The ancient writings we have are there to guide us, so that by sticking at it, and by the encouragement of the scripture, we might have hope. (Romans 15.4)
The BBC World Service is, among many other things, a friend to those who are unexpectedly wide awake in the middle of the night. So, at 3.00 in the morning, one morning last month, I learnt about an Australian novelist called Melissa Lucashenko. She has won a lot of prizes – and she has given most of the money away.
The story is this. Lucashenko, as you might suspect from her name, has eastern European heritage. Australia is a melting pot of immigrants from Europe and from elsewhere. But, what she didn’t know as a child, was that one of her grandmothers was an indigenous Australian, aboriginal. Luckashenko was one of those whose family allowed her skin colour to be passed off silently as southern European so as not to attract the extreme prejudice which aboriginal people suffer.
But once she knew about her aboriginal heritage she wanted to explore it. More than that, eventually she wanted to re-inhabit it. Eventually she moved to live on what had been her grandmother’s lands. She discovered its culture.
She didn’t come to think of that simply as more communal and more environmentally aware. Fundamentally, she found that family and land and values were all part of what she calls a single tapestry. An interdependence of people and place just seemed natural. Singing songs about it, telling stories about it, making paintings of it, were all part of inhabiting it.
And it also meant she came to regard the culture and values in which she had been brought up as a bit too individualistic and a bit too exploitative. That is to say many people like me might tend to focus on ourselves, what I’m entitled to, what would benefit me. And we may tend to view things around us simply as resources for our own use.
So she was not surprised that people like me are surprised that she gave away the prize money. For her, it had simply become the most natural thing to do. If I receive an unexpected gift, why wouldn’t I want to share it? With the neighbour whose business is struggling. With the single parent nearby who is finding it hard to make ends meet; she had been such a single parent herself.
Anyway, that is what has been feeding my soul over the last few weeks. But this is meant to be sermon and not an inspirational talk, so let me take a further step. What I think I have found myself asking myself a lot over the last few weeks is ‘isn’t Christianity meant to be a bit like that?’.
Every Christian person will have been brought up in one of the diverse cultures of the world. We absorb the value system around us. We simply pick up what is an acceptable way to behave. We don’t notice what has shaped our attitudes.
Most people in a feudal system must have simply assumed it was normal. Most people in a society which is formed around ideas like avoiding shame and maintaining family honour will live by that code. Most people like me will assume that doing as well for myself as possible, and taking as much as I need from the resources around me as possible, is a natural way to be.
But is what we are doing turning up her each week, at least in part, an attempt deliberately to inhabit a different way of understanding the world? And the singing, story telling, artistic expression are all part of it.
And in particular we deliberately expose ourselves to three sometimes quite long chunks of scripture each week. It comes in a three year cycle. As it happens, two weeks ago we had the last readings for the third year of the cycle. Last Sunday we went back to the beginning again. We are on the second set of readings for Year A today.
The Gospel reading is John the Baptist calling people to repentance. And the word translated ‘repentance’ is a compound of ‘after’ and ‘thinking’ – so it is exactly something which grows out of a fresh way of understanding things.
I think it is in Luke’s Gospel that there is a bit of the story Matthew misses out. People ask what this repentance things actually means in practice. Jesus’ reply there isn’t about our spiritual lives. If you’ve got more food and clothing than you need, share it. If you work in finance, don’t be tempted to make more profit than is reasonable. If you have power over people, don’t use it to extract money from them.
So we are not surprised that most people are surprised by Christian understanding and behaviour when they do see it. Really hard things like forgiving enemies. Turning the other cheek. Freeing people from obligations. Sacrificial acts. Praying for those who are nasty to us. A failure to keep a record of wrongs. Not making anything of the money we do give away simply because we’ve forgotten about it as soon as it is done.
But the verses from Luke aren’t actually part of our readings for today, so let me land finally somewhere quite different, on a single verse from our second reading. We’ve actually been hearing it read for a second time in a few weeks. A part of Romans 15 was used for Bible Sunday in Year C just a few weeks ago. A different part is set as a reading for the Second Sunday in Advent in Year A today. And the two happen to overlap for one verse:
The ancient writings we have are to guide us, so that by sticking at it, and by the encouragement of the scripture, we might have hope.
The purpose of all this isn’t that we are better at Bible Study. It isn’t that we learn to point fingers at the culture around us. Or at the Christian people we know who don’t measure up. Or at ourselves as falling short. It is that we might have hope.
I suspect that the reason I was so caught by the story of Melissa Lucashenko’s prize money was that fundamentally it was eliciting hope in me. There are other ways of understanding the world. There are other ways of responding to its challenges.
The life and teaching of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth have always been trying to elcit that awareness and response. We need showing the way. We need to stick at it. We need to be encouraged on the way. But it is that we might have hope.
The ancient writings we have are to guide us, so that by sticking at it, and by the encouragement of the scripture, we might have hope.
The picture is stone quarried from the Lincoln edge waiting to be used for repairs to Lincoln Cathedral, which is in the distance.
