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Epiphany 3
21/1/2024

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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Satirists use humour to point their fingers at our culture and our strange or misguided behaviour.  An example of this is Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift that pointed the finger at his 18^th century culture exposing its pomposity, the decadence of its political institutions and the brutishness of humankind among the creatures of earth.

The writer of the story of Jonah was a satirist. When we remember this, the story he tells makes a lot more sense. We were probably first told the story as if it were history, so we got all hung up on the problem of Jonah being swallowed by the fish who delivered him back to where he started. Nobody told us the story of Gulliver’s Travels as if it were history, so we never had any problems with the improbably small and large people and the creatures that he met.

Satirists often use humour, certainly that has been an indispensable feature of modern satire. The writer of Jonah may have been using humour – it’s hard for us to tell because humour is so culturally conditioned. In Jesus’ day it looks a bit as if humour was based on exaggeration. Apparently the idea of a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle was hilarious. Maybe Jonah is good for a bit of a laugh, what with there being a fish big enough to swallow a man and it taking three days to walk to the middle of the great city of Ninevah when archaeological evidence shows it was about three miles across. There is an appearance from a fast-growing Bodhi tree that might have been quite funny too.

I think the funniest thing about this story is that a preacher with the worst of all possible attitudes planted himself in the middle of town and delivered the shortest and worst sermon in all of history and the everyone from the king to the kitchen cat repented in sack cloth and ashes. My colleagues and I are obviously doing something very wrong on Sunday mornings.

We don’t really know if or why Jonah was funny, but we do know why it is satirical. We know why some people would have squirmed when they heard this story. The story of Jonah was probably written about the same time as the story of Ruth. Both stories addressed a similar issue. I used to enjoy reading back issues of Punch. Punch, of course, was the source of satire. It had wonderful cartoons, but they only made sense, or were in any way funny if you knew your history.

Jonah makes sense when we know our history. The story was told at a time when Jerusalem was resettled after the Babylonian captivity. Hundreds of people had returned from exile after Persia came to power. They were setting up a new community and they obviously had high hopes for their society, and they wanted to establish it on the highest principles. They looked to the Torah given them by God through Moses where there were places that urged them to be pure and holy just as God is holy. One way to be clean was to refrain from contact with what is unclean. Laws therefore forbade touching dead things and eating certain kinds of food. Special rituals were prescribed for becoming clean again. One way of becoming unclean was by contact with Gentiles – mixing with people for whom Yahweh was not their God. All this was extremely praiseworthy and high minded, but it presented a very serious problem for many of the returned exiles. While they had been in Babylon they had not been so puritanical and had intermarried with the local population. Many of the returned exiles had brought their Gentile wives with them. Because their wives were Gentile their children were also Gentile. One’s Jewishness is determined by one’s mother. This became an issue of debate and contention because there was a strong push from some powerful leaders to purify the race by having the foreign wives and children returned to Babylon – a form of ethnic cleansing.

The story of Jonah is a satire in that it sets out to challenge the prevailing piety, into looking again at what God is like. If you are to be holy as God is holy then look at how God’s holiness differs from the kind of holiness you are trying to live up to.

Jonah was told by God to preach to the evil foreigners of Ninevah. Instead he chose to travel in the opposite direction away from Ninevah and away from God, forgetting Yahweh is God of all creation, of storms and fish. There is no escape from God and God brought him back. So Jonah went and preached his short boring sermon – “in 40 days Ninevah will be overthrown.” Then the whole lot of them repented in the hope that God would turn his wrath from them. This is exactly what Jonah was afraid of and it got right up his nose. Jonah was the kind of puritanical fundamentalist who believed that bad people need to be punished and that the sign of a good person was one who keeps his word. All that is proper on earth has come seriously unstuck when God says he is going to destroy a whole bunch of bad people – well that’s OK, but what isn’t OK is when the bad people become good people and God changes his mind and goes soft on them. As far as Jonah is concerned some of God’s least endearing qualities are his mercy and steadfast love and graciousness.

The story of Jonah is satire because it is told to people who were just like Jonah in their pietistic fundamentalism. The story of Jonah is still satire because there are still pietistic fundamentalists who see the world in black and white, in good and bad, in reward and punishment. It is a pietism that is incapable for being gracious as God is gracious. It can have no mercy.

One of the reasons I think the story of Jonah has won favour in the Christian church is because it rubbishes the same kind of hardline attitudes that Jesus attacked in the pious leadership of his day. Jesus was found most often among the sick and the lost and the rascals and they saw in him the mercy and graciousness of God himself and it made a difference.

