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Web Reflection
Sermon preached at St Paul ’s Cathedral, Melbourne , on the occasion of the
Consecration of John Charles McIntyre as Tenth Bishop of Gippsland – 11 February
2006 By The Rev'd Bill Lawton.
Fifty and more years ago a former Dean, first of St Andrew’s
Sydney and subsequently of St Paul ’s Melbourne , conducted religious
education at Fort Street Boy’s High School in Sydney . He held me
spellbound with his words as he showed me how to take my life’s journey
with Jesus. The image of the man who spoke and the Man he spoke about
still energise me. I begin my sermon with the prayer Dean Stuart Barton
Babbage used at the commencement of every class:
Lord Jesus, Master, Carpenter of Nazareth ,
who on the cross through wood and nails
has worked our full salvation:
wield well your tools in this your workshop;
that we who come to you rough-hewn,
may be fashioned anew into your likeness
and a truer beauty:
for your tender mercy’s sake. Amen.
John
12: 20-26
Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So
these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee , and asked him,
"Sir, we wish to see Jesus." Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and
Philip went and told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, "The hour has come
for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a
grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it
dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves their life loses it, and whoever
hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone
serves me, they must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be
also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honour them.
‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’. I can’t think of a more dynamic
challenge for this moment in St Paul ’s Cathedral than those words from
John’s Gospel. Looked at in the most common-sense way, here are people
seeking an interview with Jesus. They have clearly come a long way and
they need answers to some hard questions. No one is going to pin their
life and future on one more community do-gooder or political revolutionary
without asking what their words and actions amount to.
So, John McIntyre, there is an interview at hand. In the days ahead we
will need to know what you mean when you talk about Jesus and the new life
he promised and what ‘loving’ means in action. The story we have just
heard as the Consecration Service Gospel follows on directly from some
very hard questions indeed.
Chapter 12 of John’s Gospel is quite pointed about relationships
in a Christian household – how should people treat each other and what
priority does faith have in these relationships? What is our attitude to
evil and corrupt behaviour? Do we just wink at sin and go on being
relativists? When poverty strikes and there is no work and no hope of
work, where does justice lie? John’s Gospel chapter 12 tears at the heart
of our easy answers. There is a shocking conclusion, Jesus, only Jesus, is
at the centre of life’s content.
If you will allow Luke’s version of this story to overlap John’s, what do
you make of people whose lifestyle challenges yours – when the outsider
gate-crashes your security? And when death intrudes, is it the end of
everything or in some mysterious way a new beginning? All of this is
pressing question and if Jesus has the answers, then we need to hear you
tell us about it in words we can understand. Because frankly the answers
so far seem utterly alien to the way we have learnt to see life.
Well, let’s spend time gathering how John’s Gospel offers us
another way of ‘seeing’ and a different way of ‘discovering’. ‘Greeks
come’, John says simply. They engage the reader for the fraction of a
moment and then slip out of the story altogether. They are the alien, the
outsider, the unthinkable. Just once before in this Gospel their presence
has been hinted at, but the possibility that Jesus might share the majesty
of God with outsiders is found almost blasphemous (John 7:35). They are
close enough to long for connection, but distant enough to be disregarded
and despised.
In the twenty years John McIntyre and I have known each other I have
engaged with a man whose heart lay with the alien and the outsider. In all
that time, he allowed his understanding of God and human nature to shape
his contact with people. And many in the establishment found this
offensive. His understanding of Jesus’ teaching brought race, ethnicity,
gender and sexuality under the microscope. These are the social and
communal crises in which we live. Each of them challenges the justice we
say we live by. He took the words and actions of Jesus, that are key to
John’s Gospel chapter 12, as normative for his own life.
We all talk words about acceptance but John and Jan live them. Each
in their own way reach out to alienated people and help them find
community. They are passionate about the needs of dispossessed people.
