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Pentecost 13
27/8/2023

Exodus 1:8-2:10
Psalm 124
Matthew 16:13-20

Sermon preached by Chris Booth

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I think that what we have head in our reading from Exodus is a story of new life flourishing in the midst of death. It starts off by setting the scene: the people of Israel are living in Egypt, but a king has risen to power who does not remember Joseph. He doesn’t remember Joseph, the Israelite slave who became one of the most powerful people in Egypt, who brought his people into Egypt so they could survive the famine and find a homeland. This king doesn’t remember Joseph. And yet he rules using Joseph’s methods. Joseph was a shrewd ruler, buying up all the grain on behalf of the king, because he knew that a famine was coming. When the people came asking for grain Joseph made them sell their land so they could eat, then made them sell themselves into slavery. If we’ve just read straight from Genesis into Exodus, it’s hard not to hear that this new king is doing the same kind of thing. When he notices the Israelites, another nation living among the Egyptians, he feels afraid, and so he enslaves them – and puts them to work building storage cities for storing up wealth.

The king is worried that these foreign people living among the Egyptians cannot be trusted – that they might rise up and join Egypt’s enemies in the event of a war. And he becomes more and more afraid, because enslaving them and putting them to work at hard labour has not made him feel any more safe. In fact he now feels like there are even more of them and they’ve spread to every corner of the country. Everywhere he looks he sees a potential threat. And so he feels he has to treat them more harshly, forcing them to work harder and harder.

It seems the king feels particularly threatened by Israelite men, and so he goes to Shiphrah and Puah, who serve as midwives to the Israelite women, and he tells them to kill all of the Israelite boys as soon as they are born – commanding them to participate in genocide against their own people. The thinking would be not just that there would eventually be no young Israelite men for the king to be afraid of, but also that this would mean young Israelite women would need to find Egyptian men to start families with, and this would dilute Israelite identity. This is the same kind of thinking that informed policies of removing Indigenous children from their families in these lands that we now call Australia. An attempt to erase culture and identity.

The king does not appear to be afraid of women, or suspect that women might conspire against him… He may be the most powerful man in the land… but he knows nothing about childbirth… Perhaps he’s never been present at the birth of a child. And so Shiphrah and Puah are able to take advantage of this power that they have, the knowledge of bringing life into the world. And so they disobey his orders, they are able to make something up, and he has no idea, he can’t question it because he knows nothing about birth. And they manage to do it in a way that messes with the fears and prejudices that are swirling around in his head, the fears about Israelites being stronger than Egyptians – able to give birth in a flash, before a midwife can even get there. The king may think he has the power to kill, but Shiphrah and Puah are more shrewd in their protection of new life. And it seems that God is pleased with them. God blesses them in their trickery, in their conspiracy to protect the lives of children.

This doesn’t stop the forces of death. The king sees that the Israelites are continuing to multiply and grow stronger. And he demands that all the little Israelite boys be thrown into the river, the great river that flows down from the mountains of Ethiopia and Uganda, through Sudan, to irrigate and fertilise Egypt. This river nourishes the earth and makes life possible, but the king wants to use it to kill. Once again we are told a story of Israelite women’s resistance against genocide. The mother of one of these little boys keeps her child hidden – I don’t know how – until he’s three months old. And then, at three months, she knows she can’t hide him any longer. So she comes up with a plan that will allow her to keep her baby. She makes a basket for him made out of papyrus, makes it waterproof, basically turns it into a little boat or an ark. And she takes him down to the river in the basket, right near where the king’s daughter is bathing, and places the basket in the water, leaving him there in the river. She’s done what the king has said. Obviously, when the baby notices his mum is gone, he starts bawling, the king’s daughter hears the cries and comes and finds him. The child, Moses, is adopted into the royal family, but raised by his own mother, who ends up receiving a parenting payment to raise him. Moses ends up being raised in such a way that he knows both worlds, the world of the Israelites and the world of the Egyptians, and this prepares him to lead his people out of slavery, into freedom.

Is there somewhere that you can think of, where you have witnessed new life flourishing in the midst of death?

