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Epiphany: The Baptism of Jesus
8/1/2023

Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 29
Matthew 3:13-17

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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God, may my words be loving and true, and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

My Dad had a cousin named Dawn Mount — she has now passed away. Dawn was so named because she was found abandoned at dawn at the base of a mountain. In lieu of family, or birth certificate, she was named by a police officer: Dawn Mount.

Dawn entered our family through my Great Aunt Biddy, one of the living saints of this world. Aunt Biddy has fostered dozens of young people — their photos cover the walls in the living room. Often her home provided respite for young people facing quite significant challenges. Young people the social service system in Aotearoa, New Zealand, has not always known how to cope with.

Dawn entered the house, I imagine, as everyone does: through the front gate, down the path to the door, to be greeted by Biddy’s unending kindness.

On occasion young people were accompanied inside by a social worker, who conveyed to Biddy the backstory, conducting the handover. On these occasions as soon as the social worker left it was back to the front gate, bags under arm, to come in again: through the gate, down the path, to be greeted, properly by Aunt Biddy and her unending kindness.

Biddy met no “cases” at the door, she took on no “problem children,” Biddy met children, young people: those who they were.

And they were all embraced as her own: expected to attend Church on Sundays, sent off to the same school adjacent the Church, and welcomed into a chaotic, and wonderful, and complicated, and generous home.

Dawn entered this home as a teenager. Years later she asked my Aunt, “how many people do you know who were born as teenagers?”
“None,” Biddy replied.
“Yes, you do … Me.”

What my Great Aunt Biddy knows in her bones, shaped by her Christian faith I’m sure, are the lessons of baptism.

Not baptism merely as a ritual avowal of our beliefs. Nor baptism as a routine rite of passage into one among many of the cultural and religious communities of the world. Nor baptism as the commitment of parents to induct and instruct their children in the ways of the tradition.

Aunt Biddy knows that new life must always begin at the beginning. Aunt Biddy knows that baptism is always the welcome home. Always meeting people as themselves, as those who they are.

It is the beginning of new life.
It is the welcome home.
Baptism is for the sake of the quiet, secret work in which love restores the world.

One of the things that’s interesting in the emphasis on baptism on this day of the Christian calendar, is that the text from the Gospel is actually the wrong baptism. Christians take our understanding of baptism not from Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan, but from the baptism Jesus undergoes in his crucifixion.

So it is that The Basis of Union — the founding theological statement of this church — talks of, “[Christ’s] baptism, which was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and burial…” (Basis, §7)

Of all the Gospels Matthew seems to recognise this awkwardness in the way Jesus comes to John at the Jordan to be baptised. Matthew — unlike Mark and Luke (the two other Gospels that seem to tell the story in similar ways) — makes a point of including the awkward conversation between Jesus and John. John refuses to baptise Jesus until Jesus argues him into it.

As a historic point, the commissioning at the end of Matthew’s Gospel — for the disciples to go and make disciples, baptising them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit — likely reflects, and in turn reinforce some of the earliest baptismal liturgy and practice of the Church. For this reason one can understand why Matthew makes a point of telling the story of Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan slightly awkward. To make clear that this baptism is not the primary source from which later baptismal liturgy and practice should take its lead.

Nevertheless, although today we have heard the story of the wrong baptism, Jesus’ baptism by John does teach us fundamental lessons about what baptism continues to mean for us.

John, perhaps taking the lead of my Aunt Biddy (although she’d probably resent the suggestion that she was quite that old), understood that baptism is for the healing of the world: turning from captivity to sin, and towards the restoration and freedom offered by God. If this is what baptism means, then what need does the Messiah have for baptism?

Jesus’ decision to be baptised reinforces that he too was on the journey towards the restoration and freedom offered by God. The journey begun at baptism is always a journey with others: the restoration of ourselves is always a restoration in relation with others. It is not first and foremost about what we do, but about the unending kindness we receive ultimately from God.