They have dirtied their hands in the simple affairs of life – people in
‘the Block’ being dispossessed from their homes, Indigenous people gaining
a property of their own for worship and socializing, women marginalised in
the church by being refused ordination to the priesthood, gay people
burdened with the guilt of others’ rejection. Here, with the same basic
questions raised by John’s Gospel chapter 12, John and Jan McIntyre lived
out how people might treat each other and they showed faith’s priority in
their own relationship. John and Jan spoke about justice in the face of
evil and corrupt behaviour. And when poverty struck and there was no work
and no hope of work, they committed themselves to the politics of change.
They lived out the complex questions about life and death – and all the
time when the outsider gate-crashed their own security. That other
question brings fresh meaning here: the ‘interview’ with Jesus gains more
potency. We have ‘seen’ Jesus in their lives and actions.
‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’. In this new beginning for your life,
we are all gathered to be partners in the discovery of Jesus’ words and
actions shown through you. For those who haven’t yet got to know anything
of the McIntyre’s life, let me add briefly what I know personally of John
Mac’s last twenty years. We met at a General Synod Commission on Ministry
and Training and instantly became friends. Some of this was the larrikin
in both of us; some was the odd jumble of different theological
disciplines between Ridley College where John taught and Moore where I
lectured.
However, every time we met, not this, but a passion for the marginalized
was the heart of his concern. When the parish of St Saviour’s Redfern was
offered, John took the chance to translate his philosophical ethics into
human value. Translation was the key to this significant phase of his
life. As an academic, he had explored the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr and
the human exercise of power. Now he had the chance to see that theology in
action.
Redfern was a parish no one wanted. Since the 19th century it had
struggled to be viable. After a two-year vacancy, John and Jan and their
three children, Paul, Jessica and Lisa, took up residence in the Rectory.
In the fifteen years that followed, they embraced the Koori communities
and from the tiny church group commenced ministries in the adjacent
high-rise developments and among people otherwise dispossessed from church
and alienated from family. John and Jan played a key role living as
representatives of the love and the justice of God.
Here is how John spoke about this:
Everyday I come face to face with people who are isolated by poverty and
exclusion. I am overwhelmed, often to the point of tears, by the depth of
sorrow in which so many live their lives … Our church, which reflects the
community it seeks to serve, is one tiny beacon of hope in Redfern. We see
our unity in diversity as testimony to the transforming power of God.
Personally, most of my time is spent with people who do not attend church.
My desire is to be a witness to Jesus as I engage with the community for
the sake of others. That is how our church sees and understands mission.
(Interview with Stuart Robinson 1/8/05 for SydneyAnglicans.net)
In 1997 John was named 'Citizen of the Year’ by South Sydney
Council in recognition of his ministry across the community. Those of us
who knew him well watched his tireless commitment to Indigenous
land-rights issues, to the formation of Indigenous church communities
across the Diocese and his support of Reconciliation between Indigenous
and white Australians.
At the same time, he involved himself in the women’s ordination debate and
complained about what he saw as the insensitive treatment of homosexual
people by the church. Through all of this, he practiced the theology he
once taught. And John knew how to challenge those, in his words, ‘well
known for [their] defiance of Scripture’ in one case financing legal
action in the secular courts over the ordination of women. What he added I
heard often from him:
No amount of fancy-footwork self-serving hermeneutics on the part of
diocesan theologians has ever justified [a] breach of Biblical imperative.
(Letter to the Editor, Southern Cross, 10 Feb. 2001)
You can expect him to continue this direct challenge to his sense of
injustice and hypocrisy.
‘Seeing Jesus’ was for this family about embracing the Redfern
community and becoming part of its organisations and activities. John
spoke to developers, politicians and local councillors about community
change and regeneration. He was always part of the process, longing for
people’s transformation. People loved him for his sheer doggedness and
honesty. When he took up a cause, he followed through with absolute
transparency and integrity. That is what ‘seeing Jesus’ meant for him.
And Jan, partly to keep the finances going, but more, to add her own gift
to people, engaged in ‘home care’. She lived Jesus’ command to ‘love’ by
undertaking the most menial of tasks to make life more tolerable for
others – one day at a time. She practised the presence of God in all these
basic tasks.
