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Lent 2
1/3/2026

Genesis 15:1-6
Psalm 121
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

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ForeWord

In one of our Lenten study groups this week, the question was asked about the continuing relevance of Christian faith: why do so many no longer consider Christian faith to be “relevant” to their lives?

There is a bit of a thing in the church sometimes which seeks to dismiss relevance as an appropriate criterion for thinking about faith, but it is kind of important. It helps here to know that when we ask about relevance, we are in fact asking about relief. The two words are very closely related: something is relevant to me to the extent that it relieves a tension or perceived threat. Relevance is not about affirming me or any position that I might take on an issue; it’s about what might be necessary for me to improve the life that I am living. Something is relevant if it helps; it is irrelevant if it does not.

To the extent that this is true, it answers our enquiry about why so many people find Christian confession irrelevant: it quite simply does not seem to help. And our lives are full enough with worries and things to do without adding to them things that just don’t help. Important here is what we think it is against which we struggle, and for which something like faith (or maybe just having more money) might seem to be helpful – relieving – or not.

Our Lenten study (Sam Well’s Power and Passion) is a study of the political dynamics around the trial, sentencing and execution of Jesus. Last week we considered the figure of Barabbas. Most of you will recall that the Roman governor, Pilate, offered Barabbas as a get-out-of-jail-free swap for Jesus, although the crowd chose Barabbas over Jesus.

Wells assumes that Barabbas is a member of the Zealot movement which struggled violently against the Roman occupation. Wells locates the Zealot revolutionism as one possible response to the presence of the Romans, but there were other options. Collaborationists like the royal family and the tax collectors found another way, enjoying a certain safety at the cost of their compatriots. Reformers saw the presence of the Romans as divine punishment, and sought a return to basics in religious practice; the Pharisees fall into this group. The Essenes represented another approach, that of withdrawal into a separate, pure, holy space.

Recognising these different political factions and positions helps us to understand what’s at stake in many of the exchanges and conflicts in the Gospels. The opposition to Rome, and to Jesus himself, taps into these stances. But collaboration, reform, withdrawal and revolution are not how we deal with political oppression only. Oppression is just one form of the more generalised concept of suffering, and each of those four responses to the Roman presence in Palestine in Jesus’ time could be made to any source or threat of suffering in our lives at any particular time.

We have life-denying forces operating around us with the potential to impact upon our lives negatively all the time and, in response to these, we can take stances very much like collaboration, puritan withdrawal and rebellion. And in each case, we understand our response to be one of relevance, or relief. If we can’t remove the oppressive influence or threat – if we can’t get rid of our metaphorical Romans – the next best thing is to find a way of living with it, and this is a matter of discovering what offers the most relief. What is relevant – what brings or promises relief – might be getting the right education, or moving to the right suburb, leveraging market forces, escaping into drink or drugs, short-term-till-love-runs-out relationships, or consuming triple-choc-chip ice-cream by the bucket. All such things are “relevant”, relieving in some way; we do such things because they “help”.

If this is what relevance means, it brings us to a different assessment of the relevance of Christian confession. To say that it seems to be irrelevant to most people today is to say that other things are thought to be more relevant, to bring greater relief, when it comes to considering the kinds of challenges, threats, and oppressive influences that are operating all the time around us. What is turning to God in prayer in contrast to escaping into binge-watching a whole Netflix season in one night? What is the promise of eternal life compared to a gold-level health insurance policy? At the same time, what is binge-watching but withdrawal, an insurance policy but collaboration? The world Wells describes is our own world, even if ours looks a little less “religious”.

But Wells’ critique of zealotry is that while it senses that something is badly wrong with the oppression, the revolutionary solution is too narrow. The insurrectionist wants simply to overthrow the government and replace it with a different government, imagining not least that violent means can secure non-violent ends. For all of the change that our various revolutions and democratic elections have attempted in our societies over the last two thousand years, not very much has changed. We recognise our situation and our options in the situation and options of Jesus’ time. We still struggle to identify what is relevant, what will bring relief.

And we would have to say this of the other responses to the suffering going on around us, whether collaboration with the powers, or personal reform, or withdrawal. In each of these responses, we end up reinforcing the problem, rather than coming to grips with its true nature and what it might take to overcome it – what it might take to live justly within an ineluctably unjust world. And I’m sorry for saying “ineluctably” here (because, who says that! ? ), but I just couldn’t think of a better word: it is the “can’t get out of it” which is important. We can’t get out of the system with its many sufferings and threats by means of collaboration or reform or withdrawal or violent overthrow. The burden remains.