So it is that The Basis of Union speaks of baptism as being, “united in one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy.” (Basis §7)

And above all, what Jesus’ baptism signifies is the declaration that Jesus is the beloved child of God. And this is the meaning that baptism must carry with it.

That each of us have become children of God. Not by virtue of the water, but by virtue of the work of love which is renewing the world. By virtue of the Spirit of love which emanates from the true site of baptism: the place where Jesus’ journey with others ends, and where only Christ can go. We have become children of God because of the true baptism of the cross.

In the river we see the glimpse, and at the cross we see in fullness, that God meets us at the front gate on our worst day, and walks us down the path to the doorway home. There we are met with unending kindness.

Baptism is the beginning of new life.
It is the welcome home.

Baptism is not our entryway into an exclusive club, but our witness to the whole world that each of us are embraced as divine children. For all the wrong baptisms, false starts, and fractured beginnings of our lives. Baptism is the renewal, the beginning again, always from the beginning. Baptism is the invitation to be the person who we are: who we truly are, in the love and restoration and freedom of God.

Baptism is good news.
This is good news:

You are a beloved child of the divine
You have a place in the chaotic, and wonderful, and complicated, and generous home of God

No matter the abandonment of your dawn, you are born again on this day
No matter how partial, fragile, or fleeting the love which formed you, you are met with the unending kindness of God

And friends, hear this the Good News:

Christ journeys with us, and before us, going to the cross.
God meets us at the front gate, walks us down the path, and welcomes us with unending kindness again, and again, and again, and again.

Through those we have met in this room, in our lives, as if by chance — and through the baptismal wisdom of the living saints of this world.

May the Spirit who hovered over the waters:
At creation, at your birth, at your baptism
Grant you the gift of the freedom of Christ:
in the name of God,
who created you,
who formed you,
who loves you.
Amen.

 

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Christmas 1
1/1/2023

Numbers 6:22-27
Psalm 8
Philippians 2:5-12
Luke 2:15-21

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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God, may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

What does it mean for God to enter history?

What does it mean for God? And what does it mean for history?

We are perhaps comfortable with the two touch points of God in history set out in two of our readings for today. Perhaps in part because they speak of something that is not quite history: something long ago, to be sure, but not the history of documentaries, newspapers, and academic texts.

God enters history in the act of creation. Ordering the world, and human beings within it, in a grand act of grace and freedom. Many can sit easy with a God who enters history through the whisper of the wind, the ancient forming of galaxies, the mysterious something which makes the world tick.

And we can well enough get our heads around the touch point of God’s presence in the holy of holies. In the tabernacle, and temples dedicated to the Lord. In God’s bearing with the Jewish people, through their long history. Perhaps there is a sense of God’s people as an ancient, almost mythic past, that no longer impinges on the present. … Of course, that cannot be true, when the people of the unspeakable divine name were subject to unspeakable evil.

Nevertheless, God entering history in quite abstract ways can be enough. Through the long ago creative act — the wind breathed into those first embers of creation. The long ago sacred site, where God was present as if only as a rumour.

But when God enters history in flesh and blood, as a person. When the haziness of more ancient texts gives way to a frightfully recent picture of a person. Albeit not a direct, unvarnished window, but something more … tactile.

When God enters history not simply as an unspeakable name, an ancient whispered wind, a sacred presence … When the holy unspeakable name takes on a face, and flesh, and a familiarity: Yeshua, Iesus, Jesus. This anointed One. The holy name now wholly speakable.

What does it mean for God to enter history in this way?

What does it mean for God? And what does it mean for history?

There is in our two New Testament readings two accounts of this history. The rather mundane story of a Jewish child undergoing their rites of passage. And the grand history, as if from God’s own view, in one of the earliest confessions of faith for which we have a record.

In the grand theological history of Philippians there God is emptied out, God empties God’s own self out. As one theologian puts it, it is the story of God’s journey to the far country, and then the journey home. As if, could it be, God ceases for a moment to be God. Letting go of eternal equality with God the Second Person of the Trinity becomes human, takes on the form of a slave.

