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Pentecost 10
6/8/2023

Isaiah 55:1-5
Psalm 145
Matthew 14:13-21

In a sentence:
In the hands of this God, the one pearl, invisible yeast, the tiny seed, a few loaves and a couple of fish is enough

Parables versus miracles
Over the last couple of weeks, we have heard – although not looked very closely at – some of the parables of Jesus. Today, by contrast, we hear a miracle story.

We respond differently to the various reports of what Jesus said and did. Mostly, we are happy with the parables, if sometimes a little mystified. Many of us, however, suffer from a nervous twitch when it comes to the miracle stories. We feel an urgent need to get around the miracle, an urgency we don’t feel when it comes to the parables.

The parables and miracles might be contrasted as thoughtful, scratch-your-head texts (“Hmmmm…”) and spectacle texts (“WOW!!) – even if we might be sceptical about the miracle report. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven added to the dough” – “Hmmm… That’s something to think about”; “Jesus broke bread and fed over 5000 people – “Wow! Did you see that?”

Of course, we might wonder about the miracle, but that’s not the real problem. The problem is that we don’t say “Wow!” when we hear that the kingdom is like leaven added to the dough, and we don’t really scratch our heads wondering what it could mean that a hungry mass is satisfied with one bag of groceries.

We touch here upon what someone raised last week in our brief conversation about the readings: why does Jesus justify his use of ambiguous parables with a troubling quote from Isaiah, along these lines?

‘To you [disciples] it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to [the crowd] it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13.11ff)

Jesus means here that these parables are not easy. What they relate to is about as easy as it is to perform a miracle. The Kingdom of Heaven in the parables is a very strange thing.  A little later in last week’s collection of parables, Jesus asks the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” (13.51) They answer, “Yes”. For Matthew, it is important that this is a “YES!!” but it was more likely an uncertain “Ummmm…yeahhhhh…could you say all that again?”

On the one hand, the shock to the senses of the miracles illustrates what the parables are about: they have to do with the miraculous. On the other hand, the miracles are mute and meaningless without the parables. A curious thing about today’s account of the feeding of the 5000 is that it doesn’t actually tell us what we are to do with it, which is also the case with just about every other miracle story in the Scriptures. There is no “Believe this” – that I did it. There is no “Do this” – as I have done. There is no “watch for this again” – so you’ll know when I’m around. There is just the story, and the narrative moves on, kind of like how the parables are told, leaving us to scratch our heads.

Here you are, Jesus
With all this in mind, let’s consider today’s particular story. In the middle of the account is an exchange between Jesus and his disciples about who will feed the masses. “You give them something to eat”, Jesus tells them.

The standard reading is that here the disciples are being tested, and fail. And they do fail. But what is the test? Again, the common reading is that they didn’t have “enough faith” – they couldn’t summon the magic – to do what Jesus then had to do in their stead.

But if the feeding has something to do with the Kingdom of Heaven, “not enough faith” doesn’t ring true with the Scriptural understanding of who does what in that Godly kingdom. For a contrast with these disciples here, we might jump gospels and watch what happens in Cana when the wine runs out (John 2.1-12). There Jesus’ mother Mary, the quintessential disciple, nudges Jesus and whispers, “They’re out of wine,” and then tells the servants, “Do whatever he says”. Problem solved.

This suggests that if the disciples fail a test before the hungry masses, it is not that they didn’t have enough “faith” to feed them. The failure is that they didn’t see that the test was whether they would defer to him and respond immediately, “Here you are, Jesus: we can toss in a few loaves and a couple of fish.”

The work of the miracle is to communicate that the world the parables describe can only be realised by God. The Kingdom is God’s work. Put differently, the parables tell of the miraculous nature of God’s reign.

What does this mean for anything?

It means that all of our great efforts at working miracles – our planning, our negotiations, our careful liturgy and our new organ, our food programs, education programs and asylum work – these things are but a few loaves and a couple of fish to be presented with the words, “Here you are, Jesus”.

The miracle – the unbelievable thing – is that this is enough. In the hands of this God, the one pearl, the invisible yeast, the tiny seed, a few loaves and a couple of fish… is enough. And faith, when it comes – the faith that so little is yet enough – this faith is what it looks like for God’s kingdom to come, on earth as in heaven.

