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Lent 3
23/3/2025

Isaiah 55:1-9
Psalm 63
Luke 13:1-9

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In an online article this week, the Ethics Centre’s Simon Longstaff remarked upon a couple of the more cynical modes of political self-promotion available to our parliamentary representatives. These are appeals to the voter’s self-interest though either fear or greed.

Of these, greed is probably the less effective, perhaps not least because most voters are doing reasonably well already, or because we’re less confident that politicians are reliably able to tweak the economy in our favour.

But fear can work very well. “Vote for me, and I will protect you from… [insert deep fear here]” – asylum seekers, woke city millennials, housing density increases in your area, fluoride in your drinking water, or whatever. Protection from threats like this – if “protection” is the right word – are often possible with the stroke of pen; observe the political style of a particular president across the Pacific.

Vote for me, and I will keep you safe. This works, to the extent that there is sufficient fear in the electorate.

The interesting thing about this political method for our thinking this morning is how close it seems to what Jesus says in today’s gospel reading. After hearing of a couple of local political and natural disasters, Jesus remarks – Do you think your prospects are any better? “I tell you…unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”. This sounds more than a little like, Unless you vote for me, you’re all going to die.

Certainly, many Christians have read such texts in just this way – whether in fear for their own well-being or as a weapon with which to threaten others. The proverbial fatal encounter with a bus after leaving the evangelistic meeting comes to mind: what will happen to your soul if you are run over by a bus on leaving today, unrepentant?! Jesus looks here like he might have made a pretty good politician of the cynical type.

And yet, even if this is what Jesus does mean here – or what Luke thinks he means – the Scriptures know more broadly that the promise will not be honoured. The books of Job and Ecclesiastes are not persuaded that goodness amounts to long and prosperous life. But even more central to Christian faith is the problem of Jesus’ own experience, because he himself suffers what is described in this troubling little text: his blood is “mixed” with his sacrifice when upon him falls all the towering weight of religious and political opposition.

This is to say that the “unless” – unless you repent – and the “perish as they did” cannot mean that simply repenting will see these threats resolved. And so “repent” must be less straightforward than simply “confessing all my bad stuff”, and “perish as they did” is much less straightforward than just dying young.

The problem with the politics of fear – and the religion of fear – is that it fights fire with fire, leaving us only with … fire – the fire of fear.

To relate to anything in the mode of fear is always to be fearful of that thing, even as we imagine ourselves to be protected from it. If we truly fear the judgement of God, then we will wonder whether everything we have done to protect ourselves is yet enough. This is because the protection is precisely what we ourselves have constructed, and it will likely be about as reliable as the kinds of protections many of our politicians promise us. To hear that we should repent is fine, but have I repented of everything which matters? Have I missed something? What if God really knows me better than I know myself? – surely a truly terrifying thought here, if I believe what Jesus says. How can I repent of what God knows but I do not?

And so, on the simplest – and probably most common – reading, our text today should strike horror into everyone who takes it seriously. Who could possibly be saved? Who could be confident that they repented of everything? The fear of God which demands repentance creates the fear that I have not repented enough, not repented of everything I should have. And so the fear of God begets the fear of God. There is nothing liberating or good-news-y about this.

How then could what Jesus says here be true? What could repentance mean, which makes sense of the fact that righteousness does not prevent suffering, but also calls us to a new, deeper, richer experience of ourselves and of God?

The thing of which we should repent is fear itself. It is fear the crowds bring to Jesus – Did you hear what Pilate did to those poor people? Did you hear about everyone crushed under the tower? And Jesus affirms their worst fear – that this is unpredictable, that they are no different from the others who got up in the morning and launched into their normal day but didn’t come home that night.

So, when Jesus says, “Unless you repent, you will perish as they did”, he cannot mean “Such things do not happen to the faithful”. For such things will happen even to Jesus himself, whom we see as the definition of faithfulness.

Rather, fear itself is the problem – the fear with which the crowds told the story, and so the fear by which they defined their place in the world. The possibility of dying “as they did” is not the possibility of dying early, but of dying under the cloud of the fear of death – of its unpredictability, its capriciousness, its finality.

