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Easter 4
23/4/2023

1 Peter 2:17-25
Psalm 23
John 10:1-10

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God may my words be loving and true. And May those who are listening discern what is unloving and untrue in my words, that you may be glorifying. Amen

St. Francis is credited with saying, “preach the gospel, and if necessary use words.” As good Protestants we know it is necessary to use words and gestures and symbols and rituals and candles and textiles and visual images and song and acts of kindness and mercy. It is necessary to use all things in the world to tell the story of God in Christ.

The task of preaching, the task of living a life of witness is to give some shape, some articulation to the story of God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ: to turn parts of creation to tell that story, to build a sort of symbolic world of new creation that we can inhabit. To this end, we weave together stories, images, practices. We take bits of creation, and we twist them.

The Christian tradition is famed for its use of irony. The core word we use for our central story of Jesus Christ killed by the Roman Empire is this word “Gospel”: good news; which originally meant the triumph of military power. And it becomes for us the story of military death. We name Jesus Christ as “Lord,” to spit in the face of all other lords of this world.

But there is a risk in doing this work of building a symbolic world that tries to give shape to our vision of new creation — that world just behind the veil of this world, the world which Christ, the risen crucified One has established. The risk, of course, of trying to articulate this world beyond us — that has yet arrived — To articulate this world, in language, in metaphor and symbol, in practices and ritual, runs the risk that what we build is not, in fact, this new creation, which is in the hands of God. But instead, we build our own creation. We create a symbolic world that we control, where we set the limit, set the limits of what is true, and what is real.

At the same time, by building these symbolic worlds of faith and religion, we can trick ourselves and delude ourselves and turn our gaze away from a sober reckoning with the reality that is still before us. And so we construct schedules of readings for each week in the Christian calendar, and we omit the difficult parts of the text. In our reading from First Peter the lectionary does not include the lines, “honour the Emperor.” It does not include the verse that begins and says, “slaves obey your masters.” And it has been my experience that not many people preach from First Peter at all.

So when we come to a text like First Peter with all of its challenging words, that seems to shipwreck the symbols we have associated with our tradition, Jesus who is Lord against Caesar, who is Lord. And yet here, we hear the call of Scripture itself to honour the Emperor. The apostle Paul says, “For freedom Christ has set us free.” Paul says, “there is no longer slave nor free.” And here scripture says, “slaves obey your masters, even when they hurt you unjustly for your suffering is a sign of Christ.”

One of the great gifts of scripture is of course, that it shipwrecks our assumptions and claims about God; it forces us to dig deeper to understand where God is acting now.

What first Peter teaches us, I think, is that in our attempts to be faithful to God, we cannot do this by looking away from the real concrete reality that stands before us. I don’t think — I don’t want to think that the writer of First Peter tells slaves to obey their masters because the author thinks that slavery is in itself, an inherently good thing and suffering at the hands of cruel masters is an inherently good thing. And yet, in an early religious renewal movement, a small community spread across Asia Minor, a group with no political power, with no credibility, struck by prejudice, it is difficult to find a way forward that negotiates the experience of suffering and persecution.

What First Peter offers then, is not a guide that says for all time, we must accept inequalities, discrimination, domination, violence and abuse and suffering as if all these things are what God wills for the world. Rather, I think first, Peter points us to this idea that whatever we want to say about new creation, it must be something that we are saying about this creation. New Creation is something that emerges in this creation. It is not the resurrected Christ who was never put on the cross, but always the Resurrected Crucified One. The One who brings new life to a broken world, the one who brings healing to a sick world, the one who brings freedom to a bound world. And so, to be faithful to that message, to be faithful to the declaration of liberation for someone who is literally not metaphorically enslaved means to do the hard work of negotiating with sober and tragic honesty how to be Christian in a world where we suffer.

And for those of us who enjoy the privileges of 2000 years of water under the bridge, of a world that has been radically changed, of a world where we are the beneficiaries of forms of freedom, dispossession of others, and wealth creation. Our faithfulness to these early teachings is not simply to replicate them but to look again, with honesty and sobriety, at our situation in the world. Because there are some churches in the privileged, rich white West, who are talking about how the church is now on the margins as if we don’t hold billions of dollars of property. There are those who say that the criticism that is levied against the church that has hurt and abused people, and continues to, is an act of persecution rather than a prophetic voice of justice calling us back to the good ways of God.

And so we should allow First Peter to disrupt the assumptions we make about what Christianity has to say about following the shepherd who is God in our world today. We should not allow ourselves to say well, we know what Christianity is about.

“Christianity is obviously about caring for those on the margins as we were on the margins.”