“The” parable, and miracle
So little is enough with God because at the heart of our confession is a single, baffling parable: “A person of faith freely walked a path to condemnation on a cross”. “Hmmm…”, we might say, “Not sure I get that”. That one parable is met with a single, spectacular miracle – “The crucified man was raised to life”. “Wow!!”, we might respond, “Although not sure I can believe that”.

But it also applies the other way around: the raising of the condemned man is the parable, and the steady path to the cross is the miracle. We don’t get the parables without the miracles. The easy-to-comprehend cross is only ours with the impossible resurrection. The glorious resurrection is meaningless without the gritty reality of Jesus’ life and death. What we find easy in the parables and hard in the miracles lean in toward each other, fill each other up, and there the Kingdom of Heaven is revealed.

When the kingdom of this God draws near, everything becomes a parable, and everything a miracle – even us with our hesitations, our lack of faith or vision, our fears and our graspings after empty hopes. And the same for our more “positive” experiences – our dreams and visions and joys; the Kingdom of Heaven “makes strange” everything, for the good.

Our life together as Mark the Evangelist in this place, and the quiet hopes and anxieties of our hearts, are the stuff of parable and miracle, where God’s will is done, on earth as in heaven. We will be God’s parable and miracle.

Let this be the light in which we do our next thing.

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Pentecost 9
30/7/2023

Romans 8:12-25
Psalm 119:129-135
Matthew 13:10-13, 31-35, 44 46

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18)

Sixty-two years ago, when I was a second-year theological student, I first proposed this text as a sermon offered to the Friday student preaching class. Having long forgotten its drift, I decided, perhaps foolishly, to read it again – now as an act of penance. Preachers have long been advised never to keep their early efforts, but perversely I have, if only in the hope of doing better.

What was the sound and fury of this first amateurish offering that led to my effort’s missing the point? It was interpreting Paul’s “sufferings”, and the “groaning of creation”, to be the cultural conversion of living Christian faith into conventional formulaic religion. This arguably imaginative imposition on the text might have been excused, because for some years before becoming a theological student, I had been captivated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s intriguing concept of “non-religious” interpretation of Christian faith in his “Letters and Papers from Prison”. If you haven’t ever read them, I urge you to do so, for eighty years later what he wrote has all come true. So, even though it was misconceived, and would certainly need a different text, my sermonic exertion was not entirely wrong. The fact is that emancipation of Christian faith from the category of “religion” is still a – if not the – major discovery that awaits a largely hostile or apathetic “No-religion” Western culture.

I suppose that every generation hearing this text will look to the issues of the day to find a correspondence to Paul’s “sufferings of the present time”. To be sure, it would be understandable hearing in our day his striking phrase, the “groaning of creation”, to conceive of our “sufferings” as the escalating horrors of climate change, not to speak of the ambiguous potential of burgeoning artificial intelligence. These, of course, overlay the more enduring candidates we experience as human suffering – incessant global warfare; our physical frailties; the pain, intended or unintended, that accompanies our mutual interactions; even the closing of our churches. All these which we experience as ‘suffering’, understandable though they be, would actually be a misreading of our text.

The reason why all such interpretations of the “sufferings of the present time” identified as being one or more contemporary cultural phenomena misses the point – or at least Paul’s point – is to be found in the little word in the text, “time”. “I consider that the sufferings of this present time….”  The Greek word for time that Paul employs here is not, as we might hear it to be, tick-tock, every-day, worldly time; the faces of a watch; the dates on a calendar or a tombstone, but rather is a time that comes laden with significance – he uses a word that really means something like “opportune” time, eventful time, filled time, time having real significance. Well, we might roundly assert: what could be more evocative as being absolutely decisive, cataclysmic even, of the lists of human “suffering” that we can readily compile?

But the fact is that Paul’s “filled-time”, “the sufferings of this present time”, is about something other than the world in its always-present unpredictability. Rather, he is writing to a persecuted church facing absolute predictability, whose “suffering” members know themselves to be well and truly “cultural resident aliens”. Since that is increasingly how we find ourselves, Paul’s “eventful time” should prove to be the greatest encouragement. With it we are being drawn into a new perspective as to how the world looks viewed from beyond its suffering self – a view of our everyday plain, we might say, from an elevated ridge.

