26 May 2024
St Andrew’s Indooroopilly
Rev Richard Browning
(NB: this text here is fuller than the one used on Sunday morning with a few end notes added)
Isaiah 6.1-8
Romans 8.12-17
John 3.1-17
Introduction
Maybe Nietzsche is right.
A key thread of Nietzsche is ‘the will to power’. He laments the pitiable state of humanity. He reports that instead of the will to power there has been a hollowing of the human condition with the corruption of religion. The once proudly noble, if highly masculine race of unabashed dragon slayers and defiant Spartans were players of epic striving and heroic quests.
Nietzsche would point to where statues of Hercules once stood, wrangling and slaying a fierce many headed monster. Instead, in their placed is the son of a carpenter from a random backwater hung up on a cross as a victim, a criminal, crucified and humiliated. (Exhibit A hangs behind the altar.)
Nietzsche argues valour, strength and pride in ruling with indomitable force has been replaced with diseases like humility, charity and modesty.
His claim is this: the human psyche is formed by nature for the will to power. This will cannot be nullified so the human condition is left with a will to nothingness. Forbidden from rising up and conquering, the will to power is left to consume itself.
Challenge
When I suggested maybe Nietzsche is right, I was referring to his demanding poetic challenge to the human spirit. We seem lost, powerless, even though we might care for the earth, asking what can we do, we flounder? The gospel has become a flaking bit player in the background of history with seemingly nothing to contribute but a parachute for a few for a cheeky exit from a cruel world.
I agree with Nietzsche. There is no end of the human will. It does need redirection though. It seems our will for our lives has shrunk to the near, the self centred and inconsequential.
We don’t just need heroes, we need to BE heroes in this earthly drama. It is only 70 000 years or so ago that our ancestors left Africa and have increasingly been at war with the earth and each other. We need the quest, a call to turn into turbulent winds of ordeal with a worthy challenge, embrace our will and feel powerful.
Whatever we think of the good news, it has to address the arc of evolutionary history. If it doesn’t, then it is not good news. Whatever the saving work of Jesus secures, it cannot just be personal leave passes to heaven. It has to, some how, involve creation itself.
What if creation itself is waiting “with eager longing for the coming of age of the true human-being?” That is the imagination Paul speaks of a few verses later in Romans 8. This is what I speak to this morning, reframing the good news as a quest: the will to be gods.
May our faith fortify our will to be Gods. Come with me.
Object lesson
The magnet and ferrous objects (ok, a steel rod, metal bottle and spanner)
I don’t really understand electro-magnetic forces. I know you can wrap copper wire around a piece of iron and pump electricity through it and create a magnet. I know electromagnetic forces are much stronger than gravity.
Since I was young I have delighted in the way you can take a magnet and pick up a metal object (bottle to rod). And yet more, you can also pick up another metal object with this first metal object, but only while the first remains attached to the magnet (spanner to bottle). Remove the magnet from the first object and this, along with the second object will fall like dead weights, free of any electromagnetic force.
Lesson in play
When Jesus sat with Nicodemus that night in the cover of darkness, Nicodemus called Jesus teacher, a title of great honour. He said the signs Jesus was using suggested he came from God because no one can do such things “apart from the presence of God.”
Jesus didn’t pull out a steel rod and two tools from the carpenters shed. But he could have. He could have said
“Nicodemus, truly I tell you, there is a force, an energy that comes from elsewhere, ‘above’. You can know this force. You can have this force. It can be in you. (First object stuck to the magnet.) But you can only have it by being connected to it. This force then lives in you.”
This force is of heaven. The Son of Man, descended of Heaven, is this force, imminent and in person. Trust this force, be connected with it, in communion with it, and this force will live in you.
God’s love for the cosmos is so complete that he gave his only Son for this purpose: to heal and save, not to condemn, to grant to all the force that belongs to the Son.
It took centuries for our early forebears to work it out, but we would later arrive at the idea that as light is from light, and true God is from true God, so the Son is from the Father separate persons, but make no mistake, the force from above is fully present here in the Son.
This is an epic tale. It is called salvation. May it sing into our imagination: rise with the will to be gods.
Challenge refined
My apologies. I didn’t quite finish the title of our quest:
Rise with the will to be God’s … there is an apostrophe there.
Rise with the will to be God’s vessel, carriers of the very force of God, children and heirs, agents of the Spirit of God, the very creatures creation longs for.
To draw on the images from Paul in Romans 8:
Is not the Spirit in you, with all the force that comes from above?
You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, grasping at power. No.
Call on God’s sacred name, Abba. The only way you can do this is if the force of God is in you, bearing witness to this outrageous mystery: you are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.
