Robbie Tulip Blog

Sermon at St Columba’s Uniting Church, Braddon ACT,

Sunday 8 September 2024, Robbie Tulip

The theme I will focus on today is the need to question our presuppositions.  We all bring existing values, assumptions, prejudices and beliefs to bear when we make judgements and decisions.  Our emotional instincts tell us to accept these beliefs rather than assess them in the light of reason.  Our texts today call us to reverse this instinctive attitude and instead ground our ethics in logic and evidence, in a way that looks to long term impacts rather than immediate and obvious effects. These are important themes for my work in the multi faith chaplaincy at the Australian National University.

The Epistle of James gives a great example.  Prejudice in favour of the rich and against the poor can be a natural sentiment for a church, or for any institution, who ask what a newcomer might bring.  The contrasting receptions that James describes for rich and poor visitors show how easy it can be to live by prejudice, when we assume that a wealthy person can bring money and skills and connections and growth, while a poor person can only bring burdens and work and risk. The evidence of our senses sees the rich as worldly heirs, and as usually more educated and articulate and popular than the poor.  James describes the reaction of partiality, welcoming the rich and ignoring the poor. This is an attitude we can easily understand, if not endorse. 

Even when James insists that God has chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom, there is a frequent tendency to discount this teaching.  The gospel calls us to an inversion of worldly values.  Instead, Jesus argues that material wealth corrupts the relationship between rich people and God, in ways that are sometimes obvious but are also sometimes quite hard to detect.  These are complex questions that invite us to reflect on what sort of a world we want to create.

Our reading from Proverbs provides more examples of how the Bible challenges our biases.  Secular values find it hard to believe Proverb 22:8, “Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity, and the rod of anger will fail”, and 22:9 “Those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor.”  So often we experience the opposite of these Biblical teachings.  The blessings of comfort are given to those who are selfish, while perpetrators of injustice often get away with it.  These proverbs are sometimes seen as pious platitudes, wishful comfort without a basis in fact or reason.

Against such cynicism, we can observe that these proverbs have profound meaning and truth, but the timeframe they work on is slow.  The calamity reaped by the unjust is often deferred or transferred.  The spiritual benefits of generosity can be hard to discern, but some reflection can show its importance for both giver and recipient.  God asks us to see the big picture, looking to the eventual overall consequences of different courses of action.  That ethical framework is a difficult perspective to achieve, seeking to stand under the eye of eternity. A starting point can be a rigorous questioning of our beliefs.  Do we hold beliefs just because they are comfortable and familiar, or do we try to find a coherent approach, without hypocrisy and contradiction?  This problem of working toward a consistent vision should be a central moral question, and it was this call to integrity before God that inspired Jesus to walk the way of the cross to his resurrection.

The conversation between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, also known in Matthew’s account as the Canaanite woman, picks up this problem of careless prejudice in the most vivid way.   Tribal thinking is an instinctive human trait.  We have evolved to see belonging to our clan as the basis of identity.  Community loyalty and trust are core tribal values.  In this story, we see Jesus recognising the pitfalls of instinctive tribal thinking, and instead reviewing his emotional response against a higher vision.

At first, Jesus just ignores the woman’s pleas on behalf of her sick daughter.  He seems exhausted after a long day, and just wants some privacy.  Then, in a line in Matthew, missing in Mark, he tells her “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” indicating that he is unwilling to help because the sick girl is not Jewish.  The woman’s continued efforts earn the rude racist dismissal from Jesus, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Calling foreigners dogs is entirely out of character for Jesus, out of line with his central teaching of love of God and neighbour.  It is a demeaning racial slur that today we would see as illegal and offensive. The idea that the salvation of God is freely available to all is so central to Christianity that this line from Jesus appears shocking and inexplicable.  Christianity regards Jesus as perfect and without sin, making this incident very surprising.  Theologians try to explain it away by claiming Jesus did not mean what he says, but I see it differently.  It is more about the high moral value of learning to listen and respond with care.

Perhaps we need to revise our assumptions about perfection?  If we see Jesus as fully human and fully divine, then surely his ability to see that he has made a mistake and to change his mind in light of evidence is an essential part of his humanity?