And this finally brings us to our focus Scripture text today, taken from Paul’s letter to the Romans. Behind this text is Paul’s concern to emphasise that there is nothing we can do to relieve ourselves of our fundamental burdens, and he draws on the experience of the patriarch Abraham, who impresses God not by what he does, but by his “faith”

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Romans 4.1-5, 13-17)

Word: Proclamation

Up to this point in the letter, Paul’s been at pains to demonstrate how everyone is under oppression, although his interest is not the oppression of the Romans in Palestine, or geopolitical oppression at all. The oppression he describes is the oppression of sin. By sin, he means an alienation from God, which is just as much an alienation from ourselves. And the pressing question is, What is it that can relieve us in these circumstances? The simple answer, and the common one, is broadly “the law”. The solution to sin is not sinning – is doing the “right thing” – as the very idea of law seems to suggest might be possible.

But Paul has also worked very hard to demonstrate that the law doesn’t help here; it’s part of the problem. We are forced into continual vigilance, acquiescence, or anxiety about where we stand before God. When you start with sin, you end with sin. This is similar to the outcome of the various responses that Sam Wells describes could be made to the oppression of the Romans, or more generally to any oppression we might experience. To collaborate, or to withdraw into self-reform, or to withdraw altogether from the oppressed space into some holier place, or to look for violent revolution – each of these allows the oppression to determine what the relief looks like. And so it’s never quite relief, none of these responses is ever quite relevant; we take the oppressive thing with us.

Paul’s point is that while the law might be pertinent to the question of sin, it is not relevant. And it’s because of this that he clings to the concept of faith, which he does see as properly relevant, relieving. Faith is not here the fairly shallow conviction that God exists; Paul’s interest is in what relieves – what is relevant – and God’s mere existence doesn’t relieve anything. Put differently, the question is, What sets Abraham free? Because Paul’s account of Abraham is an account of a relieved man.

What sets Abraham free, or relieves him, is nothing that Abraham himself does. Most of us know that Paul contrasts faith and action in his thinking about salvation. But the contrast between faith and action is that the faith is so large, we might say, that faith is basically what God does, and not what Abraham does. We might push the language to breaking point here by saying that God faiths Abraham. Abraham’s faith is as much something which happens to him as it is his own act.

In the passage we’ve heard this morning, Paul says this in three different ways, each an overlapping description of the kind of God we have according to what this god does: first, this is the God who justifies the ungodly; second, this is the God who raises the dead to life; and, third, this is the God who calls into being things which do not exist.

Justification, resurrection, creation: these are all substantially the same thing. One looks like moral forgiveness, another looks like a nature miracle and the third looks like a theory about the beginning of all things but, in each case, what is happening is a radical undercutting of the conditions already in place in order that life might be experienced, in order that relief might be known.

Relief is not a thing we do, not a method, not a process, not a response in terms of the system. Justification of the ungodly sets the rules aside, abandoning the self-help game; the dead have no capacities, let alone to raise themselves; and the nothing from which we are created has no potential to bring us forth. In each case, what oppresses – sin, death, nothingness – is set aside as irrelevant. There is no life, no relief, here. Faith is seeing this dynamic: that nothing comes out of sin, death and the void by our own power; we cannot make ourselves whole.

The question of relevance, then, is a question of how adequate the relief is we work up for ourselves, compared to relief which comes from the kind of faith Paul speaks of. Or, to put it as a statement, Christian faith is not relevant to many of us because we are pursuing the wrong kind of relevance. And I mean many of us, because we are here today for relevance, but we are here for relief from the types of relevance the world proposes. We are here because life demands of us collaboration with darkness, constantly requires of us that we be better, tempts us to run away from it all, or just to smash what is in our way. We see this all around us all the time, and we know there’s no lasting relief in any of it. The next thing we do on these terms will not save us, make us whole, set us right.

We can’t make ourselves, Paul says. We must rather receive ourselves, as if raised from the dead, as if created again out of nothing. Only this will relieve, will bring rest – a table set in the presence of treat and danger, as one of the psalmists once sang.

