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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.

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Pentecost 15
18/9/2022

Psalm 79
Luke 16:1-16

In a sentence:
Even death and deepest loss are not outside the reach of God

Last week a couple of Jesus’ parables led us to reflections on being lost and found. We’ll take this a little further today, and notice that in being lost, we are not simply lost; we lose something – our bearings, in particular. We suddenly realise that the landmarks which signalled where we were are now gone, and we no longer have the clues we need to get home. Our next steps now lack confidence because we have to guess which way to move, and that can just make things worse.

At the centre of today’s reading is the crushing grief Jeremiah feels at what is happening to his “poor people”: the cry of his poor people, the hurt of his poor people, the health of his poor people, the slain of his poor people. Whereas elsewhere we hear much accusation and threat from Jeremiah, now we hear his sadness, sickness and suffering over the realisation of his preaching: the fall of Jerusalem. There is no consolation here, no premature word of hope or comfort. Whatever hope or comfort might yet be heard, the present pain is pain. In place of the prayer he has been warned not to pray for this people (7.16; 11.14; 14.11) is his grief, for he cannot but weep. And even this grief is yet incomplete; the only prayer he does intimate is for more tears: “O that my head were a spring of water” that I might cry a fountain of tears.

Most of us don’t know grief like this. We might suspect that it is felt in cities across Ukraine and in 15,000(?) lounge rooms in Russia. We are learning how colonised, dispossessed and enslaved peoples have known something of such loss, and we know something of it when we lose one we’ve loved. Less dramatically but still painfully, the experience of the church in our society today has some relationship to what Jeremiah describes, and probably even more so here at MtE. Our departure from what has been so deeply valued in this place will hurt, and all the more so in the broader context of the church’s fortunes in societies like ours. In this experience of disorientation – of even being lost – we cast around to discover how it happened. We retrace our steps, hoping to pick up the track again at the point where we strayed. If we find a way back, we plan and regulate to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Surprisingly, this is not what Jeremiah does. He knows why the people have been lost: God has done this. With the other classical prophets, Jeremiah sees the disasters visited upon God’s people as God’s own judgement, exercised in the form of the marauding Assyrians and Babylonians. To our modern sensibilities in and out of the church, this a horrific assertion. It horrifies us partly because we are deeply impressed with the thought that God is love, which doesn’t look like love. And it horrifies us because it is dangerous to read history like this. We are tempted to imagine that what good happens to us is God’s blessing and what bad happens to others is God’s curse – that we and they “deserved” what we got. For this reason, the later apocalyptic prophets read the sufferings of history differently, now more in terms of an absence of God’s justice than its destructive presence.

But Jeremiah and the older prophets are not being primitive in their proclamation. Seeing God’s hand in the catastrophe allows that God is not dead or powerless – that the God of Israel is not subject to the god(s) of Assyria or Babylon. The God of Israel still oversees history, even as everything falls apart. It is with this careful bracketing – the thought that surely only God could stand so devastatingly against God’s people – that the prophets see God as the cause of Israel’s disaster.

Few prophets today – at least among us – dare to attribute the ongoing losses of the church in our society to God’s own action. We think this does God a favour. We take responsibility for the decline and get busy backtracking to see where we lost the way; we develop visions and strategies. Without the courage of the prophets, however, we unintentionally cut ourselves off from God. Now church decline is either all our fault – which is too hard to bear – or God is weak or dead, which becomes harder to deny. And so we have no sense of what might come next and whether it will be bearable, or whether God will even be there for us. Everything now becomes our responsibility – that we are lost, and how we might get un-lost again. Any thought of justification by grace – or being found by grace – goes out the window. The result is endless meetings to discuss what the church should be doing and, after all that, still the possibility of fear and loathing when finally we decide.

