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Pentecost 20
23/10/2022

Joel 2:23-27
Psalm 65
Luke 18:9-14

In a sentence:
Humility overcomes hard righteousness to bring
reconciliation for all

The obvious lesson from our Gospel reading this morning is, Don’t be the Pharisee: “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” This presumes, of course, that we all want to be exalted, at least a little bit!

This reading works even for those not really sold on the whole God thing. We value humility and have little time for self-righteous posturing. Not taking ourselves too seriously is appreciated by others, and so is a helpful rule of engagement as we move through daily life. Here endeth the lesson, then – at least the obvious, moral lesson – and a good one to learn.

But let us look to see what might be less obvious here. While the two figures in Jesus’ little story are poles apart in terms of moral judgement, they have in common that each stands at his pole alone. I don’t know whether this is intentional in the original telling of the story, but I’m going to make quite a bit of it in what follows! The Pharisee is a self-made man. It is “standing by himself” that he declares his judgement on himself and the other. He needs no other, because this is the meaning of self-righteousness: righteousness by virtue of what I am or have done, perhaps against great odds, with reference only to the truth I perceive and not to others and their truths. The unexpected and usually unobserved effect of self-righteousness is that such a person ultimately stands alone in the world they have created, which does not require and so finally does not admit others. The heaven of the self-righteous has a population of just one. My presumption to be able to perceive the unrighteousness of all others excludes them. Judging and rejecting others has no end and, finally, I am alone.

The experience of the tax collector is the aloneness of being rejected. We don’t know why he considers himself unworthy before God but we can take him at his word that he is, for whatever reason, morally (or otherwise) unworthy. If the Pharisee is a self-made man, this tax collector is a self-unmade one. This is the moral reading of their different experiences.

But the important point is not the difference of their moral achievements but the similarity of the effect of those achievements: both men stand alone. Both have isolated themselves. This sameness makes possible a new perception of their difference. No longer is this difference in taheir moral performance; it is in their perception of their being alone. For the Pharisee, aloneness is a virtue to be celebrated, for which he even thanks God. Or, more precisely, the Pharisee doesn’t see the aloneness but only his isolating righteousness. The Pharisee doesn’t know his condition. And so he also mistakes the condition of the tax collector. The Pharisee sees the other’s sin but not the other’s aloneness. The Pharisee, then, doesn’t see how he and the tax collector are the same.

While the Pharisee celebrates his righteousness and the alone‑ing it brings, for the tax collector, aloneness is a devastating affliction he desperately wants to escape. Recognising his problem, he seeks relief by the only means available – the appeal for mercy. And so the one whom the Pharisee’s moral, alienating righteousness holds in contempt now finds true, reconciling righteousness.

Hoping that this much has made sense, now for something less sensible. All this makes possible what is, on most grounds, an untenable assertion but one we must nonetheless make. If the tax collector is alienated by hard righteousness and is restored to life by God before the one who rejected him, then the tax collector is Jesus himself. It was the righteousness of the Pharisees, priests and scribes which cast Jesus out – which “alone‑d him” – in crucifixion. Easter Saturday becomes the prayer for mercy – a strangely unvoiced prayer of the dead – and the resurrection becomes God’s healing insistence on life not only for himself but for those who rejected him in Jesus. The tax collector’s prayer is not for himself only.

Notice how far we are here from the mere morality of arrogance and humility as personal attributes we might or might not possess and which we eulogise or lament in others. Humility is now nothing like a meek mildness but the opposite of the hard righteousness which divides and alienates us from each other and even from ourselves. Humility becomes the possibility of connection, reconciliation, and so of the creation of something which wasn’t there before. The truly humble do not slip quietly into the background. The truly humble are the means by which the world is made whole again. The tax collector’s prayer is not for himself only.

