Knowing Our Place

Texts: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35

According to our Church Calendar, today marks the 147^th anniversary of the start of the land wars at Waitara. It is also Gospel Day in French Polynesia. And if we were to take a moment to ponder those two memorials, we could find ourselves getting into some very deep issues. Both of them are about land, about ownership and belonging in a particular place. They’re about migration, or colonisation, or imperialism, or conquest, or bringing the gift of civilisation, or spreading the gospel – depending on our own views and interpretations of those particular histories. If nothing else they remind us of the complexities of human history, and of the simple fact that history does not take place in a vacuum or in thin air. History takes place on the ground, on particular ground. History takes place in a particular place.

And history can never be objective. It is always somebody’s history – the history of a particular person, group of persons, or a people or nation. Somebody’s story, told by the owners of that story, for their own purposes and from their own point of view. Maori history will record the events at Waitara in a different way from the Pakeha version. The French will tell the story of the bringing of the gospel to Polynesia in a different way from the Polynesian version.

And so it is when we recount stories from our faith history. When we tell our story we do so as Christians; and sometimes our version will clash with Jewish versions, and with the versions of other people caught up in that story. Clashes will occur, and when they do they will almost always clash in a particular place. Faith history includes faith geography. We not only interpret events, we interpret places too. Egypt is a symbol of slavery in our faith history, but not in Egyptian history; Babylon is a place of exile, but not for Babylonians.

Places, then, have a physical reality for us, but they often have a symbolic reality as well; and we see ample evidence of this in today’s readings.

At the very beginning of our faith history we find the saga of Abraham, and at the very heart of that saga is the issue of place, of land. God identifies himself in today’s reading from Genesis as the one who called Abraham out of the land of the Chaldeans. We take this saga as being about the beginning of the idea of a personal relationship between God and an individual. God has chosen to call this one person and to create a people for himself through the descendants of this one man.

But why should that necessarily involve that man leaving the land of his fathers and setting out for a distant place of God’s own choosing? Why couldn’t this new relationship that God has decided to have with this man be lived out there in the land of the Chaldeans? Well, scholars have long believed that one of the themes running through the Abraham saga is a move from the nomadic life to a settled agrarian life – a stage in the development in the history of many different peoples.

And there may also be a second theme here. In the land of the Chaldeans – and just about every other land at the time – the people believed in a multiplicity of gods. Good ones and evil ones, powerful ones and crafty ones, on earth and in the heavens.

Could it be that the Abraham saga is, in part, about the birth of the new idea of monotheism? Could it be that the departure from the land of his fathers symbolises the rejection of all those petty gods and a journey towards the one true God?

Certainly as we follow the history of the people through the Old Testament that theory seems to gain support. The Promised Land is the place where the people are to live in covenantal faithfulness with the one true God. And we know that they were constantly tempted to revert back to the old pagan ideas of other gods. The many references to high places and asherah poles and all the rest of it tells us that paganism was never completely eradicated, despite periodic campaigns to wipe it out.

In the fullness of time the idea of a special place for the people and their one true God becomes focussed on the City of Jerusalem; and within that city the Temple becomes the great place where true worship is to be given to this one true God. The Temple becomes the place where God’s Name finds a dwelling place. It becomes the symbolic centre of the world – the place where God is. The place from which the divine light is to shine into the world. The place from which God’s Law – God’s will – is to be proclaimed to the world. And the place to which all people will one day come to praise the one true God.

But it also comes to be the symbol of humanity’s unfaithfulness to God, not once but many times. Prophet after prophet call the people back to faithfulness to God, only for the people to reject the prophet and the call. And so today in the gospel reading Jesus comes to this very city. He comes, not to destroy it or punish it, but to make one last appeal for it to turn back to God.

Earlier the people have asked him for a sign, and he has reminded them of the story of Jonah. We have tended to emphasise the connection between Jonah being in the belly of the fish for three days with Jesus lying in the tomb. But equally important is the connection between Jonah’s mission to Nineveh and Christ’s mission here to Jerusalem. God wanted the people of Nineveh to be saved from the consequences of their wickedness; so he sent the reluctant Jonah to give them one last chance to repent.

Now Jesus has come to Jerusalem for the same purpose – to save the city from the destruction their wickedness will bring upon them if they don’t repent. As always St Luke tells the story brilliantly. The city of God has become too dangerous for the Son of God to enter. Political intrigue is everywhere. Somewhat surprisingly, some Pharisees come to Jesus to warn him to leave the city immediately as Herod, the puppet king put in place by the Romans, is planning to kill him.

We notice how, in rejecting that advice, Jesus refers to Herod as “that fox”; which takes on more power when he goes on to talk of his desire to gather the children of Jerusalem “as a hen gathers her chicks under her wins”. We know what foxes do to chickens, particularly young chicks who do not avail themselves of their mother’s protection.

And we know how this stage of our faith history ends. It is precisely in the city of Jerusalem, the place of God’s Name, that Jesus is rejected. He is taken outside the city walls and crucified. God is evicted from the City of God. Ever since, different cities have sought pre-eminence –Rome, Constantinople, even Canterbury

But one of the great differences between the Old Testament and the New, is that nowhere in the New does any particular place gain any special significance after the death and resurrection of Christ. Indeed, Christian teaching seems to go out of the way to avoid such a thing happening again.

Christians are sojourners, not residents – we are strangers and even aliens in the world. And this new idea is summed up in today’s epistle reading with this short but profound statement by St Paul: our citizenship is in heaven. That doesn’t mean, of course, that Christians go around with our heads in the clouds, disconnected from the earthly realities around us. We can only live our lives in particular places.

What it means is that those particular places can never be of ultimate significance to us. They are venues in which we are to live out our lives of faith in the one true God – places from which we may be called at any moment. We belong here only temporarily. Regardless of our ethnicity or nationality, we are citizens of heaven.

As we grow more and more into that truth, so may we be kept from repeating the tragedies of the past, whether at Waitara or elsewhere. Amen.