We get a sense of what is at stake in standing on such an elevated ridge when we hear the cryptic repeated Heaven-on-Earth parables offered to us this morning in the gospel of Matthew. In each we hear of the essentially “innocent” everyday world – of an insignificant mustard seed planted in chronological time, but destined to become a tree robust enough to accommodate “the birds of the air”, a then-synonym for the Gentiles. What Matthew is prefiguring here is an unanticipated “filled time”, soon to unfold as inclusive Easter gift replacing what was then a daily Jewish necessity of Gentile exclusion. Or we hear of yeast, in itself pointless, now transformed when added to flour to make the human necessity of bread. Or again, an unobserved hidden treasure is secured by a man’s parting of his total wealth, as indeed is that of a merchant in his everyday employment coming across a pearl of such value that absurdly he is prepared to sell everything for it. Or, if you prefer a contemporary parable, what about likening an earthly “heaven” to a spare temporal moment visit to an Op shop – an “Opportune” Shop remember – only to exclaim discovering an unanticipated find: “I’ve been looking for one of these!” Time well spent indeed!

The point is that all these everyday chronological activities have the potential to become transformed when the gospel is at stake into something radically more – a “more” which Jesus, surely extraordinarily, identifies as an experience of heaven-on-earth. In just this way, in our text, Paul is proposing a freely-embodied conscious taking up of “suffering with Christ” as being different from all every-day “sufferings”, an experience of being offered a potential new shape to the world different from the harsh realities of everyday life.

This embodied suffering with Christ comes as both a participation as well as an anticipation. Participation obviously, in an already willing sharing – but doing so as the anticipation of something not yet at hand. He calls this duality of participation/anticipation the pre-figuring of a “glory about to be revealed to us”. His point is that this future is no longer merely an extension of the present. It is an alternative to it. This radical reversal of time proposes a transfer from one domain to another – from the ambiguities of “everyday time” to a discovery of “opportune time”. It consists of living a life that is coming from an assured future into our present uncertain time. If participation emphasises the “already” of this arrival, anticipation proposes its “not yet”. For this reason, we hear that this “not yet” is to be experienced as “hope”.

But with this little word “hope”, we clearly have a real problem. Like most Christians words today, “hope” has been cast adrift from its theological mooring. We speak of those who live by hope as optimists – “glass half full” people, unlike “glass half empty” pessimists – with a distinct preference for the former. “I hope it won’t rain for the match – I’m optimistic!  And then, when it does rain: “I suppose that I should have been more pessimistic”. Either way, true hope doesn’t stand a chance. For, as Paul observes, who exhausts hope in what is seen, that is, when we already know that the day will either be sunny or wet? We need something much more reliable than this – to grasp a better true hope that has its ground beyond the inevitable paralysis of an always capricious optimism or pessimism?

Our text proposes an answer.  Grounded hope will emerge when “suffering” is grasped as the necessity of a daily fundamental reorientation – what the Gospel calls “repentance” – a willing taking up of that inevitably concealed unobservable union between God and the world once and for all revealed in the Cross and resurrection of Christ. But, if this sort of hope is to have any contemporary force, we really do need to find a better word. What about when you hear the word hope, substituting for it something like “assurance”? Because assurance has a ground, a rationale, that evades a “whistling in the dark” vacuous hope that could go either way.

In a few moments we will be invited to stand and confess the faith of the Church. Amongst many things, we will find ourselves saying: “I believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”. What are these assurances but simply “symbols of glory”, the luminous unveiling of what it has all been for? This most decisive assurance of all is what the Gospel calls “joy” – that no terror awaits that has not already been defeated – a solidity quite other than mercurial “happiness”. For with joy we live, not towards what may be, but to the vindication of what has already been secured.  And this is simply to endorse Paul’s confidence for ourselves:

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits….” 

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Pentecost 8
23/7/2023

Romans 8:18-25
Psalm 86
Matthew 13:24-30

In a sentence:
Faith acts and speaks with patience because it is confident that God has and will triumph over all things.

