Anglican Diocese of Perth

Northern Region

Bishop Farran's Sermons 2004

A sermon preached by Bishop Brian Farran at Holy Cross Church Hamersley Pentecost 4,2004
(Based on Luke 9:51-62)

Three potential disciples then; three confirmees now

There is tension in the air. No not here, now; but in that travelogue constructed by Luke. There is tension in the air there and then. Jesus is headed for Jerusalem not as a tourist but as a prophet. His visit to Jerusalem will not be for religious sight-seeing but for confrontation. Even the disciples who appear at times dim-witted in the gospel accounts sense the tension and the foreboding.

The atmosphere of tension sharpens whatever Jesus says, especially whatever Jesus says about discipleship, about following him. His recorded sayings in this extract from Luke set in that journey to Jerusalem are radical, even abrasive. The demands Jesus sets forward knife through our easy-going approach to Christian belief.

When Jesus made those initial demands about following, he would have been rubbing up against cultural norms and values. In fact, his first listeners may thought that he was indifferent to the ordinary, basic requirements of human solidarity. Yet Jesus does not resile from the radical edge he places upon following.

Three would-be followers place themselves (potentially) at Jesus' disposal. Each receives a destabilizing response that seems to turn them off discipleship. Two thousand years later (almost), in Hamersley three disciples pledge to follow Jesus now, with those original requirements for discipleship reverberating in their ears, and in our ears too. Are these three new disciples brave, fool-hardy, or convinced that living radically within an increasingly conservative society is the only possible authentic way to live with God and with themselves?

Well already last Sunday you had the privilege of hearing David, Lorena and Karly tell their stories of conversion (turning to Christ) and of discipleship (following) and of the powerful difference that this has made to their living. This church has been a real blessing to these three disciples. May I (if this does not seem crass) congratulate this church on being an authentic Christian community and being such an attractive version of Christian faith and practice? Clearly, this church has made a huge wonderful difference to the lives of these three disciples.

I suppose that as you listened to their stories (as I was privileged to myself yesterday over morning tea in my living room) you may have heard echoes of your own experience or situation or faith development. It is likely that as each dealt with the particular issues that provoked faith or awareness of God, you might have heard resemblances to similar provocations in your experience too. Personal stories are always powerful in that they speak into everyone's lives simply because they are accounts of being human I remember from my school-days Latin lessons that the Roman poet Ovid once wrote, "I am a man therefore nothing human is alien to me. " As a young eager teenager engaged with God, I found that secular insight most helpful in appreciating that through Jesus God in all of God's fullness knows first-hand the condition of human beings.

Then and still I think that God is amazingly sympathetic to human beings, given that the vast huge majority of this planet's population live tragic, tormented and pain-filled lives. I think of all those hundreds of thousands of Sudanese for instance who have died from the onslaught of military violence in a civil war. Or closer to home, I think of that extended family in Bendigo who are shattered by the loss in a tragic car accident of four of the five members of the one family, or of that young French exchange student's family who grieve her death from that same accident whilst a visitor m a country that was supposed to be a land of opportunity for her.

My point is that whenever we hear stories of faith either in testimonies as last Sunday or in Holy Scripture as in the Gospel piece from Luke this morning we also hear echoes of other stones, other experiences that conflate together. We never hear Scripture in a mental vacuum. We always hear the words of Jesus coming out of a particular context whose full details are not explicit, and whose words we must seek to understand as we apply them now in our own different contexts.

Let me concentrate for a moment upon the original context when Jesus seemingly places obstacles before three would-be disciples. We must remember that the original audience of Jesus both those in the text itself and those for whom the text was first written would have the stories of the prophets clearly in their minds, particularly as at that time there was a popular expectation of prophetic revival.

The threefold call and offer to follow remind the reader of the text of the threefold willingness of Elisha to follow Elijah in the period before Elijah's ascension (2 Kings 2: 1-6). Here in verse 57 and in verse 61 are the only places in Luke's gospel where someone volunteers to follow.

Jesus responds to all three potential disciples with indications of the radical nature of discipleship that cuts across previously accepted cultural values and behaviours. The starkness of his requirements suggests that a new world order is present in him that will not fit neatly into existing social customs, expectations and requirements. We are close to that favoured image of not putting new wine into old wineskins lest the old burst and all is lost.

