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Lent 2
25/2/2024

Genesis 17:1-10,12,15-19
Psalm 22
Mark 8:27-38

With the arrival of Jesus the messiah, almost nothing changes. But the “almost” matters.

Most of us know today’s gospel passage pretty well: from the lips of Peter, Jesus has just heard a declaration of his being the messiah, and now begins to speak of his approaching passion. And Peter rebukes Jesus, only to be rebuked himself.

Our familiarity with the story comes knowledge of how the exchange is to be understood, which runs something like this: the Jews expected the arrival of God’s messiah, but the idea that the messiah would suffer and be rejected as Jesus described was beyond the Pale. On this reading, the lesson is that the church now knows what the Jews then did not: that the messiah must suffer.

And yet this just creates another problem: why must the messiah suffer? No explanation is given in this immediate text, although other parts of the NT testimony and later Christian theological reflection attempt to provide a wide range of explanations – theories of the atonement, theories of how the death of Jesus brings salvation. Most of these involve sacrificial logic, constraints on God’s power to save without blood being spilt or some other price being paid, and so on. Yet all this tends to make the purported Christian understanding of the suffering messiah worse than Peter’s much neater, all-powerful saviour. Now, instead of a mighty God with a powerful messiah who is free to get in there and to set things right, the suffering messiah seems to have created the even greater problem of a God who is tied in knots by human sin and must go through the pain suffering of crucifixion to extract us – and himself – from the burden of sin.

Of course, we don’t actually hear what it is that Peter says to Jesus. Matthew’s account of this exchange gives a little more but doesn’t explain why Peter takes offence. The best indication of what was said, and why, is shown in Jesus’ response. Perhaps surprisingly, Jesus doesn’t reassert his forthcoming suffering and death in contradiction of Peter’s rebuke. Instead, he refers to the death of Peter and those others who would be his disciples: what will happen to Jesus will also happen to Peter himself.

Noticing this opens a new way of thinking about what is at stake here. Jesus effectively tells Peter: “Yes, as you have declared, I am the messiah. But nothing much is going to change. Persecution, suffering and death will continue – for me and for you.”

And so the crisis of the text is not that – or only that – the messiah will suffer and die; it is that Jesus’ disciples will experience just the same thing. Most bluntly, the crisis is that, with the arrival of Jesus the messiah, almost nothing changes. (Again – and we’ll get there in a moment – the “almost” is crucial.)

But what kind of messiah is this? What kind of salvation is this, which involves self-denial, taking up a cross, and following the seemingly impossible path Jesus walked? It doesn’t help to invoke resurrections at this point; the gospel is not about what might happen in 10, 25, or 60 years. The gospel is a word for the world as it is, here and now. And, though Jesus mentions that he will be raised, he doesn’t add this to his account of the disciples’ own experience. He simply says, it’s going to be pretty tough for me, and for you too. But there is life in that.

We might consider last week’s reflection here for a moment. There I spoke on the volume – the sound volume – at which divine voice spoke from heaven and of Jesus’ own proclamations. The point there was that God does not shout. But there is a difficult word about the cost of discipleship in our text today. I suspect most of us experience it as a shout, if only because on hearing it, we want to cover our ears with our hands. It is challenging and confronting, and in that sense loud. But if God doesn’t shout, and there is in all this a word from God, then it is not a loud word. It is uttered gently, as an observation on the lives we live and an invitation to reflect on what those lives might be. The heart of the Christian confession is not that Jesus died; it is that he lived. He lived with us, among us, so intimately connected to us that what we are killed him. And yet it is the living which matters and not the dying because, for Jesus, the form of his death just reflected the way he lived. It was fullness of life which resulted in his crucifixion.

And this brings us finally to the “almost”: With the arrival of Jesus the messiah, almost nothing changes. That is, there might be very little change in the form of life. Peter and the wider circle around Jesus already knew persecution and suffering and death. And we’ve seen that while Peter takes offence at the notion of a suffering messiah, this is in no small part because of the prospect of his own suffering continuing: what kind of salvation could this be?

To borrow from our Lenten study book this year, it is a salvation which gives the gift of “with”. Hardship need not but suffered alone. The gospel has Jesus with us: experiencing just what we experience, and yet experiencing it against a different background, in a different key. The gift of the gospel might be described thus (and strangely): we are now able to suffer because Jesus has suffered; we are now able to die because Jesus died.

