View or print as a PDF

Easter 7
29/5/2022

Revelation 2:8-11a
Psalm 71
Matthew 11:25-30

---

In a sentence:
Christian discipleship is purposed with being “relevant” – relieving – of the burdens which deny peace and justice

It’s something of an occupational hazard that, from time to time, someone feels that a Christian minister should know, “I’m not religious; I think that when you die, that’s the end, and there’s nothing more.” In this way, religion is reduced to an interest in life after death.

This is an understandable reduction, given how the church has often linked upright living with the reward of eternal life. If we quite can’t conceive of the possibility of what is dead being meaningfully alive again at some time in the future, then the rejection of eternal life leads predictably to the rejection of religion. This doesn’t mean rejecting the moral life but does see religion with its trappings to be an over-dressed moralism. It seems clear that we can be “good” without religion, so why bother? This is a sensible line of thought, so far as it goes (although, on close examination, it doesn’t “go” as far as many seem to think). In this way, religion seems to be shown to be quite “irrelevant” to modern, intentionally this‑worldly existence.

The question of “relevance” has become a touchstone for thinking about what makes for good modern religion among those still at least loosely interested in religious things. We assess our doctrines and liturgies, among other things, in terms of their perceived relevance. Yet we’re not often clear what we mean by “relevant”. Generally, it has to do with vague ideas about whether some belief or practice “makes a difference” – a positive difference. However, things become more precise when we look into the source of the word. Something is literally (etymologically) relevant when it relieves. Relevance is relieving. To say of something – including religion – that it is not relevant is to say that it brings no relief, that it does not “lighten” what burdens we think we carry (to “re‑lieve” is to “make light again”, to bring levity, lightness). A thought, a practice, a conviction is properly relevant when it fills a need, answers a question, relieves a burden.

To reject life after death, then, is to say that it brings no relief from whatever we think weighs us down. And by this, we mean that it brings no relief, here and now, except perhaps as a kind of distraction from where we are, a turning away from the reality and meaning of the present. Indeed, the promise of life after death can make things worse before death, if that promise is used to justify pain and difficulty here and so to justify a refusal to do anything to alleviate that suffering. This reading of promised life after death in nineteenth-century Christian society led to Karl Marx’s famous critique of religion:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Religion, that is, works to stupefy the people in the present with promises of being part of a bigger picture in a future which, for most, coincides with their death. In this way, life after death can be weaponised to suppress the possibility of any good in the suffering present. What we have heard from John this morning could certainly be read this way: “Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life” (2.10).

With the mention of Marx here, we see the importance of clarity about how life after death might be relevant – how it might relieve us here and now. It won’t do to reduce heaven to personal pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die for those who had little pie during their lives. Having rejected how talk about eternal life was related to life here and now in the Christian society of his time, Marx developed a powerful alternative understanding of where we are now, where heaven is, and the path between the two.

The power of Marx’s alternative is still active in our very midst today. If we want to explain why Russia is in Ukraine, we could point to Marx; if we want to explain why China is in the Solomon Islands or why North Korea keeps plopping missiles into the Sea of Japan, we could point to Marx. It doesn’t matter whether he would be happy with these developments. The point is that these are the real-world consequences of getting wrong the relationship between life now and any life which might yet come. The dominant reading of heaven’s relationship to the world in Marx’s time didn’t work, and his response to that injustice writes the front pages of our newspapers today.

The fact that, in the end, Marx rejected altogether an interest in life after death – and that we are still in the midst of death – indicates that we aren’t guaranteed peace simply by rejecting life after death. The relationship between today and tomorrow – between the life we have now and the life to come – is no mere “religious” issue. What follows today is at the heart of our life together – whether we imagine ourselves religious or secular. Every politics, whether it imagines itself as religious or secular, has a vision of life at the end

None of this is “relevant” yet, in the sense of being itself “relieving”! The point of teasing out how these ideas have worked for us is to show that, wild though its method is, the book of Revelation’s interest in the life to come is much closer to our own social and political concerns than might first seem to be the case.

Revelation was written to people who were suffering, doubtless often much more profoundly than many of us are at the moment. We might look more closely at Revelation’s martyrs in a week or two, but it is important that what is said to those sufferers is not what Marx heard and saw. Opium is for those we are not able or interested in helping but whom we want to keep quiet, resting in peace. Religion, with its promise of a coming relieving heaven, is here a justification of the wrongful present: it’s OK that you suffer, because there’s a heaven to come.

