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Pentecost 8
23/7/2023

Romans 8:18-25
Psalm 86
Matthew 13:24-30

In a sentence:
Faith acts and speaks with patience because it is confident that God has and will triumph over all things.

Faith, Nature, Art and War
As I sat on down at my desk earlier this week, I was struck by the titles of two books I’d placed there next to each other.

I had just finished the first book: Gerhard Ebeling’s The nature of faith. Ebeling attempts to lay faith out in such a way as to connect to the broader university community where he taught. I wonder whether this could, in part, be the kind of work we might be doing now that we are in a university precinct among colleges.

The second book was what I am now reading – Sun Tzu’s The art of war, a classic Chinese text on martial strategy. I’m reading this for a similar reason: how does one engage with strange others, whether those in the university, those in the Synod’s Centre for Theology and Ministry(!), or just in the wider world? The terrain is unfamiliar, and we don’t know what to expect from the natives. Some anticipation and strategy would seem to be required!

Common to these two books, and central in my own motivation in reading them, is the question of engagement. But what struck me about the two sitting next to each other on the desk was the similar structure of their titles – The “This” of “That: “The nature of faith” and “The art of war”.

And a somewhat silly question came to mind: are these two books about the same thing, even if written perhaps 2400 years apart and on seemingly divergent topics? Has the nature of faith got something to do with the art of war? This strange connection persisted, and now you will have to think about it with me!

War as an Art
War is a human endeavour which is, crucially, everywhere and at all times a reality or a near possibility at one level or another. This is the case whether you’re on a battlefield, struggling to get some new business startup off the ground or just preparing to visit the in-laws. Politics – our very life together – is, broadly, war.

War is then something we make or fashion, as a matter of course. As such, it can be done well or poorly. The art of war was written so that war be done well. It doesn’t matter here whether war or any human struggle offends us. None of us can do much about these struggles when they come, or even avoid them. We can only respond well or not. And this response – this art of doing war is – like any art – not easy. (A recent book makes this point by reversing the title of Sun Tzu’s book: The war of art [S Pressfield]).

It makes sense, then, that we might think about the art of war in the way that we might think about any art: How do we do this well? How do we enter into the fray? How do we engage others, perhaps against their will? If we are going to be living with other people we need to know something about the art of war; it’s just part of life, just natural.

Faith and nature
What about The nature of faith? The proposal here is that faith has a nature appropriate to itself. It has its own way of being, self-understanding, and expression. Just as sparrows, pelicans, and ostriches are each their own particular type of bird, faith – among other human endeavours – is and does its peculiar thing.

But on this account (which is not quite Ebeling’s argument), faith is a different human thing from war. If war is “natural” – by which I mean that it is everywhere at hand – this is not so for faith. Faith might have a nature of its own, but we don’t think that faith is “natural”. War and struggle are everywhere and are, in this sense, natural. Faith is not everywhere – or at least this is how the secular world frames the matter. Faith might have its own nature, but it is not natural, not fundamental, and is actively excluded from some places.

The question for us is, is this the proper reading of faith? And the answer is, No.

But it’s one thing to say this, and another to know and embrace what it means to say it in a context where it is denied.

The war of faith
The only way we can contradict this marginalisation – in ourselves and in our relationship with the world – is surprising and horrifying: faith must go to “war”. With all political struggles, war is about the crossing of boundaries. We push back invaders or become invaders ourselves. Not surprisingly, this is precisely what it feels like to ourselves and to the broader culture whenever the church presumes to speak out on some topic or to evangelise. We – the church – strategise, and the world responds as if under attack. It is almost impossible – outside the church and inside it – to hear the word “faith” without faith already being outside natural human endeavour. In a culture like ours, to propose faith is to cross a boundary, so that the very notion of faith is heard as a rumour of war.

I suspect this seems rather extreme to some of you, but consider the response you might expect from family, neighbours or colleagues if you suggested a bit of theology might do them good. The defences will go up, for an enemy is at hand.

