Jüngel on Beauty and the Beautiful

"According to the self-understanding of Christian faith, there is only one single appearance of truth which - despite all parallels to the beautiful pre-appearance of the truth - follows another law. That is the revelation of God. It is distinguished from the epiphanies of the beautiful in that the origin of all light appears in this event, and indeed appears in such a way that it does not radiate in the light of the world as does the beautiful, but rather appears hidden sub contrario [under the opposite]. The event of revelation cannot therefore be subordinated to the category of the beautiful. Sin - that which God made him, who knew no sin, for the sake of sinners, and for their benefit - was too ugly for that.... The revelation of Jesus Christ shatters all beautiful appearance. It must shatter the beautiful appearance, because it is not a pre-appearance of the truth, but is the truth itself. Yet according to the understanding of the New Testament, this truth occurs fundamentally as a crisis. It does this by confronting the world not only with its finiteness and transience, but also with its merited end and well-earned disgrace. Revelation does this, as Paul expresses it, by 'painting' the crucified 'before your eyes' (Gal. 3.1). From this death as such, it is not apparent that the life of the risen one has been released from it, and with that that eternal life is promised in the form of a visio beatifica [beatific vision], thus a totally unfettered vision of God face to face. For according to the New Testament, God's love is a work in this death. This love is not a love which (like amor hominis [human love]) is kindled by the beautiful, but rather a love which beautifies that which is ugly, namely the self-defacing homo peccator [human sinner], by loving it. As the event of the love of God, the death of Jesus Christ is the opposite of what it appears to be. The cross of Jesus Christ does not disclose that in this death there occurs the unity of life and death in favour of life, which deserves to be called love.

For that disclosure to take place, a renewed coming of the one who has previously appeared sub contraria specie [under the opposite species] is necessary. For this, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is necessary, that is, the Easter coming of the Lord in glory and thus in the unmitigated light of his own being.... For now the beautiful appears both in the alien light of the world as well as in the light of its own being; but then this twilight hanging over the beautiful will come to an end. Then nothing more will appear. For then being in glory will replace appearance.... Then truth and beauty will be identical...here and now the beautiful remains only a glimmer of truth, lighting up and fading away again. With Schopenhauer one can say that the beautiful 'does not deliver' humanity 'from life for ever, but only for a few moments'. In a world context characterized by sham existence and lack of freedom, the experience of the beautiful (as the glimmer of truth) that makes the torn world whole can only be an experience which interrupts this world context. The most that an aesthetic relation can promise is being whole (being eternal) for a moment - in order then to return to the interrupted life context, at best changed and changing. But if one wants it to be more, or if it should become more, if one denies the bitter insight that 'even the beautiful must die', then the beautiful will inevitably become and enemy of the truth.

.... only what makes a claim to truth deserves to be called beautiful, and that only where truth establishes itself in a work can one speak of a work of art. But beauty and art are both welcome and dangerous competitors with the Christian kerygma, for in the beautiful appearance they anticipate that which faith has to declare, without any beautiful appearance and indeed in contrast to it: namely, the hour of truth."

~ Eberhard Jüngel, "'Even the Beautiful Must Die' - Beauty in the Light of Truth", in Theological Essays II (T&T Clark, 1995), 79-81.

Learning to Live in Exile

Sermon for the 20th Sunday After Pentecost
Anglican Parishes of Almaguin/Emsdale
Oct. 14th, 2007

God of all hope, you have called us to be your people. Teach us how to do that so that we can witness to your ways in our world and so to participate in your transformation of it. Amen.

During one of my classes in seminary in Toronto, my theology professor was trying to make a valid point and he used a passage of Scripture from the book of Jeremiah in support of it. After making his point, a student in the back of the class raised her hand and after my professor acknowledged her, she said, “you know sir, Jeremiah just doesn’t speak to me.” Without skipping a beat, my quick witted professor responded with, “Well, frankly dear, I don’t blame him.”

The point is that Jeremiah still speaks to us whether we listen or not, whether we are open to what he has to say to us or whether we think he’s irrelevant—a by-product of another time with nothing of relevance to us.

Last week we considered what it might mean to exist as a people who live thankful lives, even in full view of the complexities and struggles of life. We learned that Israel, even amongst the ruins of Jerusalem, learned how to give thanks to God. This morning, we consider, thanks to this letter from Jeremiah to his fellow Hebrews, what it might mean for Israel and for us to live in exile.