In the gospel reading we heard about Jesus asking the disciples who they think he is. All of their initial answers are things they’ve heard others saying, suggesting that he is someone who has somehow overcome death. Some say that he is John the Baptist, who they remember being executed by the king. Some say that he is Elijah, an ancient prophet who never died, but was whisked away to heaven. Some say that he is Jeremiah, or another long-dead prophet. All of these speculations point to Christ’s death and resurrection later in the story – as though the crowds are anticipating it without realising. And Simon Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. We aren’t told here what kind of Messiah though.

What kind of Messiah is Jesus? Jesus is the kind of Messiah who comes to us and joins us in a world where human life is fragile and resilient. We have heard this at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel. Like baby Moses, baby Jesus also risks being killed in a genocide by a paranoid king. His family flee and find refuge in Egypt, where they can raise him safely. In this story Egypt is a hospitable place, sheltering the baby Jesus and his family from harm.

In our church, and I actually believe in all the churches, there is a lot of fear about death and decline of churches. That’s a real concern, and I think we need to be present to the grief of dying. But in the midst of that, I think we also need to be present and attentive to where new life may be growing. Jesus reassures us that the gates of death will not stand against the church. As we continue our worship today and throughout the week, lets be present to the grief of death, and alert to the signs of new life springing up in the midst of death.

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Mark the Evangelist Uniting Church @ St Mary’s, North Melbourne; 24/8/23

2 Corinthians 4:16-18
Psalm 121
John 10:11-15, 27-30

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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 Jn 10¹¹ [Jesus said,] ‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

And the verse before it, which we didn’t hear:

¹⁰ ‘I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.’

When we read John’s Gospel, we are aware that it has a different scope. As we say on one of our Uniting Church prayers at the Table, ‘In time beyond our dreaming, you brought forth life out of darkness, and in the love of Christ your Son you set man and woman at the heart of your creation.’ So begins the work of the Trinity of love.

And the stories he tells are not so much about events in Jesus’s life as reflections on the meaning of that life, that death, that rising in glory from the cross. They are, as he says, ‘signs… that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’. (20:31)

One of the signs is Jesus’s testimony, ‘I am the Good Shepherd’.

You may like to have Norma’s ikon on the front of the service booklet where you can see it.

Between the 2^nd and 4^th centuries, it was the main image of God in human form, then it largely disappeared but is now universal. I suppose it was a familiar sight in ancient Palestine; indeed, there are statues from pagan times of a beardless youth with a lamb slung around his neck which might have provided a model. (Sheep in their time were smaller than ours!) I’m not good at dating sheep, but Norma’s one is, I think, still young, and Jesus – the mature Jesus with a beard – is holding it firmly.

The halo forms the shape of a cross around the head, and you can see the marks of the nails in his hands. ‘The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep’.

And since you’re looking, you can see the letters O and N, by which the icon-writers identified the principal figures. The O at the top is for ‘the’, and another O (Ω) hidden under the lamb on the left side, and N on the right, form the Greek word for ‘Being’, Existence Itself, and translates the Hebrew I AM – so there you have our text.

Jesus, after all, was not a shepherd, even when young, and on the whole in the Bible, shepherds get a pretty bad press. They may be wolves who attack the flock.  Ezekiel in particular goes to town, calling them thieves and robbers ‘who do not care for the sheep’.

But the addition of the adjective ‘Good’ to ‘Shepherd’ takes the matter right out of an agricultural context. The Roman and English traditions which paint Jesus cuddling a lamb with little children at his feet in a flowery field have missed the point. It is not meant to convey a family-friendly, sentimental image to make us feel warm inside.

At the centre of this passage is the One ‘who lays his life down for the sheep’. In all the references to shepherds throughout Scripture, none goes this far. This shepherd goes even beyond the mere ‘good’. And it is saying something else: this goodness is not human virtue; it is divine, it is of the essence of God. The combination of ‘shepherd’ and ‘good’ should have been a shock to its first hearers.