This is, perhaps, an appealing exaltation of the humble. But there is some bad news here. Such justification as the tax collector received that day in the Temple didn’t change much. Things will be the same tomorrow as they are today. The Pharisee isn’t likely to have changed, nor most of the rest of us who are like him to varying degrees. Ours is a world of harsh alienating righteousness, increasingly pressing towards cynical contempt and contemptuous cynicism. This is not the rejection of righteousness but a relentless demand for it – a demand in and all around us.

In the face of this, prayer for reconciliation, and work toward it, are a struggle, something of which we see in the demeanour of the tax collector and in the crucifixion. There is nothing easy about a sinner’s prayer for mercy. Humility which is merely a mood or way of negotiating difficult circumstances cannot survive the “cost” of mercy. The humility which creates is difficult work. Without the conviction that things can be made out of nothing – the conviction that God will raise the dead – humility is something better seen in other people, a convenient pathology which makes our lives easier (if not theirs).

The humility of the tax collector, however – the humility of Jesus himself – recognises poverty and trusts that God can do something about it. Death and nothingness – the ultimate humiliations – are not barriers to life. And the humility which seeks mercy from God also seeks mercy in the world. To be humble in this way is not to be weak but to desire the smashing of the cold fetters of hard righteousness. This is not easy in a world like this one, in which the alienating righteousness of the Pharisee in Jesus’ story is part of what drives our society and its politics.

Cynicism and contempt are the fruit of an excluding righteousness, the application of some moral or political code against which the enemy measures up only very poorly. This contempt, however, is not a moral flaw in those who look about with contempt but a misreading of justice and righteousness, usually on all sides. Against this, Jesus summons us to what he calls elsewhere the righteousness which exceeds that of the Pharisee (Matthew 5.20). The righteousness of the Pharisee leads to a myriad of heavens with population one, from which we can hurl contemptuous abuse at others in their lonely heavens. But the righteousness of God is towards a single heaven bursting at the seams with Pharisees and tax collectors, Russian presidents (and American ones), rapacious colonists and displaced indigenes, billionaire entrepreneurs and gullible consumers, cynical politicians, sarcastic shock jocks, smug baby boomers, sanctimonious gossips and even Uniting Church ministers.  There they – we – all shall be, in a heaven pressed down and flowing over for the wantonness of unrighteous grace, of unrighteous mercy, of unrighteous forgiveness and of unrighteous reconciliation. With graced abandon, the unjust justice of God exceeds that weaponised righteousness with which we cut and divide so deeply.

Let us, then, not cheapen humility by mistaking it for niceness, and the call to humility as a nudge in the direction of not taking ourselves too seriously. Humility, at least that of Jesus the tax collector, testifies to God’s refusal of any final alienation and so to the power of God to reconcile.

Blessed are the humble – blessed are the peace-makers. They will be called the children of God because, like God’s first Son, their way of mercy and reconciliation grants a glimpse of what heaven looks like.

Humble yourselves, then, that God might exalt the whole world.

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Pentecost 19
16/10/2022

Jeremiah 31:27-34
Psalm 121
Luke 18:1-8

In a sentence:
Prayer requires a vision for peace for the whole

Conventional wisdom has it that when the going gets tough…there’s always Netflix. Of course, that’s not quite how the saying goes, but could it speak a truth about our infatuation with binge-watching inexhaustible streaming services? While storytelling and story consumption are deeply embedded within us, this is not enough to account for the explosion of streaming subscriptions and our consumption rate of films and TV series. No small part of this must be the escape the screen offers. There is much from which we want to escape, of which the headlines and TV news reports are sufficient evidence, whatever else might be happening in our personal lives. But video streaming is scarcely the only means of escape. Grey nomads across the county are getting away from it all in droves, extending indefinitely the escape the rest of us hang out for in this land of the long weekend. Gamers disappear into parallel universes for hours or days on end. We can escape into exercise and the body beautiful, or self-consoling overeating, or radical political and religious causes which provide meaning and refuge within the chaos. Or we can simply avoid the daily news for the stress it induces and not venture out too much.

