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Epiphany 4
28/1/2024

1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Psalm 111
Mark 1:21-28

New Testament references to demons or evil spirits are something of an embarrassment to many modern Christians. Reading the NT today, it is very difficult to get out of our heads the kinds of images deposited in our cultural memory by movies like the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist: the innocent victim, shaking beds, projectile vomit, and 360-degree head turns. Is this what the Bible means when it speaks of the demonic?

In the movies, demon possession is straightforward and moralistic: human person = goodie, possessing demon = baddie; human person = free agent, demon = enslaving agent. The drama is resolved when the baddie is finally dealt with, with the implication that the exorcised victim can now return to her fundamental, free self.

But the exorcisms in the New Testament are stories of the liberation of people who find themselves not only possessed but inextricably so. And the emphasis must fall on inextricably, because while we typically imagine clear distinctions between the demon and the possessed person, the stories themselves show how the spirit and the person become intertwined and confused, to the extent that it is not really clear where the person and the demon each begin and end, because they are so tightly wrapped up in each other.

Listen again to the first part of today’s reading:

^1.23 Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, ²⁴ and he cried out, “What have you to do with us…I know who you are.”

While it probably sounds straightforward, in fact it’s not at all clear who is speaking here. If it is the man who cries out, “what have you to do with us”, why the “us” which seems to include the man himself with the demon? And who then is the “I” who knows who Jesus? Here, and even more so in another exorcism story later in Mark’s gospel (5.6ff) we see a slippage between the identity of the man and the identity of that which possesses him, such that the one is addressed, but the other answers, but the one answering seems to speak also for the other.

The demons of the New Testament, then, are far more dangerous than those of the horror movie. If all a demon can do is throw you into convulsions and twist your head 360 degrees on your shoulders then, by comparison with what the gospels describe, you’ve really nothing to worry about(!). This can still be treated, at least on the terms of the movie – a magic spell, or the right prayer.

The biblical notion of the demonic allows no neat separation of the powers which possess and the person possessed by them – it is no clear where to punch. To understand what Mark has to say about powers is to see more (and less) clearly than the simplistic demonologies of the movies and of contemporary politics and moral discourse. The powers which possess us also create us. I am not simply extractable from all which has happened to me. Christian faith, then, is about learning hard it is to see clearly here. There is no “me” who exists independently of the things which have formed me or oppress me; we and our demons are not easily prised apart.

For most of us, of course, our identity- and freedom-blurring “possessions” are much less stand-out dramatic than that of the man in the synagogue in Capernaum or of little Regan in The Exorcist. But they are there, and they are powerful. The catastrophe of Palestine is one of the deepest demonic possession – possession by millennia of oppression of the Jews by Christians, leading to both the Nazis’ “Final Solution” and the apparent necessity of the Jews’ own solution – the State of Israel. But history possesses us to a profound depth, and so the solution of a Jewish state has been only a partial solution and led to its own demonic possession: hundreds of thousands of people now living as refugees in their own country, victims of a state which must now make them safe again, for the state’s own safety.

Closer to home, we might think of the increasing tensions around colonisation, recognition and reconciliation. This cannot be “fixed”: we cannot undo the past, cannot exorcise contemporary experience of what has been done, and a political system like ours seems to be particularly ill-equipped to help the nation forward here, not least because we are increasingly that kind of democracy in which contrarianism is thought to be the best political strategy.

And yet closer to home again – on the personal level – we cannot stop being the person to which this or that happened, or who did this or that eternally regrettable thing. We cannot be exorcised of our history, and yet we are called still to live.

This is the realism of the gospel, although perhaps it also seems to be the pessimism of the gospel. Yet this pessimistic realism is a necessary preamble to the good news, and what causes the response of the people to Jesus in the synagogue: here is a teaching with authority, and not what we have been used to. The authority has nothing to do with whether Jesus has a deep voice, penetrating eyes or a convincing argument. Rather, he speaks in such a way as to become “author” of those he addresses. Jesus expresses here a truth which is not merely true but which resonates and defines, which identifies and moves. Here is a surgeon who understands what we are, who can separate flesh and bone, who perceives what matters and inhabits what is wrong, to heal it.

