A sermon on Romans 12:9-21 & Matthew 16:21-28 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
When disasters strike, we often feel that if we can make some sense of them, it will give us some measure of protection against falling victim ourselves. That instinct has had a bit too much to grapple with this week. The news has been full of images from Nepal and Tibet where a collapsing glacier caused landslides and a massive flash flood that swept away entire villages and killed hundreds of people. And closer to home, a much loved pastor who had preached for our church not so long ago and was well known to many of us, was diagnosed with acute leukaemia and died just three days later. He hadn’t even reached retirement age.
As I pondered tonight’s gospel reading against the backdrop of this week, I felt a lot more sympathy for Simon Peter than I’ve usually felt. When Jesus describes the disaster that would soon engulf him, Peter cannot bear the thought of it. “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”
I want to say the same thing to the events of this week – “God forbid it! This must never happen.”
It made me realise that this is not so much a failure of courage on Peter’s part. But at the same time, Jesus labels Peter’s thinking as a temptation, as something to be resisted and avoided. And perhaps the temptation and our desire to quickly make sense are closely related. There is something escapist in both. We are looking for an explanation or an action plan that will keep disaster at bay. That’s not some great moral failing on Peter’s part, but Jesus nevertheless resisted it forcefully. Describing it as a satanic temptation is pretty forceful!
There have always been disasters, and we have always struggled to know what they mean. The scientists say that what happened in Nepal this week has happened many times over the centuries, but that it is no longer a rare occurrence. Climate change is making it much more frequent. Here in Australia, there have always been bushfires in the summer, but they are becoming more frequent and so much more intense that the forests don’t recover the way they used to. The planet’s climate has passed several of the tipping point markers we said we needed to avoid. We are now talking about mitigation strategies, not prevention strategies.
The reasons that we have been unable to take adequate preventative action are becoming clearer too. Serious change would have required a level of global bi-partisan cooperation at a time when we have instead become more and more polarised. We thought that MAGA style political chaos couldn’t happen here, but the One Nation party won another by-election yesterday. There are several major wars raging at the moment that don’t make any sense to anyone, and yet the protagonists can’t find any way out.
Our civilisation is beginning to collapse under the weight of its own complexity, and even the billionaire oligarchs, who supposedly have enough money and power to change things, no longer have the capacity to comprehend what is needed, or how to achieve it, or how to break free of their addictions to trying to one-up each other. They too are stuck on the same runaway train as the rest of us. Just because they can buy the train doesn’t mean they know how to turn it around.
We don’t know whether Simon Peter’s reaction was outright denial, a refusal to face the reality of what was coming, or whether it was a theological belief that God’s faithful ones must triumph over their enemies, and so if disaster threatens, then God will intervene to rescue the faithful and ensure that no harm comes to them. We don’t know which it was, and it doesn’t really matter. Both can be seen in people’s reactions today.
We’ve all encountered denialists who are adamant that climate change is either a hoax or just a normal fluctuation. We’ve also encountered those who have absolute faith that God will rapture them off to safety, or absolute faith that science will find a solution just in the nick of time. We are also seeing a growing trend of billionaire oligarchs putting their faith for their future in fortified, climate-controlled, luxury compounds or bunkers, or even in plans to escape to another planet.
Peter’s cry of “God forbid it! This must never happen,” expresses itself in all sorts of ways, and all of them are readily identifiable in today’s world as we struggle to come to terms with the future that is bearing down on us. That’s completely understandable, but Jesus still calls it a satanic temptation.
I want to turn to our second reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans, because as I read it this week, it struck me that it sounded like it was written as a manifesto for how we are to live a Jesus-shaped life in times like these. It is clearly addressing a context in which there is suffering, conflict, evil-doing, vengefulness, and a great deal of need for hospitality, food, humility, and mending relationships. So if that context sounds familiar to us, then what it prescribes will likely be relevant too.
“Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection. Be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints. Extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. So far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Overcome evil with good.”
These instructions are clearly not some kind of complicated action plan for ending the use of fossil fuels, redistributing wealth, saving the planet, and propping up society’s status quo. But they are also not denialism or an escapist fantasy. Paul seems to have a rather clear-eyed and gritty view of the reality the church has to live in, and he is spelling out what a community of Jesus-followers will actually do if they have resisted Peter’s temptation.
If the ecology and the institutional structures of society begin to collapse, we will witness all sorts of dysfunctional madness. The covid era madness of people fighting over toilet paper was a bit of a warning shot of what things could look like if people start to panic and think that they have to fight for their access to food and water and energy. Paul’s list of instructions doesn’t promise to fix the world – it paints a picture of what faithful living looks like in the face of chaos. It paints a picture of a beautiful and generous community living with courage and faithfulness in the face of a rising tide of ugliness.
Most of Paul’s list is expressed as positives, as things we should do. “Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection. Outdo one another in showing honour. Rejoice in hope. Extend hospitality.” But there are negatives too, warnings of things we should not do, paths we should not take. “Do not curse those who persecute you. Do not be haughty or claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay evil for evil. Never avenge yourselves.”