That is surely a strange thought. Most people most of the time suffer and die without obvious reference to Jesus. The difference it makes that Jesus died – if Jesus is indeed the messiah – is that the suffering and death we endure now becomes resistance against death having the last word. Jesus calls us to refuse to live under death’s shadow, as he did. We are accustomed to saying in funerals something to the effect of , “in the midst of life, death”. This is true enough as a simple observation on the normal order of things. But the gospel is a different thought: in the midst of death, life. In the midst of death, not at the end of death, not as a one-day-overcoming of death, but surrounded by death, life.

Are we not already dying – literally and metaphorically? Because this is the case, the call to self-denial and taking up our cross is not a call to more death. It is a call to begin to live in the midst of death. This is salvation, the gift of Jesus: death put to death.

Let us hear then, his call:

“Lift up your hearts.

The kingdom of God is come near.

Repent, believe, and live”.

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Christmas Day
25/12/2023

Titus 3:4-7
Luke 2:1-7

Distracted
What we pay attention to matters so much in economic terms today that commentators speak of our now inhabiting an “attention economy”. We experience this in all its social, commercial and political dimensions through the notifications on our phones, the clamouring of influencers, and increasingly in-your-face advertising.

With this competition for our attention comes the corresponding experience of distraction. When something vibrates or “tings” nearby, we are distracted from whatever we are doing. If the distraction is well-designed, the interruption grips our attention. This is how we might be sucked into a vortex of binge-watching something into the wee hours, or have a study session cut into confetti-sized bits by group chatter, or find ourselves with a hefty fine because1 we’ve tried to answer a text while driving. So pervasive is this experience that some have suggested that indistractability is the most impressive superpower of the present age.

But what does it say about us that we are so distractable? Distraction works as a commercial and political method because there are “buttons” in us which can be pushed by noises or flashing lights which will cause us to look up from whatever we are doing. These buttons are being pushed, of course, because our responses translate into dollars or votes for the button pushers.

Incomplete
But my immediate interest is that we respond, because our response tells us something about the tension between the real, tangible value of what we might already be doing and our sense of the possible value of what the distraction promises. What’s common to these kinds of distractions is the positive possibility of an “addition” to ourselves, and the corresponding negative experience of incompleteness.

This is perhaps most obvious when counting the number of online friends, followers, views, votes, shares, or re-tweets: more is more, and more matters because it is “less incomplete”. But it’s much the same with other distractions: the distraction of the latest version of our now superseded thing or of the novel “experience” we might have the money to buy. The possibility of the new thing distracts us because we imagine we are not yet complete. Where I am now, what I am doing now, what I am – these don’t seem to be enough. I am not yet enough; there must be more, and it’s not here but perhaps it’s there – in the next notification, in a different life partner, a new job, or when I finally retire

Christmas and completeness
So, what has all this got to do with Christmas? Christmas is about completeness in the midst of, and in the very form of, incompleteness.

“…And [Mary] gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger…”

Luke’s Christmas narrative is filled with signs of incompleteness. It speaks of the displacement of the holy family by the will of empire, of their marginalisation despite Mary’s condition, and of the humiliation of being laid in a manger. There is not a lot of fullness in the circumstances of the birth of Jesus.

But born, wrapped securely, and laid down safely, the child is complete. Of course – as with most children – there are many things he will do and say, many things he will enjoy and suffer. But none of that will exceed the completeness he is in himself: he is already all he needs to be. The Christmas story is about a completeness in the midst of poverty and powerlessness – a wholeness despite want and need, the utter absence of the need for distraction.

We don’t believe this, of course, which is why Christmas is often the opposite for us: a season of not enough, a season of incompleteness. And so we can be driven to distraction by the Christmas imperative to provide for the accumulation of more: more stuff for people who don’t really need it, more money to pay for the stuff, more work to earn the money to pay for the stuff, and so on. This kind of incompleteness is not merely a condition but a process, a way of life.

By contrast, there is a completeness in the Christ child to which nothing needs to be added. Yet this is not sentimental gooeyness at the image of a newborn. And neither is it a nostalgic harking back to a lost era when things were simpler. These are both themselves distractions. Sentimentality distracts us from the whole truth by telling only what might be appealing, and so sees only the cradle and not the cross. Nostalgia distracts by denying a fundamental truth of history – that though our circumstances may change significantly, we ourselves do not. And so, nostalgia imagines that the story from the cradle to the cross is not really our story.

