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Pentecost 18
8/10/2017

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Psalm 19
Matthew 21:33-46

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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Today, the lectionary places in front of us the Ten Commandments. In an era when all law seems to be under challenge, from the law regarding marriage, to gun laws to the laws of ethnic minorities in Spain – and here. And challenging law is legitimate. After all, the Basis of Union of the UCA says,

The Uniting Church will keep its law under constant review so that its life may be increasingly directed to the service of God and humanity, and its worship to a true and faithful setting forth of, and response to, the Gospel of Christ.

That is a noble sentiment with noble ends. The ‘service of God and humanity’ is something we do well in the Uniting Church, and here ‘law’ does not mean endlessly tinkering with regulations. But the interesting part is that it mentions ‘worship’ – law as it keeps our worship a ‘true and faithful setting forth’ of the Gospel. Few people realise how important that law is, or that it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

If church law rapidly descends into regulations, worship laws soon focus on rubrics – the directions of how to do it. Perhaps that’s because people find small things easier to deal with, but they will soon lose hold on the Big Picture. The Big Picture is that we gather, not primarily for human fellowship, but to worship God. Interestingly, the Basis says very little about that, but it does name the centralities. It describes Word and Sacrament in dynamic terms, not theoretical ones. It doesn’t get into centuries of arguments stemming from Reformation disputes over what has been called the ‘Supper strife’. And in any case, we have the two editions of Uniting in Worship to guide us.

Trinity College asked me if I would help teach ‘Prayer Book Studies’ this semester. It’s been an interesting experience. For three centuries Anglican worship was characterised by the use of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. For three centuries, Presbyterians and Congregationalists have defined themselves over against it. I remind you that 1661 was the year that the King – Charles II Stuart – returned to the throne after a couple of decades marked by civil war – the worst kind of all war – and Cromwell’s experiment at a republic, the Commonwealth. Whatever you think of Cromwell, it was a bold vision, but it failed. What it did was to bring all the Puritans – our forebears – outside the Church of England where we could be seen. With the return of King and Bishops, we were exposed as the enemy. King Charles did have to restore order, but he did it with an Act of Uniformity and by imposing a Book of – literally – Common Prayer on all subjects. Folk memory is a powerful thing, and it explains why our church traditions are so opposed to liturgical books, to bishops, and to uniformity. There were no alternative ways of legally being an English Christian. Over two thousand clergy lost their livings, including my personal hero Richard Baxter, a Presbyterian, and both grandfathers of the Wesleys. Why? Because they agreed either to use, without change, the BCP, or they claimed liberty in worship and paid for it. On that date, two new traditions were born: Anglicanism was invented, and Nonconformity defined – by law.

Of course, things are very different today. If in the 17^th century we had been presented with A Prayer Book for Australia (1995), there would have been no crisis of conscience, and no divided church. Even the liturgical laws the Anglican church has, have their counterpart in our authorized worship books. They are slightly more insistent on priests using the prayers laid down in the book, but they already represent a variety.

But we are all now facing a common challenge. Ever since Anglicans began translating the BCP into the languages of their former colonies, there has been no uniformity, because languages express ideas differently. Think how different Tudor English is to us today. But we are all affected by two further, connected, revolutionary inventions – the computer (with the internet) and the photocopier. My first liturgical experiments were facilitated by a very grumpy greasy Gestetner (remember?).  The writing of liturgies and sermons, the choice of music, the use of images, are all now immeasurably assisted and expanded, and we are grateful for it.

But now it is possible – and a fact – that any worship leader can find any prayer anywhere on the internet, from any theological tradition or none, and copy it, and edit it, as s/he drops it into the Sunday leaflet of the congregation. Uniformity is inconceivable. But what of the faith of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church? What of the integrity of a Uniting Church or an Anglican one? What makes our worship the faithful inheritor of what our forebears fought to retain? What makes it Christian?

Many of my former students quote back to me a remark I often made; ‘In liturgy, there are no laws’ and I did say it. That’s partly because there was a consensus, a deposit of faith, doctrine and liturgical customs which could be trusted to express worship which carried the worshippers’ consent. We have been blessed in this congregation by a series of pastors with very great ability to articulate the faith and to create the texts and acts of worship for our use. We may trust Craig Thompson, but what about his successor?