The book of Revelation, however, speaks a word to suffering people which doesn’t dismiss their suffering but names it as right suffering. It was profoundly wrong that they suffered, and they were right to experience it as such. When John writes, “Be faithful unto death”, he marks his readers’ tribulation as true suffering and deeply unjust. There is no justification of pain and loss in Revelation; those who suffer are to be avenged for the injustice of what has happened (another troubling aspect of Revelation for modern sensibilities!). The One who promises this future in Revelation has no interest in the status quo which makes life so hard. It is an offence to God that God’s people suffer, as much as it is an offence to those who suffer. This is to say that Christian visions of heaven aren’t given to distract us from hell on earth but are to mark it as hell – as wrong. The declaration of suffering as wrong from the point of view of heaven’s future is a judgement on the present and, as such, calls for a response. This means that the difference between any hell now and any heaven to come is not merely black against white but is heaven’s pull against hell. Talk of heaven becomes now not simply the expounding of a comforting beatific vision. Talk of heaven is the beginning of a struggle. Talk of heaven is resistance.

Yet this is not the resistance of the revolutionary. While the Marxists knew that a mere promise of heaven was not answer enough to death, they saw death as its own solution. The communist revolutions which flowed from Marx’ reading of history saw death not only as what we suffer but as the means – the method – for ending that suffering. This dynamic, too, contributes to the front pages of our newspapers: the imagination that the death we are experiencing can be alleviated (note: re‑lief and al‑leve…) by more death. This is doubtless part of what causes a young man to take automatic weapons into a schoolyard, for whatever “relief” it seemed such violence might bring at least to him (Uvalde, May 24 2022).

Against this, and despite the violence of the book of Revelation itself, talk of heaven is an act of peace in the midst of war. We say this because Jesus was an act of peace in the midst of unpeace. Acts of peace in the midst of war are not about life after death but life before death: life in the face of death.

This is relief which names unjustice and unpeace, by demonstrating something entirely different. It is not an easy way, but it is the way of Jesus and his disciples: enduring unto death, so that death itself will not endure. Life in the face of death – what could be more “relevant” than that?

”Come to me”, Jesus says, “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 relevant, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matthew 11.28-30 alt!).

Related sermons

·         27 September 2020 – The Resurrection of the living

·         19 April 2020 – A living hope

·         1 April 2018 – Resurrection as forgiveness

View or print as a PDF

Easter 6
22/5/2022

Revelation 21:10, 22, 22-22:5
Psalm 67
John 14:23-29

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

---

‘And in the Spirit, he showed me the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God’.

Revelation 21:10

It is a happy coincidence that this text should be before us the day after an election. Our triennial excursion to the ballot box was surely yet again a triumph of hope over experience as we voted not so much for a holy city, but for a better earthly city. In this respect, Christians joined their hopes to those of their secular neighbours.

We did so in these grim advancing years of the third millennium conscious of the present Ukraine horror, not to speak of an alarming future for the planet. But equally, day by day, we increasingly experience what feels like the fraying of a once confident Western culture – politically directionless, morally decadent and intellectually shallow.

As a matter of historical record, equally grim days called forth the text before us today. For it was written at the end of the first century when Domitian was the Roman Emperor. He was successful in erasing the hopes of a sizeable proportion of his empire through persecution, death and destruction. For this reason, this subversive but encouraging text had to be written in code – precisely to prevent a culture hostile to Christian faith from knowing what it means. To which we might add – nothing has changed!

Especially is this the case as we reflect on why it is that this text is given to us in the period between Easter and Pentecost, where we have been confronted by the divine drama that is Good Friday and Easter Day. But most of all, we must not gloss over that profound silence of Easter Saturday marking the end for God’s Son and therefore the end for God. Intellectually, ours too is an Easter Saturday culture. It is unequivocally theological in nature – a culture bereft of divine presence, and indifferent to divine absence.

But be of good cheer – our text everywhere breathes life!

Now our political gaze is directed not to what is, but to the vision in the Spirit of a New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. First, we must remember that Jerusalem is the literal compound of two Hebrew words ‘Jeru/shalom’. It means ‘vision of peace’. In our day, as did Jesus himself, we may well weep over this failed vision: no peace, no vision. But there must be no permanent lament. Deathly cities will not have the last word, will not have conquered, will not be the future. Rather, the Spirit’s gift of transformed life promises nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth coming in the form of a good city – not some sort of divine fog, a formless cloud, but a solid place where the whole creation is recreated.