Faith, Nature, Art and War
As I sat on down at my desk earlier this week, I was struck by the titles of two books I’d placed there next to each other.

I had just finished the first book: Gerhard Ebeling’s The nature of faith. Ebeling attempts to lay faith out in such a way as to connect to the broader university community where he taught. I wonder whether this could, in part, be the kind of work we might be doing now that we are in a university precinct among colleges.

The second book was what I am now reading – Sun Tzu’s The art of war, a classic Chinese text on martial strategy. I’m reading this for a similar reason: how does one engage with strange others, whether those in the university, those in the Synod’s Centre for Theology and Ministry(!), or just in the wider world? The terrain is unfamiliar, and we don’t know what to expect from the natives. Some anticipation and strategy would seem to be required!

Common to these two books, and central in my own motivation in reading them, is the question of engagement. But what struck me about the two sitting next to each other on the desk was the similar structure of their titles – The “This” of “That: “The nature of faith” and “The art of war”.

And a somewhat silly question came to mind: are these two books about the same thing, even if written perhaps 2400 years apart and on seemingly divergent topics? Has the nature of faith got something to do with the art of war? This strange connection persisted, and now you will have to think about it with me!

War as an Art
War is a human endeavour which is, crucially, everywhere and at all times a reality or a near possibility at one level or another. This is the case whether you’re on a battlefield, struggling to get some new business startup off the ground or just preparing to visit the in-laws. Politics – our very life together – is, broadly, war.

War is then something we make or fashion, as a matter of course. As such, it can be done well or poorly. The art of war was written so that war be done well. It doesn’t matter here whether war or any human struggle offends us. None of us can do much about these struggles when they come, or even avoid them. We can only respond well or not. And this response – this art of doing war is – like any art – not easy. (A recent book makes this point by reversing the title of Sun Tzu’s book: The war of art [S Pressfield]).

It makes sense, then, that we might think about the art of war in the way that we might think about any art: How do we do this well? How do we enter into the fray? How do we engage others, perhaps against their will? If we are going to be living with other people we need to know something about the art of war; it’s just part of life, just natural.

Faith and nature
What about The nature of faith? The proposal here is that faith has a nature appropriate to itself. It has its own way of being, self-understanding, and expression. Just as sparrows, pelicans, and ostriches are each their own particular type of bird, faith – among other human endeavours – is and does its peculiar thing.

But on this account (which is not quite Ebeling’s argument), faith is a different human thing from war. If war is “natural” – by which I mean that it is everywhere at hand – this is not so for faith. Faith might have a nature of its own, but we don’t think that faith is “natural”. War and struggle are everywhere and are, in this sense, natural. Faith is not everywhere – or at least this is how the secular world frames the matter. Faith might have its own nature, but it is not natural, not fundamental, and is actively excluded from some places.

The question for us is, is this the proper reading of faith? And the answer is, No.

But it’s one thing to say this, and another to know and embrace what it means to say it in a context where it is denied.

The war of faith
The only way we can contradict this marginalisation – in ourselves and in our relationship with the world – is surprising and horrifying: faith must go to “war”. With all political struggles, war is about the crossing of boundaries. We push back invaders or become invaders ourselves. Not surprisingly, this is precisely what it feels like to ourselves and to the broader culture whenever the church presumes to speak out on some topic or to evangelise. We – the church – strategise, and the world responds as if under attack. It is almost impossible – outside the church and inside it – to hear the word “faith” without faith already being outside natural human endeavour. In a culture like ours, to propose faith is to cross a boundary, so that the very notion of faith is heard as a rumour of war.

I suspect this seems rather extreme to some of you, but consider the response you might expect from family, neighbours or colleagues if you suggested a bit of theology might do them good. The defences will go up, for an enemy is at hand.

Of course, the problem with war language in connection with faith is that there is a kind of faith which literally goes to war. The young fanatic with a bomb in his backpack is a version of faith at war, as is the Christian reactionary blowing up an abortion clinic. This is war, and it is a kind of faith. But it is bad faith. For there is an art of faith which determines what the war of faith should properly look like, and this art can be badly or well done.  We need to know about the art of faith in order to know how faith might properly wage war.

