There’s a significant choice for a preacher in today’s
readings. How we choose depends on how we think God views
humanity. I could trash humanity, us, or I could make us all
blush!
Isaiah writes: ‘I am the first and the last’ and thus puts
us humans in our place. ‘Have I not told you from of old?’
God the impatient teacher: here’s a good opportunity to make
people feel bad about bad Bible habits.
In Romans we have a somewhat insensitive God: ‘don’t worry’
– the sufferings of the present are nothing compared with
the pie in the sky ahead of you. Put your head down, grin
and bear it! And Matthew’s parable of the wheat and the
weeds growing in the same field invites the preacher to
terrify a congregation with hellfire and the gnashing of
teeth. And the preacher’s eye sparkle as he or she goes on
about sin, often in a surprisingly informed way!
On the other hand: ‘Who is like me? ... Come on, get to know
me', says God. The image of the ‘groaning creation’ in
Romans tells us that creation is pregnant with possibility.
Let’s see what we can do. We’re full of promise. Even the
wheat and weeds growing together positively declares that
the wheat can grow; good is discovered even in the midst of
evil.
As to whether this works in practice, I wonder. Have you
ever seen a garden which has been left to God’s
horticultural methods?
There are many images of God in the Bible: angry, impatient,
vengeful, demanding, judgemental, threatening in the
extreme. Yes, there are many images of God in the Bible:
patient, healing, trusting, passionate, embracing, creative
and indeed loving. Sometimes we preachers speak of one image
one week and next week there’s another. Or sometimes we
preachers stick on one side or the other, afraid to budge
from our comfort zone.
None of this should surprise us. After all, there are times
when children are objectionable and other times when we now
they’re wonderful. Isaiah chapter 40 onwards is fantastic.
God had chided te children of Israel, now he awakens the
Hebrew people from their weeping by the waters of Babylon.
They’d lost much: land, friends, family, hope. They’d lost
their trust in God; lived a non-existence, as though God was
buried in the ransacked Jerusalem. Babylon was seen as
punishment from God forewarned by prophets like Amos and
Micah when the people had forgotten about God’s justice.
From Isaiah they discover something of the bigness of God,
his holiness. They rediscover the saving God, rehearsing the
stories about the escape from the slave camps of the
Pharaohs. They rediscover God not merely as condemning but
inviting them to participate with him as a light to the
nations. Gradually hope enters their hearts; they feel
afresh the close companionship of the once very distant,
absent God.
Sometimes Paul despaired of congregations emerging
around the Mediterranean, yet in the letter to Rome he wrote
of the creating God. Although he sees the wrongs, the faults
and the evil in life, he also speaks of the whole creation
as being pregnant with possibility. ‘The whole creation has
been groaning in labour pains until now, and not only
creation but ourselves, who have the first fruits of the
spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption, the
redemption of our bodies.’ Pregnant with possibility, but
definitely not the finished item, that’s the realism of
Paul.
Is Paul negative about the Romans? Is Isaiah a cup half full
or half empty kind of guy? God gets angry with us’ God is
passionate about us, God reaches out to us. The themes of
evil and sinfulness are alongside themes of passion,
forgiveness and hope.
We need both. The western church has been very deeply
influenced by the teachings of St Augustine of Hippo, who
articulated the doctrine of ‘original sin’. This doctrine
found its way into the Nicene Creed. It emphasises that
Jesus was ‘begotten, not made’ and ‘of one Being with the
Father.’ For Augustine and his followers (mainly the western
church) it was essential that Jesus had not inherited the
‘sickness of Adam’, original sin. Augustine taught that Adam
(and to a lesser extent Eve) had fixed human nature, which
meant that from the very beginning every baby is born
sinful. Everyone therefore inherits this nature from Adam,
according to Augustine, by every subsequent human being.
As the 4th century AD ended and the 5th century began, he
articulates this doctrine that human beings are of nature
sinful. For him it’s fixed in our DNA. Of course, this
didn’t come out of the blue; there were such tendencies in
Christian thinking among people before Augustine. But also
there were those before him who didn’t exhibit such
theological tendencies and those around him who argued
vehemently against him (such as a monk from the British
Isles named Pelagius, a so-called heretic).
And through the centuries since this question of the nature
of human beings has been at the centre of debate, some have
taken Augustine’s theory further to the realms of ‘double
predestination’ and beyond. Yet this notion of original sin
doesn’t come from the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Bible,
nor did it develop in the centuries immediately after Jesus’
life The question is the age old one about evil in a world
emanating from a good God. Augustine tried to solve the
question by putting Adam on the line. The choice between a
‘sermon of hell, fire and brimstone’ and a ‘sermon on human
life being pregnant with possibility’ is not an either/or
choice. It must always be a both/and sermon.
The Bible is fantastically negative about humanity and
fantastically valuing and positive about humanity, us.
Augustine’s theory tips us to one side of a fence that is
remarkably challenging to sit on! Jesus was angry, livid
when he turned over the tables of the traders in the temple.
Here was condemnation. And yet he looked on people and saw
so much possibility in them. The prejudgements of his time
meant nothing to him. Female, children, prostitute,
foreigner, tax collector, those living alternative
lifestyles and those deemed unclean because of illness –
none of these were condemned as ontologically sinful by God,
but pregnant with possibility.Naivety was not his way,
neither was a fundamental denial of the goodness that God in
the Genesis stories announced about the life he had made.
So – sorry! I can’t thump the pulpit and tell you we’re all
sinners with no hope and there’s nothing to be done. I can’t
tell you that we are the best folk since sliced bread. We
are each on a journey to express something of the God we
meet along life’s way. Sometimes we’ll succeed, and the
healthy mind and heart knows that the reverse is also true.
But there is always tomorrow, always tomorrow to which we
adjust and are called. God has not given up or consigned us
to the council dump.