Don’t hear me turn them into ‘saintly’ figures. They just met God in the
ordinary daily events, or as poet Les Murray has put it: ‘What [they] have
received is the ordinary mail of the otherworld, wholly common, not
postmarked divine’ (‘First Essay on Interest’, The People’s Otherworld,
Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1983:8).
I come fresh to those words about ‘seeing Jesus’ and know that
there is more here than a rational ‘interview’. You will learn to value
John well beyond his capacity to listen to you and empathise with your
problems. You will discover that he is a man of insight. In our twenty
years of friendship he has heard me through many personal, theological and
spiritual crises. What I value most is the space he gives to reflect and
the silence in which my own heart can speak to me. And when he adds words,
they are to ‘awaken’, to touch the soul or spirit. John continues to be
what he was trained to do - to be an ethical theologian who can open your
heart to the power of loving.
Only people who live this can teach this. Our twenty-year journey has
sometimes been intense, more often filled with laughter and tales of the
absurd. We have taken each other seriously by learning to live where the
heart uncovers pain. Without formal words, we have tapped into the
yearning of the soul.
When the question about an ‘interview’ reached Jesus, he replied: ‘The
hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.’ With the outsider
pressing to belong to God’s family, Jesus knew that the old world of
exclusion, caste, ritual purity and taboo has passed. The coming of the
outsider was the moment of Jesus’ ‘glory’.
As the years have passed my own sense of this Jesus has changed
radically. I acknowledge the variety of insights we share; indeed the
Greeks who came to see him long ago must have had many conflicting
opinions on who he was. Just read chapters 10, 11 and 12 for yourself and
you will face the many opinions that circulated then about Jesus. What did
he mean when he said he was ‘the Son of God’? In the face of the death of
his friend Lazarus, why did he seem so impotent: ‘Could not he who opened
the eyes of the blind, have kept this man from dying?’ And even when
Lazarus astonishingly appeared before his friends, some greeted this with
skepticism and made it a cause to plot Jesus’ downfall.
No, he keeps eluding our definitions and that is the wonderful feature of
the Gospel. We can’t contain Jesus. He bursts out of our boundaries of
what is acceptable, even of what is godly. He embraces people we wouldn’t
want to keep company with – calls them his friends and tells us that of
such is God’s Kingdom. John and I know only too well the many street
people who found themselves in the strong embrace of God and understood
the passion of this enigmatic man Jesus.
When you ask Jesus to define himself, he simply replies ‘Son of
Man’. There is a history to this title that must have challenged some of
Jesus’ hearers to wonder how political and world-affirming he might be.
Others interpreted the words as some super-human conqueror. But his
meaning to the ordinary unchurched outsider seems abundantly clear. He is
man – he is all that I long to be. No, he’s not a man as I live the term –
divisive, divided, uncertain, locked in my own abyss of failure and
incompleteness. He is the man I want to become, the man I spend all my
days seeking for.
And when I reach out to take hold of his sort of man, he challenges me to
the depth of my being. He calls me to live in a new way by showing me the
pattern of his own life: ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of
wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it
bears much fruit.’ That disturbs my complacency and upsets all my plans.
He is going to awaken my imagination to new possibilities and lead me to
fresh discoveries I never thought possible.
Just sometimes I took services for John and preached at St
Saviour’s Redfern. I knew the building well, having filled in a year there
as locum tenens back in 1959 when the Rector was absent, ill. The remnants
of its more colourful and Anglo-Catholic history were everywhere.
There was a profound sadness in the place and though a small congregation
persisted, you knew that soon water and white ants would destroy the
fabric. Some Sundays the intense swarm of termites drove us outside to
conclude the evening service under a street lamp. Some remarkable people
took over but in my opinion none more remarkable than John and his
immediate predecessor, Archdeacon Huard. They journeyed with people
through the dying of the parish, held on to the possibility of new life
and built again the congregation. In the last fifteen years, you entered
the vitality of a contemporary worship that honoured the Prayer Book and
allowed people the joy of discovering and owning publicly the ‘glory’ or
Spirit of God that embraced them.