Hymn of Frederick Faber

2 There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea, and forgiveness in his justice sealed for us on Calvary.

4 For the love of God is broader than the measures of our mind; and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind

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Epiphany 2
14/1/2024

Genesis 28:10-17
Psalm 139
John 1:43-51

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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The greatest question which confronted the disciples of Jesus, and the first Christians was this: Who is this Jesus? The arguments – for they split the Church – were frequently around whether he was a man, a fully human being – or God. If both, then How? All four Gospels are peppered with the debate but not least John’s and this opening chapter. The initial phase of the discussion came to an interim conclusion in the 5^th Century at the Councils of Nicaea, Chalcedon and Constantinople, all of which are foundational documents of the Uniting Church (!).

I’d love to say more, but instead I will concentrate on today’s reading from John – however, we must not forget that we are only a handful of verses away from that magnificent opening which can be summarised in v. 14 as ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us … and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth’.  The second part of the chapter is thus a bit of a disappointment.

Jesus comes to Galilee – on his own initiative. He meets Philip and says, ‘Follow me’.  In the next sentence, we listen, with some surprise, as Philip says to Nathanael, ‘We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.’ Now that is quite a rapid learning curve. So far, John has told us that the titles of Rabbi and Messiah (1: 36,38) have been used by John the Baptist and the disciples Peter and John, but not that one, nor ‘Son of God’ or ‘King of Israel’ which Nathanael is about to supply.

But Philip wasn’t there – he was not even a disciple until this moment. He seems to think that being ‘the son of Joseph of Nazareth’ is important, and Nathanael treats that with a scornful ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ So this is a constructed tale to draw us all into that long-debated question. I don’t mean that John is trying to trick us – he is as much without guile as Nathanael! And this is where Jesus gives a really intriguing answer, and it’s what I want to explore. ‘Guile’ in the KJV is translated ‘deceit’ in NRSV, ‘an Israelite without guile’, so Jesus is rather nicely inviting us to share Nathanael’s doubt. And John underlines it in that, only in his Gospel, and 26 times there, is Jesus recorded as saying ‘Amen, Amen’, twice; ‘Truly, truly’. It indicates that what follows is of great importance.

‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ (Jn 1:51)

Which takes the alert bible student to the ancient patriarch perhaps most characterised by guile and deceit, Jacob:

Jacob had just cheated his blind old father to give him the birthright which belonged to his slightly old twin (Esau, the hairy man), and fled from his brother’s rage under the excuse provided by their mother, that he should find a wife. Now he is out in the wilderness, a long way from anywhere, and exhausted by more than travel.  He lays down to sleep with his head on a stone. (In Egypt, I actually saw a camel driver doing just that.) Unsurprisingly, it produced a dream.

He saw (Gen. 28:2) a ladder ‘set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven’ and there was a lot of angelic traffic on it. A wonderful image. The Coptic ikon on our front cover looks more like a (down?) escalator. The next verse has Jacob turn and see ‘the LORD’ (the sacred name, not just any god) standing beside him, at its foot. Jacob had thought he was at a distance from home far enough not to meet his God. And not only was God there, feet on the earth, but God then promised him all this land that he’d slept on it be his own, for ‘the families of the earth’ for flourish in. Then he woke up.

And he memorably declared, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’

This was a ‘mountain-bottom’ experience and somewhat against normal religious expectations. Was not God on the top of Mount Horeb/Sinai?  But Moses had first met God far away at a burning bush. Did not Elijah seek God on the same mountain, and did he see God in earthquake and fire? And the apostles wanted to build tabernacles for Elijah and Moses on Mount Tabor to keep Jesus with them? And Jesus sent them down to the plain.

Well, Jacob built a cairn of stones and called it a house of God, a Beth-el.

And within a few kilometres there were other such sacred cairns, and shrines. There was one at Dan, another at Shiloh (where Samuel was), until Moses put the broken stones of the Ten Commandments in a box – and God dwelt there under a tent for a long time, until it came to Jerusalem. Then Solomon built the grandaddy of all Temples there.

I sometimes wonder why it is that we don’t remember God’s reaction to Solomon’s ornate designs for the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple’s grand dedication: ‘Who asked you to build me a House?’ said God. That Temple, or what remains of it, is a building still fraught with significance in our time.  The most likely site for Bethel is now in the occupied West Bank, 5 km from Ramullah. (We wish our Foreign Minister, our fellow Uniting Church member, Penny Wong a fruitful outcome of her visit there this week.)

Is it any wonder that the Scripture is full of warnings about sacred places? I know several, and visit them, but they are such places because they have been where generations of the faithful have knelt where, as the poet T. S. Eliot wrote, ‘prayer has been valid.’

Is God at the top or the bottom of the ladder? The biblical view is: Yes and No. All ground is not holy. God is at both ends of the ladder and at neither.

Three quotations to illuminate my point:

From my former Anglican colleague Andrew McGowan:

‘…[in John] the true Israelite, without guile, bears true witness to the king of Israel here. And in time, like Jacob, he will see the “house of God and gate of heaven” (Gen 28:17), but understand these are not a place, but a person.’