The evangelist is saying something important about Jesus. The human divisions and conflicts in the earlier verses are set aside. This shepherd knows his flock, and the word ‘know’ means to know intimately, knows every one of the flock and knows them thoroughly (or in the old use of the word, ‘throughly’, through and through). And the flock knows their shepherd, just as thoughly.

This is exactly how St John speaks of Jesus’s relationship to his Abba, Father. And he goes on to offer the same intimacy to us: ‘I know my own and my own know me, ¹⁵just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’

And amidst of the babble and noise that surrounds us – more than a shepherd ever knew – we know him by his voice.

^2’7My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.’

I looked at dozens of Good Shepherd ikons in my preparation. They come in all shapes and sizes, all comfortably settled, half-awake, gazing nowhere.

This is where Norma’s ikon has a surprise.

This is a lamb that knows, knows her keeper (Ps 121) and knows she is held. Her eye is unwaveringly intent on the Good Shepherd. I think that is a detail unique to Norma’s ikon.

For he has heard her voice too and has come, picked her up and carried her, he, the holy One, the I AM.

‘I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.’ (John 10: 28)

‘So [as St Paul wrote] we do not lose heart.’ (2 Cor. 4:16).

Into that loving, life-keeping embrace, we entrust our beloved Norma.

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Pentecost 12
20/8/2023

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
Psalm 67
Matthew 15:10-28

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In a sentence:
The love of God finds us all in the end, whoever we think we are

Dogs
Today, continuing on from the readings of the last couple of weeks, we hear another miracle story. Yet this one is different because the problem it presents is not the problem of miracles but the shock to modern sensibilities of what Jesus says (recall the scandal of the parables). The modern response here is less, “Jesus could not possibly have healed the girl,” than it is, “Jesus ought not to have said that.” “Dogs” is not a very nice way to speak about people who are different from us. Such a sentiment, then, on the lips of Jesus, is more than a little “uncomfortable”. If Jesus doesn’t jump in quickly with the mandatory celebrity apology, he risks being cancelled.

He doesn’t apologise, and if the church also can’t quite cancel Jesus, it’s common these days to imagine that here even Jesus reveals himself to be “human” – even he has things to learn. And thanks is then given to God for this courageous woman who, through her persistence, teaches Jesus an important lesson. And yet… Why is it that, in every other instance in the Gospels, Jesus is apparently always the one who understands, leads, directs, challenges and rebukes appropriately, but that just here – at an otherwise unremarkable point in the story – he drops the ball? More likely, he does not, and our gut response springs from simply seeing and hearing the wrong thing here.

What, then, is being seen and not perceived, heard and not understood, as we hear today’s story? If we attend to what in fact happens in the exchange between the woman and Jesus, we see that her faith is affirmed not because she shames Jesus but because she agrees with him: “Yes, Lord”; “Yes, Lord, a dog, and yet even the dogs gather up the crumbs from under the children’s table”.

Faith
The woman’s “Yes, Lord, and yet…” is met with Jesus’ response, “Great is your faith!” But what is this faith? It is not that Jesus could heal her daughter, otherwise her first request would already have proven her faith, and led to the healing. Her “faith” is that Yes, it is the children’s bread, and yet it is for me, too. Her faith is that she recites the promise of God that all the nations will be blessed with, or through, God’s “children”, Israel. Her faith is in the one who made this promise, and she speaks God’s promise to Jesus – with you, Jesus, crumbs are enough – and Jesus replies, Amen.

But can crumbs be enough? Not with “real” bread, which is why Hotham Mission has put much time and money into food programs and food security research. But this is not a story about bread; it is about relationship, participation and blessing. Bread is here a metaphor for these things, which is to say that these things are as essential for life as bread.

The woman’s quip about crumbs stretches the metaphor beautifully, by which she declares not “I also deserve to be fed” but rather, “So abundant is God’s provision of bread to his children that there are leftovers” – “crumbs”. (It is worth noting in passing that we’ve only just heard of a miraculous feeding, after which twelve baskets of “crumbs” were collected, and another follows today’s story, after which seven baskets are collected.)

