The Voice to Parliament

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Lent 5
26/3/2023

John 11:1-45

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In a sentence:
More than life after death, the gift of God is life before death

Over the last few weeks we have watched as different characters have bumped into Jesus, and made their responses. Today, we meet two sisters, friends of Jesus, who grieve for their dead brother. We easily identify with the sister Martha, who has the most to say in the story. We know what is it like to lose someone we have loved. We know that pathos-filled longing: if only Jesus/God/whoever had been here, this might not have happened. Believers also know what it’s like to have the religious words for the occasion but for those words not to make a lot of sense in the context of loss and grief.

Like us, Martha made her confessions of faith: Jesus is the ‘Son of God’, ‘Messiah’ and ‘the one coming into the world’. The piteous edge is also here, as if Martha knows what she should say to Jesus because he is Jesus, but also knows that it doesn’t really hang together.

And yet, although she doesn’t even seem to think that she could have her brother back again, he is raised. Unlike for us, her faith-words become real in her being able to embrace Lazarus again. If this is how it happened, then we may rejoice for Martha, but our situation and ability to believe is not made any easier. We have similar doctrines to those Martha confesses which, as mere words, are easy to parrot and yet often have about them an air of unreality. Yet it seems that, in addition to those doctrines, we here and now have added the apparent invitation to believe what happened to Martha. What was doubtless a marvellous thing for Martha’s faith becomes, for us, just another thing we have to believe. Good news which is someone else’s good news is not really all that good for us! Martha’s abundance here is a scarcity to us. Do we not long for such miracles now?

And yet, at the risk of absurdity, there nothing particularly marvellous about the raising of Lazarus in itself, in one way of looking at it. Of course, it would be a surprising and remarkable thing to happen! But Lazarus will die again; indeed a plot by the religious leaders against Lazarus’ life is recounted in the next few verses. Grief has given way to joy, but only for a while. Martha or Mary or some other will again stand outside Lazarus’ tomb and grieve.

If all that happens is that Lazarus is resuscitated, then it is not enough. John’s point in telling the story is deeper. For the raising of Lazarus is not something for us to ‘believe’ as a sheer fact about a past event. Those extraordinary words, ‘Lazarus, come out’, are the same words which were spoken in last week to the man healed of his blindness: ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ (9.35). They are the same words spoken in the week before to the Samaritan woman by the well: ‘those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty’ (4.14) They are the same words spoken to Nicodemus (the week before that): ‘You must be born from above’ (3.6).

But there’s a difference here, in that while Jesus is turned towards the stinking tomb, he speaks as much to Martha as he does to the dead man. The lectionary epistle reading which complemented last week’s gospel ended with a quote, possibly referencing Isaiah 60.1:

‘Sleeper, awake,
rise from the dead
and Christ will shine on you’

Jesus’ words to the dead man, ‘Lazarus come out’ are just these words, yet spoken not only to Lazarus but also to Martha: ‘Awaken and rise, for Jesus shines upon you as the Christ’. More important than that a man who lived and died might live a little longer is that life might be breathed into those dead who are still breathing, entombed in a dark world. Martha is such a one, as is Mary, and as are we. We are distracted by the reported miracle of the raising of Lazarus, but that (like last week) is not the main point. Just as miraculous is the possibility that faith – and not just orthodoxy’s correct religious words – might be resurrected in Martha. As Lazarus is roused from ‘sleep’ (v.11f) so also is Martha called to faith. They are, in the story, both addressed with the same word. The story is told, then, not to suggest that we will believe all the more strongly in Jesus if he should raise one of our dead. The point is that we – still living – are dead with Lazarus, and Jesus would raise even us.

And so we need to be explicit about one further thing. Lazarus comes forth, not as a basis of Martha’s faith, not as a reason for her belief, but as the sign of what it means to come to confess Jesus as ‘Messiah’, and ‘Son of God’, and ‘the one coming into the world’, as she did earlier in the story (v.27). Or to put it differently, the point of the story is not that, by raising Lazarus, Jesus proves to Martha that her doctrines about him are true.[1] If that were the point then the point would be pointless(!), for it leaves us with nothing but a story about what happened to someone else, and implies that we couldn’t come to belief a without similar spectacle.