And so, “Unless you repent, you will perish as they did” is not about how we might die; it is about how we are living. The right kind of “fear” of God does not keep death at bay, but it does keep death in its place. The right kind of “fear” of God refuses to live under the shadow of death, or any of death’s many friends. When Jesus says here “repent”, it is a call to repentance of a way of living which imagines that our lives are just about us – that our longevity is our importance. And so he calls us to repent of the fear which separates and isolates, to repent of the fear which causes us to judge others, to repent of the fear of judgement by others. These are the fears which a cynical leader magnifies and manipulates.

None of this is to say that we should not respect what is dangerous. Many who die young do so because they are foolish – which is to say, disrespectful of how the world usually works.

And neither does this soften what Jesus puts to the people in the text today. The fearless life is a difficult one, more so than any mere moral repentance we might make to try to keep God (and death) at bay. Our fears can be a kind of comfort to us because we are able to take control to protect ourselves from them, whether by building bigger walls or by trading with the powers which threaten us, so they’ll leave us alone.

Last week I finished the sermon with a passage from Matthew’s gospel, in which Jesus tells the people to “consider the lilies”. I didn’t prepare today’s reflection with that passage in mind, but it seems pertinent again, only today here it is in Luke’s variation on the same teaching:

²⁷ Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. ²⁸ But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! ²⁹ And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. ³⁰ For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. ³¹ Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.

³² ‘Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. ³³ Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. ³⁴ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

How we perish is not the question. The question is, how we live.

Unless we repent of the fears which constrain us, our living will be just a kind of continuous perishing: to live captive to the fear of death is to imagine that, in the end, God is death, that death is God.

But for those who live without fear, their death just happens to be the last thing they do. To recall from St Paul: “If we live, we live [in] in the Lord; if we die, we die [in] the Lord. So we whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.” (Romans 14.8).

So, lift up your hearts, Jesus says. And live.

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Lent 2
16/3/2025

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Psalm 27
Matthew 6:25-34

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[NOTE: Throughout, ‘Abraham’ is used for ‘Abram’ in the Genesis text].

It is surely a very strange text we have this morning from the book of Genesis.

It is also, of course, a crucial text – not only for the scriptural narrative but for what is happening in the world even today. (No small part of the events in the Holy Land over the last couple of years springs directly from what is said in our reading today from Genesis.)

I want to focus this morning just on the strangeness of the first promise about a great number of descendants, hoping to draw out not simply how unfamiliar to modern minds is the action in the story but how – that foreignness aside – there is a deeper strangeness which might speak to our sense of who and where we are, even now.

The text begins with the promise that God will be Abraham’s shield, and that his reward will be very great. This sounds pretty good, we might suppose, and so it’s perhaps a little surprising that Abraham responds with a question about the viability of his family tree. So far as he is concerned, that can be no shield or no reward while he remains childless. Or rather, the shield-and-reward Abraham looks for is precisely that he have descendants. The promise which God makes then is not a promise in relation to any passing personal crisis which needs to be fixed but the promise of a family which, for the most part, Abraham will not see.

God, then, restates the promise in terms of descendants numbered like the stars. This seems to satisfy the old man, and he ‘believes’. The strangeness here is that I suspect there are few of us who would be satisfied that God had given us a significant gift if it were possible that we ourselves might not even see that gift realised. How could the promise of such an extension of Abraham’s line into the future be the promise of a ‘shield’ and a ‘great reward’?

And so we might wonder: if the promise of descendants is Abraham’s shield here and now, what is the thing from which he must be shielded? If our protection is a future we will not see, what is it this future protects us against, here and now?

It might be enough for us right now not even to know the answer to this question as it relates to Abraham, but simply to see how different it is from our usual thoughts about what we think would constitute a shield or a reward for us here and now. Our personal and joint political lives are filled with desires for shields, and expectations of rewards, very few of which would be met with the promise of great-great-great grandchildren. That is, we don’t want God’s promises to come tomorrow, but today.

Yet this is exactly not what God promises Abraham.

And so we have to ask: if this is the divine order of things – if God’s sense for what we need is located in tomorrow and not in today – how are our deepest desires for today wrong?