When you talked to these people after church or at weekend conference you
heard them touch in the simplest terms their own profound awareness of
‘seeing Jesus’ – remember the interpretation I suggested earlier - they
were ‘transformed’, ‘awakened’, ‘re-born’ into a fresh sense of what it
meant to be human.
Jesus’ primary meaning was about his own dying and rising. He was
the grain of wheat, cold and bare in the earth; he was the sparkle of new
life with its abundant possibilities. But his words were also intensely
personal.
Today’s service from the Ordinal, as it speaks about the qualities of a
bishop, illustrates my point. I have used the 1662 Prayer Book but the
words are paralleled in the modern versions. Here are its classic phrases:
John must ‘preach God’s Word’, he must ‘administer Godly discipline’, he
is to ‘edify the Church’ and ‘adorn’ doctrine by ‘innocency of life’, he
must ‘pray’, ‘teach’ what leads to ‘salvation’, be ‘an example of good
works to others’ and be ‘gentle’ and ‘merciful’, ‘to poor and needy
people, and to all strangers destitute of help’. But all this is dependent
on one basic quality: he is to engage what the old Ordinal still called
the ‘Jews and Greeks’ (there they are again) - those inside the Christian
community and those alienated, forsaken and despised – by himself living
out a ‘dying to self’ and ‘a rising to new life’. The old Prayer Book
called the bishop to match ‘our Redemption by Jesus’ death’ by the way the
bishop would live his own life.
Jesus leaves us in no doubt about his meaning: ‘Whoever loves their
life loses it, and whoever hates their life in this world will keep it for
eternal life. If anyone serves me, they must follow me; and where I am,
there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honour
them.’ The promise repeated in John’s Gospel is Jesus’ own commitment to
‘life without measure’. But this only comes, as John McIntyre knows all
too well, when he has faced his own worst demons, owned his pride and
yielded to the profound love of that Other Man whom he holds in view as
the goal and drive of his life.
To become like Jesus by seeing the world as he did, is to begin at the
place of your own human poverty. You are following the man who all his
life carried the stench of the manger. The Gospels persistently reflect on
him as ‘having no place to lay his head’, as in the prophet Isaiah’s words
‘despised and rejected’, as always ‘outside’ with society’s outcasts.
Here is the work of a modern bishop. He builds his ministry around this
paradoxical figure, Jesus. He portrays God in the man Jesus and his
humiliation. He spends his days as a pastor re-framing these opposites,
the man Jesus and God, and helps people reconcile a new awareness of the
human becoming one with the divine. His work is to help people own their
needs and disabilities – their dying – and at this place of their despair
discover the centre of their wondering and imagining. They are not trapped
by their past – a new life is possible. Jesus is the catalyst who helps
them awaken to who they truly are; as they uncover their humanity they
learn that their divinity is already within them. That discovery or
‘seeing’ is our awakening.
For the moment, we are still bound by the wasteland of our
unfulfilled desires and our commitment to appearances. And unfulfilled
desire is the mark of our tragedy. We see this played out in many of our
communities, where dependence on alcohol, drugs, food, pleasure, on
poverty itself, have dwarfed people’s humanity. They will only be released
as they discover the transformation of their inner being, as they allow
the spark of their divinity to kindle.
If all that is just preacher’s words to you, then maybe these lines
written by a man who was part of our respective street worlds in Redfern
and Darlinghurst will show you the heart of this sermon:
I arrived that day
with sores on my feet
unable to walk
The kindest man
I ever met
gave me Jesus
The scars I had
healed long ago
but Jesus stayed
and gave me life
Jesus never went away
he opens doors for me
and taught my heart
so many things and became
my director of circumstances.
(David Christopher Marsh, ‘My Director of Circumstances’, A Street
Spirituality, 2002, reproduction of this poem requested.)
So, what more does a bishop need than to be a leader who has ‘seen’, ‘met’
and modeled himself on the man who is our ‘director of circumstances’. To
this I commend my good friend John and remind him of the Gospel charge:
‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus!’
Bill Lawton
for the Sunday closest to the Feast of Cyril and Methodius, missionaries
to the Slavs.