Second Sunday after Epiphany 2008


Blessed are those who have made the Lord their hope:
who have not turned to the proud,
or to those who wander in deceit.

I’m a child of the sixties. This was my time – my prime. Hugh Mackay, at the National Anglican Conference in Canberra a few years ago, described my generation. We are the boomers. We still wear our jeans and our Beatles T shirts and get misty eyed at the thoughts of times past. In 1969, the Grammies “Song of the Year” was performed by one Joe South. He was basically a one hit wonder who blazed onto the firmament for a time and a season, and disappeared as rapidly into obscurity. The Song, some of you old trendies like me might remember, was called Games People Play.

Oh, the games people play now,
ev’ry night and ev’ry day now
never meaning what they say now,
never saying what they mean.
And they while away the hours
in their ivory towers
till they’re covered up with flowers
in the back of a black limousine.

All right, so we’re not talking Shakespeare here. Keats can rest in his grave untroubled by any threat to his poetic prowess. Auden still rules, OK. But dear old Joe South has a point to make, however inelegant the state of his prose. Any scan of the horizon is likely to demonstrate that there’s a significant absence of integrity at work in human inter-relationships. We all tend to play games. And the games we play have consequences – usually damaging consequences. So the Psalmist’s endorsement of those who turn their backs on deceit stands as a bit of an indictment to the rest of us, who seem rather too caught up in deceit for our own, or any body else’s good.

In fact the truth seems to be pretty important to Jesus- particularly the Jesus as portrayed by John. With more than a little audacity, he claims the very essence for himself – “I am the truth”. It’s hard for us to imagine the scandal of that claim to the ears of his orthodox contemporaries. Not only that, he promises to his disciples that they will share in the liberating power of truth, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” because the Spirit of God will lead them into all truth.

Still, despite all the pious claims, any fair minded examination of church history leads to the conclusion that the fellowship of believers don’t always measure up so well in the truth telling stakes. Too often we seem to identify with truth with self-interest, and construct theological or pietistic edifices to protect our power and position over against the other. So we have seen religion used to institutionalise and legitimate racism, to excuse blatant sexism, to provide a cover for military aggression and even war crimes, to countenance genocide, to ensure the preservation of unjust social structures, to explain and justify domestic violence, and at the local level to provide a platform for the worst sort of bully boy browbeating and chest thumping – as any exposure to the workings of the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia, or even a local parish council will demonstrate.

Even now the western world has seemed hell-bent on waging war in the Middle East with the justification that God is on our side (and therefore by definition, not on the other side). We sixties bleeding hearts still remember Dylan’s classic protest song written at the beginning of the Vietnam War, With God On Our Side, as he tried to open a window onto the destructive workings of a certain type of Christian ideology. And we weep as we see the pattern playing out again. We hoped for so much – and we settled for so little.

If truth is so important, so close to the heart of God and Jesus, then what does it look like? How do we speak to one another with integrity? And why, o why, is integrity in discourse so hard to handle?

We can say that discourse has integrity, when it is in fact about what it says it’s about. Truth is plain speaking. Truth doesn’t conceal its real purpose – it doesn’t carry with it some sort of hidden agenda. A person can have real conversation in such a discourse. You know what you’re engaging with, and you can respond, knowing that your response deals with the real subject matter at issue. Having integrity, then, is being able to speak in a way which allows answers. It recognises that all disclosure is provisional. It doesn’t seek to limit the field of response; its tone, its direction or even its vocabulary. It applies to itself what Paul Ricouer describes as the hermeneutics of suspicion; it holds itself accountable – it accepts that it’s not final in and of itself.

On the other hand, discourse lacks integrity when it conceals its real agenda. There’s no truth in discourse that operates at two levels, one acknowledged and one concealed. It’s possible, even inevitable, that in engaging with the surface level of meaning, the body of the discourse is left untouched. A two-level discourse isn’t about conversation. It actually steps back from the two things that are essential to any real conversation: first the recognition that what has been said on either side has an unfinished quality; second that there always remains the possibility of correction.

