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Epiphany 5
8/2/2026

Isaiah 58:1-12
Psalm 112
Matthew 5:13-20

Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock

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Last year, as part of a trip to France and Italy, my wife and I spent the best part of a week in Paris. Known traditionally as ‘the City of Light’ – I was ready for quite a dazzling experience.

Now, while the centre of Paris is immensely charming, and the Eiffel Tower does glitter very prettily in the sky at night, I confess I didn’t find Paris to be especially luminous in comparison to the other modern cities I have visited. The streets are lit with the same warm light that I can find in the alleyways of Melbourne.

It may well be now that the younger, scrappier, neon cities of South East Asia can lay claim to being ‘Cities of Light.’

I have since discovered that Paris’ designation as the ‘City of Light’ of course predates the global electrification that that has illuminated the world in the last fifty years. Originating in the Enlightenment, of which Paris was a cultural centre, the title gained extra currency when the city became an early adoptee of 50,000 gas streetlights in the 1820s, and then further with the advance of electrical street lighting in the late 19^th century. Visitors from France’s interior and from elsewhere in Europe could be genuinely amazed by a gleaming city of fireflies that never went out. We underestimate the extent to which we are the beneficiaries of a revolution of light.

Yes, Paris gained its nickname in a much darker world.

Jesus’ world was a darker world, still.

Not dark in the intellectual, cultural, or moral sense. The ancients still have a good deal to teach us about how to think and reason, but dark in the literal sense.

Creating light in the imperial dominion of Judea was an expensive and laborious act. It required firewood or oil, and had to be tended, fed, monitored, and maintained. Public light was far less common. Cities streets were dark, shadowy places. Rural highways were lit only by the moon. Light and heat were jealously guarded, protected, and consumed. The movement of torches upon the street giving sign of armed Roman patrols.

A darker world is a more dangerous world. Crime flourishes under darkness, as does corruption. Darkness shrouds perception and conceals all manner of sins. In the darkness it is all too easy to lose your way. Light here is a precious commodity, a necessary precondition of truth, safety, and freedom. Darkness impedes my travel, my study. It exposes me to danger. It enables my enemies to move undetected around me.

How much more urgently attractive then, must Jesus’ command have been that we be people of light. That we be the light of the world. The light, the city on the hill. That we uncover the light that we have, concealed beneath a bushel, that we release it, that it may become a public light, a public good, that others may follow to find their way.

In a dark world, literally and figuratively, says Jesus, be a light.

I wonder what comes to mind, when you think of that bright city, that light upon the hill.

It sounds very grand, very momentous. It stands, solid and gleaming, like a bulwark against the world.

I’m conscious that, in our particular Australian context, the light on the hill is not always a benign phenomenon. Sometimes the light on the hill is bushfire.

We’ve allowed too many people to experience the light of Christianity as bushfire. As something dry, destructive, and violent. One glimpse of it and they are testing the direction of the wind, and getting out their evacuation plan.

It seems to me the United States, who had also taken the city on the hill as a seminal image of its national identity, has made a terrible parody of this in itself. In many parts of the world, the light of America’s coming is the light of the bomb, and the promise of American liberty is regarded as a contemptuous irony. It’s not enough to cast a light – a bushfire casts a great light, as does a detonation, as does a mob with torches and pitchforks.

The prophet Isaiah, while not rooted in the same context, seems cognizant of this same danger. The context for this prophetic word is the abandonment of the exile. Shocked into repentance by the catastrophe that had befallen them in the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jewish people adopted a series of fasting practices to atone for the sin and weakness that had brought down such a calamity upon their heads.

But spiritual practices can all too easy disguise a complacency. For him, to be people of light can only be founded in the fire of justice:

If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.

What good is spiritual practice that is not oriented towards mercy and liberation. It is no more than a growling belly. An empty play of devotion.

For Isaiah, the work of justice is light’s fuel in a dark world. Heap together the materials of justice, the fuel of justice, and the greater the fire you will burn. Heap together the fuels of liberation, and the fire you burn will be a clean one, incinerating chains, burning away debris, and casting light in dark places. You will shine like the noonday.