Whereas our concern tends to be about the woman’s feelings at being called a dog, she appears in the story not as one offended by Jesus but as one confident in the quality of the bread he brings to the “children”. We are, then, not to defend her but to believe as she believes.

She believes that it is through God’s few that the many are blessed. And what does this mean, practically? How is this also our truth – for that is the only reason we might bother with it? We can perhaps drive the point home most clearly with a little “embodied” demonstration. Turn and look at the person next to you, and now say to them, “Woof!” Are we not all here “Gentile dogs”? The church – which almost completely Gentile – has its very being from the crumbs of God’s love for Israel. We forget this, of course, and in the forgetting we harden grace into law. We make ourselves the source of a blessing we can give or withhold, according to whether we think we’re dealing with children or dogs.

We here are one small part of the emergence from a blessing which took place in a particular time and place which is not our time and place. We are a part of the people of God not because God is one and loves everyone the same way. God loved someone else first, and we have been picked up along the way. Of course, in the end, it does not matter who is first and who is second, who is fed at the table and who is not, for all will be fed.

But we forget the ordering at our peril – the peril of self-righteousness – and at the peril of all to whom we might be a blessing. This is because we obscure the way God works in the world at the risk of what God actually offers. We speak so easily in the church of forgiveness but what is forgiveness if not a gift of life from outside of us, a blessing with its origin outside of us?

For‑given
And this leads us to a connection which is little short of horrifying for good-minded people such as we think we are: we can now see in our story this morning that the Canaanite woman is “for‑given” for not being a Jew.

This, of course, makes no moral sense, because morals are all about responsibility for fault, and this woman is no more responsible for her heritage than anyone could possibly be. This is why we take offence here, moralists that we tend to be. It makes no moral sense but it makes good theological sense to speak of her being “for‑given” in this way, because forgiveness is properly defined not by the fault but by the gift. And the gift is always the same: Sinner? You are mine, says God. Canaanite? Mine. Dead? Mine.

The basis upon which that extraordinary woman made her appeal to Jesus is the same basis upon which the Christian becomes a Christian in conversion, on which he confesses sin and expects to hear the absolution, on which he takes as his own the death and life of another in sharing bread and wine around a table as a source of new life.

The gift is always the same – that we are claimed by God – and it always comes from beyond us. This is why Christians are called to be lovers and givers in evangelism and the service of others. Love is not mere attraction but is, more completely, gift.

He probably didn’t, but Jesus might have said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of heaven, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a dog who licks up the crumbs under the children’s table.”

The ministry of Jesus was to feed the children, and to let the dogs in. Such love and such a flow of blessing are to be the shape of our own lives.

Let us, then, love and give, puppy to puppy, to God’s greater glory and to the richer humanity of all who still hunger for the children’s bread.

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Pentecost 11
13/8/2023

Psalm 85
Matthew 14:22-33

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In a sentence:
Though it might feel like we are falling, Jesus is a very good catch

Sur‑prise
Last Monday morning, I went down to the Curzon Street church to take some photographs of the inside of the empty buildings before the sale was finalised the next day.

It was a poignant moment, although it was no surprise that the moment would come. Standing in the empty, dusty Union Memorial Church led me to reflect that those who built the place would have been surprised at what it had come to. Reflecting further, the more I pondered the word “surprise”, the stranger it became.

For us today, “surprise” describes something which breaks in as a momentary disordering of our world, whether for good or bad. But the word comes to us from Latin through French, and has a root meaning of “over-taken”. A sur‑prise is a grasping or a seizing. To be surprised is to be captured. Perhaps it’s not surprising(!), then, to learn that the words predator, prey and reprieve are related to surprise.

Now, the problem with getting into the background of words is that we – or the preacher, at least – might be tempted to make modern words mean now what they clearly don’t. And yet, this is precisely what preaching is supposed to do. Our language, like our bread, grows stale with time. Familiarity here breeds not so much contempt as simple indifference or even ignorance – that we don’t know what we are saying. We know, of course, that our times are constantly changing. But as the times change, our language no longer works as it once did. This is particularly the case with social, political and theological language – language which gives contour to the heart of our being. We could, perhaps, invent new language, and this happens as well. But we also need to strange our language to make it not only new but vital – life-giving.

