SERMON PREACHED BY

THE REV. PAUL MULLEN

AT

SCARBORO UNITED CHURCH, CALGARY

NOVEMBER 25, 2007

    “When Chaos Reigns”

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Here we are at the end of the year. Even though it is not December 31 we are at the end of the Church year. Next Sunday is the first Sunday in the season of Advent.  This on the last in the long season of Pentecost, which began the last week in May. In 1925, Pope Pius XI created what has been called Christ the King Sunday to be celebrated this last Sunday of Pentecost, ending the church year remembering, as it were, who is really in charge of this world. Pius XI did this for a number of reasons. He was concerned the church was losing respect and authority in the world with the rise of secularism. He had several other reasons as well:

1.1.    He wanted nations to see that the Church has the right to freedom, and immunity from the state (Quas Primas, 32).

2.2.    He wanted leaders and nations to see that they are bound to give respect to Christ (Quas Primas, 31).

3.3.    He wanted the faithful to gain strength and courage from the celebration of the    feast, as we are reminded that Christ must reign in our hearts, minds, wills, and bodies (Quas Primas, 33).

Although the church is held with increasing disrespect in the world, I don’t quite agree with Pius that the problem is how nations and leaders see the church so much as the way the church and its leaders too often forget that Jesus reigns and not them. That self-righteous arrogance and judgementalism are not becoming traits in those who would present themselves as ambassadors for Christ the King. Too many church leaders and Christians seem intent on inoculating people against our faith instead of inviting them into the wonder.

That being said it is useful to focus on the Reign of Christ for at least one Sunday each year in that it calls us to look at who we are accountable to, the nature of our society and the state of empire in our world. Hence the ambiguous title of this sermon, “When Chaos Reigns.” The chief stimulant for the growth of empire at any time, in any place, is fear of chaos. We are a people who like stability and the predictability that goes with it. We like stability and predictability so much that we go to inordinate lengths to create it for ourselves and those we see as being part of who we are – as individuals, families, communities and nations.

The paradox of civilization is that for some to live in peace, security and stability violence is done to others. If civilization did not need to be enforced by violence then we would have no need for armies, police forces and restrictions on freedoms. But then again life might become more chaotic.

Some people think the world is too chaotic now. Some even want to remove God from the equation. Witness books by Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion,” Christopher Hitchens, who wrote “God is Not Great,” and others who claim that the world is so chaotic now that it must be religion’s fault and all we have to do is get rid of the idea that there is a God and everything will be fine. I have to wonder if they have taken a close look at societies that have tried to ban God – Russia and China to name two. Hardly the peaceful, perfect societies that a lack of God and religion were supposed to create.

To bring it closer to home, let’s talk about Christmas some more. More specifically that form of chaos known as the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy. Because advertising has convinced us that Christmas cannot be perfect unless the right gift is bought, not only for each of our family members, but nearly everyone we know or are remotely acquainted with (OK, I exaggerate!) our well-being and esteem as economic units.  Sorry, I mean our well-being and esteem as people, depends on how we shop, especially at Christmas.

Shopping has become a key source of well-being and a form of chaos and this is most apparent in the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy. This is the time of year when chaos reigns, if not supreme, at least over the lives of too many. Friday was Black Friday to retailers in the States. Not Black Friday in terms of anything dire like a stock market crash.

    This was the economic black, representing black ink instead of red ink. Black Friday marks the theoretical day of celebration when retailers’ ledgers turn from eleven months of red ink into black ink. Most retail profits, apparently, are accrued in the last month of the year. Black Friday is the day after the American Thanksgiving and marks the beginning of the Christmas Season. Here in Canada the beginning of the Christmas Season is called Remembrance Day (Just kidding – sort of!). While not an official holiday in the US, many employers (except retailers) give their staff Black Friday off to go shopping.

It is a very strange irony that the economic survival of the great United States, the one country that seems to want to become a global empire, that the country’s economic survival is dependent on the celebration of the birth of a baby in a stable 2000 years ago.

Black Friday is very much a day of chaos. If you saw any footage of the store doors opening early in the morning, some as early as 5:00 a.m., to let hordes of shoppers stream in, you would have seen them wide-eyed and eager, ready to glom onto whatever door crasher and loss-leader bargains they can find while they last.

You can have a similar experience by visiting any mall any Saturday between now and Christmas and on the Boxing Day that follows.

For some, though, shopping has become a real problem. Some people are finding that they can’t stop themselves from shopping, shopping rules their lives. The current issue of Macleans Magazine (Nov. 26, 07 p. 64) has several articles related to the problem. They note, “It is not as if impulsive shoppers don’t know the financial repercussions. In a Mackenzie Investments poll last January, 37 per cent of 1,000 Canadian adults said they were concerned that their lifestyle – the house, the cars, and the holidays – was not sustainable over the next 10 years. Still, whether they’re worried or not, nearly half said they never stop themselves from buying anything they want.”

The article also quotes Vancouver, portfolio manager Adrian Mastracci, of KCM Wealth Management Inc., who has counselled many  who are only one paycheque way from crisis – “no savings, maxed-out credit cards, no emergency fund, nothing” – largely due to credit card debt racked up on holidays . . . or gadgets in the living room. Many of them only seek help when they have hit rock bottom and are looking at what he calls “the B-word.”

