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Pentecost 2
2/6/2024

1 Samuel 3:1-20
Psalm 139
Mark 2:23-3:6

Sermon preached by Andrew Gador-Whyte

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Why do we come to church? Well, one of the reasons is to listen in order to learn to speak. To learn to speak in imitation of Christ. To learn to speak for, even on behalf of, Jesus Christ in the world. In other words, we come to church to learn how to blaspheme.

More on whatever that is supposed to mean in a moment. But first, let’s consider our passage from 1 Samuel. We often recall this as a cute story about the childlike openness of the young Samuel’s faith. And of course, this passage is very much about childlike openness to God’s calling. Jesus has a lot to say about that. Faith is always a gradual learning to listen with simplicity. Faith is the habitual opening of ourselves to hear God’s voice – in the ordinary ways God speaks to us, and with a willingness to be surprised by the miraculous.

And in fact, each of us is in Samuel’s position. All the vivid appearances of God like this in the Old Testament point us towards God’s coming in Jesus of Nazareth. And the baptism that we share is a baptism into a shared prophetic ministry.

But clearly this passage is also about God’s judgement against the blasphemy that has become established in the holy place. ‘The word of the Lord was rare and visions were not widespread.’ There is something seriously awry in the life of the nation. The temple at Shiloh has become a place of exploitation and immorality because of the actions of the sons of Eli. The sons are presented as hardened criminals. God will judge them, and will also judge Eli who said the right things but did not act to restrain them.

What’s clear here and throughout the Bible is that there is a close connection between blasphemy in the strict sense and injustice in national life. Blasphemy in the most basic sense is the misuse of the Name of God, it’s the subject of the Third Commandment. It’s irreverence or untruthfulness in speech and worship, and like the sin of idolatry it has far-reaching implications when it has become established in the life of God’s people. What is done in speech about God, is done to our sisters and brothers. Think of Isaiah’s railing against fraudulent weights and measures. Or James exposing the blasphemy of sympathetic words with no intention to act for the other’s good. Or Jesus’ anger at those standing in the way of their neighbour’s healing on the sabbath.

Blasphemy is not a ‘religious’ sin. Misuse of the name of God and disobedience of the law relating to worship are a sign of disordered priorities, of abuses allowed to take root in a society. God’s indignation against blasphemous practices at the temple is not a petulant taking of offense by God. It’s a judgement against those given authority to serve at the heart of national life, but who are abusing and misleading the people. It’s a judgement against the refusal of the gift of God, a gift we must acknowledge our complete dependence on.

In the one baptism we have been adopted into, we share in one prophetic, priestly, and kingly ministry. That is, of course, Jesus’ ministry, which we have been made members of. In baptism, we have been met, like Samuel, by God speaking to us face to face. Jesus has given us an authority we did not choose for ourselves, an authority which we will have to grow into and live out of our own integrity and adult exercise of conscience.

What we are all baptised into is a shared life of learning truthful and reverent speech: of holding one another to account for truthfulness and reverence. Reverence in speech has often been conflated with politeness, but, actually, the Bible is never polite. And likewise, reverence can be confused with deference to an unjust social order. But true reverence in speech is the confidence that our speech is not ultimately our own. Our words are ours to use in the worship of God in the marketplace, the workplace, the law court, the home, the Lord’s house. And reverence is the confidence that, by the grace of God, our ordinary words can be God’s gift for our neighbour’s healing and growing into maturity.

There is no part of our lives where God cannot be trusted to be at work, revealing himself, redeeming the time, standing in judgement over and against our untruthfulness. For much of our lives, the way we hear God is not from God coming and standing before us, as he appears to Samuel. We ordinarily hear God speaking in and through our neighbour. God wills that we encounter Christ, scripture, sacrament not through the Self-Serve, but as a gift given through our sisters and brothers. Here we train one another up in the grammar of truthful speech.

What Jesus tells us is that our culture needs us to maintain an absolute respect for the truth. Think of his words about simplicity and truthfulness in speech: ‘let your yes be yes and your no be no: anything else comes from the evil one.’ Our world needs us to maintain a profound reverence for the world not as a final end in itself, but as the fragile and complicated place God claimed to be his cradle.

