View or print as a PDF

Epiphany 2
14/1/2024

Genesis 28:10-17
Psalm 139
John 1:43-51

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

The greatest question which confronted the disciples of Jesus, and the first Christians was this: Who is this Jesus? The arguments – for they split the Church – were frequently around whether he was a man, a fully human being – or God. If both, then How? All four Gospels are peppered with the debate but not least John’s and this opening chapter. The initial phase of the discussion came to an interim conclusion in the 5^th Century at the Councils of Nicaea, Chalcedon and Constantinople, all of which are foundational documents of the Uniting Church (!).

I’d love to say more, but instead I will concentrate on today’s reading from John – however, we must not forget that we are only a handful of verses away from that magnificent opening which can be summarised in v. 14 as ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us … and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth’.  The second part of the chapter is thus a bit of a disappointment.

Jesus comes to Galilee – on his own initiative. He meets Philip and says, ‘Follow me’.  In the next sentence, we listen, with some surprise, as Philip says to Nathanael, ‘We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.’ Now that is quite a rapid learning curve. So far, John has told us that the titles of Rabbi and Messiah (1: 36,38) have been used by John the Baptist and the disciples Peter and John, but not that one, nor ‘Son of God’ or ‘King of Israel’ which Nathanael is about to supply.

But Philip wasn’t there – he was not even a disciple until this moment. He seems to think that being ‘the son of Joseph of Nazareth’ is important, and Nathanael treats that with a scornful ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ So this is a constructed tale to draw us all into that long-debated question. I don’t mean that John is trying to trick us – he is as much without guile as Nathanael! And this is where Jesus gives a really intriguing answer, and it’s what I want to explore. ‘Guile’ in the KJV is translated ‘deceit’ in NRSV, ‘an Israelite without guile’, so Jesus is rather nicely inviting us to share Nathanael’s doubt. And John underlines it in that, only in his Gospel, and 26 times there, is Jesus recorded as saying ‘Amen, Amen’, twice; ‘Truly, truly’. It indicates that what follows is of great importance.

‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ (Jn 1:51)

Which takes the alert bible student to the ancient patriarch perhaps most characterised by guile and deceit, Jacob:

Jacob had just cheated his blind old father to give him the birthright which belonged to his slightly old twin (Esau, the hairy man), and fled from his brother’s rage under the excuse provided by their mother, that he should find a wife. Now he is out in the wilderness, a long way from anywhere, and exhausted by more than travel.  He lays down to sleep with his head on a stone. (In Egypt, I actually saw a camel driver doing just that.) Unsurprisingly, it produced a dream.

He saw (Gen. 28:2) a ladder ‘set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven’ and there was a lot of angelic traffic on it. A wonderful image. The Coptic ikon on our front cover looks more like a (down?) escalator. The next verse has Jacob turn and see ‘the LORD’ (the sacred name, not just any god) standing beside him, at its foot. Jacob had thought he was at a distance from home far enough not to meet his God. And not only was God there, feet on the earth, but God then promised him all this land that he’d slept on it be his own, for ‘the families of the earth’ for flourish in. Then he woke up.

And he memorably declared, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’

This was a ‘mountain-bottom’ experience and somewhat against normal religious expectations. Was not God on the top of Mount Horeb/Sinai?  But Moses had first met God far away at a burning bush. Did not Elijah seek God on the same mountain, and did he see God in earthquake and fire? And the apostles wanted to build tabernacles for Elijah and Moses on Mount Tabor to keep Jesus with them? And Jesus sent them down to the plain.

Well, Jacob built a cairn of stones and called it a house of God, a Beth-el.

And within a few kilometres there were other such sacred cairns, and shrines. There was one at Dan, another at Shiloh (where Samuel was), until Moses put the broken stones of the Ten Commandments in a box – and God dwelt there under a tent for a long time, until it came to Jerusalem. Then Solomon built the grandaddy of all Temples there.