Paul and the patient warrior
And now I come(!), briefly, to our text this morning from Paul’s letter to the Romans. What does the war of faith look like, according to Paul?

The condition for war is the world’s “bondage to decay”, the “sufferings of this present time” and the the great groaning” of creation and the human heart, at the struggle for life. Faith holds that this is the struggle, and that it will be a victorious struggle because the only combatant who matters is the God and Father of Jesus Christ. It is God’s own struggle.

And us? What is faith’s part here? What is the art of faith in the one struggle which matters? Faith wages war, Paul says, by being patient.

I didn’t expect that when I started pondering those book titles. If we are in a war, patience is almost a horrifying suggestion, sounding like resignation and capitulation. But this is faith’s war – the struggle of the faith which trusts in this God, who will overcome the bondage of all things, all relationships, to decay.

The art of war is, for faith, the art of patience. This is because faith holds that the war is already won. And now the groaning of all creation is no longer “mere” suffering but is transformed into the birth pangs of God’s future: the whole world is pregnant with God’s promise. There is then now, no further blow to strike. Patience need only wait for the birth of the children of God; this cannot be induced or hurried.

But the patient art of faith is not passive. Patience expects something, and faith’s mode of waiting points towards what we expect, testifying to what is to come. Faith, then, refuses to shut up about the coming reconciliation of all things, the overcoming of all boundaries, the end of all struggle and war. If faith seems to cross boundaries, it is because this crossing itself is testimony. The war of faith is not incursion into foreign territory, even if the foray makes us nervous and we are rejected as enemies. Anywhere faith goes, it knows that place as God’s own and goes there as proof of this.

This is to say that faith is at home in the world, in the entirety of the world. Faith is at home on Curzon Street and on College Crescent. Faith is at home in the rigour and passion of politics and in a solitary, quieted heart. Faith is at home in death as well as in life.

This is because faith holds that we are already conquerors through him who loved us; there is no war to wage, only the busy, witnessing work of patience. To anticipate what we will hear from Paul again next week in his great crescendo to this chapter in Romans: faith does its work patiently and without violent struggle because not death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,

is be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8.27-39).

Faith struggles here and now – but patiently – in words and works which express the reconciliation of all things which God will bring.

Our new start here today is just a part of that struggle, which we take up with joy – which is to say, with courage. We are here because it is, for us, faith’s next thing, whatever comes of it.

And so, let us lift up our hearts as, in fresh words and deeds, we begin again the patient life of the children of God.

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Pentecost 7
16/7/2023

Isaiah 55:1-13
Psalm 65
Matthew 13:2-9

In a sentence:
Thanksgiving, properly, opens us up to God’s next good thing

On Saying “Ta”
It is not long after our children begin to develop a sense for language that we teach them to say ‘ta’. This is an important lesson for at least two reasons.

First, and obviously, we want to instil a sense of humility and gratitude in our little ones. We can’t do everything for ourselves, so we learn to say thanks when someone gives us something we need.

But second – and less obvious in the lesson – saying “ta” is an essential social noise. Many personal exchanges require this of us, and so we learn to say it almost automatically. We say “Good morning” and “How are you?” when we meet someone, without really thinking about the quality of their morning or wanting to know too much detail about how they are. Similarly, saying “thanks” brings closure to a personal interaction. We say thanks when someone gives us the few coins we are owed in change, or at the end of an email, or we give a wave of thanks when someone lets us into the line of traffic. Saying “ta” is a kind of social lubricant.

Our thanks can, of course, be much more heartfelt than this, just as our greetings can be more sincere than they often are. Yet saying thanks is always at least the social noise.  And, as a social noise which concludes some human exchange, thanksgiving is an inherently past-oriented action.

“Thank God”
What does this mean for saying thanks to God, as we might understand ourselves to be doing today, now taking leave of a significant part of our past?

We get some sense of the church’s thanksgiving by examining how we sometimes pray. We thank God, perhaps, for a good harvest (“Harvest Thanksgiving”). We thank God for new members who join the congregation or for the excellent weather we had on the church picnic (at least, in those days when we had church picnics!). We thank God because one of our number escaped harm in some recent catastrophe. We might even dare to thank God for the outcome of an election. Such thanksgiving as this is in the standard mode of exchange and closure. Something has happened that we attribute to God’s action, and so we respond with the necessary social – or necessary pious – noise.