It is interesting – and even surprising – that, despite the lament of Martha and her sister, we don’t actually hear of their response to the raising of Lazarus. Perhaps it is obvious, at the personal and emotional level. Yet the whole exchange has not been about grief and joy, not about loss and restoration, but about unbelief and belief. Jesus rebukes Martha when she protests at the opening of the tomb: ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’ There is a promise made here to the faithful – ‘believing is seeing’ (which is not ‘seeing is believing’).

But we should push this a step further: to believe is not simply to see that glory, but more significantly to become, the glory of God. The human person unbound by death – whether our own or the death of those we love – such a person is ‘the glory of God’. This is what Jesus means when he declares, ‘Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die (11.25f)’. The hearts of such faithful ones will one day stop beating, but such death is as nothing(…) to those who are truly alive. It is the same Jesus who challenges Martha as calls out to Lazarus, and this challenge and call are the same – Sleeper, awake; stop being dead, for Christ shines upon you.

Lazarus, then, becomes the archetypal person of faith by making the faithful response to the call of God in Christ, awakening from his ‘sleep’. Lazarus is the true believer. His faithful response to Christ’s command models what should be Martha’s, and ours: to rise, to shine, to bask in the glory of the God who called us forth, and to become that glory in a world which cries out desperately, ‘Lord, if you had been here, death would have had no sting.’

Sleepers, awake; stop being dead, and become the glory of the God, which is the Body of Christ alive, dead and alive again.

[1] It’s worth noting that immediately following the undisputed ‘fact’ of the raising of Lazarus there is not only belief but also unbelief – not in the resuscitation of Lazarus but in Jesus – which results in a renewed vigor in the plot to kill Jesus. At the same time, v.46 goes on to speak of ‘many of the Jews’ who saw what happened subsequently coming to faith. The miracle is apparently the catalyst of their believing. Nevertheless, the miracle which is offered to us today is not the event which might stand behind this story but faith in the declaration that Jesus rouses life in the living dead.

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Lent 4
19/3/2023

Psalm 23
John 9:1-42

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In a sentence:
To be seen by God is to be freed from the things we think we see

For the modern, scientifically-informed mind, a miracle constitutes a very particular problem: the violation of the ‘natural order’.

Faced with the claim that a miracle has occurred, the first modern response will typically be that the observation is wrong: what looked like a miracle was, in fact, not one at all. So, for example, a blindness or lameness ‘miraculously’ healed is explained as the releasing of the person from a psychosomatic condition through clever therapy. Certainly, some of the miracles attributed to Jesus have been accounted for in this way, casting him as a gifted therapist (in the modern sense).

If no particular explanation can be given for the miracle, we don’t immediately conclude that, indeed, God has been active. Instead, we are more likely to assume that our theories about how the world works are not yet extensive enough to cover all observed phenomena. This is no great crisis and is often the cause of great excitement as new scientific questions are opened up. In this way, we deal with the amazing and the (currently) unexplained by simply deferring understanding until more comprehensive theories are found. An apparent miracle would speak to the modern mind less about God’s power and more about our ignorance of the deeper workings of the world.

The point here is not to argue that miracles do not or cannot happen. For our present purposes, we can be happily agnostic about this. The point is that it would almost be a waste of God’s time for God to bother with miracles these days because we have built-in means of explaining them away. We are very, very hard to impress!

Of course, the people in our focus text from John are not modern scientific thinkers. This does not mean, however, that they were fools. The Pharisees are the lead sceptics in the story, and they are rightly sceptical: the blind man’s story is not easily believable. Yet their investigation leads to them being unable to deny that something has happened which has all the feel of a miracle. To them, as would not be necessary for the modern mind, this implies the presence of God in or through the one who has done this.

Yet there is another dimension to their reading of this particular miracle which we do not usually feel today. While they cannot deny that something extraordinary has happened – and that this might well be a sign of God’s own presence and activity – it seems that this alleged work of God has occurred in a way which violates God’s own command. This is the reason for the controversy around Jesus’ having done this on the Sabbath.

We must forget here that we have heard from Jesus in another gospel tradition – that ‘the Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath.’ In John’s account, Jesus appeals to no happy humanism to justify what he has done. In fact, he quite simply does not justify what he has done. Whereas in the other Gospels Jesus often engages in arguments and proofs of his point with his opponents, in John’s gospel we don’t hear these arguments so much as simply see the disorienting impact Jesus has on those who meet him; their ‘sense of sense’ is undermined. There is no justification given here for Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath but only the confusion of the Pharisees, echoing Nicodemus’ exclamation a couple of weeks ago, ‘How can these things be’? The miracle points towards Jesus as important, but its performance on the Sabbath points away from him.