But that first Christmas was the beginning of a story of wholeness in full awareness of our deprivation, a vision of completeness despite absence. We could moralise this by saying that Jesus remained true despite his lowly beginning, the opposition to his ministry and the final injustice of his crucifixion. This is worth saying, but it also reduces Jesus to a mere hero. The problem is that we don’t need heroes to do it for us; we need to be able ourselves to live complete lives in the midst of incompleteness. We need to be able to live lives which are not constantly haunted by the suspicion that there’s a better life, a better option, just behind the next glittering, ringing, distracting thing. Because there really isn’t.

Being enough
If Jesus does remain true from the cradle to the crucifixion, it is not by mere moral courage. It is by the conviction that he is complete wherever he is, whatever he is doing, whatever is happening to him. That is, Jesus knows his life to be a point at which God reigns in the world. It is this presence of God in what he does and experiences which is Jesus’ completeness. And this is despite appearances. God reigns in the child in the manger, in the sweaty teacher on the dusty streets, in the argumentative troublemaker and in the despised figure on the cross.

To get Christmas right is not to reduce it to a small part of our incomplete lives but to see it as being about everything in one thing: the whole of God and ourselves in just one small child and what he was to become, and perhaps also in us.

The reign of God – the gift of God’s self to the world, to our very selves – is not a distraction from what we are doing. It is the revaluation of what we are. You are not the sum of everything you have done, if this means there would be more of you if you did more, experienced more, viewed more, or sampled more. With the God of the cradle and the cross, you are enough before you begin doing or experiencing anything.

We lose this somewhere along the way, strangely becoming less as we do and own and experience more. The child in the manger will one day propose that unless we become again as children, we cannot be whole, cannot know God’s kingdom, cannot know that time and space in which whatever belongs to us, we belong to God (Matthew 18.2-5).

Indistractability is about this gift of completeness – trusting that even though there are many things we can do and we can add to ourselves, it is enough that we have been born, and swaddled, and laid in the manger of the world.

Because with this God, You. Are. Enough, however incomplete you think you are, however tempting it is to want to be more.

Rest, then, under the loving gaze of God, as did Jesus once under Mary’s eyes of love, and know yourselves to be complete.

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Reign of Christ
26/11/2023

Psalm 95
Matthew 25:31-46

It is easy to turn love into a means to an end – a means to getting what we want, a means of keeping the peace, a means of impressing God. The love of the gospel, however, is pointless.

Today’s semi-parable of the coming of the Son of Man in judgement is familiar to most of us. Through this story, we have learned to see the need of Jesus himself in the needs of the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, those imprisoned. This lesson comes at the climax of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew’s gospel, which makes the point all the more point‑y. Let us hear the call to love again today.

I want, however, to draw attention to something about the parable which is less obvious simply because the moral lesson is so obvious: those who are commended for doing good did that good in ignorance that the needy they served were, in some sense, “Jesus”. In this, the blessèd “sheep” of the parable are different from us because we have heard the parable. This creates for us a motivation alien to the blessèd ones in the story.

This can distort our sense for what we are called to do and to be. Most simply, the problem is this: to love others because they are, in a sense, Jesus, is not to love them because they are themselves worthy of love; it is to love something other than what we think they manifestly are. In this way, we try to perfume the stink of needy humanity – of each other in our various needs, of the overwhelming need of the poor, the angry, the sick, the ruthless. While the “lovers” of the parable love and serve those in need simply because they are in need, our knowledge of the parable tempts us to “add” something to those we are to love. We are tempted to read the parable as wanting to make others more lovable. Why help the needy? Because it is really Jesus we serve, and surely we want to serve him, if not these bothersome or contemptible people themselves.

The problem is that to make something “more loveable” is to turn it into a means to an end. It is to turn it more into what I need. So far as our reading of the parable is concerned, the “end” here might be our own salvation: seeing Jesus in others makes us more likely to serve them in their need, putting us in a better light before God.