For Jeremiah, the God who destroys is the God who can rebuild. This doesn’t justify the loss or justify God. Justifying a loss involves invoking a calculus in which we must be deprived. This is the strange consolation we sometimes hear (or speak) in response to bereavement: that God “wanted” our loved ones to die, for our sake or theirs, as if death were a divine strategy. Rather, allowing what is lost to have been lost in and through God turns that loss into a call for response – a response in and to God, a response to the call to live. If Jeremiah is sure that God’s hand is at play in the disaster unfolding in Jerusalem, it is because he is confident that this is not the end; God will continue with the people even through the tragedy. There is nothing they can do for themselves but wait – wait on the God who will surely gather them back again.

Jeremiah’s flooding tears, then, are tears without fear. His is a “free” grief which feels the pain of loss but holds no fear for the future. If we fear for the future, grief can turn to anger, despair or nostalgia. Anger has its place, if it is without violence. Despair is a living death and scarcely an option for anyone who thinks anything has meaning, much less for those who utter the word “God” with any seriousness. The real temptation is nostalgia – the happy face of despair. Nostalgia imagines that it is enough for life to know where God once was. Once God loved us, but not now. Once we could point to the power of God in the masses of people, but not now. If we are believers, our nostalgia traps God in yesterday, before the tears came.

Against this, Christian discipleship is tears-without-fear. We look for not a little joy along the way, of course! But where there is sadness and loss – and there will surely be this – our tears are without fear. Even real and deep sadness need not be not despair. The Jewish-Christian vision is not tragic, and so our hopes far exceed nostalgia’s ghosts of Gods-past.

Jeremiah’s God gives, and takes away, and gives. We must live within this, for not to live here would be finally to despair in the face of death and loss. But there is the second giving – an intensifying of original gift – a forgiving which heals for life. And so we can live within sadness and loss – towards, through and out of it.

Blessed are the meek who learn this, Jesus says, though they have lost many things.

The Lord gives, and takes away, and gives again: blessed be the name of the Lord.

And blessed are those meek who find God’s life within this, for they shall inherit all things.

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Pentecost 14
11/9/2022

1 Timothy 1:12-17
Psalm 51
Luke 15:1-10

In a sentence:
We are not defined by sin but by the love of the God who seeks us in all circumstances

One of the side-effects of the waning of God in the public imagination in these latter days is that we have seen a corresponding reduction in the number of sinners: less God, less sin!

Of course, there is still plenty of wrong-doing going on, including all the big-ticket items: disrespect, murder, adultery, theft, lying and coveting abound. Yet little of this is now commonly recognised as sin, except by the few who still know why those particular transgressions might be the “big-ticket items”. We still lament all of this, of course, except perhaps for the coveting, which is the engine of our modern economies. But, for the most part, these are all once-were-sins. Whatever the root problem in the world today is, it is not “sin”. This is because we have lost the idea of God around which the popular notion of sin was constructed. Because the God who commands and against whom we can sin is no longer a shared experience, neither can we have in common that we are sinners in any sensible way. The accusation “sinner” was once powerful. “He welcomes tax collectors and sinners”, declare Jesus’ accusers in today’s Gospel reading; that meant something to Jesus and his accusers. These days the notion of sin is thought to be at least unhelpful inside the churches and is ridiculed outside of them.

Yet, if we are not sinners, do we not still experience ourselves as “lost”? We are disoriented by a senseless war in Ukraine, sabre-rattling in the South China Sea, climate change threatening to roast most things, and the unreconciled claims for justice out of colonial history, to say nothing of those threats and problems which have been with us much longer. Besides what we can see, COVID-19 has further undermined our sense of security by revealing how vulnerable we are to things we don’t even imagine might be over the horizon. And there is a prevailing sense that “everyone is so angry about everything all of the time”.^[1] As much as we might like church to be a place of escape from all this, that doesn’t much work either. If it were just a bad dream, we might expect to wake up at some stage, but we’ve no reason to imagine anything other than that this is as good as it is going to get. Where are we as a society, as a church, as individual hearts and souls?