Bankruptcy certainly isn’t pretty and isn’t always the best way out of debt. Perhaps the only advantage is that you usually have to turn over your credit cards. (Although it is way too easy to get them back.) It’s as if the retailers know that the very thought of bankruptcy can be so be downright depressing – and the way to cure that is to go shopping!! And so they send you more credit cards.

Sad but true, shopping has become a way to feel better, to purchase self-esteem, or simply to be entertained. Sometimes people feel so powerless in life that they don’t just buy things they steal them. Shoplifting, Macleans notes, becomes a way to re-claim power when people feel helpless to buy what everyone else seems to have, or to add excitement to a life that was supposed to be wonderful once one “has it all” but still feels empty, or to fulfill a sense of entitlement – good people have all these things, I am a good person, therefore I am entitled to this or that item.

Well, this is not intended to be a diatribe about shopping as such. What I really want to do is challenge each of us, myself included, to look at the place of shopping in our lives. I want to do this because what we buy is an indicator of what we worship, or to put it another way, what rules our lives. As my quotable Father says, “The most sensitive nerve in the human body runs from the heart to the wallet.” More biblically, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matt. 6: 21)

What and who we worship is critical. Critical enough that I need to make a distinction between attending a worship service, Christian or otherwise, and living out that worship in our daily lives. Integrating our faith with our daily living so that our worship of God governs our lives in all aspects is extremely challenging – something to continually work toward rather than something to achieve once and for all.

One of the reasons we encourage people to worship weekly – let me take that back and say, to worship every week – too many of us worship weakly instead of every week. Are you following my drift? Worshipping with some regular frequency is a discipline by which we remind ourselves that we worship God and not the economy, that we worship God and not some ideology, that we worship God and not some political point of view, that we worship God and not the military might it takes to inflict our way on others.

All of these – economics, ideology, politics and the military – demand our loyalty. And all four of them are necessary if a country is to have the necessary social power to create an empire.

Dominic Crossan, in his recent book, “God and Empire”, notes that for an empire to be built and effective, it must dominate economically, ideologically, politically and militarily. He contrasts the building of the Roman Empire in biblical times with empire that Jesus of Nazareth was promoting, and presents helpful insight into challenging the building of empire today.

He also helps us to understand how a Palestinian peasant became known as King of Kings in the first place and gives us a clue as to why Jesus was so popular and so despised in his day – and even today.

He asks us to “imagine this question. There was a human being in the first century who was called “divine,” “Son of God,” “God,” and “God from God,” whose titles were “Lord,” “Redeemer,” “Liberator,” and “Saviour of the world.” Who was that person?”

The answer is not Jesus of Nazareth even though most Christians today believe those titles were originally created for and uniquely applied to Christ. These were all titles officially bestowed on Caesar Augustus.

I had the opportunity to visit the Royal Ontario Museum a few years back and I looked through the section on Ancient Rome. They had a display of coins there from the Roman Empire. Because I had read about the coins in Jesus’ day I looked for one of the Caesar Augustus coins and found it. Printed around the edge of the coin, as I remember it, were the words “Augustus Caesar F. Divi” or Caesar Augustus, son of god. The god in question was Julius, or as we know him Julius Caesar. The name “Augustus,” by the way,

means “worthy of worship.”

Crossan concludes that to take these titles and apply them to Jesus the Christ was to deny them to Caesar Augustus. Followers of Jesus were taking the identity of the Roman Emperor and giving it to a Jewish peasant. “Either,” he says, “that was a peculiar joke and a very low lampoon, or it was what the Romans called majestas and we call high treason.

Caesar Augustus was proclaimed the son of the god Julius, known to us as Julius Caesar. Augustus was given all those supreme titles because he brought an end to the civil wars that were rending the Roman State and threatening to destroy the emerging Empire. Augustus brought peace – pax romana – by brutally crushing any and all opposition and by allowing local governments to rule as long as taxes were collected and sent to Rome, and as long as their loyalty to Augustus was without question or hesitation. In short, he controlled the economy, the politics, the military and the ideology – that he was a god not to be questioned.

Against all this power and might, Jesus of Nazareth invited people into a different kind of kingdom, a different kind of civilization – a kin-dom, if you will, based on right relationships instead of violence. A civilization of peaceful, respectful co-existence in which even one’s closest followers will not take up arms to defend you, nor will you ask them too, even if it means a tortuous death on a cross. A kin-dom in which we all endeavour to love one another and all creation into fulfillment.

So I invite you to remember, as this new church year begins and Christmas approaches, first, that no matter what your TV tells you, you are more than an individual consumer unit. Your value is far greater than any of the things you might buy. You are a loved child of God, a God who loves you as much or more than life itself. Second, remember whose rule you have committed to honour in your life – not the rule of power and authority that we create to protect all our stuff – a more risky rule, a rule that has the potential for the profoundly satisfying chaos that comes when we love without fear. Love in a way that invites the spontaneity of caring for each other and the earth, of doing what we know is right and appropriate rather than what is expected or required. Love which is willing to let go of all the things, the stuff that so imprisons us. Love which might just be born in our stable hearts and grow to turn the world upside down. Love which obeys the paradoxical one who is both lamb and shepherd, prince and slave, peacemaker and sword bringer, giver of the way he took, the everlasting instant we both scorn and crave.