The truth of this is in faith’s conviction that the catastrophe of the crucifixion of Jesus becomes God’s blessing. Here, when most clear-sighted, the people of God are most wrong. To be sure we are so right, and yet to be so wrong, is to be possessed by powers such that we cannot know where we end and the powers begin. This is not to say that the devil made us crucify Jesus – for we did it ourselves – but we could not but do it and cannot now undo it. What can save us in such circumstances? What can undo the disastrous effects of the necessary establishment of a Jewish state, the ongoing impact of unavoidable colonisation, or the big mistakes we might have made in our lives and cannot undo?

There is nothing to fix such things in the simple way we would like, because such a “fixing” imagines that there is an evil spirit which is not properly part of the machine and we just need an exorcist to clear it out and all will be well again.

Only grace can make a real change here. Only grace can both know the truth about what I am and love me, nonetheless. Only grace can take the body of an innocent man and make of it the sign of forgiveness – true forgiveness in the form of the sin forgiven.

There are many things which possess us in the manner of demons – mostly without the thrashing and screaming, but nonetheless falsely assuring us or accusing us. To be called into the kingdom of this God is to be invited into understanding the true nature of the kingdoms within which we already live, the powers to which we are already subject, our com‑plicity – our interweaving – with those powers and our incapacity to extract a pure “us” from all that has happened to us.

But to be called into the kingdom of this God is also to hear a promise that, despite all which seems to envelop us, despite all which makes us less than we hoped to be, despite the seeming impossibility of wholeness, there is one who speaks our name with authority and so authors us: who calls us to be, and makes possible that we might yet be more.

Let us, then, despite the demonic darkness which looms and threatens to crush, listen for the voice of Jesus: come to me, and live.

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Epiphany 3
21/1/2024

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

Satirists use humour to point their fingers at our culture and our strange or misguided behaviour.  An example of this is Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift that pointed the finger at his 18^th century culture exposing its pomposity, the decadence of its political institutions and the brutishness of humankind among the creatures of earth.

The writer of the story of Jonah was a satirist. When we remember this, the story he tells makes a lot more sense. We were probably first told the story as if it were history, so we got all hung up on the problem of Jonah being swallowed by the fish who delivered him back to where he started. Nobody told us the story of Gulliver’s Travels as if it were history, so we never had any problems with the improbably small and large people and the creatures that he met.

Satirists often use humour, certainly that has been an indispensable feature of modern satire. The writer of Jonah may have been using humour – it’s hard for us to tell because humour is so culturally conditioned. In Jesus’ day it looks a bit as if humour was based on exaggeration. Apparently the idea of a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle was hilarious. Maybe Jonah is good for a bit of a laugh, what with there being a fish big enough to swallow a man and it taking three days to walk to the middle of the great city of Ninevah when archaeological evidence shows it was about three miles across. There is an appearance from a fast-growing Bodhi tree that might have been quite funny too.

I think the funniest thing about this story is that a preacher with the worst of all possible attitudes planted himself in the middle of town and delivered the shortest and worst sermon in all of history and the everyone from the king to the kitchen cat repented in sack cloth and ashes. My colleagues and I are obviously doing something very wrong on Sunday mornings.

We don’t really know if or why Jonah was funny, but we do know why it is satirical. We know why some people would have squirmed when they heard this story. The story of Jonah was probably written about the same time as the story of Ruth. Both stories addressed a similar issue. I used to enjoy reading back issues of Punch. Punch, of course, was the source of satire. It had wonderful cartoons, but they only made sense, or were in any way funny if you knew your history.

Jonah makes sense when we know our history. The story was told at a time when Jerusalem was resettled after the Babylonian captivity. Hundreds of people had returned from exile after Persia came to power. They were setting up a new community and they obviously had high hopes for their society, and they wanted to establish it on the highest principles. They looked to the Torah given them by God through Moses where there were places that urged them to be pure and holy just as God is holy. One way to be clean was to refrain from contact with what is unclean. Laws therefore forbade touching dead things and eating certain kinds of food. Special rituals were prescribed for becoming clean again. One way of becoming unclean was by contact with Gentiles – mixing with people for whom Yahweh was not their God. All this was extremely praiseworthy and high minded, but it presented a very serious problem for many of the returned exiles. While they had been in Babylon they had not been so puritanical and had intermarried with the local population. Many of the returned exiles had brought their Gentile wives with them. Because their wives were Gentile their children were also Gentile. One’s Jewishness is determined by one’s mother. This became an issue of debate and contention because there was a strong push from some powerful leaders to purify the race by having the foreign wives and children returned to Babylon – a form of ethnic cleansing.

