SERMON 8 August 2004

Readings:     Genesis 15: 1-6        Psalm 33:13-21        Hebrews 11-3, 8-16        Luke 12: 32-40

 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.  

Many years ago when I was a young public servant I was introduced to a sophisticated work avoidance strategy that had been honed to the point of excellence by my colleagues. Rather than working yourself into the ground, you took yourself off to ‘consult’ with a colleague in another section. The fact that the colleague was also a good mate and you were discussing Saturday night’s party rather than Australia’s refugee intake or the latest UN resolution on Israel was carefully disguised. Indeed, I was told, you could spend days doing nothing but wandering the corridors of the Foreign Affairs Department. As long as you had a file under your arm, no one would question you. 

Some of my fellow junior officers had raised the whole exercise to an art form and while I never actually participated, being somewhat of a goody two shoes, every time I saw someone else wandering around with a file carefully displayed I did wonder where they were going and with whom they had ‘consulted’.  

The Public Service of the late 70s was a very different place to the Public Service 25 years later! Life now, I am told, is somewhat more demanding and bosses more observant than they were then. However, it is one of the standard human behaviours to work hard when the boss is around and to slacken off when they are not in sight. We have a magnet on our fridge which depends for its humour on exactly this tendency: ‘Jesus is coming’, it says, ‘look busy!’ 

This approach is, of course, the antithesis of today’s Gospel message. In the second part of the reading three quite different images are jammed up against one another. We have the idea of being ready to respond when the master comes. Then comes the statement that the master will serve those he finds ready. And finally the image of the house burglary is used to tell us we should not be taken unawares. It is an odd mixture of images but the overall message seems to be that we are to be alert and ready at all times.  

The text also seems to contain the idea of faithfulness to task. Preparedness and readiness is not just so that you can look as if you have been busy all the time. We are to be faithful to our tasks in order to be ready when the master comes. It is how we are to live our lives. Perhaps translated for the public service in the 1970s, the text could read: ‘be at your desk working, not wandering the Lower Ground Floor with a file under your arm’.  

This command follows straight on from a number of short passages in Luke dealing with material possessions and the necessity of storing up treasure in heaven rather than on earth. Last week’s gospel reading, you might remember, contained the parable of the rich man building bigger barns to house his wealth, little knowing that he would die that very night. Today’s gospel reading makes the point that we should build up treasure in heaven, rather than treasure on earth. True freedom consists, not in the accumulation of material goods for use in an uncertain future, but in the accumulation of spiritual capital, in walking with God. 

The task we have, then, is to live every day as God wishes us to live. In doing this we accumulate spiritual wealth. And so we find ourselves slap bang where we were last week. Yet again, the message seems to be that one of the primary calls of the Christian is to live mindfully, intentionally, day by day; to focus on the here and now; living each moment, intent on the spiritual life and not distracted by material things. 

At the most basic level this comes down to choice. It seems simple at one level – choose good, walk away from evil. But it is not as simple as it sounds. 

On Friday we marked both the Transfiguration and Hiroshima Day. The blinding light of the glory of God seen around Jesus on that day 2000 years ago stands in stark contrast to the blinding light of destruction that razed Hiroshima nearly 60 years ago. As human beings we stand in the shadow of both – the capacity to reflect the glory of God and the capacity for great destruction. These things live inside each of us and are not easy to disentangle.  

The atomic bomb was dropped in an effort to end a war that was costing millions of lives. Many involved with its construction and deployment believed that by shortening the war more lives were saved overall than were lost in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On a simple cost-benefit analysis, it makes sense and perhaps they were right. But what a terrible choice! 

Is this truly the way we are to live? In what sense do such choices and decisions reflect a love of God and of neighbour? It seems that once we are embarked on a destructive path it is hard to escape from it, however noble our motives in entering into it. The evil of war breeds more evil. At the personal level, antagonism within a family breeds more antagonism.  

The simplicity of the overall concept: love God and love each other, masks enormous complexity when it comes to implementation. The truth is that ethical, life-giving, godly decision-making is not easy and involves rigorous self-critique as well as deep compassion for others. We are easily blinded by our own situation, by our own experiences, our own weaknesses, indeed, by our own strengths. How many of the atomic bomb developers asked themselves whether what they were doing was motivated by a love of humanity, or by the excitement of working on a secret project, or by the desire for a high income or by the sheer beauty of the physics and maths involved? To what extent was the choice based on a combination of some or all of these considerations? 

As humans our motives usually are mixed. That is not necessarily a problem in itself, but we can blind ourselves to the truth of what we are doing by focussing on the nobler of our motives and ignoring some of the other factors at play. We see these dynamics at work every day. Look at Iraq – there were many reasons for Western nations to want to invade Iraq: fear of weapons of mass destruction, a desire to liberate the Iraqi people from the regime of a brutal dictator, guilt at having been instrumental in putting that dictator in place, a desire to control oil reserves… In the end, what predominated? We know what was said, but what actually tipped the scales? We will probably never know the answer to that question, and indeed the answer may be bound up in other things altogether, such as father-son dynamics within the Bush family. But my question sits there: did any of the major decision-makers at any point seriously attempt to unravel and critique motivations? 

Jesus’ command to love God and love one another is sometimes dismissed as being hopelessly idealistic, simplistic, sentimental and trite. But it is not so – it is about hard work, rigorous honesty and profound grappling with the reality of who we are, both as individuals and in community. This is how God wants us to live. This is our task, in all its complexity, challenge and joy. Once again Michael Leunig can offer the last word: 

“ ‘Love one another and you will be happy.’ It’s as simple and as difficult as that. There is no other way.  Amen.”

 Sarah Macneil