Come to me, Jesus once said. Come, those who are weary from carrying heavy burdens, for I am relev-ant. Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in spirit, and you will find relief for your souls.

Justification, resurrection, creation: this is God’s gift in an unjust, dying, nothing-ed world.

Whatever else life might demand of us, let us receive this gift, that we not be overwhelmed, and that we might become to others a small glimmer of light, of relief, in the darkness.

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Lent 1
22/2/2026

Genesis2:15-17, 3:1-7
Psalm 32
Romans 5:12-19
Matthew 4:1-11

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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I am grateful to be invited to preach. It’s now been 65 years, and as I prepared for today, I suddenly remembered that when I began, the biblical text we heard was from King James Version, 1611. Preachers also prayed in that language.  Most of us had a lot of it by heart in its language and I still can’t quote a modern version accurately.

So the unexpected blessing of this invitation was to prepare the texts which you have heard read according to very latest, but academically respectable, English version – because it is important that the translation be accurate to the original language and carefully put into the language of our world and our culture without distortion of what the authors wrote.  We don’t need it in American, which is a distinct kind of English, nor do we want it to be angled to the favoured theology of the interpreter.

That is why, early in its history, the Uniting Church formally recommended the use of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of 1989. It was updated in 2021 and I used that.  There was the New English Bible which excited us all in the 1960s, but its update, the Revised English Bible of 1989 failed to catch on (except for me!).

But to illustrate. Comparing translations of our so-well-known Genesis reading, the conversation between Eve and the serpent. Today you heard Eve reply to the Devil’s prompt,

“God has forbidden us to eat the fruit of that tree [the tree of good and evil] or even to touch it; if we do, we shall die.” ⁴ But the serpent said to the woman, “Of course you will not die,⁵  for God knows that as soon as you eat it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”

Their eyes were opened. The shock of being naked was not Victorian modesty, but the realisation that their unseen embodied selves faced an unexpected long human life of a kind they had not imagined.  They covered themselves up, perhaps not out of modesty but because they weren’t quite ready for it.

By contrast, Jesus’ confident response to the devil’s wiles was:

“Out of my sight, Satan! Scripture says, ‘You shall do homage to the Lord your God and worship God alone’”.

All three of Jesus’ ‘tests’ turn on the same act (temptations are tests, after all). It was Adam and Eve’s test too: to seek salvation in our human selves, without God; to think that experiencing evil would be an advantage.

The new translations make it a lively conversation and not a ‘sacred’ text for pious people. And of course, we know that the stories in the first five books of the Bible were handed down by being told and heard by word of mouth for centuries before being written down and edited and translated into fresh tongues.

And I love what follows:

⁶ The woman looked at the tree: the fruit would be good to eat; it was pleasing to the eye and desirable for the knowledge it could give, so she took some and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, and he ate it.

Her reasoning is revealing: it looked good (well, it was from God’s own garden!) but – it also promised some ‘benefit’ to the takers. That double reasoning plays a major part in sin of all kinds. There are consequences in a choice. And forget about laying blame on Eve: they both – as Paul writes, they together ‘sinned as Adam did by disobeying a direct command’.

If you read ahead, you will meet the consequences of ‘The Fall’.

I once interviewed Rabbi John Levi for the Christian Television Association in front of Arthur Boyd’s vivid painting The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden (1947) which was no Eden – located in the wild Australian bush. We talked about the setting, and I retold the Genesis story for our unbelieving audience, and John stopped me. He said, ‘You know what’s a very Christian interpretation?’ And he explained that for Jews, this chapter is not primarily understood as a story of man’s fall, but as the context of the first commandment – ‘Go forth and multiply’ (Gen. 9:7). It was about grace, not sin. And law as grace.

II.

I sometimes wonder if that’s why Paul wrote as passionately as he does in Romans about the great contrast between sin and grace – and again the translation is so uncluttered and clear:

¹⁶ The gift of God is not to be compared in its effect with that one man’s sin; for the judicial action, following on the one offence resulted in a verdict of condemnation, but the act of grace (Jesus’ self-offering on the cross), following on so many misdeeds, resulted in a verdict of acquittal.

He even says it twice:

¹⁸ It follows then, that as a result of one misdeed was condemnation for all people, so the result of one righteous act is acquittal and life for all.

