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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

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

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.

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Advent 1
27/11/2022

Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Psalm 122
Matthew 24:36-44

In a sentence:
Time is what passes between persons; love is time.

On the first Sunday of Advent each year, our readings touch on time and the coming judgement of God. Yet these themes are set in an apocalyptic key far from modern thinking about the nature of time. While these old texts answer a question about the kind of time we live in, we would need to share the apocalyptic sense of the times for the answer to make sense to us.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is impossible. We can’t unthink what modern culture has taught us about the nature of time, and become first-century apocalypticists. What we can do, is get a clearer sense of how time and life are connected for us today, and ask what someone like St Paul might say into that.

For us today, time is a “forever” thing: it rolls on and on. We might calculate that one day the universe will end with the heat-death of all things (everything ending up at the same cool temperature) but this is not a limit on our experience of time. Time is close enough to infinite that we can think it to be stable and ourselves to be placed in it to fill it up. This time is like a jar into which we pour what we do. The “bucket list” method of living our lives is perhaps the quintessential symbol of this for our time. The bucket list names those “experiences” with which we hope to fill our few moments in infinite time. The great time-bucket, of course, is indifferent as to whether there’s anything in it or not. It remains a bucket if we never get around to doing anything. But even a life rich in experiences is but a drop in the enormity of the infinite time-bucket. And so, when our actions in time’s ever-flowing stream are merely “in” time, they finally amount to nothing. It matters not what we do; time rolls on and sweeps everything away. Infinite time is finally empty time. (Consider a thought from a few weeks ago, that eternal life might be boring). The old Greeks had it right when they imagined that the god Chronos consumes all his children.

If we hear St Paul this morning through this notion of time and our place in it, he can make little sense. For him, time is not infinite but has an end, and soon. But the “end”-thing is distracting. If we don’t expect time ever to end, why not simply dismiss what Paul says about life in time? If you’re never going to get to the end which is the judgement, why bother how to get there? How could our unending time finally come to something, come to some meaning, to some sensible summing-up? And so Paul’s exhortation that we live a certain kind of life makes little sense to many today not because his morals are out of step with ours but because his idea of time looks wrong. What we do cannot matter for the reasons Paul seems to propose.

And yet, for all this, it is not an end to time which concerns Paul; he anticipates less that time will end than that a judgement will be made. This judgement reveals the nature of time: what time is for. Paul’s call to the sleepers to awaken looks at first to be about keeping ourselves safe in the coming judgement. Yet his concern is not the threat of judgement but the nature of our time here and now. What is the purpose of our being, and how does what we do embody that purpose (or not). “Live this way”, Paul says, not because the final judgement is coming but because this is what time properly requires.

This, then, is the difference between our sense of time and Paul’s sense: our unbounded time finally swallows us up and sweeps us away, while Paul’s time is waiting for us. The time in which we live is for him not empty and indifferent about whether or not we pour anything into it. God’s time waits for us. God’s time expects something, looks for something, demands something. And it is not yet God’s time until this demand is met.

And this brings us to the surprise in the gospel’s proposal about time. To wake from sleep (as Paul commands), to lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light, to live into the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control Galatians 5.22f) – all this is to make time. This “making” of time is not what we usually mean – finding time for some good work, making time “for” something. It is the making of time into God’s own time: the creation of a true timeliness in our lives. What Paul criticises – drunkenness, debauchery, jealousy, the “fruits of the flesh” – these are empty time, time within which meaning is eroded as mutually responsible relationships are broken down. Election season in a democracy like ours is empty time in this way.  Time is what passes between persons, and properly to “make time” is live toward an interpersonal human being made from love and gentleness and patience.

Do this, Paul says, and time – the substance of your lives – comes into being.

But also, “Do this”, Jesus says, for the remembrance of me – also a creating of a certain kind of timeliness. Do this, take and taste bad time – broken body and spilt blood – and hear the promise: This is my body given for you, that you might have bodies, my blood that you might have blood. Or, this is my time, given for you, that you might have time. If we’re paying attention, we might marvel that God can make time for us from the nothingness of broken time: from our choices for sin and death.

This is no mere wish or other-worldly thing. The word the sacrament acts is that, gathering as we do around the one table, all the time we need is standing next to us, the (only) time which matters.

Making time is now not about “finding” time but creating it through lives of love and care. The time of our lives has a face which turns towards ours and asks, Do you love me?

Sleepers, awake. Paul says. Open your eyes and see. Live love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

And you will have time enough.

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Reign of Christ
20/11/2022

Colossians 1:11-20
Psalm 46
Luke 23:33-43

In a sentence:
Patience is finding life in the midst of life

Conventional wisdom has it that “patience is a virtue”. As often as not, this is declared by the person on whom we are waiting, and so the saying generally serves as a way of trying to keep us at a distance until our time, or turn, comes.