Our world is, we continue to discover, a blasphemous world – a world needing to be redeemed by reverence for the truth. It’s a world in which hospitals and refugee camps have been treated as targets. Where euphemisms for killing are piled upon euphemisms. Where freedom of speech is asserted as a licence to abuse and spread lies. Where there is no proper respect for secrets and the sanctity of the interior life.

It’s a world in which anti-vaxers or pro-vaxers, or more tragically, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli voices, have been taken to be blasphemers and treated as though they had forfeited a claim to the basic generosity that structures society. We are part of a world where blasphemy is taken for right speech. We are people of unclean lips, and we live among a people of unclean lips. This is the world to which we have been yoked as apprentices in a prophetic vocation. This is a world that needs us to keep learning the grammar of reverence for life.

So then – what then do we make of Jesus the Blasphemer? Jesus repeatedly transgresses the law. He heals on the sabbath. He touches the infected, he socialises with people who are not in a state of grace. He overturns the tables of the temple traders changing secular money into sacred. We read the Gospels in a serious voice, but Jesus’ parables are often funny, ironic, irreverent in exposing our hypocrisy and hardness of heart. Jesus is held to be a blasphemer in claiming to be greater than Moses, the Son of the Blessed One, I Am. And it is precisely as a blasphemer that Jesus is condemned to death.

The New Testament does not give us an easy formula for reconciling the givenness of the law and the cavalier way Jesus transgresses it. We can only witness Jesus’ freedom here as authoritative reverence and truthfulness, bringing to light our darkness. Jesus’ blasphemy reveals that much that is held as sacred in the world is idolatry, lies, self-projection, or simply violence.

As with Samuel, the risen Jesus meets us face to face, speaking our name. And seeing the risen Christ, we recognise that we had been so profoundly enmeshed in the worship of our own security, that we refused the gift of God that is the blasphemy of Jesus of Nazareth.

But God will not allow our refusal of the gift to have the last word. Because, we can trust that, most often through our sisters and brothers, Christ will call us by name as he called Samuel, confronting us and calling us into service.

Visions are not widespread in our blasphemous times. But we may open ourselves to the grace of God, who trains us through our life together to speak with truth and reverence. Which may, of course, be to speak with laughter, with irony, with irreverence in a culture where euphemisms and lies justify the buildup of weapons. Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening, and teach us your holy blasphemy.

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Trinity Sunday
26/5/2024

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29
John 3:1-17

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“Whom shall I send? ”, cries the God of Isaiah’s vision. And the wannabe prophet responds, “Here am I Lord. Send me. ”

This is often read as a text for missionaries, even for the mission of the church as a whole. God seeks voices to testify to God’s truth, and Isaiah’s enthusiasm serves as the perfect motivational text for the individual wondering whether she is called into the ordained ministries or for a church wondering whether it needs to be jolted into action. God’s “Whom shall I send?” seeks the willing response, “Here am I, Lord. Send me. ”

So far, so comfortably pious. But Isaiah’s vision continues in the verses which follow those we’ve heard this morning but to which our reading rarely extends. “Go then”, said the Lord, “and say to the people”… What?

• That they should be a diverse community?
• That it’s time for a restructure?
• That God will wipe away every tear from their eyes?

Nah. Go then, said the Lord, and say to the people:

“Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand. ”

Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes,

so that they may not look with their eyes, and [not] listen with their ears,

and [not] comprehend with their minds, [so that they may not] turn and be healed.

“I send you to them”, says the Lord, “so that they may not see, may not listen, may not understand. ” This is not what we expect…

And it gets worse. Then Isaiah said, “How long, O Lord? ”

¹¹ …And [the Lord] said:
‘Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,

and houses without people,
and the land is utterly desolate;

¹² until the Lord sends everyone far away,
and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.

¹³ Even if a tenth part remains in it,
it will be burned again,

like a terebinth or an oak
whose stump remains standing
when it is felled. ’

In view of all this, there comes to mind the question of Nicodemus in our Gospel reading this morning: How can these things be?

How can it be that we must be born again?

How can it be that God is not tame?

How can it be that our part in the mission of God might just be to proclaim and enact until the land is utterly desolate?

It’s not for nothing that these verses are rarely included when Isaiah’s vision pops up in the lectionary. The lectionary sometimes seems to want to protect us from the more difficult biblical judgements. Or, perhaps, the lectionary wants to protect God. If we leave a few verses out, we can stitch a couple of fig leaves over God’s confronting nakedness, because a God whose proclamation doesn’t improve things would seem to be a useless God; better to cover that uselessness up by not reading a few things.

