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Pentecost 12
11/8/2024

2 Samuel 18:5-15
Psalm 34
John 6:35, 41-51

Most of you here this morning probably have in your pocket or bag a device which is capable of recording and storing thousands of photographs and tens of thousands of books.

These days, information is cheap – recording the details of our lives is cheap, and easy. We can click a picture of every meal we eat and upload it to share for others (for reasons not entirely clear), or write posts on all sorts of platforms, sharing instantly and perhaps forever what thought has just arced from one place to another in our minds.

We know that it wasn’t like this in the “olden days”, of course. But what is less obvious is what this meant for recording information back then. In the times that the Scriptures were written, materials were expensive, and the labour required to transmit a written story was enormous.

One effect of this was that you would keep the details down to just what needed to be said. While we – at a whim – can afford to store high resolution images and detailed texts we might never look at or read – the writers of what are now our Scriptures had to be sure that what was recorded actually mattered.

This being the case, what do we make of all the detail we have about the life of David in the scriptural narrative – for the detail abounds?

Today’s reading from 2 Samuel skips over a lot of the Absalom affair, precisely to be brief. But, to fill in some of that detail: Absalom’s sister Tamar was raped by their half-brother Amnon. Knowing this, David nevertheless refused to act against Amnon. Eventually, Absalom kills Amnon and flees into exile, later to be reconciled to David. Absalom, however, has high political ambitions, and campaigns to replace David as king, forcing David to flee Jerusalem. Absalom pursues David but, despite David’s insistence that he not be hurt, the young man is killed, as we heard in today’s reading. In the midst of all this, there are defections and spies, passion and suicide – all the makings of a great TV series.

Whatever judgement we might make about all that, we might wonder, Why even tell the story? Why do we need to know the “days of our lives” of these 10th Century (BC) Israelites? Of course, we can moralise happily about this or that event in the story. But if that was the intention of the writers themselves, then perhaps they might have given us a bit more of their own moralising because there isn’t very much of that in the text. Mostly, we hear what happened but not what it means or what judgement we should make of it.

Why, when it was so difficult to record and reproduce this information, risk leaving it to readers to work out the moral of the story for themselves?

The reason for the detail has to do with the very humanity of the story. We might imagine those early editors looking at all the material they have in front of them, ranging from the innocence of David as a young shepherd and his courage in fronting up to Goliath, to his abuse of Bathsheba and murder of Uriah and his loss of strength and sense in the face of Absalom – looking at all this and simply wondering how it could all be so.  How could God’s favourite be all this?

And so they write it all down, or enough of it to make the point. Here is the breadth and length, the height and depth, of the life of any one of us. Even though the story has comparatively little detail compared to what we might tell about ourselves today, in a context where recording and storing information was so expensive the story displays an extraordinary interest in the details of human relationships and the impact of those details upon those people themselves. That David is the king makes the story all the more compelling because, as we have noted before, David serves here not simply as one person among the many billions of us who have lived before and since but as a representative figure.

When we come then to speak of God’s dealings with us, we must remember that it is with this kind of humanity that God engages. We are brave and beautiful, we kill and steal, we plant and build, we are neglected and raped. We are no mere “stars” which descend from heaven for a time before returning, as is sometimes sentimentally said, as if our core reality were the simplicity of a single light. We are – each of us – whole galaxies of hopes, experiences, achievements and failures.

Yet, for the most part, we prefer either to oversimplify the complexity of the good and the bad which we are. Such oversimplification is akin to the sentimentality we considered last week. It speaks a partial truth: “stop the boats”, “a woman’s right to choose”, “from the river to the sea”, “God gave us this land”, “but Absalom is my son” are partial truths, wishful oversimplifications of deep and complex human realities. Sentimentality omits inconvenient details about what we are.

But even if oversimplification serves us nicely in distracting us from unpleasant details of our reality, this doesn’t work for God. God will consider us without reduction, without covering over. There are no fig leaves adequate for shielding us from the God who already knows what we look like uncovered.