I fear that good news has not always been echoed in Christian preaching.

And listen to today’s psalm (32), in a modern version:

Happy the pardoned,
whose sin is cancelled,
in whom God finds
no evil, no deceit.

It is an official Catholic version, and its heading reads,

‘A joyous hymn of thanksgiving for God’s forgiveness. Sin concealed is a burden of misery; sin confessed frees from harm.’ (ICEL)

Rabbi Levi himself remarked, ‘If there is a Fall in this story, it is a fall upwards!’  A whole theological movement, Creation Spirituality, followed that view in the 1960s, led by a Dominican Friar, Matthew Fox. He opened the way to liberation theology, environmentalism and to reconsiderations of human sexuality – and is still popular as ‘Green Theology’.  It has produced some fruitful (!) ideas. It was also produced some dead ends. It tends to forget sin and evil and their effects.

The late Francis McNab once boasted that his congregation had not ’used those outdated prayers of confession for years.’ There is a popular view among those who have left the Church that we only speak of sin. If our critics never experience our worship, they will never know our equal insistence on grace. e.g., in our liturgies of healing and personal reconciliation (sometimes called Confession) in Uniting in Worship 2, the last words said are: ‘You are free! Go in peace in the name of God.’

There is a danger in replacing biblical language with psychological; grace cannot be reduced to therapy.

III.

But curious language can sometimes provoke us to think. I was reminded of one of the teasing sayings of that 14^th English saint, Julian of Norwich, in her Revelations of the Divine Love. We all know her ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’, but we don’t all know what went before it.  She wrote, ‘Sin is behovely’.

It’s yet another old English word, meaning ‘necessary ‘or even ‘fitting’, but Julian is not saying ‘Sin is inevitable’. She means that sin has its uses: it can turn the mind, the heart, the spirit, to God.

Julian is struggling with an old question, one St Augustine wrestled with. If God is in, and is the cause of all things, where did sin come from? Why did Jesus have to suffer the cross? Julian’s very questions lead her to the Good News: it is through God’s passion that God’s love is revealed. The sheer magnitude of God’s love would not have been made visible without human sin. The parallel old saying is ‘O happy ‘fault’, or ‘O blessed Fall that gained for us so glorious a Redeemer’.  It is a paradox, a mystery, if you like, and much more needs to be said and most theology is an attempt to say it.

Sin is behovely. But knowing that, all shall be well, indeed, ‘all manner of thing shall be well’.

Thanks be to God.

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Transfiguration
15/2/2026

Matthew 17:1-9

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ForeWord

A funny thing happened on the way to church this morning! In fact, it happened on Monday when, thinking about coming to church this morning, I sat down to have a look at the readings set by our lectionary for today. The “funny” thing was this: hearing a quiet voice speak within: “Oh no, not the Transfiguration. Again”.

Part of this response had to do with the fact that I’ve been doing this for 25 years or so, and there’s a limit to how many imaginative things might be said about the Transfiguration. But there was another dimension to my response. Why do we even bother to give such regular thought to the Transfiguration?

Of course, the story does relate some extraordinary happening, and it is found in documents that are important to the church. To that extent, we need to be able to make something of the Transfiguration. But the very nature of the story is such that our usual treatment of it is what we might call a process of “interpretation”: we seek to interpret the story.

That might seem an obvious thing to have to do when confronted by such a strange story, but it’s worth considering what we are doing when we interpret. Interpretation implies that there is something about the story which is problematic and which we need to sort out. We read that Jesus was transfigured, and we wrestle with the text until it makes sense. What we mean by “ making sense” is a kind of taming of the text. This is all the more the case when it comes to miracle stories, which this one seems to be. Miracles don’t fit, so we have to make them something else.

But what if the story is not given to us in order to be interpreted? What if the story is itself an interpretation of us? That is, what if the story is given as part of a proposition that we are ourselves the problem? If this is the case, then the Transfiguration of Jesus says as much about us as it does about Jesus himself.

Having in mind that expectation of what the text might be doing, let’s now hear once more the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Matthew 17. 1-9)

Word: Proclamation

I said a moment ago that the Transfiguration of Jesus is as much about us as it is about Jesus himself. I don’t mean here what is sometimes drawn from the story, that we’re all a bit like the figure of Peter, with his confused stumbling and fumbling in response to Jesus. There is probably some truth in this but there’s another level at which the story is about us.