Of course, thanking God is often contentious. The lovely day we enjoyed for the church picnic might have been one more day on which a desperate farmer did not get the rain she so earnestly prayed for. And the test case for all pious thanksgiving in closure mode is the crucifixion of the Christ: Thank God that we are finally rid of Jesus the Nazarene.

We might reasonably suspect, nonetheless, that we must make some thanksgivings like this. We give thanks for worship services in workshops and hotels here in North Melbourne in the early 1850s, for the laying of various foundation stones between 1859 and 1898, and for the taking of responsibility as circumstances changed. We give thanks for the consolidation of earlier communities here in 1987 and 1996, and for all the efforts over the past 15 years or so which sought to maintain our presence here. We must do this because the social noise – and its pious version – does matter. People have done their best, and we thank God for them and for the benefits of their labours.

And yet, thanksgiving like this also brings each of these exchanges between God and us to their respective closures. As such, our thanksgiving here remains oriented towards “yesterday”.

Eucharist: Thanksgiving as Becoming
But the church does more than this in its thanksgiving. At the heart of the life of any (small c) catholic Christian worship is “the Eucharist”. We know it also, of course, as “the Lord’s Supper” and “Holy Communion” or even “the Mass”, but perhaps “Eucharist” characterises the sacrament best. From a Greek root, the word means “thanksgiving”. How does the church give thanks here?

A major feature of that part of our worship is the “Great Prayer of Thanksgiving”. This prayer tells the story of creation, of the call of the people of Israel, and of God’s struggles with that people. We hear of the sending of Jesus, of his death and resurrection, and of the fruit of God’s saving work in him. All of this is told in the past tense, and so it looks very much like saying thanks in the mode of exchange and closure. In the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, we say “Ta”.

But the Eucharist – the thanksgiving – is not yet over. We move from the prayer into the actions around the bread and wine: the blessing, the breaking of the bread and the eating and drinking. This, too, is thanksgiving, but now we are not bringing closure but opening up, not drawing to an end but becoming the shape of a beginning.

And what is beginning is the Body of Christ – the church – nourished by and participating in the humanity of Jesus, which is signed in the eating and drinking of bread and the wine said to be the body and blood of Jesus. We persist in this ghastly image because we are what we eat. Let us receive what we are, Augustine says, Let us become what we receive: even the Body of Christ.

For the church to say thanks, properly as church, is then not to look back to some closed past of Jesus. For the church to give thanks for Jesus is for it to become itself the Body of Christ. To give thanks for Christ is to become an openness to the future. If we remember the work of God in Christ, we remember our future, so that thanksgiving is a process of becoming that future.

And so, to thank God is not bring closure; it is to make a commitment. “Do this”, Jesus says, “for the making again of me”. For the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist to give thanks for all that we and our predecessors have known of God’s grace of God is, then, for us to re-commit ourselves as bearers of God’s grace. There is no closure here, only openness to God’s next good thing.

When Gods call us to thanksgiving, we are not only to remember the past but are challenged to make a commitment to a future about which we know nothing except that the Father’s heart is there, waiting for the arrival of the Body of the Son – waiting of our arrival. And to arrive, we must go, now as always.

We don’t know where we are going, in the sense that really matters. We know only that God will be there.

Thanksgiving, then, is a risky venture and not for the fainthearted. Thanksgiving remembers and closes and releases and, from there, turns to the openness of a genuinely new and unknown day.

How does the church say thanks? In fear and trembling, throwing ourselves forward into the promise of God.

God says to us now, “Say ta. I dare you. And when you do, you shall go out with joy, and be led back in peace, and the mountains and the hills will burst into song, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”

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Pentecost 6
9/7/2023

Romans 7:15-25a
Psalm 145
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Sermon preached by Daniel Sihombing

In her book published in 2015, titled The New Prophets of Capital, Nicole Aschoff, a sociologist from the United States, presents a chapter titled “The Oracle of O: Oprah and the Neoliberal Subject.” Oprah here is of course the famous Oprah Winfrey, a television personality who is likened to a prophet. Not the kind of prophets that we find in the Bible, for she is categorized as one of the twentieth century prophets of capital, whose vocation is about the creation and reproduction of neoliberal subjects.