It’s a bit scary, really – that we might be wrong about what we need. Though I don’t want to dig too deeply into the promise of the land given in today’s reading, it’s worth noting that the guarantee of the land promise is given to Abraham in a deep sleep, within which descends a ‘deep and terrifying darkness’. This is not just a cheery ‘it’s all going to work out OK in the end’. The thing God is going to do is like darkness to our sense of what is light – and this is shocking.

Again, we might wonder: if God’s promise is the answer to the question Abraham imagines matters, what is the question? Because the answer doesn’t make sense, given our normal questions. What is wrong with our questions given that God’s answer to Abraham would not impress us?

I don’t think I can answer the question about the right question(!) today in a way which will satisfy even myself, let alone you, unless – perhaps – it is simply this: that we are probably worried about the wrong things. Our questions don’t accord with God’s answers, with God’s gift.

The exception to this is Abraham himself. When the text tells us that Abraham ‘believed God’, the point is not at all about credulity or even pious trust; Abraham believes because the promise is true both to himself and to God. Abraham and God are both bound and set free by the future-located promise.

To fill this out a bit, we should recall that, in addition to the importance of the promised descendants and the gift of the land for the biblical story, this Genesis text also features in St Paul’s account of faith and justification by grace apart from moral works. That ‘Abraham believed and God counted this as righteousness’ became a central text for Paul’s attempt to speak of God’s freedom and the freedom of the children of God.

But Paul is not interested here in credulity – in the fact that Abraham simply believes whatever God says, as if the promise of countless descendants were not much different from the promise of an eternally re-filling packet of Tim Tams, and suggesting that if God had promised that Abraham would also have believed it.

Rather, God’s promise of the descendants means this: even long after you have gone, Abraham, I’ll still be there. But you will be present to me in my faithfulness to your descendants, in my remembering of my promise.

To be justified by grace in Paul’s sense is just this: that, before God, we stand on nothing but that God remembers us. This is our end, and it is what Abraham believes.

But if we believe with Abraham that this is our end, then it is also where we begin. We start with the promise that we are the memory of God’s promise to Abraham, and that there will be yet others by whom God remembers us.

All of this is to say that the whole thing – everything we thing we are caught up in and worrying about and working towards – it’s not really about us – not in the anxious way that we tend to experience it. “Abraham, your shield is not only that you will have more descendants than you could ever count, but more than you will ever count. But I will count them for you, and this will be your reward? It’s not just about you.”

And so for us, too: it’s not just about us.

This, of course, seems like bad news: like a deep and terrifying darkness, as if the light of God’s gaze is turned away from us to someplace, someone, else.

But it is in fact good news. It doesn’t render us irrelevant but free. This is because the story – the great story of which we are part – is now not our problem to finish or resolve. Our role in the story is now less to strive than it is to play; less to calculate than to experiment; less to work than to pray – whether in words or actions.

^{Matthew 6.25} ’Therefore I tell you, [JESUS SAYS] do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷ And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? ²⁸ And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹ yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. ³⁰ But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹ Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ ³² For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³ But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

This is what it means to believe: not to believe that God ‘exists’ but to believe that even when we no longer exist, it matters that we did, and matters to God, and in this is the glory in which we are clothed.

“Look toward heaven and count the stars”, God says. “This is the measure of my love for you.”

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Lent 1
9/3/2025

Deuteronomy 26:5b-11
Psalm 91
Luke 4:1-13

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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Deciding good from bad can be so hard, especially when bad can actually look very good. The idea of providing food for all people so that no one need go hungry seems pretty good to me. Having all the powers of the nations given into the hands of a truly good and godly person also seems pretty good. Using whatever means that might be possible to prove the goodness and the power of such a person seems good and sensible too. When we consider that this good man is Jesus there is much to be said in favour of these ways of accomplishing the good of all. Make sure all people are fed – make stones into bread. There are plenty of stones. They would make plenty of bread. This would satisfy the personal needs of the people.

Having the rulers of the world acknowledging the authority of Jesus as King of all people would solve the world’s political problems. Shows of supernatural power would coerce people to believe in Jesus and that would solve the religious problems. Are these not good things? Apparently not, and how would one know?

