Monthly Archives: January 2019

20 January – Mourning and Dawn

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Epiphany 2
20/1/2019

Isaiah 62:1-5
Psalm 36
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11

Sermon preached by Matt Julius


God, may my words be loving and true, and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

In the revised preamble to the Uniting Church’s constitution we confess that:

‘The First Peoples of this country had already encountered the Creator God before the arrival of the colonisers; the Spirit was already in [this] land revealing God to the people through law, custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally and fully revealed in Jesus Christ sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God’s ways.’[1] (UCA Revised Preamble to the Constitution §3)

In the continuing attempt to listen to the particular insights of first peoples the national Assembly of the Uniting Church has set aside today as a day of mourning. A day that recalls us to the terrible history of the treatment of indigenous people in this country by second peoples. In setting aside this Sunday as a day of mourning the Uniting Church has sought to hear the voice of God through the voices of our indigenous brothers and sisters.

As we gather in this place, we acknowledge the commitment of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation to nurturing this sacred Land from time immemorial. We acknowledge their elders: past, present, and emerging. We strive to hear their voices.

The commitment to listen to the voice of God through the voices of our indigenous brothers and sisters sets the context for my reflection on today’s readings. This context challenges the very act of preaching and proclaiming the Gospel. The Uniting Church confesses that the very integrity of the Gospel was diminished by the church’s failure to speak the truth about Australia’s First Peoples, and in the church’s complicity in dispossession.[2]

I want simply today to proclaim the Gospel with integrity. And to explore the way in which the proclamation of the Gospel can be both good and mournful news.

Our reading today from the latter part of Isaiah shows us how the proclamation of God to the world carries within it both goodness and mourning. This is a poem written out of the experience of exile, proclaiming hope for God’s people. In holding together both the experience of exile and the proclamation of hope this poem may help to guide us to appreciate the mourning we are recalled to today.

Scholars have suggested that this latter part of Isaiah was written towards the end of the Jewish people’s exile by the Babylonian empire – or perhaps during the period the Jewish people had newly returned to their homeland. This text, therefore, speaks out of an experience of people being stripped of their land, stripped of their identity, stripped of the cultural and religious practices that sustained their relationship to God. If we hear the words of Isaiah 62 as the words of a people trying to find their roots again in their own land, we may hear the solemn undertones of grief beneath the surface that talks of hope.

Isaiah speaks a word of hope on behalf of Zion, the land of the Jewish people, and a word of hope for Jerusalem.

“For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, | and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest | until her vindication shines out …” (v1)

It is important to note the focus of Isaiah’s hope: vindication. In pursuing vindication Isaiah does not simply hope that God’s people would be happy in their land. But Isaiah recalls the period of exile and suffering through which God’s people have come. Isaiah at this point refuses to understand the period of exile as a sign of failure or unfaithfulness, as a simple punishment from God. Vindication is the revelation that God’s people are justified, are right with God, and have remained faithful through their experience of dispossession. In setting up this song of hope with a focus on vindication Isaiah carries the history of his people into this song.

Isaiah’s hope is not abstract. It is not detached from reality. It does not look up to heaven and expect everything to be washed away. Isaiah’s hope is rooted in the survival of his people. Isaiah’s hope is rooted in resilience and return to land: in people who are faithful to God. (Faithful to a God who in turn is faithful, as in Psalm 36, whose steadfast love reaches from the land to the skies.)

That Isaiah forges his hope out of the experience of survival during the exile adds a solemn undertone to his hope:

“You shall no more be termed forsaken | and your land shall no more be termed desolate…” (v4)

For God’s people have been through the many years of forsakenness in exile, the land still bearing the marks of their dispossession and of desolation.

The newness of life and name that are heard in Isaiah’s song carries with it the memories and scars of the history of exile.

Isaiah, I suggest, teaches us about the solemn grief we are called to share with our indigenous brothers and sisters. By holding fast to the hope of God, but not allowing that hope to easily erase true and painful history.

Our indigenous brothers and sisters too have experienced dispossession. They too carry with them a history of pain, trauma, and suffering. Many were killed by the white settlers that built modern Australia. Many were subject to slavery, and slavery like conditions. Many were treated as little more than animals. Refused the basic rights that others enjoy: citizenship, voting rights, land rights. Children were stolen from first peoples. Our indigenous brothers and sisters have been shaped by experiences of survival. Experiences of forsakenness and desolation. We cannot erase this true and painful history.

And yet …

Can we hear the ancient words of Isaiah’s hope for our indigenous brothers and sisters? Can we bear a hope that refuses to see the suffering of first peoples as a just punishment? Can we bear a hope that does not erase solemn grief, and yet brings new life?