I sometimes wonder why it is that we don’t remember God’s reaction to Solomon’s ornate designs for the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple’s grand dedication: ‘Who asked you to build me a House?’ said God. That Temple, or what remains of it, is a building still fraught with significance in our time.  The most likely site for Bethel is now in the occupied West Bank, 5 km from Ramullah. (We wish our Foreign Minister, our fellow Uniting Church member, Penny Wong a fruitful outcome of her visit there this week.)

Is it any wonder that the Scripture is full of warnings about sacred places? I know several, and visit them, but they are such places because they have been where generations of the faithful have knelt where, as the poet T. S. Eliot wrote, ‘prayer has been valid.’

Is God at the top or the bottom of the ladder? The biblical view is: Yes and No. All ground is not holy. God is at both ends of the ladder and at neither.

Three quotations to illuminate my point:

From my former Anglican colleague Andrew McGowan:

‘…[in John] the true Israelite, without guile, bears true witness to the king of Israel here. And in time, like Jacob, he will see the “house of God and gate of heaven” (Gen 28:17), but understand these are not a place, but a person.’

That is the basic meaning of the one title Jesus seems to accept: ‘Son of Man’.

Former Presbyterian and Church of South India bishop, Leslie Newbiggin [The Light Has Come, 22-3]:

Jesus is ‘the place of God’s dwelling, the place where God is no longer hidden behind the vault of heaven, but where there is actual revelation, actual traffic between the [human] world and the world of God.’

And Lutheran liturgical scholar, Gordon Lathrop [Holy Ground, 47] has:

‘In him is the gate of heaven, the awesome place, the holy presence beside the poor and the wretched.  What humanity has hoped for in shrines and temples is found in an utterly new way in him.’

And, I promise you, in this place, in this service of Word and Sacrament, Jesus, Child of God and child of Mary (as the Chalcedon Council said), meets us, today.

View or print as a PDF

Baptism of Jesus
7/1/2024

Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

It’s a challenge for those living in 21^st century Australia to grasp the impact of Mark’s Gospel upon its original audience. It’s been suggested that Mark’s original audience was a Christian community in Rome during the middle decades of the first century of the common era. One of the most prominent events in that period was a Jewish rebellion against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, with Rome responding by destroying the Jewish Temple in 70CE. This historical setting is the context in which Mark writes an innovative piece of literature, probably sent as a letter, to clarify the significance of a man who’d been crucified a few decades before. In his opening words, Mark recalls how this man, Jesus, had travelled from Nazareth to be baptized in the river Jordan. Mark describes is thus: ‘And just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

Any Jews in Mark’s original audience would be astounded by this, surely recalling the pleading words of the prophet in Isaiah 64: ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.’ Mark declares that Isaiah’s plea has been answered in the most extraordinary way, not as God arrives at the head of a heavenly army to vanquish the foes of his people, but rather as Jesus is baptized by John and driven into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. Mark stresses the sense in which the baptism of Jesus is a commissioning for his vocation of self-giving love and service. This is what baptism means for Jesus, and it sets the pattern for those who follow him.

The church declares Holy Communion and Baptism to be sacraments, because they proclaim the grace and truth of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Uniting Church Basis of Union says this about the sacraments: ‘The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ has commanded his Church to proclaim the Gospel both in words and in the two visible acts of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Christ himself acts in and through everything that the Church does in obedience to his commandment: it is Christ who by the gift of the Spirit confers the forgiveness, the fellowship, the new life and the freedom which the proclamation and actions promise; and it is Christ who awakens, purifies and advances in people the faith and hope in which alone such benefits can be accepted.’ (BoU, para 6)

And the Basis of Union provides the following commentary about baptism: ‘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.’ (BoU, para 7)

Note the description of who is active in baptism: it is Christ who incorporates people into his body, enabling them through the gift of the Holy Spirit to participate in his death and resurrection. And note the purpose of baptism: it 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. This is why the Ephesian disciples, mentioned in Acts 19, are baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. They’d received the baptism of John as a sign of their desire to turn to God, but they’d not yet been commissioned for the ministry of Jesus Christ. They’d not yet been identified with Christ by being buried with him and raised with him.

