Waiting impatiently in the Doctor’s waiting room, I thumbed through the pile of traditional magazines. Most of them were about twelve months old and most of them dealt with the so called celebrities of screen and stage and how some had lost so many kilos in so many days. Just my kind of reading! And then, right in the middle of the pile, I came across an issue of the Smithsonian magazine with photos of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln on the cover with the caption: “Darwin and Lincoln, born on the same day 200 years ago, they changed the world forever. Their genius, their legacy, their humanity”. I avidly picked it up and, such is the disorganised appointment timetable of most medicos, I was able to read it before I was ushered into the Doctor’s rooms. I was most impressed with the article, so much so, that, to the shock horror of my beloved, I took the magazine home to copy it. I hasten to add that it was duly returned the next day.

I mention all this because the rephrasing the title of the article provides me with a framework for what I want to say this morning

Jesus of Nazareth.
born two thousand one hundred years ago
his genius, his legacy, his humanity.
and, in so far as he reveals the purposes of God, his divinity,
changed the world forever.

This I would submit is a summary of the words we call “The Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth”. Those of you who attended the Lenten series will remember that, after weeks of scriptural analysis, Bill Loader concluded his sessions with the words “The story of Jesus is about change and hope.”

Two things we need to recognise about change

The first is that change is of the nature of life and always has been part of the human condition. Life is dynamic. The world is dynamic. It is in motion. The world changes as we walk in it. Change is the name of the game! The Christian faith likewise is dynamic. Change is so important to Jesus that he talks of it in terms of “being born again”. Or as Alfred North Whitehead put it “Our existence is in our becoming”. We are a work in process. We are moving, we are changing, growing – and this may be for good or bad. There is no denying the dynamics of our existence. And as Somerset Maugham said many years ago “If change is the essence of existence, one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy”.

The second is that if we fail to recognise the centrality of change, we face dire consequences. At exactly 5.13am, the 18th April 1906. a cow was standing somewhere between the main barn and the milking shed on the old Shafter Ranch in California, minding her own business. Suddenly the earth shook, the skies trembled, and when it was all over there was nothing of the cow showing above ground but a bit of her tail sticking up.

The Shafter cow is a sort of symbol for our times. She stood quietly enough, thinking such gentle thoughts as cows are likely to have, while huge forces outside her ken built up all around her and – within a minute – discharged it all at once in a great movement that changed the configuration of the earth, and destroyed a city, and swallowed her up. (1)

I was interested the other day to learn a little known aspect of evolution pointed up by William Jungers. “Evolution is all too often been depicted as a straight line development from knuckle dragging apelike creatures to upright human beings. Jungers maintains that this is “simplicity born of ignorance… There have been many experiments in human evolution and all of them but us have ended in extinction”. I find this a very sobering thought in the light of the contemporary scene where nuclear warfare and climate change offer real possibilities of extinction. We say, of course, that we would not be foolish enough to allow either to happen. Don’t you believe it! If a man has a rock in his hand he will throw it, if he has a club in his hand he will use it, if he has a hydrogen bomb he will, if pushed far enough, drop it. To say that we would not be stupid enough to engage in nuclear warfare goes against everything we know and have experienced of ourselves. The Brits and Cologne, the Americans and Nagasaki it’s all there! To say that we would not be stupid enough to destroy ourselves is probably what the other evolutionary lines would have said had they survived to our stage of development.

                                    *                                    *                                    *                                   

The problem we face with change is, of course, that we don’t like it. We seem to have a built in resistance to change. We see this clearly with respect to climate change. You and I haven’t the technical expertise to assess the situation. We can only listen to the evidence and come to a conclusion on the basis of the evidence. My conclusion is that climate change is a real threat. The earth is moving beneath our feet. Will we then make the appropriate changes? I doubt it! Information in itself does not result in change. This is being played out before our very eyes: denial, greed, nationalism, political advantage – the list goes on and on. The really frightening thing about coping with climate change, indeed about change itself, is that it necessitates people working together. Life is about relationships. The primary problem is not technological. It is political and social – and the signs are not good. I would remind you again of Paul Tillich’s definition of sin “Sin is the structure of self destruction”. Those who see humankind riding an upward bound escalator hindered only by irrationality haven’t got to square one. The earth is indeed shaking beneath our feet.

The Shafter cow is a symbol of our times – that unless we have an understanding of change in our world, the importance of being born again, we may well find ourselves like the Shafter cow – swallowed up by a vast upheaval in our way of life – suddenly, early in the morning – and another experiment in human evolution will have ended!

