Revelation 7:9-17
Matthew 5:1-12
Do you know what code-switching is? It’s when you change your communication style depending on the context. Kids learn how to code-switch early on – they know (usually) to speak to the School Principal in a calm and polite way, which is quite different to the way they talk to their friends in the playground, and completely different to the way they talk to their parents. Nurses in the break room speak differently to nurses on the ward, and anyone who deals with customers knows that you put on a different voice and manner for customers than when you’re out the back or at home. People who belong to minority groups find themselves code-switching all the time. Sometimes it’s to do with the language they’re speaking, or else speaking more loudly or softly or making more or less eye contact or using more or fewer hand movements.
On Wednesday, the new Lord Mayor of Perth failed to code-switch when talking about transgender constituents. Instead of behaving like a statesman and the leader of a city that is becoming increasingly diverse, he behaved like a shock-jock looking to draw attention to himself. The condemnation was swift, of course, but even more bizarre was the response. Mr Zempilas forgot he was the mayor, apparently. So he spoke just as he would if he was having a beer with his mates, or, in this strange world we inhabit, as if he held a well-paid job in a media organisation.
Writing this week in the New York Review of Books, the US essayist and playwright Wallace Shawn reflected on the changes he has experienced over his long life. The USA has always been brutal, he reflects, but now the rhetoric truly reflects the reality. There was a time when public leaders in the USA spoke of peace among the nations and the eradication of poverty. No more.
Trump has liberated a lot of people from the last vestiges of the Sermon on the Mount. A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good. The fact that the leader of one of our two parties—the party, in fact, that has for many decades represented what was normal, acceptable, and respectable—was not ashamed to reveal his own selfishness, was not ashamed to reveal his own indifference to the suffering of others, was not even ashamed to reveal his own cheerful enjoyment of cruelty…all of this helped people to feel that they no longer needed to be ashamed of those qualities in themselves either. They didn’t need to feel bad because they didn’t care about other people. Maybe they didn’t want to be forbearing toward enemies. Maybe they didn’t want to be gentle or kind.
In a world in which the rich want permission to take as much as they can get without feeling any shame, and many of the not-rich are so worried about their own sinking fortunes that they find it hard to worry about the misery of anyone else, Trump is the priest who grants absolution. In a way, he seems to be telling his followers that perhaps compassion is just one more value of the elite culture that he and they hate, like speaking in long sentences and listening to classical music.
Liberated from the last vestiges of the Sermon on the Mount. That’s where ‘western culture’ has arrived. No more room for meekness or mercy or peacemaking. Just arrogance and cruelty.
For us Christians, as we come to terms not only with the violence inherent in our social systems, but the violence inherent in our religious systems, we may feel a loss of confidence, a creeping despair. Once, we might have imagined ourselves offering an antidote to the selfishness and indifference, but now our stocks are so low in civil society, that it is hard to speak our truth without feeling like hypocrites, let alone being called hypocritical by others.
I don’t subscribe to this silly view that Christians in Australia and Europe, the US and the UK are somehow being persecuted because the shops are open on Sunday or whatever. There are persecuted Christians in the world, but they don’t look like us. But we are undergoing an ordeal. Not because institutional Christianity has lost influence and credibility. But because, I suspect, we can no longer rely on civil society to even pretend that the pure in heart and those who ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness’ are truly blessed. We are called in this moment to proclaim a message that is against the rhetoric of the prevailing culture, and we are not equipped for this new struggle.
But there’s hope. In St John The Divine’s vision of the new creation that we heard from the Book of Revelation, the great multitude, that no one could count, from every tribe and people and language, are standing before the throne of God and before the Lamb. They have been through an ordeal, but their hero is a cute little lamby lamb. Can you think of anything milder and less threatening than a baby sheep? An animal we routinely slaughter and put on the barbecue? Is there anything meeker than that? Yet it is the lamb whom the saints of God worship around the throne, embracing gentleness over violence and rivalry.
This vision of John is not just an aspiration for the future, but a blueprint for the church here and now. We gather as saints around this altar to worship the one who is self-giving love. And God lifts up our hearts, lifts up our vision, builds up our energy and passion for the work we must do.
And we are not alone. You see, we could easily imagine today that the saints are historic figures, there to act as an example or inspiration. We could easily imagine today that our loved ones who have died, those ‘unpraised and unknown’ saints are simply a memory. But no. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. As we worship the lamb today, the communion of saints is gathered about with us – praying with us, worshipping with us, yearning with us the life to come.
We are not alone today, or ever. The communion of saints of which you and I are a part, is the precise opposite of a Trump rally, wallowing in vindictiveness and mockery. We are in a crowd, with Cuthbert and Mary, and all those precious saints who are and have been part of our community and family. But this crowd has no need to jeer and demean, because though we are poor in spirit, though we have much to mourn, though we hunger and thirst for righteousness that is still unattainable, we worship the lamb who was slain, the One in whom weakness is made strong, and who is victorious not through conquest but through peacemaking.
The Lord Be With You
[I am indebted to The Reverend Professor Scott Cowdell for some of the insights and language in this sermon]