That is the basic meaning of the one title Jesus seems to accept: ‘Son of Man’.

Former Presbyterian and Church of South India bishop, Leslie Newbiggin [The Light Has Come, 22-3]:

Jesus is ‘the place of God’s dwelling, the place where God is no longer hidden behind the vault of heaven, but where there is actual revelation, actual traffic between the [human] world and the world of God.’

And Lutheran liturgical scholar, Gordon Lathrop [Holy Ground, 47] has:

‘In him is the gate of heaven, the awesome place, the holy presence beside the poor and the wretched.  What humanity has hoped for in shrines and temples is found in an utterly new way in him.’

And, I promise you, in this place, in this service of Word and Sacrament, Jesus, Child of God and child of Mary (as the Chalcedon Council said), meets us, today.

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Baptism of Jesus
7/1/2024

Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

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It’s a challenge for those living in 21^st century Australia to grasp the impact of Mark’s Gospel upon its original audience. It’s been suggested that Mark’s original audience was a Christian community in Rome during the middle decades of the first century of the common era. One of the most prominent events in that period was a Jewish rebellion against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, with Rome responding by destroying the Jewish Temple in 70CE. This historical setting is the context in which Mark writes an innovative piece of literature, probably sent as a letter, to clarify the significance of a man who’d been crucified a few decades before. In his opening words, Mark recalls how this man, Jesus, had travelled from Nazareth to be baptized in the river Jordan. Mark describes is thus: ‘And just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

Any Jews in Mark’s original audience would be astounded by this, surely recalling the pleading words of the prophet in Isaiah 64: ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.’ Mark declares that Isaiah’s plea has been answered in the most extraordinary way, not as God arrives at the head of a heavenly army to vanquish the foes of his people, but rather as Jesus is baptized by John and driven into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. Mark stresses the sense in which the baptism of Jesus is a commissioning for his vocation of self-giving love and service. This is what baptism means for Jesus, and it sets the pattern for those who follow him.

The church declares Holy Communion and Baptism to be sacraments, because they proclaim the grace and truth of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Uniting Church Basis of Union says this about the sacraments: ‘The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ has commanded his Church to proclaim the Gospel both in words and in the two visible acts of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Christ himself acts in and through everything that the Church does in obedience to his commandment: it is Christ who by the gift of the Spirit confers the forgiveness, the fellowship, the new life and the freedom which the proclamation and actions promise; and it is Christ who awakens, purifies and advances in people the faith and hope in which alone such benefits can be accepted.’ (BoU, para 6)

And the Basis of Union provides the following commentary about baptism: ‘The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ incorporates people into his body by Baptism. In this way he enables them to participate in his own baptism, which was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and burial, and which was made available to all when, risen and ascended, he poured out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Baptism into Christ’s body initiates people into Christ’s life and mission in the world, so that they are united in one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy, in one family of the Father of all in heaven and earth, and in the power of the one Spirit.’ (BoU, para 7)

Note the description of who is active in baptism: it is Christ who incorporates people into his body, enabling them through the gift of the Holy Spirit to participate in his death and resurrection. And note the purpose of baptism: it initiates people into Christ’s life and mission in the world, so that they are united in one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy, in one family of the Father of all in heaven and earth, and in the power of the one Spirit. This is why the Ephesian disciples, mentioned in Acts 19, are baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. They’d received the baptism of John as a sign of their desire to turn to God, but they’d not yet been commissioned for the ministry of Jesus Christ. They’d not yet been identified with Christ by being buried with him and raised with him.

In the same way, baptism commissions us to love and serve God through the power of the same Spirit. Martin Luther, the 16th century church reformer, once said that there’s no greater comfort than baptism. In the midst of his own experience of affliction and anxiety, he comforted himself by repeating, ‘I am baptized! I am baptized!’, a mantra that affirmed his belonging to God through Jesus Christ. Note that Luther does not say, I was baptised, but I am baptised. Baptism is not merely something that happened to us in the past, often when we were so young that we can’t even remember it. Baptism is a present reality in the here and now that is saturated with divine presence and power.

Our formation as disciples of Jesus Christ is no genetic certainty or accident of birth, but rather depends on the practice of a particular identity that both signifies and conveys the favour of God. Consider how our relationships form identity. When we make an introduction, it’s common to say, this is my spouse, or this is my child, or this is my friend. It’s interesting that the structure of these words implies possession or ownership. Linguistically, to say that a person is my spouse, or my child, or my friend does seem to suggest that I own them, because the word ‘my’ is derived from the word ‘mine’, which implies possession. But, of course, that’s not what is intended. What I mean when I call a person my spouse, or my child, or my friend is that I share with each of them a particular relationship. My spouse and I share in the intimacy of marriage, my child and I share in a familial relationship, and my friend and I share in mutual affection and interests. In each relationship, there’s a sense of reciprocity – I am my spouse’s husband, my child’s father, and my friend’s friend. I belong to them, just as they belong to me, and this mutual belonging both creates and affirms our identity.