Of course, the problem with war language in connection with faith is that there is a kind of faith which literally goes to war. The young fanatic with a bomb in his backpack is a version of faith at war, as is the Christian reactionary blowing up an abortion clinic. This is war, and it is a kind of faith. But it is bad faith. For there is an art of faith which determines what the war of faith should properly look like, and this art can be badly or well done.  We need to know about the art of faith in order to know how faith might properly wage war.

Paul and the patient warrior
And now I come(!), briefly, to our text this morning from Paul’s letter to the Romans. What does the war of faith look like, according to Paul?

The condition for war is the world’s “bondage to decay”, the “sufferings of this present time” and the the great groaning” of creation and the human heart, at the struggle for life. Faith holds that this is the struggle, and that it will be a victorious struggle because the only combatant who matters is the God and Father of Jesus Christ. It is God’s own struggle.

And us? What is faith’s part here? What is the art of faith in the one struggle which matters? Faith wages war, Paul says, by being patient.

I didn’t expect that when I started pondering those book titles. If we are in a war, patience is almost a horrifying suggestion, sounding like resignation and capitulation. But this is faith’s war – the struggle of the faith which trusts in this God, who will overcome the bondage of all things, all relationships, to decay.

The art of war is, for faith, the art of patience. This is because faith holds that the war is already won. And now the groaning of all creation is no longer “mere” suffering but is transformed into the birth pangs of God’s future: the whole world is pregnant with God’s promise. There is then now, no further blow to strike. Patience need only wait for the birth of the children of God; this cannot be induced or hurried.

But the patient art of faith is not passive. Patience expects something, and faith’s mode of waiting points towards what we expect, testifying to what is to come. Faith, then, refuses to shut up about the coming reconciliation of all things, the overcoming of all boundaries, the end of all struggle and war. If faith seems to cross boundaries, it is because this crossing itself is testimony. The war of faith is not incursion into foreign territory, even if the foray makes us nervous and we are rejected as enemies. Anywhere faith goes, it knows that place as God’s own and goes there as proof of this.

This is to say that faith is at home in the world, in the entirety of the world. Faith is at home on Curzon Street and on College Crescent. Faith is at home in the rigour and passion of politics and in a solitary, quieted heart. Faith is at home in death as well as in life.

This is because faith holds that we are already conquerors through him who loved us; there is no war to wage, only the busy, witnessing work of patience. To anticipate what we will hear from Paul again next week in his great crescendo to this chapter in Romans: faith does its work patiently and without violent struggle because not death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,

is be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8.27-39).

Faith struggles here and now – but patiently – in words and works which express the reconciliation of all things which God will bring.

Our new start here today is just a part of that struggle, which we take up with joy – which is to say, with courage. We are here because it is, for us, faith’s next thing, whatever comes of it.

And so, let us lift up our hearts as, in fresh words and deeds, we begin again the patient life of the children of God.

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Pentecost 7
16/7/2023

Isaiah 55:1-13
Psalm 65
Matthew 13:2-9

In a sentence:
Thanksgiving, properly, opens us up to God’s next good thing

On Saying “Ta”
It is not long after our children begin to develop a sense for language that we teach them to say ‘ta’. This is an important lesson for at least two reasons.

First, and obviously, we want to instil a sense of humility and gratitude in our little ones. We can’t do everything for ourselves, so we learn to say thanks when someone gives us something we need.

But second – and less obvious in the lesson – saying “ta” is an essential social noise. Many personal exchanges require this of us, and so we learn to say it almost automatically. We say “Good morning” and “How are you?” when we meet someone, without really thinking about the quality of their morning or wanting to know too much detail about how they are. Similarly, saying “thanks” brings closure to a personal interaction. We say thanks when someone gives us the few coins we are owed in change, or at the end of an email, or we give a wave of thanks when someone lets us into the line of traffic. Saying “ta” is a kind of social lubricant.

Our thanks can, of course, be much more heartfelt than this, just as our greetings can be more sincere than they often are. Yet saying thanks is always at least the social noise.  And, as a social noise which concludes some human exchange, thanksgiving is an inherently past-oriented action.

