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Pentecost 24
12/11/2023

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25

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Only a god like the God of the crucified Christ can resolve the tension many of us experience as beneficiaries of a violent colonial history.

Only a god like the God of the crucified Christ can make a gospel Yes out of the violent No of history’s tragedies, including colonialism.

This is because the violence of colonisation is the violence of the crucifixion. And if the substance of salvation can wear the form of the cross, the healing yet to come can wear the vestments of colonial history.

The burden of my sermon today is how this might be so…

The colonising God
Consider the terrifying words of Joshua to the Israelites: “…the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land.”

Did God do this? Did the “God of love” command and enable the violent displacement of the Amorites (among others) in favour of the Israelites? The moral answer required by modern sensibility is a resounding No, God did not.

But it’s not that easy, if the Scriptures matter for our sense of God.

It’s not that easy because the “gift” of this land in fulfilment of the promise to Abraham is central to the Old Testament’s confession of the faithfulness of God. From Abraham through the Exodus to the occupation, in the prophets and then in the Exile, and again in the post-exilic Restoration, possession of this land is a central measure of God – a proof of God’s faithfulness. And, of course, in the New Testament, St Paul makes not a little(!!!) of Abraham’s trust in the promise of God with respect to descendants and the deliverance of Canaan.

This matters to us here and now, of course, because as for the Israelites so for us: our land, too, is bloody. And so we find ourselves seemingly in need of these texts because they sign God’s faithfulness, while also being fully aware of the moral problem: everything non-indigenous Australians have is had at enormous cost to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples. While we wonder about the possibility of doing theology “on” stolen land, the scriptural text theologises the stealing: God did this.

Death as method
We can make the problem more concrete by asking, Does God kill for God’s own purposes? Is death a method for God, a means to divine ends?

This opens the question up to include now the crucifixion of Jesus – the colonisation of a single body. The cross is the quintessential scriptural moment at which human and divine violence coincide. The human violence is obvious: a man is killed. The divine violence appears as an overlay on that death, with talk of ransom and sacrificial exchange hinting that God purposed Jesus to die.

But do God’s purposes require killing? Did God kill the Amorites for the sake of the Israelites or kill Jesus for everyone’s sake? No, God did not, although we can’t say this merely because we imagine that ours is a God of love. “Love” versus “not‑love” at this point simply moralises the problem, and this can’t make sense of the way the Bible circumscribes love with the language of divine violence. St John tells us that divine love is God sending “his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). We can’t happily lean on the scriptural authority of John’s “God is love”, without accounting for his interweaving of love with death.

Death and the free God
We must indeed say that God doesn’t kill or demand killing – of Amorites, Jesus or indigenous peoples. But this isn’t merely because God is love; God doesn’t kill because God doesn’t need to. Killing is method – a means to an end. We have means and methods: if this sacrifice, then that benefit – and we have found that blood can be a very effective lubricant. Because God also has purposes, it is almost irresistible to conclude that God must need means. Thus, God drives out the Amorites in order to fulfil the promise, and kills Jesus in order to save us. In this way, death now appears as a means to God’s ends.

But this over-reads the scriptural text and under-reads Christian confession. God does will and does purpose, but needs no means by which to achieve that will. More specifically, God has no need that we do a particular thing for God’s will to be fulfilled, certainly not that we kill. This is the importance of the doctrine of creation out of nothing. Creation out of nothing is about the freedom of God, such that nothing has to be in place “in order that” God can do God’s thing. God’s power to create out of nothing is the meaning of grace and the possibility of the resurrection of the dead. God is unconstrained by prior conditions. God does not kill because God doesn’t need anything to die for his purposes to be realised.

Why, then, do the Scriptures cast God as one who kills to save or to punish?

Death is not a method for God, but it is for us. We fight our way into places not ours, or fight our way out of places in which we are trapped. This is Palestine and Ukraine and our own colonial history right up to this moment, and countless other instances besides. This is the normal – even the natural – way of the political animal.

And by simply not having drowned under our history of violence, we survivors today find ourselves afloat upon a sea of blood: the blood of soldiers who died in wars we didn’t fight, of indigenes in colonisations we can’t undo, the lives of slaves on whose back we have built our lives, and so on. The human being is many things, but it is this also.