The story of Jonah is a satire in that it sets out to challenge the prevailing piety, into looking again at what God is like. If you are to be holy as God is holy then look at how God’s holiness differs from the kind of holiness you are trying to live up to.

Jonah was told by God to preach to the evil foreigners of Ninevah. Instead he chose to travel in the opposite direction away from Ninevah and away from God, forgetting Yahweh is God of all creation, of storms and fish. There is no escape from God and God brought him back. So Jonah went and preached his short boring sermon – “in 40 days Ninevah will be overthrown.” Then the whole lot of them repented in the hope that God would turn his wrath from them. This is exactly what Jonah was afraid of and it got right up his nose. Jonah was the kind of puritanical fundamentalist who believed that bad people need to be punished and that the sign of a good person was one who keeps his word. All that is proper on earth has come seriously unstuck when God says he is going to destroy a whole bunch of bad people – well that’s OK, but what isn’t OK is when the bad people become good people and God changes his mind and goes soft on them. As far as Jonah is concerned some of God’s least endearing qualities are his mercy and steadfast love and graciousness.

The story of Jonah is satire because it is told to people who were just like Jonah in their pietistic fundamentalism. The story of Jonah is still satire because there are still pietistic fundamentalists who see the world in black and white, in good and bad, in reward and punishment. It is a pietism that is incapable for being gracious as God is gracious. It can have no mercy.

One of the reasons I think the story of Jonah has won favour in the Christian church is because it rubbishes the same kind of hardline attitudes that Jesus attacked in the pious leadership of his day. Jesus was found most often among the sick and the lost and the rascals and they saw in him the mercy and graciousness of God himself and it made a difference.

Hymn of Frederick Faber

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Epiphany 2
14/1/2024

Genesis 28:10-17
Psalm 139
John 1:43-51

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

The greatest question which confronted the disciples of Jesus, and the first Christians was this: Who is this Jesus? The arguments – for they split the Church – were frequently around whether he was a man, a fully human being – or God. If both, then How? All four Gospels are peppered with the debate but not least John’s and this opening chapter. The initial phase of the discussion came to an interim conclusion in the 5^th Century at the Councils of Nicaea, Chalcedon and Constantinople, all of which are foundational documents of the Uniting Church (!).

I’d love to say more, but instead I will concentrate on today’s reading from John – however, we must not forget that we are only a handful of verses away from that magnificent opening which can be summarised in v. 14 as ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us … and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth’.  The second part of the chapter is thus a bit of a disappointment.

Jesus comes to Galilee – on his own initiative. He meets Philip and says, ‘Follow me’.  In the next sentence, we listen, with some surprise, as Philip says to Nathanael, ‘We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.’ Now that is quite a rapid learning curve. So far, John has told us that the titles of Rabbi and Messiah (1: 36,38) have been used by John the Baptist and the disciples Peter and John, but not that one, nor ‘Son of God’ or ‘King of Israel’ which Nathanael is about to supply.

But Philip wasn’t there – he was not even a disciple until this moment. He seems to think that being ‘the son of Joseph of Nazareth’ is important, and Nathanael treats that with a scornful ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ So this is a constructed tale to draw us all into that long-debated question. I don’t mean that John is trying to trick us – he is as much without guile as Nathanael! And this is where Jesus gives a really intriguing answer, and it’s what I want to explore. ‘Guile’ in the KJV is translated ‘deceit’ in NRSV, ‘an Israelite without guile’, so Jesus is rather nicely inviting us to share Nathanael’s doubt. And John underlines it in that, only in his Gospel, and 26 times there, is Jesus recorded as saying ‘Amen, Amen’, twice; ‘Truly, truly’. It indicates that what follows is of great importance.

‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ (Jn 1:51)

Which takes the alert bible student to the ancient patriarch perhaps most characterised by guile and deceit, Jacob:

Jacob had just cheated his blind old father to give him the birthright which belonged to his slightly old twin (Esau, the hairy man), and fled from his brother’s rage under the excuse provided by their mother, that he should find a wife. Now he is out in the wilderness, a long way from anywhere, and exhausted by more than travel.  He lays down to sleep with his head on a stone. (In Egypt, I actually saw a camel driver doing just that.) Unsurprisingly, it produced a dream.