How can such things be? Is ministry not about trying to help the people to hear, to see, and to understand? Is mission not about making a discernable difference – an improvement? Do we not seek to avert the encroaching desolation and emptiness?

It is in the thick of the choking incense, ears filled with the shrieks of the burning seraphim, and dripping with perspiration from the scorching heat of the altar, that Isaiah cries out, “Send me, Lord”. But this is not to say that the smoke lifts or the noise or heat subsides. The powerful Assyrians are coming, and Isaiah’s ministry will be to ride the wave of the Assyrian onslaught to its very bitter end.

If we claim Isaiah’s “Send me” for the mission of the church itself, is the call on us to ride out some coming desolation? To put it more pointedly, who would be a minister of the gospel or a member of a congregation in a mainstream liberal Western denomination here and now, in what looks very much like the twilight of the church, quite apart from what’s happening in the wider world?

“How long, O Lord?”, cries Isaiah. And the Lord replies, Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and churches without people.

What kind of mission is this? Can we bear it?

We must do “something”, of course. The Uniting Church Assembly’s final report of its Act2 process has just been released with its recommendations for a reorganisation of the church. It is “something” and a response to a real problem. But there is not a lot of preaching into the desolation to be found on all those pages – not a lot of what we might call a theological realism which recognises the grim possibilities as much as those which enthusiasm can see.

– – – – – – – – – –

Negotiating all this hinges very much on what we think desolation means and, more importantly, whose desolation it is.

Consider the following Christian hijacking of Isaiah’s vocation:

I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; …and one called to another and said. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory. ” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? ”

And a voice responded, “Here am I, Father, send me. ”

Go, then, said the Father, and become a parable. Let them listen but not understand, see but not perceive, hear but not respond. Become the sacrament of their dullness and deafness and blindness.

And then the Son asked, “How long, Father? ” And the Father said, until you are made an emptiness in the midst of the land, burned and burned again like a tree which has been cut down – until you have taken the vast, vast, vast emptiness of the godforsaken and made it our very own desolation.

And so, as love for the world, God sent the only Son to become a desolation, that all who believe in him might have fullness of life.

– – – – – – –

We fear desolation, for it is the loss of ourselves and the loss of God. And so we wince at the thought of it, and even more so at the suggestion that there is nothing we can do about it – nothing even which God will do about it. We look rather for a way out, a solution to whatever crisis threatens emptiness, and we expect of ourselves a capacity to rise to meet the threat and turn it aside.

This is the “fix-it” mentality which treats the world as a problem and our technological ingenuity – our strategies, our negotiations – as the answer.

But the world is not a problem which can be fixed; it is a mystery within which to live. Here and there, of course, we can do “something” to make a difference, and we should where we can. But what was bearing down on Isaiah’s people was not their doing (though the prophets make a causal link), just as their prosperity in other times was not God’s blessing. The mission of prophet, of evangelist and of church, is not to bring solutions to problems. It is to name mysteries. It is to bring into the mix an account of God, the world and ourselves which calls hearers to a different seeing and a different being.

The preaching of Isaiah into the desolation is not God’s condemnation of the people, and neither is it the offering of a solution to the crisis bearing down on them. Isaiah’s word is the sign of God’s faithfulness. It is God seeing us, comprehending us to the very end. The word of truth, the wisdom at the heart of creation, the secret – the mystery – of all things, this doesn’t change as those things themselves change. God is faithful: the Word of life is still spoken.

And so, in Jesus, God himself rides the desolating wave to its very bitter end in the cross, in order that we might know something other than bitterness. Because now, when we arrive at the end, we find that God is already there, in the wormwood and the gall. Our lives – our joys and our desolations – are not problems to solve but mysteries to be lived. Should we be consigned to desolation, it is already God’s own desolation. The where-it-wills freedom of the Spirit is not divine unpredictability but our confidence that nothing can be outside God.

We worry about how much we see and hear and comprehend, and so we plan, and report, and budget. And all this is OK – it is a form of prayer. But this is less important than knowing ourselves to have been seen, to have been heard, and to have been comprehended. Send me, says the Son, and we will know their desolation, so that they will know that nowhere they go is finally godless.

