Café

The Hardest Sermons You’ll Ever Have To Preach
Reviewed by Hans Kristensen
Little Black Books: Science and God
Reviewed by Andrew Laird
Making the Most of the Cross
Reviewed by Lesley Hicks
Higher Ground
Reviewed by Andrew Laird

A lesson from street people

12:27pm Sunday, 25th July 2010

What the people of St Kilda taught Tim Costello.

Last month I talked about John’s Gospel and how in everything I understand about God I know through Jesus. I then related how people see God in nature or in the Bible, but in doing so we can still miss the heart of God in Jesus. Let me continue with a story.
About a year ago I was preaching with a well-known Christian leader. I had talked a little bit about my pain for Palestinians: Christians and Muslims in Gaza. And I talked about how many Christians don’t even know there are Palestinian Christians, and they’re not sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. This preacher came after me. He held up his Bible and he used the Old Testament, and he talked about the 31 kings that blocked Joshua and the children of Israel from taking the Promised Land. And holding up his Bible, he talked about the importance of conquering those 31 kings, and taking all of Judea and Samaria, and, by implication, Gaza and the West Bank and everywhere else. His sermon was very biblical. It just—in my view —wasn’t Christian. Everything I know about God I know through Jesus. And Jesus said, “Love your enemies”; he said “turn the other cheek”. He didn’t have a conquest theology that overcame people like Palestinians who have also lived in that land, often peacefully with Jewish people for thousands of years.
Sometimes it’s culture that we mix up with our Christian faith. There is nothing wrong with culture, but it’s still different to being Christian. I learnt this as a young minister going into St Kilda. I went there thinking I was going to be the Good News for St Kilda; I was taking the gospel, and wouldn’t they be all waiting with open arms to welcome me.
But I discovered that the people in St Kilda who knew a lot more about the Gospel were street people like the Aboriginal woman Eva. I remember my shock, because I thought Eva couldn’t really be a Christian. Why? Because she smokes a lot, because when she’s got money she just throws a party and wastes it, because she and many of the other street people who started coming to St Kilda Baptist are a little bit on the nose.
I’d grown up hearing that cleanliness is next to godliness. I had heard it so much I was sure it was in the Bible—I just hadn’t found it! So how could they be Christian? I was really offended ... until I realised that my understanding of a Christian was pretty culturally determined.
I don’t apologise for being middle-class; that’s who I am. Middle-class people save for a house, for a trip, for the future. That’s how we think; we’re futurists. But here were street people who, if they had money, spent it all now.
So I went back to the Gospels and realised that if I confess that everything I know about God I know in Jesus, then Jesus didn’t save for a house. He said the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.
I realised with a bit of a shock that in 1st century Palestine maybe Jesus and the disciples were a little bit on the nose too; that in fact Eva might have had more in common with those 1st century disciples and with Jesus than I did.
To be Christian is to take seriously that anything we know about God we know through Jesus—He is the Word God has spoken. It is to be sceptical about those who substitute other things for God.
So, for me, it’s important to know that this God gave us in Jesus the Sermon on the Mount, which teaches us to love, to absorb violence. I think Martin Luther King got it right best when he said to white racists, “We’ll match your capacity to hate us with our capacity to love you”. That’s Jesus: Father forgive them. “We’ll absorb your violence with our capacity to suffer.” That’s Jesus, saying, rather than there being some biblical conquest violent model, there is a kingdom, and it’s breaking in, and it changes everything, and at its heart is the Good News that it’s peaceable, and its revolutionary, and its transformative.