I was listening this week to the Christian prayer and meditation app, Lectio 365, and on one occasion they took an opportunity to commemorate the anniversary of the actions of the Civil Rights leader Rosa Parks. But in doing so, the gave an important warning:

Rosa Parks was an ordinary, everyday person who just needed a seat on a bus. It is vital, they said, that we hold on to the ordinariness of people like Rosa Parks. If once we allow them to be mythologised, to be elevated beyond the normal, mortal plane, we strip them of their power. It is only because Rosa Parks is ordinary that she matters. Because if Rosa Parks can do it, then I can do it. If Rosa Parks can make this fast, this fast to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke, then it is also within my power to make this fast. Rosa Parks does not possess some God-given uniqueness that excuses me from following her example, or from taking my lead from any ordinary act of justice that I am witness to in the world.

The light of sainthood, the glow of Isaiah’s fire is cast from ordinary candles. Just plain wax. It was only because the darkness around Rosa Parks was so deep that her little light shone such a great distance.

Above all, of course, Jesus is the light of the world. His light shines in the darkest places, in the desolation and hopelessness of the cross, in the abyss of state violence and terror, in the shadow of mob violence and vengeance and petty vanity. In the pit of failure and disaster. The city that Jesus builds is on the hill of Calvary.

And that is why the resurrection is so dazzling, because the eye that is accustomed to darkness is always blinded by a sudden great light.

We don’t have to have any unique gifts. Rosa Parks didn’t. We don’t have to be a lighthouse, towering over the landscape. We need only be a campfire – a place of warmth, safety, and welcome, that pushes back the boundary of the darkness, that lights the way, that offers a place for other travellers to sit and rest.

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Epiphany 4
1/2/2026

Matthew 5:1-12

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ForeWord

Background music

The soundtrack of a movie is an essential part of the experience of watching a film, so much so that it’s quite a strange experience to watch a film with the soundtrack stripped out. The experience feels empty because the soundtrack tells us how to feel about the action we see on the screen, intensifying the excitement, fear or sadness of the twists and turns of the story.

This is probably most powerfully illustrated when you watch something which has the wrong soundtrack associated with it. If you’re into falling down rabbit holes in places like YouTube, you can find mock movie trailers of Mary Poppins which splice scenes together against a new soundtrack to recast it as a horror movie (Scary Mary, perhaps? ), or which take The Silence of the Lambs, recut and re-music it into a Beauty and the Beast romance between the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter and the young FBI investigator Clarice Starling.

The music tells us what kind of thing we’re seeing. (The soundtrack is not always musical, of course; certain types of commentary voice-overs can do a similar kind of work, if perhaps usually more directed to our thinking than our feelings).

I raise all of this to propose that we are ourselves experiencing the world according to a particular soundtrack. We have known something of this now for a long time. The deep dive into the human psyche which began with Freud’s depth psychology discoveries from the end of the 19th century has revealed to us how much about what we are is not obvious to us. Just as the protagonists and antagonists in a movie don’t know what music is being played as the story unfolds, so also is there a kind of silent soundtrack informing how we experience the world and those around us.

Better to understand ourselves, then, the question becomes, What is the soundtrack according to which the action of our lives is being interpreted? And is it the right soundtrack? And what might it mean or feel to change the soundtrack, if that seems a good idea?

With those questions in mind, let’s listen to our reading today from Matthew, from the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: the well-known Beatitudes. And as you listen, consider the strangeness of these announced blessings – their contradiction of what is expected. For this contradiction is not unlike action observed according to the wrong soundtrack, and Jesus’ announcement is the reinstatement of the right one.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(—> Hearing: Matthew 5.1-12)

Word: Proclamation

Discord

These purported blessings, the Beatitudes of Jesus, strike us as jarring, at least as statements of what is clearly the case. The poor in spirit are not very likely candidates for coming into possession of the kingdom of heaven. The meek are not very likely candidates for inheriting the world. Mercy is risky or interpreted as weak. Purity of heart looks like foolishness in an everyone-for-themselves world. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are rarely satisfied or slaked. According to the soundtrack which tells us how to experience our lives in the world, those whom Jesus names here as blessed don’t look as if they are living life against the background of cheery four-chord major key settings.