The point here is not to criticise the much-needed holiday, the relaxing weekend immersed in a favourite TV series or setting different priorities from those of our parents’ generation – whichever generation that was! The point is to express the suspicion that, perhaps for most in the modern world, life is lived in the mode of distraction from life. If this is true, it is because of a perceived inadequacy of the story we are presently living, or even the unliveability of that story. A few brave souls – or perhaps deluded ones – don’t experience themselves in this contradicted way. But many of us have become more adept at losing ourselves in stories rather than featuring in them.

My interest this morning is not Netflix or purveyors of other streaming services and means of comforting distraction. Rather, I’m interested in prayer as it features in today’s Gospel reading. What we think prayer might be is controlled by our response to the story we think we are living, because prayer has to do with changing our stories. If video streaming or early retirement or upgrading a spouse or drinking ourselves into oblivion is about leaving behind our present uncomfortable story, then this will affect our sense for prayer. In particular, if escape is our mode of coping, we’ve already decided that prayer cannot help us with our uncomfortable existence. Those escape artists who still pray do so as escapees. The escape is a disconnection from the whole, so that the escapee’s prayer is now not about the whole but about the individual. My inner, personal spirituality and communion with God become my escape. I’m spiritual-but-not-religious because religion is worldly, and the world is what I’m leaving behind. Prayer turns inward because that is the only place I find myself to be safe. Prayer beyond this is pointless for those who have lost hope that there is a story of the world other than that of grim newsfeeds with their wars and rumours of wars, and in which “everyone is angry about everything all the time”. At best, prayer might help my inner story by re-storying me apart from the wider world. Such prayer is now not for the world with its roar of cascading, contradictory stories but against that world.

At the end of today’s reading, Jesus asks, “…when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”. That is, at the final setting right of all things, will there be anyone left who is praying for that setting right? Clearly, there may still be prayer, in the sense of those inward-looking prayers in the hearts of the escapees. But the faith and its praying sought by Jesus is not this. It is the faith suggested by the widow’s persistence in his parable. If her constant harassing of the lazy judge is what prayer is to be like, such prayer bears no marks of escapism. She lives her uncomfortable story as she seeks to see it changed. Her effort is not towards escape but transformation. As one of the tough, she gets going in action which models the kind of prayer which wants to change the world’s story. This kind of prayer – and action – denies the world’s brokenness from within that world. It is, then, prayer not against the world, justifying my flight, but prayer for it, necessitating my staying. This prayer does not abandon ship but can only be prayed from onboard.

This is the very ministry of Jesus. He is pushed out of the world onto the cross by us in a kind of reverse escapism; the world-as-a-whole can’t flee but it can fling just the one Jesus away. Yet, true to his deeply world-centred existence, Jesus will not be suppressed or escaped. And so he prays even from that cross – literally from on‑board, both within the world and cast out of it: “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what to do”; they don’t know how to pray. Such prayer seeks community even out of alienating rejection. Prayer like this expresses a vision of the reconciliation of the whole world. This world so deeply divided by cynicism, contempt and fear needs a faith which will do this work of prayer – a work that can only be done from within the brokenness and not from outside.

And so this is the kind of prayer, work and life to which we are called. This is the taking up of our own cross after Jesus, with prayer that leans into the world and not away from it. It prays for the coming of God’s peaceable kingdom; that earth become heaven; for bread, grace and safety. Outside the world which is not yet its true self, but within it and sharing in its brokenness, we pray and work for the forgiveness, reconciliation and wholeness which will make all things – even us – new.

In such prayer and the active struggle for life it expressed, let us be unceasing.

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Pentecost 18
9/10/2022

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Psalm 66
Luke 17:11-19

In a sentence:
Life begins with thanksgiving

“Say ‘ta’ ” is one of the first things we teach our children: it’s nice to say thank you. And it is! As a polite social noise, saying thank you paves the way for easy exchange, even when the gratitude might not be particularly deep.