“Thank God”
What does this mean for saying thanks to God, as we might understand ourselves to be doing today, now taking leave of a significant part of our past?

We get some sense of the church’s thanksgiving by examining how we sometimes pray. We thank God, perhaps, for a good harvest (“Harvest Thanksgiving”). We thank God for new members who join the congregation or for the excellent weather we had on the church picnic (at least, in those days when we had church picnics!). We thank God because one of our number escaped harm in some recent catastrophe. We might even dare to thank God for the outcome of an election. Such thanksgiving as this is in the standard mode of exchange and closure. Something has happened that we attribute to God’s action, and so we respond with the necessary social – or necessary pious – noise.

Of course, thanking God is often contentious. The lovely day we enjoyed for the church picnic might have been one more day on which a desperate farmer did not get the rain she so earnestly prayed for. And the test case for all pious thanksgiving in closure mode is the crucifixion of the Christ: Thank God that we are finally rid of Jesus the Nazarene.

We might reasonably suspect, nonetheless, that we must make some thanksgivings like this. We give thanks for worship services in workshops and hotels here in North Melbourne in the early 1850s, for the laying of various foundation stones between 1859 and 1898, and for the taking of responsibility as circumstances changed. We give thanks for the consolidation of earlier communities here in 1987 and 1996, and for all the efforts over the past 15 years or so which sought to maintain our presence here. We must do this because the social noise – and its pious version – does matter. People have done their best, and we thank God for them and for the benefits of their labours.

And yet, thanksgiving like this also brings each of these exchanges between God and us to their respective closures. As such, our thanksgiving here remains oriented towards “yesterday”.

Eucharist: Thanksgiving as Becoming
But the church does more than this in its thanksgiving. At the heart of the life of any (small c) catholic Christian worship is “the Eucharist”. We know it also, of course, as “the Lord’s Supper” and “Holy Communion” or even “the Mass”, but perhaps “Eucharist” characterises the sacrament best. From a Greek root, the word means “thanksgiving”. How does the church give thanks here?

A major feature of that part of our worship is the “Great Prayer of Thanksgiving”. This prayer tells the story of creation, of the call of the people of Israel, and of God’s struggles with that people. We hear of the sending of Jesus, of his death and resurrection, and of the fruit of God’s saving work in him. All of this is told in the past tense, and so it looks very much like saying thanks in the mode of exchange and closure. In the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, we say “Ta”.

But the Eucharist – the thanksgiving – is not yet over. We move from the prayer into the actions around the bread and wine: the blessing, the breaking of the bread and the eating and drinking. This, too, is thanksgiving, but now we are not bringing closure but opening up, not drawing to an end but becoming the shape of a beginning.

And what is beginning is the Body of Christ – the church – nourished by and participating in the humanity of Jesus, which is signed in the eating and drinking of bread and the wine said to be the body and blood of Jesus. We persist in this ghastly image because we are what we eat. Let us receive what we are, Augustine says, Let us become what we receive: even the Body of Christ.

For the church to say thanks, properly as church, is then not to look back to some closed past of Jesus. For the church to give thanks for Jesus is for it to become itself the Body of Christ. To give thanks for Christ is to become an openness to the future. If we remember the work of God in Christ, we remember our future, so that thanksgiving is a process of becoming that future.

And so, to thank God is not bring closure; it is to make a commitment. “Do this”, Jesus says, “for the making again of me”. For the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist to give thanks for all that we and our predecessors have known of God’s grace of God is, then, for us to re-commit ourselves as bearers of God’s grace. There is no closure here, only openness to God’s next good thing.

When Gods call us to thanksgiving, we are not only to remember the past but are challenged to make a commitment to a future about which we know nothing except that the Father’s heart is there, waiting for the arrival of the Body of the Son – waiting of our arrival. And to arrive, we must go, now as always.

We don’t know where we are going, in the sense that really matters. We know only that God will be there.

Thanksgiving, then, is a risky venture and not for the fainthearted. Thanksgiving remembers and closes and releases and, from there, turns to the openness of a genuinely new and unknown day.

