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Pentecost 21
17/10/2021

Psalm 91
Mark 10:35-45

In a sentence
Our serving others begins with God’s serving us

Most of you are probably familiar with the story of The Invisible Man – whether from the original book by H G Wells or one of the many film adaptions. As superpowers go, invisibility is pretty high on the many people’s most-desired list. In the stories, the invisible man can move, infiltrate and steal, can be spy, voyeur and even violator with almost absolute freedom. This freedom from detection is the attraction of the power. To be able to see but not to be seen is a power almost divine in its possibilities. It is so, of course, only for the one who is invisible. The most recent adaptation of the story (2020) is a gripping horror movie from the perspective of she who is stalked by an invisible man.

The reading we have heard this morning is a familiar one to most of us, as is its interpretation. Let’s, then, render it a little less familiar by proposing that what James and John seek here is the freedom of invisible men – now a freedom from God. They seek to see as God sees, undetected themselves, rather than be seen by God.

This will surely strike many as an odd proposal, for it is almost the reverse of the typical reading! Those who know this reading know that it’s about the contrast between a certain kind of glory and servanthood. The two disciples ask to sit at his left and right hand in the heavenly court – to be glorified with Jesus and to be seen to be glorified. And Jesus turns their attention from seeking elevation to kneeling in service. The story seems to have a simple moral message: don’t big-note yourself but rather be helpful to others. This is an important moral message, and one we might forget at least in this or that particular situation; it’s good to be reminded of it. Chances are there is more we could do for someone nearby who would really appreciate our help. Give that help.

Yet, there is nothing morally surprising about what Jesus says. We have talkback radio and social media to remind us of these obligations to each other, criticising those who are too full of themselves and lauding those who sacrifice for others’ benefit.

On this moral reading, Jesus’ (the Son of Man’s) servanthood seems to be revealed here as an example for us to emulate: ‘I, Jesus, have come to serve and not be glorified; you do the same’. But if this is all Jesus says, he becomes largely irrelevant for the point. If I have a particular respect for Jesus – as James and John certainly did – then it might motivate me to hear that Jesus is a servant and I should be one too. But if the story is a common moral requirement hung on Jesus, then the passage is really only important as ‘humility for Christians’, which is the same as ‘humility for atheists’ except that atheists don’t have to bother with Jesus to get the point.

Yet there is more than an important moral point to hear in this exchange. Jesus is more than a moral exemplar: the Son of Man…came to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. Here we move past mere helpfulness. A ransom is paid not for those in need of help but for those in captivity, held hostage, imprisoned. The service Jesus brings doesn’t assist us but fundamentally liberates us. Jesus serves in that he – God, if you like – sees us and our need, and acts to change these. We are seen, and what is seen is that we are not free.

Let’s look back now to James and John. The moral reading of their request is that they aspire to be glorified and to be seen to be glorified, sitting left and right of Jesus in the heavenly court. But we can find deeper meaning in their request. The effect of their sitting left and right of Jesus is that they no longer look at him but out to whatever Jesus sees. They ask, then, to see as Jesus sees, rather than to be seen by Jesus. They seek to be – with some imagination! – undetected invisible men – unseen by the Jesus whose gaze is properly forward and not to the left or right.

This is not now mere self-importance; it is ignorance of self. The Son of Man comes to serve you, James and John, and to ransom you. Our gospel passage begins not with the moral imperative to serve which rings so loudly in our activist ears but with but a fundamental gift: the Son of Man serves by ransoming, by setting free: God has detected us. With God, being seen – and our knowing ourselves to be seen – is the meaning of salvation. Sitting at his right and left, James and John would not meet the gaze of Jesus, would not know that he sees them too. They would not know that they too are detected, judged and forgiven.

In the story, Jesus declares that he has no say over who sits left and right of his throne. But we need to push this further. Of course, there is no throne or heavenly court – we’re in the realm of metaphor here. But to retain the metaphor and refine it, we should now say not that we cannot know who will sit at Jesus’ left and right but that in fact there are no seats to Jesus’ left or right. We are all before the throne; no one is to the side or behind. For this is where we must be if we are to be seen, and to know that we are seen, and accepted.

For this is how we are served: in being seen by God, and knowing that God sees us, and knowing that God’s gaze sets us free.