My ‘no laws’ quip is unpacked by an article one of my teachers wrote, which he headed, ‘You are free – if…’  If you know what a liturgy of baptism is intended to achieve, you are free to draw together the resources you need (always remembering that congregational assent). The same for a marriage, or a Christian funeral, or a service of lament for a broken world. You could say that the whole of Uniting in Worship consists in providing models which our leaders are trusted to use or adapt. It stands in the tradition of the first Nonconformist Directory of Public Worship in 1644 – not a required book of common prayer. How many of our present ministers own or consult a UiW?

There is in fact one liturgical law, and it is more of an observation. Lex orandi lex credendi, which in its efficient Latin means, ‘The way we pray determines what we believe’. Not the particular words, but what we do in worship sets the pattern of what we believe.

So the fact that we do Word + Sacrament every Lord’s Day here, already speaks volumes about who we are. We hear the scriptures in an orderly way (lectionary) and we break bread as the body of Christ, and we sing all those responses. That we praise the Triune God in hymns and songs, and pray prayers of confession and hear words of assurance, and prayers of intercession, keeping our ears open to the cries of the suffering and needy of the world, adds up to a book of practical theology. The pattern is our tutor, our connection with something deeper. True, it is very fragile indeed, but so is faith in a crucified God.

Our foundations are there, but they are also being undermined in this increasingly dominant secularist and selfish culture. I don’t think we have begun to address the deeper questions of our futurity.

This may not be a biblical sermon, but it is a ‘church’ sermon, for it concerns us all – and let me end by showing a connection.

The Ten Commandments have a long history of us in Christian worship, but their very presence raises questions. I don’t just mean the ones that are daily broken across our present sad humanity. I mean the laws themselves. How do we use them in worship?  Thomas Cranmer, the composer of the Common Prayer, set the Commandments to be read before a prayer of confession, the law as a canon to judge ourselves by; Calvin placed them after the Assurance of Forgiveness, the law as a guide to right living. You need not choose between them! Ancient patterns still have creative things to say to us.

The 12 units of the CTM’s training modules for church council/elder training are combined in one document here.

If you’d like any of these separately, send Craig a note…

 

 

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Pentecost 17
1/10/2017

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
Psalm 25
Matthew 21:23-32

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In our gospel reading today the elders and the chief priests ask a question which seems reasonable enough: by what authority do you do these things – “these things” including the overthrowing of the temple marketplace? We understand that particular answers might be dangerous for Jesus but, still, we listen for a straightforward answer from him. What we hear, however, is a clever answer which seems simply to allow Jesus to avoid the hard question. Yet the point of the story is not that we might remark, “Clever Jesus.” The text lays before us a challenge about the relationship between how we think the world is or ought to be and how we actually live in that world.

Jesus counters with a question of his own, about the authority of the now dead John the Baptist. The elders and chief priests carefully weigh up their answer-options: if we say John’s ministry was from God, we’ll be shown up as in error, for we did not welcome him as a prophet; but if we say John’s ministry was of human origin, we risk the anger of the people. Finding both of these outcomes equally unpalatable, they are forced into a public and dishonest agnosticism: “…we do not know…”

The public nature of their refusal to know is critical. They know very well what they think privately, for we see it in their earlier rejection of John. But they dare not think this out loud. For fear they refuse to declare the truth as they see it. In this dishonest turn the elders sever the relationship between their “internal” and “external” selves: what I am in myself and what I am in public are here demonstrated to be two different things. My private self is created by my own thoughts, experiences, emotions, desires, etc., and those of the people close to me. My public self is what I think I need to be in order to protect my private self. The elders and the chief priests protect themselves in their private beliefs by refusing to have a public opinion about John.

Things are very different when it comes to Jesus himself. God reigns in a certain way “inside” Jesus and in the same way “outside” him: internal motivation and external action are the same. In Jesus, God’s kingdom is come and will is done, “on earth, in heaven”. Jesus is what we see him to be; he has what we might call a “plain sense”, nothing hidden.