This is the task we recall ourselves to today. As we mark today as a day of mourning we are challenged by the hopeful song of Isaiah, that yet carries within itself solemn grief. We are challenged to ask ourselves what the hope of the Gospel might mean for our indigenous brothers and sisters. We are challenged to proclaim the Gospel with integrity.

The Gospel is the proclamation that in the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s Messiah, the reign of God’s love has been established once and for all. This love is made visible through acts of mercy and justice. Through the Spirit we are empowered to faithfully participate in making this reign of love take root in this world. Like Isaiah we do not proclaim an abstract hope, detached from reality. But a hope rooted in the experiences of people who have suffered, people who have survived — and many who have not. We preach a hope that moves towards us in Christ, and catches us up in the movement of God in the world. We preach of a love the traverses chasms, and reconciles communities.

To proclaim this Gospel with integrity means we must commit ourselves anew to the experiences of our indigenous brothers and sisters. We must commit ourselves to hearing their stories. We must commit ourselves to telling the truth about our collective history.

In so doing we participate in the ever unfolding reality of God’s reign of love in the world.
Echoing Isaiah:

For Australia’s sake we must not keep silent, | and for the sake of our indigenous brothers and sisters we must not rest, | until their vindication shines out like the dawn …

We must learn to understand our Christian hope in the light of Isaiah. Pursuing concrete forms of love, through mercy and justice. Rooting our hope in the history and the land in which we find ourselves.

In this may we follow Christ to the cross, and be led to the hope of resurrection.

Amen.

[1] UCA Revised Preamble to the Constitution §3.

[2] UCA Preamble §5-6.

13 January – Ends as Beginnings

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Baptism of the Lord
13/1/2019

Isaiah 43:1-7
Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber


I imagine that many of us will know the celebrated words from TS Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: “In my beginning is my end” or, even better in expanded form: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from”.  The older we get the more this truth becomes apparent. When we are young, and without a perceived end, we have no real awareness of those moments when a recognisable beginning in time might be happening that is the start of what will consequently really shape our life. Only as our lives mature to their end do the apparently disconnected arbitrary events in the past begin to assume a focus. Only then do we become conscious in a real sense of a personal history that in hindsight is grasped as being inevitable. Beginning and end become one. Not only: “In my beginning is my end”, but, equally, we eventually come to understand that: “In my end is my beginning”.

What is true of the lives of each of us is absolutely the case of the gospel. We can’t be told too often how it is that the gospel takes shape, and how it is contrary to everything that we assume is the way things work: the conventional assumption that life moves from a beginning to an end has to give way to a much richer journey – a rear view mirror from an absolute finality to what was originally a beginning whose implications were not yet transparent. As Eliot tells us: “The end is where we start from”.

In liturgical language this means that Easter precedes Christmas.  Having lived all the years of our lives where the opposite is relentlessly absorbed, that babies come before adults, makes it all the more mandatory to register without any hint of contradiction that Easter precedes Christmas. Or, if you like why, in the chronology of the New Testament, the apostle Paul precedes the narratives of the Gospels.  That is to say, there is a period of at least thirty years that bridges the gap between the event of the experienced end of Jesus of which Paul is witness, and the accounts of the beginning for Jesus as that is unfolded in the Gospels. Indeed, this temporal hiatus is the very reason why the gospels were written.

All that the earliest Christians needed to know was Paul’s declaration of the continued presence of Jesus after his crucifixion. This end expressed the finality of the whole purpose of his coming. But as the first generation of Christians died, this message of Jesus’ end was in danger of being divorced from its beginning in his earthly ministry. Which explains why a theological biography needed to be constructed, and why we today have the narrative of Luke’s account of this beginning in the baptism of Jesus.

In that day there were at least three distinctive racial and religious communities; first, Jews living in Palestine; then diaspora Jews living in the Greek and Roman cultures; and finally, outright non-Jews, the Gentiles. Each community required a different explanation within their own framework of how the beginning of Jesus needed to be unfolded. “Within their own framework” is the operative phrase. That is why we learn everything we need to know of these differences when we take account of where each of the gospels frames the beginning of Jesus. The earliest Gospel Mark, wanting to show how it came to be that Jesus finished on a Cross, establishes Jesus’ baptism as that beginning. The next Matthew, writing for Christians previously Jews, constructs a genealogy dating Jesus’ origin from Abraham, their founding Father. Luke, the Gospel before us today writing for Gentile converts, constructs another genealogy, dating Jesus’ origin from Adam: Why Adam? Because Luke is writing a truly cosmic history – from its earliest human origin in the Gospel to its geographical conclusion in the Book of Acts, foreshadowed as it is in  the ascension mission mandate at the beginning: witness away to the “end of the world”, the pagan city of Rome as the absolute antithesis of the city of Jerusalem. And then, finally, the Gospel according to John grasps that Jesus’ real beginning cannot be dated as world history at all, but arises in the very life of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”.