The simple answer in the case of Jesus in the wilderness might be that Luke tells us that Jesus was tempted by the devil. Quite simply any suggestion by the devil must be ipso facto bad. But of course, talk about the devil presents a particular problem to our modern minds. The personification of evil in a character that can be seen and heard and touched is quite alien to us. It is not our experience. It seems to me that in the terms I have just described such a devil was not Jesus’ experience either. I am not saying that the devil doesn’t exist or that Jesus didn’t have an encounter with the devil. I am saying that the gospel writers wrote of evil in the form a the devil because by doing so they were able to speak into the mind set of their day and overcome all kinds of difficulties that are encountered if you try to explain the events of Jesus in the wilderness in other ways. For starters a conversation between Jesus and the devil makes it clear that Jesus was not dealing with any idea of evil in himself. Promptings to do what is wrong come from beyond Jesus in the gospel writers’ scheme of things.

I think, before I say another word, I had better clear up this business about the devil or Satan. I said a moment ago, ‘I am not saying the devil doesn’t exist.’ Was I therefore saying that the devil does exist? Scripture deals with the presence of evil in different ways. Sometimes it is personified in a devil, in demons, in Satan, in a powerful angel gone wrong, cosmic power, powerful forces set against the will of God. What it all adds up to is that the bible agrees that there are forces within us and around us that are in opposition to love, health, wholeness and peace – against those things God is in favour of.

I am writing quite a long list of questions to ask St Peter at the pearly gate when I get there, and one of them is about how evil is present in the world, but at this stage of my journey I am inclined to go along with scripture, not in terms of a devil but certainly in terms of forces within and beyond human beings that are in opposition to God’s plans for love and wholeness and peace.

For me, therefore, Jesus’ time of trial in the wilderness was a confrontation with that power of opposition. The thing about that power is that it is dressed so respectably – more like a blue suit and red tie than battle fatigues. If there were a personification of evil in the devil I do not think he would be distinguished by horns or a pointing tail. I think he would be as respectable as you and me, and thoroughly pleasant besides. It is one of the most sinister things about evil – it is so reasonable. The choices Jesus is given are not obviously evil. They are not even selfish. They represent choices that should give good things to people. They are even backed up with texts from Scripture. They must be good. Evil is not playing fair when it dresses up as if it is good. That is particularly sinister.

Another aspect of this story of Jesus making his decisions about his ministry is that the suggestions made by the devil are the only suggestions before Jesus. He hasn’t got a set of plans from Satan on the one hand and another package of ideas for ministry from God on the other. To make matters worse Jesus is in the wilderness with and by the Holy Spirit. Our reading began, Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness,… God and evil are there with Jesus and the devil is the only one coming up with the ideas. Jesus returns from the desert with the articulated ideas for how he will conduct his ministry all rejected. The ideas of the evil one are cast aside. The devil leaves Jesus, but Luke says that evil has not left forever. He says that the devil would wait for an opportune time.

Jesus comes away from his forty-day temptation in the wilderness knowing what not to do. We have no indication of a plan. The only thing that emerges as the story unfolds is that the way of God for Jesus would be the way of the cross. His way ahead is lit, but with a poor light. I interviewed a candidate for the ministry once. I asked how she would tackle the issues that faced her down the track. She said that the Lord was a lamp to her feet and light to her path but he only ever showed where the next step would be. That for me was a wonderful statement of trust. Jesus was left with the same need of trust. So are we.

We can’t even come up with definitive answers to the questions of what is right and what is wrong. We don’t really know how to plan for the best for our children. We can’t be certain if this or that choice is God’s way or if it is evil dressed up as good complete with Scriptural warrants.

We can know that Jesus knows the dilemmas we face. His temptations were greater than ours. Not only that, but temptation is not a time when God is far away. ‘Filled with the Holy Spirit the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness.’ For whatever reason our alone times are spirit filled times. (That is not to say that we can have lonely times when God seems far away. I want to distinguish between lonely times and alone times.) So it is that Christian people have learned to come away from their wilderness experiences, not so much with questions answered as with faith enriched – being prepared to walk with God again and to trust, one step at a time.