We’ve read the headlines and heard the dark foreshadowings of today’s prophets. If they are right, it matters not. As we pray through our many efforts to avert the next threatened disaster, we do so in the knowledge God has already been where we are going. God has been to us.

Step into tomorrow, cries the voice from the throne. Go where I have gone, and I will meet you there.

This is the God in whom we live and move and will have our being, our end and our beginning, wherever we find ourselves.

“Who will go with us, and live into whatever comes next?”, asks Isaiah’s God, and ours.

Here are we, Lord. Take us.

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Pentecost
19/5/2024

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 102
Acts 2:1-21
John 15:26-27, 16:4-15

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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There are some things that are just too hard to talk about. Some things defy description. Take God for example. How can you talk about God? Our basic senses of sight and hearing and smell and so forth, they can’t perceive God, so how can we put language to the divine and how can we tell what God is like?

In the face of this great difficulty many have concluded that there is no God. Millions have come to another conclusion and their conviction has demanded that they find words to tell of their experience of the God they cannot see or hear or taste or smell or feel but who unmistakably is revealed to them, by what means, again, language struggles to make clear.

One form of language that is helpful for explaining the inexplicable is story telling. Philosophers and theologians can give us tightly packed arguments that help us understand who God is but the story teller philosopher and the theologian who spins a yarn is also the purveyor of truth.

St Luke was such a theologian. When he told the story of God coming among the friends of Jesus as a rushing wind and as tongues of fire the story teller preacher was at his best. But is that what really happened, those things Luke said about 3,000 converts in one hit? Maybe they did. John’s gospel describes the giving of the Spirit differently so one or both of them could be wrong in the details, but each is describing a truth through a story. What is the truth about God that Luke is saying in his dramatic and energetic story?

Well, Luke is starting by saying that God is dramatic and energetic. He also deals with the delicate issue of how God seems to be revealed to some people and not to others, or that some people perceive God and others make fun of those who do. So Luke tells of a house filled with wind and flames alighting on the disciples.

In this scene there is the inner group of Jesus followers who are the ones who receive the Spirit of God and there are all the others. The idea of ‘them and us’ is a very uncomfortable one for Luke who understands that in Jesus Christ God intends that all people come within God’s rescue plan. He cannot get away from the fact that some people know God and others don’t so those who do go all out to make God, who was known to them in Jesus, and who is alive in them through this gift of the Spirit, – to make God known to all other people. Luke is very particular about who this means. He includes in his story of drama and energy the strange phenomenon of people understanding speech across all the linguistic barriers. People from all nations and tongues can receive this gift. This is not a ‘them and us’ situation. This is a for everyone event. Bringing different national groups together was a vital issue for Luke. His understanding of who God is includes the idea that God made all people and desires all people to be reconciled to God and to each other. He understood that part of the task of the followers of Jesus is to make this known to all people and that God would be in that task breaking down the barriers.

So why would Luke have been so interested in God and race relations? Was it just a disembodied theological concept, that because God made all people, all people should be reconciled to one another. Why should that follow? Why not allow that different races have their different places where God put them? Let them get on with each other in their own places? No! In our experience and in Luke’s experience it simply does not work that way. Race relations were as much an issue and a threat to world peace for Luke and his world as it is for us and our world. He saw minority groups oppressed by occupying forces. He saw attempts at ethnic cleansing. He and his church experienced separation from family roots and alienation from their spiritual homelands.

Luke was convinced that reconciliation between all people was God’s will and the Spirit’s power to achieve and that God called men and women into that ministry of reconciliation.

Over the years Rob Gallacher and I have had requests to provide photos of icons for the front cover of the devotional aid With Love to the World. A few years ago I was asked for a photo for the Pentecost edition. The result is on the front of today’s order of service. With Love to the World is a publication of the Uniting Church. One of the characteristics of the Uniting Church is that it is made up congregations of different ethnicities. On a festival occasion when the church hears again the story of the power of the Holy Spirit enabling people of all languages to hear Peter’s sermon I wanted to find a way to celebrate our church’s diversity and a unity found by the pouring of the Spirit. In the icon Peter stands holding words from Joel 2:18, ‘God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh’. Peter stands on a kind of pavement made up of translations of that text in some of the languages of ethnic congregations of the Uniting Church – Tongan, Chinese, Indonesian, Korean and Tamil and Garrwa, spoken by First Peoples of Australia living near the Gulf of Carpentaria’s coastline.