The theological question, with which early Christians wrestled is:

Whether God must cease to be God in order to enter history? In order to take on human flesh, human face, and human name?

The early Christian wrestling with this question responds with a resounding, “No!”

At one of the early councils of the church at Chalcedon the formulation was offered:

One divine person, with two natures: human and divine, neither confused nor separated.

Jesus never ceasing to be divine, never ceasing to be human.

But perhaps we can go further than this. It is not simply that the divine person takes on a human nature, as if there were a question of whether there ever would be an incarnation. Rather, God so entwines God’s being with our human life, through the human life of Jesus, that we cannot think of God apart from this one.

Hear these words of Scripture: “God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before God, in love.” (Ephesians 1:4)

In just the same way we cannot think of God as other than the one whose being flows through creation. That ancient wind which flared the embers of creation to a guiding and abiding flame.

In just the same way we cannot think of God as other than the one who brought liberation to a people born of grace and freedom — God who speaks through Psalms and prophets.

In just this same way: we cannot think of God as any other than this one who is emptied, this one who takes the journey into the far country, our home. We cannot think of God apart from the entry into human history. In freedom and grace God chooses that divine destiny would be bound up with our human being: our history, your history, my history. In Jesus we see coming to fruition the God of all creation who seeks to make a home in the far country, to make a home in our home.

There is only God in this fragile child among humanity. Heralded by shepherds and strange sights in night skies — as if entering the layers of sacred stories which hold the precious memory of his own people’s history. There are no accidents here.

When Jesus comes to be circumcised we are led to see this as a new child taking their place among God’s people. Tying the child’s fate and future to God.

And yet, it is not a child who is taking their place within the people of God. Rather, here is God taking his place among the people. God freely and willingly binds divine destiny in this moment to human care. So fully does God give of herself in this Child that God becomes vulnerable to these figures of history, subject to their care.

Here the history of God’s people is inverted. It is no longer that God’s people can not exist apart from God’s sustaining power; here God can not exist apart from the people. Into their hands, into our hands, God offers God’s very self and child.

This is the ultimate demonstration of God’s self-giving love. Not simply that God would love us, but that God in an act of freedom and grace, chooses to be no other God than the one who embraces our humanity. God in freedom and grace chooses to be no other God than the one who is present with us, even in our frailty and vulnerability. God is no other God than the one who makes the journey to the far country, our home.

Ecce Deus. Behold God!

Let us then go all the way with our proclamation today of the Good News. The unspeakable holy one of old has now placed the name of Jesus on our lips.

So let us go all the way with our proclamation of the journey home. The God who binds divine destiny to our humanity gives Godself to us, but does not give herself away.

Gathered around this child in history is the tender love of parents. And this tender love responds to the self-giving love of God heralded by shepherds. And this tender love has echoed throughout history, it has touched the lives of each of us.

We, then, are the sign of renewal. However partial, fleeting, or fragile we have received this same divine love which has reverberated through the millennia. We have been grafted into the history which begins with this child and has been carried to today. We are gathered in this place to proclaim God’s presence with us.

So friends here is the Good News:

God has arrived and placed a name on our lips: Jesus, the Messiah — anointed One that we may all be anointed.

And we are anointed with the love that kindled the stars
The love that led the march of liberation, that sounds the call for justice

And we are anointed with the mercy that binds the broken
The peace that lies ready to be discovered in the heart of the world
The joy that breaks free everyday

This is the Good News:

God is with us, the divine destiny bound to our human history.
That every one of us may bow in wonder, and every tongue confess that love reverberates through the world.

And even at the end of our own fragile, fleeting moment.
God is with us in the sunset and the dawn of the new life.

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Christmas Day
25/12/2022

Genesis 1:26-28
Isaiah 9:2-7
Luke 2:1-7

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In a sentence:
The birth of Jesus is the meaning and purpose of all births

Somewhere in the middle of 2022, the eight-billionth living person drew breath for the first time. From a rough guess about when modern humans emerged, demographers calculate that this puts the number of human beings born in all of history at around 117 billion. “Be fruitful and multiply”, God commands the book of Genesis – perhaps the most closely observed divine command of all!