This is not how it is for the rest of us. Whereas the duplicitous religious leaders could think one thing and say or do another, Jesus could not because God does not. There is no distinction between how this God is in himself, and how God is and acts among us; there is a cohesion between God’s private life and God’s public life.

And this brings us to a surprising connection: this exchange between Jesus and the elders hinges on what the church has sought to mark with its classic confession of God as Trinity. This is surprising, first, because neither Jesus nor the elders have any notion of the church’s later trinitarian confession. It surprising, second, because few Christians actually believe that trinitarian doctrine is about anything that matters, believe that it is more than some strange thing we are made to say and believe.

What is the church’s confession of God as Trinity?  It is not, in the first instance, that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the form or “shape” of the confession. More fundamentally, the confession of the Trinity is concerned to affirm that the “inside” and the “outside” of God are “the same”. The doctrine says that God is-in-Godself in the same way that God is-in-the-world. There is no deception, duplicity, or dissembling. With God it is not “What you see is what you get”; this is the game of the elders and the chief priests, and ours with them. With God, it is “What you see is what there is”. So far as what we see can be labelled, those labels happen to be “Father”, “Son” and “Holy Spirit”, but this is just so that we can say something about these identities as they converge in Jesus. The matter of central importance is that the way in which Father, Son and Spirit “play” before us in the person of Jesus is how they play when they’re not in front of us. How God is in the world is how God is in Godself.

The importance of this here is the contrast between this divine way of being and that of the chief priests and the elders – and of us with them. They, and we, are different in ourselves from what we are in public. I don’t refer here to those things which are properly personal and not appropriate to public space. I mean rather those circumstances when we find ourselves doing the kinds of calculations the chief priests and the elders do in response to Jesus: knowing what we think but sparing ourselves the grief which would come from speaking it, choosing to divide ourselves into two identities – the one I think I know and the one I dare to show. God gives us each one face, and we divide it into two, each side looking in different directions, each ear listening for different things.

The counter-question of Jesus demonstrates that, in their dissembling, their deception, the authority of the chief priests and elders to ask their question evaporates. They know two authorities, Jesus knows only one. Authority rises from a single voice, from both ears hearing the same thing. It is on the divine cohesion of his own inner life and outer ministry that Jesus’ authority is founded.  In contrast, the priests and the elders – and we with them – are divided in themselves; they are spiritually “schizophrenic” (Greek: “divided mind”).

Such dishonesty about myself before others arises from fear: I don’t trust the world with my true self. Fair enough: the world is a dangerous place and a self-preserving instinct does not always deny God. But at the same time dishonesty like this also gives rise to fear, because no one really knows what’s lurking beneath the surface. Fear breeds dishonesty and dishonesty dissolves community.

In contrast, honesty – being the same in myself as I am in public – gives rise to love and trust. It is not easy, and often dangerous. I have to put myself at risk by revealing who I am so that you can know what to expect from me when the relationship between public and private is pressed. And when you know what to expect, your world is safer. Love – community and a safe public space – grows from honesty, and enables honesty.

The gospel is that Jesus – and the God working in him – is not different in himself from what he is in relation to those around him. He names fearful dishonesty and calls it to account. He loves with a creative honesty otherwise unknown to us.

The gospel is further that, while we will fail at being Jesus – of which the cross is the sign – God remains inside as God is outside: ever for us. God is faithful to Godself and to the creation which was, and will again become, “very good”. The body of God – the convergence of Father and Son and Spirit in the person of Jesus – the body of God broken by us is still God’s body for us. And so we take and eat and drink, and declare in these actions that what we have seen in God’s work in Jesus is how God is in Godself: love on the outside, love on the inside. This love we take to our insides that our outside might begin also to become love.

So fed, we are made to become, however fleetingly, ourselves the body of Christ: a community in which the public is built up by the private, and the private is built up by the public, a community not of fear but of faith and hope, in love.

This is the gift of the gospel, and its call to us.

All thanks and praise be to the one who loves us inside out, calling us to this love and making it possible among us.

To God’s greater glory, and to the richer humanity of all God’s people, let us, then, look to be made love, inside and out.

Amen.