The question is whether God can work with this, whether the nothingness of human brokenness is the kind of nothingness out of which God creates.

– – – – – – –      Selah     – – – – – – –

The sinful form of forgiveness: the “happy sin”
An answer is found if we turn to the marvel – and the moral shock – of Christian confession, with its understanding of the dynamics of forgiveness.

The cross, of course, is central to this dynamic. In particular, it matters that the cross is intrinsic to a particular experience of forgiveness. An extrinsic account of forgiveness holds that the cross doesn’t need to know what sin I have committed. I might be an adulterer, a murderer or a thief, but in any case the cross is invoked as a catch-all means of reconciliation to God. An intrinsic account of forgiveness is one in which the cross is part of the sin I have committed. This means that, in its first moment, the cross saves only those who, 2000 years ago, rejected the presence of God’s kingdom in Jesus. The crucial(!) point here is that the sign of God’s blessing is cross-shaped because the crucifixion of God’s kingdom is the sin to be overcome. Put more simply, forgiveness cannot – ever – forget. Forgiveness cannot forget because to forget the sin would be to forget that I have been forgiven. And I would lose myself as a new creation.

It is this which leads us into the moral jolt of forgiveness and reconciliation: any deep experience of forgiveness looks back on the particular sin as the “cause” for the present blessing: I know the blessing of reconciliation now “because” I sinned. And so, in fear and trembling, the church has sometimes spoken of the felix culpa – the happy, lucky, blessed fault. So unlikely, so unanticipated, so impossible is the vision of God had in this experience of reconciliation, that it becomes possible to imagine that God’s hand must have been in the very fault itself – possible to see God’s hand in our sin, so that we might see God and ourselves more clearly.

This is slightly overstated, but only slightly. None of this works at the level of morality, of course, which is why Paul rejects the conclusion that we should abound in sin in order that grace might abound (Romans 6:2). The idea of a blessed fault only works on a reading of the cross as sinful human violence which God has made a blessing. It’s God’s hand, and not ours, which makes this reading possible. Just as the Psalms are our words to God made into God’s Word to us, so also is the cross a pious act against a blasphemer made into a healing revelation of our own blasphemy. In the Eucharist, the body broken “for us” is only so because it is the body broken by us. How could we have known that there is a God who works like this without the cross? Surely, the Scriptures conclude, God must have destined the Son to die for us; surely God “did” the cross.

This is the strange, and disquieting, but evangelical logic of the Scriptures, by which the light does not merely contradict the darkness but comprehends it, making the darkness its own. Our darkness is never darkness in God’s sight (Psalm 130:12).

Canaan as the cross
The Scripture’s theologising of the bloody acquisition of Canaan can’t be reconciled morally, but it can be heard through this dynamic of sin-shaped forgiveness. The sin is the violent dispossession, but the blessing is the experience – or cultural memory – of having been slaves and, impossibly, freed from slavery and, impossibly, finding our way to and settling into a new homeland. So unlikely is this to have happened that it must have been God who did it – from the Plagues, to the drowned Egyptian charioteers, to surviving the desert, to settling in green pastures beside still waters. How could it not be that the Lord drove out the Amorites before us?

But God is no killer on this reading, even if perhaps the scriptural writers probably believed she was. This reading requires, rather, that the blessing comes in spite of human violence even if in the shape of that violence. And this is dependent principally upon a reading of the cross as a sin-shaped means of grace.

God and our history, beyond morality
Now, if we find some truth in all that, what does it tell us about our own contemporary experience of colonisation – and I mean here particularly, the experience of those who have benefited from the dispossession? Is it possible that we might come to an experience of forgiveness and reconciliation which must wonder whether God’s hand was in the violent processes of the colonisation of this land, in a way comparable to what I’ve proposed for the taking of Canaan?

This is a ghastly question at a moral level, and the moral answer is No, and rightly so: God did not kill by the colonist’s hands; what happened to create modern Australia has no moral justification. Yet it did happen; death is a method for us. And we are stuck – colonisers and colonised alike. It can’t be undone because there is no proper recompense for blood in strictly moral terms. Blood stains deeply, and it can’t be washed out.

