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Epiphany 4
30/1/2022

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71
Genesis 1:1-5
Luke 4:21-30

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In a sentence

We are, as a congregation, at a moment of creation which – if it truly reflects the creative activity of God – is a moment of radical freedom.

The first few verses of Genesis describe what Christian doctrine has come to call God’s creation “out of nothing”. The problem with this is that there is, in fact, not “nothing” in the text but a “formless void” and a “deep.”

“Nothing” is, in fact, impossible to conceive. Try for a moment to think of nothing. It’s like trying to imagine ourselves dead. We imagine ourselves being dead and experiencing that we’re dead, which we wouldn’t be doing because we would be dead, and the dead don’t experience anything. Thinking nothing is like this: nothing always looks like the somethings of the world.

The Genesis text, then, mythologises here not because it is primitive but because the radically creative act it wants to describe requires this kind of trick. We do the same today even in modern physics, when we talk about black hole singularities or invoke the mathematical idea of zero. Like biblical myth, these are kinds of “placeholders” for impossible thoughts that seem necessary – or at least useful – to think.

Because Genesis has to talk about nothingness in thing-ness terms, it speaks not in terms of quantity – whether there is something or nothing – but in terms of quality: form or formlessness. “…the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep…” In this, the earth is a “nothing-something”. It’s “there”, but not in any useful or meaningful sense. Creation out of nothing happens when clay takes form as a pot, noise resolves into a melody, or a dead thing stops being dead: when sense drops out of nonsense.

This understanding of nothingness matters for us right now in this place because there is just such a “nothingness” standing on this property, from which we are about to turn in search of a “something”. Perhaps this seems too harsh a characterisation of Union Memorial Church. Yet the point here is not to offend, or to denigrate what it has been for the last 140-odd years. The point is to understand where we are in our need to make decisions and the theological – “faith” – nature of those decisions.

What Genesis says about the “nothing-something” of the earth “prior” to the moment of creation can be said about UMC. It’s “there” but it is not there in any useful or meaningful sense. Again, this doesn’t mean that UMC has not been important but only that its future is now closed to us. While it still has a diminished form, Union Memorial has proven to be a “deep” from which we’ve been unable to extract what we need.

This is a painful reality. But if it is true, the Genesis way of speaking of the beginning of all things enables us to re-cast where we are now, such that we are not at a point of radical loss but at a creation moment.

This way of seeing things matters for what could happen next because an essential dimension of creation out of nothing is that it is not necessary. It is not necessary, in the sense that it is an effect without a cause. The world did not have to be, and it did not have to be like this. The primal nothingness does not have the seed of the world resting within it, about to burst out. It is not an equation that unfolds into the laws of physics from which everything eventually comes to be.

To put it more concretely, creation out of a deep void is an act of utter freedom – the freedom of God to create or not to create, to create us as we have been made, or differently. Or, we might say, it is good and proper that there is no necessary link between our formlessness today and our form tomorrow. We are, as a congregation, at a moment of creation which – if it truly reflects the creative activity of God – is a moment of radical freedom. And so anything is possible

And yet, freedom is corrupted for us: we cannot be radically free if this means everything which has gone before us be counted as nothing. We can’t really cast Union Memorial Church as a formless void because history is continuous. There are no true beginnings in history – everything has something before it. That is, we remember. And, on the conviction that what we have been has been good and godly, we want the next thing to be kind of the same. Yesterday – how we were – this is our nothing-something: it is nothing in that it is gone; it is something in that we don’t simply forget it. The problem becomes that we are a UMC-shaped congregation trying to fit into what has to be a non-UMC-shaped hole.

We are not, then, radically free. And we will experience this unfreedom in two closely-linked places. First, a tension before God: will we make “the right” decision? Freedom demands responsibility, which requires decision, and we always think about decisions in terms of risk: what if we make the wrong choice? This opens up fear and anxiety before God.

Second, the compromise we’ve all agreed upon just by turning up here each week until now has to be renegotiated. And so we will experience unfreedom in tensions between each other: we value the past differently and so would create different futures if we were God.

These two points of tension are inseparable because, of course, what I finally think God wants I hold to be good not only for God and me but also for you. What does faithfulness look like when our freedom is compromised like this?

We heard another creation-out-of-nothing story this morning, although it didn’t sound like one: God’s call to Jeremiah. Hearing God’s call, Jeremiah responds, “I am only a boy”, which we might paraphrase as, “I am a formless void”. Yet God has already answered this objection before Jeremiah makes it: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you…”. That is, it is not you yourself, Jeremiah, but my knowledge of you that will make these things possible. It is not what you know or how good you are, but my call that will matter, for your ministry will be a creation out of nothing.