So today, on the first Sunday after Epiphany, we make a real beginning in hearing of Luke’s purpose of the cosmic Jesus for the world – his baptism. But immediately we are told that this baptism has a context. The crowds came to be baptised by John the Baptist, a baptism of repentance. We live in a culture that has moralised the word repentance virtually out of existence. Repentance for this, repentance for that – always for individual acts on a scale either trivial or devastating.

This is not what the Gospel intends. Here repentance is altogether a much more encompassing symbol. It is essentially a theological, not a moralistic, necessity. Repentance is perhaps best understood as the need to make a U turn with the whole of one’s life; to engage the oncoming reign of God for our life by facing the other way; by a turning to glimpse a lifegiving future, not a dead past. And it is just this vicarious baptismal repentance which Jesus shares with us, and this we are told before he does anything else at all. But then everything which follows his baptism falls into place. Each of the Gospels as they unfold demonstrates how his baptism, as an apparent beginning in time, has the Cross as its end. This means that his baptism already encompasses that end. There is a seamless connection between the beginning, his baptism, and his end on the Cross. “In my end is my beginning” Eliot proposes. And if this is the truth of our life, how much more is it also of the life of God. What greater identification of the life of God with the life of the world could be made than this ending of a beginning – the end of a cross of blood concealed in a water of baptism?

It is this same identification that has already been proposed when we hear Isaiah say to Israel: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine”. For Luke, Jesus in his baptism is reaffirming: “you are mine”. But wait. The presence of the crowd offers much more. His communal baptism foreshadows the embrace of all humanity; Isaiah’s prospective “east to the west, the north to the south” are already incorporated in the real beginning being made in Jesus’ baptism, which for him turns out to already encompass his end. It is a baptism into death, even death on a cross, but which will take another three years to be realised. In very truth, Eliot’s words are as true for God as they are for us. “What we call a beginning is … the end”.

It is learning about just this end which is revealed in the passage from Acts. As Luke unfolds the spread of the gospel into alien lands, here into Samaria, a territory half Jewish half Gentile, he reports that “they had only been baptised into the name of the Lord Jesus”. That is to say, theirs was only the sort of baptism offered by the Baptist – a real baptism of water, and hence a baptism of repentance, a turning in principle but without a fruitful promise. As such it had no future, being merely a truncated sort of baptism. It was only when Peter and John laid their hands on them that “they received the Holy Spirit”. It is the Spirit which opens up a future. It is the Spirit which accomplishes the U turn, which makes baptism effective as the sign of an accomplished end. It is only the Spirit who can make an end of a beginning.

And so it is for the Church down through the ages, and therefore for us too. We receive these readings on this the first Sunday after Epiphany, that is to say, after the revelation of the Jewish Jesus to his future home in the Gentile world – our world.  Epiphany is that period when the Church reflects on the manifestation of Christ to all people. This first manifestation is his baptism; the last manifestation of the period of Epiphany will be his transfiguration. They belong together. A baptism at his beginning; transfiguration, as a disclosing hint on the way to his ending.

In very truth – as Eliot asserted – the end for Jesus reveals the baptismal place where he began. In the same way, as those attempting to become disciples, will we too find ourselves, sooner or later, confessing: in his conferred end – now made my own – is my beginning –  a beginning which is also my end.

6 January – Another Way

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Epiphany of the Lord
6/1/2019

Isaiah 60:1-6
Psalm 72
Matthew 2:1-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Rob Gallacher


“They left for their own country by another way”. Matthew 2:12

6 kilometres north west of Nazareth is a significant archaeological site. A few years before the birth of Jesus, Herod Antipas started to build his administrative centre at Sepphoris, a sort of Canberra in the Galilee. Before that, it had been a tiny village, said to be the home of Joachim and Anna, parents of Mary. If you are romantically inclined you might like to think that Joseph met Mary while he was working on the building of this new city. But that’s quite irrelevant to the point I want to make. Sepphoris was destroyed by an earthquake in 363. So it’s a time capsule spanning the period in which the early church lived. This is the picture that it gives. It was strongly Jewish. As a Roman city it cooperated with the punitive invasion Vespasian in 68 – 70 A.D. So Jews migrated there for safety. It was wealthy, as indicated by the exquisite mosaic floors in many villas. There was a large number of Gentiles, Roman officials, collaborators and traders. It was influenced by religions of the east, especially astrology, as indicated by the signs of the Zodiac on the floors of several first century synagogues. So a story about a star would go down well here.

