The following links are to the Revised Common Lectionary commentary pages of Howard Wallace and Bill Loader, and are suggested as preparation for hearing the readings in worship for the Sunday indicated above.
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 see also By the Well podcast on this text
Philippians 3:17-4:1 see also By the Well podcast on this text
Luke 13:31-35 see also By the Well podcast on this text
Lent 1
10/3/2019
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13
Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben
You’ll have noticed that I am not wearing seasonal purple. A few years ago, my artistic sister presented me with this stole, as a surprise. It was, because it was not in the tradition – except that it takes its central theme from the desert, the red and brown ochres which make our land so essentially Australian. Like the Australian desert, it is not barren. The tree represented in fabric by the leaves of the Tasmanian Blue Gum, and their shape recurs beyond the flowers in red and brown thread, leaves becoming flames. And more of them come down from the top, an abundance, the glory of our gum trees whose seasons never end. And twelve gum nuts, which are real, and happen to have a small Greek cross in their centre. All of Lent is here.
The passage from Deuteronomy, a book quoted in both New Testament readings as well, is about bringing the first fruits of the harvest and presenting them at the Temple as a solemn thanksgiving. You may wonder why a harvest festival is an appropriate reading for the beginning of Lent! But behind the thanksgiving is the desert of the Exodus, the wilderness and its immeasurable forty communal years of deprivation, suffering – and trust. That the children of Israel were delivered from that, to a land flowing with milk and honey, is the ground of Lent and this of thanksgiving, this eucharist.
The ritual part of the reading is a kind of creed, a solemn remembrance of the Hebrews’ extraordinary journey with God. It begins, ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor’ – so says the modern translation, but the original says ‘Father’ and means it – for it takes the corporate memory back to that wanderer Abraham. The stories from Abraham to Moses are full of strife and battles and jealousies, of loyalty and faithfulness, of sin and suffering, enough to keep us sleepless for 40 nights. And now they have come to a land of milk and honey – in a land given to them, but which they do not own.
Thus in Deuteronomy they are called to thanksgiving, and the offering of their ‘first fruits’ – the very best that can come from the harvest, which is not theirs. Perhaps the question is: What is the appropriate ground for thanksgiving? What is the context of praise? The recollection of that wandering Aramean requires that thanks be given for the good and the bad, the sufferings of Egypt and the Lord’s deliverance, the years in the desert and the safe arrival, in the land of promise. Memory is not enough: it requires us to do something, to give something of what we are, of who we have become. This is the challenge of the Lenten journey.
We offer our first fruits, symbolically, every Lord’s Day. In my other congregation (St Mary’s), when the collection plates and the bread and wine are brought together to the Lord’s Table, this prayer is offered:
‘Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation.
Through your goodness we have this bread to offer,
which earth has given and human hands have made.
It will become for us the bread of life’.
For myself, the less said about the role of human hands the better; it suggests that we somehow improve on God; – but there is a point. The work of the farmer, the guardians of river systems, the makers of machinery, the carriers and the storage places, the markets, the merchandisers, and we who carry the hessian bags home – all this human work is involved, and who would not say that there is sin and suffering and deprivation built into that equation? But, as St Paul remarks, God made it grow.
It is also risky that the symbol of first fruits we bring is money. That is how humankind decided – many millennia ago – to facilitate trade. Craig and I wondered last week how long we would continue to take up collections in church, when many (more fruitfully) choose to do it by a bank draft. Perhaps we could give those thanks at the Table, as long as what we say sounds like the old song we used to sing:
We give thee but thine own
whate’er the gift may be;
all that we have is thine alone,
a trust, O Lord, from thee.
And it’s worth adding that the thanksgiving by the Israelites is done in conscious acknowledgement of the presence of ‘the Levites and the aliens who reside among you’, our neighbours, the strangers, the modern wanderers.
Today’s Gospel story comes in three versions, Matthew, Mark and Luke’s. They are different, and we read them in a cycle. This year, ‘C’, it is Luke’s.
Luke reminds us that ‘Jesus returned from the Jordan’ from his baptism, where the Spirit was seen ‘descending on him in bodily form as a dove’ (3:22), and a voice was heard declaring him to be God’s beloved. Luke keeps that event in mind as he writes of the journey to the desert. He does not say, as Mark does (1:12), ‘The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness’, or even as Matthew does, more mildly, ‘Jesus was led up by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil’ (4: 1). No. Luke says, ‘Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness’. There is a Puritan saying that ‘Christ is the oil in which the Spirit lies.’ So that it is Jesus aflame ‘in the Spirit’ who survives the wilderness, and who faces the demon. Hence the leaves which turn into flames on my stole. And in Luke there is no angel to help him. He has no such need.
