something that is very different to the nonsense we have endured over the past weeks: “Ho, ho, ho! What would you like Santa to bring you for Christmas”. We give gifts at Christmas time not because of some fat fraud underwriting the economy but because of the gift given to us in Jesus of Nazareth.

Today, in accordance with John Wesley’s urging, we will move from our society’s capitalistic Christmas and recommit ourselves, re-covenant ourselves, as disciples, as followers, of Jesus of Nazareth.

But before we do that let us first go through a detox process and sing a song of re-orientation. To sing all the verses would be pushing my point a bit too far. I will read the first three verses and we will then stand and sing the rest.

Christians Awake TIS 306

As we depart this Christmas time of year
Tempted to spend. It’s sure to bring good cheer!
We have been told, we must spend more not less
Peace and goodwill have given way to stress.
Driven by profit; money is the thief
Of deeper values. Lord, we need relief!

It is so welcome when this time has passed
Almost as bad and trying as the last.
Over indulgence and the spending spree
Buying too much because we “get one free”.
Trading, when brisk, is economic good
Consuming everything. We’re told we should!

Children are targets of this market clout;
“Don’t be so mean. Don’t let your child miss out”.
So rears again the hideous head of greed,
“Buy now, pay later” is the common creed.
Human fulfillment flows to young and old
Hope, love and joy. These can’t be bought or sold.

Christians awake! We must avoid the sham,
Insulting him who is the great “I am”.
Why prostitute his birth to foster trust
In more possessions that will turn to dust
Where is the Christ child and the Godly bliss?
Where is our Jesus found in all of this?

Christians awake! The call is here to heed;
Stand firm against the wrongs of human greed.
Jesus himself, threw from the temple courts
Those profiteering from their business rorts.
Now at his cause, we turn to those in need
To those who hunger and to those who bleed

Christian’s awake! The message is good news
God’s constant love is here for those who choose
Not in the presents or the fairy lights
But in the love that helps on dark, bleak nights.
God’s love is found there, full and free for all
This is the message of the lowly stall

Hear again the gospel according to Saint Joseph of Canberra as it is found in the West Australian Newspaper of 2nd December 2014
“We want Australian to go out there and spend for Christmas. Don’t let Santa down – go out there and spend for Christmas.”

Hear also from an epistle of Nicole Heales in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled “How to curb emotional spending” : “Work out what you are doing and why you are doing it. Look at what is driving you. Set boundaries. Try asking yourself : How will I feel tomorrow?”

A very short sermon

The message of St Joseph of Canberra is that greed is good. The message of Nicole is that it can bring disastrous consequences. Yoval Harari in his book “Sapiens” maintains that Capitalism is our most popular religion. I think he is right. Capitalism is a religion. It is based on credit which is in effect trust in an imaginary future. Credit builds the present on the basis of a belief in the future– and if ever this was an act of faith, that is one! The faith engendered by credit also has a strong ethic: that economic growth is the supreme good. Another article of the creed of capitalism is that “capital should be free to influence politics but politics should not be allowed to influence capital.” Profit is to be re-invested in production and it is this that makes the world go around. One would think that having to engage in “quantitative easing”, the printing of money, might raise a few doubts, but no, our faith in capitalism remains supremely strong. On the 26th December the faithful gather in their thousands outside the Citadels of Capitalism (otherwise known as “Shopping Centres”) and on the appointed hour raise their song of praise as they rush for the bargain counters and give their offering of over $2 billion to the deity of our day.
Capitalism is, in anyone’s book, a highly organized religion, and it stands in stark contrast to the one in whose name we meet together.

Enough of the Creed of Capitalism! Let us now make the transition to the faith we seek to celebrate today . Let us make the transition as we stand and sing.

HYMN “O little Town of Wembley Downs” TIS 316

O little town of Wembley Downs,
do not be fooled this day.
The Christmas we have just endured
is not the Saviour’s way;
Behind the lights of Christmas day
remains another light,
the hopes and fears of all the years
are met in him tonight

When we discern the greater light,
act out the God within.
then – “God is love”- that great insight
is where we must begin.
We do not need the certainty
however much desired,
for Jesus knew love’s energy
is all that is required.

If Jesus came to us today,
what might his message be?
It may be just the same as then
with pow’r and urgency.
God’s kingdom still belongs to those
who suffer for the right;
to those who work for truth and peace
and in these find delight

When God is known at every time
and seen in every place
then sacred myst’ry steals into
each time and every space.
This truth made plain in Bethlehem
is hers and his and mine,
with God beyond, between, within
we live in love divine.

Readings

Hear now of Jesus of Nazareth

From the Gospel according to St John
Jesus said “I have come that you might have life and have it in all its fullness. Love one another. By this will all people know that you are my disciples, that you have love, one for another”.

And from the Epistle of Paul to the Church at Ephesus.