How does the church say thanks? In fear and trembling, throwing ourselves forward into the promise of God.

God says to us now, “Say ta. I dare you. And when you do, you shall go out with joy, and be led back in peace, and the mountains and the hills will burst into song, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”

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Pentecost 6
9/7/2023

Romans 7:15-25a
Psalm 145
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Sermon preached by Daniel Sihombing

In her book published in 2015, titled The New Prophets of Capital, Nicole Aschoff, a sociologist from the United States, presents a chapter titled “The Oracle of O: Oprah and the Neoliberal Subject.” Oprah here is of course the famous Oprah Winfrey, a television personality who is likened to a prophet. Not the kind of prophets that we find in the Bible, for she is categorized as one of the twentieth century prophets of capital, whose vocation is about the creation and reproduction of neoliberal subjects.

In Aschoff’s words, “Oprah’s success and charisma undergird her core message that anything is possible. Her story is a real-life, rags-to-riches tale that inspires a belief that wealth and success are achievable if we open our minds.” One of the stories that she mentions in the chapter is about one of Oprah’s trips to Africa, where she told “a group of impoverished children who had been orphaned by the HIV/AIDS epidemic that with hard work and determination they too could be like her one day: ‘I grew up like many of you. No running water. No electricity, as a little girl. You can overcome poverty and despair in your life with an education. I am living proof of that.”

How often do we hear this kind of message in the last few decades? About how the societal problems and solutions are ultimately rooted in individual mindsets. It’s all about perspective! Change your mindsets, and life will be different.

What a contrast to what we hear from Paul in our reading today, in Romans 7! For here Paul instead puts a lot of emphases on the inability of an individual subject to overcome the tide of sinful history by their own power.

Verses 15 and 16: “For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

The “I” that Paul writes about here actually knows what is right. This subject knows what is the right thing to do. They do not need to change their mindset. They know that the law is spiritual. They know that the law is good. In verse 22, Paul even writes, “For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self.” There is nothing wrong with the mindset.

And yet the same subject admits that “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (v.15). “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” (v.18). So it is not just about the mindset. There is another factor at play.

And what would that factor be?

In Paul’s words, “But I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin.” (v.14). “It is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” (v.17). “If I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” (v.20). He also speaks about the subject being “captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” (v.23). “Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (v.24)

This body of death, where sin dwells within. This body of death, sold into slavery under sin. So there is another factor, something that dwells within us. There is another factor, something that enslaves us. Something that took over and control our body. Something that limits the efficacy of a transformed mindset.

It sounds as if what Paul speaks about in Romans 7 goes against the oracle of Oprah. It sounds as if what he tells us about the body of death is a counter-argument to the idea of the neoliberal subject. For sure, neoliberalism as an economic system haven’t yet existed in Paul’s lifetime. But hearing what he says for us in this time, it sounds to me that Romans 7 is a reminder that what is possible for us as individuals is always under the constraints of historical conditions, something that is located beyond our inner self, and that those historical conditions are often kind of negative forces, because history is under the power of sin.

How often do we feel the power of these historical constraints that limit our ability to do the good things? This is what happened when we pay for our taxes and so much of that money goes into the war machinery, even though we did not vote for the government in power. Are we complicit in this regard? And what about our position in the global relations of production? We probably think we only do our jobs, make an honest living, feed our family, but how does what we do in our job actually be part of a global chain that impacts people all over the world, especially those who live in the Global South. How does that impact climate change and environmental sustainability and the lives of the next generation, humans and animals?

This is where I hear Paul speaking about this body of death, “sold into slavery under sin.” “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” “Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

Now, if we look at the context, the previous chapter, Romans chapter 6, is about dying and rising with Christ. The old self is buried, the new one is raised with Christ. But what is this new life in Christ? Is it a kind of a morally good life, where we can now fulfil a set of rules and practices? No! So Romans 7 is where Paul is trying to block this move, by saying that if you are trying to rely on your works, it will only reveal that your self, is actually not fully yours. There is a kind of power that rules over it. The power of sin. And then you would see that this body is the body of death. What he had in mind instead, is what he is about to say next in Romans 8, living in the power of the Holy Spirit, joining the new movement from God that radically transforms the world in the power of resurrection.