Jesus ate nothing, remember; chose to eat nothing during the forty days, a true fast, and that provides the reason for the first temptation. At the end, Luke says ‘He was famished’ (NRSV). The tempter offers the thought: With the present help of One who created the cosmos out of nothing, a stone into a loaf of bread would be easy. Jesus replies, as he does in each Gospel, with a scriptural quotation, from Deuteronomy, pitting God’s word against his prosecutor.
The second temptation is the stuff of a certain kind of movie: world domination, but then, truthfully, at the cost of becoming a vassal of the Satan (the Hebrew word for ‘devil’). Recently, the Pope’s attribution of the sins of the clergy to the devil’s work was not intended (as the media suggested) to lay the blame elsewhere.
It is the last temptation, the climax of the series, which is the most demonic of all, for it is to tempt God. We often hear of what God requires of us – but what can we require of God? And this time, the devil himself begins with a Scripture quotation: ‘for it is written, “He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you”, and “On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone”’, both of which are from Psalm 91.It is no more than a test; there is no promise attached to it. I dare you, says smiling Satan. ‘But this you do not do’, says Jesus, quoting Deut. 6:16, and Satan vanishes – but note the ending of the sentence: ‘he departed from him until an opportune time.’ Gethsemane perhaps.
This last sober truth is why we observe Lent. For many of us, most of our life is spent in a land of milk and honey. We have enough bread. We don’t need to compete with a neighbour for scarce resources. The Homeland Security ministry means we live in relative peace and quiet. Which should remind us that we gain most of this by bowing the knee to the gods of this world, Mammon, and those who make the world secure by threats and intimidation.
They haven’t delivered what they promised: even in our part of the world, as one commentator has put it, ‘we still bury too many of our young thanks to accidents, disease or plain foolishness’. We would like some messiah ‘who could leap not just the Kidron Valley, but the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the Chasm of Cancer, and the Abyss of Accident and Tragedy, so that we could all have our threescore years and ten and die in our beds, with grandchildren all about to sing us a sweet benediction.’ But that’s not where we live.
Last week, we noted that the wonderful story of the Transfiguration was followed by Jesus being confronted by a boy in the clutches of a demon. We do not live on the mountain, but in a real world, and it is there that we must offer our thanksgiving, in the presence of God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the presence of desert trials. That is our context of praise.
As Andrew Gador-Whyte movingly said in his sermon last week,
‘And the Father says to each of us as he says to that boy: “You are to me as my Son Jesus is to me. Though in the world’s darkness your glory is hidden, yet from the foundation of the world, I have known you as daughter, as son”.
If anything separates us from life as child, as heir, of this God, Jesus has been there for us at Golgotha. Though we have forgotten our glory, Jesus has remembered who we are.’
The challenge of this Lenten journey is once more to hold on to that truth, and to do likewise.
Ash Wednesday
6/3/2019
Ecclesiastes 1:1-18
Luke 6:27-38
In a sentence:
To be seen by God is its own reward
This evening, we have heard two accounts of how to be which seem to be quite unrelated. Yet, at the very least, what they do have in common is than each draws a contrast between two options and commends the one over the other.
From Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), we hear of the priority of the living over the dead: better a living dog than a dead lion. For him death holds no promise beyond the shadowy existence of Sheol and, although living is comprised by ‘vanity’ – by the ungraspability of being – it is living, and we are to make the most of it.
From Jesus we hear something which seems a whole world away: how to ‘practice piety’. Paramount here is the question of who ‘sees’: do we pray or give to be seen by those around us, or to be seen by God?
Before going too much further it will help to recall how we are reading Ecclesiastes in these Lenten reflections. We are holding two things in a creative tension – what we hear from Ecclesiastes and what we hear in the gospels. In this we allow that what one or the other might seem to mean by itself may come to mean something quite different when impacted upon the other. The tension is creative – out of it comes something that was not there before (or, at least, not seen before).
When Qohelet contrasts death and life, there is no tension, and there is none in the contrast which Jesus draws between those who sees us. But if we allow that both Qohelet and Jesus are speaking about the same kind of thing – how to be in this life ‘under the sun’ – and with the same kind of scriptural authority, then what each commends needs to be considered in relation to the other.
This means that Qohelet’s couplet of ‘life’ and ‘death’ correspond to Jesus’ couplet ‘being seen by God’ and ‘being seen by other worshippers’.
To match these things up, then, Qohelet’s ‘to be joined with the living’ corresponds to Jesus’ ‘being seen by God’: to be seen by God is to be joined with the living.