Saying thanks is central to our Gospel text this morning. But what does the thanksgiving “do”? The structure of the story might be read to suggest that the thanksgiving is the basis of the healing: “you are made well because you have given thanks”. This is not unlike what our children learn: saying “ta” increases the likelihood of getting more stuff! Yet this doesn’t match the story. Had the grateful Samaritan not returned to Jesus, Jesus might have said of all ten who cried out for healing, “Your faith made you well”, for all were healed simply at the asking. So gratitude doesn’t get us stuff, at least so far as God is concerned. But what, then, is the purpose of thanksgiving? To get deeper into this, we need to look a little into the problem of gift-giving.

Over the last few months, a number of us have been reading and discussing a book by Miroslav Volf on giving and forgiving (Free of Charge). We have seen how difficult it is to give a gift. It is easy, of course, to present someone with something, but this is rarely true gift-giving. Perhaps we give because it’s expected of us (it’s her birthday, and that’s what you do), or because someone has given us something and we feel obligated to return the favour (thereby fulfilling local righteousness). Perhaps we give to ingratiate ourselves and to receive some favour in return now or later, or perhaps we’re just clearing out our cupboards, and “giving” away our junk is a useful twofer. Real or perceived, these mixed motivations make it hard to know that our gift is truly free of compulsion and self-interest – in totality about the recipient and not about the giver herself. Our gifts tend to have value to us, the givers, and we look to see this value realised. Strangely, but probably correctly, Volf goes so far as to speculate that the only way a giver could be confident that her gift is truly free of ulterior motives is if she intends to forget having given it, and so to have no further expectation from it precisely because it is forgotten. The true gift is forgotten by the giver.

This invites a strange thought: if the gracious God gives perfectly – freely and without self-interest – we could say that God “forgets” having given. The word “forget” means – literally and concretely – to “un-grasp” something, to let it go. Forgetting releases the thing said or done. This means that, having healed the ten in the story, the gift cannot be manipulated against the recipients because God has no further interest here, which is the meaning of “forgetting”. This forgetting is not a divine “senior moment”. To say that God forgets is to say a positive thing negatively: unlike like our own gift-giving, what God gives is a true gift. We might note here that the Bible has long maintained that, in forgiving, God forgets our sin [e.g. Isaiah 43.25, Jeremiah 31.34 and Hebrews 8.12]. If we believe that God forgets the sin, we must believe that God forgets the forgiving.

This is more than just a little odd, in at least two ways. First, what could it mean that God forgets and, second, what now is thanksgiving?

First, then, how can the all-knowing God forget? In fact, the notion of an all-knowing God is itself a negative idea and no better than the notion of a forgetful God. To say that God knows all things is simply to say that God’s knowing is not like ours; if our knowledge is limited, we then say that God’s knows everything. God’s ways are not our ways. And so, if it’s the case that we prefer not to forget having given gifts because the giving might still benefit us, we are free to say that God’s giving is so different from ours that God does forget. Of course, this is a rhetorical trick, but all speech about the gods is rhetorical trickery. We are just more familiar with some Godtalk and so imagine it to be more sensible than novel trickery like a God who must forget if we are to be both healed and free. God appears as much between the words as in them. If we speak a truth about God, any strangeness in what we say has to do with what we are also denying. “God forgets” means that God’s giving is unlike our giving. And so we affirm that God forgets the gift.

What then of the second question, about thanksgiving? What could thanksgiving be if God forgets having given, and so seems to release us from the responsibility of saying “ta”? The answer is as strange as the suggestion that God might have forgotten in the first place. We give thanks in order to remind God that he has given. To give thanks is to name God as Giver, and in this naming we bring God as giver to God’s own mind, and to our own. This thanksgiving is not polite noise; it goes to the heart of our relationship to God as a relationship of giving and receiving. God forgets the gift but we must not, because it is our re‑minding God and ourselves that the creature-creator relationship is renewed.