This holds for us all and is why we baptise infants. A child might be baptised before she has manifested anything other than a capacity to breathe because in baptism the most fundamental thing we declare is that, without God, we are formless and void, and we come into being at the call of God. The baptismal waters are a wet “Let there be…and there was…”

And it is the same with adults. Of course, like an infant, an adult presenting for baptism is not nothing. Yet in that baptism, he looks forward to what God will make of him, not to what he will make of himself.

As for individual children and adults, so also for congregations: we are together now at a baptismal moment. We are not nothing but tomorrow will be a new giving of form to all that we have been, a re-creation of what we are. What happens next has not been pre-determined by what we have already been, if it is this God who is making us.

None of this tells us what to do, but only indicates the spirit in which we will act if God truly creates in freedom and we are children of this God, being the expression of that freedom. The obvious needs in what confronts us have to do with accommodation, continuity and identity, and self-determination. Such things are about what we have already known. Any community needs these things, and so they are not problems in themselves.

Just as important yet much less obvious is that, as we step forward, it is into a deeper Christian identity in Godly freedom. This will be freedom from things we’ve turned into the stuff of God but which really are not and so can be allowed to lapse into nothingness. Christian freedom is freedom to be wrong, and so it is freedom from fear of judgement and the temptation to judge.

We need such freedom, of course, not only in relation to the future of MtE but also in our own personal lives. Mr Palmer and his United Australia Party are right that we are in desperate need of freedom, even if they seem to have no idea what that means.

To be free after the freedom of the truly creative God is to be free to create what is not necessary to carry but will nonetheless be good, and even very good.

Let us, then, in our life together and in the lives which are just our own, imagine not only what seems to be necessary our past into the future but also what is not necessary – a creation out of nothing which comes as light in darkness, life to the dead.

This is God’s new thing among us, which we and the world desperately need.

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Epiphany 3
23/1/2022

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Luke 4:14-21

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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E tō mātou Matua i te rangi
Kia tapu tōu Ingoa.
Kia tae mai tōu ranga tiratanga.
Kia meatia tāu e pai ai ki runga ki te whenua,
kia rite anō ki tō te rangi.
Hōmai ki a mātou āianei
he taro mā mātou mō tēnei rā.
Murua ō mātou hara,
Me mātou hoki e muru nei
i ō te hunga e hara ana ki a mātou.
Āua hoki mātou e kawea kia whakawaia;
Engari whakaorangia mātou i te kino:
Nōu hoki te ranga tiratanga, te kaha,
me te korōria,
Āke ake ake.     Āmine.^[1]

Hear these words from the law:

“If resident aliens among you prosper, and if any of your kin fall into difficulty with one of them and sell themselves to an alien, or to a branch of the alien’s family, after they have sold themselves they shall have the right of redemption; one of their brothers may redeem them, or their uncle or their uncle’s son may redeem them, or anyone of their family who is of their own flesh may redeem them; of if they prosper they may redeem themselves.” (Lev. 25.47-49)

O lord, my rock and my redeemer. (Ps 19.15b)

“Some of the [religious leaders] in the crowd said to [Jesus,] “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” [Jesus] answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the rocks would shout out.” (Luke 19.39-40)

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

We live on a land of droughts and flooding rains
And the droughts are getting longer
And the floods are getting deeper
And the fires are burning longer
And the crisis is getting deeper
And the wait for justice is getting longer
And the cries are getting deeper

“Without a word, without a sound,
without a voice being heard” (Ps 19.4)

And those who were killed by the colonisers when they came have no voice
And those whose land was taken have had no voice
And those who were enslaved have no voice
And those whose culture has been erased have no voice
And those in youth detention in spit hoods have no voice
And those left in remote communities, when the services are switched off have no voice
And there is no treaty, so there is no voice

“Yet their message fills the world,
their news reaches its rim.” (Ps 19.5)

Āke ake ake

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Hear these words from the law:

“The uniting churches were largely silent as the dominant culture of Australia constructed and propagated a distorted version of history that denied this land was occupied, utilised, cultivated and harvested by First Peoples who also had complex systems of trade and inter-relationships. As a result of this denial, relationships were broken and the very integrity of the Gospel proclaimed by the churches was diminished.”^[2]

The uniting churches were largely silent

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

“Some of the [religious leaders] in the crowd said to [Jesus,] “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” [Jesus] answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the rocks would shout out.” (Luke 19.39-40)

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Leaders met at the meeting place
Coming from all points of the southern sky
At Uluru — and spoke about sovereignty from the big rock

“Sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature,’ and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with [their] ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty.”^[3]

Hear the voice of Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven:

women are still not being heard
our bodies ignored
crimes against us approved
sister spoke up
it took her life
in custody, without custodianship
children taken, and land
weeping and lonely
no more women unheard behind the wall
no more women dead over unpaid fines
no more women dead by men
it must end.^[4]

…

The Psalmist ties together a reflection on creation with praise of the law. The created order of things is not simply an inert object, not simply a bundle of random stuff. Rather, the created world is the wide horizon of our encounter with God.