It is almost a bit of a binary view. There are two pathways you could take in the face of all that is going on. Take this one. Don’t take that one. And sometimes things are that simple. Not easy to live, but simple to understand. Love one another and forgive one another, and just in case that is not sufficiently clear, never seek vengeance.
I’m not going to dig too deeply into what Paul means about God when he says we can leave vengeance up to God. Given that the witness of Jesus is clearly that God never seeks vengeance either, there are two or three theories as to what Paul is on about. But in truth, Paul’s point is not actually about what God will or won’t do. It’s about what we shouldn’t do. He’s saying that even if you still think that there has to be some sort of just vengeance at some point, it won’t be your job. Leave it to God. Your job is to love your enemies, bless those who persecute you, and give food to them if they are hungry.
This question of vengeance and retribution is very much a live one in the context of the chaos that is threatening our world. Venture capitalist and entrepreneur, Nick Hanauer wrote, in what he called a letter to his “fellow zillionaires” back in 2014, that “there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society,” he said, “and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.”
In the twelve years since he said that, inequality has continued to soar, and the world has produced its first trillionaire. And sure enough, police states are on the rise in an attempt to stave off the uprisings and pitchforks. Even here in lovely peaceful Australia our police now dress like combat soldiers and are introducing facial recognition technology and drone surveillance to resist the unrest.
When things are falling apart, we want to identify those who are to blame and make them pay. The billionaires know that they are going to be blamed, even those who are resisting Nick Hanauer’s call for wealth redistribution. That’s why they are fortifying their bunkers. Tim Winton’s latest novel, Juice, portrays a post climate-catastrophe world in which secretive vigilante groups breach the fortifications and murder the billionaires in retribution for what was done to the world.
The apostle Paul encourages us to hate what is evil, but also to resist the urge to take vengeance into our own hands. And indeed, in the novel, the vigilantes who are ridding the world of its bunkered billionaires become disillusioned with their own vengeance project. It is eroding their own humanity without making the world a better place.
That’s the thing with our attempts at vengeance. They always collapse into scapegoating. Even when the anger is totally deserved, it really only gives us a short term sugar hit of self-righteousness without doing anything to make the world a better place. Sure, the billionaire oligarchs had way more power and resources than you and me. They might be the ones most responsible for losing control of the runaway train, but knowing whose fault it was doesn’t stop the train. In the end, taking out our anger on them would be little more than that – assigning blame so we can feel righteous. Don’t do it, says Paul. It just makes things worse.
Communities that live faithful Jesus-shaped lives in this world will hate what is evil – obscene inequality, war, apartheid, repression, misogyny – and will do all it can to expose them and resist them, but it will continue to recognise and respect the humanity of all, even the billionaire oligarchs, even those who profit from evil. Bless and do not curse them. Never avenge yourselves. Overcome evil with good.
I’ve spoken before about Bishop Malkhaz, who I spent time with in Georgia last year, and about his “theology of beauty”. It is a commitment to meet the rise of ugliness, not by attacking the ugliness and its proponents, but by building counteracting projects of beauty. As the vigilantes in Tim Winton’s novel began to see, violently attacking those who had generated and profited from the ugliness does not create beauty. It just creates more ugliness – perhaps an ugliness that we can feel more self-righteous about, but ugliness nevertheless.
“Never avenge yourselves. Bless and do not curse them. Overcome evil with good.”
Overcome evil with good. Overcome ugliness with beauty. Overcome hatred with love and blessing and hospitality.
This manifesto might sound near on impossible if you make the mistake of hearing it as a call to each of us as individuals. You will just end up feeling guilty and inadequate. But that is not what it is. Paul is addressing us as a church, as a community who seek to follow Jesus together. That means that not only is the burden shared, but that we are surrounded by encouragement and accountability to help us resist both Peter’s escapist temptation and the slide into retribution, and to instead keep striving to build practices of love, compassion, care, hospitality, and beauty.
Of course, even if you don’t share my sense that the world as we have known it is collapsing around us, Paul’s manifesto for what kind of community we should become still makes sense. The temptation to deny or escape anything bad, and the temptation to seek retribution on those we deem to be to blame for anything bad have been just as much a part of the world we have always known. Paul’s message is relevant in whatever circumstances the church has to live in. It is ever and always a call to live differently, to take up our cross and follow him into whatever reality lies ahead of us, to live as we would wish the world to live – rejoicing with those who rejoice; weeping with those who weep; associating ourselves with the lowly and disadvantaged and contributing to the needs of all in the face of rising inequality and injustice; blessing those who hate us and share our food and drink with our enemies when we see them in need.
If we find ourselves in times marked by desperate hoarding and selfishness, we will be a community of generosity, of sharing, of hospitality. Of course that could be costly if there is real scarcity, but wouldn’t you rather share a last bowl of food in love and community than defend it with guns to gain an extra few hours of isolated anger and hostility? To paraphrase what we heard Jesus say tonight, what will it profit you if you gain the last bowl of food but forfeit all that makes your life worth living – love, compassion, community? Choose the project of beauty, the life worth living.
A sermon full of challenge and hope. It’s worth a much greater audience. Thank you Nathan.