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Epiphany 3
25/1/2026

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

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ForeWord

“Light will win”

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

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

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

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

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

Darker lights

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

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

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

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

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

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

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: 1 Corinthians 1. 18-31)

Word: Proclamation

Filtered light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The God who sees in the dark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Epiphany 2
18/1/2026

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

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Baptism of Jesus
11/1/2026

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

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ incorporates people into his body by Baptism.  In this way he enables them to participate in his own baptism, which was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and burial, and which was made available to all when, risen and ascended, he poured out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Baptism into Christ’s body initiates people into Christ’s life and mission in the world, so that they are united in one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy, in one family of the Father of all in heaven and earth, and in the power of the one Spirit.’

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

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

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

‘You are my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

To the God of all grace, who has called us to eternal glory in Christ, be the dominion forever and ever.  Amen.

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Epiphany of the Lord
4/1/2026

Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

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I wonder how many of you have made new year’s resolutions.  Some new year’s resolutions are about doing less – consuming less food or alcohol, being less critical or cynical.  Other new year’s resolutions are about doing more – being more mindful, more encouraging, more joyful, more hopeful.  Some people make new year’s resolutions believing they mark a significant turning point in their lives, as the transition of one year to the next provides an opportunity for life to be reset and renewed.  It’s like a secular version of a declaration of forgiveness, in which the sins of the past are washed away through the dawning of a new year.  The arrival of January 1st is not merely the anticipation of the new but also the relegation of the old, perhaps to be ignored or even forgotten.

It’s interesting to reflect on this in relation to the story of Christmas.  The Christmas season usually features Luke’s narrative of the birth of Jesus, and the testimony of those on the margins of society who declare that his birth is a sign of God’s favour.  On this Epiphany Sunday, we hear Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, and its characters are not merely marginalized members of society, but foreign magi who travel from the east and ask:  ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’  Gentiles announcing a Jewish king?  That’s a surprise, as is what follows: ‘When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him.’  Historians suggest that Herod was paranoid and this explains his fear, but why all Jerusalem with him?  It’s easy to assume that the residents of Jerusalem share the reason for Herod’s fear, but it could be that they’re actually afraid of its consequences; afraid of the suffering that his fear will cause them.

In this regard, we note world leaders in our own time who manipulate political discourse to justify their use of violence.  When they’re challenged, they lash out at those who look, live or think differently – immigrants, the marginalised, the poor, and those who seek justice.  This emboldens power hungry sycophants and patriots, and it silences ordinary people; stifling debate and dissent.  Fear and division abound.  Some might say it’s human nature to observe things we dare not challenge; human nature to believe things we dare not declare; human nature to avoid controversy and not draw attention to ourselves; human nature to be afraid of those who have the power to hurt us; human nature to seek opportunity in the suffering of others.  Some might call these the idiosyncrasies of human nature, but they are in fact born in the depths of our cultural formation.  We are part of a culture that teaches and forms us to be fearful of difference, and even to take advantage of it when convenient.

We share this in common with the community that first heard the words of the apostle Paul.  A Gentile community deeply formed by a culture of difference and disrespect with Jews now hears Paul declare that: ‘They have become fellow-heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.’  Paul claims that he’s been called by God: ‘to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, … so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known.’

‘The wisdom of God in its rich variety’ is nothing less than the reconciliation of all humanity in the peace of Christ.  One of Paul’s great challenges is to convince both Gentile and Jew that God has given him authority to proclaim a message that seems completely new.  But, even if the message seems new, it reflects an ancient promise.

Isaiah, chapter 60 declares: ‘Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will rise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.’

In the Advent texts, Isaiah hopes for peace; not merely peace to bring an end to war, like a truce or ceasefire, but peace that means freedom from the compulsion for revenge and retaliation; peace in which enemies are reconciled in order to bear witness to the glory of God.  The gospel of Christ crucified and risen declares God’s peace, not by ignoring a history of brokenness, but by entering into it;  not by forgetting a difficult past, but by remembering it, because this is the true path to reconciliation.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the famous opponent of apartheid in South Africa, insisted that forgiveness was the only way to achieve reconciliation.  In response to those who demanded a more punitive response, Tutu argued that the nation could never be healed by vengeance.  Tutu believed that the truth about atrocities must be told, not to punish but to forgive; not to condemn but to reconcile.

In 2017, Australia’s First Nations peoples gathered at Uluru, issuing a Statement from the Heart that included reference to Makarrata.  This statement declares that: ‘Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination. We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.’  Again, this truth-telling does not wish to condemn or punish; rather it seeks to establish a story about the past about which all Australians can agree and be reconciled.