And so, if we are going to take them seriously, the Beatitudes require that we hear them as an alternative soundtrack, against which to observe and experience the world around us. Jesus proposes here a kind of recasting of our story like Scary Mary: same action, totally different experience: your condition is not a curse, but a blessing.

But one of the criticisms made of the Beatitudes, particularly those of Matthew when contrasted to those of Luke, is that they seem somewhat pacifist. Why does Jesus address the poor in spirit, the meek, and the hungry and thirsty, and not those who oppress them, are filled with pride, and do not share what they have with the needy?

At one level, a fair answer is that he does this elsewhere. But then we have to account for why Jesus speaks this way here.

The reason is not a comfortable one, at least at first. Jesus addresses those who are somehow “less” than the “more” of the world because the gospel does not expect very much to change in response to the ministry of Jesus. Things might change – people might be moved to act in ways which relieve the burdens others carry – but this might also not happen. Many people in faraway places have long suffered, sometimes for the whole of their lives, under oppressive powers and regimes within which the hope of any change in circumstance is pretty slim, and yet with Jesus’ announcement of blessing in their ears. And not only in faraway places. If not quite by overbearing political or social oppression, most of us most of the time are subject to powers which diminish our humanity. These powers can be oppressive personal experiences we cannot forget, the way the colour of our skin or the gender of our bodies is read, or the political and economic forces which drive our particular world.

If we wanted to measure the impact of Jesus’ inversion of values here, we’d have to admit that there is still a lot of inversion to happen, and that it won’t likely happen soon. And, because of this, it’s tempting to shift the location of the blessings to a distant future, beyond what we presently experience and feel.

But, then and now, Jesus speaks not to the future but to people standing around him and their immediate experience of themselves in the world. And so if Jesus does not speak in such a way to change the dynamics of what is happening around us – to change the action – he speaks to change the soundtrack: to change our experience of that action.

We don’t live in a world which values poverty of spirit, which rewards those who suffer, who do not self-promote, who are not strong enough to realise justice for themselves, who sacrifice their own interests in modes of mercifulness and peacemaking.

The blessedness of incompleteness

But the strange, contradictory beatitudes of Jesus propose a different reading of our experiences. Blessing – wholeness, righteousness – is not for the proud and the self-righteous, who typically triumph. Self-satisfaction is not the measure of wholeness. Indifference to injustice is not the way to fulfilment.

Rather, Jesus calls us here to courage. He calls us to live in contradiction of the prevailing colourings and soundings which value life-denying, freedom-limiting priorities. And so, strangely, the Beatitudes are as much about incompleteness as they are about fulfilment. Your incompleteness is a blessedness because you are seeing and feeling that the world is not ordered rightly, because you long for the whole and not the part.

The blessed are those who continue to struggle against what oppresses, what denies life, what closes off futures. Blessed are you if this is your way in the world.

And so Jesus announces this contradiction of the old soundtrack to give courage, calling us to keep at it: keep at the hunger and thirst for a broader justice, for a purer righteousness, for a true peace.

Don’t give up, don’t cease to struggle for life, for spirit, for freedom for all. For this is blessedness. And it is only by such blessed, incomplete ones as these – as you – that the world can know itself to be incomplete, and begin on the path to blessing and wholeness.

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Epiphany 3
25/1/2026

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

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ForeWord

“Light will win”

Last week, many around the country observed a National Day of Mourning in response to the terrorist shootings at Bondi just before Christmas. The theme of the day, proposed by the Chabad community which suffered the attack, was “Light will win”.

This is surely a profound assertion. It is a statement of extraordinary scope: that the long arc of the moral universe bends towards justice (M L King, Jnr). It is, indeed, a god-sized declaration and so a very difficult one. The problem is this: what is the light we imagine will shine through here? And what is the darkness over against which this light will prevail? Perhaps this seems obvious. The darkness is precisely that manifest in the murderous intent of terrorists. And the light is what prevailed before the darkness arrived.

We see this understanding operating in the Prime Minister’s statement, made a month after the attack. The scene is set: The attack took place in an “iconic” spot in our “beautiful” country, with babies and their “doting grandparents” present. In response to the danger and tragedy was the “valour” and “remarkable, selfless courage” of the responders. The tragedy is cast as a “stern test of our national character”, in response to which test light shone forth in cooperation and mutual care.