When Jesus commends the Samaritan’s faith, then, he speaks not of the wish which cries out just in case Jesus might be able to do something to help. And faith is certainly not our ability to distort our minds to accommodate creeds which don’t yet make sense to us. Our passage suggests, rather, that our minds are already distorted – or, at least, nine minds out of ten are. “Your faith has made you well” is not about the total remission of the illness but the entry into remembrancing the gift of life as a gift. Faith sees the gift.

This is worth saying because of how rare it is. In today’s reading, the frequency is one in ten. Last week’s Gospel reading (from Sunday 26C) was even more pessimistic. After discussing how we know the truth about ourselves and God, the text concluded, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16.19-31). This is a radical scepticism about the power of a miracle to change human hearts: despite the miracle, we will still get the gift wrong. Transferring this to today’s text, the scepticism becomes, “neither will they be convinced if I cure ten sufferers of their debilitating illness.” Convinced of what? Convinced not of God’s power to heal but that this God is the one and only source of all life. Life is knowing where life is to be found. The shock of the story is that while ten survive, only one lives.

The urging in our reading today is not towards believing in healing miracles but towards believing that we could live a “eucharistic” existence, to borrow from the Greek for thankfulness. This is to experience life as grace‑d givenness. It is to become that miracle which is the creature who finds life again at its source in God, even in the midst of the chaos around us. For if, indeed, we live in a world in which nine out of ten forget to say thanks for the gift of life, it is surely a chaotic world.

Let us, then, give thanks with no mere “saying ta” but in such a way as to re‑mind ourselves by re‑minding God, for our old minds will not get us to where we need to go.

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Pentecost 17
2/10/2022

1 Timothy 6:6-10
Psalm 91
Luke 16:19-31

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

“If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16: 31)

All texts are tricky, even those that appear to be quite straightforward. Why do I say that? Because what they are about is always a solution to a problem that is inevitably concealed from us. By contrast, those who first received these texts, whether gospel or letter, were invariably aware of the issues at stake. Two thousand years later, we are not. We are hamstrung. We need to find out – what is the problem for which this text is a solution? What is the question which this text is wanting to answer? Biblical scholars for the last couple of hundred years have been able to identify these questions, which, if we let them in, should make any reading of the Bible much more interesting for everyone. It is an increasing frustration that those who put themselves outside the Church as well as many inside, are, for a variety of reasons, completely unaware of how much we now know about how these ancient texts must be heard. Otherwise, it is all too easy to quote texts out of context. Today is a case in point.

To illustrate the significance of these background matters, let me try to paint a few broad brushstrokes to help us with this text. With regard to the four gospels, Mark and John act as chronological bookends, by date Mark first, and John last. In different ways, their endeavour may be understood as being an explanation of why and how Jesus is different from John the Baptist. Then enclosed within these two bookends we have the gospels of Matthew and Luke, each writing for one of the two sorts of people who became the first Christians. These two were either Jews or Greeks. Matthew is writing for Jews who had become Christian, helping them to understand the difference between their former and now new faith. This is why for Matthew the genealogy of Jesus has to start with Abraham. Luke, on the other hand, is writing a universal history for enculturated Greeks who had become Christian, which is why he has to begin his genealogy with Adam, only to underscore in the text today why Moses is crucial. The fact is that what was mother’s milk for Jews, their Jewish scriptures, was a complete mystery to the Greeks. So, Luke has to get them first to understand, and then to take seriously what for them was an alien culture.