Joining the movement from God means that it’s not about us, individuals, being able to overcome the constraints of historical conditions by our own works, through our change of mindset. It’s not about being a neoliberal subject, preached by the new prophets of capital, that you can do and be whatever you like as long as you believe and put the work in, and solve the problem as an individual. It’s not about us being holy and moral through our own efforts, as if we are not living under the historical conditions ruled by the power of sin. The gospel for Paul is so much more than that, as it is about joining the movement from God that radically transforms the world, the movement that is signalled by the resurrection of Jesus. May the Holy Spirit blow this power again and calls us all to join in. Amen.

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Pentecost 5
2/7/2023

Romans 6:12-14, 20-24
Psalm 89
Matthew 10:40-42

In a sentence:
God renews our times with the gift of a new tomorrow

Time and character
In his book Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell unpacks the conditions which cause epidemics of the social and economic kind – epidemics of behaviour. What causes a long-available brand of shoes suddenly to sell wildly all over the place, or an online video to go viral?

Among the many factors Gladwell considers is the impact of context on behaviour. Our assessment of our own character – and so of our behaviour in different circumstances – will usually be a judgement we make independently of those different contexts. Gladwell shows how insecure that assessment might be, precisely because it does not attend to the impact of context.

Among several examples, Gladwell cites a study based on what we know as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This was a study of the difference context made to the actions of a group of seminarians (students for Christian ministry). The students were sent across campus to what they were told was an important appointment. Planted along their path was a person in some serious need. The study asked was whether priming these seminarians in particular ways would change their response to the needy person. If the importance of the appointment were exaggerated, and the students were told they were running late, would this affect how many would play the Samaritan and stop to help the needy person? The answer was, Yes. Significantly fewer students helped the needy person when their context – in this case, whether or not they were running late – put more “pressure” on them. Change the context, and you change the behaviour, the expressed character of the person.

Drawing on wider research, Gladwell concludes that context shapes our expressed character (our actions) much more than we realise. This is not a fatalistic conclusion – that we are trapped in this way – but simply a realistic observation: the temptation not to do the “right” thing is strongly influenced by where we find ourselves at the time. In certain contexts, we are tempted to argue that the ‘time’ is not right for this or that good thing we know could otherwise have been done.

If we are what we do then (which is difficult to deny), it also seems true that the times in which we live make us what we are: we are our context.

This must be true in a general sense: to be born in a particular place and a particular time makes us different from those of other places and times. But the issue here is not this general truism. The question is whether we are also – or could be – more than the time we live in.

The sense of time I’m using here is obviously not merely the ticking of a clock. It is the social and political times in which we live. And my interest is not merely that we are in this kind of time, but how we are here: does our time make us, or do we make time? Gladwell’s boot is oriented towards how circumstances change us and can be manipulated to change us. How can we sell more phones or get more people to volunteer their time for some worthy cause? This is the times making us.

The possibility the gospel poses is the opposite: we are called to make time. This is not a matter of “finding” time in the crush of things we usually have to do. The time-making of the gospel is the re-making of the times in which we live, and so the remaking of ourselves. It is a new perception of life.

Paul: Christ as the time of our lives
This is the possibility Paul addresses our few verses from Romans today, even if he doesn’t do it in these terms. Extending what he had to say in the previous chapter (Romans 5), Paul contrasts slavery and freedom, wages and gift, death and life, and so on. This language gives his treatment of the question an almost irredemiably “religious” feel, and so makes it quite alien from the lives we think we normally live. Who thinks these things at breakfast, at the hairdressers or when binge-watching a new TV series?

But Paul is not “religious”. His concern is “the human”. Is the human bound or free? What are her necessities, and her freedoms? Where is she overwhelmed by death, and where by life? Or, in the terms we have just been considering, what kind of time does she inhabit? In contrast to the time of sin and death represented by Adam, Paul simply posits a time of God and life represented by Christ. If there is any sense in which we are “in Christ” as believers, it is then not a merely mystical thing. We are “in Christ” in the real lives we live. Paul says, “Let your experience of the time given you be different. Let Christ – and not Adam – be the time of your life”.