Our first reading is the beginning of a letter which Jeremiah wrote to his fellow Jews who had recently been trucked off to Babylon after Jerusalem fell. There were some prophets who were counseling the people that they would be leaving Babylon shortly and that their stay there would soon end. But, if we were to read further into the letter, Jeremiah calls these prophets liars. Jeremiah’s words to Israel?: Israel better hunker down and spread some roots because this stay in Babylon was looking more permanent than transitory. In fact, Israel remained in Babylon captivity for generations but ultimately they did survive their exilic existence and were restored as a people though many continued to live as Diaspora Jews, as ‘scattered’ Jews within Babylon. This is one of the most astonishing historical phenomena we have in the Hebrew Scriptures that the Jewish people survived the Babylonian exile. If this doesn’t impress you at face value, the Northern kingdom went into captivity as well at the hands of the Assyrians and, well, that’s where we get the name the ‘lost-tribes’ of Israel from…they just disappeared from history.

The story of Israel’s exilic life is ultimately a story of hope in the darkest of days, a story of surviving as a people, when all the odds are stacked high against you. Jeremiah’s counsel is for Israel to continue to exist as Israel, to keep on doing it’s Israel thing—to multiply and not to decrease, and as Israel to seek the welfare of the city, to pray for Babylon, and in its welfare to find its own welfare for Yahweh works—surprise, surprise—even through Babylon. Jeremiah doesn’t counsel revolt against Babylon but an active living in it—and through this, through living as Israel fully immersed in Babylon and its culture, Israel would witnesses to the fidelity of God in a society that is hostile to its existence. Jeremiah doesn’t counsel Israel to passively acquiesce in Babylon, but to be who she is in Babylon—to be active witnesses to God even in Babylon. The vision of Israel’s life in exile is a missionary vision. In Psalm 137 the Psalmist asks : “How can we sing the Lord’s songs in a foreign land?” And yet that is what Israel learned to do, and do well.

We often hear about the death of the church at the hands of secular culture, a culture that has little or merely decorative use for the church. And our culture, if we’re honest with ourselves, is, if not outright hostile to the church’s existence, at the very best, merely puts up with it. But this is nothing new and it shouldn’t come as a surprise, the church was born into such hostility in the Roman empire. So it’s not a new situation, the church has always existed as a witness to the ways and world of God in Christ within a world that would rather not hear about it. And this culture, this situation, this post-Christian world we live in is looking more permanent than transitory. We better learn how to hunker down and learn how to live as the church in our times.

So, just like Israel, the church lives in exile—as the church we live as a peculiar and strange people—as people whose lives are shaped and governed by the gospel and by the virtues and habits of being of Christian discipleship and we exist as this people in a world that is shaped by all sorts of other isms—by materialism, by capitalism, or by secularism to name but a few. Many have sounded the death knell on the church. But just like the rumors of Ina’s Trollove’s death were so greatly exaggerated, so too is our culture’s pronouncement of death upon the church.

Our word this morning from this ancient prophet is a word of hope—what does Jeremiah speak to us this morning?—keep on living as the church in the culture we find ourselves in, keep on being the church: multiply and do not decrease, keep on existing as a people whose lives find their rhythm, not in the time and pace of society and culture, but as the church, as a people whose lives are shaped by God’s time, by God’s time for us in Jesus Christ. Our lives are shaped and given contour and definition by what we do here in our liturgy this morning and by the subtle gestures of our common life because it is in the enactment of this common life, that the transformation of the world has begun.

It is in the subtle gestures of our common life—gestures of kindness, peace, and concord—and in the rhythm of the liturgy, in the formation of Christian discipleship; it is in all of this, in the living of life as Christ’s body to the world, that the church lives its life in exile. The church lives, not in revolt against our culture, but as fully alive within it! This is the call of mission for the church: it is not a call to passive acquiescence, to roll over in Babylon, but a call to an active witness in a culture that so badly needs to hear about the One who has redeemed our world.

Amen.

Living Amongst the Ruins of the City: On Learning to Give Thanks

A Thanksgiving Day Sermon
The Anglican Parish of Almaguin-Emsdale
Oct. 7, 2007
Lam. 1:1-6; Lam. 3:19-26; 2 Tim. 1:1-14; Lk. 17:5-10

Lord of Creation, you who spoke light out of darkness, speak life into us this morning so that we may live lives of thanksgiving so that the world may know You. Amen.