This is all true, of course – the contrast of a community festival by the beach with the screams of terror, the contrast of the bravery of unarmed people against the violence of armed men. We recognise what the Prime Minister grasps after here.

But the problem is the PM’s confidence that he knows what the light is, that the light was shining brightly before the gunman struck, and that it will shine again, and all the more brightly for what the government intends to do in response to the disaster. Australia Felix – happy, fortunate, iconic, beautiful, relaxed Australia – is Australia Lux, Australia the Light.

Darker lights

Thinking this way, we risk playing into a deep sentimentalism in our response to crises like this, which shake our easy confidence that things are OK, that we are safe. Sentimentalism is the failure, or even the refusal, to see the bigger picture.

The idyllic scene of families coming together for a communal celebration is one with which we are all very familiar, and so its disruption with the sound of guns and screams of distress is a horror the rest of us might just be able to begin to grasp. But there are other things going on in the world behind what we see, and in darker corners of Australia the Light. Today, the Sunday before Australia Day, has for a few years now been designated by the Uniting Church as a Day of Mourning. This is in recognition that all the light most of us see around us shines within the darkness of the process and the continuing impact of the colonisation of this land. Our inability, at a national level, to hold this tension was indicated in the Referendum a couple of years ago. Did we not tell ourselves then, sentimentally, “Don’t mention the war(s)”? And we could list any number of other moral contradictions at play, in our political, economic and personal lives, outshone by whatever light we prefer to see.

To acknowledge the darkness in our light, of course, is not intended in any way to diminish the horror or the suffering of those targeted at Bondi or who had to respond to the catastrophe. The issue here is not whether that attack was darkness. The question is, What is the light? And what could it mean to say that “light will win”? The kind of analysis the Prime Minister has offered has to do with a faint, dim light – the light to which our eyes are already accustomed. We need more than that.

To think about all this differently, we’ll turn now to St Paul and what he had to say to the Corinthian church, a community pretty sure it knew what the light was, and against which knowledge Paul wrote in his letters to them.

(Today’s reading is actually from next week’s lectionary readings; I wasn’t paying enough attention when I began preparation this week and started working on them before I realised. I don’t think God will mind too much, and I hope you won’t either! )

As you listen to what Paul writes, note what he says about strength and weakness, wisdom and foolishness, and the importance he places on these contrasts for understanding God’s work in the crucified Christ.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: 1 Corinthians 1. 18-31)

Word: Proclamation

Filtered light

In what we’ve just heard, Paul is at pains to emphasise that if, viewing the cross, we look for power, we see weakness; if we look for wisdom, we see foolishness. Or to connect this to what we’ve just been considering, to see Christ crucified is not to see anything that looks like light.

And this, Paul asserts, is the way into understanding the order of things with this God. To look at the crucified Christ is to see not light but something rather more like darkness. Or, at least, this is what it seems when we bring our understanding of strength and wisdom to bear on what happens on the cross.

The Prime Minister’s statement on the events at Bondi speaks of the light we seek in terms of our wisdom and strength when confronted by darkness. Such things matter, of course, but they are not yet “light”. Paul would happily assert that “light will win”, but his sense for the light comes from the experience of God in the cross: the cross is the light which will win.

The crisis at Corinth was one of communal division. “We see the light” was not the literal slogan of the various parties against each other, but it sums up the dynamic pretty well. This misplaced confidence led to jealousy and competition, sexual immorality and the exclusion of the poor. The light perceived by each party was such that they could not see each other.

I spoke earlier of a “dim” light, but the intensity is not quite the point. A better metaphor is that of coloured glass, which stops us from seeing things as they “properly” are in clear, white light. To declare that “light will win” – if we mean it seriously – is to say that there will be a time when there are no more filters, a time when – as Paul says elsewhere (1 Corinthians 13) – we will see not as in a glass, darkly, but as God sees us.

If we mean seriously that “light will win”, it becomes now rather an uncomfortable proclamation. Not seeing some things because they’ve been filtered out can be pretty convenient. Or, to put it differently, a little darkness can go a long way. It does not go too far to say that, while we spend a great deal tending to our fear of the dark with laws and security measures of all sorts, we fear just as much the bright and clear light.