Which brings us finally to our text today. Luke writes to Gentiles, those who were not Jews:

“If you (Greeks) do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will you be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”

The Greeks knew all about dying and rising gods, ignorant though they were of Moses and the prophets. What’s more, the Greeks were pre-occupied with how they were to get across the river Styx. That is to say, for them, earthly life is simply a prelude to what lay beyond death.  Hence, the fact that, in our text, the rich man is “buried” is noteworthy. He had come to a radical end, but was about to start a new adventure. Jews on the other hand were not so interested. For them, death is a fact of life, “going” or “being gathered to one’s fathers” and “being with Abraham” is enough. So, then, we are told that Lazarus does not need a burial, simply that “he died”.

We have to be careful not to read prejudicial assumptions into this parable. The truth is that the rich man is no blatant scoundrel. He just lives according to the then contemporary conviction – even some modern ones – considering wealth and poverty to be the gift of God. And Lazarus – nothing is said about his goodness. Indeed, if the seven deadly sins are any yard-stick, he is no saint, since the text tells us of his envy of the rich man. And for goodness sake, why not? He wants only to gather the crumbs that fell from the groaning table. Lazarus is simply one who has no human help. Certainly, he appears to be an immobile cripple – the text tells us that someone “laid” him on the road. Then we learn of the presence of dogs. Generally speaking, we like dogs, but at the time of our text they were considered unclean. So, the dogs licking Lazarus sores was no act of compassion, but simply emphasises to the first hearers how wretched is his condition. Yet, despite all this, he is given a name. He is Lazarus. He is not just any anonymous “man” like the one falling among thieves also lying on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, seen, but avoided, by the priest and Levite.

What then is the point of it all? It is this. The terrible thing is not the wealth of the rich man, but the innocence, indeed stupidity, with which he lives his life of ease, avoiding contact with what is right before his eyes – unlike the priest and Levite in the earlier parable, he does not even look at Lazarus. We feel this callous indifference. Dives will not be the first, and certainly not the last, to turn away from presenting misery. Which gives us warrant to encounter Lazarus not merely as a solitary individual, but increasingly as a political victim of communal national and international inequality.

Two things are crucial in understanding our reading. First, the description of Lazarus’ good fortune is not to be heard as some sort of morality tale about the reversal of fortune after death. Rather, the point of the parable is to condemn the wrong done to all called Lazarus on the earth. To this end, second, the conversation between Dives, the rich man, and Abraham is the central concern. Dives asks Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his still-living, presumably equally wealthy five brothers, of their dire condition. The first hearers – the Greeks for whom Luke writes his text – would readily have seen themselves in the figure of the five brothers. And are we not also such Greeks? In which case, all of us are being told: you don’t need any warning. You already have it:

“If you do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will you be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”

With these five brothers, we have that same word of scripture – and that is sufficient. We all have Moses and the prophets. Those who are unmoved by that message will not, we are told, be convinced by a miracle, even by something like a resurrection.

But then imagine this – what if our text is offering us something quite new, so breaching that apparently final absolute chasm between Dives and Lazarus?  What if – if, and when, we truly hear Moses and the prophets, we find that we ourselves are actually rising from the dead?

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Pentecost 16
25/9/2022

2 Timothy 1:1-14
Psalm 137
Luke 17:5-10

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

Sometimes the world shakes … our world shakes. It is, of course, different for each of us. Tragedy, loss, and disappointment always find new ways to manifest — in large and small ways.

On the 11th of March 2021 an email was sent to the pool of candidates for ordained ministry in our Synod informing them that I had resigned as one of those candidates. It was a decision I in no way regret, and yet it has led me to reconfigure my understanding of myself, and my faith, and my place in the Church. It was only in a recent conversation with a mentor that I realised how deep the work of reconfiguring my faith still has to go. With the discussion of faith and loss in our readings for today it is difficult for me to disentangle my own life and experience from these texts.

All encounters with texts, particularly those of scripture, draw us into the life of the text, and the text into our lives. Through the assumptions we bring to, our mood and state of mind, the ways the text makes us feel — or not feel — the new ideas they generate in us, the context in which they are read: we encounter ourselves in encountering the texts of scripture. And when we hear these words in a time of worship or prayer we hope, above all, that through this encounter we do not simply find ourselves, but find God.