What do all those babies mean in view of the prophet Isaiah’s declaration: “a child has been born for us”? What is the meaning of the one child in relation to the 116,999,999,999 others?[1]

To answer this, we need to back up a little and consider first what the old Genesis commandment might tell us about the meaning of any child. “Be fruitful and multiply” is an odd commandment, seemingly given as if not multiplying might have been an option. But at the end of the account of the creation of Adam and Eve in the next chapter, we are told, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2.24, KJV). The thing about “cleaving” is that it’s quite good fun. And so, having cleaved once, the man and the woman are likely to want to cleave again (and again and again), with the typical result being considerable multiplication. This happens naturally so that, of all the cleaving required to produce 117 billion babies, very little has been in direct response to the command to multiply. What, then, is the point of the command to be fruitful, given that the widespread enjoyment of clefts and cleavers results in fruitfulness anyway?

hen what happens naturally is endorsed with a commandment, we’re in the realm of giving “meaning” to the ordinary. The command to be fruitful is a kind of overlay on what would happen anyway, by which God hijacks natural human procreation for some purpose. By claiming an interest in human fruitfulness, God gives a particular meaning to a child. Children are to be born now not merely “of blood or of the will of the flesh or of [human will], but by the will of God” (cf. John 1.13). Children are now born “for God’s sake”. That is, regardless of the motivations of their parents, children are now God-purposed.

And the point here is not simply about children. We were each born, so we are thinking here about the meaning of any human being. And the issue is not whether we are or aren’t fruitful (for whatever reason) but that we are fruit. What does that mean? What were each of us born “for”? We need an answer to this to be able to say something sensible about why we have gathered today to hear St Luke tell us that Mary “gave birth to her firstborn son”.

The faith of the church makes a connection between the one birth of Jesus and all other births, and so proposes a meaning of the one and the many births. And this connection and meaning are as unbelievable as all miracles are. The meaning of the Genesis commandment to be fruitful and multiply is that God claims all subsequent human history as a preparation for the arrival of Jesus: Have babies, God commands, so that Jesus might finally appear. Or, to put it the other way around, the birth of Jesus is the meaning and purpose of all other births. By making babies we make history, so that history might be made in Jesus.

Imagine if that were true…

Yet, as I’ve just said, it is quite unbelievable. It’s unbelievable, first, because it’s an impossible thought that one could be the meaning of all, especially when that one is not the first or the last but arrives in the messy middle.

And it is unbelievable, second, because who actually thinks anything like this when it comes to baby-making? The drives of the flesh and the heart are, most of the time, far from any thought about the will of God.

Yet, unbelievable as it is, this connection of our births with Jesus’ birth is the only thought which makes sense of the celebration of Christmas. We don’t have to believe the connection, but without it Christmas would be merely sentimental wonder at childhood, or a desperately wishful hope which distracts us for a moment from the harsh realities of life.

Do this, God commands in Genesis. Be fruitful and multiply not merely because you are driven to cleaving but so that the humanity of Jesus might appear. All human being is oriented towards this. And so, though Genesis speaks of all of us as created in the image of God, the New Testament speaks of the one Jesus as that image. His way of being human is our destiny. Do this – be fruitful – so there may be a history within which Jesus can arrive. This is the meaning of a child – our meaning, our purpose.

And now there appears a third and final unbelievability concerning what I’ve proposed. Meaning and purpose have a future orientation, but the baby Jesus is now very much in our past. How can our birth after the appearance of Jesus be a preparation for his appearance? How can the goal of all human history be in the past?