What does this mean?

Making time
To be in Christ doesn’t mean, ‘Be religious”. It means to be in the times everyone else is in, but to do so in the likeness of the humanity of Jesus. This likeness contradicts the times. It is a strange new order in the midst of disorder. It sees the world everyone sees, but now seen in a different light. Jesus and his opponents did not differ about the world in which they lived, but only in how to live in it: do we receive our times, or do we make time? Do our context, our history, and our relationsihps make us, or are we making something of them?

There is a sense in which the time in which we live is always Yesterday; we always live in received time. How we live in that time is the possibility of a re-made Tomorrow which is not simply Yesterday done over again but is something new. This is what it means to “make time”. Jesus was lively, new-creation time in the midst of stale, old time. So confronting was this contrast that he was crucified for it. To speak of Jesus as risen is to speak of the possibility of such new time now, even among us.

As a congregation, of course, we are shifting to a new space. In the sense of “era”, this represents a new time. But it will be easy to mistake the mere shift as a newness which matters. It matters much less than whether the quality of our time changes. In Paul’s terms, Adam’s time – the time of Yesterday – is an ever-present possibility, wherever we are. But Christ’s time opens up new tomorrows. Those new tomorrows are the time-making to which the gospel calls us. To make time is to reconstruct our time, to reconceive it. It is to bring order out of deep chaos, and so the gift of God is to become God-like, Creator-like. It is not our context which makes us; we are made to become makers.

And what does this feel like? To borrow from the Gospel reading today, it feels not like peace but like a sword. It might be hard – for us and for others. Making time does not avert difficulty or death. Again, Jesus died because of this. To make time is to change our future. This is not that we won’t die, but that our death itself will be changed.

We move to the next thing, not in timid acquiescence to the times but in the effort to become new, to make the times new, and in calling others to join us in this.

This is the life of the gospel, as individuals and as a community. Let us then, grasp the gift of the gospel, and make time, anew.

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Pentecost 4
25/6/2023

Genesis 21:8-21
Psalm 86
Romans 6:1b-11
Matthew 10:24-39

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

One of the reasons we like to read and reflect on passages of Scripture is because readings from the bible comfort the afflicted. The trouble is that far from comforting the afflicted, much of Scripture afflicts the comfortable. One of the complaints we might want to make about those who chose the readings that are included in the three-year lectionary cycle is that they have not only included the bits that comfort. They have also included bits that afflict. The readings for this Sunday fall into that category. In his letter to the Romans, Paul wrote, ‘Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?’ Matthew writes words of Jesus, ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ The story of Hagar and Ishmael is touching but it relates why future enemies of the chosen race were permitted to survive and flourish.

It prompts the questions, ‘Why were these accounts recorded in Scripture?’ ‘What might have been happening at the time of writing these passages?’ The same kind of questions may be asked of any story. Why tell it? How does the story connect with what is going on in our lives now?

The story in Genesis about Hagar and Ishmael was told to the tribes of Israel over many centuries but the first five books of the bible were probably written down in the form we have them in our bible today at a time of crisis, at the time when Israel and Judah were in exile in Babylon. Matthew’s gospel was probably written after 70 CE when Jerusalem fell, and the temple was destroyed. Paul wrote to Rome at a time of lively philosophical and religious debate. Writings we know as Scripture today were written at times of crisis and upheaval. It might be argued they were written because of the times of crisis and upheaval of those who read and heard Scripture.

It needs to be noted that these writings did not just relate to a series of events without some interpretive comment. We can detect deliberate messages. Each writer writes about certain events but they are adding comment as to how their readers can understand what the events mean for them. Sometimes their comment flies in the face of what readers might expect.