“Christianity is obviously about speaking truth to power as if we are not connected to the axes of power.”

The Call of the gospel today is to face up with the complexity of our place in life. To face up to what it means to have a legacy of Christendom that the church still holds on to, but must renegotiate in a new way. The point here is to say that there are no easy answers in scripture or in life or in preaching or in the life of faith.

There is only the hard work of discernment, of placing our stories about ourselves and the world and our place within it. Placing those stories into conversation with our own tradition and history, with the lives of those who are suffering and calling for justice, and acknowledging where we stand in relationship to the guilt and shame of the world.

The point might be to say that we actually do need to construct the symbolic world we inhabit. We need to gather as communities of faith, that worship, that tell the big story of God’s reconciliation. We need to come to the table and be fed. But we should always do this not because we seek to encounter something that comforts us, something that we understand, a story that we are telling. We do this to listen to stories of others, stories in which we are engrafted, stories that shape us and that are not shaped by us.

The story of God’s transformation is always the story of God’s transforming work. We must tell the story over and over and over again. And in doing so, we must discern that God is calling us. We must be willing to confess.

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Easter 2
16/4/2023

Acts 2:14a, 22-23
Psalm 16
John 20:19-31

In a sentence:
Whatever resurrection life looks like, it does not leave our history – us – behind

Identifying the dead
The fan of the TV murder mystery knows that an essential part of many of those stories is identifying the dead body. By this we confirm that the deceased is the person we think she is.

When we identify a living person, it is by recognising her face or voice. If we know her very well, we might even recognise her by smell or the feel of her skin. That is, we identify the living by sensory means, by what we naturally are, as perceived by sight, sound and touch.

When we identify a person who has just died, sight is the only sensory means left. The detective pulls back the pall, and the face is recognised. Often in the murder mystery, however, the story is more complicated than this. The trauma to the body or years in a shallow grave means that seeing doesn’t tell us much. Our senses fail us here or, perhaps better, the natural, sensory being of the person who died fails us because what remains can’t tell us who this is.

And so, where the person’s natural appearance is no use, the investigator turns to ‘history’ – to what the person did or was done to him. Now it’s about tattoos and scars, dental records and prostheses, or the remnant of a train ticket found nearby. These are historical ‘additions’ to the natural person, the unique marks our particular experience of life adds to our natural embodiment.

Thomas and the marks of crucifixion
Each year on this Sunday we hear John’s account of the appearance of Jesus to the disciples, in the absence of Thomas. Thomas, who begins in doubt, soon makes one of the strongest declarations about Jesus in the Bible: ‘My Lord and my God.’

We have all wondered with Thomas and then wondered at Thomas and his credulity. Our problem is that he apparently has Jesus standing in front of him, but we have the story of Jesus standing in front of him – natural Jesus, perceived by the senses of sight and hearing and touch. And the story doesn’t seem to be enough for us. Thomas and the other disciples seem to have it easier than we do.

But let’s look at the details of the account and, in particular, at how Thomas comes to his extraordinary confession. We all know that Thomas insists on seeing Jesus’ wounded hands, feet and side. This seems to be a gross materialism – ‘Let me hold him, and I’ll believe he’s here’.

Yet, we don’t usually note that this is also how the other disciples identified Jesus:

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. (20.19f)

When Thomas says, ‘Show me the marks’, he asks for nothing more than what the other disciples have already had. Thomas doesn’t want to see ‘Jesus’ in some ‘There you are, old chap’ kind of way; he wants to see the marks of crucifixion. It could only be the risen Jesus if those marks were there.

This is very odd. Thomas and the others knew what Jesus looked like and sounded like and so could identify him by his natural features in the normal, sensory way. Yet it is by the marks of crucifixion that they identify him. This is to say that what Jesus ‘looks like’ – his natural person – doesn’t matter here. What matters is nothing natural – nothing sensory – but only the traces of Jesus’ story – his hi-story – summed up in the wounds in his hands, feet and side. Jesus is what he did and what was done to him. It is the (hi-)story which matters, the human and social dynamics which Jesus embodies and is.

Resurrection as the recovery of the cross
If this is true, something very strange happens to resurrection-talk. If Jesus is what was done to him, the rising of Jesus is the rising of just that – the rising of what Jesus did and of what was done to him. The rising of Jesus, then, is not merely the breathing-again of a dead man but the rising of the cross: the recovery of the cross as the heart of the matter. The resurrection is not ‘once-dead friend Jesus’ who comes back to life as some proof of life after death; the resurrection is the return of the crucified – the return of the cross. We are not, then, to believe in the resurrection but in the cross. It is the cross which is the scope and completion of Jesus’ work (‘it is finished’, John 19.30); the cross is the ‘load-bearer’ here, as we said last week.

