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Pentecost 12
28/8/2022

Philippians 2:1-11
Psalm 131
Luke 14:7-11

In a sentence:
The humble heart does not desire to go anywhere, but to create

The item at the top of the news feeds over the last couple of weeks has been former Prime Minister Morrison’s having been sworn in – secretly – as co-minister of numerous government portfolios. It’s not entirely clear why this has been deemed so important. It was, apparently, done legally, if never previously done. Apart from the welcome political leverage it has given the new Prime Minister, the principal reason we are still hearing about it is perhaps simply – as many have said – that it was a bizarre thing for Morrison to have done. Why he did it has been a matter for speculation in the absence of any good explanation from him, and the less charitable of that speculation has included the charge of a less than humble grasp for power and control.

When citizens are asked to assess their politicians, the word “humble” is not often heard, even if those close to our leaders would speak of them as persons in that way. Humility is a tough sell in a modern democracy. When Jesus said, “…all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted”, he was not offering campaign advice to election hopefuls, particularly those running in marginal seats. We might want our leaders to be gentle and humble of heart, but this is not why we elect them.

What is Jesus saying, then? It sounds like he offers guidelines about how not to make a fool of yourself at a formal gathering by not making a higher claim for yourself than others might think is your right. In fact, he seems to imply, deliberately make a lower claim than you could, so that you might be called higher up by the host.

Of course, the lesson that it is better to be exalted than humiliated is clear enough to us, as is the common sense recognition that if you place yourself at the bottom of the table, there is nowhere to go but up. And we also generally resonate with the concept of humility, especially in contrast with pride. Very rarely do we congratulate somebody for their pride or arrogance, but we often celebrate the humble life.

But there is a problem if we hear Jesus’ teaching to link humility and exaltation such that the way to the top involves an intentional lingering around the bottom. This would be a doublemindedness; humility is now a ruse towards elevation in this life or the reward which comes at the end of life (assuming that that is where God pays out, if not already).

So knotted can this become that we will be unsure of even our own motives. We might think that the humble person is more respected than the arrogant one, which is to be interested not in humility but in the respect it would bring. We might think that humility makes us less noticeable than we might otherwise be, which is to be interested not in humility but in keeping out of the limelight. We might think that humility in possessions or attitude is better for our blood pressure, which is to be interested not in humility but in the length and quality of our life. In each case, humility is but a means to an end, and the end can even be the exact opposite of being humble means.

A clue to unravelling this tangle of God’s call and our motivation in answering it is found less in what Jesus says in this teaching than in what the church has said about Jesus himself. We’ve also heard this morning Paul’s account of the humility of Jesus:

^{Philippians 2.5} Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
⁷ but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
⁸ he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
⁹ Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹ and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. (NRSV)

The humility-reward scheme is still here, but it now has a clearer structure. The exaltation which follows the self-humbling of Jesus is not the end in Jesus’ sight from the beginning; the only goal for Jesus is the obedience and service itself. This is what it means to be “in the form of God”. Nothing else is glimpsed or sought. Humility is not a strategy. To have in us – as Paul proposes – the mind of Jesus, is not to know that our humility will end in exaltation but simply to know ourselves subject to the call from a faithful God: live and love, the essence of humility.

This is very easily said. And it is very easily corrupted by our adding other little bits in a way that can only be said to be self-justifying. And so true humility is rare thing – true attention to God in the need of our human neighbours, for the neighbours’ sake and not for our own. When humility happens, the effect is not that we are rewarded for our actions but a kind of renewal of the world. The exaltation which flows from the humble man or woman is an achievement previously thought impossible in and for others. The humble create what was not there before. Humility, then, is not about upward – or downward – mobility which benefits or diminishes the humble. Humility is an outwardness; this turning-out is the possibility of a renewal of the world from wherever we happen to be. The doubleminded – those who feign humility to some other end – make nothing new but are merely manipulators who move stuff around for their own benefit.

We all, Prime Ministers included, know well enough how to manipulate systems – how to look like we’re doing one thing when we’re really doing something else. We are so good at it that it’s scarcely possible for us anymore to know what truly motivates our actions. This might also apply to Prime Ministers.