Jewish exclusivity was a major theme of messianic expectations in the Old Testament.  The Messiah was envisioned as a descendant of King David who would reign over Israel as a righteous, earthly king, bringing a return to Jewish sovereignty.  As we know, these assumptions came to be dramatically questioned in the theory of salvation brought by Christ, with his central focus on love, truth, equality and justice.  However, this story suggests that Jesus had initially assumed and accepted these Jewish ideas about exclusivity, without properly thinking them through.

Jesus’s first responses to the Canaanite woman seems to align with traditional Jewish exclusivity.  His comments about dogs and the lost sheep of Israel reflect the common Jewish expectation that the Messiah’s primary mission was to the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham, and that God’s promises were centred around the restoration of Israel.

The continued insistent pleas for help from this poor foreign woman, someone with no social status, seem to cause an epiphany for Jesus, a sudden realisation that his attitude was wrong.  Jesus changes his mind, marking a decisive shift. He recognises that salvation cannot be confined to a tribe but must be universally available for all, through the grace of God.

Again, Matthew’s account expands on the story we read in Mark.  Jesus is listening and learning and changing his mind, not just proclaiming a dogmatic evangelical doctrine, the kerygma.  When he says “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire”, at Matthew 15:28, the old idea of the messiah as a Jewish warlord breaks down. The daughter is healed because of the mother’ faith in God.  Sincerity and humility, not ethnicity, become the basis for receiving God’s blessing and healing. The story highlights the universal nature of Jesus’ mission, which transcends ethnic boundaries and the traditional messianic focus on Israel alone.

It seems that Jesus has changed his mind.  This is something politicians are taught never to do, as it makes them seem weak and indecisive.  Napoleon’s advice was to never retreat and never retract.  Refusing to admit any error might create a public image of perfection, but it conceals numerous flaws, as Napoleon himself discovered during his disastrous retreat from Moscow. 

The form of perfection we find in this story from Jesus is quite different.  In this story, Jesus values inclusive principles of respect, listening, dialogue, equality, forgiveness, mercy and human dignity.  It is often the case that we assume things to be true that careful reflection and dialogue can reveal to be flawed.  That is how our social values evolve.  The dialogue between Jesus and the Canaanite woman is a parable for the importance of courteous listening and reflection.

Jesus took this inclusive principle to an extreme with his call in the Sermon on the Mount to love our enemies.  The situation in the world of his time was that previously separate cultures were thrown together, creating what we call the common era.  Christianity emerged as a way all those different communities could live together with mutual respect, although this was only partial. The Empire needed to retain Roman primacy, and so the creeds simplified and distorted the original gospel, losing some of the sublime transforming message of love.

We are now in a world situation somewhat similar to the early Roman Empire, with different cultures learning to live together.   Jesus was able to transcend his own instinctive prejudices to recognise the universal dignity of our shared humanity.  We can look now to how our tribal instincts govern our decisions and values, and we can challenge our own presuppositions.  The healing mercy that Christ showed to helps us see the universal saving love of God as the basis of a transformed and liberating ethical vision.

Lectionary Texts

Proper 18 (23)Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost Sep 08, 2024

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 Psalm 125

Isaiah 35:4-7a Psalm 146

James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17

Mark 7:24-37

A sermon I gave at Kippax Uniting Church on 1 September 2024, using the texts Song of Solomon 2:8-13, Romans 8:18-25, and Revelation 11:18; 15:2-3; 22:1-2

Saint Paul tells us at Romans 8:22 that the whole creation is groaning together in the pains of childbirth.  He says the creation waits in eager expectation for the revelation of the children of God. This is a remarkable Christian vision of the integration of care for humanity and care for nature, what Pope Francis has called an integral ecology.  Paul saw the expectation of faith and hope and love for humanity in the message of Christ as somehow mirrored in the expectation of the cosmos itself.  The idea that the whole creation is suffering provides a starting point to discuss how God is both present and absent in the world and in the cosmos. 

In comparing the created order to a woman in labor, Paul implies that the world has an inherent divine purpose, that our planet is pregnant with divine intent.  He looks to a goal of planetary transformation that will bring a complete change of our perception. Once a child is born, its relationship to the world around it transforms completely compared to when it was in the womb. Paul teaches that the world will be transformed through broader understanding of how God relates to nature and to humanity, as a new world is born from the womb of the old.

A baby is not seen until it is born.  Similarly, the reign of God is largely invisible, seemingly absent, but ready and waiting to be born when the world is ready.