No commentator actually suggests that Sepphoris was where Matthew wrote the gospel, but most agree it was near here, maybe across the border in Syria. See how the gospel, and this story of the Wise Men in particular, fit these characteristics. His 130 references to the Hebrew Scriptures would appeal to a Jewish audience. Unlikely foreigners, Gentiles, keep appearing unexpectedly. Gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh appeal to the wealthy, and a story about magi from the east following a star picks up on the connections to the east and the astrology.

Further internal evidence in the Gospel suggests that Matthew was writing for a congregation of Jewish Christians that was well established, but rather more concerned with their tradition than their mission. “Settled and content” says one commentator (Herman Waetjen), who then says that Matthew’s intent is to “unsettle, rather than endorse”. That is, he advocates “another way”. Look for example at the genealogy with which Matthew begins. It includes women, unusual women! They were foreigners, whose marriage involved scandal. There is Tamar, a Canaanite, Rahab another Canaanite and a harlot, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba (you all know about her), and Ruth, the Moabite, whose book we have just been studying. Straight down the line Hebrew matriarchs like Sarah and Rachel are overlooked.

Then we get the Magi, a recognised group in Eastern religions, a bit like alchemists in Medieval Europe, perhaps Zoroastrian priests, or maybe Persian shamans. Once you see this intent to challenge closed attitudes, you notice subtleties. For example, the Canaanite woman wanting the crumbs under the table shouts and is insistent in Matthew’s version, whereas in Luke she bows and is respectful. Or the centurion at the cross who proclaims “This man was the Son of God”. In Luke it is the centurion only, but in Matthew it is the “centurion and all those with him”. It all builds up to the grand finale, the great commandment that closes the gospel “Go and make disciples of all nations”. Show them another way.

When you read this story of the Magi, read it as a beautiful, if challenging, image. Some open-minded strangers see a light, a shining star, and they follow it. It is a difficult journey. “A cold coming we had of it. Just the worst time of year for a journey”. These were the opening words of Lancelot Andrews sermon around 1610, and which T.S. Eliot picked up in his poem “The Journey of the Magi”. The difficult journey crossed barriers of race and religion, it side stepped cultural norms and social status. It avoided government interference. It ends up with them going another way. But the centre of the story is sacrificial worship at the manger of the Christ child.

I began to tick off these characteristics in relation to Mark the Evangelist.

  1. We honour our tradition, especially in our worship. “Lift up your hearts” is attested as early as 252 A.D. by Cyprian. It works on 2 levels. We rise above the mundane to the sacramental, and we are united with Christians through the ages.
  2. We are on a hard journey where the development of our property is concerned.
  3. A large part of the work of Hotham Mission is with Moslem immigrants, many from the East, well, the Middle East.
  4. We have a vision, a star to follow, even a vision statement at the beginning of the Mission’s Strategic Plan

“Out of the goodness of God’s creation and in response to God’s continuing acts and promises to all, our vision is for abundant life in which our mission may be restorative and transformative, constantly responding to the gospel hope of cosmic reconciliation”.

  1. The Mission goes another way by not accepting any government funding, and in so doing has cut quite a lot of the red tape imposed by both state and church .
  2. And the central focus is always on the presence of Christ. There is now a cross and an icon on the meeting room wall in the cottage as well as the Christian symbols of font, table (Sacrament) and lectern (Word) here in the church.

As I ticked off so many good points I began to feel rather smug. It was then that I realised that the purpose Matthew has in mind is to disturb a church that is settled and smug. Perhaps our vision could be wider. After all there are many shining lights out there.

Let me tell you about one I saw in Ethiopia. In the town of Bahar Dar we visited one of the five Fistula hospitals now operating in Ethiopia. Catherine Hamlin, now in her 90’s, went there as a young doctor and saw the plight of women with this problem. She began to treat them, and witnessed the way these outcast women were restored to their families and villages with dignity and purpose. The work grew, and grew. First a specialist hospital, then another and another, till last year (2018) 5 doctors trained at the main hospital in Addis Adaba in order to help women in Madagascar, Ghana, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

There are many such stars shining: The Christmas Bowl supports some. The National Council of Churches is putting new energy into the fight against modern slavery. There is a glimmer of hope that Australia might recognise the Nuclear Ban Treaty.

The Magi followed a star, opened their treasure chests, worshipped with costly gifts, and found another way.

We read their story on the first Sunday in Epiphany. An epiphany is to see yourself as you are and then catch a vision of what you might become. There is always another way. When you see the light, follow the star, and become.

We are also at the beginning of a new calendar year, a time of refreshment and resolution. Don’t let your stars disappear with the fireworks. As a congregation Matthew speaks to us as a community. He honours the tradition, challenges our self-satisfaction, points to the real source of light and commands us to go into all the world – to find another way.

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