We share more with Mark’s original audience than we might imagine, for we too seek to belong to Christ crucified and risen. In our world, imperial power takes various forms: Presidents of some nations are elected for life, and others secure tenure by silencing or eliminating opposition;

• Naked military aggression is dressed up in nationalist propaganda to defend against fictitious foes;
• Innocent, defenceless, non-combatants are killed by those who claim that existential threats justify collateral damage;
• Populist governments appeal to the basest of human instincts and fears, propping of their power on the back of empty promises to wreak havoc on justice and peace;
• Wealthy individuals and corporations determined to minimize and evade fair and responsible taxation;
• Our fragile planet’s resources plundered and its species depleted.

In the midst of unaccountable power that threatens human flourishing, we can read Mark’s Gospel just as his original audience did – as those who hold to a strange hope in a man who travelled from Nazareth to be baptized in the river Jordan and immersed into the mission of God’s love. Jesus invites us to belong to him and to derive from him a baptismal identity that speaks to us of God’s favour: ‘You are my beloved child. With you, I am well pleased.’ To the God of all grace, who has called us to eternal glory in Christ, be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.

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Christmas 1
31/12/2023

Ecclesiastes 3:1-13
Psalm 8
Revelation 21:1-6a

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There is a time for every matter under heaven – a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, to pluck up, to kill, to heal, to seek, to lose, a time to love, and a time to hate. These things – and many others – fill our time. The old philosopher who wrote Ecclesiastes got this right at least to the extent that he sought simply to describe the kinds of things which go on in the world.

But there is more at stake in our time than a simple inventory of what happens, as if that would give “permission” for all we do and experience. Our lives are not merely a matter of washes over us. We are agents in history – we decide and act. It is we who build and plant, kill and heal. But Ecclesiastes describes what we do, and gives us no direction as to precisely what time it now is. Is this the time for killing or for healing? Perhaps the answer seems obvious – to us here, at least. But a different answer is equally obvious to others in different times and places, whose sense for the time fills our news reports daily with accounts of actions taken according to different seasons and calendars.

While Ecclesiastes’ philosopher can tell us what we do, he cannot tell us what to do. For this, we appeal directly to God: God, show us the way. It’s not usually as explicit as this, nor even clearly religious. But every invasion and persecution, every bomb and expulsion, as much as every act of grace and mercy, appeals to the necessity, the timeliness, the divine (or ultimate) requirement that now we kill or heal, keep silent or speak, weep or laugh. We seek assurance or assure others that our actions are just and, so, that they are timely: now is the time for this to happen.

Our lives, then, are not merely subject to the many things happening around us. These events, and our responses to them, are claims and counterclaims to justice and rightness. Our enemies believe that they are right in their enmity, as we think we’re right in opposing them. If there were a God, God would see things their (and our) way.

How then do we tell what time it is? What can reconcile our conflicting discernments of the times? How do we know what to do?

A hint of an answer is given in today’s reading from Revelation. The city of Jerusalem – a work of human hands – descends now from heaven as a new city. It is crucial, however, that it is recognisable as the old city with its deep history of conflicting time-tellings, its persecutions and injustices and misjudgements. It is indeed healed, but the recognisability is crucial because it means all that history of Jerusalem’s errors of judgement about the time do not finally determine how things end.

It’s almost as if God does not bother to tell the time, but rather simply presumes that now is his own time: the time in which all things are claimed for God’s purposes and not for any of our conflicting intentions and cross-purposed calendars. We mark just this each week when we gather around the table and declare that our failure to receive the kingdom of God has become God’s means of calling us again to become that kingdom, as the body of Jesus broken by us is said to be broken for us. Jesus was broken because he seemed to us untimely, out of season, but the Eucharist is God’s own telling of the time: your times, your healing and killings, mournings and laughter, made my own.

What does this mean for us, on the cusp of another new year, according to our calendar time? It means that we are free to read the times as best we can, to argue about them, to persuade, to invite, to act, to warn and to correct as best we can. It means that we are free to risk telling the time and to act according to what the season seems to require, to test what it means here and now to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly. It means that where, in the old year, we might have gotten the times wrong, the new year begins with grace and forgiveness.

We look forward to the year to come not with confidence that we know now what to do, what time it is, but in the hope that we will find it again to be God’s own time, in which our time is continually made new

Lift up your hearts then, and give your thanks and praise to the God who comes to be the time of our lives.

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Christmas Day
25/12/2023

Titus 3:4-7
Luke 2:1-7

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Distracted
What we pay attention to matters so much in economic terms today that commentators speak of our now inhabiting an “attention economy”. We experience this in all its social, commercial and political dimensions through the notifications on our phones, the clamouring of influencers, and increasingly in-your-face advertising.