God is big.

The story of God can only be told on the cosmic scale of the universe. The rhythms of life, the fact that we human beings are products of nature’s processes, the changing of night to day and day to night … All of this must be included in our account of a God who speaks to the world.

The voice of God comes to us through creation itself. It comes to us through the voices of those who have tended to creation, those who have cared for these lands and waters and living things since the time when the sacred stories were first told.

Too often we have not heard these voice. We have let them go silent.

And yet, says the Psalmist, even though no voice is heard, no words are uttered, even without a discernible sound, God’s message permeates the world.

God’s message speaks of a law that is perfect, demands which are just, decrees which are faultless, of more worth than gold.

What the Psalmist offers us in this rich poem is a vision of a world in which the movement between the world itself and our human community is a seamless whole. We should not seek here a sense of a discussion of creation simply stitched together to a discussion of the law. The law which restores our souls in the law which forms a human community which reaches beyond itself and embraces all people, all things, in a new order of righteousness and love.

For this we must allow the message of God which permeates the world to permeate our souls. We must be open to acknowledging faults … We must be open to letting go of being the ones in control of measuring our own correctness:

“… faults hide within us
forgive me mine …” (Ps 19.13)

says the Psalmist.

We must “keep [our] pride in check, / break its grip; / … be free of blame / for deadly sin.” (Ps 19.14)

We must allow this Psalm to sear into our souls.

There is blood in this land, and not enough justice yet to clean it.

So let us listen to God’s voice in those who speak for justice
Let us hear the call for Voice. for Treaty. for Truth.

Āke ake ake.     Āmine.

^[1] The Lord’s Prayer in Te Reo Māori.

^[2] The Uniting Church in Australia Revised Preamble to the Constitution.

^[3] Uluru Statement from the Heart.

^[4] Ellen van Neerven, ‘Women are still not being heard,’ Throat, p. 47.

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Epiphany 2
16/1/2022

Isaiah 62:1-5
John 2:1-11

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

This is the kind of question which entertains undergraduate philosophy majors for hours and days on end. (Philosophy undergraduates like I was almost a decade ago.)

There’s actually quite a clever answer to this age-old question if you read a few complicated philosophy books: yes. As it turns out, yes a tree does make a sound when it falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it. Case closed.

One of the philosophical reasons for saying yes to this question is actually kind of interesting. In some schools of thought within philosophy they talk about the idea of “adumbration.” In a technical philosophical sense, this big, strange word “adumbration” refers to the fact that human beings only ever perceive the world in part, and yet experience the world as a rich and seamless whole.

I may only be able to see your masked up faces from one perspective, and yet I have no doubt that if I were to walk around the room I would find that you are, nevertheless, three dimensional people. And not just cardboard cut-outs set up for my amusement.

So too, when I speak to someone, I may only grasp a tiny piece of who they are in conversation, but I experience them as a full human being: with interests and passions; family, friends and acquaintances; regrets and hopes.

At its best – indeed at our best – the world and its people are experienced as full, as something to be discovered, as an inexhaustible opening to adventure. Even though our small experience of the world is only ever partial, fragile, and fleeting.

And so it is that the philosopher says the tree which falls with no one around, acts in the same way as the one which falls in front of me. There are no gaps in reality, only bits we haven’t yet seen.

Our reading from John’s Gospel invites us into something like this experience of “adumbration,” this experiencing of the world as a seamless whole, even though we only ever see it in part.

The basic story is fairly straightforward: Jesus is invited, along with his mum, to a wedding. The hosts run out of wine. So Jesus does what any self-respecting incarnate Word of God would do in the same situation … and turns the water from six large stone jars into wine. This wine, as it turns out, is a marvelous hit with the wedding host and the whole party rejoices.

The point of this miraculous act, we are told, was so that Jesus could reveal his glory.

Here, however, we only glimpse the glory of Jesus in a partial and fragmentary way. If the point of this miracle story is that it reveals Christ’s glory, why is it that we are also told that only the servants and disciples saw the miracle, but not the chief steward and the bridegroom — and presumably the other guests?