Back when the icon was painted I offered it as a prayer of thanks for a unity found in diversity. Today it is offered in a world tearing itself apart because of its diversity, where nations head towards Ezekiel’s vision of a valley of dry bones. Can current conflicts end in any other way than death? Ezekiel’s vision poses our questions; ‘[God] said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”’ (Ezekiel 37:3)

As I use this word of Scripture to offer a word of hope from God, I am conflicted. Ezekiel offered his word to Israel in Babylon’s captivity. If the icon of Peter at Pentecost is a prayer as proclaimed by Joel declaring that God’s Spirit will be poured out on ALL flesh, then Ezekiel’s vision must address today’s world rather then an ancient time. The context for this Scripture needs translation to our time. Also, it is word that needs to be addressed to people rather than to nations and their governments. In answer to the question, ‘Can these bones live?’ God says, ‘you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live …’ (Ezekiel 37:13f). My prayer is that this be a word of hope – for Israelis and Palestinians, for Ukrainians and Russians, for all victims of aggression and their perpetrators. To them, and to us, God says, ‘you shall live.’

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Easter 7
12/5/2024

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Psalm 1
John 17:6-19

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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It is Mothers’ Day, and so long as we know who our mothers are, we can be pretty sure how we belong in our families. Because we know who mum is we know we don’t belong to the family next door. Because we know who mum is we know a lot of things about ourselves – why our skin is the colour it is, why our language and accent is the way it is – all sorts of things.

But we don’t just belong to a mother. We are not just members of our families. We are members of all kinds of groups. We are keenly aware of some of our groups when the national anthem plays or the football siren sounds. I remember an American preacher, James Glasse, explaining how he knew who he was by knowing who he wasn’t. He and his friends told stories about the black people. That’s how he knew he was white. They told stories about the Catholics. That’s how he knew he was Protestant, and so on.

One of the strong messages I have received through my formative years and beyond is that we are all members of the human race, all equal in the sight of God, all destined under his mercy and good favour. It was pretty easy to be convinced of this, living in an upper middle class suburb of a city equal in wealth and sophistication to any of the great cities of the modern world – pretty easy living during a post war migration scheme under a white Australia policy – pretty easy living under a policy for Aborigines that advocated assimilation, a policy that my church went along with. Under that policy I joined church work parties to build houses for Aboriginal families in country towns through NSW.

Then things became confused for me. People my age were going to university and were seeing Australia’s involvement in Vietnam differently from how the government saw the conflict. A petition did the rounds of my church objecting to the visit by the rugby union Springbok team from South Africa. I was confused. I didn’t know what apartheid was. Suddenly it was not as easy as it had all seemed. Brotherly love was not going to sweep through the world and make us all God’s loving children. (I hadn’t heard about sisterly love yet.)

But at least the church was on the right track, surely. There was talk of church union. Of three denominations coming together in Australia. This must surely be an irresistibly good thing to do. To my dismay the church was divided over the issue. I was a member of the NSW Assembly, and to my horror the vote went ‘no’ and the moderator could scarcely contain his joy and I saw the sorrow on the faces of the ministers and elders who had voted for union as they lined up at the table to record their dissent from the majority decision.

It wasn’t easy any more to hope for peace and goodwill in the world or in the church. The church and the world is departmentalised.

Now, as I read the scriptures I discover it was ever thus. In Jesus’ prayer for his disciples in John’s gospel there is a distinct them and usness about it. Jesus is praying for his disciples and not for the world. The disciples are in the world but they have been given into Jesus charge and he has not lost one of them. Jesus is in the world too but he is soon to be removed from the world. The disciples will remain in the world but they will not be of the world because the world hates them, so Jesus prays that the evil one, who is of the world will not bring them to harm.

Why couldn’t John say that Jesus prayed for the world too? What was going on in John’s church that prompts the recording of this prayer? In John’s church as in any group of people, there are those people who do not live up to the group’s ideals. When some of these people aspire to leadership in the group then you get political conflict. This causes uncertainty in the group. In the church, when there is uncertainty over ideals, it calls in question our certainty of our place within God’s loving care. John’s gospel is at pains to assure the faithful that they are in God’s loving care. The problem is that within the community of God’s care there are those who don’t really belong. Among the disciples there was one – Judas Iscariot. There he was in the community of the faithful, but until his betrayal, the faithful did not know that he did not really belong.