We like Thanksgiving, don’t we? It’s a time of celebration and joyfulness for all that we have in abundance. Giving thanks is almost as natural as breathing, or at least it should be. Someone opens a door for you, you respond automatically with ‘thank you’. But we had to be taught to be thankful. When someone gave you a gift as a child, your parents hopefully taught you to offer them a heartfelt ‘thank you’. Well, our Scripture readings today, specifically the readings from the book of Lamentations, teach us that being thankful is not an easy or trivial thing to do, they challenge us to re-think what it means to be thankful in a world like ours—and in fact, I want to suggest that living a life of thanksgiving requires a lot of effort, and like all things worth working for, is itself an art form, a learned skill, it's something we all keep on learning—and this morning, the Hebrew poets of lament are our teachers.

In our reading from the book of Lamentations, we have what seems to be the exact opposite of giving thanks—we are here witnesses to the ancient Hebrew practice of poetic lament, that literary performance which gave public testimony to the deep grief of the Hebrew people over the destruction of the city of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians. Israel, as a people, had experienced something they never expected, they lived through the ruin and devastation of Jerusalem and more pointedly, they experienced the annihilation of the Temple—the very thing that gave their lives, as Jews, meaning.

But nevertheless, in the middle of the poet’s darkest reflections—and even T.S. Eliot, at his most somber, doesn’t approach the sense of melancholy and sorrow expressed here by this Hebrew poet—even in the middle of all of this, the poet is able to articulate: ‘But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness’. Even in the midst of the tumultuousness of its life, Israel is grateful to her God for his goodness and his provision; even amongst the ruins of the city, Israel learns to give thanks, to acknowledge its hope in God’s mercy, his faithfulness and his steadfast love. The poet, in our canticle, comes to a resolution only as they reflect on God’s provision and his care for his people; the poet is able to wrestle life out of death because of God’s steadfast love.

Following the literary movement of this poet, from the depths of lament to hopefulness of God’s provision, I’m reminded of one of the most moving scenes in modern cinema, from Roberto Benigni’s 1998 movie Life is Beautiful—a movie which takes place during the rise of fascism in Italy during WWII. I’m reminded of the scene where the father and his young son are in the concentration camp, in the most horrible circumstances one can imagine. The father wants to protect his son from the reality of what they are facing and so tells him that the whole thing is just a big game and that the manual labour that he performs every day is just really a competition. In this way the father, a man who can find humor in the most bleak of situations, shields his son from the horrors of the camp which, in the end, saves the son. Here is a man, who in the heart of darkness, is so thankful and grateful for the life of his son, that he struggles to find the beauty of life in order to protect him. He is able to wrestle life out of death so that his son might have hope and not despair.

This is the reality of our lives as Christians, this is what the gospel of thanksgiving is all about! Thanksgiving, giving thanks to God in the middle of the hard things of our existence is an art learned in the living of it; true, deep biblical thanksgiving is a chastened gratitude for what God has given us, for what he had taken us through and for what he will take us through. The celebration of Thanksgiving is more than a one day affair, much more than a long-weekend spent with the family, but something, as Christians, that we live out with our lives, one day at a time.

It’s easy to thank God before meals and for our families (well, most of the time), or for prosperity and health or for the beauty of creation—but after this it gets a little difficult. It’s not an easy thing to live lives of thanksgiving when we have obstacles to be overcome, lessons to be learned, when we need to endure hardship, or to live with those people in our lives who are more thorns than they are roses. Sometimes it’s much easier to become disillusioned with our lives and so become bitter. But this morning, it is not a glib or superficial ‘thank you’ that we offer to God, but we offer our very lives in gratitude to God, as damaged, as broken and as bruised as our lives may be—we live them in thanksgiving to a God who struggled to find life in the heart of darkness, who wrestled life out of death in the life of his resurrected Son so that we might have hope and not despair. True thanksgiving is gratitude born in the full view of all the realities of life, in view of joy & sorrow, of love & brokenness, of pleasure & pain, of gratitude & lament, of life & of death.