And this is how we become servants ourselves – seeing those we did not see before, not as mere features in our lifescape but as people like us, whom God also sees, not least with our eyes.

And then we move to serve as Jesus serves, in order to ransom those who are captive.

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Pentecost 20
10/10/2021

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15
Psalm 90
Mark 10:17-31

In a sentence
Our future is not in what we can imagine but what God has already given us

Consider the following from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

‘God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who fashion a visionary ideal of community demand that it be realized by God, by others, and by themselves.

They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge the fellowship and God himself accordingly… They act as if they are the creators of the Christian community, as if their dream binds people together.

When their ideal picture is destroyed, they see the community going to smash. So they become, first accusers of the fellowship, then accusers of God, and finally the despairing accusers of themselves.’

There is violence in all this drive to make changes. Bonhoeffer again:

…Those who love their dream of a community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of the community, even though their intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and faithful. (Life Together, SCM 1954, 17f)

If I see the goal, if I know what must be done to achieve it, and if I have the means to pull it off, I will work to bring the vision to reality. And I may well do this ‘no matter what’. This is the logic of the suicide bomb, the engine of domestic violence, the rationale for nuclear warhead stockpiles. I will believe my vision to be the vision – God’s vision – and that will require my all, and yours.

Yet, it is not the exercise of our power to influence which brings the kingdom of God, but God himself and, whatever God does among us, it is not violent.

To bring this home, let’s recall that we as a congregation are seeking a vision for the future. Some of us dream of what we have, or have had. Some of us dream of what new thing might yet be. In either case, we are visionaries looking to the left or the right, forward or backward, up or down.

Yet, what if Bonhoeffer is right: what if God does hate visionary dreaming? Is this the kind of visioning we’re presently encouraging? What does this mean for our planning, given that we must plan, that we must have some vision of our future?

In our gospel reading this morning, a man approaches Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. To this well-lived life Jesus adds just one more requirement: give away all that you have, and come and follow me. This is more than the rich man can bear, and he leaves, ‘grieving’.

This is one of those ‘squirmy’ readings which makes uncomfortable those of us who also have many things, but we won’t focus on that discomfort today. With Bonhoeffer in our ears, we will rather consider the rich man’s vision: the vision of ‘eternal life’. By itself, the desire for eternal life is not yet a problem. But the man links his desire to the question, ‘What must I do?’ In this, he assumes responsibility for achieving his most profound need, so that when Jesus ups the ante and names the thing which ‘can’t’ be done, the man’s vision and hopes are shredded. Even the disciples are horrified.

The problem here is the vision of being rewarded by God for the good work we have done: ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ While we earn wages, we do not earn an inheritance: inheritance comes by virtue of being a son or daughter. Not what you do, but what you are, is the grounds for inheriting. With this man’s particular vision and his presumption that its fulfilment is about the choices he makes, what he needs most is lost, and he himself is also lost.

We can’t avoid asking and answering the question ‘What shall we do?’ And when we ask this, we kind of mean what is the right thing to do? What shall we do ‘in order to inherit eternal life’? This is the question of the rich man standing before Jesus – and it is not yet a bad question. But it turns bad when we attach to it a concern for being rewarded; with talk of reward (or punishment) we enter into the realm of anxiety and fear. To do the right thing is to win and find peace; to do the wrong thing is to lose – ourselves and the things we value – and here resides the anxiety and fear.

Yet Christian faith is not about being at peace in the knowledge that we have done the right thing. Of course, as human beings, we must decide: we must do something. But the heart of the matter is not in this.

While life might require that changes are made and that we make decisions about those changes, there is nothing we can do to change what we most basically are. The question which matters, then, is not what we will do, but what are we? By what spirit do we live? Where is the true source of our life? Is there any fixed thing in our lives which cannot be assailed, whatever might besiege us, whatever decisions we make?

The answer of the gospel is Yes. We are children of God, and so all that matters is already ours as inheritance. It is not ours to earn or achieve, not ours by virtue of being ‘right’ in our vision. We must indeed yet make decisions about our future, but we also hear that God has already given us adoption as his children. This is ‘eternal life’, and its concrete outworking for us is freedom to live as part of a community which is never destined to be a particular shape according to a specific vision. There is nothing to be done to inherit the fullness of life; it is already ours through Jesus the Son and it has less a specific shape than a particular relationship: unity around Jesus, under God. Christian discipleship – in all the things we do and say, in the visions we form and the choices we make – is simply a matter of orbiting together more closely to Jesus.