After hijacking the absolute human necessity of being born, God does the same with another absolute necessity: staying alive by eating and drinking. Do this, Jesus says – eat this bread and drink this cup – that my humanity might be present among you again. Do this, for the appearance of me: eat and drink and become the many members of the body of Christ.[2] This – the body of Christ – is no mere or weak social metaphor. Become the body of Christ: become the appearance of the humanity of Jesus in a community of love, even if only for a moment. In the act of creation comes the command, Do this: Be fruitful. In the act of re-creation comes the command, Do this: Take, eat, drink, together. All of this is towards the appearance of the kind of being human we see in Jesus in the manger, on the roads of Palestine, and on the cross.

Do this: be fruitful. Do this: eat and drink. Seeing these together is to see that, at least so far as God is concerned, the Eucharist is as good as sex. For our part, we might wonder about that! But we can at least see that they have in common that they make possible the appearance of the rich and open humanity of Jesus, the presence of the kingdom of heaven on earth. We are, so that a humanity like Jesus’ own might appear. And Jesus appears, that we might see what life can be, and will be. We are for him, and he is for us.

The difference between us and Jesus is only that, between the promise of the cradle and its rejection in the cross, he succeeds in being fully and freely human, and we usually don’t. This is lamentable, but not the end of the story: “a child is born for us”. While we are the reason this one child can be born, he is born for us. Our failings, whatever they may be, are simply that the humanity of Jesus is not yet our humanity. When we talk about “sin” we mean just that we don’t often live freely in love as he did. But this is secondary to his being for us and not over against us.

For the humanity of Jesus is not only the “model” for our own but is also a promise: we will be as he was, knowing God as he did. We will be the presence of God’s kingdom of love and freedom. This “for us” is so central to the story, that we can might dare even to say, Mary wrapped us in cloths and laid us in the manger of the world, and God looks to make us come alive and grow in God’s own Spirit.

For the final time, none of this could possibly be true. It contradicts everything we think we know, which is that the many give meaning to the one, and not the other way around.

Yet here we are, a remant gathered 2000 years after the event of one birth. We might be here because of tradition or obligation or curiosity or misapprehension. Or we might be here in order to be reminded of something we think we’ve forgotten, and so to understand once more.

In any case, let us understand what it would mean if it were singularly important to hear that “a child is born for us”. What would it mean that there, in that one place in the messy middle of our history, is the beginning from which all things have sprung, and the end towards which all things are headed? What would it mean that there is found a humanity which, to date, we have only seen as in a glass, darkly, but through which God sees us as if face-to-face?

To believe that this one child is indeed born for us would be to believe that each gurgling bundle of joy, each callow youth, each jilted lover, each soldier lining up the sights of his rifle, each bearer of terminal cancer, each tearful refugee, each self-satisfied magnate of industry, each frail old soul moving slowly from her bed to her window seat… Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once is purposed for the appearance of God in a humanity like Jesus’ own. To believe this would be to see in another person not only what we think they are or even what they think they are – which is too often to see only the straw in the manger. To believe that Jesus was born for us would be to see in another person the child who is purposed for the appearance of God. And it would be to begin to live differently, as if our lives and the lives of others mattered far beyond anything we could have imagined, because it is God we are to become.

Of course, this is all quite unbelievable, Wonderful as it might be were it true.

But in view of everything we see going on in and around us, this might be the one thing we need to believe, and to begin to live, for God’s sake, and for our own sake, and for each other’s sake:

we are born,

that Jesus might be born,

that we might become like him.

Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. And his name is called, Wonderful…

[1] While Isaiah wasn’t thinking of Jesus here, his words have been borrowed by Christians to say something about Jesus.

[2] The other absolute human necessity is dying, which is “covered” with St Paul’s reading of baptism – dying with Christ – a thought for another time!

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Advent 3
11/12/2022

Isaiah 35:1-10
James 5:7-10
Luke 1:46b-55
Matthew 11:2-11

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In a sentence:
The promise of God is not for our well-being alone but for peace in our midst, reconciliation across divided communities

Ringing through all this morning’s readings is the news of God’s approach to set right all that has gone awry in the world.