In the same way, baptism commissions us to love and serve God through the power of the same Spirit. Martin Luther, the 16th century church reformer, once said that there’s no greater comfort than baptism. In the midst of his own experience of affliction and anxiety, he comforted himself by repeating, ‘I am baptized! I am baptized!’, a mantra that affirmed his belonging to God through Jesus Christ. Note that Luther does not say, I was baptised, but I am baptised. Baptism is not merely something that happened to us in the past, often when we were so young that we can’t even remember it. Baptism is a present reality in the here and now that is saturated with divine presence and power.

Our formation as disciples of Jesus Christ is no genetic certainty or accident of birth, but rather depends on the practice of a particular identity that both signifies and conveys the favour of God. Consider how our relationships form identity. When we make an introduction, it’s common to say, this is my spouse, or this is my child, or this is my friend. It’s interesting that the structure of these words implies possession or ownership. Linguistically, to say that a person is my spouse, or my child, or my friend does seem to suggest that I own them, because the word ‘my’ is derived from the word ‘mine’, which implies possession. But, of course, that’s not what is intended. What I mean when I call a person my spouse, or my child, or my friend is that I share with each of them a particular relationship. My spouse and I share in the intimacy of marriage, my child and I share in a familial relationship, and my friend and I share in mutual affection and interests. In each relationship, there’s a sense of reciprocity – I am my spouse’s husband, my child’s father, and my friend’s friend. I belong to them, just as they belong to me, and this mutual belonging both creates and affirms our identity.

We share more with Mark’s original audience than we might imagine, for we too seek to belong to Christ crucified and risen. In our world, imperial power takes various forms: Presidents of some nations are elected for life, and others secure tenure by silencing or eliminating opposition;

• Naked military aggression is dressed up in nationalist propaganda to defend against fictitious foes;
• Innocent, defenceless, non-combatants are killed by those who claim that existential threats justify collateral damage;
• Populist governments appeal to the basest of human instincts and fears, propping of their power on the back of empty promises to wreak havoc on justice and peace;
• Wealthy individuals and corporations determined to minimize and evade fair and responsible taxation;
• Our fragile planet’s resources plundered and its species depleted.

In the midst of unaccountable power that threatens human flourishing, we can read Mark’s Gospel just as his original audience did – as those who hold to a strange hope in a man who travelled from Nazareth to be baptized in the river Jordan and immersed into the mission of God’s love. Jesus invites us to belong to him and to derive from him a baptismal identity that speaks to us of God’s favour: ‘You are my beloved child. With you, 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.

View or print as a PDF

Christmas 1
31/12/2023

Ecclesiastes 3:1-13
Psalm 8
Revelation 21:1-6a

There is a time for every matter under heaven – a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, to pluck up, to kill, to heal, to seek, to lose, a time to love, and a time to hate. These things – and many others – fill our time. The old philosopher who wrote Ecclesiastes got this right at least to the extent that he sought simply to describe the kinds of things which go on in the world.

But there is more at stake in our time than a simple inventory of what happens, as if that would give “permission” for all we do and experience. Our lives are not merely a matter of washes over us. We are agents in history – we decide and act. It is we who build and plant, kill and heal. But Ecclesiastes describes what we do, and gives us no direction as to precisely what time it now is. Is this the time for killing or for healing? Perhaps the answer seems obvious – to us here, at least. But a different answer is equally obvious to others in different times and places, whose sense for the time fills our news reports daily with accounts of actions taken according to different seasons and calendars.

While Ecclesiastes’ philosopher can tell us what we do, he cannot tell us what to do. For this, we appeal directly to God: God, show us the way. It’s not usually as explicit as this, nor even clearly religious. But every invasion and persecution, every bomb and expulsion, as much as every act of grace and mercy, appeals to the necessity, the timeliness, the divine (or ultimate) requirement that now we kill or heal, keep silent or speak, weep or laugh. We seek assurance or assure others that our actions are just and, so, that they are timely: now is the time for this to happen.