And this is why Paul insists that the cross be at the centre of our understanding of God and of ourselves. Our light – the light by which we think we see: our strength and wisdom – is filtered. We see, but we don’t see enough. This means that, if we were to depend solely on what we see, we would soon be lost. When Paul joins God to the crucified, he joins God to one who has no light, no power, no wisdom. And yet, this one – the crucified – is claimed to be the closest to God. God views and values outside of our own measurings.

In this way, Paul sees our humanity not as on a spectrum, along which we are each placed somewhere between dark and light, for condemnation or praise. Before God, we are not distinguished by strength or weakness, by wisdom or foolishness. Whatever power or effectiveness there is in the crucified Jesus, it doesn’t correspond to wisdom or strength or light. Jesus’ value is simply in God’s claiming of him despite all his apparent emptiness.

The God who sees in the dark

The bad news here is that we get light – rightness – wrong. But the good news is that God can see in the dark. And it is God’s capacity to see – God’s gaze – which is Jesus’ value, and ours. For what God sees is us, groping around, trying to feel our way to safety, or perhaps even hiding in the dark, thinking we can’t be seen. And God’s response is…mercy. Because what is our helplessness and fear, compared to the nothingness of the cross, which God has already blessed?

The Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard said something which can be paraphrased like this: “O, the blessed assurance of knowing that, before God, I am always in the wrong”. As pessimistic as that sounds, it is in fact profoundly liberating, because it restates just what Paul has said: your wholeness, your value, is not your own sense of righteousness but God’s determination to count you right. We are not what we see by our own light, for better or for worse. We are not our own judges. By the grace of God, we are more valuable than even we sometimes imagine.

This is not to say that we don’t do anything in response to the darkness, that we don’t act to make safe or to limit danger when we see it. We don’t dismiss outright any fault in ourselves or others; mercy is only mercy where there is fault identified and acknowledged.

But Paul’s identification of God with the cross relieves us of the temptation to judge, whether to accuse others or to defend ourselves. The cross opens us to light we cannot see.

And so the light which will win doesn’t radiate from some vision of our perfect selves, to which we are already closely aligned. The light which will win will burn more brightly than we imagine. And, just because of this, it will reveal to us things we might not want to see. The light which will win will expose things about Australia Felix and the felicity of our individual lives that will be painful and costly.

But anything less than such truth-telling under bright light would just be a program for more of the same: more injustice, frustration, violence and tragedy. The light will have won when we confirm that we have no light of our own, nothing according to which we can properly boast before God or each other, and so when we have begun to live with a humility, openness and love that doesn’t measure others but serves them.

God deals with us not according to how strong or wise or enlightened we imagine ourselves to be.

God deals with us according to a different light – a light which does not draw assuring distinctions but is love for one, and love for all.

This is how God has dealt with us; let us deal with each other in the same way, that the light might indeed win.

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Epiphany 2
18/1/2026

Isaiah 49:1-7
Psalm 40
John 1:29-42

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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What did the Baptizer mean when he saw Jesus and said, ‘Here is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’?

This has become one of the ordinals of the Eucharist, one of the texts that are common to every communion liturgy. These texts include the Kyrie (Lord have mercy), the Creed, and the Sanctus (Holy, holy, holy).

One of the activities that gives meaning in my life is singing in choirs. This is given me many opportunities for singing Latin masses. They always conclude with the Agnus Dei – Agnus Dei qui tolis peccata mundi, miserere nobis (Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us). It repeats this twice except the last time the miserere nobis is replaced with dona nobis pacem (give us peace).

Modern English versions of this can be seen in the liturgies of all the major Western churches including the Uniting Church, ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.’

For a metaphor like ‘lamb of God’ there needs to be some context or it does not make sense. This particular image can be a bit confusing because a much stronger image in the gospels, that is to say a much more frequently used image for Jesus, is that of shepherd. Matthew, Mark and Luke think ‘shepherd’ when they think of Jesus. Only John also thinks ‘lamb’ and only in the portion we heard this morning.