The central element in the story is not the apparent miracle. It is the voice from heaven. Or more to the point, it’s what the voice says, what it points to. The miraculous transformation of Jesus would be ambiguous – even meaningless – without some accompanying text, but what the voice says doesn’t need the shiny miracle; it doesn’t even need to be loud. And what the word says, illustrated by the miracle, is that everything which matters is just here, in this ordinary Jesus. This is the surprise, the shock, the miracle of the story.

We have here not an account of some amazing event alongside all the other miracles Jesus is said to have done. The story doesn’t even declare that Jesus is somehow bigger or better than us in the way we normally understand that comparison. The story simply declares the presence of God in the very ordinary Jesus: “This is my son”. We tend to imagine voices from heaven to be booming and overwhelming, just as Jesus is said to have suddenly exploded in light, but the miracle is not the dazzling brilliance or the booming voice from heaven. The miracle is what the voice declares: this one, this ordinary human in his fleshy createdness, this one embodies everything. Here, in this ordinary one, is the truth. Here, hanging on the cross, is the truth. Here is divine pleasure, divine expression: in the human Jesus.

We are not to see Jesus transfigured; we are to see through it. The Transfiguration marks Jesus as the coincidence of earth and heaven, the heavenly kingdom come and done, as earth. The point of the story, then, is not that the transfigured Jesus is strangely out of place. The point is that Jesus fits precisely here. And the follow-on from this is that it’s the surprised Peter and the other disciples who do not fit. Though Peter wants to build a place to put Jesus into, Jesus is already fit for location; it is Peter who is wrongly in the world.

And now, with Peter, we see that the story is about us as much as about Jesus. The text interprets us: you are surprised at Jesus, surprised at the proposal that in his ordinariness is the coincidence of God and all things. The glory of God, one of the old sages said, is the human being fully alive. If Jesus is lit up with divine glory, it is because his humanity itself is deep, pure, and glorious.

This might change our idea of salvation. The common notion of salvation is very much one of being saved from something – perhaps a salvation from sin and judgment, and likely consignment to hell. We are saved, that is to say, from the world and its ways, and are now oriented toward another world yet to come. On this reading, Jesus comes, or is sent, in order to die, in order to make an exchange to secure this other place for us and finally carry us over into it.

But an alternative reading of the life and death of Jesus is that he comes not in order to die but in order to live. Or, we might say, he comes to relocate heaven for us in the here and now. On this reading, the Transfiguration is not a foretaste of the coming resurrection after Jesus dies; it is a declaration to Peter and the other disciples that here and now, in the tangible and fleshy reality of Jesus, is the presence and reality of God. Or to put it rather more pointedly: here, now, in this one, is heaven: This is my son, the beloved. See him. Listen to him. Be as he is.

Our problem is not that we don’t see flashy displays of God’s presence in the world around us. Our problem is that we think that that’s what we need to see for God to be present to us. Blessed are those who have not seen, but heard and understood. We might even dare to wonder whether Jesus really was transfigured or whether, for a moment, Peter and the others understand what they are dealing with. It doesn’t really matter. The gospel would still be the gospel without the Transfiguration story.

And so the question is, what is the gospel? And, alongside this, if the gospel is “good news”, what is the bad news the gospel answers?

The gospel reveals the possibility of a life free from fear, a life which doesn’t turn the world into either a Godless place, or make it into God. The bad news here is that we do fear what we should not, that we do banish God, or worship the world.

The gospel is that God – and so our fullest, richest humanity – is neither a long way off nor an occasional, local, miraculous flash. Reconciliation with God comes with reconciliation with the requirement that life not be put off to some after-death renewal but be lived to its fullest here and now.

If we must come around to the Transfiguration every year, it’s not for comprehensiveness’ sake – that we cover all the high points in the story on a regular basis. It is because the gospel is about us ourselves being changed. Not transfigured – not made to look different, but changed as we are, in our awareness of what and where we are, of who and whose we are, even now.

The glory of God is a human being fully alive. Jesus was always this, even despite the Transfiguration. The gospel is that we might be it, too.

Let us, then, see and listen to what and how Jesus is, that our lives here and now might be lived from glory into greater glory.

And all God’s people say, Amen.

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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.