What I’ve described is not the lostness we see in Jesus’ parables about the sheep and the coin. What is lost now is not one sheep or coin but the whole flock and purse. The parable implies a holy huddle – 99 sheep, nine coins – waiting safe while the lost one is finally restored. The 99 and the nine left to huddle are, in the story, the righteous who know where they are. Read this way, the parables are stories of the ins and the outs – a moralistic account of how we relate to God. Here, Jesus allows that “sinner” implies the possibility of un-sinners, the “un-lost”. But, whatever Jesus allows in the rhetorical moment, the text is not finally about a moral purity from which a few have strayed. Jesus seems to be defending his interest in the “tax collectors and sinners” but his accusers are themselves are also part of his interest. There is, then, an irony at play here, which is more obvious in the parable which follows today’s reading – the story of the unrighteous “prodigal son” whose self-righteous brother shows himself to be no less mistaken about the father’s love. Both these sons are lost, the one outside and the other inside, the clearly lost and the apparently un-lost.

This lostness in and out of the fold resonates with our experience today of a shared disorientation, and indicates that our attention should not be on the one lost sheep or coin but on the shepherd and the woman who seek the lost treasure. It is these who bind together the lost and those who think they are un-lost. To move from the parables to the broader gospel, the cross and the resurrection of Jesus are the key to interpreting our sense of being lost, or not. The cross captures those who are outcast – as the crucified Jesus is himself – and those who think they are “in-cast”, who think themselves among the safe 99. The cross is a leveller – capturing the ins and the outs, the pious and the impious, the religious and the secular. The cross becomes the one thing we have in common: that all are outside, whether we know it or not – that we are all lost. Faith in the cross is not merely faith that somehow God saves us in the death of Jesus if, by this, we mean God connects us back to the nine and the 99 who didn’t need saving. Faith in the cross sees the lost one and the unlost nine and 99 in a single vision.

There are, then, no 99 safe and the one lost – or, as it might seem in the churches today, one safe and 99 lost! “Sinner” doesn’t define us; it certainly doesn’t distinguish us from one another. The accusation “sinner” isn’t heard on Jesus’ lips but on the lips of those who accuse him and others. Jesus speaks instead of “hypocrites”, meaning those who refuse to see themselves as God sees them – as lost and found. Rather than accuse, Jesus stands for the one – the shepherd, the woman in her home – who sees and holds them all together.

And so there is no “safe”, un-lost community over against the lost, no sinners over against the righteous. We gather today, in this way, not as a holy huddle or a faithful remnant. We gather not to escape but to hear again that God finds us anywhere we might be, in or out.

If I ascend to heaven, you are there [writes the psalmist]; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

Psalm 139.8-12

A God such as this cannot know us as lost but only as found, cannot know us as sinners but as those destined for redemption.

We gather today as those lost in a lost world, to be reminded that we are sought, and to become seekers ourselves.

We gather as those dying, to be reminded of the promise of life, and to become signs of that promise.

We gather to keep hope alive – for our own sake, and so that we might become signs of hope for the world.

So, if God has found you, become yourself a seeker, a sign of promise, and a beacon of hope within a world which knows itself only as lost.

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-is-everyone-so-angry-about-everything-all-of-the-time-20220902-p5betf.html

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Pentecost 13
4/9/2022

Philemon 1-25
Psalm 139
Luke 14:25-33

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

What we have discovered after so many years of making long term plans is that we do certainly achieve many of our goals, but things happen over which we have no control and many of our plans go overboard in mid-stream.

I am told the new way to plan is called Scenario Planning. What will we do if this happens, or what will we do if that happens. In 2001 the Shell Oil Coy had done its planning like this. They were the only major oil company that had asked, ‘what happens if there is a war in the middle east?’ Shell was the only company that had an action plan to deal with the Gulf War.

Scenario planning requires looking ahead and asking, ‘what are we going to do if this happens or if that happens? What will the consequences be, and what will our response be?’