But people are not means to ends. People are, properly, an end in themselves. We might risk saying that this is the basis of divine law, and that violations of the law are instances of people – or God – being made a means to an end. What are idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery and theft other than strategies to get to something other than God or the violated person? What is indiscriminate shooting or bombing of an enemy but a means to an end beyond those killed? What is political misinformation or pornography but a means to an end other than those misled or abused?

This kind of relating to God and to others is certainly a live option for us. But we are to deal with each other without manipulation, for this is how God deals with us, first of all in the person of Jesus. The life of Jesus himself was no means to an end. If he was truly human, his purpose was none other than to live a life of love, for that is our purpose, however badly we might sometimes manage it. Atonement theories which propose that the life of Jesus was strategic, that he “had” to die for a reason different from the rest of us, diminish the freedom of God and diminish Jesus’ own humanity. They reduce God’s freedom by imagining God’s hands to be tied by some economy of salvation, such that God “has to” do something to achieve salvation. And such theories diminish Jesus’ humanity by turning his life into a means to an end other than his own self – his own liveliness, his own enjoyment of God and neighbour. Jesus here is a coin God spends not for Jesus’ sake but for ours.

In the same way, to love God is not a means to an end. Again, we look to Jesus here. Jesus does not love God so that he might live a charmed life, in order to secure life after death, or for another other end we might imagine God might facilitate. Living in God, living for those around us, is the end – the purpose – of it all. This is what we are for, this is enough.

We could, then, overstate the matter – although only slightly – by  saying that love has no “point”, no purpose, other than the life together of the lovers. As we read it now, the difference between the sheep and the goats in the parable is the difference between the beloved as an end in herself and the beloved as a means to an end which finally leaves her behind.

And this brings us to the end – the dead end – of all love which has is aimed at anything other than the beloved. Love which is manipulative, which does not love the person him- or herself, finally renders us alone. Here we would surpass the beloved, stepping on or over or through him to something else, some vision of what we should be or have. But this would be lonely life. In this we would leave the one who thought herself loved behind. And God is not there, either; for God loves persons, not other ends achieved through persons. This is the eternal punishment of the parable: life alone.

As archaic as the language is, the church speaks of Jesus as king not because this is a quality which resides in Jesus for himself, but because his is an active reign which does what it commands: loves without ends, that our love might be without end. We gather around a table at which is served symbols we call “body” and “blood” because they are the signs of a life manipulated, a life turned into a means to some end, and so discarded and left behind. To what end does God say that these signs can heal? To no end but us ourselves. Love makes us here, again, and that is all. God’s desire for us draws us together, love opening up the possibility of love. There is no further purpose than being made in love, and then beginning to love, and seeing what happens next.

Being, then, drawn together in this way, let us love without ends, without purpose, without ulterior motive, be this in the case of the fellowship of the community gathered here today, the work of Hotham Mission, your love for your parents or children or spouse or neighbours or colleagues or some unhappy soul sitting out his day on the footpath.

In this way we not only love Jesus as the parable proposes, but love like Jesus does.

What else does the world need now but love, such love?

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Pentecost 25
19/11/2023

Zephaniah 1:7-16
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

How are we to do God’s will when God’s voice is so tiny. Elijah found this to be true. He expected to hear God in storms and earthquakes and cataclysmic events – stuff accompanied by big noises. Afterall, if God is so big it follows that God has a big voice. Not so, says Elijah. God speaks in sheer silence. No wonder I can’t hear what God is saying. That, at least, is the complaint implicit in the one talent servant who buried what was entrusted to him and returned it to the master on his return. He complained that he knew what kind of man his master was and what he would expect and out of fear he kept the talent safe, buried in the ground.

This calls for a little bible study. There are a few things to say about the parable that could be helpful. There is another version of the story in Luke. Luke’s version has quite a different feel but in this version one notable difference from the one in Matthew is that the master gives instruction as to what the servants are to do with the money. He said, ‘Do business with these until I come back.’ (Luke 19:13) The third servant wrapped the money in a cloth to return it but the master admonished him for not even putting it in the bank where he could have earned some interest.

The Matthew version of the story is the third in a series of parables that follow a theme. They are about waiting. There is the unfaithful slave who is behaving badly when the master returns. There are the foolish virgins who had run out of lamp oil when the bridegroom arrived. Then comes the absent master who returns to assess the management of his property entrusted to three servants.