It is, then, by the grace of God that our dreams and visions of this or that grand community will fail and be cast aside by God, for our dreams are limited by our poor imagination. God breaks such futures on the sharp rocks of his grace so that ‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’ – the things God has prepared for those who know themselves to be his – so that these things might become ours.

What happens next for us can only be good if, at its heart, it is the expectation that God will be there with us.

Let us, then, be prepared to allow that, whatever the future holds for us as a congregation – or in our individual lives – we need not fear it and so need not seek to control it, for the future belongs to the God in whose Son our lives are hidden and held safe. If we desire that future, we will find that else we need has been added to us.

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Pentecost 19
3/10/2021

Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
Psalm 26
Mark 10:2-16

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

Our reading today from the Gospel of Mark the Evangelist, like our Gospel reading from last week, comes from a section of Mark’s Gospel which gives us a sort of loose collection of Jesus’ teachings. It’s kind of like the story is about to get to the good bit — where Jesus actually goes to Jerusalem to be arrested, tried, and crucified — but there’s still a couple of teaching moments that need to be squeezed in at the last minute. So it feels like we get a bit of a mishmash: last week we heard something about a rogue exorcist, and the risk of being cast into hell. And today we have heard a teaching about marriage and divorce; and then a teaching about needing to receive God’s kingdom like a child.

However, rather than being simply a collection of last-minute teachings before Jesus’ passion, I want to suggest that this section of the Gospel aims to prepare us for the road ahead. Jesus has before him a road which leads to death, and as our teacher it seems this is a road we too must follow. To quote the German martyr and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “When Christ calls a person, he bids them come and die.”

The Gospel of Mark, while it is the shortest Gospel, doesn’t actually tell the life of Jesus in the most straightforward way. Mark at times repeats stories or teachings which the other Gospels don’t. Often the stories which are retold from Mark in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are actually shorter in their retelling. And then on top of that Mark sometimes seems simply to repeat himself.

In this transitional section of Mark Jesus predicts more than once that he must go to Jerusalem, be handed over, and die. As often as Jesus repeats this prediction, the disciples fail to understand it. Instead of heeding the foreboding words of their teacher the disciples instead challenge and rebuke Jesus, becoming distracted by fighting amongst themselves over who is greatest among them. Rather than the disciples taking the stark warning from their teacher as a sign to pay closer attention, we see instead the disciples repeatedly getting in the way of Jesus’ work. Last week, the disciples tried to get in the way of someone sharing in Jesus’ work of freeing the world from demonic forces; and today they try to keep away the children Jesus wishes to embrace and bless.

Setting today’s reading into the context of discipleship — and context is everything — allows us to see in Jesus’ teaching not only wise counsel, but a deeper lesson about what the path of following Christ is in fact about.

The question about the lawfulness of divorce is, in reality, a non-question. While there was some debate in Jesus’ day among the Pharisees — the forerunners of later Rabbinical Judaism, who like Jesus sought to teach their students how to interpret and apply the tradition they had received– While there was some debate among the Pharisees about how liberally or restrictive the law relating to divorce should be interpreted. What exactly should the threshold for divorce be? The question of whether men had the right, under Jewish law, to divorce women was not really at issue. Men had the right to divorce their wives; and there was little women could do about it.

While it can seem strange to modern ears, shaped by the ongoing struggle of feminism for women’s autonomy, what Jesus offers in seeming to rule out divorce is actually a subversion of the presumed rights of men. In heightening the seriousness and responsibility of marriage, Jesus makes clear that women cannot be discarded as though they simply do not matter. Men must hold onto the responsibility to provide for women who would otherwise struggle to sustain themselves in a society dominated by men.

Against the received tradition in which men had rights and little responsibilities, and women had little to no rights at all, Jesus seeks to assert the status, dignity, and equality of women. And Jesus makes this assertion not by a technical reading of the law, but by reclaiming the world that creation ought to be: the world that is in fact more true than the one in which we live, because of our hardened hearts.