The main difference between the will to power and the will to be God’s children is that power is not for possessing and holding on to. It is a force for flowing through and pass on. Any attempt at holding onto the force with a will to power will distort and corrupt that force and break the connection.
No. Rise up with the quest to be the very thing this earth longs for, the very thing Christ poured himself into and became the truly divine now truly human.
Implications
If this quest fired our imagination, our faith and life in this world would mean:
- We would never side with genocide. Or quietly let it pass. How could we?[i]
We could only ever stand in solidarity with others as neighbours. Never again means never again for anyone.
- We would never oppress another, or occupy what is rightfully theirs, their body, their home, their life, their land.[ii]
We would only ever seek “life and peace” (Romans 8.6).
- We would never will to power, or obstruct or undermine a rules based order grounded in the fundamental dignity and inalienable humanity present in every human being.[iii]
- We would never see ourselves as separate from creation, but only, always and forever as members within it with the charge to our wills to be God’s children.
Theosis
There is an old name for what I am describing here. It is called Theosis which means being made God. It is a dominant image in Orthodox theology and Athanasius, the author of the words we are using this morning as our statement of faith, was one of the earliest thinkers. That is, God become human so humans would become divine. The quest is even grander than I supposed in the beginning. Dare ever the will to be God? This is the extraordinary goodnews grounded in the notion of
- adoption as children of God by the indwelling Spirit (Rom 8);
- participation in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4);
- the gift of divine glory (shot through the whole of John’s gospel but especially 17.5, 22-24).
The active presence of the Spirit of God brings us into communion with God. We enter into communion as children and heirs with Christ, because, by the Spirit of God, God dwells within. Here this morning in the sacrament of Communion we leave not because it’s been lovely and now there are other things to do. We leave because we are sent: “Who will go for us?” (Isaiah 6.8)
They key drama in the story of salvation within Theosis is not the death of Christ, but his birth. The emptying of God into the person of Jesus is effective and sufficient. The cross bears witness to God’s complete identification with the human condition; the resurrection bears witness to the general resurrection and the reckoning of God’s justice.
This quest of ours, the will to be God’s agents has a very simple code in the writings of St Paul: “in Christ, in Christ”, everywhere “in Christ”. We are in Christ and if in Christ, then through Christ we are participants within the very life of God. How does it go:
Renew us by your Holy Spirit, unite us in the body of your Son and bring us with all your people into the joy of your eternal kingdom, through Jesus Christ our Lord, with whom, and in whom …
Conclusion
The arc of this sermon traces the journey made by Dr Anne van Gend in her fabulous book “Restoring the Story: the good news of the Atonement”. She asks great questions, demands more of our imagination while speaking into it and of all the models of the atonement, she ends in theosis[iv]. Find in her book clues to how better to be in Christ and engage in the transforming of our being. In this moment though, I make a final call to your imagination. Rise to the quest of the will to be as God, vessels filled with the life Giving Spirit.
- We have an earth to care for and return to our children’s children from whom it has been borrowed.
- We have a peace to make with our own will to power, our own history of occupation.
- We have a force that is in us, from above, that we can neither hoard nor control, but as we are in Christ, we find ourselves sent to be agents for the renewing of creation.
[i] This is of course a reference to Israel Palestine. It is a reference to the ICJ and ICC rulings about Rafah and the continuing onslaught of Palestinians, leaders in particular, Israel as the dominant power specifically.
[ii] Again a reference to the attack on Rafah. It is also a reference to what happens in homes across Australia and is called domestic violence. Women are not safe in the place where they should be safest. It is also a reference the historical acquisition of this southern land under the practice of terra nullius. It is a reference to how our faith points us towards realising the dream of God that is shalom, one human family under the banner of God’s love.
[iii] How is it possible that Biden ignores his own redline, continues to fund arms deals with Israel and addresses the horror of the bombing and starvation by attacking the international body dedicated to upholding international rules based order?
[iv] Anne asks many good questions throughout her book. One of the best is near the end: “What stories did we tell ourselves about ourselves that made it possible for abuse of the vulnerable by the powerful to happen?”
The 19th century modernist invention of the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement demands examination. The PSTA makes the violent retribution of God superior to God’s mercy. It turns Jesus into to a mercenary sent seemingly separate from the God head to appease an angry God. This metaphor receives minimal but sufficient attention in Anne’s writing. A simple way to restore good news to the penal substitution theory and the violence inherent in this kind of ‘sacrifice’ is good Trinitarian theology. The Word was always going to be incarnate, from the foundations of the world it was so. The sacrifice the word makes is not to appease God but is the steadfast witness of the second person of the Trinity’s complete and perfect identification with the human condition. The human condition now ‘in Christ’ makes divinisation for humanity available. That is quite simply, extraordinary good news. Sacrifice as loving self-donation rather than an act of appeasement to an angry Father is good news.