But any possible lack of humility in others matters less here and now than what there might be in us of a doubleminded humility. “Am I humble enough?” is not a question about the state of my heart but about the effect of my actions: is the world today a better place – renewed – for what I have said and done? Is my spouse or child or neighbour or colleague more than they would have been, had I not been there?

Take your place at the table, Jesus says. And whether that’s where you stay, or you’re called up higher, grow into humility with hands that do not grasp but which are open to give and create.

In this way become, in your place, a surprise: the creation of something new, and open up some cracks in the old world of grasping and manipulation.

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Pentecost 11
21/8/2022

Jeremiah 1.4-10
Hebrews 12.18-29

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God, may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is unloving and untrue in my words. Amen.

The world ends every day.

It ends when a harried surgeon walks alone to a teary-eyed family telling them their mother didn’t make it.

It ends when a once hope-filled couple silently packs away the crib and nursery for a new life that never came home.

It ends when a phone call severs the last chance of reconciliation with an abusive father, who slipped away during the night.

It ends when abuse passes on to another child, and the trauma will have to wait one more generation to be cleared away.

The world ends every day.

Every day the world is shaken at its very core.

Over and over and over and over and over and over and over …

And our human fragility is left wandering the world as if in the wilderness. Is this the freedom from God?

Hebrews is a difficult text. I don’t really have the foggiest idea what’s going on. But part of what’s going on, clearly, is a contrast being made between the ancient story of Israel: the Jewish people freed from captivity in Egypt, and yet left wandering in the desert — and the story of Jesus Christ: who frees us from our captivity to the forces of sin and death, and yet here we find ourselves in worlds that end over, and over, and over again.

Part of what makes Hebrews such a difficult text is the seeming incompatibility between these two stories: the story of Israel, and the story of Christ.

Throughout Hebrews Jesus is spoken of as the great high priest of Heaven; and yet, if we follow the strictures of the Jewish Torah (the law) Jesus does not properly fit into the line of priests. After all, Jesus literally was not a priest, and was not from the line of priests, or even the priestly tribe.

Similarly, if we follow the story of the system of ritual sacrifice established by God in the wilderness of wandering, the sacrifice of Christ does not make sense. There is no call for human blood, nor a single sacrifice that disrupts the daily cycle of the cult in tabernacle or temple.

So it is, as is often the case, that we find ourselves at the centre of the encounter of two worlds. Today in our reading Hebrews welcomes us into the heavenly Jerusalem, into an angelical festal gathering. And yet, at the very same time, we are put on guard lest our refusal of this welcome home turn into the final shaking of the world, the final end that leads to consuming fire.

Hebrews leads us to sit in this tension. (I almost wonder if the baffling nature of this text is intentional: forcing us to really sit in the mood it evokes.)

We are in a world of sin and repeated death, which we must face up to. In this present world we remain enslaved to the constant cycle of world ending tragedy, death all around, our own failures and the failures of others … and so we are like the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, setting up altars wherever we rest for a while: constantly making amends, and beginning again, and trying in our fumbling, fragile ways to restore ourselves and our broken worlds. Over, and over, and over again.

And yet, and yet says Hebrews: “Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant … speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” (Heb. 12.24)

We must be on guard here against readings of this text that see us replacing the promises of God to the Jewish people: simply setting aside the old ways of Torah for something new. We cannot do this, because we hear the better word of Jesus precisely and because we too learn from journeys in the wilderness. We hear the better word of Jesus only because we come lately and join the journey of God’s promise and people.

And this is the better word …

The word that is better than the blood of Abel, the crying out of the tragic death of humanity
The word that is better than all the injustice that goes unanswered in the world
The word that is better than land stained with suffering, and robbed of life
The word that is better than shaken foundations, and worlds that end daily

This is the better word:

God has answered our echoing prayer, we have called out to God from the cycle of tragedy:

“Hosanna, Save us, we pray, you beyond all!”

And God has answered this call, entering into a world that is strange and ill-fitting of the divine. God has become the human one among us, feeling the loss of betrayal, suffering the persecutions of the powerful, beaten and bruised, murdered and pierced. The whole story of humanity is gathered in this human one, this Son of Man who comes on the clouds as if from Heaven itself: this one has come and gathered in all humanity and put God where the people die.