This is not necessarily good news. We oversimplify and distract ourselves and others from the details of our personal and collective humanity for good reason: we would rather others did not know, often enough even that we ourselves did not know. We don’t what this, not here, not now. The complex mess which we are – now right, now wrong, now strong, now weak, now sure, now unsure – makes the world more than we can bear. We simplify to survive.

But we are not in this way brought to heaven. And the result is that we cease to be either properly of the world or of heaven. Rather, like the unfortunate Absalom hanging in the fork of a tree, we are strangely suspended: hanging between heaven and earth. This is where we live most of our lives.

And so anything worth hearing of God and gospel must acknowledge this. The Old Testament narratives don’t just tell us “what happened”. They show David – and everyone else – now ascending a little, now descending a little, neither properly divine nor properly human. For whatever other reasons we might value the Old Testament, we have to love its realism.

And it’s because of this that the place Jesus himself occupies is our actual place: hanging on the cross, suspended between heaven and earth, seeming to be neither human nor divine. God know us here, as we are.

To say with John that the Word became flesh is to say God becomes our flesh in all its messy, suspended detail. And now the detail which matters most about us is that we are known better than we know ourselves. The detail which matters most is God’s very knowledge of us, and its purpose: that we be loved as we are, caught between what we wish we were and what we see ourselves to be.

The details of the stories – David’s and ours – matter first because they are what make us us. This is us. But the details also matter because they are known by a God who – sometimes in spite of the details, sometimes because of them – loves us and cherishes us: for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.

This is not a simple God for a simple people. God is complex and variable because we are. And God is this, in order that we might simply be his. The scriptural writers invest so much in the detail of David’s life because it is the life of one of us, as we are; and it is a remarkable thing that such a one as he does not simply fall within God’s capacity to love, but is in fact the focus of that love.

And so also for us. This is a love which shines in our darkness and yet is not overcome by it.

For such an all-searching, all-comprehending and all-embracing love, all thanks be to God.

And let our thanksgiving take the form of turning to the messy, suspended world, and loving it as God does.

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Pentecost 7
7/7/2024

2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Psalm 48
Mark 6:1-13

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God, may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

As I begin this sermon two things give me some encouragement:

Following the Gospel reading, I am very glad to be preaching in Melbourne. I was born in Ōtautahi Christchurch. This is not my hometown, so there is some hope!

Second, my focus today will be on our reading from 2 Corinthians. As I prepared for this sermon I went back over some of my notes from the class I took on this epistle. I found a quote I wrote in a reflective piece we were asked to write about our major exegetical essay:

“The sense of the Bible’s distance can be surmised from the immense struggle I had with the major exegetical essay – submitting work I was unhappy with. My sustained engagement with the text revealed it to be far more complex and foreign than I had hitherto appreciated. It stood against me…”

I have been in the depths with this text before. So at the very least the thorniness of today’s reading isn’t new!

The challenge in engaging scripture is that the text always pulls us in two opposite directions.

On the one hand, the closer we look at the text, the more we wrestle with its language, the historical context, the sweep of its ancient rhetoric, the subtle references to other texts within and beyond scripture, the more and more we appreciate its complexity. So far as I can tell all of scripture was written by aliens. People whose lives and understandings of the world are so remote from me that I can scarcely imagine what their world was like. The texts which we have received are utterly distant and strange.

On the other hand, because what we have received in these texts is, “prophetic and apostolic testimony, in which [we] hear the Word of God and by which [our] faith and obedience are nourished and regulated.” (Basis, 5) Because these texts are a witness to our living faith in a living God, they are the most intimate of texts. Not alien, but deeply, deeply personal. Not distant, but close.

This is the mystery of what it means to encounter the Word of God in the scriptures. To interweave the intimacies of our relationship with God with the stories of alien, yet fellow, believers long ago. There is a sense in which the way we understand the world itself needs to be pierced through by the light of our experience of faith.