But the gospel is that the God we are dealing with here is not a moral agent in the world, and doesn’t deal with us according to our moral achievement or failure. God’s interaction with our history is not a moral matter but a matter of the nature and possibility of forgiveness, of the willingness to remember and the requirement not to forget, and of discovering ourselves as worthy of judgement but blessed nonetheless.

Whatever might be the conflicting hopes and fears of the broader Australian community, the colonially complicit church hopes in a God who will reconcile in such a way that it will seem that things had to happen as they did, horribly wrong as they were.

The church can hope this only because the violence of colonisation is the violence of the crucifixion of Jesus – our colonisation of his body.

The church can hope this only because if the substance of salvation can wear the form of our crucifixion of the Lord of glory, so it can also wear the tragedy of colonial history.

This is the gospel for the coloniser who cannot undo the colonisation.

– – – – – – –      Selah     – – – – – – –

What is missing in all that I’ve said this morning, of course, is the perspective of the Canaanite, of the crucified, of the colonised; the perspective of the Israeli woman enjoying a weekend music festival and of the Palestinian boy whose hospital collapses on top of him. I have addressed primarily the condition of the violent and their beneficiaries – those of us who have blood on our hands. Nonetheless, the victims of violence can also be addressed through the dynamic of the cross because the victim and the victimiser are two different types of nothingness, out of which God can create. It’s just that that would be another too-long, too dense sermon.

None of what I’ve said justifies violence or injustice. None of this lightens the moral demand for redress. The gospel is not a political program. My concern here is confession – confession of sin and confession of faith as to what we can expect from God. As interested as we must be in we should now do, I’m speaking here about what God will do.

If there is horror in what I’ve said, it must be not only in the possibility that colonialism might be destined to be found a blessing, but perhaps more profoundly in relation to the place of the cross itself in our account of God. A God who has a “use” for a crucifixion must surely be a terrifying God, and yet we confess just this God to be marvellous, and because of the crucifixion. God is marvellous because nothing should come back from a crucifixion, much less the crucified himself, showing us the marks cold steal leaves in flesh but speaking words of peace.

And can anything come back from colonisation or a lost referendum, or from murder or rape, or from suicide or bereavement or a terminal diagnosis? That is, can anything good come back from such brokenness and loss?

In terms of our moral measures of the world, it is an indeed an impossible thing we confess: history – all that we have done and has been done to us – is to be made the province of God, the form of God’s grace‑d presence to us, re-creation out of nothing.

– – – – – – –      Selah     – – – – – – –

Can it be?
As I struggled to bring all this to some sort of conclusion, the words of a perhaps-too-familiar hymn came to mind, which I had never quite felt in the terms I’ve outlined this morning:

…can it be that I should gain
An int’rest in the Savior’s blood?
Died He for me (!?!), who caused His pain?
For me (!?!), who Him to death pursued?

It’s a rollicking good song to sing but perhaps this verse at least is better whispered than belted out, for it indicates the shocking proposal of the gospel: that my victim will become my salvation.

Can it be that the crucified God will make a gospel Yes out of the violent No of history’s tragedies?

Whatever else the church might say in our wrestling with our history and with every other tragedy besides, we must – in fear and trembling – say that if we confess the crucified Jesus to be Lord, then we confess also that God can draw the reconciliation of all things out of the nothingness of human sin and violence.

Whatever moral good we must yet do to acknowledge the sins of the past and mitigate their continuing effect, these works will not justify us and we delude ourselves if we think we can make it good. Blood stains deeply, and can’t be washed out.

But we are a people of the gospel. To take an image from the Seer of Revelation, we confess that with the God of the crucified Christ, Blood. Washes. White.

Can any other God do this?

“…put away then the other gods that are among you,” Joshua said to the people, “and incline your hearts to the Lord.”

 

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Prayer of response

We bless you, great God,
for you have created and sustained us
and all things
for your own name’s sake,
that we might glorify and enjoy you forever.

And yet we confess that, in thought, word and deed,
we fail to bring you glory.

Forgive us when, wittingly or not,

our lives are lived at the cost of others,
and we refuse to know the need for forgiveness…

Forgive us when, mindful of our failures,

we imagine that we can make good
with this or that gesture,
and we refuse to know the cost of forgiveness…

Forgive us then, when we withhold forgiveness,

and lack generosity and mercy;
or refuse the consequences of being forgiven
and lack justice and sacrifice…

Gracious God,

you bring your people home from despair
and gave them a future of freedom and plenty.
Do not let us rest easy with injustice,

or wallow in our inability to heal ourselves,

but bring us home to justice, sharing, and compassion,
in the realm you promise all the world
This we ask in Jesus the Christ,

who became sin and salvation for us. Amen.