With this competition for our attention comes the corresponding experience of distraction. When something vibrates or “tings” nearby, we are distracted from whatever we are doing. If the distraction is well-designed, the interruption grips our attention. This is how we might be sucked into a vortex of binge-watching something into the wee hours, or have a study session cut into confetti-sized bits by group chatter, or find ourselves with a hefty fine because1 we’ve tried to answer a text while driving. So pervasive is this experience that some have suggested that indistractability is the most impressive superpower of the present age.

But what does it say about us that we are so distractable? Distraction works as a commercial and political method because there are “buttons” in us which can be pushed by noises or flashing lights which will cause us to look up from whatever we are doing. These buttons are being pushed, of course, because our responses translate into dollars or votes for the button pushers.

Incomplete
But my immediate interest is that we respond, because our response tells us something about the tension between the real, tangible value of what we might already be doing and our sense of the possible value of what the distraction promises. What’s common to these kinds of distractions is the positive possibility of an “addition” to ourselves, and the corresponding negative experience of incompleteness.

This is perhaps most obvious when counting the number of online friends, followers, views, votes, shares, or re-tweets: more is more, and more matters because it is “less incomplete”. But it’s much the same with other distractions: the distraction of the latest version of our now superseded thing or of the novel “experience” we might have the money to buy. The possibility of the new thing distracts us because we imagine we are not yet complete. Where I am now, what I am doing now, what I am – these don’t seem to be enough. I am not yet enough; there must be more, and it’s not here but perhaps it’s there – in the next notification, in a different life partner, a new job, or when I finally retire

Christmas and completeness
So, what has all this got to do with Christmas? Christmas is about completeness in the midst of, and in the very form of, incompleteness.

“…And [Mary] gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger…”

Luke’s Christmas narrative is filled with signs of incompleteness. It speaks of the displacement of the holy family by the will of empire, of their marginalisation despite Mary’s condition, and of the humiliation of being laid in a manger. There is not a lot of fullness in the circumstances of the birth of Jesus.

But born, wrapped securely, and laid down safely, the child is complete. Of course – as with most children – there are many things he will do and say, many things he will enjoy and suffer. But none of that will exceed the completeness he is in himself: he is already all he needs to be. The Christmas story is about a completeness in the midst of poverty and powerlessness – a wholeness despite want and need, the utter absence of the need for distraction.

We don’t believe this, of course, which is why Christmas is often the opposite for us: a season of not enough, a season of incompleteness. And so we can be driven to distraction by the Christmas imperative to provide for the accumulation of more: more stuff for people who don’t really need it, more money to pay for the stuff, more work to earn the money to pay for the stuff, and so on. This kind of incompleteness is not merely a condition but a process, a way of life.

By contrast, there is a completeness in the Christ child to which nothing needs to be added. Yet this is not sentimental gooeyness at the image of a newborn. And neither is it a nostalgic harking back to a lost era when things were simpler. These are both themselves distractions. Sentimentality distracts us from the whole truth by telling only what might be appealing, and so sees only the cradle and not the cross. Nostalgia distracts by denying a fundamental truth of history – that though our circumstances may change significantly, we ourselves do not. And so, nostalgia imagines that the story from the cradle to the cross is not really our story.

But that first Christmas was the beginning of a story of wholeness in full awareness of our deprivation, a vision of completeness despite absence. We could moralise this by saying that Jesus remained true despite his lowly beginning, the opposition to his ministry and the final injustice of his crucifixion. This is worth saying, but it also reduces Jesus to a mere hero. The problem is that we don’t need heroes to do it for us; we need to be able ourselves to live complete lives in the midst of incompleteness. We need to be able to live lives which are not constantly haunted by the suspicion that there’s a better life, a better option, just behind the next glittering, ringing, distracting thing. Because there really isn’t.

Being enough
If Jesus does remain true from the cradle to the crucifixion, it is not by mere moral courage. It is by the conviction that he is complete wherever he is, whatever he is doing, whatever is happening to him. That is, Jesus knows his life to be a point at which God reigns in the world. It is this presence of God in what he does and experiences which is Jesus’ completeness. And this is despite appearances. God reigns in the child in the manger, in the sweaty teacher on the dusty streets, in the argumentative troublemaker and in the despised figure on the cross.

To get Christmas right is not to reduce it to a small part of our incomplete lives but to see it as being about everything in one thing: the whole of God and ourselves in just one small child and what he was to become, and perhaps also in us.

The reign of God – the gift of God’s self to the world, to our very selves – is not a distraction from what we are doing. It is the revaluation of what we are. You are not the sum of everything you have done, if this means there would be more of you if you did more, experienced more, viewed more, or sampled more. With the God of the cradle and the cross, you are enough before you begin doing or experiencing anything.