This is not just neat theology; it makes a difference in real and specific human experiences and contemporary challenges. Some of you have read the op-ed piece I wrote last week, linking this interpretation of Thomas’ experience with the proposed indigenous Voice to Parliament. I won’t say anything more about that this morning.

But we can also connect Thomas with the fact that we (as a congregation) are here today in this particular place because we are about to move away from 170 years of one way of being, into something very different.

The raising of the wounded church
It might be (just a little) overdramatic to speak of our congregation’s present and immediate future as being a matter of death and resurrection. (It’s probably more like an amputation, which is bad enough!). But we do symbolise something of the wounds of the whole church in its current condition in broader society. It is not only the state of the property at Curzon Street which sees us having to move; if we were still the community which built those buildings, we would also be able to take care of them. But we’re not that community anymore, and maintenance and insurance and other overheads have pushed us into deficit budgets. The crisis of UMC aside, we were (are) in serious trouble. We should use it carefully, but dying is a useful metaphor for understanding many – perhaps even most – Christian communities in Australia today. The possible exception here might be recent, more successful migrant-based churches and a few Pentecostal megachurches. However, even many of these might yet be found just to be running late for their own funerals.

Whatever we think has caused this, the wounds in the Body of Christ are deep. And the question is, what would a resurrection look like? All we can say about this is that a resurrected Body of Christ – tomorrow’s church – will bear the marks of its suffering and rejection, and yet, those marks and wounds will not debilitate. The risen body of Jesus – marked as it is – is no longer on the cross and no longer wrapped in tight linen bindings. So also it will be for the Body of Christ which is the church, and this is the hope with which we contemplate our future.

We are everything which has brought us to this point. And our future can only be one that catches us up and carries us forward, history and all. The promise of this place, then, is not a sudden burst of new people coming in, filling this space in no time and out-shining all that has gone before. The church does not believe in flash-in-the-pan, won-the-lottery, dropped-out-of nowhere miracles. This is what we think Thomas and his friends got – a sight and sound spectacular. And yet, such a spectacle would prove nothing. So what if one dead person once rose from the dead? Quite seriously – so what? ‘Do you believe because you have seen?, asks Jesus, as if to imply, ‘What kind of belief is that?’

The church does not believe in miracles like this. It believes, rather, in the story of a history of a transformation of death: a scarred but living and strong body of Jesus, which then become the scarred but living and strong Body of Christ – even the church.

If we were to come here – and this has not yet been decided – it would be so that we might be both the congregation we have known and the congregation God might raise us into. Any future of the church is not simply a cutting itself free of its history of success and failure. The church’s future is a carrying-forth and transformation of all that. If we come here, and if this is in the hope of anything in any sense like resurrection, then we must both remember everything and also look to see it all transformed.

‘Do you believe because you see?’, Jesus asks us. No, we believe because we hear that history’s tragedies are just the nothingness out of which God creates a future with the world, a future with us.

The risen Jesus bears the marks of sin and death, and yet lives. His risen life, and ours, is one of memory and hope.

Our life is memory and hope.

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Easter Day
9/4/2023

Colossians 3:1-4
Matthew 28:1-10

In a sentence:
We do not know where we are or what we are until God turns our understanding upside down.

Resurrection and magic
The delight in watching a performing magician is seeing something which doesn’t ‘compute’: the white rabbit pulled out of the empty hat or the pretty assistant who, apparently having been sawn in two, can still wriggle her toes.

The conjurer knows the art of surprise by distraction. Crucial for her act is that we are tricked into focussing on something other than the crucial move. This is particularly the case with sleight of hand, by which the magician draws our attention to one hand while the other does the real work. If we have only our eyes to trust, we have to testify that the card ‘magically’ appeared where it could not have been, or the coin we have just seen has disappeared. Of course, we don’t think this is ‘real’ magic, so we immediately wonder, ‘How did she do that?’

Most of us experience the Resurrection stories of the Gospels like this. We ‘see’ the Resurrection by hearing the stories: this is the rabbit out of the hat. And as with the magician’s trick, so with a purported resurrection, we might wonder, ‘How did he do that?’ Is it possible that the dead can be raised?

Asking ‘How?’ at least allows that something special might have happened after Jesus died. But, as far as most of us are concerned, we don’t think too seriously about this: there is really no trick to see here. It’s perhaps a nice story, but it’s ‘only’ a story, somewhere between straight deception or a sincere account from deluded witnesses.