 

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Three related sermons:

Salvation’s sinful form (John 3:14)

https://marktheevangelist.unitingchurch.org.au/15-march-salvations-sinful-form/

The God of COVID-19 (Isaiah 53:10)

https://marktheevangelist.unitingchurch.org.au/5-april-the-god-of-covid-19/

God is a resurrecting avenger (Revelation 16)

https://marktheevangelist.unitingchurch.org.au/3-july-god-is-a-resurrecting-avenger/

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Pentecost 23
5/11/2023

Joshua 3:7-17
Psalm 107
Matthew 23:1-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

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The opening chapters of the book of Joshua tell how the Israelites are finally about to cross the river Jordan and enter into the land of God’s promise.  For 40 years they’ve wandered in the wilderness, and during this time many of the people who came out of Egypt died in the desert.  Like Moses, they never crossed over Canaan’s side.  We can only guess how they might have felt, stumbling and falling on the way, hope surrendering to despair, as they realize they’re not going to make it.  And yet, if it wasn’t for those who died along the way, there would not have been a pilgrim people to make the journey, and the destination would have been irrelevant.  As the Israelites tread the verge of Jordan, the Lord says to Joshua: ‘This day I’ll begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel, so that they may know that I’ll be with you as I was with Moses.’  It’s no coincidence that what follows recalls the crossing of the Red Sea four decades before.  While the priests bearing the ark of the covenant, the sign of God’s presence, stand in the Jordan River, the Israelites are able to cross over into the Promised Land without even wetting their feet.  The message for the Israelites is clear – as the baton of leadership is passed from Moses to Joshua, the Lord is indeed among them just as surely as when they fled Egypt.

The leadership of God’s people has always been contentious, and the Hebrew Scriptures record the various ways in which it was exercised in different eras, from patriarchs to judges to kings to prophets; from priests appointed according to the Law to self-appointed leaders in popular lay movements.  Leadership in Jesus’ day was no less contentious, as we note in his numerous conversations with the Pharisees, the scribes, the Herodians and the Sadducees.  Jesus’ frequent criticism of these leaders seems to be at odds with a comment he makes in his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5.  After blessing the poor, the grieving, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart and the peacemakers, Jesus declares: ‘Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’  What seemed like an impossible goal for his audience is now clarified in today’s gospel passage, as Jesus says: ‘Do whatever the scribes and Pharisees teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practise what they teach.’  In other words, the scribes and Pharisees are not nearly as righteous as they imagine.

But this begs the question – to what righteousness may God’s people aspire?  Jesus then says: ‘The greatest among you will be your servant.  All who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted.’  Many years ago, a colleague suggested that the purpose of the gospel is ‘to subvert the dominant paradigm’, and Jesus blessing the poor and critiquing authority certainly seems to achieve this.  Yet, as attractive as this comment is, it’s important to understand why it’s not adequate.  The gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t an ancient version of Marxist economic theory; it is rather the story of God’s determination to reconcile and renew a broken world.  This provides the proper theological context for Jesus’ references to greatness and servanthood, to humility and exaltation.  The good news is that Jesus is talking about himself, and his own vocation as a Messiah who will humble himself on a cross in apparent resignation and defeat.  I say apparent act of resignation and defeat, because God vindicated the humility of Jesus and exalted him as Lord.

The flesh and blood of Jesus, crucified and raised, becomes – through the power of the Holy Spirit – the living body of Christ’s church, a servant community that embodies the grace of God.  We are the body of his humility, breathed into life by his Spirit, to give glory to God.  This is our vocation, purpose, and identity as church.

It’s now several months since this congregation shifted from North Melbourne into this facility.  This transition seems to have gone well, largely due to congregational goodwill, as well as careful leadership, consultation, planning and preparation.  Perhaps you feel a sense of satisfaction at this achievement.  You’ve not spent 40 years in the wilderness, but this transition does mark the end of a long journey which is now concluded.  And yet we should be cautious about any end that is not, as the Basis of Union, paragraph 3, declares, God’s end in view for the whole creation: ‘God in Christ has given to all people in the Church the Holy Spirit as a pledge and foretaste of that coming reconciliation and renewal which is the end in view for the whole creation.’