Part of what makes the Apostle Paul quite difficult to read is that he is often reconfiguring our understanding of the world itself. In part this is because of his own transformative encounter with the Risen Christ. In light of this encounter Paul was forced to reevaluate everything he knew about himself and the world. Such a radical transformation led him to reinterpret his personal, as well as cultural and religious, identity and history. In this way many of us can identify with Paul: knowing for ourselves the indelible mark our encounter with Christ has left on who we are and how we make sense of ourselves and the world.

And yet, the more alien dimension of Paul’s reconfiguration of history arises out of his place within the particular historical, cultural, and religious moment in which he lived. While Paul, in today’s reading, offers a parody of mystical experiences of the heavens, Paul very much lived in a world in which journeys through the heavens were a live option. Part of what makes the parody work is the assumption of a multilayered heaven – with estimates ranging from 3 to over 300 layers … And the place of paradise among these heavens.

Our challenge as those listening for the Word of God in the Scriptures is to understand just how Paul’s reconfiguration of the world helps us to do the same.

Paul adopts the posture of a mystic trying to argue for the validity of his ministry. Arguing that he has seen through the veil of the world, and ascended to the third heaven. We might never really know which schema of heaven Paul had in his head: 3 layers of heaven? 7? 10? Much of this text is still too alien to really know so.

But it is fairly clear that Paul is using a fair bit of irony here. This mystical experience has not, in the end, filled Paul with mystical insight: he declares only that he is a fool. Whatever he learnt was unutterable anyway. So too, this experience has not made Paul the strong decisive leader who peers through the veil to the truth of the matter. Paul is weak, and has a thorn in his flesh.

We might imagine that when Paul says this mystical journey ended up in Paradise that he arrived late to an empty Eden. Elsewhere Paul uses the interplay of Adam and Jesus to talk about the way the world has become captive to sin. Perhaps in this story Paul arrives to find Paradise already lost. Paul is whisked up to see the mysteries of all of time and space, and returns with nothing.

In the end the best Paul could hope for is a t-shirt that reads: “I got whisked up to heaven and all I got was this lousy thorn in my flesh.”

The whole point of Paul’s story about traversing the heavens seems to be how irrelevant that whole journey is. How little it matters supposedly understanding all the mysteries of the world.

What ultimately matters is the piercing of the thorn in his flesh. Again, we’ll never really know what this thorn was. But we might make something of the fact that thorns pierce the flesh. At least rhetorically for Paul, the thorn draws him back to the experience of Christ. Pierced flesh, suffering in the flesh, weakness which holds a hidden power.

Ultimately the great mysteries of the world are not to be found or solved by some insight into the riddle beneath all things. Rather, it is always back to the cross which we must return. The power of that weakness, the strength in that pierced flesh.

So what, then, as we move from this quite alien story to our own lives of faith?

Perhaps we can be so bold as to imagine our own journey through the heavens.

“I once knew a Church which was so enamoured by its own moral clarity … that was able to see that protecting its place and influence in the world was like recreating Paradise … that had left a large legacy in society …”

But all of this, in the end, counts for very little. What the Church needs is a thorn in its flesh. A piercing which reminds us of the crucifixion, which is the true axis of history. A thorn which — and we should be a little bit bold here — helps us to hold lightly the idea that, “the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends towards justice.” Not because God is not sovereign over the world, but because no one uses this quote as a word of repentance. We must allow the thorn of the cross to pierce the flesh of the Church, and remind us that we do not see through the veil of the world when we are convinced of the Church’s self-importance. We see through the veil when we are reminded that it is the cross which pierces the veil.

The cross which transforms our lives, and leads us to the kinds of service which are for their own sake — not merely to secure the success of our various political projects. It is the cross of a living God: the Risen Crucified One, who ultimately transforms the stories of our lives. So that We do not seem to protect or sustain the institutions of the Church, but the resurrection life in the crucified bodies of the world.

This is the secret behind the veil. Not a glimpse into paradise. But the vision of the cross in this world, with all its chaos and confusion. This is the world which needs the piercing, saving power of God. No other world and no other salvation. Not an institution sustained for its own sake, but a people formed by the transforming power of God. People who know hope, and live love, and seek fresh mercy every day.