So, as we prepare to come to this altar this morning, as we come to perform the church’s most central act of thanksgiving in celebrating the Eucharist—and eucharist itself literally means ‘gratitude’ or ‘thanksgiving’—let’s offer our thanks for God’s wonderful provision and for his beautiful creation we see all around us—for the marvelous colours of this fall season and for a bountiful harvest, but most of all, let us offer our thanks to God for wrestling life out of death.

Amen.

Abelard on Family Life

I came across this in Peter Abelard the other day:

"What man, intent on his religious or philosophical meditations, can possibly endure the whining of children, the lullabies of the nurse seeking to quiet them, or the noisy confusion of family life? Who can endure the continual untidiness of children?" (History of My Misfortunes, ch. 7)

Any of you academics working on your degrees with children present can surely relate to Abelard's concern, hee hee! Well, he never was married (duh!?) and did eventually get castrated by some really angry guys for sleeping with his collegue's daughter. Boy, if only theology faculties could live up to this sort of drama today!

The Upside-Down World of Jesus

A Sermon Preached at Church of the Epiphany, Sudbury ON, July 15, 2007

When my wife Renée and I were expecting the birth of our son William about three years ago now, we were given a popular book that many mothers swear by: What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I’m sure that some of you recognize it. The cover has a picture of a young mother-to-be, rocking peacefully in a serene scene full of bliss and joy. It sounds nice doesn’t it. It didn’t take long after William was born—a couple of sleepless nights to be exact—for me to begin to think that there was something a little slick and slightly dishonest about the title. It’s not that I’m not grateful for books which try to prepare parents-to-be for what they are about to experience. It’s just that having a baby and becoming a parent is such an unexpected, interrupting and world-altering experience that by definition, expecting what’s going to happen is a stretch, to say the least.

We may go into life and the situations we encounter along the way with all sorts of expectations and, if we make the mistake of taking ourselves too seriously, we can be bound to those expectations—and we can get bitter if things don’t work out the way we want. When your world is turned upside-down by something like the birth of a child, you quickly realize that what you thought you recognized as the lay of the land, is actually a completely different landscape. It’s unsettling and it takes time for our eyes to adjust to our new surroundings.

Something similar is going on in today’s gospel with the lawyer we meet. We’re all somewhat familiar with this parable. The parable of the Good Samaritan has indeed seeped into our common vocabulary and popular culture. It’s just another example of the Golden Rule right? “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?” This is usually what we think of when we read the parable—at least that’s the way it was always taught to me. It’s a moral lesson about being good to people, about helping others, about loving thy neighbour as thyself. It’s about being ‘good’ just like the Samaritan, right?

Well, that’s certainly part of it, but if we leave it at this we really miss the subversive nature of Jesus’ parable and indeed of the gospel as a whole. There’s something much more radical going on here—the parable, if we actually read it, or rather allow it to read us, is quite a challenging and unsettling one—it’s a world altering story. And here’s a tip: if we read one of Jesus’ parables and we feel comfortable and settled, chances are that we’ve misread it.

A lawyer, one soaked in the Hebrew law and Jewish religious customs, approaches Jesus, not with a question but with a challenge, with a test, with a public legal dispute. In the Greek we have a strong verb here—and with the tone we get the sense that the lawyer is trying to entrap Jesus—this certainly wouldn’t be the first time. There’s a sense of hostility here—this is no courteous conversation over a cup of tea. The lawyer means business, as they often do.

The lawyer came thinking he knew what to expect from Jesus—he knew what Jesus would say—he had it all figured out, this legal stuff. After all, he had studied the law for quite a long time. “Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” The lawyer is asking the question, not in order to hear something—he didn’t come ready to listen to Jesus, rather he wanted to say something—he wanted to test Jesus’ fidelity to the law. This legal question may indeed be a veiled assault on Jesus’ ministry with the unclean, with those whom Jesus treated as his neighbours. The lawyer came expecting Jesus to play ball.

But instead of answering his question, Jesus throws it back to lawyer—“Well, you, lawyer, you know the law better than anyone—how do you read the law?” This is really a trick question on the part of Jesus and you can sense Jesus’ sarcasm here—of course any good Jew knew the law: 1) Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and 2) Love your neighbours as yourself. “Rabbi, that’s an easy answer!” “Well”, says Jesus, “you know the law, A+, bang on—do that, and you’ll find all the life you need.”