To this end, this city offers no cancellation of human works, but rather their elevation. Twice we hear that:

 ‘the kings of the earth bring the glory and honour of the nations into it’.

It is indeed good news to hear that despite the three-day Easter drama of the horror inflicted on God, and despite all the horrors that nations inflict on one another, it will be the secular kings and nations who will be destined to know themselves players in this reconstituted Jerusalem. Having been at the Good Friday and Easter Day centre of judgement, and there ultimately destroyed as final authorities in the world, now they are to be dispensers of glory and honour – all that has been, and still is the work of the kings and nations – all the produce of nature, all the various human cultural achievements – music and sculpture, poetry and mathematics, philosophy, politics and economics – all enter into this holy Jerusalem to become ingredient in building up this final perfect work. And they do so, not as in some museum, but as an integration into a living whole, a dynamic re-creation. Because everything here is living, and is not closed or ossified, what human beings wished to be our creation with all its problematic outcomes is now promised to be recreated for all time.

‘Everything’ is here? Not quite. Those rejoicing in the decline in our day of what they call religion might be encouraged to hear explicitly that there is no temple here – no church buildings, no ordained ministers, no Church councils, no Synod property officers. But the tension increases even more. It is not simply that with no temple there is no longer any need of a particular place to express or enclose a sacred presence – it is even that the distinction between sacred and profane itself collapses; here each of our contrived divisions become immediate to the other. And this because the triune God is finally revealed to be immediate to all.

But there is yet more. In the vision the sun too disappears, though light nevertheless remains – a reversal of the images in the Genesis creation story, where we are told that the sun appears on the third day whereas light appears on the first.  But now it is the light of God which replaces the light of the sun – that light which ultimately must pass away because it is not eternal, but rather comes from a created source.

We are, in truth, with this city – this New Jerusalem, this new vision of peace – in another dimension; in an ‘other’ universe, which has another structure which no longer fits human religious categories. Utopian? Surely not! For the gospel tells us that this city has in fact already been accomplished. We read this text in the Easter season because in a crucified human being the perfect union between God and the world has already been achieved. A new creation is already a present perfect reality awaiting the world’s performance.

In the faithful re-enactment of the worship of the Church, not least in the divinely appointed sacramental symbols of water, bread and wine we confirm the protest at the world’s present disunity which refuses to accept the truth of its own healing – a disunity in which the church also shares. For in this liturgical reality, we are given a union of things visible and invisible, a union of body and spirit, of heaven and earth – present faith raised to the vision of the new Creation.

So it is that already just here, in Christian churches destined to disappear, we not only see, but more to the point, by grace already enter the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. In other words, the joy and promise of our text is simply the assurance that endings are in sight for a humanity which surely sooner or later will find that the interminable is much harder to bear than termination.

All that remains for us now therefore is the boldness to confess: to this God, whom the vision of Revelation proposes as the One “who is, who was, and who is to come” – note the sequence of tenses, not who was, who is and who will be, but “who is, who was and who is to come” – to this God be all praise and thanksgiving, now and forever.

View or print as a PDF

Easter 5
15/5/2022

Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 148
Matthew 6:1-6

---

In a sentence:
Regardless of what we believe and hope for, it is all oriented towards God’s promised peaceful kingdom

While flicking through the Australian Electoral Commission’s “official guide” pamphlet to next week’s election, I was struck by a representation of one of those cardboard polling booth set-ups we all know: little enclosed shelters in which we are able to vote without those next to us knowing how we have voted.

In what was perhaps a moment of inspiration, or just as an instance of the odd way brains work – or mine at least! – I thought of Jesus’ teaching on prayer, which we’ve heard today: “whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6.6). It seemed to me that those people pictured in the pamphlet’s polling booths could have been monks praying in their cells, which led me to wonder about the relationship between praying and voting.

Doubtless, some pray while voting. This is the attempt to “supercharge” our vote. In a close electoral race like this one, those who pray this way probably include prime ministers, opposition leaders, and candidates in marginal seats.

Whatever might be said about supercharging our vote in this way, I’m more interested today in thinking about voting as praying – voting as a prayer in itself. For what else are both votes and prayers but the expression of a desire for a particular world not yet realised? Prayer springs from recognising our condition between yesterday and tomorrow. Today is received from yesterday in thanksgiving or lament – in prayer – and tomorrow is sought as an extension or overcoming of today – in prayer as petition and intercession. Voting is entirely the same, the electorate standing between yesterday and tomorrow, embracing or rejecting yesterday for some envisaged tomorrow. To vote or to pray is to express our feeling for the best future.