In John’s church there were people who left the community during time of persecution. How could this be that the community of faith could have members that were not true to their membership? It was as if the true church was invisible, known only to God, for only God can read the heart. These are conclusions that a church under persecution came to so they could understand the apparent inconstancies of life around them. The church is the safe place where God’s love and care is known. The world is hostile to the church so how are we to understand God’s presence in the world? And how are we to understand signs of the world in the church? Answer: the true church is invisible except to God. The sign of the faithful will be those who love Jesus and you can tell those as the ones who keep his commandments, and his commandment is to love one another. So the church is visible in as much as we can see love in the church, but its edges may be very blurry.

Is that the only way to think about these things? Well, no. Paul saw the church as being perfectly visible. He saw sinners in the church, all they needed was a good talking to by his good self, they would change and all would be well. The church is full of saints and sinners and they all belong within God’s good grace.

The world is different today, and so is the church. The world and the church are still pretty blurry around the edges. The signs of the church are still the same. Jesus’ followers can still be told apart from the ones who love enough to obey his commandments of love. But if ever we thought that love would be restricted to within the community of the faithful, that time is not now. John taught his church that Jesus prayed for the church, and so he does, but the loving work of an inclusive church is to pray for the world.

Families will gather today to honour their mothers. They will have a sense of a particular belonging. Churches gather to honour Jesus. They have a sense of a particular belonging as they gather around the Lord’s table. They are mindful of their love for Jesus and Jesus’ love for them, and of God’s love for all creation.

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Easter 6
5/5/2024

1 John 1:5-9
Psalm 98
John 15:9-17

Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock

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‘Love one another as I have loved you.’

Today in our lectionary reading, Jesus recalls, or perhaps better to say, foreshadows, last week’s reading from the first letter of John. In that letter, John says:

‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.’

This reading forms part of what is called Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. The final series of solemn words that Jesus imparts to his disciples as they gather together in apprehensive and furtive communion with Jesus for the last time. As they begin to face the cold new possibility of going on without Jesus. As they wrestle with the prospect of being left alone in a hostile world. I can only imagine how they must have drunk in these words, memorising them, meditating on them, arguing over their meaning, parsing over them again and again for crumbs of guidance and comfort in the days ahead.

We might think of this sequence as a kind of spoken Last Will and Testament. I think it is important to see it that way because it is generally at the end of our lives that we clarify, amongst all the tumult and distraction and day-to-day ordinariness, what is really important. We distil what our lives have meant and what we hope for the future. We seek the company of those we love. We express with a decisive finality who we are. What Jesus chooses to say now, we should regard as of supreme importance. It is a final summation of who he is and what he teaches. He reveals to the disciples what previously has been concealed, and he names them as his equals. No longer servants, but friends.

And this is his final summation:

God is love. Love one another as I have loved you.

How often have we heard these phrases? If you had to distil Christianity down to its barest elements, you could do worse than those. God is love. Love one another.

How good are you at loving, friends?

I wonder if familiarity dulls us to these words and their radicalness. How can we hear them today as though for the first time? How can we access their urgency, their insistence, their revolutionary character, as they must have been for the disciples who hear them firsthand?

One way, I think, is to remind ourselves of the context in which they are spoken.

We know that the world of the first century was a universe teeming with gods. It was an intensely polytheistic place. For the ordinary Roman, or the Greek, or the Egyptian, the gods were an inherent reality of what you did and what you experienced. It was expected that they would play a role, either in favour, curse, or indifference, the small affairs of your day-to-day living, and the great affairs of your kingdom. To the gods who presided over every aspect of life, you would appeal for the success of your business, for the safe passage of your ships, for the health of your household, for advantageous and harmonious marriage, for victory in war and stability in peace.

But what were the gods like?

The most influential of the ancient gods has always been the Greek. It is they who preceded the development of the Roman gods, and whose mythology has shaped divine stories throughout history and its many cultures.