Of course, as the closest followers reflected in another gospel on their experience of following, Jesus indicated to them that whatever they had given up had been overly compensated for by the new community that they formed. Indeed, this is where the life of the local church is critical to authenticating the gospel. The local church is expected to act as the new family for those who discover that their families of origin are incapable of offering the liveliness that is naturally required to live as an authentic Christian.

The Church has to acknowledge the difficulties in front of anyone trying to live as a disciple. The Church cannot be naive about indicating the costs of discipleship nor the struggles involved in being human.

One of the fiercest critics of Christianity the German philosopher Nietzsche complained that Christian  discourse was essentially about unreal persons with unreal desires and fears.

Now let us think of discipleship in our own context, here and now.

Christians are intended by the teaching of Jesus to be thoroughly radical people. This may seem a surprise, given that our reputation in society is for conservatism, for life-denying and for being wowsers. I think we gained this kind of reputation in the 1950s and it has stuck with us. During the 1950s and at least the next decade, the Christian Church did not think theologically (at least in public and especially on Sundays) but moralized instead. So being Christian was all about being good, being a model citizen, and about being in church. I cannot recall during that period (and admittedly I was young) any real efforts to offer serious bible exposition, or theological teaching, or local social justice initiatives that exemplified the Kingdom of God in very local settings. Mostly, sermons seemed to be either an almost literal re-telling of Scripture, certainly not any contextual unpacking, or of moralizing or a quasi-political commentary from a Christian perspective.

Discipleship seemed to differ little from the behaviour of the rest of the community except perhaps that Christians at that time did not talk publicly about sex.

Now, we have been through periods of marvellous theological exploration, huge advances in gaining knowledge about the exact contexts of the various books of the New Testament, and the central preaching of Jesus about the Reign of God. Whereas Jesus preached about the Kingdom of God, the church preached about Jesus and tended to ignore the very centrepiece of Jesus' teaching. What a strange paradox!

The centrepiece of Jesus' teaching has been rediscovered. Much has been written about the Kingdom of God that helpfully offers would be disciples insights into the kind of life that discipleship is to be. Being a Christian is to live essentially with two dimensions of awareness - thankfulness and defiance. As Bishop John Taylor once wrote in his book, Enough is Enough, "we are to live eucharistically and defiantly". What is the defiance of which the bishop writes?

Well, it is to live out the radical teaching of Jesus that turned upside down so much of the then accepted social norms. Jesus insisted that the least would become the greatest, that the last would be first. But this teaching of inclusion that embraced the least, the last and the lost even began to be compromised within the earliest periods of the church's life, as early as the controversies that are recorded for instance in the Acts of the Apostles.

I am strongly indicating that Christian Faith is not something that can be placed over an already existing set of beliefs, or even a way of understanding yourself. Christian Faith provides a new way of understanding yourself that is theo-centred (God -centred) not self-centred.

What has happened is that just as with wood veneer when what seems like real wood is glued over chipboard, so it is possible to embrace a Christian veneer without having made the principal adjustment of centring one's life upon the realization of the Reign of God here and now. Commitment to living as a sample of the Reign of God alters values, commitments and behaviour. It leads to defiant living. Let me give a simple instance of such defiant living that captured my imagination as I thought about placing myself at Christ's disposal for the fuller realisation of the Reign of God. This account comes again from Bishop John Taylor from a series of Bible Studies he gave and which I attended at a course in Canterbury in 1988. The studies became the basis of another of his books, Kingdom Come.

READ P. 70,71 AND 92,93 in Kingdom Come

(To go to the web site, type in Google Oasis of Peace)

The issue before us as we pledge ourselves as followers, as disciples, is what piece of defiance against apathy or indifference or social injustice or neglect must this church undertake in order to be authentic to our foundation as a preview of the Reign of God that is now unfolding gradually and that in its fullness becomes the Last Day.

Well, that is your task prayerfully and determinedly to discern how to be a sign and sample of the Reign of God as followers of Jesus Christ, who challenges all obstructions to God's justice and presence. Becoming that kind of challenge is today part of being an authentic disciple. It is still a matter of living as an alternative to the mainstream.