We lose this somewhere along the way, strangely becoming less as we do and own and experience more. The child in the manger will one day propose that unless we become again as children, we cannot be whole, cannot know God’s kingdom, cannot know that time and space in which whatever belongs to us, we belong to God (Matthew 18.2-5).

Indistractability is about this gift of completeness – trusting that even though there are many things we can do and we can add to ourselves, it is enough that we have been born, and swaddled, and laid in the manger of the world.

Because with this God, You. Are. Enough, however incomplete you think you are, however tempting it is to want to be more.

Rest, then, under the loving gaze of God, as did Jesus once under Mary’s eyes of love, and know yourselves to be complete.

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Advent 3
17/12/2023

John 1:6-8, 23, 26b-28
Psalm 126
Luke 1:39-55

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In the season of Advent, our Scripture readings do strange things with time. We are called to remember something which is yet to occur while, at the same time, called to prepare for the arrival of one who, common sense would say, has been and gone. The same kind of time-twisting is heard today in Mary’s song of praise:

⁵¹ [God] has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud…⁵² He has brought down the powerful …
[he has] lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

Whatever we might think about where we are in the midst of these powerful and lowly, hungry and rich, the claim is unambiguous: God has worked with power to change the order of things in the world. Yet, this doesn’t ring true. From time to time, we might see the lowly lifted up and the haughty brought down but, for the most part, things don’t seem to be going the way Mary’s song would imply on a plain reading; the assertion that God “has” done such things is not convincing.

But the issue is not only that we don’t see this kind of change in the time between Mary’s song and now. The thing about her song is that nothing could have happened yet – at the very time she sings – if she is singing the gospel – singing what God has done in Jesus. Jesus is not yet born, but she still sings,

[God] has shown strength …; he has scattered … He has brought down… [he has] lifted up… he has filled… and sent away…

It is odd that Mary should speak in this way.

The key to understanding this strange speech is to see that there is no “history” here, in the ordinary sense. So far as Christian confession is concerned, there is little interest in the order or timing of revelation but only in what is revealed. And what is revealed about God’s work for the poor and the hungry? The only sense in which faith can say unequivocally that God has shown strength to lift up and fill the weak and poor is in relation to the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. He is the powerless and lowly one filled and lifted by God.

But consider what this now means! Mary does not sing the praises of the God who has lifted her up, as some readings of this text run. Or, at least, this is a secondary sense of her song. Rather, Mary praises the God who raised her son, the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. And here we see the Bible’s strange sense of God in time: Mary praises God for having done something that has not yet happened at this moment in the story.

This is bad history by most standards, but is in fact good biblical theology. Not unreasonably, we typically read history from start to finish, as if it were simply the unfolding of events from beginning to end. The very way in which we read a book – including the Bible! – reinforces this. Yet the Scriptures read, or tell, from end to beginning. The “end” is some experience of God, a salvation of some sort: an exodus, a healing, a restoration or a resurrection. This new thing is of such proportion that the beginning cannot be merely the first thing which happened on the way toward the present experience. The beginning is what must have been the case for us to have experienced the salvation we have.

And so, when it comes to what Mary sings, the important thing is not that she did say this – for it would make very little sense if she did. Instead, for Luke himself, bursting to speak of the work of God in Jesus, there would have been nothing else Mary could have said: the prelude must anticipate the climactic finale. If, in view of the resurrection, we imagine that Mary might have sung a song of praise to God at the news of her pregnancy, it would have to have been a prophetic song, because of what was going to come of her child. The song would point to the end which is Luke’s real purpose in telling the story: God’s work in Jesus. Why does Mary sing? Because of what God has done. And what has God done? God has raised the crucified Jesus from death. All of this then, and most strangely, makes the singing Mary the New Testament’s first believer in the resurrection.

Once again, we acknowledge that this makes no sense: it hasn’t happened yet, when Mary sings. But all belief in the power of God is like this: all confidence in the power of God is the bringing into the present some promised but unrealised future as if it had already happened. All belief is a living out of what God has done before it has been done, a living towards what we expect God to do.

Faith is a lived-out vision of the future. Faith says, That is how things will be in the end, so this is how I will be now: live with others now, speak of God now. The real question in faith, then, is simply the vision: how will all of this end? What will we say God has done in our story when it comes to being able to tell it in as finally completed?

To see what is at stake in this way is to see also that faith is not merely a “religious” question. Any life – whether it knows God, is still seeking God or is altogether indifferent to God – is the backward projection of some expected future, some time of completion, some sense of what it is all about. Every conscious action (and most of our unconscious ones) speaks of our sense of where we are headed, of what will finally be declared about the proper order of things. When Mary sings that God has done this, she declares her place in the world and the world’s place in God, despite every contradictory appearance. My soul magnifies the Lord, Mary sings, because God “has” magnified Jesus and will magnify me.