Why then do we so often engage in discourse without integrity – double-speak – hidden agenda speaking? We need to make an important point here – this isn’t about goodies and baddies. We’re not making a self-righteous judgement about those who deliberately tell the truth and those who deliberately lie. We’re not imputing conscious bad motive or conscious good motive. Potentially truthful forms of speech are as liable to end in discourse without integrity as are crude and deliberate lies. Indeed, the deliberate lie is usually relatively easy to unmask and identify. It’s the unconscious lack of integrity which is much harder to identify, and potentially much more destructive because it can appear to be so benign.

Lack of integrity in speech isn’t about goodies and baddies – it’s a political matter. It seeks to make what’s being said invulnerable by displacing its real subject matter. So it’s really about power. It’s a strategy for retaining the upper hand, and protecting yourself from the other. It seeks to rob them of any ground to stand on, so the only ground that’s left is your own ground. It’s the antithesis of openness and vulnerability. It claims finality for its utterances, not provisionality. It’s non-reflective, closed to criticism. There’s nothing unfinished about this sort of communication, no possibility of correction because its real nature remains concealed. So the respondent is precluded from any real engagement with the true subject matter.

Does this all sound a bit familiar? I might be describing any modern fundamentalism – religious or not. Eco-fundamentalism. Economic-rationalist fundamentalism. Muslim fundamentalism. Jewish fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalism. Let’s resist the seductive temptation at this point to speak prophetically to the world about its shortcomings. Too often when we do so, we’re engaging in precisely the discourse without integrity I’ve just described – talking theology but striving to retain power. Let’s go to a more dangerous place – let’s apply the blowtorch to our own belly.

Christianity finds itself in a very difficult place indeed here. It is, after all, making claims about the whole moral universe. It offers a view about how human life can be well and properly lived, and seeks to speak from the perspective of God’s very self. Provisional statements are not likely to prove ultimately satisfying taken against this backdrop. And yet the claim of a total perspective, the claim that one can speak from a global context denies the possibility of any real conversation, any engagement. One either accepts, or one refuses to play. The claim for a global context, whatever else it might be, is a claim to power and a prohibition of free response and continuation. This is the word of the Lord, so put up and shut up!

A window into what I mean at this point is provided by the current brouhaha in the church about human sexuality, and in particular how we should deal with homosexual people. For some it is simple. St Paul has said all that is to be said. Terribly sad, and all, but there it is. No need for conversation. Nothing left unanswered. Nothing provisional. No need for continuation. We’ll spout the usual pietistic claptrap about hating the sin and loving the sinner, but when push comes to shove, they’re on the outer and we’re on the inner.

Now clearly there’s a hermeneutical question floating around here. What does it mean to be a bible-believing Christian? How do we read the clear and simple message of Holy Scripture? But it’s not the only question. Indeed the question itself obscures a deeper series of questions. What’s going on for me as I read the text? What presuppositions and prejudices do I bring to the enterprise? What unacknowledged things are happening for me that influence what I see and how I respond? What sources of power am I trying to protect?

Since Ludwig Feuerbach identified the mechanism of projection in the 18 th century, theology has been compelled to look at itself in a new light. It’s clear that human beings bring as much of themselves to God as God brings to human beings. Building on Feuerbach’s atheism, Marx exposed how religious language can be used to protect the entrenched power of the political establishment, and keep the powerless firmly in their place. Liberation theology has taken these insights into the heart of the gospel in an attempt to fashion a new discourse, honestly acknowledging past failures of theology and seeking to be open to the other, particularly the powerless other. Freud has clearly identified neurotic religion, and the way in which our own psychological lack of resolution impacts on the way we behave. Feminist theologies and green theologies ask us to re-examine old truths in the light of new awareness, and lay bare the power games which have lain behind so much of our talking and acting.

Today with John the baptiser we contemplate the Lamb of God who comes into our reality to take away the sin of the world. Jesus who is the way and the truth and the life; who calls us into all truth; and who tells us that as we know the truth then shall we be free. This is likely to be a year of crisis for the Anglican Communion. Already the battle lines have been drawn over the issue of human sexuality and women in the episcopate. In July all the bishops of the Anglican Communion are due to meet in Canterbury for the Lambeth conference. But there is talk of boycotts and alternative conferences for the true believers, and the Church we love is under extreme pressure. My prayer is that our discourse and our debate will be conducted with integrity. That as we struggle to understand and articulate the mind of God we deal truthfully with each other. For if we who are disciples of the one who is the truth cannot be truthful in our own debates, what hope is there for the Church and for our mission to the world.