Miracles and distraction
The story of Jesus’ resurrection of Jesus, like the other miracle stories in the Bible, looks to us to be just a magic trick, which is to say that it seems to be nothing at all. We know there is no ‘real’ magic, no control of the world by will. Magic is only skilful manipulation, visible or hidden.

But the miracle stories are not intended to be accepted as magic. A few weeks ago, we considered an account in John’s Gospel of the bringing of sight to a man born blind. We saw that a problem with ‘nature miracles’ is how distracting they are. As that account unfolds, it becomes clear that the story is not about the good luck of one person who happened to have his eyes magically opened. It is about that man coming to see who Jesus was and, at the same time, the failure of others to see the same thing, despite the overwhelming evidence. The miracle story reveals not that there is a God who does magic but the possibilities of the human heart: from the seedling faith of the healed man to the barren ground of those who opposed Jesus despite the evidence.

To see only the miracle is not to see very much at all. This applies even to resurrections, which brings us back to our reflection on Good Friday. There we considered the significance of Easter for Good Friday. Good Friday needs Easter to tell us who Jesus is, making possible language like ‘messiah’, ‘son of God’, and ‘lord of glory’ for the one who dies on the cross. Good Friday matters because this one, revealed by Easter to be Lord and Messiah, dies. This is not any old crucifixion.

Not any old resurrection
But now we might turn things around to consider the importance of Good Friday for Easter. Easter needs the crucified man Jesus for us to see the sleight of hand under the distracting miracle.

In saying, ‘Jesus is risen,’ we naturally let the emphasis fall on the ‘risen’, for this is surely where the magic is: dead people don’t usually stop being dead.

But Easter is not any old resurrection; it is not the resurrection of ‘someone’ in general. In affirming ‘Jesus is risen,’ the emphasis falls most of all on the ‘Jesus’: not ‘Jesus is risen’ but ‘Jesus is risen’. This is because the real surprise is who is raised: as a despised, rejected and crucified man, Jesus is the last person we should expect God to raise.

To get the emphasis wrong is to mishear the gospel’s declaration. At the first hearing – and for many us, at second, fifth and twentieth hearings – the Easter story sounds like Jesus dies as a man but rises as a god. But taking Easter and Good Friday together reveals the gospel’s sleight of hand: the God dies, and the man rises. Easter Day reveals that it was God hanging on that cross, while Good Friday reminds us that it is a despised and rejected human being who is raised from the dead.

There are a lot of footnotes which scream to be inserted at this point, but there’s more devil than God in the details.

The central ‘takeaway’ is that Easter is not concerned with the question of life after death, and so not with the ‘idea’ of our continuation after our hearts stop beating. Easter is concerned with the switch: a god is crucified, and a broken person is raised. This movement is a radical shaking up of expectations, revealing that most thinking about the Cross and Resurrection is like watching the wrong hand and being deceived.

The magic hand in which we are held
God does not seek to deceive us here, of course. It is a self-deception because we hear the story according to our own sense of what matters and is possible, and not God’s.

On Friday we reflected on why, of all the endings of all the lives lived in all of history, we might concern ourselves primarily with the end of Jesus’ life. We might ask the same question now of the resurrection: of all the risings which might perhaps happen, why does this one matter? These are, in fact, the same question: what has the life and death and life of Jesus got to do with any of us?

The answer is given in our short text this morning from Colossians (3.1-4). There Paul speaks of us as having our being not in ourselves, but of our being in Christ: your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ is revealed, so too are you.

This is true magic: our lives filled out, made whole, justified in the life of another.

Up to this point it is as if, in living our lives, we have performed a magic trick on ourselves, misleading even ourselves to look at the wrong hand. And we open that hand and see all the things we have done and all the things which have been done to us, and we think that what we hold there is all we are.

Dying as gods to live as creatures
But there is another hand which holds the secret of the trick we are. Scarred but strong, this hand holds us as we hold all we have been and desire to be. We are hidden in this strong hand, completed and made whole there, enclosed within Christ.

For this to become our reality, the gods we desire to be have to die so that we might emerge again from our tombs as human beings, re-imaged – re-imag-ined – in the humanity of Jesus. God dies on Good Friday so that a true humanity might rise at Easter. This humanity is created not to be divine but to be creaturely, not for fear but for love, not for selfishness but for service, not for self-justification but for grace and gift.

By sleight of hand God catches us, like a falling coin, to reveal in the end that we were looking in the wrong place.

‘He is not here!’ laughs the smiling magician, ‘and you should not be either. You are looking in the wrong place. He is risen and gone head. Run, and catch up to him. And all that is his will be yours’

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Good Friday
7/4/2023

Isaiah 52:13-15
John 18:33-19:16

In a sentence:
More than life after death, the gift of God is life before death: life which knows the tragic but overcomes it

So long ago

Good Friday – the Good Friday – seems now to be ‘so long ago.’ Why, of all the places we might turn to in this modern age for reflection or insight, should we turn to this place?