We might ask: If a miracle is performed, and no one important is there to see it, does it reveal Christ’s glory?

Here we are only supposed to glimpse the glory of Jesus in a partial and fragmentary way. We are, as it were, thrown off the scent of what we might initially think glory is all about. Glory is not about flashy shows of power, about clear signs that God in Jesus Christ can command the world of creation at will, bending it to his every will. Rather, glory is about servants seeing the new wine being poured into old wine skins – or perhaps old water jars. Glimpsing glory is about the first fruits of reconciliation. Glory is about the wonder and anticipation of meeting Jesus, this remarkable person, and believing in this One: glimpsing glory leads the first disciples – and us as disciples – to the beginnings of belief, the beginnings of the journey of following Jesus.

In other words, what is seen only by some, only partially, only in ways which are confusing and strange: what is seen in part, becomes an invitation into the whole. This is the importance of today’s reading from John 2 within the broader arc of Gospel narrative: it is the entry point into the journey which will unfold as the Gospel narrative carries on. And so this strange story is an invitation to us, to step into this journey as well. Not simply to keep reading John’s Gospel, but to be enticed into following the strange way of this Jesus, the incarnate Word of God.

Here Jesus’ performs a miracle not to demonstrate his power, but to lay out bread crumbs, to release a sweet perfume, to open our ears and eyes to wonder.

Look at this one who performs miracles that spark joy in the world!

Look at this one who invites servants and fishermen into the secret of his renewal!

Look at this one whose glory is seen only partially, so that we might be invited on the journey to see the whole world as filled with glory!

The disciples see a sign of the beginning of renewal — but only the beginning — so that they may appreciate that they too will be caught up in Christ’s renewing work. They see this miraculous sign of Jesus exerting power over natural things, so that they know all of creation will be renewed by Jesus’ merciful might. They see at a wedding in Cana only a tiny piece of Jesus’ strange way: and this invites them into discovery, into an inexhaustible adventure. This is the point of today’s reading: it piques our curiosity and wonder, so that we lean into the world transforming glory which Jesus will ultimately bring at the appointed hour.

In today’s reading Jesus tells his mother that his hour has not yet come. Jesus’ mother will not re-appear in John’s Gospel until this hour does come.

The hour in which the celebration of the party guests is turned to the mocking of the crowd.

The hour in which the sweet wine of miraculous joy is turned into the sour wine of persecution.

The hour when the water of purification flows from the vessel of Christ’s body, through his pierced side.

This too is what we are invited into; this too is glory.

The task which is set before us by today’s reading, and by the Scriptures which we read together week after week, is to adopt a posture of seeking out God’s glory at work in the world. At times this is strange, wondrous, and joyous. At times this is a bitter fruit, and suffering — which we know all too well in the current crisis. And yet the task is to look beyond the immediate experiences which stand right before us, and recall that while we see only in part the world is a seamless whole, history is a seamless whole, creation is a seamless whole. And it is God who holds all things together, it is Christ the Word through whom all things are made, it is the Spirit of God which nourishes us and beckons to us: what we see in partial ways will be used for God’s glory; what we feel as fragile will be caught up and transformed into new life; what we grasp at and which seems only fleeting will be held in the very heart of God.

For glory is all around us, but it is not first and foremost the miracle, but glory is found through faith in the one who leads us, who bids us to begin the daily journey towards glory and light and love.

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Baptism of Jesus
9/1/2022

Acts 8:14-17
Psalm 29
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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A favourite image on Christmas cards is the three magi with their unsuitable baby-presents gathered at a safe distance around the manger. It is a kind of tableau, a vivid image placed before our eyes, and has been a favourite with artists. And we are right to gaze in adoration on the epiphany in the mother and child, remembering Whose Child he is. But since the magi were late, the western churches remember them after twelve nights if we observe them at all.

It’s very different for Eastern Orthodox Christians, for whom cribs and magi are mere preliminaries and the focus is on the baptism of Christ, today’s theme. You often see a photo in the media of the ceremony on the Bay where the bishop hurls a cross into the water and some swift swimmer rescues it. Anglo-Saxons look on this ethnic display with astonishment.

The word ‘epiphany’ in Greek means a manifestation of God, and the Orthodox more precisely call it Theo-phany. In these moments, God is revealing something of Godself – in the birth of the Christ Child, in the young Jesus stepping down into the waters of the river Jordan.

Today we read Luke’s description of the baptism. The same notably brief account appears in all four gospels. We meet the strange figure of John, later given the title ‘the Baptizer’ because that is what he believed God had called him to do – that, and scare the living daylights out of an already fearful and subject people. Our lectionary leaves out most of Luke’s darker summary of the message (but so do the other gospels).