One of the sad things about evolution as we perceive it today is that we think of it as purely biological and occurring only in genetic structure. This is the emphasis of the so called “new atheists” who receive a very heavy serve in Karen Armstrong’s new book. (2). What some of us have been saying politely, she states in no uncertain manner. She describes Dawkins and Co as presenting a facile, infantile, undeveloped and inept view of God. They are “parasitically dependent on the form of theism they seek to eliminate”. Behaving like fundamentalists they are at best counterproductive and at worst positively dangerous (3) It reminds me of the story of a scientist who was wandering the woods one day with a friend when he came upon a small turtle. Overcome with pleasure he picked up the turtle and started home, thinking to surprise his children with it. After a few steps, he paused and surveyed the animal doubtfully. “What’s the matter?” asked his friend. Without responding the scientist retraced his steps as precisely as possible and gently set the turtle down upon the exact spot from which he had picked it up. Then he turned solemnly to his friend. “It just struck me” he said “that perhaps for one man I have tampered enough with the universe.” It was not a denial of science. It was a recognition that science itself is not enough. I have no problem with science itself. It is the arrogance of some scientists that riles me – an arrogance seen in a “Catalyst” programme where there were comments such as “It will be science that solves the world’s problems”; “Our existence on this planet depends upon science”. On a recent Q & A programme there was a guy who had an avid faith in science but was critical of those who had a faith in Jesus of Nazareth. They would do well to note the humility in the words the great Albert Einstein “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science…. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our full faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of all true religion. In this sense, and this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men”. It really is staggering how much you have to know before you know how little you know.

Alongside biological mutation there is required what might be called social mutation – homo humanus vis a vis homo sapiens. And it is here, of course, that we identify Jesus as the “breakthrough” person. When Pilate said of Jesus “Behold the man” he was saying far more than he knew. “Ecce homo humanus!” Jesus, we maintain, is the catalyst of change, the means by which the new community desired by God is to be brought into being – the new community described in biblical days as “The Kingdom of God”, the phrase that Kenneth Leech refers to as “the integrating and central core of the Gospel”. “By neglecting the Kingdom of God in our preaching, we have lost the integrating and central core of the Gospel. The disastrous result is “saved” individuals who comfortably fit into the old order, while the new order goes unannounced.” (4)

Somehow we have to face up to the fact that the Church as God’s instrument of change has largely lost the plot. For the first 300 years or so the Church was on track, they were described as “People of the Way”, and those who persecuted them got the message. They were a threat to the social and political systems of their day. They wanted change! Then came the take over by the Emperor Constantine. The Church was recognised and became a powerful social entity. This era is known as “Christendom” and, fortunately, it is now coming to an end. The Church is no longer a power, a force in our society. Christendom is at an end and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men will never put Christendom together again. The Church is, and must be, an instrument of change, but power and control have no part to play in effecting that change. The Christian faith is not about power. It is about relationships. Jesus was crucified by the secular and religious powers of his day. The Church as an established powerful institution is contrary to everything that Jesus lived and died for.

What then is the theology that should undergird our role as the Church? The other day I came across an article we used to use in Faversham House Conferences fifty years ago. It described the Church in terms of Pioneers and Settlers with the Wild West presenting two kinds of theology: Settler theology and pioneer theology.

In Settler theology God is the Mayor. The settlers look to him to keep things going. In Pioneer theology God is the trail Boss. The trail boss lives, eats and sleeps with the pioneers. The trail boss gets down in the mud with the pioneers to help push the wagon which frequently gets stuck.
In Settler theology, Jesus is the Sheriff – the guy authorized by the Mayor to enforce the rules and decide who will be thrown into jail. In Pioneer theology, Jesus is the Scout, who rides ahead to find out which way the pioneers should go, and who shows those on the trail what it really means to be a pioneer.

In Settler theology the Church is the courthouse. It is the settler’s symbol of law, order, stability and most important, security. In Pioneer theology, the church is a covered wagon, always on the move. It is where the action is. It bears the marks of life and movement. It isn’t comfortable but the pioneers couldn’t care less. There is a new world to be discovered.

And so it goes on. (5)

Tom Frame has written a new book. (6) Frame, as a Bishop supporting the Iraq war, is not a person whom I would usually quote but as a contemporary church historian he has a real contribution to make. In his book he traces the history of the church over the years from the Second World war. It appears that many of us grew up as Christianity enjoyed its zenith (1946 – 1956) and there are seven reasons for the decline in the late 50s
                  1. growth of alternative clubs
                  2. collapse of Sunday School and Youth movements
                  3. disconnection from respectability
                  4. growth of alternative views
                  5. erosion of concern about judgment and the after life
                  6. church out of touch with science
                  7. failure to speak with one clear voice.

He concludes that “the Christianity which most Australians encounter is weak and insipid and, in more than a few instances, uninspiring and unintelligible…. religion is seen as a personal choice reflecting one’s temperament….belonging to a faith community is irrelevant because religion is a personal pursuit …Belief has gradually become implausible or irrelevant…Because it isn’t a quest for truth, it is largely a take it or leave it affair” It is seen as a matter of personal preference. “It has no bearing on how people choose to lead their lives.”