Parables can be tricky. Sometimes we can see them as metaphors that depict what God is like. It seems reasonable to let the good Samaritan remind us of Jesus. It seems reasonable to do the same with parable of the lost sheep. Indeed, in iconography, the shepherd who finds the lost sheep is usually depicted as Jesus.

There is a temptation to make these connections in all Jesus parables but if we did that we would be considering divine attributes that belong better with inhabitants of Mount Olympus. The masters and the bridegroom in the three waiting parables are unreasonable and vengeful, not the loving and gracious God we have come to expect.

How interesting that Jesus told stories with main characters who shape the outcome of events in these parables who have values and personalities devoid of what we might expect to be divine attributes. How interesting that gospel writers reported these stories and expected their readers to derive lessons in them for being more faithful in their following Jesus. How perplexing that so many of these stories with characters who have just mist the point rather than being outrageously bad, who look like they have been treated unfairly, how come they are the ones that end up gnashing their teeth.

Remember, Matthew is the one who reports Jesus’ words, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Some chapters later Matthew tells of someone who asked, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” (Matthew 19:16) The two of the waiting parables in chapter 25 look like part of the answer to this except that the actual doing part is not spelled out, much to the misfortune of the foolish virgins and the servant entrusted with one talent.

Now, we who have sat under the scriptures and sound preaching all our lives Sunday by Sunday are fully aware that the juxtaposition vis a vis us and eternal life is not dependant on our doing but on what God has already done through Christ. The baptised are in Christ living in a sure and certain hope of eternal life.

What we must do is not our path to eternal life. Christ has already trod that path. Whatever we might do is in response to the gift of life. There is doing to be done. There is the leading of God to be heard and obeyed. Problem, the voice of God is very tiny. But, thanks be to God, the returning master who admonished the one talent servant for treating what had been given him as if it were dead by burying it gives a clue as to how to get round the apparent silence of God.

Indeed he taught him with his own words. As he flicked mud from the exhumed talent offered him by the lazy servant he said, “You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter?” (Matthew 25:26) There it is. The absent master did not need to leave spoken instruction because those who had lived with him knew him and his expectations. Knowing the master informs the doing of obedient servants.

Matthew and his church knew the lazy servant’s dilemma. Jesus was no longer with them in the flesh as he been before his death. He was not with them to teach and instruct and provide a living example of doing that befits eternal life. They were living in the waiting time of the absent Lord.

Followers of Jesus are entrusted with bearing witness to what God has done and is doing in Christ. Bearing that witness, doing what is expected calls for listening to a master who is present in the Spirit, but that kind of presence looks a lot like absence. So how can the faithful followers know what to do? Part of the answer is revealed in the parable of the talents. Those who know the master know what is expected. Knowing Jesus makes God audible. Knowing Jesus makes sense of the sheer silence of the voice of God.

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Pentecost 23
5/11/2023

Joshua 3:7-17
Psalm 107
Matthew 23:1-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

The opening chapters of the book of Joshua tell how the Israelites are finally about to cross the river Jordan and enter into the land of God’s promise.  For 40 years they’ve wandered in the wilderness, and during this time many of the people who came out of Egypt died in the desert.  Like Moses, they never crossed over Canaan’s side.  We can only guess how they might have felt, stumbling and falling on the way, hope surrendering to despair, as they realize they’re not going to make it.  And yet, if it wasn’t for those who died along the way, there would not have been a pilgrim people to make the journey, and the destination would have been irrelevant.  As the Israelites tread the verge of Jordan, the Lord says to Joshua: ‘This day I’ll begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel, so that they may know that I’ll be with you as I was with Moses.’  It’s no coincidence that what follows recalls the crossing of the Red Sea four decades before.  While the priests bearing the ark of the covenant, the sign of God’s presence, stand in the Jordan River, the Israelites are able to cross over into the Promised Land without even wetting their feet.  The message for the Israelites is clear – as the baton of leadership is passed from Moses to Joshua, the Lord is indeed among them just as surely as when they fled Egypt.