He saw (Gen. 28:2) a ladder ‘set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven’ and there was a lot of angelic traffic on it. A wonderful image. The Coptic ikon on our front cover looks more like a (down?) escalator. The next verse has Jacob turn and see ‘the LORD’ (the sacred name, not just any god) standing beside him, at its foot. Jacob had thought he was at a distance from home far enough not to meet his God. And not only was God there, feet on the earth, but God then promised him all this land that he’d slept on it be his own, for ‘the families of the earth’ for flourish in. Then he woke up.

And he memorably declared, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’

This was a ‘mountain-bottom’ experience and somewhat against normal religious expectations. Was not God on the top of Mount Horeb/Sinai?  But Moses had first met God far away at a burning bush. Did not Elijah seek God on the same mountain, and did he see God in earthquake and fire? And the apostles wanted to build tabernacles for Elijah and Moses on Mount Tabor to keep Jesus with them? And Jesus sent them down to the plain.

Well, Jacob built a cairn of stones and called it a house of God, a Beth-el.

And within a few kilometres there were other such sacred cairns, and shrines. There was one at Dan, another at Shiloh (where Samuel was), until Moses put the broken stones of the Ten Commandments in a box – and God dwelt there under a tent for a long time, until it came to Jerusalem. Then Solomon built the grandaddy of all Temples there.

I sometimes wonder why it is that we don’t remember God’s reaction to Solomon’s ornate designs for the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple’s grand dedication: ‘Who asked you to build me a House?’ said God. That Temple, or what remains of it, is a building still fraught with significance in our time.  The most likely site for Bethel is now in the occupied West Bank, 5 km from Ramullah. (We wish our Foreign Minister, our fellow Uniting Church member, Penny Wong a fruitful outcome of her visit there this week.)

Is it any wonder that the Scripture is full of warnings about sacred places? I know several, and visit them, but they are such places because they have been where generations of the faithful have knelt where, as the poet T. S. Eliot wrote, ‘prayer has been valid.’

Is God at the top or the bottom of the ladder? The biblical view is: Yes and No. All ground is not holy. God is at both ends of the ladder and at neither.

Three quotations to illuminate my point:

From my former Anglican colleague Andrew McGowan:

‘…[in John] the true Israelite, without guile, bears true witness to the king of Israel here. And in time, like Jacob, he will see the “house of God and gate of heaven” (Gen 28:17), but understand these are not a place, but a person.’

That is the basic meaning of the one title Jesus seems to accept: ‘Son of Man’.

Former Presbyterian and Church of South India bishop, Leslie Newbiggin [The Light Has Come, 22-3]:

Jesus is ‘the place of God’s dwelling, the place where God is no longer hidden behind the vault of heaven, but where there is actual revelation, actual traffic between the [human] world and the world of God.’

And Lutheran liturgical scholar, Gordon Lathrop [Holy Ground, 47] has:

‘In him is the gate of heaven, the awesome place, the holy presence beside the poor and the wretched.  What humanity has hoped for in shrines and temples is found in an utterly new way in him.’

And, I promise you, in this place, in this service of Word and Sacrament, Jesus, Child of God and child of Mary (as the Chalcedon Council said), meets us, today.

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Baptism of Jesus
7/1/2024

Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

It’s a challenge for those living in 21^st century Australia to grasp the impact of Mark’s Gospel upon its original audience. It’s been suggested that Mark’s original audience was a Christian community in Rome during the middle decades of the first century of the common era. One of the most prominent events in that period was a Jewish rebellion against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, with Rome responding by destroying the Jewish Temple in 70CE. This historical setting is the context in which Mark writes an innovative piece of literature, probably sent as a letter, to clarify the significance of a man who’d been crucified a few decades before. In his opening words, Mark recalls how this man, Jesus, had travelled from Nazareth to be baptized in the river Jordan. Mark describes is thus: ‘And just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

Any Jews in Mark’s original audience would be astounded by this, surely recalling the pleading words of the prophet in Isaiah 64: ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.’ Mark declares that Isaiah’s plea has been answered in the most extraordinary way, not as God arrives at the head of a heavenly army to vanquish the foes of his people, but rather as Jesus is baptized by John and driven into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. Mark stresses the sense in which the baptism of Jesus is a commissioning for his vocation of self-giving love and service. This is what baptism means for Jesus, and it sets the pattern for those who follow him.