The foremost of the Greek gods was Zeus. Presiding over the pantheon of Olympus, Zeus reigned, having overthrown the Titans and their primordial parents. Zeus was the god of sky and thunder, honoured above all, and deserving of sacrifice and worship befitting his station. But Zeus was also married to the goddess Hera, and was serially unfaithful to her. Zeus was a god driven by his lust. Again and again, he would see a mortal woman and desire her. He would couple with her, and his children became the demigods. But very often these couplings were violent and brutal. Sometimes he would disguise himself to get what he wanted. Sometimes he used force. Zeus was, in blunt terms, a serial rapist.

Perhaps you have heard of Prometheus, the god who, taking pity on humanity, gave them the gift of fire. And Zeus, furious at this unsanctioned act of initiative, punished Prometheus by chaining him to a mountain and condemning him that every day an eagle should come and peck out his liver.

Or Poseidon, the god of the sea. He too was as power-hungry and rapacious as his brother Zeus, and on one occasion forced himself upon a woman named Medusa, or was then transformed by Athena into a snake-haired monster.

These were the gods of the ancient world. They were not always so brutally callous. And the mythological stories are, in part, moral tales that serve an instructive, ethical purpose as well as a religious one.

But the gods of the Greek pantheon could never be accused of being characterised by ‘love’. Certainly not in the way that we understand it, and the way that Jesus or John means it. All the love of the ancient gods was directly inwardly. They loved themselves. They loved their pride and their vanity and their desire. They loved power and they loved to exercise it.

That’s why the historian Tom Holland in his excellent book ‘Dominion’ asserts so strongly the impact that the Christian gospel of love has exercised on the Western view of ourselves and our place in the world. What a transformation it must have been for those who had spent their lives making sacrifices to the capricious and self-loving gods of the old Pantheon, to think that God might love them. Not just favour them, but to enfold Godself, by God’s very nature, into loving relationship with them through God’s given son.

It changed the world.

And it must continue to change the world, through us.

The most important thing to say about this love that changes the world, is that it is not a feeling. It is not a chemical reaction that occurs in the brain and is exhausted. Not sentimentality. Not a temporary feeling of passion or nostalgia. It is not affection. Affection and passion may accompany love, but love in this theological sense encompasses so much more than the heart that beats harder.

Love is the greatest of all the gifts of the spirit. Love is our law. It is our constitution. It is our judge and our government. It is our yardstick and our scale. It speaks in our heart in no uncertain terms, to tell us what it requires. Love longs for reconciliation and forgiveness. It insists on mercy. It is patient and it is kind. Love is not proud, but it will fight for what is right. It is not jealous, but will make sacrifices for justice. Love is revealed in Jesus, God incarnate, who shares our life in the world. It is in love that the world is made, and toward love that all things bend.

Love is relationship. It is the obligation of being created things. We love because God first loved us. So it cannot rise and fall with our mood or our sentiment. It is for that reason that it is possible to love strangers, or our enemy. It makes it possible, above all, to die for what is right, as Jesus does.

It is for the law of love that we must be known for our staunch opposition to violence against women. It is for the law of love that we must be known as enemies of violence against children. It is for the law of love that we must be squarely against colonisation and unjust war and capricious injustice. We haven’t always been good at that, but we must become better. That is how we redeem the Gospel in the eyes of the world. The law of love places us in opposition to all those things that the old gods were. It places us in opposition to all the things that the gods of our day represent. The god of money, the god of power, the god of sex, the god of profit, the god of consumption, the god of novelty. The god of self-love is like a still pond, stagnant and unclean, and rotten. Nothing grows there. But the love of relationship, love that is given and received, is a river. It has movement, it gives life. It is clear and clean. You can drink from that water.

There is no fault in the law of love. It can never lose its power. It can never lose its revolutionary character. Only we, who can fail to live up to it. We don’t need a new story. The old story is still strong. It is ever young. We just have to keep telling it, keep holding on to it, keep making it real in our lives, and it will vindicate us. It cannot fail to vindicate us. The law of love will live on after us. No institutional failing of our making can diminish it. We can only diminish ourselves as its representatives and its disciples. But through it, we may abide in the great love of Jesus Christ. That for which there is no better thing to live for.

May the spirit strengthen and renew us as we seek to live out this final will and testament of Jesus Christ the lover:

Love one another as I have loved you.

Amen