In Aschoff’s words, “Oprah’s success and charisma undergird her core message that anything is possible. Her story is a real-life, rags-to-riches tale that inspires a belief that wealth and success are achievable if we open our minds.” One of the stories that she mentions in the chapter is about one of Oprah’s trips to Africa, where she told “a group of impoverished children who had been orphaned by the HIV/AIDS epidemic that with hard work and determination they too could be like her one day: ‘I grew up like many of you. No running water. No electricity, as a little girl. You can overcome poverty and despair in your life with an education. I am living proof of that.”

How often do we hear this kind of message in the last few decades? About how the societal problems and solutions are ultimately rooted in individual mindsets. It’s all about perspective! Change your mindsets, and life will be different.

What a contrast to what we hear from Paul in our reading today, in Romans 7! For here Paul instead puts a lot of emphases on the inability of an individual subject to overcome the tide of sinful history by their own power.

Verses 15 and 16: “For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

The “I” that Paul writes about here actually knows what is right. This subject knows what is the right thing to do. They do not need to change their mindset. They know that the law is spiritual. They know that the law is good. In verse 22, Paul even writes, “For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self.” There is nothing wrong with the mindset.

And yet the same subject admits that “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (v.15). “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” (v.18). So it is not just about the mindset. There is another factor at play.

And what would that factor be?

In Paul’s words, “But I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin.” (v.14). “It is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” (v.17). “If I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” (v.20). He also speaks about the subject being “captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” (v.23). “Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (v.24)

This body of death, where sin dwells within. This body of death, sold into slavery under sin. So there is another factor, something that dwells within us. There is another factor, something that enslaves us. Something that took over and control our body. Something that limits the efficacy of a transformed mindset.

It sounds as if what Paul speaks about in Romans 7 goes against the oracle of Oprah. It sounds as if what he tells us about the body of death is a counter-argument to the idea of the neoliberal subject. For sure, neoliberalism as an economic system haven’t yet existed in Paul’s lifetime. But hearing what he says for us in this time, it sounds to me that Romans 7 is a reminder that what is possible for us as individuals is always under the constraints of historical conditions, something that is located beyond our inner self, and that those historical conditions are often kind of negative forces, because history is under the power of sin.

How often do we feel the power of these historical constraints that limit our ability to do the good things? This is what happened when we pay for our taxes and so much of that money goes into the war machinery, even though we did not vote for the government in power. Are we complicit in this regard? And what about our position in the global relations of production? We probably think we only do our jobs, make an honest living, feed our family, but how does what we do in our job actually be part of a global chain that impacts people all over the world, especially those who live in the Global South. How does that impact climate change and environmental sustainability and the lives of the next generation, humans and animals?

This is where I hear Paul speaking about this body of death, “sold into slavery under sin.” “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” “Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

Now, if we look at the context, the previous chapter, Romans chapter 6, is about dying and rising with Christ. The old self is buried, the new one is raised with Christ. But what is this new life in Christ? Is it a kind of a morally good life, where we can now fulfil a set of rules and practices? No! So Romans 7 is where Paul is trying to block this move, by saying that if you are trying to rely on your works, it will only reveal that your self, is actually not fully yours. There is a kind of power that rules over it. The power of sin. And then you would see that this body is the body of death. What he had in mind instead, is what he is about to say next in Romans 8, living in the power of the Holy Spirit, joining the new movement from God that radically transforms the world in the power of resurrection.

Joining the movement from God means that it’s not about us, individuals, being able to overcome the constraints of historical conditions by our own works, through our change of mindset. It’s not about being a neoliberal subject, preached by the new prophets of capital, that you can do and be whatever you like as long as you believe and put the work in, and solve the problem as an individual. It’s not about us being holy and moral through our own efforts, as if we are not living under the historical conditions ruled by the power of sin. The gospel for Paul is so much more than that, as it is about joining the movement from God that radically transforms the world, the movement that is signalled by the resurrection of Jesus. May the Holy Spirit blow this power again and calls us all to join in. Amen.