As members of the church, we receive God’s peace through a particular act of remembering.  One of the great signs of God’s peace is the Eucharist, as we submit to the sustaining activity of God by remembering and giving thanks for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  The practice of the Eucharist is a form of resistance against the fear of Herod and of all Jerusalem, in which we welcome the God who reaches out to reconcile a broken world.  Our participation in the sacraments sustains us in the ministry of Christ, a ministry that is founded upon the self-giving of God, through Christ, in the fellowship of his Spirit.  We gather at the table of the Lord, to be incorporated into the history of God’s act of self-giving love, and become part of God’s reconciling future.

Just as the Magi return home another way, so too does the revelation of the mystery of Christ send us on a new path of love and service, in which fear of self-giving is overwhelmed by God’s grace.  Let us, with the Magi, offer our richest gifts – the praise, thanksgiving, and adoration in which we participate in epiphany, and go home by another way, reconciled and renewed in peace.

To the holy, blessed and glorious Trinity, three persons and one God, be all glory and praise, dominion and power, now and forever.  Amen.

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Christmas 1
28/12/2025

Psalm 148
Matthew 2:13-23

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Foreword

Hijacking a story

One of the favourite family movies at our place over the years has been Shrek (2001), which is basically a beauty-and-the-beast story, with a few extra twists.

Shrek is the name of a grumpy but otherwise good-souled ogre, who is forced by the evil Lord Farquaad to rescue the beautiful princess Fiona from a high tower in a dragon-guarded castle somewhere, Fiona being whom Farquaad intends to marry. One of the twists, however, is that Princess Fiona has been cursed: while she is beautiful by day, she turns into an ogress at night. This she keeps secret.

Along the journey back after the rescue, Shrek and Fiona find themselves falling in love. Fiona, however, is bound by the need to release herself from the curse, which can only happen at true love’s first kiss. She presumes that, since Lord Farquaad instigated her rescue, he is that true love. For his part, Shrek is bound by the fact that Fiona is, as far as he knows, human and not ogre.

Finally resolving that he loves Fiona regardless, Shrek crashes the wedding. Shrek and Fiona kiss and, because it is love’s first kiss, Fiona’s curse is lifted: she is beautiful again. The twist here is that she takes the form of the ogress – that which Shrek would love all the more. And the two live happily ever after, as the saying goes. Or, at least, they’re happy until the crises arise which precipitate several successful sequels.

In the traditional beauty-and-the-beast story, of course, it is the beast who is transformed into the handsome prince, who then marries the beautiful maiden. A popular animated version of the traditional story was made by Disney a decade before Shrek. And the Shrek movie plays on this, taking the beast-to-human transformation scene of the Disney film and mimicking it, but with the opposite outcome. Whereas in both scenes a “beast” is levitated and spun around and transformed by the lifting of the curse in a circle of brilliant light, in the Shrek version, what descends is not the beautiful princess but the ogress.

You would probably still get the point if you’d not previously seen the Disney version, but to recognise the link between the scenes in the two movies makes the critique of our assumptions about beauty all the more pointed. Shrek says “no” to Beauty and the Beast, and it’s the interaction between the two which gives the later movie much of its grunt.

Now, feel free to forget most of that straightaway, except for the technique of plagiarising what has gone before in order to make a comment on it, or on something else. For this is exactly the kind of thing which is happening in our gospel reading this morning, with its account of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt and return to Nazareth. We can read these stories “cold”, and understand that this or that particular thing happened. But, to get the point, or even the joke, of what Matthew is saying, you have to know earlier stories of old Israel because Matthew is drawing on what the people already know, to tell who this child Jesus is.

If we miss this engagement with the earlier events and sayings, there is a danger of romanticising the stories and turning them into mere facts about the events of Jesus’ early life. But Matthew’s intention is not simply to tell us that all these amazing and terrifying things happened. More important are the links with what has happened before in the past. It is as if history is repeating itself, although with a difference.

Let’s, then, pause to hear from Matthew’s Gospel…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Matthew 2. 13-23)

Word: Proclamation

Once more, with feeling

Matthew tells us that Jesus and his family were forced to go to Egypt, not because he thinks that it’s something we’d like to know, or need to know so that we’ll be nicer to refugees in our own time. They go to Egypt so that they can come back, because when they do, it is just like when the Hebrews were set free from slavery. It is not the Holy Family’s itinerary we are to note but the resonance, and so the meaning, of their movements. In Matthew’s presentation, Jesus is like old Israel itself: loved by God as a parent loves her child, and “saved” from Egypt as Israel was.

Matthew also tells us about Herod’s rage and the killing of the young boys. Again, this is not so that we’ll be more sympathetic to people who suffer these kinds of atrocities. Matthew is more interested in drawing parallels to the well-known birth story of Moses, when exactly the same thing happened. To kill the rumoured deliverer of the Hebrews, the Egyptian Pharaoh had all the young Hebrew boys killed, although Moses escaped; King Herod does the same thing. And so in Matthew’s telling of the story, Jesus is cast as a new Moses.