Jesus summarises this in his response to the Baptist’s question about who Jesus is:

‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them’ (Matthew 11).

Such promises, and the declaration of their imminent fulfilment, are words gladly heard even by people like us, for whom life is a relatively ‘relaxed and comfortable’ reality. Yet, regardless of whether we imagine that the kingdom has largely come for us, or whether we still long for some missing healing or security or restoration in our lives, we can easily miss the point here. One mistake is to hear what is said about what God will do as a charge as to what we should be doing. Another error – and the one we’ll focus on today – is to imagine that the mere restoration of sight or hearing or social and economic rights will, in themselves, amount to a return to a full humanity.

The promises made through the prophets, and said to have been consummated in God’s work in Christ, can read as if they concern merely this or that thing which God might rectify. The blind will see, and the deaf will hear, which is surely good news. The poor will be lifted up, and the hungry will be fed – again, surely good news. Yet the point of these texts is not simply the removal of obstacles to fullness of life. Good health, by itself, is not the promise of the gospel. Well-being and economic fairness, by themselves, are not the promise of the gospel. Such healing and restoration are important, of course. Yet, we tend to think about them in quite closed and individualised terms. The point about the types of restoration the gospel points to is not only that bad things are fixed up, but that broken relationships are restored. This is a subtle qualification but an important one.

The restoration of relationships will require the opening of eyes and ears and the loosing of tongues, and so on. Yet, these miracles themselves are necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions for the healing of relationships; more is needed. Peace is not everyone having a job, or universal healthcare, although these must be part of it. By themselves, these are not enough because, if I can now see when once I could not, I may still choose not to look at you. If I can now hear, I may yet choose not to listen to you. If I am no longer imprisoned or enslaved or downtrodden, I may yet become your gaoler, enslaver, or oppressor. The justice of God is not simply a matter of cutting the ties which bind, a loosing of tangled wings and a healing of broken bodies and hearts. God does not simply heal and liberate but reconciles. Indeed, this reconciliation is between ourselves and God, but it is inseparable from social reconciliations between ourselves. We can’t state this too strongly. And, in connection to our readings, it also can’t be too strongly said that our natural tendency is to focus on what God promises to do in the ‘vertical’ between us and God, and to miss what is said about the ‘horizontal’ you-and-me dimension of reconciliation.

Each Sunday, we gather for what looks like a vertical engagement but is deeply horizontal. We meet around prayers and hymns of invocation, we listen for the word in scripture and preaching, we pray a prayer of confession, hear a declaration of forgiveness, sing a doxology or hymn, say a creed, gather around the table, pray prayers of intercession, and then are dismissed under a blessing. So far as reconciliation goes, the interesting part is that which follows the preaching in our usual order – the prayer of confession and the word of forgiveness. This is the moment at which, we might say, reconciliation is declared and enacted. Who is being declared to be reconciled to whom at this point? The easy answer is that we are, whether as individuals or as a whole, speaking here of reconciliation between ourselves and God. Perhaps you can verify for yourselves whether that is what you hear and experience at that point in our worship when it comes in a few minutes!

But there’s complicating thing which happens in the Eucharist. Holy Communion enacts a reconciliation or communing not only with God but with each other. In preparation for the Eucharistic liturgy, we ‘pass the peace’, which is not an act of greeting but a declaration to those around us that we constitute no threat to them; we are ourselves claiming to be reconciled and reconciling agents of peace. We move then to pray that, in taking the sacramental signs of Christ’s body and blood, we might ourselves together become the body of Christ.

An individualised God-and-me understanding of reconciliation obscures the bigger picture – that the salvation God brings is not just for us in our notions about where we need healing, but for others. And the ‘for others’ raises the possibility that salvation may actually cost us something. God comes not to heal ‘me’ as I am in this or that particular distress, but to heal us. The gospel promises not only the lifting up of the lowly, but the humbling of the mighty – maybe us. Not only are the captives set free, but presumably those who locked them up unjustly are chastised or corrected – maybe us. What takes place is a ‘setting right’ of disorder. Such a setting right requires the work of God not only because we can’t heal and set right all things ourselves, but because we have too much vested interest in things remaining much the way they are, or in others suffering for our gains. If we doubt this, consider only the rhetoric of election time with its shrill clash of conflicting desires and proposed futures.