This question is not just a matter of time. A few years ago, the broadcaster SBS had a line in its advertisements, “Six billion stories, and counting”, later updated to “Seven billion”, and we’re now at eight billion. Considering on top of this the 100 billion or so other human beings who have lived, the narrowing of our interest to one dismal Friday two thousand years is the strangest of things.

Of all the endings of all the lives in all of history, why consider just this one?

Good Friday is only interesting if Jesus himself is interesting, and a certain kind of interesting. He is arrested and executed because the authorities find him interesting in problematic ways. To these, Jesus’ crucifixion was the death of an enemy. He was interesting to the crowds and the disciples in a different way. For these, his death was the death of a friend or a hope. These experiences are familiar and play out daily in nursing homes, on country roads and in Ukraine’s smashed villages and towns. As the story unfolds, this is ‘all’ Jesus is to those around him, and Good Friday is just plain tragic in the way human life can be.

Who are you?

‘Are you a king?’ asks Pilate of the accused Jesus, standing before him. ‘Where have you come from?’ That is, ‘Who are you’? Pilate can only understand these questions on his own terms – are you a king like Herod or the Emperor? This is fair enough, but any answer on these terms is almost irrelevant to why Jesus’ death might matter. Kings and emperors also die. At this point in the story, the end of Jesus is like the end of the rest of us: a lament, a death notice, a newspaper obituary. This is simple tragedy if, in Jesus’ case, tragedy in one of its nastier realisations.

Easter and the tragedy of tragedies

It is sometimes said on Good Friday that we shouldn’t jump too quickly to Easter, skipping over the pain and suffering of the day to what seems to be the happy ending. But we can’t keep Easter out of the picture here because Easter shifts the story beyond mere tragedy. Easter doesn’t ‘undo’ Good Friday, but it answers Pilate’s question, now on God’s own terms; Easter reveals the identity of this crucified one.

If Easter tells us anything which matters, it tells us who died, and we focus on this death among all deaths today because of this identification. And this is because Easter reveals that the bad news of Good Friday is worse than we first imagined. The bad news is not merely that tragedy continues to unfold, but that good people have crucified the ‘king’, the ‘son of God’, the ‘messiah’, the ‘lord of glory’. The bad news is that this tragedy is the tragedy of all tragedies. It doesn’t get any worse than this.

The God who does not look away

Easter, then, does not exceed or cancel Good Friday but points back to the cross as the true load-bearing event. The weight of Easter is here: today, Friday.

And what is that weight?

At the risk of wandering into the realm of exaggeration – but only just so – Easter faith is the conviction that the God of all things died on Good Friday. To believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to believe this: that this death, among all deaths, is the one which matters. For, here, God dies and all the world with him.

This is, of course, impossible (or, at least, without a good trinitarian theology, which might make it sustainable). To say ‘God died’ feels like an over-reach which is very difficult to allow. The mere saying of it can only be mystifying (which doesn’t hurt, from time to time). But we can wonder what would be the case if it were true, and what light such speculation might see.

If this is the death that matters among all deaths – the tragedy of all tragedies – and yet Easter follows, then we can say that on Good Friday God sees us. God sees us, becomes us, feels us in all our tragedy.

And, on the strength of the peace declared in the risen Jesus, we can also say that God, having seen us, did not look away.

God sees us and does not look away. God sees that we are tragic and does not look away. God sees you and does not look away. To look away would be to cringe before tragedy, finding it too much to bear, and so refusing to see or hear.

We know tragedy. We have been and caused tragedy, and we know the ease of looking away.

But God sees and doesn’t look away. And it is this sustained gaze which brings life. God’s gaze denies the tragic – not denying the suffering but denying its final power.

God looks, to deny that the last word will be death.

God refuses to turn away from seeing the deep and the void of the worldly inevitability of crucifixions and firing squads and genocides, of abuse and neglect and exploitation.

God sees, and this is the beginning of the end of tragedy because, from the perspective of Easter, we begin to see with God’s eyes.

Tragedy’s deathly grip weakens for us when resurrection’s light reveals our part in the dark and broken world and we can see, and repent, and become ourselves a new beginning to the end of tragedy.

‘Who are you?’, Pilate asks, and we ask with him, suspecting that the tragic is all there is to know. We have to listen for a night, and a day, and a night to hear Jesus’ answer:

‘I am the death of death, and hell’s destruction.

Open your eyes, and live’.