I think Jesus must have been into a kind of scenario planning routine. His mission was going pretty well. The Gospel writers tell us that lots of people came to hear him on his lecture tours. Sometimes he had to do outdoor gigs because his house groups got out of hand – one time some people broke up the roof to let their sick friend in for healing (rotten queue jumpers).

Jesus had lots of admirers. Jesus had done a bit of scenario thinking about what might happen if these admirers became followers. What will the consequences be for them if my unpopularity with authorities gets me killed? So we have this interesting situation where Jesus is saying to his admirers, ‘come and follow me, but make sure you have done your own scenario planning.’

You have come out today to admire what I have to say, and it is life changing stuff and you feel the urge to respond to the alter call and give your life in my service, but I am not going to be hear tomorrow. When you follow me tomorrow we are going to be 15km along the road, and two days after that we will be 30km away and who knows when we will be coming back this way.

If you follow me do you know where you will sleep tonight, or if there will be food tomorrow. And another thing, what will your family think about what you are about to do? Will they understand? You know they probably won’t. You know they had hoped you would keep the family fishing boat going. Can you live with their disappointment in you? Can you bear to hear them calling after you, ‘We thought you loved us, how can you hate your own family so much as to follow that Jesus of Nazareth?’ Have you worked out the cost of switching from admiring to following?

‘Shame’ must have been a very powerful force in the society of Jesus. We have met it a few times in recent weeks – the shame of being sent to a lower place at the table, the shame of not giving hospitality when the disciples went on their mission in the villages and town, the shame of not giving a loaf of bread to a neighbour even when he asked in the middle of the night. Here it is again. Consider the shame if you have to return home because you can’t hack the pace of following Jesus. You don’t start building a tower until you know you can pay for it. You don’t declare war unless you have worked out how you are going to win it.

You don’t follow Jesus into some kind of dream world. It is a real world – the most real of all worlds. Jesus summed it all up in terms of taking up your cross. Take up your cross and follow me. The Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan was led away to an American federal prison for his resistance to the war in Vietnam. As he went he smiled at reporters covering the event and said, ‘If you follow Jesus, you’d better look good on wood.’ That’s the kind of scenario planning Jesus suggests. If following him turns really bad, do you look good on wood?

That is how Jesus saw it for his day. How does following Jesus look today? Can we get away with admiring Jesus and still look as if we are following? I don’t know what cross you have dragged into this church today, or what cross you left in the car park because it might look too ugly for this fine space. I don’t know what it has cost you to be a follower, what it has cost your family, what resentment you have born over the decisions you have taken because you are a follower and not just an admirer. I don’t know what crosses there are, but I know they are there.

The Christian’s cross is raised by the contrasts between values. The pain of that contrast, the point that sees us hit the wood, is when our value is in such contrast that we feel separated from those we want to be close to. Jesus so much wanted Jerusalem to see things his way, through his spectacles of faith. He wanted to gather them all under his wings like a mother hen. It was that difference that saw him killed. That was the literal cross. As we try to view life through Jesus coloured glasses the contrast with those we want to love and who we want to love us defines the point of pain, the prick of the nails.

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Pentecost 12
28/8/2022

Philippians 2:1-11
Psalm 131
Luke 14:7-11

In a sentence:
The humble heart does not desire to go anywhere, but to create

The item at the top of the news feeds over the last couple of weeks has been former Prime Minister Morrison’s having been sworn in – secretly – as co-minister of numerous government portfolios. It’s not entirely clear why this has been deemed so important. It was, apparently, done legally, if never previously done. Apart from the welcome political leverage it has given the new Prime Minister, the principal reason we are still hearing about it is perhaps simply – as many have said – that it was a bizarre thing for Morrison to have done. Why he did it has been a matter for speculation in the absence of any good explanation from him, and the less charitable of that speculation has included the charge of a less than humble grasp for power and control.