The question posed by our Psalm is, in one sense, the perennial question posed by our encounters with scripture: how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? Because we are always, in one sense, in a foreign land. We are never situated in the place where these texts were first heard.

Indeed, we scarcely know where these texts originally spoke from or to. Our Psalm speaks of the experience of the exile by Babylon — likely the clearest reference to exile in the Psalter. But the challenge of the Psalm is not to imagine ourselves among the artisans, landowners, and elites who were taken away into exile in the 6th century BCE. The challenge is to us today: how can we sing the Lord’s song in this new land?

Here, for those of us whose whakapapa — that is, heritage and history — is not rooted in this land what we hear in our Psalm is not a simple echo of ourselves, but a stark reminder of our distance from the Psalmist. We are not in exile. Indeed, we are the beneficiaries of a legacy of dispossession in this land. How then do we remain faithful to the question of the Psalmist: to sing the Lord’s song in this land?

The lesson here is what it means to remain faithful to the call of scripture. We remain faithful not by reconstructing the often-lost histories of ancient texts, as if our lives should be seen as a simple echo of lost days. Or as if the past could ever be a simple rubric applied directly to the present. Rather, we remain faithful by facing up to the kinds of questions, the kinds of challenges, that the writers of Scripture faced.

What we receive in these texts is that call: to open ourselves in honesty, naming the uncomfortable parts of our life with God, allowing ourselves to feel the frustration and disappointment that we do indeed feel. The call of scripture is, I want to suggest, to be honest before God; and not the imposition of a holy veneer, where everything is neatly filed away. The Psalmist — though not in the exact version we used today — even expresses the desire for violent vengeance against the children of their captors.

And so it is that through our honesty before God we remain faithful to God.

This is the word of grace we receive from Second Timothy. — a text we must read on face value, given the significant contest over where and from whom this text actually comes. Second Timothy reminds us that the faith and power of God is not something we must strive for, but something we receive. And we receive the gift of faith more fully when we are more fully open to receive it: more fully honest to receive it.

Faith is a gift, a spark, to be rekindled. A fire which we have received from those who love us. And, ultimately, from the one who loves us above and beyond all: God; in the fullness of life which pulsates through the world.

It is telling that Second Timothy does not settle with abstractions here. The text gets down into the dirt: naming the ones from whom faith has been received. This too is our task: honesty before God must mean giving an honest account of those from whom we have received our faith. Faith binds us together, it is something that lives in others, and then in us, like a subterranean root system feeding a network of new shoots. Like germinating life that falls from old growth and reseeds every generation.

I have to name the simple faith of my mother, the generous service of my father, my wife’s prophetic voice, my brother’s resilient heart, my many teachers — Craig not the least of them.

I confess in my current period of reconfiguration I have felt caught in these various shadows. Not quite clear how I can “make good” on what I have received from those who love me.

And yet, and yet … in traversing the distance and closeness of my relationship to scripture I am beginning to find again my closeness to God.

All of the past has conspired to gather us here. And yes we are each but a single thread in the tapestry of faith. Perhaps only able to conjure an honest word of anger, or disappointment, or loss. But there is love gathered at your back, pressing you onward. here are names of saints who have blessed you — and it is your task that their names not be lost.

Be honest before God, because God loves you. Be open to receive, because you will receive Sun and not shadow. Be patient in the sufferings of life, because the work of reconfiguration is hard and rewarding — I hope.

Hear then this good news:

Jesus has already invited you to a seat at the table. You are already included in the love that has rung throughout the world since before all ages. You are already part of the tapestry of faith which bears the burdens of others. You are already redeemed and restored. You are already the recipient of a gift: Jesus Christ who abolished death and brought life and light.

Be of good heart and do not despair. There are questions to be faced, challenges to undertake, and God to be found.

Truly.