And, to the extent that she not only says this but lives it, she begins to appear, a glimmer of God’s intention for her. And God begins also to become clearer, a glimmer of Mary’s own future.

This is Advent faith: no mere wish that things were different, but a life lived differently because we have caught a fleeting glimpse of the possibility of a new order in which is set right all we know is wrong within us.

Let us live, then, as if what will finally matter has already happened and we are its reflection: an image of the God who is justice, mercy and peace.

Advent 2B
10/12/2023

Isaiah 40.1-11

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AUDIO ONLY: HERE

Advent 1B
3/12/2023

Isaiah 64.1-9

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AUDIO ONLY: HERE

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Reign of Christ
26/11/2023

Psalm 95
Matthew 25:31-46

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It is easy to turn love into a means to an end – a means to getting what we want, a means of keeping the peace, a means of impressing God. The love of the gospel, however, is pointless.

Today’s semi-parable of the coming of the Son of Man in judgement is familiar to most of us. Through this story, we have learned to see the need of Jesus himself in the needs of the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, those imprisoned. This lesson comes at the climax of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew’s gospel, which makes the point all the more point‑y. Let us hear the call to love again today.

I want, however, to draw attention to something about the parable which is less obvious simply because the moral lesson is so obvious: those who are commended for doing good did that good in ignorance that the needy they served were, in some sense, “Jesus”. In this, the blessèd “sheep” of the parable are different from us because we have heard the parable. This creates for us a motivation alien to the blessèd ones in the story.

This can distort our sense for what we are called to do and to be. Most simply, the problem is this: to love others because they are, in a sense, Jesus, is not to love them because they are themselves worthy of love; it is to love something other than what we think they manifestly are. In this way, we try to perfume the stink of needy humanity – of each other in our various needs, of the overwhelming need of the poor, the angry, the sick, the ruthless. While the “lovers” of the parable love and serve those in need simply because they are in need, our knowledge of the parable tempts us to “add” something to those we are to love. We are tempted to read the parable as wanting to make others more lovable. Why help the needy? Because it is really Jesus we serve, and surely we want to serve him, if not these bothersome or contemptible people themselves.

The problem is that to make something “more loveable” is to turn it into a means to an end. It is to turn it more into what I need. So far as our reading of the parable is concerned, the “end” here might be our own salvation: seeing Jesus in others makes us more likely to serve them in their need, putting us in a better light before God.

But people are not means to ends. People are, properly, an end in themselves. We might risk saying that this is the basis of divine law, and that violations of the law are instances of people – or God – being made a means to an end. What are idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery and theft other than strategies to get to something other than God or the violated person? What is indiscriminate shooting or bombing of an enemy but a means to an end beyond those killed? What is political misinformation or pornography but a means to an end other than those misled or abused?

This kind of relating to God and to others is certainly a live option for us. But we are to deal with each other without manipulation, for this is how God deals with us, first of all in the person of Jesus. The life of Jesus himself was no means to an end. If he was truly human, his purpose was none other than to live a life of love, for that is our purpose, however badly we might sometimes manage it. Atonement theories which propose that the life of Jesus was strategic, that he “had” to die for a reason different from the rest of us, diminish the freedom of God and diminish Jesus’ own humanity. They reduce God’s freedom by imagining God’s hands to be tied by some economy of salvation, such that God “has to” do something to achieve salvation. And such theories diminish Jesus’ humanity by turning his life into a means to an end other than his own self – his own liveliness, his own enjoyment of God and neighbour. Jesus here is a coin God spends not for Jesus’ sake but for ours.

In the same way, to love God is not a means to an end. Again, we look to Jesus here. Jesus does not love God so that he might live a charmed life, in order to secure life after death, or for another other end we might imagine God might facilitate. Living in God, living for those around us, is the end – the purpose – of it all. This is what we are for, this is enough.

We could, then, overstate the matter – although only slightly – by  saying that love has no “point”, no purpose, other than the life together of the lovers. As we read it now, the difference between the sheep and the goats in the parable is the difference between the beloved as an end in herself and the beloved as a means to an end which finally leaves her behind.

And this brings us to the end – the dead end – of all love which has is aimed at anything other than the beloved. Love which is manipulative, which does not love the person him- or herself, finally renders us alone. Here we would surpass the beloved, stepping on or over or through him to something else, some vision of what we should be or have. But this would be lonely life. In this we would leave the one who thought herself loved behind. And God is not there, either; for God loves persons, not other ends achieved through persons. This is the eternal punishment of the parable: life alone.