God has allowed us to know the secret of his plan and it is this: He purposes that all human history shall be consummated in Christ, that everything that exists shall find its perfection and fulfillment in him. And here is the staggering thing: that we, who are the first to put our trust in Christ, we have a part to play in the working out of his purpose”

The Preaching of the Word

On the tenth day before Christmas I awoke at my usual hour of 4am and it struck me like a bombshell: “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything”. I have no idea what prompted the thought, and it kept reverberating through my mind “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything”.

I suspect the reason for this awakening, this epiphany, the enlightening moment, was due to two things.

(1) The inanity and insanity of the days before Christmas. It seems to be getting worse as the years go by.

(2) The second thing that probably prompted me was hearing on the BBC news the computer generated voice of Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant physicists of our day .
“The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have, have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own, and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded”.

This view was offset by a statement by Rollo Carpenter, the creator of Cleverbot, the robot computer whose software learns from its previous conversations and which has fooled many people into thinking they are conversing with a human being. Rollo Carpenter maintains that we will stay in control of technology for “a decently long time” and it will take “a few decades” before we will have either the computing power or the algorithms to achieve full artificial intelligence. “A few decades!” If he intended to ease my concerns, he failed miserably!

The news item reminded me, as it did the presenter of the news, of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 saga “A Space Odyssey: 2001” where the astronaut commands the computer H.A.L. 9000 to open the doors of the spaceship and Hal replies “I’m sorry Dave. I can’t do that”. Kubrick was a bit out with his time line of 2001 but what’s a few decades between friends – or enemies for that matter. The film critic Robert Ebert said of the movie “Two out of three people who see it will assure you it is too long, or too difficult, or (worst of all) merely science fiction. In fact it is a parable about the nature of man.” He went on to say “Perhaps it is the nature of man not to wish to know too much about his own nature”.

That may have been true in 1968. It is no longer, especially in the light of the fact that in 2013 the E.U. contributed one billion euros towards the Human Brain Project which aims to design a two way brain/computer interface. My non computerized brain boggles at the thought of being connected to the internet. James Lovelock has a pacemaker connected to an external computer and admits to “an empathic dread for some unfortunate person whose body becomes connected to one of more of the ubiquitous social networks.” Perish the thought! Perish the persona! His point is the same as that of Yuval Harari “We have to be sure we need these new life forms”

What was the result of me hearing the BBC news item? I Turned to a decade old book of Lesslie Newbiggin whose insights remain largely unrecognized, and who is devastatingly clear about the limits of what we call “liberal theology”. What is liberal theology? It is the kind of theology you hear from me week after week. It is that all dogma must be open to question in the light of our present understanding. Last week’s refutation of the virgin birth and angels fluttering down from heaven would be an example. Liberalism maintains that all dogma is, and must be, open to question because of the advancement of human knowledge. To speak of angels fluttering down from heaven and Jesus ascending into heaven on the basis of a three tier flat earth is nonsense in the twenty first century, and, in this sense, I will be a liberal theologian to the day I die.

But there is an obvious weakness to liberal theology, as Newbiggin pointed out. It inevitably leads to nihilism, which is just a flash word for nobody believing anything, and, “if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.” It’s not easy to stand for something when the earth beneath you is constantly moving. As Newbiggin puts it “In human affairs action is required before all the questions can be asked and answered”. Artificial intelligence is an example of this.

Another problem with liberalism is that it puts our questions and our answers at the centre of life – and that is a disaster not only from an ecological point of view but from almost any viewpoint. ”. I continue to despair over Descartes with his famous phrase “I think therefore I am” Hope doesn’t lie in our thinking. Thinking invariably leads to bigger and better nuclear weapons. Hope lies in loving. “I love therefore I am” – and that is precisely what the Christian faith is all about. Our place is not in a box in a theatre watching a play. It is on the stage in the drama, making decisions without knowing all the answers and desperately needing a pivot about which we can operate. The claim of the Christian Church is that Jesus of Nazareth, the one who referred to himself as “the son of man” is such a pivot. As Newbiggin puts it “Knowing cannot be severed from living and acting for we cannot know the truth unless we seek it. The Christian faith is not basically about knowledge. It is about hearing the call to follow one who described himself as the son of man, and see where it leads. Dear old Joe Oldham put it in a striking way when he entitled his book “Life is Commitment”.

All of this, I recognize, is very heady stuff. Let me then finish with some extracts from Studdert Kennedy’s very simple and straightforward poetry.

How do I know that God is good? I don’t.
I gamble like a man. I bet my life
upon one side in life’s great war. I must.
I can’t stand out. I must take sides. The man
who is neutral in this fight is not a man.
He’s bulk and body without breath. I want to live, live out,
not wobble through my life somehow and then into the dark.
I must have God. This life’s too dull for aught but suicide.
What’s man to live for else?
I am no fool. I have my reasons for this faith, but they are not the coldly calculated formulae of thought divorced from feeling. They are true, too true for that.
I know not why the evil, I know not why the good, both mysteries remain insoluble.
I know that both are there, the battle set, and I must fight on this side or on that.
I can’t stand shivering on the bank, I plunge head first. I bet my life on Christ, Christ crucified.
Such is my faith and such my reasons for it, and I find them strong enough. And you? You want to argue? Well I can’t! It’s a choice and I choose the Christ.