In our reading from Colossians this morning, Paul prays for two things for the Colossian believers: that they might be made strong with the strength that comes from God’s own power, and that they might be “prepared to endure everything in patience”. These are really not two things but one, and we’ll look at them together by focussing on patience.

Patience is a certain kind of waiting, the bearing of suffering or some other deprivation or difficulty. We don’t have to be patient. Despair is a way of enduring which knows no hope – no end to whatever afflicts us. Despair anticipates no resolution and the ethic of despair is sheer endurance. But few people can live this way; we’re more likely to opt for the less debilitating resignation, which is marginally happier. Resignation tolerates suffering and deprivation as a strategy of least resistance. At best, it will be a brave acceptance of what cannot be changed, a stoic keeping-at-a-distance of loss or suffering. A third response to suffering or deprivation is impatience – a refusal to accept suffering by exercising power to bring about a change. Impatience powers-through, if it has the resources, either in a DIY way or by haranguing others.

Why, of the various responses to difficulty, does Paul propose patience?

The key here is in recognising that patience is not simply endurance, and so not really like despair or resignation at all. Patience is a reconciliation with the timeliness (the temporality) of our lives. This is more than accepting that we need to wait out whatever is wrong. The timeliness of our lives is not in counting the ticking of clocks but rather in the fact that our lives are not “immediate”.

In our common talk, when something is immediate, it happens now: I want it done, and done immediately! The modern world is increasingly immediate in the sense that things happen faster: faster calculations, faster travel, faster service delivery, and so on. There is the more trivial sense of immediacy – quickness, without intervening time.

Broken down to its roots, however, the word “immediate” means, “without mediation”. Something is immediate in this sense when neither time nor anything else stands between us and what we desire. The “middle” drops out. We no longer order a book from a local store, which store then orders it from overseas; we can go direct to the supplier ourselves. We can – if we’re lucky! – find a life companion directly online without the hard work of lurking in this or that place, joining a social group, discovering who might be nearby and interested and available. We can find a spare part or the next piece in our collection without driving across the city or the country looking for it. Impatiently desiring Faster and Easier is not only about the immediate as instantaneous. It is also about the immediate as “without a middle”, without someone or something between us and our goal, perhaps even standing in the way.

By contrast, patience has discovered something which matters in the “not-immediate” (to put it clumsily) or, more positively, in what is mediated. After Paul speaks of patience in our passage this morning, he moves straight on to an account of God’s work in Christ: “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Most importantly, this healing work does not take place “immediately” – instantly or without something between the origin and the goal. This is a mediating kingdom, a mediated relationship to God, and to everything. Christ stands in the middle between God and us. There is no immediate, direct link between us and God; time, space, and spaced-timed bodies are part of what it means to connect to this God.

Impatience is about immediacy; patience has come to terms with the mediated nature of our existence as creatures of this particular God. There is an unavoidable middle between us and what we truly need. But being unavoidable, it is necessary. And so patience experiences time and all that is in it as itself the stuff of life. “What we truly need”, then, is not just where patience might lead us but also the messy middle between here and there. Time and the persons and things which seem to be in the way between us and our desires are just what God uses to make us, to redefine and fulfil those desires. What God finally makes is the Body of Christ – a community of people learning to be patient with each other.

Patience is a virtue not because it is convenient for the person we are waiting on but because we too easily experience time as quite other than filled with divine possibilities between us and where we think we are going. In fact, having to wait seems increasingly to be creating a hatred of time and those who fill it, whether it be sitting in traffic, waiting 10 extra seconds for a slow internet download, standing in a supermarket queue or “having” to pause to eat in the midst of a busy day. We struggle with the passage of time and what fills it because it seems to be empty time: wasted time simply to be endured, time for resenting others because they are holding us up and, of course, time for being resented by them in return. Patience is not waiting; it is allowing that God takes time. God takes time, and makes of it life for the time‑d.

Patience is not a dry agonising endurance of time or of each other. True patience reflects God’s patience with the world – God’s making use of our time. Patience does not simply endure but takes what fills our time to be a rich field sown with the stuff of life.

Patience is then not an emergency plan for a situation in which something has gone awry. It is about the simple, God-blessed fact that we are situated – “sited” – in time, in relation to others.

Patience is being reconciled to being the kind of embodied, time-set creatures we actually are. We are not to be patient because the circumstances might require it; patience is all there is. To be reconciled to God and to each other is to be patient.

Paul prays for patience so that we might discover that even time which looks empty is God’s own time. God has been patient, has “endured” time, has become broken flesh in Christ, and so made time God’s own, the place God is content to be. If God is content to be here, to be patient is to claim this time as be truly our own, the place where we are content to be.

To be patient is, then, to be conformed to God’s own way of being and doing. To be patient is to be our true selves: the “image” of God.

By the grace of God, then, may the virtue of patience, with the strength it gives to redeem our time, be ever more fully ours, to our fuller humanity and (what is the same thing) to God’s greater glory. Amen.