St Mary's

NOTES FOR HOMILY

Sunday 6 July 09 – Mark 6,1-6

In the reading today, Jesus situates himself squarely in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets.

A biblical prophet is one who conveys a message from God to a particular time and place. They’re not, contrary to popular belief, people who can foresee the future. They are rather people gifted with an ability to see deeply into the present, to look below the surface of society and see the undercurrents and hidden realities that determine what is happening or will happen. The word “Seer” is a good description. An example might be that of a builder coming to your house, your beautiful house with polished floors and newly painted walls and a view of Mt Coot tha, and saying – “You’ve got termites in the timbers under your house and the stumps are rotten. It’s not going to last. It’ll collapse unless you do something”. The builder can foretell the future only because of his ability to see under the surface of the present.

Most of the classical OT prophets lived at a time of prosperity. They saw the corruption and oppression, the manipulation of the poor that had contributed to the wealth and they condemned it in the strongest terms.

And they weren’t well received in their own country. We know little of the lives of any of them, apart from Jeremiah, but if the way he was treated was any indication (and they all preached the same message) they had a hard time. Jeremiah was arrested and jailed more than once, he had death threats, he was eventually thrown down a well to get him to shut up, and ended his life in exile.

And of course, Jesus saw his rejection in that light as well.

This gift of prophecy has always been in the Church. We’ve heard more about it in recent years, perhaps because it’s harder now to keep people quiet than it used to be. People like Martin Luther King, Archbishop Romero, Teilhard de Chardin, Mary McKillop were all prophetic figures in the same tradition. All of them, by word or by deed, conveyed a message from God to the situation of their day. King and Romero were killed, Teilhard de Chardin was silenced, Mary McKillop was excommunicated.

The gift of prophecy is found also outside the Church. For me, examples are the environmental movement, the black consciousness movement and the womens movement. These movements told us – tell us – something profoundly true about the human condition or about the unfolding of the universe. And they have also, even now, seen a lot of opposition.

And I want to mention finally our own community here at St Mary’s. I believe it’s possible to see our present situation in the light of this idea and this history. Partly because of the social justice ministry of Micah projects and the hundreds of other activities supported by this community (I had first hand experience of this huge generosity when I was working for the Romero Centre). But also because several of the very things that some people found offensive in our community were, I believe, prophetic actions. People took offence at these things – and it’s interesting to note that the Gospel reading today uses the same words for the peoples’ reaction to Jesus.

I think for example that the blessing of gay and lesbian unions is a prophetic act. It results from a determination to look beneath the surface and beneath the conventional derogatory view of homosexuality, and see two human individuals who are worthy of our respect and God’s blessing.

I think the presence of the Buddhist statue in the Church was a symbol of the openness in the community to the ways that God might be revealed in other religions and other traditions – and a more general openness to difference.

I think the welcoming of women to present homilies is a similar thing. It’s a prophetic act because it recognises the injustice of excluding women from certain areas of ministry and it’s an affirmation of their dignity and their equality.

I think that the absence of vestments is an act which cries out for a greater awareness of the priesthood of the laity and a breaking down of the huge gap that has opened up between clergy and laity – a gap which seems absent from the early Christian communities.

Most of all, I think that our seeking to find new ways of speaking about God is a prophetic act. We do this in baptism when we use the words creator, liberator and sustainer of life. It can be seen as a recognition that all the language we use about God has to be metaphorical language. The one thing we know for certain about God is that God is Other, God is different. God does not belong to this universe of which we are a part. And yet the ony language we have is human language.

So when we say that God is compassionate, wise, merciful etc, we have to recognize that these are essentially human qualities and can only apply to God in a metaphorical sense. God is infinitely bigger than these attributes. So to describe the Second Person of the Trinity as the Son is to use a metaphor, just as it is when we use the word Liberator. In using alternative language, as we have in baptisms, we’re trying to explore what it means to say “Father Son and Holy Spirit” And we have to do this with all the language we use about God. What reality are we trying to express when we say “God is Three, God is One”? What do we mean when we speak about the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection? We’ll only come to a deeper understanding of these realities if we use different language.

We know from ordinary conversation that we sometimes have to say things two or three times in different ways before we can adequately express a feeling or an experience. There must be a million ways to describe the experience of being in love, all of them inadequate. But if some authority were to come along and say, “Look, all this multiplicity of words is downright confusing. From now on, we’re going to have one formula for expressing this experience, and here it is – blah blah blah. From now on this is the only orthodox way of expressing this experience. All other expressions are inaccurate and invalid”. Well, we can see how ridiculous this is. But we’re tied to certain fixed expressions of the experience of God, and I believe it is a prophetic act – the act in fact of adult Christians – to look for other ways of expressing our experience.

So all these things, which have caused such offense to others, can be seen as prophetic acts. And predictably, they have landed us in hot water and resulted in our presence here today instead of the old St, Mary’s building.

And now, we gather here this evening to share in perhaps the most dramatic prophetic act of our Church – the celebration of the eucharist. The Eucharest can be seen in many ways, and one of them is that it is a great symbolic act in which we look beneath the surface appearance of difference and diversity and disharmony in the world and express our belief in the essential unity of all humanity – by sharing bread and wine. We believe that in this act, God becomes present to us and among us in a new way and with a new intensity and immediacy.

Many of you, like me, may feel uncomfortable here, we may find it unpleasant to be here as outcasts rather than in the church building. But at least we cannot say after reading today’s Gospel, that we weren’t warned.

Dermot Dorgan