The point of the poem, as is the point of today’s service , is that “if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything” which is precisely the position in which our society finds itself today not only with respect to artificial intelligence but the complete and utter ridiculousness of Santa as the saviour of capitalism before whom both our society and our government bow the knee.

Offering

And just to make it clear exactly where we stand with respect to the religion of capitalism, let us now worship God with our offering.

Offering Prayer

Not only what we say and do
This too Lord is what we think of you”

Call to Covenant

And so we come to what I was referring to in the beginning – John Wesley’s call to recommit ourselves to Jesus of Nazareth and his way of life. He puts it in terms of renewing of a covenant, a phrase with which I have difficulty. Covenant, dictionary defined, is “an agreement to do or not to do a certain act”. Historically a covenant is a contract under seal and has led to the woeful theology of our future being sealed by the blood of Jesus on Calvary, a theology that I unreservedly reject. Love, as expressed by Jesus is not conditional. The love of God is unconditional . Period! To reduce life and love and the future to a contract is to miss the point completely.

Notwithstanding this, there is without doubt a necessity for commitment – a commitment to the fullness of life found in Jesus of Nazareth as over and against the worshipping of the almighty dollar and the pursuing of pleasure , – the bowing of the knee to St Gina and St James, and worshipping in the citadels of Capitalism otherwise known as Shopping Centres which will be packed today as people scramble at the post Christmas sales. It really is the case that “if you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything” and the New Year really is a good time to renew our commitment to the one who brings us fullness of life.

Before we do this let us engage in an act of confession – an expression of where we have fallen short of the mark. The most common word for Sin is hamartia which gives us the picture of an archer releasing his arrow and it falling short of the target. It is a good description of where many of us find ourselves today: falling short of the mark.
That is what repentence is about: being honest as far as our performance is concerned.

Forgiveness is about being released from the past. As Hannah Arendt points “without being released from what we have done, it is conceivable that our whole life could be determined by one single deed” – and that would be a tragedy of immense proportions. It should not be and shall not be. We all make mistakes and thank God both as individuals and as a community we can start again.

For our prayers of confession and forgiveness today we will largely use the words as used by John Wesley in the covenant service

Spirit of Life, you have revealed in Jesus of Nazareth the way of to experience fullness of life.
We confess with shame our slowness to learn of him, and our reluctance to follow him. You have spoken and we have not heard. The magnificence of life has shone and we have been blind. You have stretched out to us through the hands of our fellows and we have passed by. We have experienced your love and are unworthy of it
Forgive us, we pray
Forgive us wherein we have wasted our time or misused your gifts. Forgive us when we have excused our wrongdoing, and evaded our responsibilities. Forgive us that we have been unwilling to overcome evil with good, and have drawn back from the cross
Forgive us, we pray
If we have made no ventures in community, if we have kept in our heart a grievance against another, if we have not sought reconciliation, if we have been eager to punish rather than redeem.
Forgive us we pray
Let us each in silence make our own confession to the Spirit of Life.

People of God in the suburb of Wembley Downs, the life to which we are called is the kind of life revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. It stands in stark contrast to the way of life promoted by our politicians. Jesus is the revealer of the way to fullness of life. And upon this life we have embarked. We have confessed that we have not made a good job of it, and we are now free from the controlling influence and the shackles of the past. The future is again before us and I invite you to stand and declare with me

Freed from the control of the past, we hereby recommit ourselves to seeking the fullness of life that we see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.
We pledge ourselves to being and becoming the new community envisaged by Jesus.
Challenged and inspired by him, we choose this day to travel together into the future, to seek justice and love and to walk on the path of God’s directing.
And may the covenant we have made with each other this day be lived out in the days to come. Amen

HYMN 675 TIS

Lord, the light of your love is shining,
in the midst of the darkness shining:
Jesus, light of the world, shine upon us,
set us free by the truth you now bring us –
shine on us, shine on us

Shine, Jesus, shine,
fill the world with your heart and story
blaze Spirit blaze, set our hearts on fire,
flow river, flow,
Flood the nations with grace and mercy,
send forth your word, Lord, and let there be light.

Lord, we come to your awesome presence
from the shadows into the radiance;
by your life we may enter your brightness
search us, try us consume all our darkness
shine on us, shine on us

Shine, Jesus shine……..

As we gaze on your dazzling brightness
so our faces display your likeness,
ever changing from glory to glory:
mirrored here, may our lives tell your story –
shine on us, shine on us.

Shine Jesus shine…..

BENEDICTION