The cycle of our human frailty that separates us from God is broken by this one, by Jesus who speaks the word that is better than the blood of Abel crying from the land. This cycle is not broken because the world has no more tragedy; and we cannot accept the welcome into God’s presence without acknowledging that the foundations of worlds continue to shake. The promise of Christ’s presence breaks the cycle of our abandonment in the wilderness, because the living God has now entered fully into our journey.

The fullness of God has reached out and grasped
The fullness of God embraces us with love
The fullness of God has called us holy, and is making us holy

You are holy and loved by God
You are holy and loved by God

In the midst of all failure, all tragedy, all injustice:

You are holy and loved by God.

We have not come to a reconciled world that can be touched, we are not led by a pillar of blazing fire through our wilderness, and the tempest and the trumpet and the voice of God do not regularly sound aloud in our Assemblies …

And yet we are holy and loved by God, called to the deeper, invisible world which can no longer shake. Though the world ends over and repeatedly, we live for the world in which justice and mercy kiss.

The world in which the cry of the blood from the land — the cry of First Peoples — no longer has to call out, because justice is done.
The world in which all who were told their love made them unholy are told that they are holy and beloved.
The world in which the land sustains life, and the life of the land is sustained.
The world in which the pioneer and perfecter of peace causes all war to cease.

We live for the world beyond tragedy … the world through tragedy. The world without end. For this is the journey with God. Amen.

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Pentecost 10
14/8/2022

Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Psalm 82
Luke 12:49-56

In a sentence:
For all the good (and bad we do),
God remains hopelessly devoted to us

On Tuesday, I again turned to discover the top item in the day’s news feed, to serve as a launching place for today’s sermon. I found there what I’d heard that earlier morning: that Olivia Newton-John had died overnight. I then realised that a “Greatest Hits” collection of her songs was quietly playing away in the background in the café where I was reading about this. Perhaps a sign from God?

Newton-John was talented and gorgeous, seeming to be the kind of person many would be happy to have as daughter, friend or lover. Rising to prominence as she did in the 60s and 70s, her bright personal style seemed to reflect something of the country’s own developing self-perception, and she made big on the international scene just as Australia itself was becoming increasingly aware of its own international presence and possibilities; “our Olivia” singing and starring was another “goal” kicked for Australia. Later in life, Newton-John’s public struggle with cancer also became representative of similar hardships among her fans.

It is meaningful and right, then, to say that Newton-John was an “Australian icon”. The Greek word eikon is what the New Testament uses to speak of religious idols, and of Jesus as an “image” or icon of God (e.g. Colossians 1.15). An Australian icon is, then, properly an “image” of Australia, encapsulating something of our essence. At least in the first couple of decades of her career, Newton-John seemed to do just that.

When our icons die, we hear what they achieved and what they stood for, principally from those who loved them for it. In this way, we “eulogise” the dead, to borrow another Greek term which means “speaking good of”. We gather to remember, to mourn and to tell stories.

And this brings me to a connection we can draw between the eulogising of Newton-John and the not unreasonably expectation that most of us, too, will one day be eulogised. Because, for the most part, we are icons to those who love us, if on a smaller scale than our celebrities, and the dynamic of story-telling is not different whether we have lived loudly or quietly. What is the “good word” to be heard at our funerals when the time comes?!

Let’s take it as a starting point that a eulogy should tell the truth. What does this mean? Our icons invite us to be wholly affirmative as we tell their story, and there’s been plenty of that this week. It seems bad taste to darken death with accounts of the darker corners in our lives, and we fear being judged for presuming to judge others and tarnishing the image. Of course, we make a judgement already if we choose to speak only the good, laying fig leaves over any regrettable nakedness that might be exposed if we peeked behind.

And yet, we have a problem if we only bury saints who did no wrong and victors who always prevailed, because a funeral gathers a room full of sinners, victims and losers. What we hear about him who died and what made his life worthwhile is also being said about us sitting in the congregation, and it may not fit very well – they are too unlike us in all our good and bad realities. A good funeral service – and the Uniting Church has a pretty good basic funeral service – allows that the saint we gather to remember was also a sinner. We are each icons – images – of more (or less!) than just the best we allow to be seen or acknowledged. If we are saints – and the funeral service also declares this – it is despite the truth about lives as much as because of it.