We will hesitate at such a vision of the kingdom and its healing work because it will cost us too much. A healing and restoration to wholeness which is just our own is easier and costs us less than one which heals others at the same time. We often have an interest in others being a little less healed and restored than they might like. A bit of blindness and lameness and poverty about the place is convenient and comfortable for many. Being reconciled to God but not necessarily to each other is easier and allows us to keep the things of God merely ‘spiritual’ and disconnected from the ‘real’ world around us. The criticism of religion that it promises an other-worldly escape from each other is, then, shown to be wrong. Indeed the critique rebounds: there is nothing religious in the observation that our world trades on difference and oppression, so that any vision of reconciliation will be uncomfortable for us all. Of this the conversation around the indigenous Parliamentary Voice is just one proof. The vision of justice in the gospel exposes the religious and the unreligious with a harsh light.

In Advent, we focus on the desire for God’s justice and hear a whisper not of new religious possibilities for our relationship with God but of the possibility of a wholly different world. This new world comprises a setting-right which is a lifting up and a casting down, a gathering in and a sending away, and yet is also salvation for all – for those elevated and those humbled, for those made rich and those made poorer by the action of God.

The fulfilment of such a promise as this would be worth waiting for, and worth living towards, as painful as its realisation might be for many.

May God’s people take comfort not merely in God’s love for them but in that God’s love is for all, and carries a promised future in which all have a place, and a right relation both to God and to each other.

And may God’s people live ever more deeply in ways which model this promised future, here and now.

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Advent 2
4/12/2022

Isaiah 11:1-10
Romans 15:4-13
Psalm 72
Matthew 3:1-12

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In a sentence:
Jesus is where the reign of God happens, and we live within this reign as we are conformed to his humanity

“Repent”, John advises (demands!), “for the kingdom of heaven is come near”.

Repent is a loaded word. Mostly it means for us “stop doing something.” See where you’ve done wrong, be sorry, and do rightly. More fundamentally, however, it has to do with thinking again, seeing anew, turning to move in a different direction. And, while the force of John’s preaching comes from his conviction about a coming day of judgement, repentance is not just a religious notion. Within a day of last week’s state elections, the clamour for change was heard within the state Liberal party: the party needs to turn around, become something different, think and see differently. In other words, the party must “repent”.

This repentance, of course, is not in response to the approach of God but because there’ll be another election in four years, and we (the Liberal party) can’t endure another such loss. But the principle of repentance is the same: we were not ready this time, and we fear we might not be again when the election comes around once more. This is repentance motivated by fear – understandably so, but fearful nonetheless. The news of the approach of the next election is bad news because we’re clearly not ready for it.

Yet the proposal for change here is odd. The election seemed to declare that Liberal party policy was not welcomed by the majority. Repentance in this circumstance is a commitment of the Liberal party to stop being itself. The focus is not on what is right but on what will see us through the next electoral moment.

John’s preaching seems to resemble this. “Repent” is spoken in the context of a presumed crisis – that God is coming. On this surface reading, the approach of God is bad news because – as with the Liberal party in its present condition – we might not be ready. There is not a little fear at play in this hearing of John.

Yet the problem with repentance arising from fear is that it can only be superficial. Such repentance is not about what we believe to be true but what we need to do to survive the coming crisis. It’s like the Liberal party thinking it should ask what the people in Melbourne’s West want and then shaping policies to those desires, rather than imagining – as political parties tend to – that there are certain things which need to be done despite the will of the people. If – as one Liberal supporter probably now regrets having said last week – Victoria is populated by idiots who simply couldn’t see the merit of the Liberal policy platform, must the Liberal party itself become a party of idiots to win back ground next time around?

