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Easter 7
21/5/2023

1 Peter 4:12-14, 5.6-11
Psalm 111
John 17:1-11

In a sentence:
Fear is always finally that God will not be there ‘tomorrow’, but this we do not need to fear

Being human
Most of us have had the experience of not being able to keep watching the news or reading the newspapers, simply because it has become overwhelming: too much controversy, too much complicated debate, too many shot dead, burned in a hotel fire, dragged out of mangled cars or drowned when overloaded boats succumb to the waves.

The news is distressingly un-new; it simply replays over and over with different actors and, not surprisingly, can be overwhelming. We feel threatened by the dangers which leap out of the television screen, knowing that each person caught in the lens might well have been us, or perhaps we are overwhelmed because we feel we should be able to do something about it but can’t, or don’t know what. When we switch off the screen or radio, or close the paper, we prove the somewhat cynical wisdom: ignorance is bliss.

Over the last couple of weeks, our discussion groups have begun a new book in which theologian David Ford proposes that experiences like being overwhelmed are defining for human beings. We are overwhelmed from birth by family, language and culture. We are overwhelmed by love or grief or by the kinds of things which confront us in the news. Positively or negatively, the human being is inherently susceptible to being overwhelmed, or perhaps even needs to be overwhelmed.

In the same way, Ford then goes on to consider desire. Like the various overwhelmings which define us, these desires can also be positive or negative and can be quite comprehensive. Desire, then, can also be used to describe the human being: the human is a being which desires, and perhaps which desires most deeply to be desired.

Ford’s method in the book seems to be to identify certain aspects of human existence which might be said to be universal, and then to ask how such things are means by which God connects to us. That is, his point is not least that good theology requires good anthropology, and good anthropology points to what good theology needs to address.

The fear of God
I suspect that our experience of fear might be another of those universal human experiences which can be a basis for thinking about God. ‘Cast all your anxiety on God’, writes St Peter in our reading this morning. Anxiety, or fear, pops up several times in this letter. Peter’s community is under persecution, apparently having been marked out as sufficiently different from the mainstream to present some threat to the wider community. But at this point, Peter doesn’t suggest that fear is inherently bad. He allows for it but tweaks it: ‘Fear God’ (2.17), he writes, ‘Do not fear what they fear’ (3.14).

The idea of fearing God seems strange to us these days. We’re more likely to want to speak about ‘loving’ God, drawing a polemical contrast between love and fear: love (good) versus fear (bad). But the Scriptures know us a little better than this. Not fearing would be like not being overwhelmed or not desiring. That is, we can’t do it. The question is not ‘to fear or not to fear’ but what we fear, on the assumption that we will fear something. Peter’s ‘do not fear what they fear’ invites a discrimination between fears, just as we might discriminate between types of love – that ‘love’ which destroys us or others, versus those that build up.

For Peter, it is only Godly fear which properly makes a claim on us; all other fears diminish us. And in this contrast, we see how fear begins to change meaning when borrowed and applied to our relationship with God. The fears which Peter’s community has, and those which most of us have, are social, economic and political. We fear that there will not be enough – not enough money, not enough time, not enough ‘me’. And so we act, out of fear, to assure ourselves of ‘enough’. We can read wars in this light – not least the current war in Ukraine. Political struggles are about ‘enough’: consider the debate around the proposed Parliamentary Voice in these terms. We fear that nothing will change, so that we will still not have enough, or that too much will change and we will lose what enough we have. We fear that we will still not be, or will no longer be, free. Even as we oppose each other, we fear the same thing – that we will be lost, or remain lost. To tweak Peter’s language here and borrow what he says about the devil, this is the fear which devours, the fear that consumes until nothing is left.

‘Do not fear what they fear’, Peter writes. Do not fear in the way they fear – do not fear that there will not be enough. For the fear of God is not a fear that God is a powerful judge, such that we have to do the right thing in case we won’t be enough – in order not to be punished for not being enough. This would be merely to replace a clear and present danger of everyday fears with one which is less clear and in the future. We do not fear God because God is scarier than the other things we fear.