The lawyer’s feathers are ruffled, he wants to justify himself, to defend his case, he wants Jesus to meet his expectations. So he can’t just let it go at that. Loving God, well, that’s the easy part of the law…we all know who God is. But, on the neighbour thing, we’re a little less clear. “So, just who is my neighbour, exactly Rabbi”? His question is that of a point of legality and did in fact concern a central issue in Jewish law. Ancient Jews defined the neighbour in terms of insiders and outsiders and generally a neighbour for a Jew was considered to be a fellow Israelite. But this lawyer wanted an exact definition just in case the legal question of loving one ever came up. He wants to know who the law demands that he love. He wants boundaries, because boundaries make life easier to live. He wants a reality defined in terms of those inside and those outside. If we know who are neighbours are, we can offer them our love. We can meet the demands of the law if we know what the law demands.

But Jesus doesn’t answer his question...he doesn’t play ball here either. Instead, Jesus did what he did best: he told him a story. A traveler who was on his way to Jericho, is attacked, robbed, beaten and left for dead in a ditch. By chance, a priest and then a Levite pass by without offering any help. The priest and the Levite would have been two people extremely stringent on the law (in fact, many priests were also lawyers—a point certainly not lost on the lawyer questioning Jesus). They pass by, presumably, to avoid contamination and defilement by a dead, or a soon to be dead body—the only dead body a priest could defile himself with by touching was a member of his own immediate family for the purposes of burial.

But now a Samaritan came walking by, he had pity on the stranger, bandaged his wounds and brought him to an inn where he could get well and made sure that he did. We need to understand the radical nature of this dramatic turn of events. What Jesus’ audience would have understood is that the Jews saw the Samaritans as the lowest of the low. A neighbour was one on the inside and anyone outside of that circle was excluded from this category. Samaritans were definitely on the outside—no group was more unacceptable to the Jews of this time—they ranked lower on the scale than did Gentile slaves. For example, if a Samaritan volunteered to pay the temple tax, it was to be returned to them.

So, Jesus asks him point blank, who here was a neighbour to the man? Notice Luke’s intent: he reminds us again that Jesus is speaking to ‘the one who was an expert in the law, and so the expert answers “The one who showed mercy.” Luke wants us to appreciate the great shock of the lawyer’s confession. “Go and do likewise” Jesus tells him.

Jesus was very intentional in his choice of characters here. He chooses the most despised outsider who was unfit for friendship with a Jew as the hero of this parable to deliberately shock, provoke and scandalize his audience. What Jesus’ story does is to effectively turn the lawyer’s world upside-down and inside-out. The lawyer came expecting one thing, but he got another thing entirely—he is confronted, challenged and striped bare with this parable. Everything the lawyer takes for granted, everything he expects is put into question and revolutionized. And notice that Jesus never answers his question, “who is my neighbour” but with the parable, with the story he tells, he forces the lawyer to re-think his presuppositions behind his question. Jesus doesn’t answer his question because in Jesus’ world, the question is unanswerable and ought not even be asked in the first place.

In Jesus’ world, love doesn’t begin by defining its objects but rather discovers them. Jesus turns the question around and inside-out: he never gives the lawyer the boundaries, the restrictions he wants because “neighbourhood” is defined for Jesus not in terms of the object of love. Rather the identity of neighbour is caught up with the subject, the one who shows mercy. The identity of the neighbour shifts from the one who receives mercy (from who is eligible for our love and mercy) to the subject who shows mercy. The question is not, “who is my neighbour?”, but “who am I as a neighbour to those I encounter along life’s way?”—and by this shift Jesus effectively erases any boundaries—if a Jew could admit that the hated Samaritan was the neighbour in this case, then there are no boundaries, no working definition to make life easier. Jesus places the enemy in the position of the elect and becomes the example for the community. This is a mind-blowing, reality altering way of looking at the world and it’s a hard reality for the lawyer to swallow. And notice that we aren’t left knowing how the lawyer reacted to all of this. Jesus’ intent was to clearly change this man’s perspective on reality, but we’re never told how the story ends for the lawyer. Did he go and do likewise, or did he remain stuck in his way of doing things?

We come to church sometimes like the lawyer came to Jesus, don’t we? We may not be hostile (or, indeed sometimes we may). But we do come with our expectations of what church should be, how things should be done, and sometimes with a very strict definition of who is in and who is out. And, more often than not, we come thinking we know what Jesus is all about—we don’t expect to be confronted by Jesus. But, just like the lawyer who thought that he knew what’s what, Jesus doesn’t leave us, with our boundaries and definitions, and expectations unchallenged or unprovoked.