Understanding New Testament concepts often relies on knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. I remember a visiting teacher of liturgy telling us that if you need to leave out any of the set readings on a Sunday, don’t drop the Old Testament one. We can’t understand the gospels without knowing the Hebrew Scriptures.

That is certainly true for this metaphor of the lamb. However, we could start on this one without any ancient context to build on. The context of the story on its own stimulates interest and raises the eyebrow. John the Baptiser has been preaching that someone greater than he is coming along to step his mission to a higher level. In the next breath he points at the man he is talking about and calls him the lamb. Not the lion or the bear or the elephant but the lamb.

John the gospel writer talks of Jesus as lamb only this once, but John the Theologian in Revelation calls Jesus the Lamb 26 times. We could write a few doctoral theses on whether the writer of John’s gospel and that of Revelation are the same person, but the lamb metaphor does provide a link.

So, what was happening in the Hebrew Scriptures to help us understand what John was thinking? There are three that I have found and together they provide some of the richness and complexity for grasping the work of Jesus and his nature. Let’s go backwards through the books. This morning we heard part of the first of the Songs of the Suffering Servant of the prophet Isaiah. In Passiontide we often hear from the fourth Song of the Suffering Servant that includes the lines, ‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.’ (Isaiah 53:7)

We are reminded of Jesus silence at his trials. John is also the one who records Jesus words, ‘For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.  No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.’ (John 10:17-18) Was John thinking of Jesus’ posture of silence before his accusers, his do nothing to prevent his death is why we speak of Jesus’ self-giving for the sake of the world?

Let’s go back further to the book of Exodus, to the Passover lamb that was to be killed and eaten before the journey of escape. The blood of the lamb is given graphic mention in this story, but it is not sacrificial blood. This blood of this lamb is to be daubed on the door posts and lintels so that the angel of death will pass over the houses so marked, but the first born of households not marked with blood will be killed that night. John the Theologian lays great store on the efficacy of the blood of the lamb to maintain life for the faithful. Is this what John the Evangelist had in mind? Now to unwrap all that Revelation means of how the blood of the lamb works for the good of humanity would require a few more PhDs, so let’s leave it there.

Go back to Genesis to the strange and disturbing story of Abraham offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice. At the last moment a lamb caught in a thicket provides the substitute sacrifice. Was John thinking of Jesus whose death is our deserving?

Well, we don’t know what John the Evangelist was thinking or what John the Baptiser was thinking when Jesus was named the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He did not go on to say, ‘Now, what I mean by …’ and then give a detailed explanation so that what it means is this or that and nothing else. It is the power of poetry, music, parables and metaphors that they do not nail down the truth but allow emotions, current contexts and the movement of the Spirit of God to shape and reshape how we know what God has done and what God is doing and the life of Jesus in our world.

However the ancient texts of our Jewish heritage tells it, the image of the lamb as a metaphor for God’s love and desire and power to save us points to weakness and vulnerability. God’s saving act in Jesus is so risky. Put the salvation of the world in the life of a human born into world where the geopolitics and religious extremism is rife – what could possibly go wrong. A world so familiar to our own – what can possibly go wrong.

We know that just about everything can go wrong. That is one of the facts that prompts us into prayer. The churches in the Northern Hemisphere are praying for unity this week. Today marks the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Well may we pray for Christian unity because if the church is better at one thing than another it is disunity. Did you know that tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jnr Day, a day when the US remembers a saint of the church who preached and prayed and dreamt unity? The calendar of special prayer days asks us to remember the sin and trauma of the past, and this amidst current trauma of geopolitical chaos and natural disasters that would be less disastrous if we cared for the planet.

What goes wrong in our world yesterday, today and probably tomorrow? Just about everything. So we place our hope and trust in the vulnerable Christ who does not avoid his own destruction, who is caught in the thickets of the world gone mad, who marks humanity for life – to this one we pray:

Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, give us peace – give us peace.

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Baptism of Jesus
11/1/2026

Isaiah 42:1-9
Matthew 3:13-17

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

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In 1990, my wife and I had been married for 8 years, and lived a happy and settled life.  We had just purchased a house in the bowl of a quiet court, down behind the Wheelers Hill pub, within walking distance of Jells Park.  We were the parents of a boy and a girl, and assumed then that our family was complete, though years later we welcomed another boy and another girl.  I was employed as a technical officer in the Telecom Research Labs in Clayton, and my wife had returned to primary teaching.  We were regular participants in the life of the Glen Waverley Uniting Church, and involved with a community of young families that met regularly for fellowship and conversation.  For the past 35 years, we’ve been enjoying an annual holiday with two of those families.