In light of contemporary political and social challenges, it can be hard to picture this coming reconciliation and renewal.  The outcome of the recent Voice referendum obscures how progress towards healing and justice for Australia’s First Nations peoples may now be achieved.  And fresh violence in the Middle East pours salt into an old wound in the heart of a region that, ironically, is historically acclaimed as holy ground.  Equally ironic is that technologies and capacities designed and intended for human flourishing and peace appear instead to resource us even more deeply towards division and violence.  The myth of human progress, so attractive during the second half of the 20th century, now seems largely forgotten or at least discredited.  How can we imagine the vision of God’s end in view for all of creation?

Only by remembering and trusting that it is God’s vision.  Like the Israelites treading the verge of Jordan, so too do we anticipate a future founded not upon human courage and design, but rather upon the call and promise of God.  Just as the first generation of Israelites departing Egypt never enter the promised land, so too does the gospel of Christ crucified and risen call us to invest in a promise that is always beyond human possession and control.  For us, the Jordan is not a place, but a person.  Jesus is our Jordan, the verge and the fullness of God’s promise to a pilgrim people.  He is the verge and the fullness we tread:  as we gather in humble adoration of the one who is great on our behalf; as we learn the peace of the gospel and practise it in the life of discipleship; as we exercise the grace of God in our relationships, especially those that are strained; as we live simply and walk lightly, distancing ourselves from the death and despair of colonialist, nationalist, and materialist aspirations.

Let us tread the verge of Jordan, with all humility, patience, and grace, seeking in faith the one who makes our anxious fears subside.  Let us trust our Lord to breathe his Spirit into his body, to meet us here and now in Word and Sacrament, our hope and our heaven.  Faithful is God who has called us and who will not fail us.  And now 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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All Saints
29/10/2023

1 Thessalonians 2.13-20
Psalm 127
Matthew 22.34-40

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In a sentence
The communion of saints is from and for the changing of lives

What is our crown of boasting? asks Paul. What is our joy? What is our glory?

What is the glory of the Christian church? What is the glory of the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist? Paul answers his own question: Is it not you, you saints in Thessalonica? Yes, it is you. This is what we value in Christian ministry, what we ought to value: the hearts and minds and lives changed by the gospel.

Glory and joy are not common words in modern speech. Glory usually has to do with sports success, and the word joy probably pops up most often with respect to the experience of children or grandchildren (mostly grandchildren!). Nonetheless, what Paul declares here makes sense to us: “You are our glory and joy”. “For we now live”, he says after recounting some of their sufferings in ministry, “we now live, if you continue to stand”.

There’s not a lot of this in our churches these days. Strategic reviews and mission studies seem to dominate the way we think about what matters here and now, for it seems that there could not be a lot of glory or joy in the decline of a congregation.

For Paul, by contrast, it’s more a “people thing”. He and his missionary team are stumbling around Asia Minor, from success to disaster, from acceptance to persecution, and they come to Thessalonica and they meet a group of people, and they tell a new story about the Thessalonians and God. The story is received with joy. And so Paul can now tell about how the word of God has blossomed in these people, and how through that blossoming these people have themselves become imitators of Paul and his missionary team. The Thessalonians have themselves become a means by which the gospel continues to be spread, through whom the word has more effect. And by “effect”, we mean that it changes lives.

As for them now, so also for us today. We are invited into just that process. Faith is not just about being right, if it’s about that at all: getting the words right, the liturgy right, reading the right Scriptures from the right translation, and having the right doctrines. These “institutions” matter but only so far as they draw us further into the truth about ourselves, the world and God.

We at Mark the Evangelist have moved from an old place of being into a new one. To what extent is there a call to a new way of being? What is worth investing our released resources in now, that we might begin to become a little more like those Thessalonians, whose glory is not so much in the comfort of buildings, in the aesthetic and well-roundedness of liturgy, or in the truth of doctrine but in being the glory which is lives that have been touched by the gospel, such that they and we ourselves become “touchers” of others’ lives, for the good?