When citizens are asked to assess their politicians, the word “humble” is not often heard, even if those close to our leaders would speak of them as persons in that way. Humility is a tough sell in a modern democracy. When Jesus said, “…all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted”, he was not offering campaign advice to election hopefuls, particularly those running in marginal seats. We might want our leaders to be gentle and humble of heart, but this is not why we elect them.

What is Jesus saying, then? It sounds like he offers guidelines about how not to make a fool of yourself at a formal gathering by not making a higher claim for yourself than others might think is your right. In fact, he seems to imply, deliberately make a lower claim than you could, so that you might be called higher up by the host.

Of course, the lesson that it is better to be exalted than humiliated is clear enough to us, as is the common sense recognition that if you place yourself at the bottom of the table, there is nowhere to go but up. And we also generally resonate with the concept of humility, especially in contrast with pride. Very rarely do we congratulate somebody for their pride or arrogance, but we often celebrate the humble life.

But there is a problem if we hear Jesus’ teaching to link humility and exaltation such that the way to the top involves an intentional lingering around the bottom. This would be a doublemindedness; humility is now a ruse towards elevation in this life or the reward which comes at the end of life (assuming that that is where God pays out, if not already).

So knotted can this become that we will be unsure of even our own motives. We might think that the humble person is more respected than the arrogant one, which is to be interested not in humility but in the respect it would bring. We might think that humility makes us less noticeable than we might otherwise be, which is to be interested not in humility but in keeping out of the limelight. We might think that humility in possessions or attitude is better for our blood pressure, which is to be interested not in humility but in the length and quality of our life. In each case, humility is but a means to an end, and the end can even be the exact opposite of being humble means.

A clue to unravelling this tangle of God’s call and our motivation in answering it is found less in what Jesus says in this teaching than in what the church has said about Jesus himself. We’ve also heard this morning Paul’s account of the humility of Jesus:

^{Philippians 2.5} Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
⁷ but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
⁸ he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
⁹ Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹ and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. (NRSV)

The humility-reward scheme is still here, but it now has a clearer structure. The exaltation which follows the self-humbling of Jesus is not the end in Jesus’ sight from the beginning; the only goal for Jesus is the obedience and service itself. This is what it means to be “in the form of God”. Nothing else is glimpsed or sought. Humility is not a strategy. To have in us – as Paul proposes – the mind of Jesus, is not to know that our humility will end in exaltation but simply to know ourselves subject to the call from a faithful God: live and love, the essence of humility.

This is very easily said. And it is very easily corrupted by our adding other little bits in a way that can only be said to be self-justifying. And so true humility is rare thing – true attention to God in the need of our human neighbours, for the neighbours’ sake and not for our own. When humility happens, the effect is not that we are rewarded for our actions but a kind of renewal of the world. The exaltation which flows from the humble man or woman is an achievement previously thought impossible in and for others. The humble create what was not there before. Humility, then, is not about upward – or downward – mobility which benefits or diminishes the humble. Humility is an outwardness; this turning-out is the possibility of a renewal of the world from wherever we happen to be. The doubleminded – those who feign humility to some other end – make nothing new but are merely manipulators who move stuff around for their own benefit.

We all, Prime Ministers included, know well enough how to manipulate systems – how to look like we’re doing one thing when we’re really doing something else. We are so good at it that it’s scarcely possible for us anymore to know what truly motivates our actions. This might also apply to Prime Ministers.

But any possible lack of humility in others matters less here and now than what there might be in us of a doubleminded humility. “Am I humble enough?” is not a question about the state of my heart but about the effect of my actions: is the world today a better place – renewed – for what I have said and done? Is my spouse or child or neighbour or colleague more than they would have been, had I not been there?

Take your place at the table, Jesus says. And whether that’s where you stay, or you’re called up higher, grow into humility with hands that do not grasp but which are open to give and create.

In this way become, in your place, a surprise: the creation of something new, and open up some cracks in the old world of grasping and manipulation.