The church declares Holy Communion and Baptism to be sacraments, because they proclaim the grace and truth of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Uniting Church Basis of Union says this about the sacraments: ‘The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ has commanded his Church to proclaim the Gospel both in words and in the two visible acts of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Christ himself acts in and through everything that the Church does in obedience to his commandment: it is Christ who by the gift of the Spirit confers the forgiveness, the fellowship, the new life and the freedom which the proclamation and actions promise; and it is Christ who awakens, purifies and advances in people the faith and hope in which alone such benefits can be accepted.’ (BoU, para 6)

And the Basis of Union provides the following commentary about baptism: ‘The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ incorporates people into his body by Baptism. In this way he enables them to participate in his own baptism, which was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and burial, and which was made available to all when, risen and ascended, he poured out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Baptism into Christ’s body initiates people into Christ’s life and mission in the world, so that they are united in one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy, in one family of the Father of all in heaven and earth, and in the power of the one Spirit.’ (BoU, para 7)

Note the description of who is active in baptism: it is Christ who incorporates people into his body, enabling them through the gift of the Holy Spirit to participate in his death and resurrection. And note the purpose of baptism: it initiates people into Christ’s life and mission in the world, so that they are united in one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy, in one family of the Father of all in heaven and earth, and in the power of the one Spirit. This is why the Ephesian disciples, mentioned in Acts 19, are baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. They’d received the baptism of John as a sign of their desire to turn to God, but they’d not yet been commissioned for the ministry of Jesus Christ. They’d not yet been identified with Christ by being buried with him and raised with him.

In the same way, baptism commissions us to love and serve God through the power of the same Spirit. Martin Luther, the 16th century church reformer, once said that there’s no greater comfort than baptism. In the midst of his own experience of affliction and anxiety, he comforted himself by repeating, ‘I am baptized! I am baptized!’, a mantra that affirmed his belonging to God through Jesus Christ. Note that Luther does not say, I was baptised, but I am baptised. Baptism is not merely something that happened to us in the past, often when we were so young that we can’t even remember it. Baptism is a present reality in the here and now that is saturated with divine presence and power.

Our formation as disciples of Jesus Christ is no genetic certainty or accident of birth, but rather depends on the practice of a particular identity that both signifies and conveys the favour of God. Consider how our relationships form identity. When we make an introduction, it’s common to say, this is my spouse, or this is my child, or this is my friend. It’s interesting that the structure of these words implies possession or ownership. Linguistically, to say that a person is my spouse, or my child, or my friend does seem to suggest that I own them, because the word ‘my’ is derived from the word ‘mine’, which implies possession. But, of course, that’s not what is intended. What I mean when I call a person my spouse, or my child, or my friend is that I share with each of them a particular relationship. My spouse and I share in the intimacy of marriage, my child and I share in a familial relationship, and my friend and I share in mutual affection and interests. In each relationship, there’s a sense of reciprocity – I am my spouse’s husband, my child’s father, and my friend’s friend. I belong to them, just as they belong to me, and this mutual belonging both creates and affirms our identity.

We share more with Mark’s original audience than we might imagine, for we too seek to belong to Christ crucified and risen. In our world, imperial power takes various forms: Presidents of some nations are elected for life, and others secure tenure by silencing or eliminating opposition;

• Naked military aggression is dressed up in nationalist propaganda to defend against fictitious foes;
• Innocent, defenceless, non-combatants are killed by those who claim that existential threats justify collateral damage;
• Populist governments appeal to the basest of human instincts and fears, propping of their power on the back of empty promises to wreak havoc on justice and peace;
• Wealthy individuals and corporations determined to minimize and evade fair and responsible taxation;
• Our fragile planet’s resources plundered and its species depleted.

In the midst of unaccountable power that threatens human flourishing, we can read Mark’s Gospel just as his original audience did – as those who hold to a strange hope in a man who travelled from Nazareth to be baptized in the river Jordan and immersed into the mission of God’s love. Jesus invites us to belong to him and to derive from him a baptismal identity that speaks to us of God’s favour: ‘You are my beloved child. With you, I am well pleased.’ To the God of all grace, who has called us to eternal glory in Christ, be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.