I’m not interested in all this to analyse the election nor to criticise the Liberal party; any party in the same position would likely think this way. The point is to see the temptation to superficiality which comes with fear: the temptation to sell out. Or, if the plan is not to sell out but to “trick” the approaching menace, then we are planning to manipulate by deception. In either case, our true selves are obscured as we re-colour to hide in the shadow of the approaching doom.

The preaching of John – if we take it seriously – can be heard in just this way: stop doing what you clearly think you should be able to do, and do something else. This is an invitation to the superficial – in John, a moral superficiality. You can’t deny the power of God or the poll booth, so deny yourself. The superficial is what sits on the surface, so that we look like one thing but are really something else. Superficiality is a mask behind which is the true me. In the end, John sounds like he’s saying, “Stop being yourselves”.

It is, of course, impossible to stop being ourselves if we honestly value what we are. We can’t healthily desire one thing and be another. The commandment we don’t want to hear instils in us this tortured dynamic. Certainly, what we do – our moral action – is important. But the call to goodness and the motivation of fear are in deathly conflict because the fearful can’t know when they’ve done enough. John’s preaching, then, must be heard as a kind of pre-repentance call: a call which cannot bring about what it demands. Hearing the call, we begin to wonder, how can we repent? How can we be both ourselves and different? And how much change is enough?

The answer is hinted at in John’s preaching and developed in the wider context of the gospel. The kingdom of heaven is not distant and on its way. Rather, the kingdom has drawn near; the kingdom is come with the arrival of Jesus. The call for repentance – the call for reign-of-God-like human being – is answered in the person of Jesus. Jesus is our repentance, our re-thinking, our seeing again.

If Jesus is the kingdom, John’s call changes radically. The kingdom is now not first something demanded of us but given to us: The kingdom is come. So far as repentance goes, Jesus is enough.

And the “enough” is crucial. If we intentionally do something wrong – which is John’s moral observation – it is because of fear about “enough”. We fear that there will not be enough – not enough of me, not enough for me – and we act against the rules to secure enough or we calculate to prove that we are enough (which is what we call self-righteousness). When it comes to repentance, the question will be, have I repented enough? How moral do I have to be? How much does God – or the electorate – need to let us through? These are the moral uncertainties we face if it ever occurs to us to think about them.

With Jesus, it is different. The question is not our “Am I good enough?” or “Have I got enough?” Jesus answers God’s own question: What is required when the question is always “How much?” What is required is assurance of enough. And this is what comes in the arrival of Jesus. Jesus does not ask the superficial How Much? As the presence of the kingdom of heaven, Jesus is simply Enough. The miracle is that he is enough as one of us. Limited in time and space and culture, limited in how much good he can do, still susceptible to the charge from those around him that he has not done enough, our faith is that this one is enough – that Jesus was enough human being, enough God: the definition of the kingdom of heaven.

God’s answer to the question about enough is Jesus: this is enough for God. And God gives him as also enough for us. Not a mere model of how to be, Jesus is made the fullness of God’s kingdom for God and for us. With this, repentance is no longer becoming enough by doing better here or there but receiving this fullness, pointing to the coinciding of our desire and God’s desire in Jesus. Christian repentance stops trying to be enough and lets God’s gift be enough.

Of course, the moral imperative to do better doesn’t go away. There is no question that we could not do better and, most of the time, we probably know what and where this is the case. Just do it. But do it not because there approaches some crisis to avoid. Do it because the only crisis – the only judgement – which matters has already come: enough of God has come in Jesus to liberate us from fear we can’t do and be it all, and to liberate us for works of love and mercy for their own sake.

Repentance is not a wondering about how to win God’s favour but the conviction that we already have it.

And so the moral life is not about storing up reserves against the judgemental onslaught of God or the world but about expressing that favour for those who do not yet know it.

We are not called to avoid the approach of a menacing God but to become the approach of God’s grace, mercy and peace.

Repent, therefore, and believe the good news, so that the kingdom which has come may come again.