A sermon on 1 Peter 3: 13-22; Acts 17: 22-31 & John 14: 15-21 by Nathan Nettleton

There has been a lot of huffing and puffing in the media lately about what sort of access Christians should be allowed to government schools and what they are or are not allowed to do there. Some of the debate is a bit confused, because the issues from two different debates get mixed up together. There is a debate about religious education classes in schools, and there is another debate about the government program to provide chaplains in schools, and the questions and dilemmas in each debate are actually different. In the RE debate, it is about providing specifically religious teaching to all students unless they opt-out, in which case there may be no alternative available and they may end up sitting in the corridor with nothing to do until it is over. In the chaplaincy debate, it is about providing a pastoral professional in the school who students or teachers can go to when they feel the need to do so. Government funding is a fraught issue in both debates, but the opt-in or opt-out nature of the two makes a big difference on the ground. The real heat is, and I think rightly, in the questions of proselytising and privilege. Is it appropriate for Christians to be using their access to the schools to try to win converts for their churches, and, given that we could probably all agree that we don’t want the proponents of every wacky religion being allowed to go recruiting in our schools, should Christians be allowed a privileged access that is not available to other religions?

I’m opening up these questions tonight because the scripture readings we have heard seem to speak into them, and so perhaps the dialogue between the current debates and these foundational stories of our faith will help us to find our way forward.

In our first reading, we heard a classic account of the Apostle Paul engaging in the work of proselytising. He is in Athens, and he is speaking to a group of locals about their religious beliefs and practices, and he is unapologetically spruiking the merits of following Jesus over following the various gods of their tradition. The story is a famous one for several reasons, but one of them is that Paul does not come across as hostile towards their non-Christian religiousness. He doesn’t denounce it as evil or refuse to engage with it in any way. Instead, he shows quite a knowledge of it, and he uses its assumptions and teachings as a starting point from which to present his claims that Jesus has made known to us the true God in whom we all live and move and have our being, and in whose hands our hopes lie.

The dubious ways in which many Christians over the years have gone about their proselytising — their trying to win others over from some other life to the life of following Jesus — has often made it difficult for us to feel comfortable talking about proselytising. It conjures up images of coercion and scare campaigns and imperialistic assumptions. But the Christian Church has been in the proselytising business ever since Jesus said “Go into all the world and make disciples.” It is something that Jesus calls us to do. But how, and when, and in what Spirit? And does that mean that we should be allowed to go into the schools in class time to proselytise children? Some of the current controversy has blown up because Access Ministries, who oversee the RE program in government schools, got caught out pitching their aims and agendas to some churches in a way that they could not and world not pitch them to the government or the wider community. To an evangelical Christian audience they said, “this program is wonderful because we are seeing children saved and bringing their families to church”, and to the government and the schools, they are saying, “we are not trying to convert the children, but just provide them with some education in good values and on the role of Christianity in our society.” Now, it’s not surprising that they pitch it differently depending on who they are talking to — that’s marketing for you. When they are trying to recruit RE teachers from the churches, they need to make it sound like it will bear fruit for the churches, otherwise why would anyone sign up. But that’s not likely to be a winning pitch with non-Christian politicians or school principals. And I can totally understand why. My daughter had a good experience of RE in primary school, but I reckon that was just the luck of the draw. In another school where the RE teachers came from a different church, she might just as easily have been taught that our particular church was heretical and she needed to be saved in some other way. I can understand why others would be anxious about having “our faith” presented to their children, because I would be anxious about some other faith being enthusiastically presented to my child in the classroom. Even some other brands of Christian faith. So if we are called to proselytise, but we are anxious about the integrity of so much proselytising work, where does that leave us?

I think our reading from the first letter of Peter has something to say. Peter too is a willing evangelist, as we’ve seen in some of the stories from the Acts of the Apostles over recent weeks. Tonight we heard him say, “Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.” In other words, don’t hide your light under a bushel. Don’t downplay your faith in Jesus. Be ready to speak up for it boldly whenever the invitation is open. “But” he says, and this is a pretty important ‘but’, “do it with gentleness and reverence.” Gentleness and reverence. And as he fleshes that out, it is pretty clear how applicable it is to this current debate. If I can paraphrase with some of the language from the current debate, it might go something like this: “if you get yourselves into trouble for being two-faced and pushy and arrogant, you deserve everything you get, but if you are gentle and respectful and transparent and honest, then you’ve got nothing to fear from whatever opposition comes your way.” Or to put it even more bluntly, “Followers of Jesus can expect to be criticised and opposed, but make sure it is for behaving in ways that Jesus would be proud of, and not for being a pack of arrogant pricks who think they have an entitlement to special privileges and to the support and funding of the wider community.”