The leadership of God’s people has always been contentious, and the Hebrew Scriptures record the various ways in which it was exercised in different eras, from patriarchs to judges to kings to prophets; from priests appointed according to the Law to self-appointed leaders in popular lay movements.  Leadership in Jesus’ day was no less contentious, as we note in his numerous conversations with the Pharisees, the scribes, the Herodians and the Sadducees.  Jesus’ frequent criticism of these leaders seems to be at odds with a comment he makes in his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5.  After blessing the poor, the grieving, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart and the peacemakers, Jesus declares: ‘Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’  What seemed like an impossible goal for his audience is now clarified in today’s gospel passage, as Jesus says: ‘Do whatever the scribes and Pharisees teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practise what they teach.’  In other words, the scribes and Pharisees are not nearly as righteous as they imagine.

But this begs the question – to what righteousness may God’s people aspire?  Jesus then says: ‘The greatest among you will be your servant.  All who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted.’  Many years ago, a colleague suggested that the purpose of the gospel is ‘to subvert the dominant paradigm’, and Jesus blessing the poor and critiquing authority certainly seems to achieve this.  Yet, as attractive as this comment is, it’s important to understand why it’s not adequate.  The gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t an ancient version of Marxist economic theory; it is rather the story of God’s determination to reconcile and renew a broken world.  This provides the proper theological context for Jesus’ references to greatness and servanthood, to humility and exaltation.  The good news is that Jesus is talking about himself, and his own vocation as a Messiah who will humble himself on a cross in apparent resignation and defeat.  I say apparent act of resignation and defeat, because God vindicated the humility of Jesus and exalted him as Lord.

The flesh and blood of Jesus, crucified and raised, becomes – through the power of the Holy Spirit – the living body of Christ’s church, a servant community that embodies the grace of God.  We are the body of his humility, breathed into life by his Spirit, to give glory to God.  This is our vocation, purpose, and identity as church.

It’s now several months since this congregation shifted from North Melbourne into this facility.  This transition seems to have gone well, largely due to congregational goodwill, as well as careful leadership, consultation, planning and preparation.  Perhaps you feel a sense of satisfaction at this achievement.  You’ve not spent 40 years in the wilderness, but this transition does mark the end of a long journey which is now concluded.  And yet we should be cautious about any end that is not, as the Basis of Union, paragraph 3, declares, God’s end in view for the whole creation: ‘God in Christ has given to all people in the Church the Holy Spirit as a pledge and foretaste of that coming reconciliation and renewal which is the end in view for the whole creation.’

In light of contemporary political and social challenges, it can be hard to picture this coming reconciliation and renewal.  The outcome of the recent Voice referendum obscures how progress towards healing and justice for Australia’s First Nations peoples may now be achieved.  And fresh violence in the Middle East pours salt into an old wound in the heart of a region that, ironically, is historically acclaimed as holy ground.  Equally ironic is that technologies and capacities designed and intended for human flourishing and peace appear instead to resource us even more deeply towards division and violence.  The myth of human progress, so attractive during the second half of the 20th century, now seems largely forgotten or at least discredited.  How can we imagine the vision of God’s end in view for all of creation?

Only by remembering and trusting that it is God’s vision.  Like the Israelites treading the verge of Jordan, so too do we anticipate a future founded not upon human courage and design, but rather upon the call and promise of God.  Just as the first generation of Israelites departing Egypt never enter the promised land, so too does the gospel of Christ crucified and risen call us to invest in a promise that is always beyond human possession and control.  For us, the Jordan is not a place, but a person.  Jesus is our Jordan, the verge and the fullness of God’s promise to a pilgrim people.  He is the verge and the fullness we tread:  as we gather in humble adoration of the one who is great on our behalf; as we learn the peace of the gospel and practise it in the life of discipleship; as we exercise the grace of God in our relationships, especially those that are strained; as we live simply and walk lightly, distancing ourselves from the death and despair of colonialist, nationalist, and materialist aspirations.

Let us tread the verge of Jordan, with all humility, patience, and grace, seeking in faith the one who makes our anxious fears subside.  Let us trust our Lord to breathe his Spirit into his body, to meet us here and now in Word and Sacrament, our hope and our heaven.  Faithful is God who has called us and who will not fail us.  And now to the holy, blessed and glorious Trinity, three persons and one God, be all glory and praise, dominion and power, now and forever.  Amen.

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All Saints
29/10/2023

1 Thessalonians 2.13-20
Psalm 127
Matthew 22.34-40

In a sentence
The communion of saints is from and for the changing of lives

What is our crown of boasting? asks Paul. What is our joy? What is our glory?