Our lives, then, are not merely subject to the many things happening around us. These events, and our responses to them, are claims and counterclaims to justice and rightness. Our enemies believe that they are right in their enmity, as we think we’re right in opposing them. If there were a God, God would see things their (and our) way.

How then do we tell what time it is? What can reconcile our conflicting discernments of the times? How do we know what to do?

A hint of an answer is given in today’s reading from Revelation. The city of Jerusalem – a work of human hands – descends now from heaven as a new city. It is crucial, however, that it is recognisable as the old city with its deep history of conflicting time-tellings, its persecutions and injustices and misjudgements. It is indeed healed, but the recognisability is crucial because it means all that history of Jerusalem’s errors of judgement about the time do not finally determine how things end.

It’s almost as if God does not bother to tell the time, but rather simply presumes that now is his own time: the time in which all things are claimed for God’s purposes and not for any of our conflicting intentions and cross-purposed calendars. We mark just this each week when we gather around the table and declare that our failure to receive the kingdom of God has become God’s means of calling us again to become that kingdom, as the body of Jesus broken by us is said to be broken for us. Jesus was broken because he seemed to us untimely, out of season, but the Eucharist is God’s own telling of the time: your times, your healing and killings, mournings and laughter, made my own.

What does this mean for us, on the cusp of another new year, according to our calendar time? It means that we are free to read the times as best we can, to argue about them, to persuade, to invite, to act, to warn and to correct as best we can. It means that we are free to risk telling the time and to act according to what the season seems to require, to test what it means here and now to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly. It means that where, in the old year, we might have gotten the times wrong, the new year begins with grace and forgiveness.

We look forward to the year to come not with confidence that we know now what to do, what time it is, but in the hope that we will find it again to be God’s own time, in which our time is continually made new

Lift up your hearts then, and give your thanks and praise to the God who comes to be the time of our lives.

View or print as a PDF

Christmas Day
25/12/2023

Titus 3:4-7
Luke 2:1-7

Distracted
What we pay attention to matters so much in economic terms today that commentators speak of our now inhabiting an “attention economy”. We experience this in all its social, commercial and political dimensions through the notifications on our phones, the clamouring of influencers, and increasingly in-your-face advertising.

With this competition for our attention comes the corresponding experience of distraction. When something vibrates or “tings” nearby, we are distracted from whatever we are doing. If the distraction is well-designed, the interruption grips our attention. This is how we might be sucked into a vortex of binge-watching something into the wee hours, or have a study session cut into confetti-sized bits by group chatter, or find ourselves with a hefty fine because1 we’ve tried to answer a text while driving. So pervasive is this experience that some have suggested that indistractability is the most impressive superpower of the present age.

But what does it say about us that we are so distractable? Distraction works as a commercial and political method because there are “buttons” in us which can be pushed by noises or flashing lights which will cause us to look up from whatever we are doing. These buttons are being pushed, of course, because our responses translate into dollars or votes for the button pushers.

Incomplete
But my immediate interest is that we respond, because our response tells us something about the tension between the real, tangible value of what we might already be doing and our sense of the possible value of what the distraction promises. What’s common to these kinds of distractions is the positive possibility of an “addition” to ourselves, and the corresponding negative experience of incompleteness.

This is perhaps most obvious when counting the number of online friends, followers, views, votes, shares, or re-tweets: more is more, and more matters because it is “less incomplete”. But it’s much the same with other distractions: the distraction of the latest version of our now superseded thing or of the novel “experience” we might have the money to buy. The possibility of the new thing distracts us because we imagine we are not yet complete. Where I am now, what I am doing now, what I am – these don’t seem to be enough. I am not yet enough; there must be more, and it’s not here but perhaps it’s there – in the next notification, in a different life partner, a new job, or when I finally retire

Christmas and completeness
So, what has all this got to do with Christmas? Christmas is about completeness in the midst of, and in the very form of, incompleteness.