When we come then to think about the ‘creative tension’ which stands between these ways of understanding how to be, being alive and being dead are not only about whether my heart is still beating. While Qohelet doesn’t hold to anything which looks like a Christian account of a joyful afterlife, he can use biological death as a way of characterising the half-life he has lived to this point, and the half-life which most of us live most of the time. I have done it all, he says, and it is just a chasing of the wind. Not to recognise the vanity of our efforts to overcome the human condition is to be dead, to have ash in our hair rather than oil, sackcloth rather than white robes. His question is, Why die before you are dead?
And it is the same with Jesus. To be seen only by those around us, those who intentionally or unintentionally confirm our own chasing after the wind, is its own reward. It is as much as we will receive and is not yet to be seen by God. This is its own kind of living death.
To consider our context tonight, we will hear in a little while, ‘You are dust, and to dust you will return’. What does that mean?
We are not to lament that we are dust, only to remember it. If Lent is a season of repentance, or (literally) ‘re-thinking’, then it is a season not of lamenting that we are dust – which we do often enough – but a season of learning again what happens when God looks upon dust.
Jesus contrasts not what we see and know but who sees and knows us. Merely to be seen through the eyes of those around us is its own reward – ashes upon ashes, dust upon dust. (We are ash to ash and dust to dust, but we are not to build with ash or dust; it is just this which Qohelet seeks to name as pointless.)
And to be seen by the eyes of God is its own reward. For the gaze of God raises the dead, enlivens even the dust.
Lent is a season of Easter, a life-giving season. As we observe Jesus on the path to the cross, we are seeing God looking at one of us and, in that, knowing us and persevering with us. The path to the cross is dust made lively under the gaze of God.
To speak of resurrection, which we will come to do, is to say that God still sees Jesus, even on the cross, and this gaze continues to be life-giving. Because the heart of our faith is that Jesus is joined to us, so too then will we be raised.
Qohelet himself will finally affirm that we are dust (12.7). But affirms also what God gives to us: approval and time.
Remember that you are dust, and rejoice that that is enough for God to work with.
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The following links are to the Revised Common Lectionary commentary pages of Howard Wallace and Bill Loader, and are suggested as preparation for hearing the readings in worship for the Sunday indicated above.
Luke 4:1-13 see also By the Well podcast on this text
Transfiguration
3/3/2019
Exodus 34:29-35
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Luke 9:28-43a
Sermon preached by Andrew Gador-Whyte
In a sentence
“The Transfiguration reveals that in the darkness of the Cross, God has claimed the world as his kingdom and disclosed our nature in Jesus as his daughters and sons.”
Today all mortal nature shines with the divine Transfiguration
And cries with exultation:
“Christ the Saviour is transfigured to save us all!”
This is one of the hymns of the Orthodox Church.
The Transfiguration, which we are celebrating today, is the event where the disciples see Jesus revealed as God.
It is the event that reveals Jesus’ coming suffering and death as his coming to reign on earth, and as the fulfillment of the hope contained in the Law and the Prophets.
And it is the event that reveals the glory of God in every human face.
In identifying with the life of his creation, God has unveiled the divine light shining in everything that he has made.
In their Transfigured Lord, the nations not only find their salvation, but are themselves unveiled as a means of God’s saving grace, as sharers in God’s own life.
The Transfiguration sits between the feeding of the five thousand and the healing of an epileptic boy. Luke connects the Transfiguration with abundant life in Christ and the restoration of bodies and relationships to the fullness of life.
But just before our narrative, Peter names Jesus as the Messiah. And Jesus claims this title in a disturbing and disorienting way.
The anointed one, the heir, the Son, is the one who will be rejected, suffer and die, and on the third day, rise. And being his disciples means taking up his cross.
This is the disturbing context for the Transfiguration.
Luke wants to show that the revelation of Jesus as God is bound together with his suffering. In his divinity, Jesus does not stand apart from the alienation of the world.
The Transfiguration shows that the way God has come to reign among us is by taking up the cross. In the place where Jesus shares completely in our weakness, alienation and death, on the cross – that is where he will be most fully revealed.
Jesus goes up the mountain with the three disciples. Suddenly Jesus is visible shining with the light of God. Moses and Elijah are there speaking to him, and speaking about his Exodus. Moses represents the Law, Elijah represents the Prophets.
Here God reveals that everything that Moses spoke in the law was addressed to Jesus Christ.
Everything God spoke through the prophets was the Word coming to dwell in the life of God’s people.