The one thing fearful
Rather, to speak of fearing God is to let go of fear about all other things, although this is a negative way of putting it. To put it positively, to fear God is to be free of the fears which press in on us. Do not fear those things which might diminish you; ‘fear’ rather the God in whose eyes you cannot be diminished.

The psalmist’s ‘beginning of wisdom’ (Psalm 111.10) is, then, also the beginning of freedom. This wisdom is that the fear of the Lord is not fear at all. It is more like a kind of mindfulness – although not quite in the modern therapeutic sense. It is to be mindful – to be mind-filled – not of the unavoidable difficulties and challenges and oppositions which fill our lives, but to be mindful that God accepts you. In all things, we are God’s precious children. We must respond to the challenges and threats, but God’s acceptance of us is not dependent on that response. And so mindfulness of God’s acceptance of us is liberating. If God already embraces us before we do anything, then our actions from within that embrace cannot break it – we cannot fall out of God’s love because that embrace is never not enough.

In the life we each go home to after worship today, in the life the congregation must negotiate in the months and years to come, in the lives we are given to live with each other, we are have enough to do the next thing which will point away from fear to freedom. We have enough to point away from the possibility that we might be loved to the actuality that we are. We have enough to point away from death to life.

In the normal course of things, the ever-present danger is that fear itself might overwhelm us, so that our fear-filled desire for life might in fact lead us to a living death.

But the ‘fear’ of this God is the gift of freedom from fear because, whatever the future holds, in God we have enough. When a God like this is the one thing fearful, there is none to accuse or fear, only the freedom to do the next good thing which must be done, leaving the rest to God.

Let us, then, not be anxious or fearful about the next thing which comes, because this would be to fear that God will not be there, in that next step. And this we do not fear, for God is faithful, and so not only must we step out into tomorrow, but we can.

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Easter 6
14/5/2023

1 Peter 3:13-16
John 14:15-21

In a sentence:
God gifts us with memory, that we might know we can be different

Faith and politics, yesterday and today
It is a widely-held ‘truism’ within Australian society that ‘religion has no place in politics’.

This assertion seeks to exclude those faith convictions – notably Christian and Muslim – which might make some claim on society as a whole. (More private and internally ‘spiritual’ religion has already absorbed the ‘no faith in public’ requirement of modern liberal societies. This kind of spirituality is already committed to residing just in heads and hearts and not in the broader political sphere).

The rejection of faith convictions in the public sphere looks like the assertion of the public-private distinction which colours our thinking around religion. Our shared idea that politics is public and religion is private is part of the prohibition. But alongside this distinction between public and private realms is our sense of the distance between the present and the past. Faiths like Judaism, Christianity and Islam have deep historical roots. Indeed, they are rooted so far in the past that the question of their continuing relevance is greatly heightened. Are we today not ‘modern’? Are we not people of the present rather than stuck in the past? And so there is no small sense in which the purported irrelevance of faith for modern politics is linked to the distance of faith’s founding events from the present. The further back in time those foundational events are, the less relevant they seem to be for those today who have forgotten them. The historical distance of the crucifixion and resurrection seems to signify Jesus’ modern irrelevance. The past is a private – privy, hidden – thing, and not for present, public exposure.

Put differently, the ejection of faith from politics presumes a politics which does not remember.

Forgetting and remembering
Our gospel text today addresses the question of the impending departure of Jesus and this as a crisis for the disciples. It’s not immediately clear from the text how the crisis is experienced. Clearly, the disciples’ lives have been tightly bound up with Jesus, and his looming departure would create the typical experience of loss and grief at an emotional level.

Yet Jesus speaks not of coping with grief but of ‘reminding’: ‘Though I go’, Jesus says, ‘the Spirit, which the Father will send, will remind you of me’. This answer to the disciples’ worry indicates that what’s at stake here is not the grief around Jesus’ departure but the possibility that everything will be forgotten – first Jesus and then the disciples themselves. I’ve said before, and it needs constantly to be recalled, that when Jesus identifies himself as ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’, the word for truth has the curiously negative sense of ‘not-forgotten’: Jesus is ‘the Way, the Not-Forgotten, the Life’.