“…And [Mary] gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger…”

Luke’s Christmas narrative is filled with signs of incompleteness. It speaks of the displacement of the holy family by the will of empire, of their marginalisation despite Mary’s condition, and of the humiliation of being laid in a manger. There is not a lot of fullness in the circumstances of the birth of Jesus.

But born, wrapped securely, and laid down safely, the child is complete. Of course – as with most children – there are many things he will do and say, many things he will enjoy and suffer. But none of that will exceed the completeness he is in himself: he is already all he needs to be. The Christmas story is about a completeness in the midst of poverty and powerlessness – a wholeness despite want and need, the utter absence of the need for distraction.

We don’t believe this, of course, which is why Christmas is often the opposite for us: a season of not enough, a season of incompleteness. And so we can be driven to distraction by the Christmas imperative to provide for the accumulation of more: more stuff for people who don’t really need it, more money to pay for the stuff, more work to earn the money to pay for the stuff, and so on. This kind of incompleteness is not merely a condition but a process, a way of life.

By contrast, there is a completeness in the Christ child to which nothing needs to be added. Yet this is not sentimental gooeyness at the image of a newborn. And neither is it a nostalgic harking back to a lost era when things were simpler. These are both themselves distractions. Sentimentality distracts us from the whole truth by telling only what might be appealing, and so sees only the cradle and not the cross. Nostalgia distracts by denying a fundamental truth of history – that though our circumstances may change significantly, we ourselves do not. And so, nostalgia imagines that the story from the cradle to the cross is not really our story.

But that first Christmas was the beginning of a story of wholeness in full awareness of our deprivation, a vision of completeness despite absence. We could moralise this by saying that Jesus remained true despite his lowly beginning, the opposition to his ministry and the final injustice of his crucifixion. This is worth saying, but it also reduces Jesus to a mere hero. The problem is that we don’t need heroes to do it for us; we need to be able ourselves to live complete lives in the midst of incompleteness. We need to be able to live lives which are not constantly haunted by the suspicion that there’s a better life, a better option, just behind the next glittering, ringing, distracting thing. Because there really isn’t.

Being enough
If Jesus does remain true from the cradle to the crucifixion, it is not by mere moral courage. It is by the conviction that he is complete wherever he is, whatever he is doing, whatever is happening to him. That is, Jesus knows his life to be a point at which God reigns in the world. It is this presence of God in what he does and experiences which is Jesus’ completeness. And this is despite appearances. God reigns in the child in the manger, in the sweaty teacher on the dusty streets, in the argumentative troublemaker and in the despised figure on the cross.

To get Christmas right is not to reduce it to a small part of our incomplete lives but to see it as being about everything in one thing: the whole of God and ourselves in just one small child and what he was to become, and perhaps also in us.

The reign of God – the gift of God’s self to the world, to our very selves – is not a distraction from what we are doing. It is the revaluation of what we are. You are not the sum of everything you have done, if this means there would be more of you if you did more, experienced more, viewed more, or sampled more. With the God of the cradle and the cross, you are enough before you begin doing or experiencing anything.

We lose this somewhere along the way, strangely becoming less as we do and own and experience more. The child in the manger will one day propose that unless we become again as children, we cannot be whole, cannot know God’s kingdom, cannot know that time and space in which whatever belongs to us, we belong to God (Matthew 18.2-5).

Indistractability is about this gift of completeness – trusting that even though there are many things we can do and we can add to ourselves, it is enough that we have been born, and swaddled, and laid in the manger of the world.

Because with this God, You. Are. Enough, however incomplete you think you are, however tempting it is to want to be more.

Rest, then, under the loving gaze of God, as did Jesus once under Mary’s eyes of love, and know yourselves to be complete.