A main difference between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world is that God’s reign is orderly, while worldly politics and culture are chaotic and fallen from grace.  Paul saw the reign of God reflected in the perfect eternal order and stability of the visible heavens, the whole created order of the cosmos.  God calls us to shift from chaos to order, from fall to redemption, grounded in moral principles of love, truth and justice. 

These principles of divine order are eternal, extending beyond human society to encompass the whole natural creation.   We speak of a fall from grace as occurring when a person loses their previously stable position, status and purpose and is disgraced.  The analogy with a state of divine grace as imagined in Paul’s creation theology can see the whole planet as having a stable position, status and purpose, as distinct from our confused and corrupted human condition.  In modern climate science, this sense of a state of planetary grace can be understood through study of fields such as Earth System Stability, Complex Adaptive Systems and punctuated equilibrium.

Is it possible for the whole world to return to a state of grace?  That is the astounding promise of salvation in Christ presented by Saint Paul in his Letter to the Romans. 

The orderly nature of the cosmos is seen in the stable patterns of the stars and the solar system. We can also see stable order in the durable productive cycles of ecological systems, except that climate change is disrupting and corrupting the existing order. Jesus calls in the Lord’s Prayer for the will of God to be done on Earth as in Heaven.  He implores us to see the unchanging and eternal as the model for what our constantly changing temporal world could become.

Paul envisages a change akin to childbirth. He describes the creation itself being set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. His call for patient hope for what we do not yet see invites us to imagine the presence of God among us.

The Song of Solomon celebrates the presence of God in nature as the season changes from winter to spring, as we celebrate the first day of spring today with Wattle Day, Father’s Day and Creation Sunday.  Solomon compares God to the Sun, “leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills”, looking in our window of winter to call us to a new year as the spring flowers appear on the earth and the time of singing has come.

Celebration of the natural cycle of the year was central to the agrarian communities of Biblical times, seeing God in the cycle of the seasons between times of action in the warmer months and reflection in cooler months.  Religion set the timing of festivals to accord with the seasons, using astronomy to watch the movement of the Sun and Moon against the stars.

Birth is difficult.  The Book of Revelation imagines a time when the wrath of God will destroy those who destroy the Earth, at Chapter Eleven Verse Eighteen.  This is a remarkable ecological vision that imagines God transforming our planet through Christ, like Paul’s vision of the birth of a new creation. John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, invites us here to think about who today is destroying the Earth and how they stand with God.  To return to a state of grace is not compatible with destroying the Earth.  Instead the Earth must be held sacred.  And yet that destruction may be our planetary trajectory, if global warming is not reversed. The Revelation imagines a cosmic war between good and evil, fought over whether our Earth has a future of grace or of corruption. This can be partly understood by seeing the divine blessing upon natural Earth systems and divine wrath upon those who destroy them.

Revelation 15:2 describes those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside a sea of glass mixed with fire. In line with the previous statement about divine wrath, this difficult image of victory over the beast of the apocalypse, seen as the embodiment of evil, can be understood to refer to God’s victory over everything that destroys the Earth.

In a beautiful image of the Kingdom of God, Saint John next tells us “They were holding harps from God, and they sang the song of God’s servant Moses and of the Lamb:  “Great and wonderful are Your works, O Lord God Almighty! Just and true are Your ways, O King of Ages!

This title King of Ages is often mistranslated King of Nations or King of Saints. The focus of King of Ages is on God’s eternal timeless nature rather than authority over nations.  This sense of eternal divine sovereignty accords with an ecological vision of the world, seeing a deep time context of what the ancients meant by Ages.  My view is that the ancient concept of Ages derived from astronomy, watching and measuring the slow movement of the stars against the seasons.

The cosmology in our texts today is about creation history, from the original good creation, then the fall of man, looking toward redemption in Christ as a return to a state of divine grace.  In iridescent poetry, John expands on this vision of grace. He tells us the angel showed him a river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the main street of the city. He says on either side of the river stood a tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit and yielding a fresh crop for each month. He comments that the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

This vision of the tree of life has much to tell us about the theology of creation.  The tree of life first appears in the Bible at Genesis 2:9, where it represents life and God’s eternal providence. It is distinct from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, from which Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat. The return of the Tree of Life in Revelation 22 at the end of the Bible marks the promise of a return of humanity to a state of grace, coming home from the exile of the fall.