What is the glory of the Christian church? What is the glory of the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist? Paul answers his own question: Is it not you, you saints in Thessalonica? Yes, it is you. This is what we value in Christian ministry, what we ought to value: the hearts and minds and lives changed by the gospel.

Glory and joy are not common words in modern speech. Glory usually has to do with sports success, and the word joy probably pops up most often with respect to the experience of children or grandchildren (mostly grandchildren!). Nonetheless, what Paul declares here makes sense to us: “You are our glory and joy”. “For we now live”, he says after recounting some of their sufferings in ministry, “we now live, if you continue to stand”.

There’s not a lot of this in our churches these days. Strategic reviews and mission studies seem to dominate the way we think about what matters here and now, for it seems that there could not be a lot of glory or joy in the decline of a congregation.

For Paul, by contrast, it’s more a “people thing”. He and his missionary team are stumbling around Asia Minor, from success to disaster, from acceptance to persecution, and they come to Thessalonica and they meet a group of people, and they tell a new story about the Thessalonians and God. The story is received with joy. And so Paul can now tell about how the word of God has blossomed in these people, and how through that blossoming these people have themselves become imitators of Paul and his missionary team. The Thessalonians have themselves become a means by which the gospel continues to be spread, through whom the word has more effect. And by “effect”, we mean that it changes lives.

As for them now, so also for us today. We are invited into just that process. Faith is not just about being right, if it’s about that at all: getting the words right, the liturgy right, reading the right Scriptures from the right translation, and having the right doctrines. These “institutions” matter but only so far as they draw us further into the truth about ourselves, the world and God.

We at Mark the Evangelist have moved from an old place of being into a new one. To what extent is there a call to a new way of being? What is worth investing our released resources in now, that we might begin to become a little more like those Thessalonians, whose glory is not so much in the comfort of buildings, in the aesthetic and well-roundedness of liturgy, or in the truth of doctrine but in being the glory which is lives that have been touched by the gospel, such that they and we ourselves become “touchers” of others’ lives, for the good?

There is a lot of work going on in the church these days – a great effort towards managing our changing situation and securing a future of some kind. As hard as all that is, it’s easy compared to the heart of the matter. Because however well we are structured and funded, if we feel that we cannot say of anybody, in Paul’s sense, You are our glory and joy, the question has to be asked: have we a gospel? Is there any really good news we have for those around us, or even for ourselves? There’s a real possibility that the answer here is “perhaps not”. The glory and joy of Christian faith is no method of doing church but is found in ministry – being ministered to, and ministering to others, towards healing, towards a futures we can’t yet see (as distinct from the frightening ones we can).

Each year on this weekend, we mark the communion of saints. The celebration occurs one day a year, but the human community by which the gospel is embodied is as much the everyday heart of our faith as is the doctrine of creation or the Trinity. This community is what we are created for, what God’s own being makes possible.

And this concerns not just us “religious” folk who express our humanity by turning up at church. To consider the communion of saints – as with such wide-reaching doctrines as creation and Trinity – is to consider the promise and call to all humankind. The communion of saints is not a thing in the world; it is the future of the world: the promise God gives to the world.

For our world is filled with fear and sadness. The closest thing we have to glory is shock and awe – whether in the form of a political ambush, a bigger than-ever-before bushfire or a sky darkened by a storm of missiles loosed to rain down on our enemies’ homes. And so the daily news never brings joy, despite the cheery “human interest” story bulletins often tack on the end, because we can’t force joy. It is just such force which causes the misunderstanding and suffering in the first place.

The joy of the communion of saints is the hidden and unforceable work of God. It is gift, and not the fruit of our self-assurance or busy-ness. But, in receiving this gift of God, we can allow ourselves to become the kind of people who are growing in joy and glory, becoming the gospel – becoming good news for each other and for those around us. This might mean – probably will mean – doing and being quite differently from how we have done and been. This shouldn’t surprise us. To grow is to change; it’s as simple as that. The communion of saints is not a static thing in the world, it is the dynamic future of the world, and the world is not yet what it will be. And so neither are we.

The communion of saints is not a thing but a purpose.

Let us, then, to the glory of God and for our own joy, commit to being a people who count not only the things we can enjoy and value now but what God’s grace is yet to realise among us: lives deepened by the gospel in new and as yet unimagined ways, glory and joy.