The worship service for Sunday 3 July 2022 can be viewed by clicking on the image below.
Other worship services can be found in the list below or at the MtE YouTube channel
The order of service can be viewed here.
Pentecost 3
26/6/2022
Revelation 6:1-11
Psalm 16
Luke 9:51-62
In a sentence:
The witness – “martyrdom” – of Christians is against the powers which dehumanise the world.
The book of Revelation is a violent book, deeply marked by antagonism, conflict, threats, and death.
It is the violence of God in Revelation which is the most problematic. God’s four horsemen of this morning’s reading “conquer”, take away peace “so that people would slaughter one another”, and are given authority “to kill with sword, famine, and pestilence, and by the wild animals of the earth”: not everyone’s idea of a God of love. While the violence of God catches our attention, less obvious is the violence which has preceded the blood-letting of the narrative: the violence against the people of God. We might return to God’s violence before we finish with Revelation; today we’ll look to the martyrs in the text.
In today’s reading, John identifies “those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given” (6.9). The word “martyr” doesn’t appear in our usual translation of the book of Revelation, although it is present throughout the text in Greek. The Greek word marturia means “testimony”, so that a “martyr” is “one who gives testimony”. The later notion of martyrdom extends from this root to understand the death of persecuted believers as being because of, or as giving testimony to, the truths of God. The original context of Revelation is still debated, but part of that context is likely to have been the persecution of Christians, even to death. It’s not always clear why they were persecuted. Just being different can be enough to cause the powerful to scapegoat a community, as Nero is said to have done when he burned a large part of Rome. Here, the sheer difference drives the persecution rather than the content of a community’s belief. Scapegoats can be politically useful.
But other times it is the belief itself which causes the persecution. We have a record dating from early in the second century (AD 112), which describes the test put by one Pliny the Younger – a local Roman official – to Christians:
I interrogated them as to whether they were Christians; those who confessed I interrogated a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; those who persisted I ordered executed. [1]
Pliny elaborates further, but the threat of execution in the interrogation was clear. Given that threat, are these believers themselves not being a little extreme, a little fanatical? What is lost if one softens a bit, especially if we keep our fingers crossed – if God knows we still believe even if we tell the Romans we don’t?
But we can’t begin with this question until we see what Pliny describes from another critical angle. We might think it extreme to die for convictions and creeds about something which can’t be seen. But we should also wonder: What is it about these “mere” beliefs which makes believing them reason to execute the believer? The death sentence reveals that what is at stake is not merely “religious” – not merely about what we might believe and others might reject. Pliny the Younger was sane and measured. He observed and investigated – if by torture! – and found only that Christians were deluded by “depraved, excessive superstition”. But these were for him no mostly harmless late-afternoon nutters on public transport. Pliny held the delusion of the Christians to be utterly dangerous to the community, the temple and the local economy. And so the Christians were executed if they would not sacrifice in the temple or worship the emperor’s image. Christian belief had consequences which threatened to break the social and political order.
In a decision to execute over “mere” belief, faith is revealed not merely a “belief” thing, as distinct from a political or social matter. Pliny killed Christians because the social and economic consequences they drew from their “deluded superstitions” were perceived to be positively dangerous. This is clear. But let us also see that if we consider the martyr to be a little unreasonable in her refusal to change her beliefs “a bit” under threat of death, we should also hold that it is unreasonable to threaten and execute her over such things in the first place. We might lament this clash of worlds and the blood it spills, but we should not do it too loudly, for Pliny might mistake us for Christians. No well-meaning “wish” that we could just get along better together is going to overcome the fact that, even today, people are killed because they see the world differently – often rightly – and such vision is dangerous. We might think here of those crushed in dark, faraway places by the interests of large corporations, or those who see the lies in despotic politics, or those who expose to us where we benefit from overlooking inconvenient truths. The history wars playing out in Australia are caught up in a similar dynamic; we’re just not as bloody-handed about it (anymore). To say “it all happened so long ago” is not unlike saying “it’s just something you believe”.
There is a lot of blood spilt in the book of Revelation – the blood of the martyrs and the blood of the perpetrators. This is because there is a lot of blood spilt in the world. The witness – the martyr – says, against too-easy claims about peace, justice and life, that is not peace, that is not justice, that is not life. The need for wide-ranging judgements about life and death, peace, justice and life are not as distant as we imagine. How will we handle the needs of the millions living on low-lying coastlines when rising sea levels render them homeless? There is no technological solution to this question; solar panels don’t float. How will we handle increasing hostility in the superpowers we don’t like or understand? Will there be true peace or the more likely return to killing as a means of “peace”? What truths will require witnessing – “martyring” – in these contexts?
We “hope”, of course, for less blood than more. By this, we usually mean that we have our “fingers crossed” because we know that the powers of darkness are very strong, for all our effort against them. We don’t need the book of Revelation to tell us this but opening our eyes to the world around us should at least explain why Revelation is violently dark and red. Indeed, revelation tells the story of the God of love, but it is the story of God’s love for us who are too familiar with blood.
