When I first started singing lessons, one of my party pieces was Imagine by John Lennon. It contains the lines ‘Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too, imagine all the people living life in peace’. It is, in many ways, a beautiful song – though these days I would have some critiques of its assumptions. But the reason I’m mentioning it today is because of today’s useful fact in the sermon series on Isaiah.
On Thursday afternoon, Izzy and her Dad rode the bus to Kirribilli House. Izzy is 13 years old and, after breathing smoke for days on end, she wanted to demand real action on climate change from our leaders. She and her Dad joined the peaceful protest outside the gates, where obviously the Prime Minister was not in residence because he was in Hawaii. As the day wore on, and after the speeches and chanting, 25 armed riot police showed up in a van and started targeting leaders, arresting them and taking them away. One police officer approached Izzy to demand that she leave. He threatened her with arrest, and told her that ‘force may be used’ if she didn’t comply. The interaction was filmed, and it shows a large, loud police officer standing over this small-framed girl who nevertheless maintained eye contact, and refused to be intimidated. It is a powerful set of images, as this young woman clutches her home made sign, holding back tears but stoically holding her ground.
As we work our way through pieces of the Book of Isaiah, we are learning useful facts together!
The first useful fact was that the book of Isaiah is in three sections. First Isaiah is from before the exile to Babylon. The bit we read this week is from First Isaiah. Second Isaiah is from during the exile. The bit we read last week, about building a highway in the desert to lead the people home to Jerusalem, is in Second Isaiah. Third Isaiah is from when the People of God return from exile and start to rebuild Jerusalem. One famous part of Third Isaiah is ‘The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed…’
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On Sunday 15 December, we heard the story of the prophet Isaiah. If you’d like to experience it, watch the video below.
Isaiah 11:1-10
Before one is ordained as a deacon or priest, one goes to visit a psychologist for a battery of psychometric testing, which includes drawing up a kind of family tree of dysfunction. I was reflecting on that experience this week as I celebrated 16 years of ordained ministry, and I remembered explaining to the friendly shrink that both my grandfathers were alcoholics who abused their wives, probably had post-traumatic stress disorder from their war service and who were both remembered as toxic, aggressive, unkind men with few redeeming features. By contrast, my own Father who this week celebrates 45 years married to Mum, is a gentle and kind man who is beloved by everyone he knows. It is no accident that his two sons are a nurse and a priest (albeit a rather cynical and jaded nurse and priest) and that his grandsons are intelligent, creative, kind and respectful young men. While I’m conscious of the privilege of being white and living in Australia, I’m also conscious that in many families trauma begets trauma from one generation to the next, and I count myself very fortunate that the violence and pain of my forefathers is almost entirely absent from the lives of my nephews.
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Today is the beginning of the church’s new year. Advent Sunday begins the new year, and the beginning of the season of Advent. It also means that we change the pattern of scriptures we read each Sunday at the Eucharist. For the past year, we’ve been hearing from Luke because it was Year C in the three year cycle. For the next year, we’ll be hearing gospel readings mostly from Matthew because it is Year A. Year A also gives us a heavy dose of Isaiah during Advent and Epiphany, so this year, throughout December and January I will be preaching a sermon series on the book of Isaiah. What with one thing and another, it will work out at six sermons. I’ve had to resist the urge to drop too much information in the first sermon, and instead I’m going to try to give you one useful fact about Isaiah in each one. By the end you will have six useful facts, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a good number of useful facts to have about anything.
Resistance, Sedition and Treason, anyone?
Luke 23:33-43
The practice of saying the Lord’s Prayer and the Nicene Creed has fallen out of custom in some churches. Indeed, when I came here nine years ago, the custom of saying the creed each Sunday had lapsed. I heard of a speaker recently who visited an Anglican school who launched into the Lord’s prayer and expected at least some people to join in, and had to do an unexpected solo.
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On Sunday 17 November we heard the story of the Circle of the Church Year. If you would like to hear it, you could watch the video below.
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It all began with taxes. Doesn’t it always? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t object to paying taxes. I understand that we all have to contribute. The Emperor has wars to fight and bureaucrats to pay, and the roads and aqueducts don’t maintain themselves. Do I object to Roman control over my people’s land? Of course I do! But, let’s face it, when we had our own kings back in the day it wasn’t all sweetness and light either. And now we have Herod and his family with the title of King, but we all know they’re just business people, same as me. You’ve got to live in the world as it is, not as you’d like it to be. So I’m living in this world, where the Romans are in charge and always will be, and where I need to get ahead.
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A colleague of mine arrived at her new parish to discover a particular custom. The custom was that at the conclusion of each Sunday service, the children from the Sunday School would come to the front of the church and display their creations – perhaps a coloured in picture of a good shepherd, or some sort of craft inevitably involving a paper plate. Then, one of the children would be interviewed about what they had learned that day. The random choosing of a child had results that varied from poignant to hilarious to tearful.
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Remember when you were a child, and stories tended to have a ‘moral’ or a object lesson at the end? So, for ‘The boy who cried wolf’ the moral was ‘don’t lie’. And for ‘the hare and the tortoise’ it was ‘slow and steady wins the race’. Well, whenever I was told the story of the ten lepers, the moral was always ‘don’t forget to say thank you’.
Now, I’d hate to discourage anyone from saying thank you when someone is kind to them. It is a very nice thing to do. One should also eat with the correct cutlery and queue correctly. But to diminish the narrative of Jesus and the ten lepers to a lesson about manners is an example of eisegesis. That is, finding in the text one’s own biases, presemptions and agendas. It is hardly surprising that Sunday School and regular school teachers read this text to groups of children, and land on ‘good manners’ as the take-away lesson. Adults in charge of children have a vested interest in good behaviour. But as disciples of Jesus, we do exegesis – we try to let the text first speak from its own context, with its own emphases. What we then do with interpretation and application is another matter – we call that hermeneutic, but before anything else we try to have a sort of scientific, objective view of the text, putting aside (to the greatest extent possible) our own agenda.
If you have lots of money, there are plenty of ways to rort the system. For instance, you can set up a foundation with deductible gift recipient status. You then funnel some of your profits into the foundation, which employs friends and members of your family to do very important work, and which is heavily branded with your name and logo. The foundation gives some money away, but nothing like as much as it would have cost to pay tax on the original amount, plus you’ve enriched your mates and got some cheap feel-good marketing into the bargain.
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