An obvious example of that comes when Matthew has Jesus say, ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword…’. He goes on to spell that out in graphic and brutal terms – specific family members who normally would be expected to get on and have each other’s backs are the very ones who will be set against each other – stabbing each other’s backs. Did Jesus really say this or did Matthew invent this to make a point? There are some tests that bible scholars use to determine the likelihood of a genuine quote. One test is if an act or saying feels out of character or awkward, then it is more likely to be a true quote. Matthew tells us that Jesus, the prince of peace said, ‘I come to bring a sword.’ – very awkward. Another test for authenticity is if Jesus is turning an idea on its head like in the verse that concludes his saying about peace and swords and family members hating each other – Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Paul has a reputation for saying weird things that get people thinking differently about life and death. He has said that God’s grace is more than a match for the world’s evil. If there is more evil, then there is more grace. Well that’s good. God’s grace is very good. The best way to get more grace in the world, according to Paul, is to sin more, be more evil.

Paul comes right out and says it, ‘Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?’ Having asked the question, the competent debater sets out to answer. The response is extraordinary and unexpected. I would have said something like – if you have been in debt and someone pays it off for you and gives a bit extra for good measure how can you expect help if you go into debt again. Surely nothing wrong with that answer, after all, Jesus said much the same in one of his parables. The problem with that answer is that Paul has just said that God’s grace knows no bounds so the debt would be covered again, wouldn’t it?

Paul comes up with a gob stopper. Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? Certainly not. Why not? Because we are dead.

‘Well, what sort of answer is that?’ I hear you cry. How is being dead going to help? Well, if you are dead no one can harm you anymore. The worst that can happen has happened. What people think of you doesn’t matter anymore. You cannot be frightened.

In the world of Paul, Christians had to live fearlessly to stay faithful. No problem, says Paul. You are dead, the fear of being debilitated by sin and death has passed. How can this be? Well, you are baptized. So? Well in baptism we have entered into Christ’s death. The baptized die with Christ. That is what the symbolism of water is in baptism. That stuff can kill you. This link between death and water is more obvious in those places where total immersion is practiced. In the Uniting Church we have tried to make the water more visible by pouring it in generous proportions into the font. I can remember as a student participating in a baptism where the container for the water was like a little crystal butter dish. There was so little water that at one baptism the session clerk thought there was no water at all and went to get some. If he couldn’t see the water from one metre away, how visible could it have been for the congregation. It is very difficult to feel threatened with death when you are being sprinkled with water from a butter dish. But Paul says this is actually what it is about.

‘Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.’

Often baptistries are in the shape of a cross. I have pictures of baptistries and fonts designed to remind the church of graves and coffins.

Morbid? It would be if the symbolism stopped there. It would not symbolise the truth of the matter if candidates for baptism only went down into the water. But that is not the end of it. The baptised come up out of the water, dripping wet like one newly born. The newly baptised child is taken away from the font and presented to its new family, the church. That family promises to be a life-giving community. Within the family of the church the Christian is not immune from evil and death. There is no magic umbrella to protect us from the real world. But it is the company of the church that acknowledges the reality of evil and death but does not concede that it has the last word. More powerful and significant is the life-giving grace of God. If that is the focus of the Christian we don’t need to fear all the other stuff.

Remember you are baptised and be thankful. In baptism you have died. Now you can live.

God breaks out of every scheme of logic with all the loose ends neatly tucked away. So we tell stories, stories ancient and new, stories of God and faithful people who, despite the complexities of life, trust the Lord of life to be faithful to his promises of life.

It is not a matter of God changing to our concepts, but of us changing to God’s concepts. Of losing in order to find, of being bound in order to be free, of dying in order to live. That calls for trust in God. Jesus said, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 10: 39)

Bronwyn Pike is the Executive Director of Uniting, the church’s social care agency. In the Religion Program on ABC radio in 2002, when she was Victoria’s Minister for Housing and Aged Care, Bronwyn said:

I believe absolutely firmly that people’s lives can be transformed in a relationship with Jesus Christ, and I think that we’ve tended to think that maybe people’s salvation is only found in psychology or counselling and all of these things help, but true transformation is still there and available when people come to understand that by giving their lives away, they find it.