There are RE teachers who are doing us proud and deserve our thanks. They volunteer their time and treat the opportunities they are given and the kids to whom they have access with gentleness and reverence. My hat’s off to them, and I pray God’s blessings on them. But then there are others…

And when I listen to the angst in this debate, I try to imagine how I would feel if some other religion was the dominant and privileged religion in our society. You see, at present, Christian RE is the default position, which is a privilege. Unless you actively opt your child into an alternative, or out altogether, then they will be given Christian RE classes. Now imagine what that would seem like to us if the Mormons or the Hare Krishnas were the dominant and therefore privileged religion. What if in order to avoid having your child actively proselytised by the Mormons or the Hare Krishnas, you had to risk them feeling like the odd one out in the class and sitting in the corridor for an hour a week? I think that image begins to expose what this issue of entitlement and privilege is all about. When you are in the privileged majority, the privileges are always pretty much invisible. We are oblivious to them. And I think it is arguable that Christianity always mutates and poisons itself when it gains a position of dominance and privilege. This can be seen especially when it thinks the government should support it financially, which is one of the issues in the chaplaincy and RE debates. Once we accept government funding, we then have to protect our funding in order to survive, and then we are very prone to selling our souls to maintain the cash flow. Baptists were historically opposed to ever accepting government funding for precisely this reason. When the Church depends on government funding, it is just as compromised as our government who is now totally dependent on revenues from the gambling industry. Those who pay the piper call the tune.

One thing that is very clear from the stories of Jesus is that he operates from the margins of society and ministers from a position of vulnerability. While he is not afraid to engage in dialogue and debate with the ruling powers of the day, he does not court their approval or their endorsement, support or funding. On the contrary, he seems to regard such cosying up with the ruling powers as another form of trying to serve two masters. Jesus seems to assume that following in his footsteps and continuing on his ministry and mission will always keep us on the margins and in positions of weakness and vulnerability. We heard it again in his words about sending the Holy Spirit in the gospel reading tonight: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.” In other words, don’t go expecting the world to think you’re on the right track and have got something that you should welcomed to come and share with their children in the classroom. They are not going to get it, and if you’ve managed to pitch it in a way that makes it palatable to them at that level, is it still the gospel you are pitching, or have you turned it into something else?

Jesus goes on to suggest that if it were not for his sending of the Holy Spirit to be with us, we would feel like orphans in the world, lost and alone and with no one to care for us. And the trouble is, in much of this RE debate, it sounds like the Christians are feeling like orphans. They are desperately trying to present themselves as deserving to be treated as society’s most privileged child, who is entitled to be respected and honoured and treated as special. We are running around trying to convince everyone that we have always made such an important contribution to society that society needs us and should privilege us accordingly. But we are not supposed to be society’s child. If we are trying to be adopted again as society’s child, and given the care and protection of such a child, then one is almost forced to conclude that we don’t actually believe in God or trust in the Holy Spirit at all. The minute we feel orphaned, we look not to the Spirit whom Jesus asks the Father to send us, but to the big sugar-daddy world around us and the care of its institutions of government and education.

When we gather around this table in a few minutes, it will not be to sit at table with the powerful and privileged and to work the networks of influence to secure our place in the world. Instead, at this table, we will be welcomed by the risen Christ who will feed us with the signs of his own brokenness, his own fragile and marginalised presence in a hostile world. And it is here, as we are reminded of who we are and to whom we belong, that we will find the only strength and privilege our ministry and mission can ever rightly claim, the strength and privilege of following in the footsteps of the rejected one, the despised one, the crucified one. For gentleness and reverence are born of such humility in places of such insecurity and vulnerability. It is from there that Christ offers himself to the world in love and mercy, in gentleness and reverence. And it is from there that he calls us to follow and do the same.