From the beginning, God’s word in Law and Prophecy was revealing Jesus’ reconciling suffering and death.
The Word who was in the beginning with God is the thread running, sometimes hidden, through the life of God’s chosen people.
In the Transfiguration, that thread is now revealed as a seamless robe.
Seeing Jesus in glory with Moses and Elijah, all Peter can stammer is ‘let me pitch three tents for you’.
But perhaps he recognises that at the Transfiguration, the whole story of the chosen people – their wanderings and living in tents, their worship and their sufferings – is gathered up in this person.
But here the disciples are terrified by the voice of the Father, and the Holy Spirit descending like a cloud.
Luke picks up the Exodus story. In the cloud, Moses hears God speak the beginning of the Law – ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt’
At the transfiguration, the disciples hear God speak the beginning of the Law, the word before all things. ‘This is my Son, My Chosen; listen to him!’
On this person, on this Word, hang all the law and the prophets.
Those who look and hear and obey his voice are daughters and sons of the covenant.
Here God has made possible a life of unbroken fellowship with him, simply and only through entering into life with this person.
This Son is the one from whom every daughterhood and sonship in heaven and on earth takes its name.
Now when Jesus and the disciples descend the mountain, they are immediately confronted by a man crying out to Jesus: ‘This is my son, my only child – Look at him!’
The child is in the grip of a spirit that threatens to destroy him.
When it seizes him, his voice and movements lose their meaning. He can no longer do what sons do.
Jesus simply speaks. When he rebukes the spirit, he calls the boy back to his life as a son.
Jesus gives him back to his father. He restores him to life and communion.
It is as though Jesus says to the unclean spirit, ‘This is my son, my chosen – listen to him.’
And the Father says to each of us as he says to this boy: ‘You are to me as my Son Jesus is to me. Though in the world’s darkness your glory is hidden, yet from the foundation of the world, I have known you as daughter, as son.’
If anything separates us from life as child, as heir, of this God, Jesus has been there before us at Golgotha. Though we have forgotten our glory, Jesus has remembered who we are.
In being born among us, Jesus became as we are.
At the Transfiguration, for a moment Jesus was shown to us as he most fully is.
His life was revealed to us there, as an unbroken and unchanging exchange of love with the Father, as perfectly attuned to the love and the will of the Father.
And here Luke foreshadows that soon our nature as daughters and sons of God will be disclosed.
Because the divine Son will go before us to the place of the Skull.
There everything that hides our nature as God’s children will be pierced through by the light of God.
The Transfiguration reveals Jesus’ identity as the eternal Son of the Father, who revealed his glory in sharing absolutely in the suffering and alienation of the world.
Like the crowd, we see one who gathers up all the promises of the Law of Moses.
Yet he will go to the place where he will share with us utterly in our being outcasts under the law.
When we saw the light of the Transfiguration, the light of God exposed the darkness of our life. We look to the transfigured Jesus, and find our lack of love judged by the love of God.
And at the same time, we find ourselves clothed in baptismal radiance.
Here the darkened rooms of our hearts have been flooded with light, and we have become a dwelling place, not only for Moses and Elijah, but for God himself, and five thousand or so hungry Galileans.
At our baptism, we too were robed in dazzling white. We were claimed with the same voice that claimed Jesus on Mount Tabor.
In baptism, and at this table, we have been incorporated into life together as God’s children.
Here, at his table we are transfigured.
Here he makes us to shine with our true nature, which is to be a source of God’s grace to our neighbour and our enemy.
Jesus is with us at his table, as guest and host, as the very stuff of life, as the forgiving neighbour who makes possible life together again.
In the Transfiguration God has adopted us simply as those he created in Christ.
We belong to him through his love alone, in spite of all our strivings to free ourselves from guilt, from death, from association with evil.
God has adopted us so that we might live as sources of reconciliation and healing, as means of others’ coming in touch with the reconciling love of Jesus Christ.
However scarred and distorted our lives are, God makes each of us a means of others being restored to life and to relationship with one another.
God has called us his children so that we might know the joy of sharing in the suffering love of Christ, the joy of joining him on the road from Mount Tabor to the Cross.
In the Transfiguration, we saw Jesus revealed as God.
We saw Jesus coming’ suffering and death as the fulfilment of God’s promises and the coming of God to reign among us.
We saw Jesus claimed as God’s Son.
And we found ourselves shining with the light of Christ, adopted as God’s children, becoming sharers in God’s life, and sharers in the sufferings of Christ.
May we become in Jesus a source of others’ healing from everything that hides their nature as God’s children.
May our lives become to all nations an invitation into the light of Christ.