And our Gospel reading finished with Jesus ending up in Nazareth. Once more, this is not given as mere information. Important for Matthew is that he is then able to call Jesus a “Nazarene”, which may have reminded Matthew’s readers of the Old Testament order of Nazirites, men specially dedicated to serve God. (In fact, the precise reference Matthew intends to make to the Old Testament is not clear, as there is no “He shall be called a Nazorean” line to be found there. The reference to the Nazirites is one possibility (cf. the birth of Samson, Judges 13.5); another is a play on the Hebrew word “neser” in Isaiah 11. 1 (“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch [neser] shall grow out of his roots…”). In any case, the point is the resonance with what has gone before. (And the story of the star of Bethlehem, and the gifts the astrologers bring, are also told not merely because they are actually supposed to have happened, but because they have an important Old Testament precedent, but that’s next week’s reading! ).

Matthew is saying to those to whom he writes: “You’ve heard all of this – this is your heritage – the story of Jesus is your very own story”.

The repeated history is not quite the same, of course. When the old stories and images are revisited, they’re given a new twist, and their meaning is intensified. So, for example, there’s an element of irony – something unexpected – which creeps into this new enacting of the stories: whereas in the original story it was a “foreign” power holding the Hebrews captive, or killing the children, here it’s the royal representative of the people of God himself; the people of God are shown to quite capable of the inflicting the evil they themselves have suffered at the hands of others. It’s not merely a matter of “once more, folks”; but a re-enactment of the old stories which digs deeper than the original did.

Now, if we’re telling a story, we don’t have to do it in this way. Tales which begin with the familiar “once upon a time” just get going, introducing the characters as required, to relate some happening or teach some moral. But it isn’t just accidental that Matthew tells his story in this way rather than in one of the other ways he might have told it. He tells the story this way because this way of telling reflects how God actually enters our lives. When God enters our lives, it’s not as one more piece of information. Christian discipleship is not about learning a lot of facts about God.

When God enters our lives, the things we already think we know – our stories, our histories, our hopes and dreams – are taken and made knowledge of something different.

But it’s not quite that something is added, or that our old knowledge was incomplete. Matthew is seeking to make sense of what otherwise makes no sense. In Jesus, he has encountered something which must be proclaimed, but how? What makes sense of life out of death, the continuing felt presence of the crucified Jesus? The old stories had meaning enough in themselves, but Matthew takes them and applies them to speak about what Jesus now represents. What hi s readers already knew about themselves becomes the basis for understanding what Jesus is: their story becomes wrapped up in his.

Our story for God’s story

But this works both ways. Matthew borrows the old stories to say what Jesus represents. But this changes the old stories in the process. In the case of the scriptural narrative, Matthew’s method makes the old stories look a little like prophecies, and this is probably partly how Matthew understood it. But we don’t have to commit to an overly simplistic prophecy-fulfilment process here. Perhaps a more accessible reading of this dynamic for today is to see what Matthew does as revealing that our stories are open to God’s story. Our stories are steps along the way in God’s own story. If Jesus is not prophesied by the Old Testament stories, those stories are still useful for understanding him because it is the same God at work before and in Jesus.

And the same applies since then. Faith does not look back 2000 years to an experience constrained by the categories of the time. Jesus is the new Israel, the new Moses, for those to whom those identities are absolutely central. Matthew effectively colonises these ideas, borrowing them, hollowing them out and filling them again with Christ. In this way, he makes the history of Israel point to Christ, be oriented towards his appearance.

For us, now, the requirement is not that we become first-century Jews and think about Jesus in the same terms they did. Rather, to come to faith is to begin to see our own stories as the material by which Jesus can be experienced and known. What we have been taught, and have done and suffered, are the basic elements by which Jesus takes shape for us, and so these things become part of Jesus’ own story.

Jesus is given as the key to unlocking our own stories, recasting what has happened to us and reshaping what might yet come of us.

The continuing presence of the crucified Christ, which the Easter church celebrates each Sunday, is an invitation to see our lives re-shaped and re-modelled in this way. This is to recast our past not as a thing which limits us but as something which, in this God’s hands, can become our liberation and the liberation of others. It casts our future not as uncertain and so threatening but as the place where we will meet God, and so as sheer opportunity and possibility.

What we have and are now is where God begins, but God will end in a surprising and enlivening filling-out of who we are, making of our lives in Christ the very presence of God, whether we look like a princess or an ogre. For our story to become entwined with the story of Jesus is the transformation of true love’s first kiss.

Christmas is an invitation: Open yourselves to this one, allow his story to become the true meaning and goal of your own story, and begin being the people of love and hope you were created to be.

This is the gift in Christmas.

Let us receive it, become it, towards our own richer humanity and God’s greater glory.