There is a lot of work going on in the church these days – a great effort towards managing our changing situation and securing a future of some kind. As hard as all that is, it’s easy compared to the heart of the matter. Because however well we are structured and funded, if we feel that we cannot say of anybody, in Paul’s sense, You are our glory and joy, the question has to be asked: have we a gospel? Is there any really good news we have for those around us, or even for ourselves? There’s a real possibility that the answer here is “perhaps not”. The glory and joy of Christian faith is no method of doing church but is found in ministry – being ministered to, and ministering to others, towards healing, towards a futures we can’t yet see (as distinct from the frightening ones we can).

Each year on this weekend, we mark the communion of saints. The celebration occurs one day a year, but the human community by which the gospel is embodied is as much the everyday heart of our faith as is the doctrine of creation or the Trinity. This community is what we are created for, what God’s own being makes possible.

And this concerns not just us “religious” folk who express our humanity by turning up at church. To consider the communion of saints – as with such wide-reaching doctrines as creation and Trinity – is to consider the promise and call to all humankind. The communion of saints is not a thing in the world; it is the future of the world: the promise God gives to the world.

For our world is filled with fear and sadness. The closest thing we have to glory is shock and awe – whether in the form of a political ambush, a bigger than-ever-before bushfire or a sky darkened by a storm of missiles loosed to rain down on our enemies’ homes. And so the daily news never brings joy, despite the cheery “human interest” story bulletins often tack on the end, because we can’t force joy. It is just such force which causes the misunderstanding and suffering in the first place.

The joy of the communion of saints is the hidden and unforceable work of God. It is gift, and not the fruit of our self-assurance or busy-ness. But, in receiving this gift of God, we can allow ourselves to become the kind of people who are growing in joy and glory, becoming the gospel – becoming good news for each other and for those around us. This might mean – probably will mean – doing and being quite differently from how we have done and been. This shouldn’t surprise us. To grow is to change; it’s as simple as that. The communion of saints is not a static thing in the world, it is the dynamic future of the world, and the world is not yet what it will be. And so neither are we.

The communion of saints is not a thing but a purpose.

Let us, then, to the glory of God and for our own joy, commit to being a people who count not only the things we can enjoy and value now but what God’s grace is yet to realise among us: lives deepened by the gospel in new and as yet unimagined ways, glory and joy.

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Pentecost 20
15/10/2023

Exodus 32:1-14
Psalm 106
Matthew 22:1-14

Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock

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Friends, God is furious today.

‘Now let me alone,’ he thunders, ‘so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them.’

Elohim smoulders with anger at the ungovernable folly of his chosen people. Yahweh, the God of their fathers, has made his covenant with them of old. He has tested the faith of Abraham. He has given Jacob children past the age of hope. He has inspired Joseph with dreams and lifted up Moses as a prophet of liberation. He has subdued the stony pride of Pharoah and delivered his people from slavery. He has shown them wonders to shake the world. They have seen plague and calamity and darkness. They have seen moving fire running through the clouds. They have seen the waters of the Red Sea part and collapse in their wake.

He has left them in no doubt of his power, of his judgement, and of his faithfulness. And now, just as his finger leaves the tablet upon which he has inscribed a new law, a template that will be the foundation of a new kingdom of righteousness; just at the moment that he has set his seal upon a new foundation of justice, his chosen people turn from him again. The old covenant trembles on the edge of failure.

‘Let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them.’ How does that instinct of wrath feel to you? Do you relate to it? Do you feel that rage at human failure and fault?

This week we have witnessed a new outbreak of violent horror in Israel and Gaza. Atrocities too awful to contemplate are once again the daily reality of Palestinians and Israelis caught in an ever-tightening knot of pain and injustice and enmity. Many killed and many displaced, in fear, and grieving. How long, O Lord?

Are you frustrated? Are you appalled? I am. I can’t see a way out and I’m angry at political leaders who seem unwilling to compromise, to set aside their pride, to make sacrifices for peace.

Yesterday, we added a 37^th failed referendum to our political history, as the Australian people declined to amend its Constitution to provide for a Voice to Parliament. How do you feel about that? Whatever side you have voted upon, it seemed to me that it was an unedifying and small-minded campaign, in which all the ordinary and pragmatic considerations of political life prevailed over a real wrestling with our national identity, with a real reckoning with the urgent demands of reconciliation.