An intriguing thing about this image is its fit to observation of the heavens.  Here is an artwork I made to explore the analogy between the pure crystal river of life and the Milky Way, and between the Tree of Life, with one fruit for each month, and the position of the Sun against the stars over twelve months.  A clue to this reading is the statement that the tree grows on both sides of the river.  No earthly tree grows on both sides of a river, whereas the twelve zodiac constellations traversed by the Sun are on both sides of the great celestial river of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Using astronomy software, I made a map of the stars along the Milky Way as viewed looking south from Australia in autumn.  Scorpio is on the lower left while Sirius is at top right.  From Sirius, the Milky Way goes through Argo the ship, then the Southern Cross, the Centaur including the Pointers, the Dark Emu, Norma the Carpenter’s Square, and flowing out into Scorpio. 

The tumbling river of life starts at Sirius and goes through the tree of life before falling over two waterfalls and reaching Scorpio after pooling at the Dark Emu and Norma.  I have drawn the tree of life based on the Southern Cross as the trunk, adding roots and branches.  The twelve signs of the zodiac above the tree are shown to symbolise the tree of life growing on both sides of the river of life. The Large Magellanic Cloud is shown as a turtle, Argo as a flying goose, and a circle marks the South Celestial Pole, the point around which the whole heavens revolve. 

This next picture is again an astronomical sky map I made, showing how the Milky Way bisects the circle of the zodiac.  The constellations from Taurus to Sagittarius are to the south of the Milky Way, while those from Gemini to Scorpio are to the north. This star map includes the southern heavens, with the brightest stars Sirius and Canopus pointing toward the Large Magellanic Cloud and the South Celestial Pole.

The ancients were far more aware of visual astronomy than we are today.  Watching the stars provided the celestial context for the message of the Gospels, seeing God present in the order of the visible heavens, great and glorious and gracious, unchanging and eternal.

Seeing this eternal order of the stars as a framework to understand time can be compared to the theory of time in the Bible with its majestic story of creation, fall and redemption.

The study of deep time enables us to understand how fragile and sensitive our living planet really is.  Climate change is our biggest danger.  Humans have added a trillion tonnes of carbon to the air, which is now like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.  At least four times in geological history, rising carbon has caused mass extinctions.  Defusing this risk requires rigorous scientific assessment.  While carbon is the big climate problem, the best way to treat it in the short term, in my view, is to rebrighten the planet, using global cooling technologies to reflect more sunlight back to space and increase what is known as planetary albedo, also called reflectivity or brightness. Earth’s albedo has darkened by nearly 2% in this century, a major contributor to heating.  Higher albedo would reverse this trend.

Global cooling requires immense care and cooperation. This step would change the relationship between humanity and our planet, opening a need for global climate stewardship. Wise governance is essential to ensure decisions are safe and acceptable and effective. International governance of research and planning can enable coordinated use of sunlight reflection, on the model of world cooperation in many sectors of the economy and culture and science. 

However, there is much opposition to this proposal. Governments recently prevented the United Nations Environment Programme from studying it.  Sceptics should weigh the risk of research into rebrightening the planet against the much worse risks of unchecked climate change, even with emission reduction. An emerging scientific consensus agrees that the likely benefits of rebrightening justify research, aiming to mitigate the adverse impacts of excess heat, such as sea level rise, loss of biodiversity, extreme weather and systemic disruptions.  The UK Royal Society estimated the cost to cool the Earth by increasing planetary albedo as 1000 times less than the estimated cost of equivalent cooling from cutting emissions.

Conflicts around the world are worsened by impacts of global warming and extreme weather on food security and forced migration.   Climate is a security problem.  Discussions on rebrightening the planet would encourage global cooperation for peace, aiming to reduce the climate drivers of conflict. Unfortunately, this line of thought is largely excluded from discussion at the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I hope that will change.

As we return again to Paul’s vision of the whole creation groaning, we pray for our groaning world with eight billion people and collapsing ecosystems, with no clear path toward a sustainable future.  The clear hope of Paul for a redeemed creation, where he says in Romans 8 that the creation itself will be set free, is reflected in the beautiful image in revelation 22 of the leaves of the tree of life for the healing of the nations.  Healing is better with a good diagnosis.  Trying to understand the thinking in the Bible about the theology of creation can help us to heal our world.