The promised gift of the Spirit, then, is no mere ‘There, there, it’ll all be OK’. The Spirit is given because forgetting is bad; remembering matters for true human being – for the continued presence of the humanity of Jesus. It is this remembering which creates the church.

And yet, the point here is not that only the church is a remembering community. This would be to leave us with the modern problem that the church seems – even to itself – to be a people trapped in thoughts about yesterday, and so politically irrelevant. The gift of the Spirit at the departure of Jesus marks the claim that human communities in general (and not merely religious communities) must remember in order to become their true selves. This centrality of memory to identity is the engine of countless ‘amnesia’ plots in films and TV series, with their driving ‘Who am I?’ question resounding in the head of the protagonist. Remembering creates our identity by telling us what we have done and what has been done to us.

Perhaps this is not overly controversial. Yet, even when we remember, we are prone to want to remember only the best and none of the worst. In contrast to this, remembering Jesus involves recalling not only the good stuff but the bad, not only the resurrection but the cross, not only what Jesus said that we liked but also when we suddenly found ourselves the target of his polemic. It is not for nothing that tokens of a broken body and spilt blood are at the centre of what we do at Jesus’ behest, ‘for the remembrance of me’. These gory elements are there lest we forget that the light casts shadows.

So, too, with remembering in any community: the memory is usually pretty selective because it is painful to be reminded of things we have managed to forget.

A nation called to remember
Australian society is presently in the grip of a call to memory: Remember that the Australia we now know was founded as a colony. Remember that colonisation was very often a violent process and, even where it wasn’t, recognise that it was and continues to be radically disruptive of whole peoples. Remember, Australia, and know how we have come to be what we think we are.

The ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ and the corresponding proposal of a First Nations Voice to Parliament are two forms the call to memory has taken among us. Without recognition of the importance of memory for identity, these can make no convincing social or political sense. And so, we must understand the place of memory, and the importance of institutions like the Voice which have precisely the purpose of reminding and bringing a fuller identity.

Remembering can be painful. If the promised Spirit reminds those first disciples and even us today of ‘Jesus’, it reminds not only of the words of peace on the lips of the risen one but also of the desolation of the cross. If the resurrection reveals something about the powers at play in the heart of God, the cross reveals something about the powers in the heart of humanity. Heaven is not the memory only of the good things. The church remembers the crucifixion and the synagogue remembers the exile, and both remember the divine judgement read into these experiences. But to forget such things would not simply be to cease being Christian or Jewish; it would be to cease to be human.

The remembering which could be enabled by the Uluru Statement’s proposal of the Parliamentary Voice, with other history-telling processes, will similarly not be easy or comfortable. It will not be easy because we don’t know what has been forgotten and so what might be recovered. It won’t be comfortable because we cannot see the cost of remembering before we begin. It won’t be simple because, sometimes, we will get the memory or the consequences we draw from it wrong. Memory can be wrong or deceived, but this makes it no less important. Errors should be named, but still we must seek to remember rightly, to know ourselves: to know our inherited way of being human. We are what we have done and what has been done to us. These experiences are voices which speak to us and by which we speak, even if we don’t remember them. To remember is to know why we are like we are, and so to see that we could have been different. To see that we might have been different is to realise that we could still be different. Memory like this makes change possible. And we could do with a few changes.

Jesus’ promised gift of the Holy Spirit to his disciples is a promised gift of memory. What is remembered through this Spirit is the human experience of Jesus as a revelation of the rich possibilities of human life. To remember this is to see such richness as a possibility, even for us forgetful people of today.

The call to memory in the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ is no less a gift: reconciliation requires truth, and truth is Not-Forgetting. And so we must heed the call in the Statement and commit to the Voice and to similar institutions for remembering.

This is how we are to become what God creates us to be. It is the one Christ toward whom the Father draws all peoples. And so the humble spirit which calls through the Statement is the Holy, Creating Spirit of God, drawing us down one path which will bring the whole groaning world a little closer to God’s coming reconciliation of all things.

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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.