Australia’s search for a settlement of its colonial past remains agonised in the grip of this reality. ‘YES’ posters gaze pleadingly from windows overlooking stolen land. Cattle chew on native grasses as calloused farmers puzzle over the Constitution. The agile shadows of kangaroo pass like spirits over the hot span of the highway. The Statement from the Heart speaks, though we cannot agree what it says. We cannot erase the past. Colonialism cannot be undone. Yet we cannot seem to find a way through to a truly unifying and healing picture of ourselves. Maybe we never will.

Do you, like God upon the mountain, feel exhausted at the effort? Are you tempted to give up on human beings?

In the heat of his anger, God turns to Moses and makes to him a great and terrible offer: ‘Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.”

‘This covenant has been a mistake. These people are not worthy of the great charge that I lay upon them. I will not dwell with them. But you, Moses, I will make a new covenant with you! I will make you a new Abraham, and your descendants shall be the ones in which I place my trust.’

Down below, at the foot of the mountain, the oblivious Israelites have made their golden calf. This picture of idolism is so enduring that it has passed into the English language as idiom. We all recognise this tendency for faithlessness in ourselves. This blind inclination to turn all too quickly from what we know is right and true and difficult towards what is comforting and gratifying and easy. There is something pitiably sympathetic in what the Israelites have done. It’s not clear that they intend to turn away from their God, from their Yahweh. “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the LORD,” says Aaron. While Moses communes with God upon the mountain, the people have sat wondering below the covering cloud for 40-days and nights. And such is their longing to see their God, to be close to him, to know him, that they give up their treasures. They melt down what little gold that they have carried with them from Egypt, and from it they fashion this pale shadow of their God.

And looking down from the mountain, Moses pities them, despite his own great anger. He cannot accept God’s offer. He cannot become a new Abraham. He cannot let God indulge his wrath. He pleads for them. He pleads for mercy for those that he knows are wrong.

Friends, this is what the Gospel of Christ asks of us, what the Law of love requires. We cannot give up on human beings. We cannot give up on community. The Kingdom of God is not a Kingdom of one. The church can never be a solitary endeavour. So much of our collective failures are born out of the little, pitiable, understandable urges of the golden calf. The desire to be a little richer. The desire to be a little more important. The desire to be a little more noticed, a little more gratified, a little more justified. Even to see God a little more clearly. But we plead for mercy for those we believe are wrong, in the hope that when we are wrong, we will receive mercy. We trust in the redemptive power of God to overcome human evil and apathy.

This unerring commitment to togetherness, to community, is written across all the pages of our tradition.

When Naomi says to Ruth, ‘where you will go, I will go. Your people will be my people and your God will be my God.’

When Adam and Eve are made for each other, flesh from flesh, so that neither should be alone.

When David and Jonathan make their covenant, and Timothy helps Paul carry his burdens.

When Esther risks all for her people, and when the disciples mark their final hours together with the sharing of bread and wine. When Jesus washes their feet.

That is what the Kingdom of God is like. This is what we are called to, even when it feels hopeless. Even when it feels pointless. Even with people who seem unreachable, with whom common understanding feels impossible.

In the end, God hears Moses’ pleading, and he changes his mind. How does an omniscient, unchanging, perfect God change their mind? Perhaps they don’t. But to change your mind, to relent, to give up the right of wrath and judgement, that is the stuff of relationship. And our God is the God of relationship. Relationship that perseveres through error and folly and failure. Relationship that endures beyond death.

May God grant us the humility to plead for those with whom we disagree, to release our grip on our pride, to resist the temptation of wrath, to persist for justice, and to sojourn on in imperfect community, trusting in the God who travels with us.

Amen.

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Pentecost 19
8/10/2023

Philippians 3:4b-14
Psalm 80
Matthew 21:33-46

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In a sentence:
Whether seemingly on our side or not, God in Christ is always for us

“They wanted to arrest Jesus, but they feared the crowds, because [the people] regarded him as a prophet.”

The ambiguity of the crowd
Crowds are ambiguous things. Crowds are “averages”, for better or worse. Governments need to know what is the average need of people in a crowd in order to deliver one-size-fits-most social services. Schools need to know the average needs and abilities of students to deliver one-size-fits-some education. Event organisers need to know how many toilet cubicles to order for the average crowd at an average concert weekend. Crowds tend to be predictable.