Part of the reason Christians might not feel what the Pharisees feel is that we have heard this story. We ‘know’ what the Pharisee does not know: the perspective of the gospel, that Jesus is in the right and they are not. In the same way, we know what the woman at the well did not know (last week, John 4), and what Nicodemus did not know (two seeks ago, John 3). They all effectively ask ‘How can it be?’ regarding things which seem easy for us. We ‘know’ of the wind-like character of the people of the Spirit (which Nicodemus did not). We know of worship in spirit and truth (which the Samaritan woman at the well did not), and we know about the Sabbath in Jesus’ teaching, which the Pharisees seem not to know. It is given to us who read these stories and have been formed by them to ‘know’, to ‘see’.

Yet all of this brings us to a consideration of where today’s Gospel text ends.

³⁹Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ ⁴⁰Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘surely we are not blind, are we?’ ⁴¹Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains.

Do we, in fact, see – simply because we have the benefit of having overheard Jesus’ clash with the Pharisees? Can we know? In a relative sense, this must be the case. We go to a mechanic because he knows cars, to a doctor because she knows bodies, and to accountants because they know money. But in the gospel story, the knowing and seeing are of the absolute variety: the knowledge of God and so the true knowledge of ourselves. In this instance, the Pharisees’ knowledge of God cannot accommodate Jesus because he exercises a freedom which seems to violate God’s command: he makes no ‘sense’. And because of this, nothing of what they know and by which they make judgements about the things of God amounts to anything. Your sin remains, Jesus says: you say you see, but you do not see, and so God is lost to you.

There is a kind of pessimism to be read from this story: it is as difficult to see the presence of God in the work of Jesus as it is for a man born blind to begin to see. Though their eyes and ears are open to see and hear everything that can be seen and heard, they do not see and hear.

The man who is healed in the story is, in fact, healed of two things: that which ailed him alone – his blindness – and that which he and Pharisees suffered in common: not seeing who Jesus was. His eyes begin to work as they should, and he sees the ‘Son of Man’ (9.35-37). Our reading today is only in a passing way about the healing of the eyes of a man whose eyes did not work. For the thing to see here is not eyes which now register light see but the presence of God in Jesus, which the eyes of the Pharisees both see and cannot see.

If there is a kind of pessimism in this story about our ability to see, it is met with the promise that eyes can be opened: that those born and living with what we might hesitatingly call ‘spiritual’ blindness can be healed even of that most dehumanising of conditions: seeing with only our own eyes and not as God sees. To be beginning to see as God sees – this is faith. Faith begins with knowing that we have been seen. And so faith is a kind of innocence which knows and yet does not, a humility which is open to being taught and so realises the gift of a freedom which comes from not having to know all things because God knows us, sees us and loves us. This is the true and life-giving ‘human condition’. Our condition is, properly, not what we think we see. It is not the great changes, the seemingly overwhelming challenges or the apparently insurmountable injustices. These matter, of course. But to see only things is to be limited and constrained.

To be seen by God in that space, however, is to be freed. What is the Sabbath when God is at stake? What is Curzon Street or the fraught nature of life together or the frailness of human bodies and minds? What is death or life, angels or rulers, things present or things to come, powers, height, depth, or anything else in all creation? Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8.38f).

For God. Sees. Us, so that we might see and not be afraid.

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Lent 3
12/3/2023

Romans 5:1-11
Psalm 95
John 4:5-42

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.

I recently sat in on a liturgy class. I was there to help facilitate a discussion on contemporary issues in liturgy within the context of the Uniting Church — as often happens in the best classes freewheeling discussion ensued. One of the questions that was posed was what to make of the Uniting Church President’s prayer at the death of the Queen.

I confess I had mixed feelings about the Queen’s death, and so opted to disengage from much of the mourning rituals, and reflections on her life and what she represented (both positive and negative). Nevertheless, when put on the spot, what to say?

The question came from the perspective of someone formed in a non-western context where their country has been shaped by colonisation. And accompanying this colonisation the suffering, oppression, and violence which always accompanies colonisation – and the blind eye turned to unspeakable violence.

I remember their question framed by this comment:

“When I came to Australia I did not join the Anglican Church, because I opened the Prayer Book and there was a prayer that said of the Queen, ‘may her enemies be vanquished.’ … I am her enemy.”