This is the context in which the church is today called to exercise its ministry. This is the wild west where we have to break camp and move into the future rather than circling the wagons. If “the Christianity which most Australian encounter today is weak and insipid, and, in more than a few instances uninspiring and intelligent” ours is the task of making it otherwise, not by turning back the clock but by breaking camp and moving on.

And this brings me to the sixty four trillion dollar question and the main thrust of what I want to say, and what the scripture passages are about. “How do we change things? How is change effected?

For most people in the world it is by power, the power of politics, the power of violence and military might, the power of indoctrination, the power of education, the power of deterrence, the power of the media – the list goes on and on of measures that work from the outside in – manipulating, moulding, forcing …. And in the presence of all of this a man hangs on a cross, bearing witness to the futility of power, calling people to work from the inside out – the exact opposite to how we work today. This is the essential message of the Gospel passage. It is not simply a passage about Jesus coming into conflict with hand washing tradition. It is the importance of working from the inside out.

Our society today, for example, has a drug problem. How do we try and tackle it? From the outside in. We concentrate on restricting the supply and give little or no attention to the question of demand. Why do people take drugs in the first place? A few brave souls are concentrating on this aspect but the majority effort is about restricting supply – working from the outside in.

Our society has got it back to front. In Jesus of Nazareth is the “Anatomy of Change”. I first thought of the title “The Nature of Change” for this morning’s reflection but then realised that it didn’t go far enough. Jesus is about the anatomy of change – the outstretched hands and the broken body on a cross – confronting the necessity for change and copping the consequences. “If any one would come after me let them take up their cross and follow me.” This is the physicality, the anatomy of change – the embodiment of sacrificial love. The Christian faith is not the way of power, it is the way of a love. Christina Rossetti summed it up in her great hymn. “Love is the key of life. Of all Christ did of all he said love is the key.” Love is of course a very ambiguous word. As the word is used today it can mean anything. In the Christian context, however, it means selfless outgoing concern and compassion. That’s why I find myself using the words “sacrificial” love – a situation where one sacrifices one’s own concern for the sake of others. This is the anatomy of Change – the way of love rather than power.
                  I have mentioned before what I regard as the greatest disaster within my admittedly very limited life. I still grieve over it.
                  It began with reading of a speech by Ron Sider about the awfulness of war, and the cross as an alternative to the sword. He finished his address with these words. “To rise to this challenge in history we Christians need to do three things
(1) To reject ways in which we have misunderstood Jesus’ call to peacemaking
(2) We need to embrace the full biblical understanding of peace
(3) We need to die by the thousands.”

The kairos event for me happened some three years after the Iraq invasion when four Christian Peace Team workers were kidnapped in Iraq. Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) are small groups of Christians who go to trouble spots to identify with the suffering there. The body of one of those kidnapped was found on a rubbish heap. The question then was what should happen as far as CPT was concerned? The question was, “Should they stay or withdraw.” I had quite a bit to do with CPT when in Iraq during the Shock and Awe bombing and when this happened I immediately wrote to them urging them to stay and saying that I could provide at least four other people, including myself, who would be prepared to go and be part of the Team. The idea was that as one person was struck out another would be ready to take their place at the plate. CPT eventually decided to withdraw – and I believe one of the really great moments of history was lost: the opportunity for Christians of the world to die by the thousands if that was what was required. In our lifetime there was an opportunity to present the Gospel– and we blew it! The opportunity of a life time, of an era, of a century, of a thousand years – and we blew it! Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.

The Christian faith is about change. It is about new life bursting out of the old. It is about life in the presence of death. The theological expression for this is resurrection – something that I believe has nothing to do with the resuscitation of a body. It is about new life breaking out of the old. If you want to believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus then that’s OK. I heard someone the other day refer to “the democratisation of faith”. But for me the resuscitation of a physical body misses the point of a community who believed that the crucifixion was not the end of the matter, “a community convinced that the love of God was not and will not be defeated by human cruelty, blindness and self serving political and social systems”. We are the community of the resurrection. “The inner energy that drives the evolutionary process, which lures creation towards deep community, compassion and peace is the energy of resurrection” The resurrection stories are about new life bursting out of the old, of change, of the presence of God in our future. The Christian faith is about change, “the confidence that the future belongs to love and the qualities of peace justice and community that flow from it.” (6)

What then is the essential work of the Christian Church today? It is to break camp and move on in the name of the one who presents to us the way the truth and the life – the life of sacrificial love as the way to effect the necessary changes to enable humankind to live life in all its fullness as we see it in Jesus of Nazareth the breakthrough person, homo humanus, the saviour of the world.

You don’t get any bigger challenge than that!

Acknowledgements

(1) ‘Dynamics of Change’ Don Fabun
(2) The Case for God, Bodley Head
(3) Review by Peter Kirkwood in the Weekend Australian Aug 2009
(4) ‘Spirituality and Pastoral Care’
(5) www.servant.org/pa_ft.htm
(6) ‘Losing My Religion’
(7) Quote from a Keith Rowe sermon on ‘Hope’