Within our Uniting Church funeral service are elements which make explicit that even if we gather to bury one of our icons, she is not much different from us. And so we pray,

In strength and in weakness, in achievement and failure, in the brightness of joy and the darkness of despair, we remember her as one of us…

We are also encouraged to pray,

…we confess that we have not always lived as your grateful children; we have not loved as Christ loved us…forgive us if there have been times when we failed her.

Then, scandalously to some ears, we also pray,

Enable us by your grace to forgive anything that was hurtful to us.

These little prayers are not much in the whole sweep of what is said in a funeral, but they mark the vision of human being in the service. We are one of each other: able to hurt and be hurt, and in need of forgiveness and reconciliation, as well as able to be the good which others will one day miss. This is very often difficult to acknowledge around the time of death: that the life our loved ones have lived – even if it has seemed to be a good one – has not been complete or whole, and neither yet is our own.

In our reading from the letter to the Hebrews this morning, there is a strange twist. Great Old Testament icons of the faith are recalled, who variously were

“…stoned to death…were sawn in two…killed by the sword…they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented…”.

In this, for the writer, they were terrifyingly exemplary. Yet faith icons though they are, the writer goes on to say that even they “did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.” Those who seemed to have achieved so much are yet incomplete. They – in some way – need us. The dead depend somehow on the living. Or, more precisely, the truth of the dead depends on the truth of the living.

What is the truth of the living? The writer goes on: the dead look to us as we look to Jesus, whom the writer calls the “pioneer and perfector” of our faith, the pioneer and perfector of our very lives. With this, the letter reminds us that there is a second story to be considered alongside our own: our story is told within the encapsulating story of Jesus, pioneer and perfector, beginning and end.

And so, a Christian funeral tells these two stories and not just one. There is, of course, our story: what we did and what was done to us. And there is Christ’s story, within which our story is placed. This second story is widely overlooked. Even in Christian funerals, it is often reduced to serve as an extension of our story, becoming a comforting religious bit to help with the mess of hearts and minds death leaves behind.

The overgrown eulogising which dominates in many funerals today is a sign that we don’t know any other story to tell, and so we tell only that of the deceased – as much of it as we dare. And so the death of one who lived life badly, or whose life was cut far too short, leaves us speechless. If they have not yet done anything or did nothing good, what can we say?

To tell just the one story is to misunderstand the funeral as being only about the deceased. Rather, funerals are about the living, not the dead. The second story about Jesus – the pioneer and perfector, the beginning and the end – is told to catch us all up together, the image-icon we gather to remember and us who saw ourselves in the icon we have lost.

We are, of course, entirely dedicated to knowing just how good we are and how good or bad others might be. We make these judgements not only in eulogies but in other assessments of ourselves and others along the way. Yet Christian faith shifts the focus: not only what we do but also what God gives and does: this is the whole of us. There is a pioneer from whom we spring and a perfector who fills us to completion.

Hearing this is not just the work of the funeral. Sunday’s services share in the same logic: a naming that we are less, and more, than we know. If we are doing it properly, Sunday worship should address us in such a way as to want to turn away from self-fascination and self-judgement towards an openness to a life which springs from and is completed by others. Sunday’s word is that we do not start ourselves and we do not finish ourselves: we are pioneered and perfected as much despite what we do as because of it.

There is freedom and peace in this: we are not measured, assessed or tested by God, even if we do this to each other. And we need not do this to ourselves or each other – proving or testing whether we and they are worthy of good words, of rich eulogising. If the wholeness of Jesus himself encapsulates us as pioneer and perfector, we are not under scrutiny: we have been well started and will be well finished. We can, then, be honest about ourselves without fear of judgement.

A life well-lived is one freely received and expressed in this light: now in strength and now in weakness, now in achievement and now in failure, now knowing the brightness of joy and, now, the darkness of despair. Such a good-and-bad life is finally worthy of a good word because it rests in a goodness greater than our own. Jesus is the pioneer and perfector of our lives. This means that, in our best works and in our worst, God’s word to us is, “I’m hopelessly devoted to you”. Every love song is on its way to becoming a psalm.

The good word about God – God’s own eulogy – is the beginning and the end of the good word to be said about us.