Jesus told this parable to turn the lawyer’s world upside-down and today this parable is for us an invitation to the quite unexpected world of Jesus where Samaritans, the despised outsiders of society and not the religious leaders of the day are the heroes of the story. Where enemies, those we consider to be on the outside are really on the inside. A world where we are shocked to find out that the first are really last and the last are in fact, first.

It is an invitation to a way of life, to a community that doesn’t seek to set boundaries of who is in and who is out—who we love and show mercy to, and who we leave in the ditch for dead. It’s an invitation to live as a follower of Jesus not with our expectations controlling our lives (for we all sometimes get caught up with the expectations we place on each other and on God or especially with the expectations we feel are made of us) but an invitation to have our lives overwhelmed, turned upside-down and inside-out by the miracle of God’s grace.

And just as we don’t know how the lawyer reacted to this provocation, to this quite unexpected turn of events, I don’t know how you’ve reacted to the reality altering world and ways of Jesus in your own life. The invitation to encounter this Jesus who transforms and revolutionizes our lives is open to everyone—and if we let him, he will turn our worlds upside-down.
Amen.

The Church as Eccentric Community

A Sermon Preached on the
Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, June 24th 2007
Church of the Epiphany, Sudbury, ON

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts and minds be pleasing unto You, O Lord our Saviour and Redeemer. Amen.

John the Baptist is certainly in the running for one of the strangest characters from scripture. True to the form of Old Testament prophets, John was, to say the least, an odd and peculiar person. He looked, and probably smelled, more like someone living on the street than any of us here today. In light of the reading from Luke’s Gospel this morning, where we are told that the one who will come to prepare the way of the Lord is the Prophet of the Most High, we are probably prone to expect something other than what we got in John the Baptist—someone important, well-connected, someone socially stable. But that’s not the way God works…He gave us John the Baptist—a man with animal skin for clothes, and with honey and locusts stuck in his beard; a smelly and grubby itinerant preacher from somewhere out in the wilderness. In a word, he gave us an “eccentric” witness.

Truth be told, we’d probably all rather not have him sitting next to us in church on Sunday morning. I’m sure that we can draw up all sorts of eccentric characters from the pool of our collective memories and experiences—someone who was always a little off-center—whether it’s a co-worker who doesn’t quite fit in, or someone from your childhood who was the class oddball, that weird kid that everybody picked on…or maybe you fell like you are the one of those people always sitting on the outside looking in.

What I would like us to consider this morning is that the church is called to be eccentric, much like John the Baptist was. Just so we’re clear here, I’m not suggesting that we are all called to wear ratty clothes and eat weird things and generally not look after ourselves. But what I do want to do is to play around with this word “eccentric”. What does this prophet have to teach us, gathered here this morning, about the church as an eccentric way of life?

First of all, the word eccentric carries with it the sense of being off center—to be out of center. In this way functions as the opposite of ego-centric: it means living ‘outside’ of ourselves in contrast to living a self-centered life. Karl Barth, the theological giant of the twentieth century, had a picture hung above his desk for his entire life. The picture, copied for you on the front of this week’s bulletin, was Matthias Grünewald’s crucifixion scene from his Isenheim altarpiece painted in the early 16th century. I want you to look at it and take it in. Barth was fond of this picture, not for the centrality of the crucifixion scene per se, but rather for Grünewald’s representation of John the Baptist. In this figure of the prophet, with the Holy Scriptures in one hand and the other, with finger outstretched toward the figure of the crucified, we have, Barth claimed, the very vision, the very identity of the church, of what it means to be a witnessing community.

It is the finger of the Baptist draws our attention. Elongated and outstretched, he doesn’t seek to attract attention to himself, but wants our gaze to be cast upon the crucified Lord. John is not interested in himself but in the One who has come to put all things right. John’s disregard for himself was not a product of a self-imposed humility. Rather, John had the task of preparing the way of the Lord and His salvation—it was a job that required taking notice of Jesus and not of himself.

As members of God’s church we are called to the same ministry as John the Baptist. We are called to be witnesses to Christ in our world—not as self-interested people but as selfless ones. Our job is, like John’s, to point to Christ so that the world may know that salvation has come and this requires, to put it rather bluntly, that our egos are checked at the door. The church is not a community focused in on itself, but it is called to be a community centered on others. The church only exists as her true self when she exists for others.