The campaign slogans of the major parties are revealing in this respect. In the blue corner, we have “Strong economy. Stronger future”. In the red corner, we have “A better future”. In the green corner, there is no central slogan but the first assertion you meet on their website is “The time is now to vote for a better future” (May 13). This is just what we will enact later in today’s service: the time is now to pray for a better future.

The book of Revelation, of course, concerns itself with tomorrow. Yet in Revelation on the one hand, and in a modern political context on the other, the relationship between the present and the future is entirely different. Today, we are highly conscious that the future is something laid upon us to create. In the New Testament – and not least in the book of Revelation – the future is a gift.

This is perhaps – unconsciously – one of the deeper reasons we have an aversion to the book of Revelation. While the apocalyptic genre with its fantastic imagery is difficult enough for modern minds to fathom, more offensive is that God is the only real protagonist in all the action of Revelation. If we have a role in what the book portrays, it is as witnesses – either in the role of John the Seer himself or as one in the multitudes gathered around the throne, praying: “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7.10). This is precisely not “Salvation belongs to Scott” or “to Anthony” or the “to the voting public”. The book of Revelation has no place for the political activist which most of us are, except perhaps in the figure of the martyrs around the throne. But their time is also over. Only God truly “acts” in this vision, in the sense of action we understand ourselves to be undertaking in voting or agitating for change.

Or perhaps better: the book of Revelation describes the state of affairs when every vote has been cast. It describes the culmination of all things. Everything has now happened – all monarchy and democracy, all despotism and anarchy. History – all our efforts at creating our own future – has taken place, and is red with blood.

Perhaps this seems hopelessly pessimistic, even if the historical evidence to date is on-side. But pessimism is not the point; the point is seeing more clearly what faithful action looks like. What it looks like is – voting‑as‑praying. We imagine voting to be a technique – something we do to make a political thing happen. We think this way because this is what we thought prayer was: a “religious” technique to make some personal or political thing happen. As we have become more secular as a society, we have simply switched voting in for prayer.

There is no pessimism in the book of Revelation unless we imagine that only our actions matter for our future. We are free to hold to this, but it is not the vision of Revelation. Revelation holds that all votes are finally counted as a vote for the future this God promises.

For, regardless of our political position, what do any of us vote for but John’s vision of

^7.15 […one] seated on the throne [who] will shelter them.
¹⁶ [That they] will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not strike them,
nor any scorching heat;
¹⁷ for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

What does even the rabidly radical right-wing atheist want but an end to hunger and thirst and the wiping away of all tears? The only shock for modern political sensibilities in all this is “the Lamb” – who stands for nothing our political thinking can comprehend. The Lamb, of course, is Jesus, and the reference to this Lamb as “slaughtered” (Revelation 5.6,12) is a reference to the crucifixion. Interpreted through the mechanisms of sacrifice, this is enough to make the whole scenario unpalatable to modern minds.

But, to press the election theme further, the New Testament can be read to present the crucifixion as history’s “vote” on Jesus. It is a vote against him, of course, but we must also see that the vote is offered to God as a prayer. In condemning Jesus to death, the people of God pray, “Let such as him not be our future”. The crucifixion reveals that only history is bloody; prayer is too.

And this brings us to a final strange thing we might have missed in today’s reading but which interprets everything we are and do. The great multitude gathered around the divine throne “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (v.14). The crimson bloodiness of history culminates in the blood of the Lamb, which now washes history white. In this vision blood, which stains all things, which cannot be washed out and which always reveals the culprit, Now. Washes. Clean.

The real problem Revelation presents to the modern mind – and to ancient ones – is not the religiosity of its wild imagery and language. It is the proposal that, in the end, all things – all good and evil, all generosity and greed, all love and hatred – are resolved in the triumph of the one who sits on the throne, and of the Lamb.

This is to say that every prayer, every vote, desires the same thing and – by the grace of God – finally finds its desire fulfilled: life in the presence of

^7.15 …the one…seated on the throne [who] will shelter them.
¹⁶ [And they] will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not strike them,
nor any scorching heat;
¹⁷ for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

So then, let us vote, let us pray, let us live, for this.

Related sermons

• 15 April 2022 – Holy, Holy, Holy! – Sermon preached by Matt Julius
• 15 December 2019 – Offended at Jesus