Crowds can also be pretty stupid. The mob cannot think, so people can be crushed by crowds – one way or another, literally or metaphorically, intentionally or not. The current critique of political populism is as much a critique of the stupidity of crowd as it is of the cynical manipulation of the masses by influential individuals. Crowds tend to operate close to the lowest common denominator and, as such, can be very hard to move when that thing in common is challenged. Democracy, of course, is a politics of the crowd, with elections and referendums being about what is most common to most in the masses.

In and of the crowd
Yet, for all of the ways that crowds reduce us, in truth we need crowds as much as we need to be done with them. The trick to crowds is being “in” the crowd but not “of” the crowd. Indeed, this is the trick to life, for life is crowd‑ed.

In our text today, the Pharisees and the priests are in the crowd, and “of” the crowd. This doesn’t mean they agree with the crowd but that the crowd prevails. Challenged by Jesus, they are forced – they think – to acquiesce, and they slink away to attack again at some later time. They are only able to act with the crowd. Later in the story, another crowd comes into play, with which the religious leaders are again in accord, but now it is “their” crowd. Now, still “in” and “of” the crowd, they are what the crowd allows and they get what they want.

Jesus, on the other hand, is in but is not of the crowd. Certainly, this crowd saves him some grief from the religious leaders, but another crowd will gather to accuse and decry against him. The crowd is Jesus’ context, but not his measure. Jesus is in the crowd, but not of it – not contained by it.  Crowds change, but Jesus does not. For the religious leaders, however, the crowd is their measure, is their containment (or freedom). The Pharisee and the priest caricatured in these conflicts with Jesus change with the crowd.

Note what this means: the Pharisee and the priest can only be themselves in one kind of crowd: the crowd they agree with. The Pharisee, then, changes with the changing context, becoming larger or smaller, freer or more constrained.  Fear might cause us to make ourselves safer but it also makes us smaller.

For Jesus, all the world is open to him, good and bad. He is always in crowds but never of them, never by them. Of course, some crowds are safer and more comfortable. But there is no part of the world which is not his world, given to him, open to him, in which he is not at home.

The difference between Jesus and the Pharisee – the difference, that is, between Jesus and most of us – is that the Pharisee changes as the crowd changes but Jesus does not. The Pharisee is often in the wrong place, in the wrong crowd – as in our reading today. Jesus is never in the wrong crowd, because the crowd is not his measure. His measure is the unity of God and the oneness of the world. God does not wax or wane with location, so that the many locations in the world do not divide the world in any real way. The one God relates to one world, and so Jesus does not change.

And this opens up something else – in fact, the crucial thing. The Pharisee is sometimes for the crowd, and sometimes against – depending on the crowd – changing the Pharisees own purpose. Jesus’ doesn’t change with the change of mood which might sweep across the masses. His stance, his relationship to the crowd, remains unchanged.

In and for the crowd
And what is that stance? Jesus is in the crowd but not of the crowd for the sake of the crowd. I called this the crucial thing – the crux, the cross­­‑­thing – because it is in front of the crowd at Golgotha and the crowd of all human history that Jesus hangs “for” those who put him there. Jesus is always for the crowd, always for those around him, whether he affirms them or opposes them. It is on the cross that Jesus is definitively one for all, surrounded by those who oppose him and those who hoped he was their hope.

This is the basis of Christian talk of justification by grace. God values our good work but loved us before we did anything. God hates our sin but loves us nonetheless. This doesn’t make the good we do (or don’t do) without value. It calls us to re-value our good. Goodness is not only for the crowd in which we feel comfortable. Our goodness should not change with whether we are among friends or foes, whether it is light or dark. For, as with God, so also for us: we are what we do to those who oppose us, we are what we do in the dark.

In the light of day and the darkest night, in solitude and in the throng, in safe places and fearful one, God is for us, in order that we might be in God and for those who love or oppose us. There is no place that God is not, in order that every place can be a place of rich human possibility. There is no place that God is not, in order that love might always be possible.

Let us, then, wherever we find ourselves, commit to the work of love which brings order out of chaos and life out of death.