As archaic as the language is, the church speaks of Jesus as king not because this is a quality which resides in Jesus for himself, but because his is an active reign which does what it commands: loves without ends, that our love might be without end. We gather around a table at which is served symbols we call “body” and “blood” because they are the signs of a life manipulated, a life turned into a means to some end, and so discarded and left behind. To what end does God say that these signs can heal? To no end but us ourselves. Love makes us here, again, and that is all. God’s desire for us draws us together, love opening up the possibility of love. There is no further purpose than being made in love, and then beginning to love, and seeing what happens next.

Being, then, drawn together in this way, let us love without ends, without purpose, without ulterior motive, be this in the case of the fellowship of the community gathered here today, the work of Hotham Mission, your love for your parents or children or spouse or neighbours or colleagues or some unhappy soul sitting out his day on the footpath.

In this way we not only love Jesus as the parable proposes, but love like Jesus does.

What else does the world need now but love, such love?

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Pentecost 25
19/11/2023

Zephaniah 1:7-16
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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How are we to do God’s will when God’s voice is so tiny. Elijah found this to be true. He expected to hear God in storms and earthquakes and cataclysmic events – stuff accompanied by big noises. Afterall, if God is so big it follows that God has a big voice. Not so, says Elijah. God speaks in sheer silence. No wonder I can’t hear what God is saying. That, at least, is the complaint implicit in the one talent servant who buried what was entrusted to him and returned it to the master on his return. He complained that he knew what kind of man his master was and what he would expect and out of fear he kept the talent safe, buried in the ground.

This calls for a little bible study. There are a few things to say about the parable that could be helpful. There is another version of the story in Luke. Luke’s version has quite a different feel but in this version one notable difference from the one in Matthew is that the master gives instruction as to what the servants are to do with the money. He said, ‘Do business with these until I come back.’ (Luke 19:13) The third servant wrapped the money in a cloth to return it but the master admonished him for not even putting it in the bank where he could have earned some interest.

The Matthew version of the story is the third in a series of parables that follow a theme. They are about waiting. There is the unfaithful slave who is behaving badly when the master returns. There are the foolish virgins who had run out of lamp oil when the bridegroom arrived. Then comes the absent master who returns to assess the management of his property entrusted to three servants.

Parables can be tricky. Sometimes we can see them as metaphors that depict what God is like. It seems reasonable to let the good Samaritan remind us of Jesus. It seems reasonable to do the same with parable of the lost sheep. Indeed, in iconography, the shepherd who finds the lost sheep is usually depicted as Jesus.

There is a temptation to make these connections in all Jesus parables but if we did that we would be considering divine attributes that belong better with inhabitants of Mount Olympus. The masters and the bridegroom in the three waiting parables are unreasonable and vengeful, not the loving and gracious God we have come to expect.

How interesting that Jesus told stories with main characters who shape the outcome of events in these parables who have values and personalities devoid of what we might expect to be divine attributes. How interesting that gospel writers reported these stories and expected their readers to derive lessons in them for being more faithful in their following Jesus. How perplexing that so many of these stories with characters who have just mist the point rather than being outrageously bad, who look like they have been treated unfairly, how come they are the ones that end up gnashing their teeth.

Remember, Matthew is the one who reports Jesus’ words, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Some chapters later Matthew tells of someone who asked, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” (Matthew 19:16) The two of the waiting parables in chapter 25 look like part of the answer to this except that the actual doing part is not spelled out, much to the misfortune of the foolish virgins and the servant entrusted with one talent.

Now, we who have sat under the scriptures and sound preaching all our lives Sunday by Sunday are fully aware that the juxtaposition vis a vis us and eternal life is not dependant on our doing but on what God has already done through Christ. The baptised are in Christ living in a sure and certain hope of eternal life.

What we must do is not our path to eternal life. Christ has already trod that path. Whatever we might do is in response to the gift of life. There is doing to be done. There is the leading of God to be heard and obeyed. Problem, the voice of God is very tiny. But, thanks be to God, the returning master who admonished the one talent servant for treating what had been given him as if it were dead by burying it gives a clue as to how to get round the apparent silence of God.

Indeed he taught him with his own words. As he flicked mud from the exhumed talent offered him by the lazy servant he said, “You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter?” (Matthew 25:26) There it is. The absent master did not need to leave spoken instruction because those who had lived with him knew him and his expectations. Knowing the master informs the doing of obedient servants.

Matthew and his church knew the lazy servant’s dilemma. Jesus was no longer with them in the flesh as he been before his death. He was not with them to teach and instruct and provide a living example of doing that befits eternal life. They were living in the waiting time of the absent Lord.

Followers of Jesus are entrusted with bearing witness to what God has done and is doing in Christ. Bearing that witness, doing what is expected calls for listening to a master who is present in the Spirit, but that kind of presence looks a lot like absence. So how can the faithful followers know what to do? Part of the answer is revealed in the parable of the talents. Those who know the master know what is expected. Knowing Jesus makes God audible. Knowing Jesus makes sense of the sheer silence of the voice of God.