More often than not, the church’s actual posture is one of pointing to ourselves, seeking our own attention, rather than the posture of the Baptist who points away from himself. Our communal life can all too easily slip into self-centeredness when we get caught up with ourselves, with our own individual desires, our own plans, when I want it my way. When we live such a self-centered life, individually and as a community, we miss the boat. We exist for others, plain and simple. When we think that being the church is all about us, that all of this is here for us, we miss our call to be an eccentric, other-centered community. When we live with our egos at the center, with our fingers pointed to ourselves, we blur and confuse our witness. John knew this as we read this morning from the book of Acts, “What do you suppose that I am? I am not he. No, but one is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of the sandals on his feet.” John knew that to be self-centered meant obscuring his witness to Christ. In fact, in the sometimes overwhelming temptation to be overly concerned with ourselves, we block out the image of the crucified, which is another way of saying that we sin.

And this brings me to the second sense in which the church is called to be eccentric, and here I mean it in a more corporate and social sense: Christ calls the church to live, not as an important social club—as a place where membership gets you some sort of credibility amongst your peers, or where you come to feel important or to maintain some sort of status. No, in a very real way, Christ calls us to exist like those eccentric and strange figures in our lives, at the fringes of society, at the outside of the social margin where God’s peace and tender mercy are all but invisible. We live there because that’s where Jesus lives caring for the poor and the hungry, suffering with the sick and the rejected.

We may think that we’re cultured, and well-to-do and important, but we belong to a body where all are welcomed, especially those people who make us uncomfortable, those people who make us shift a little in our sometimes all too comfortable pews. The church is the place where those who don’t ‘fit-in’ in the world are welcomed and accepted. It is the place where we exist as God’s living alternative to a world gone awry—and that’s often an uncomfortable and unpopular place to be.

It’s not easy to live as God’s alternative in a world that worships the idols of capital, the health of the market and the bottom line; in a world that treats people like statistics and holds the poorest of nations in debt; in a world that teaches us to value and protect our own self-interest over that of others, that it’s okay to exploit others in the name of self-preservation. It’s no accident that the New Testament word for witness is martyr—the very giving up of the self—something John the Baptist knew all too well. No, it’s not easy to live as a community that is supposed to embody God’s way of life. It’s not easy to cry in the wilderness, pointing to the crucified, “Here is your God!” The light of the dawn that breaks over us, the light that Zechariah prophesied about in Luke’s gospel is the light of God’s salvation that has come to shine on us and our world. It is our job to selflessly share this light with the world, a world that sits in darkness and in the shadow of death.

So being witnesses to Christ doesn’t mean being prim and proper, important or self-sufficient, least of all does it mean ‘upwardly mobile’ or ‘normal’ or ‘socially functional’. John the Baptist is our great example of what it means to exist as a witness, not because he had it all together (he most certainly did not), but because he was transparent to Christ. True eccentricity, true selfless living in the interest of others in the name of Jesus Christ is what it means to be God’s witnesses. It’s not easy, but that’s what we’re supposed to be all about.

Not because ‘we’ have it all together…we don’t and that’s the point exactly. Living eccentrically means that we’re not just a group of isolated self-interested individuals looking out for number one who occasionally bump into each other at church, but it means living as a community that exists for each other, both inside and outside of the walls of the church. It means life together for others. It means living for others with each other and when we do that we live as transparent witnesses to Christ. We live off-centered, outside of ourselves when we open our doors to all people and invite them to participate in our peculiar and eccentric way of life where self-centeredness crumbles under the weight of God’s redeeming grace, where conflict and bitterness are transformed into living for the sake of others, where the strangeness of God’s love overwhelms the normalcy of our lives, where our inward pointing fingers are turned from ourselves to the life giving cross of Jesus Christ.


for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to give knowledge of salvation to his people
by the forgiveness of their sins.
By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace. Amen.

W.H. Auden's Horae Canonicae

For those of you who enjoy the poetry of W.H. Auden, BBC Radio 3 had a reading of his marvelous lenten poem, Horae Canonicae (The Canonical Hours) read by Tom Durham with introductions by Archbishop Rowan Williams. You can listen here.

You can get the text of the poem here.