Consider hearing “surprised” as “captured”. It now becomes the case that we are always surprised because we are always captive to something. We are captive to our bodies – which kind we got and what our lifestyle and age have done to it. We are captive to fear of whatever kind presently presses in on us. We are made captives when we fall in love, to the economy we live, and to our mortality. In various ways and to various things, we are captive, we are seized, we are “sur‑prised”. This is inescapable, whether in our personal lives or in our lives together as a society or a church.

As a community, we were surprised by the problems with Union Memorial Church. We were surprised, in the ordinary sense, by the unexpected movement of the foundations. But, more profoundly, we were seized by the need to do something about it. For about 15 years, we were over‑taken – “sur‑prised” – by the problem. We could more dramatically extend this characterisation of that experience by bringing in the related predator-prey language. Were we not prey to our desires to remain in that place, and to our sense of responsibility for it, but also to the dilapidated condition of faith in contemporary society, and to the financial decisions of the wider church, and to the foibles we each brought to the process? This is not necessarily to criticise anything which happened, but only to make strange our way of talking about it. Were we not grasped – predated as prey – by things much bigger than any of us? Was this not a “sur‑prising”, a seizing, a capture?

I think that this way of talking about what we’ve been through. But it also tells us something about our present experience here, now that we have moved. For though we are now here at the CTM, it has not yet sur‑prised us, it has not yet grasped us, it does not yet hold us.

Falling
And this brings me to the problem of the moment: not yet to be held is to be falling, one of the most disorienting experiences we can have. In its own frightening way, a fall surprises us – it takes us over. We know it is happening but we can’t do anything about it. We have to ride a fall – we have to ride nothingness – to the ground, until the ground captures us again, and not usually very gently.

At last, then let us look to our reading from Matthew this morning. Out on the water, the disciples are seized, surprised, overtaken by the wind and the waves, and there appears in the midst an impossible thing which seizes them more tightly in their fears. It beckons to them but they don’t believe, and so Peter proposes a test: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus replies, “Come.” So Peter gets out of the boat and starts walking on the water toward Jesus. But he notices the strong wind, becomes frightened, begins to sink, and cries out, “Lord, save me!”

We here have stepped out of a boat on the high seas, imagining that it is better to respond to Jesus’ command than to let the ship suck us down. Perhaps some of us have also done this in some way in our own lives. But, having disembarked,  there is a lot of water to cross before we get to him, before we are held again. And in that space, it is as if we are abandoned: Lord, is that you? Is this you? Or have you forsaken us? (We might note here, in passing, that Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross is just such a “crossing of the water”).

“Lord, save me!” Peter cries, and Jesus reaches out and seizes him and says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” But doubt what? Doubt that water can hold us up? No. Christian faith doesn’t believe that, with enough faith, we could walk on water. We believe rather that, though we are falling, Jesus is a good catch.

Caught
No small part of the life of faith – in fact, of any life – is waiting to be caught in God’s secure hands as we take a step away from what can no longer sustain us into some new sur‑prising. Faith is living in the expectation that we will be caught, that we will be surprised by the embrace of God. Of course, we work hard most of the time to ensure we don’t fall; this is what strategies, planning and training are all about.

But falling is inevitable, and once it happens, we can only let it happen. If we are falling then, the only question is whether we think we will be caught, or come crashing to the ground.

In terms of the gospel story, we ride the fall waiting for the hand of Jesus to grasp us by the wrist and drag us waist-deep through the fearful nothingness to himself, to God.

If this is what we believe, our present and unavoidable finding-again of ourselves in a new place is not the end of the story but a necessary thing if we are to discover God again and anew.

We once had to “lean into” the decision to move here; with Peter, we started walking on the water.

Now that we are here on the water let us again lean into what this surprising God will do to make this time and place ours, and to remake us for this place and time.