So while we might take some clues from the subversive teaching Jesus offers here, when we think about the rights of women in our quite different context. We should also be attentive that what is at issue in Jesus’ teaching is the concern for the empowerment of women who have no rights, and the reclaiming of a world in which those without status are restored to full dignity and respect.

This is the theme which ties together the teaching about divorce and Jesus’ teaching about children. While children today are celebrated as joyous gifts, as signs of hope, protected by child labour laws, and a UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the context of the first century children had no legal rights of their own: excluded from participation in public life, or that of the synagogue, until they became “children of the commandment” at their “bar Mitzvah.” Much like women, the example of children represents those who were deemed to have no status in Jesus’ day. They were under the rule of their father. With no rights to freedom, only obligation.

In these two teachings Jesus is pointing to the focus on those without status in his broader redemptive work. This is what ties together Jesus’ movement from claiming that the world is one in which women without rights must be treated as equal, to the claim that we must welcome God’s Kingdom as though we were like children. God’s work is among the lowly, whom Christ embraces, empowers, and restores. And so we must see the disciple’s jostling for greatness as a cautionary tale, and allow ourselves to be led down the path Jesus must tread: the path that leads to Jerusalem, and ultimately the cross.

When, in our reading last week, Jesus talks about being cast into “hell,” using the word Gehenna: which refers to the Valley of Hinnom, just outside Jerusalem. Jesus is talking about a place you can visit, a place which was associated with ancient child sacrifice, and which in Jesus’ day was likely a rubbish dump — perhaps a smouldering cesspit. In other words, Jesus was talking about the place where the trash goes when it is taken out of Jerusalem. Jesus is talking about the place that it is cursed because it was believed to have been the site where children were sacrificed and discarded.

And so, when Jesus offers a vision of the world which upsets the presumed rights of men over women, when Jesus embraces the child, and offers harsh teachings which come with the threat of being cast onto the cursed rubbish heap, Jesus is trying to get his disciples to understand the path he is on. The seriousness of his call. Jesus is trying to get his disciples to see, to get us to see, that his way towards Jerusalem is for those who find themselves without status, those who are at risk of becoming refuse. Jesus goes to become one among the many who are discarded, who find themselves in hellish places, who go where the trash goes when it is taken out of Jerusalem.

Jesus is concerned with the discarded many of his day, and those of every day: in Myanmar, Afghanistan, Yemen, Tigray; refugee camps dotted throughout the world; the poor in slums waiting for the pandemic to come; and so many more. While we should certainly hear in this passage a lesson and guide about marriage, and how we should treat vulnerable children. We should, at the same time, hear here the faint echo of Jesus asserting a claim about the world his own saving work will bring. For Jesus the way to the trash heap, for us a path to a renewed order of righteousness and love: that goes through death and beyond it.

And so let us hear as Jesus’ disciples the challenge he gave to his first disciples:

If we are concerned with greatness in God’s Kingdom, let us not be concerned with ourselves. Let us have the same mind that was in Christ, who emptied himself, and took on the form of a servant.

Let us recall that we are the students, and our teacher is found willingly with the little ones, the disregarded, the broken, the maimed, the blind: those who have no rights. Let us seek out ways we can help those who are struggling — having slipped through the net of love which ought to bind us together.

Let us welcome all who work against the hellish places, where those who are refuse and rejected are sent. May we offer prayers and actions for displaced peoples in refugee camps, in warzones, in the midst of oppression.

And may we do this, not because we are good … but in contrition, knowing that we are still students of Christ’s way, still seeking to find our teacher who goes ahead of us to be with the afflicted. We do this because we have become children: lowly ourselves, obliged to others.

‘Everyone,’ — Holy Scripture says — ‘will be salted with fire.’

May we find in our own afflictions the teacher who embraces us like a child

May we find in the afflictions of others the willing one who lifts us out of our stumbling

May we find, and see, and hear the Good News:

In Jesus God reaches out in love, going before us, to bear the struggles we can no longer bear — binds the broken-hearted, gathers us in mercy, stands with us for justice: enacts a new order of righteousness and love. And though the fiery, hellish places seem never to be quenched, the risen ones resists, and resists and overcomes even death.