This is not the too often simple rejection of the Western led order of the world offered by some on the political left. This is a visceral, lived insight: some of the greatest tragedies in this person’s country happened during my parents’ lifetime.

When we pray we direct ourselves towards God. We seek after God’s presence alone. A Rabbi I once heard even described communal prayer as being “alone together.” Sat or standing before God to express our deepest selves, to express truths so deep that we must borrow the best words of our tradition, lest we simply offer sighs too deep for words. And yet whenever we pray the whole world is gathered together: we bring ourselves, and we ourselves are a bundle of the histories which have shaped us and shaped our world. The most honest prayers lay bare the world before God.

And so, it is right to ask what social, and political assumptions frame the words we pray.

This sermon is not the answer I gave in class, but perhaps it can be a contribution to taking the concerns of every one of our sisters, brothers, and siblings in the Church seriously. I am only beginning to learn that the questions asked by many in our minority cultural communities are vital for the life of the Church, because they free us from the ways our majority culture can narrow our vision of God.

What does it mean to say “Glory” in the Christian tradition? What does it mean to pray that someone may rest in peace, and rise in glory?

“We are justified by faith, we have peace with God … we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. … we boast in our afflictions … affliction produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint … God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” (Rom. 5.1-5)

In Romans chapter 5 the Apostle Paul gathers up the argument he has been making in the preceding 4 chapters. From tracing how deep the problem of sin truly is — so deep it infects everything, shapes everyone, so deep down it’s in the water table! To the gracious release that only Christ can offer us through faithfulness. All of this is gathered together in the short verses from the beginning of Romans 5, which then point to the next turn in the argument.

Paul’s point seems to be to take seriously the completeness of Jesus Christ’s salvific work, while recognising the gap between the proclamation of salvation and our tangible experience of it. If Jesus’ death has in fact released the world from the bondage of sin, then why is so much in the world still clearly marked by sin and its effects?

We might phrase this question in another way: how do we hold to the hope of resurrection when there are crucified bodies all around us?

For Paul we begin to answer this question when we recognise that the salvation achieved by Jesus Christ is not first and foremost about God’s abandonment of a world marked by suffering. Rather, salvation is our release from being shaped by the forces of sin and death, and so that we are new people in the midst of a suffering world which God is redeeming. What we inhabit is not a magical solution to all the world’s ills, as if every problem can simply be ignored or wiped clean, without the hard work of reconciliation and healing. Rather, we inhabit a new situation in which God is revealed in and through the suffering of the world, as the one who will never abandon the least or the last. We are in a new situation in which we are shaped by the outpouring of the Spirit which is transforming each of us, and the whole world.

What, then, do we boast in? We do not boast in ourselves, marked as each of us are by the painful histories of ourselves as individuals, our families in their complexity, our wider society, and the degradation of the world itself. We boast instead, says Paul, in affliction, in suffering. Not because affliction and suffering are in themselves good: by no means! We boast in affliction because it recalls us to solidarity with each person who suffers, and the whole suffering world. We boast in affliction if and when it recalls the solidarity which Jesus himself lived on behalf of all of humanity, and all of creation.

This is glory. Glory is the cross. Glory is the gathering of the whole wretched world in the afflicted person of Jesus, who represents humanity to God and receives righteousness and justification on our behalf.

So it is that to receive the glory of God means sharing in the suffering of Christ which puts on display God’s love for a wretched world. Let me be clear: when we speak of a wretched world we can never mean a world which is bad and which God seeks to abandon, a world in which we should think of ourselves as worms. When we speak of a wretched world we speak of a world in which everything is marked by a march towards death, where from our first waking moments we enter cycles of trauma, where we live in stolen land, where we are shaped by anxieties, insecurities, abuses, and disregard. What Christ gathers into himself is this world beset by tragedy, and embraces it so thoroughly that the tragedy ceases, and yet we who are formed in and by this tragedy do not cease.

This is the glory of God: who embraces the affliction of the world and forges from it a new humanity, bound together by bonds of love and not animosity. This is the glory of God: who invites us into the afflictions of the world so that we too become agents of transformation and new life. This is the glory of God: that the hard edges of the world might be cast aside, and yet not a single soul can be left out or abandoned.

Glory is being bound to each other, being stitched into the tapestry of love which gathers all of the troubled world into a new beginning. This new beginning, this rising in glory is the ongoing work of living into what is true:

We have been justified by faith, we have peace with God. May we boast in sharing in the afflictions of the world, for this is true glory, and the redemption of the cross.