To be fair, John did preach about judgement – about the winnowing-fork and threshing floor, the separation of the grain and the burning of the chaff – but, unlike some modern preachers, he does not leave them without hope. The gospels use the same phrase for the first message of both John and Jesus: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!’ The first step for that crowd was to wash themselves in the Jordan.

But that’s not the epiphany. That follows Jesus’ baptism. There, a very striking tableau is revealed. Listen again:

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized/ and was praying, the heaven was opened, ²²and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

Only Matthew records John’s objection to Jesus asking for his baptism. Of course, the human being who uniquely shared the holiness of God had no need to repent – and Paul captures the reason, when he writes to the Philippians, ‘Christ Jesus… though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.’ Of course, he stepped into the water with the slaves who were certainly in that crowd.

But look at the actual epiphany: Jesus, standing in the water, praying to the One he called ‘Abba, Father’, as the Holy Spirit visibly descended on him, and God’s voice was heard addressing Jesus: ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’. An ikon indeed, God revealed.

We tend to think of the link of baptism with the Trinity being in Matthew’s formula: Go, teach, ‘baptize in the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’, but the three-actor image in the other three Gospels makes this ancient doctrine just as clear. This was an event in the life of the fullness of God, the triune God of love. This is the key to the birth of all Christians, of the way the Church reproduces itself.

Our reading from Acts this morning shows that there was a period when the earliest Church was sorting the liturgical details out. Some simply baptised ‘in the name of Jesus’ (v.16). Some indeed ’had not even heard there was a Holy Spirit’ (Acts 19:2). Luke-Acts is doing some necessary tidying up.

Now let me ask a modern question, a liturgical one in fact.

A moment ago, I added another facet to my words about water. Water cleanses, purifies, and gives health; it also slakes thirst and refreshes. But now add birth. We are conceived and grow in the waters of our mother’s womb, and we are gently bathed. But then water is as dangerous as it is life-giving, as recent news about summer drownings attest.^[1] All symbols have multiple layers of meanings; they catch the attention and open the eyes in fascinating ways and lead us into deeper understandings. An early writer called the font both ‘womb and tomb’. Jesus left us the Gospel and two sign-acts which use physical elements, water, bread and wine. Sacraments.

Now, my question, perhaps an uncomfortable one.

What kind of epiphany accompanies our contemporary celebrations of baptism? In what ways does modern baptism proclaim the richness of its meanings? We usually achieve one: washing, but if our children came back from the bathroom after using three droplets of water, we’d send them back. It’s hardly bathing and it’s no threat to life. The dimension of cross is invisible. We are a long way from Jordan and the practice of the church for the first thousand years, evidenced in their generous fonts.

The change began as soon as the majority of Christians were adults. They naturally wanted their children to stand under the same gospel sign. And where there is a hope that children will be brought up in close connection with the faith, lived by their parents, I still think that is appropriate. Our present secular culture certainly does not assist that growing in faith as it once did; quite the opposite.

Our received church culture also became rather sentimental about babies, and baptism even became a social occasion, to be followed by a sherry party. But given that baptism of infants has almost totally disappeared from our society and churches, I want to suggest that rescuing baptism from all that polite custom, is necessary for evangelization and mission today.  If we are a church planning for the future, we will be baptizing adult converts. I see few signs of that in the Uniting or other churches, except for Roman Catholics.^[2] Our worship book, Uniting in Worship-2 (2005) has adapted their program for our use, but it is largely ignored.

My point is not to dig up ancient rituals, but to recover the living symbols which served the church well until now; it has nothing to do with the amount of water used; the Holy Spirit is quite capable of working with three droplets or none!

The old ikons show little fishes swimming around Jesus, deep in the water. They are there because they have seen and felt and known the Christ of the epiphany and are reborn. They are us.

In the crowds around us here and now are grown-up, educated and self-aware human beings, seeking salvation, wholeness of life, for an alternative to the destructive philosophies of our time. There are also those who are none of those things, the marginalised, the neglected and the poor.  For all these, the God of love gives the church the means to be ‘transformed by the renewing of our minds’ (Rom. 12:2) in and through the experience of our faithful worship, by words, yes, but also in sacred signs, in the overflowing font and in the breaking of the bread.

[1] John promises that Jesus will baptize with fire (the Holy Spirit), and fire has this double meaning too: both the revivification of the bush and its modern devastation.

[2] The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (1976) is a process which arose from the research and teaching of the Second Vatican Council. It is sometimes called the ‘Catechumenate’.