I was a naive young man with evangelical tendencies who yearned for moral rectitude, theological certainty and liturgical purity.  I considered leaving the Uniting Church to join a Pentecostal tradition in which I could fulfil all righteousness, but something unexpected happened.  The prayer and discernment of others pointed me in the direction of ordained ministry.  The report of the Presbytery candidates committee suggested that I was not as convinced about my sense of call as those around me but this did not seem to cause me any anxiety.  By the end of that year, I was a candidate for the Ministry of the Word and had commenced a most unexpected journey that continues to unfold.

What I didn’t understand then, and am yet discovering, is that the righteousness I so desired was not mine to create or possess, but rather is the righteousness of Jesus Christ that he embodies on my behalf.  This dynamic becomes clearer when we interpret the baptism of Jesus as confirmation that he is the one who will inaugurate the justice promised by God through the prophets.  This is why the location of John the Baptist’s ministry is a detail of particular significance.  In one of the most important narratives in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Israelites cross the Jordan River on their journey into the Promised Land.  Having fled from Egypt and wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, the crossing of the Jordan could be understood as the final act of their captivity.

In John’s time the people are captive once again, but not in a distant place; now they’re exiled in their own land by the occupying forces of Rome.  In the midst of oppression and persecution, John invites people to turn to God.  The baptism he offers prepares people for the coming of the Lord; the more powerful one who will baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire.  Given that he’s been proclaiming the arrival of the Lord, John doesn’t seem phased when Jesus shows up to be baptized.  His only comment:

‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’

John is reluctant to baptise Jesus, but Jesus insists.  He knows the historical and theological significance of what John is doing in the Jordan River, and he knows that his own baptism will fulfill all righteousness.  It’s precisely because he is Emmanuel – God with us – that Jesus joins the queue, waiting his turn.

In his baptism, Jesus is identified as the one of whom the Lord says through Isaiah:

‘Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.’

In his baptism, Jesus embraces God’s call to be the righteous servant who will lead people home, from the wilderness of alienation into the peace of God.  In his baptism, the heavens are opened to him and he’s anointed by the Holy Spirit for his messianic vocation, while a voice from heaven declares:

‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with whom I am well pleased.’

Despite their different perspectives about the origins of Jesus, the four gospels all agree about the significance of his baptism.  His baptism signals the beginning of his ministry – the public proclamation of the kingdom of heaven that he embodies in acts of sacrificial love, costly service, and ultimately in his death.  All righteousness is fulfilled as Jesus is anointed through baptism as God’s begotten Son, becoming sovereign of a kingdom for which he will ultimately be crowned with thorns.

Jesus is baptised into God’s mission of self-giving love that leads him into suffering and death, there to be identified with all human misery and despair.  Jesus is baptised into life eternal, as his ministry of self-giving is vindicated by God and revealed to be the way to life for all of creation.

One of the great joys of Christian discipleship is sharing in communal discernment to clarify the implications of our baptism into Christ crucified and risen.  The Basis of Union (para 7) explains the baptism of Jesus, and what it means for us:

‘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.’

We are baptised into the death of Jesus to proclaim the righteousness that he fulfills through his own self-giving.  And we are baptised into the life of Jesus to participate in the fellowship of his Spirit;  to share in the journey of faith, hope and love in which we die to ourselves and live in Christ.  Not all of us are elected or ordained for leadership in the church, but we are all called to serve, and the commissioning liturgy reminds us that:

‘Each one of us is given a gift by the Spirit:
and there is no gift without its corresponding service.’

As those baptised into Christ, we listen for the call of the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being; the one who makes us his sisters and brothers in the fellowship of his Spirit; the one who leads us from the wilderness of alienation into the peace of God.  Just as he hears the words of divine pride that confirm his identity and send him into ministry, so too does Jesus speak those words to us:

‘You are my beloved, with whom 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.