For this reason, we gather around the table not merely to receive “the bread of life” and a “cup of salvation”. Indeed, this language is appropriate, but it doesn’t tell the whole truth, and here of all places, let us tell the truth. We are given what is named explicitly as tokens of the body and blood of Jesus because the very people of God – people like us – are capable of making a martyr of the Lord of life. “Bread of life” and “cup of salvation” are Christ broken “for” us; “body” and “blood” are Christ broken by us. Salvation is salvation from this “having-broken” another. The mystery of Christian faith is that, without justifying the violence, God uses it for the revelation – for the apocalypse – of God’s persistent love for his enemies.
Christians do not “wish” for peace. We “hope” for it. That is, we confess a God who exceeds the possibilities of a world of predictable cause and effect – the cause which is violence and the effect which is more violence. To hope “Christianly” is to say that violence is not the only thing which can follow violence. The violence of denial does not have to follow the violence of dispossession or neglect. The violence of war does not have to follow the violence of escalation. Yet Pliny shows how, in a violent world, even such suggestions seem violent, a challenge to the prevailing order: depraved, excessive superstition. Christian hope – not mere belief – can be costly.
To hope Christianly is to live as if we have done the worst and been forgiven, and to relate to others who have done badly in such a way that we become the means by which they do better. It is in this that we “martyr” – that we give testimony to a truth which is not known until someone points to it by being it. “This is what truth looks like”, says the risen Son of the Jesus hanging on the cross.
In none of this is there any revelling in the possibility of martyrdom – that martyrdom which is dying. This corruption has certainly infected the church and many other movements at times, but it is a corruption. Death is never a means to an end with this God.
In reflecting on the martyrs, there is only the invitation to open our eyes to the violent ways of the world. This is not easy for those of us served well by violence. Nevertheless, testimony – martyring – in word and deed – speaking the truth about God and the truth about ourselves – is our purpose as a church and the expression of our faith. Violence might be the way of the world but it is not to be our way.
Let us, then, be willing witnesses to the peace of God, for the sake of all world, believing and not.
Related sermons
[1] The text of the letter can be found at https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/pliny.html.
The worship service for Sunday 26 June 2022 can be viewed by clicking on the image below.
Other worship services can be found in the list below or at the MtE YouTube channel
The order of service can be viewed here.
Pentecost 2
19/6/2022
Revelation 21:1-6a
Psalm 42
Luke 8:26-39
In a sentence:
Heaven is where we are made by other people, not the absence of other people.
History has delivered many images of what heaven is like, which are usually connected to certain notions of what hell might be like, the one contrasted with the other. Hell is a place of fire and punishment; heaven is a place of sunshine and bliss – so the story typically goes. The book of Revelation has contributed considerably to these expectations!
Our Revelation text this morning provides a vision of heaven with elements of the blissful existence we might be hoping for: God will dwell with them, will wipe away every tear from their eyes, death and mourning and crying will be no more. These are things we all long for.
But there’s another aspect of John’s vision which may be more troubling if we consider its fuller ramifications: heaven is a place where others are. We might take some comfort in being in heaven with others if we could choose who else is there: friends, the family members we actually like, perhaps our favourite artists or musicians or thinkers. Yet not only they are there if heaven is a city. As a city, heaven is a communal place and not a place of isolated individuals with their narrow desires. This means that heaven may be a place where there will be people we don’t like or have even learned to hate and who return that favour. And there doesn’t seem to be very much heavenly about that.
Of course, if it’s a city, we expect heaven to be pretty large. Perhaps we could be in heaven without running into those people who rub us up the wrong way. Yet, given that that’s how we do things already here and now, there’s still nothing very heavenly about this vision if we have to plot when and where we’ll be to avoid being annoyed or threatened by others. If heaven is a city full of people, it could be just plain hard work. So, after a lifetime of being commanded to love people whom it’s hard to love, we’ll go to heaven and meet more of them. Praise the Lord.
This is all a bit silly but unpacking the ideas of the text in this way shows how they can be misunderstood. There are a lot of half-thought wishes and dreams about heaven (and hell) which have little relationship to scriptural imagery. Whatever heaven is, it is not our favourite things.
Day after day, our televisions, newspapers, radios and social media feeds fill the space around us with the cacophonies, the dissonances, the traffic of city life. What would it take for life in a city to be a harmonious reality, for the heavenly city John describes actually to be heaven?
The answer is that we cannot imagine. By this, we mean that we do not know how this could be possible and so we can’t create this Utopia. The bad news the church has is that we are unable to save ourselves, to the extent that we would have to be alone in heaven if we were to be there on our own terms and not be hassled by other people – even by those we love and yet who are still quite capable of driving us up the wall. Every dream of a new city, every vision of a new society, every “solution” for some communal problem creates just another problem. This is the dynamic between the left, the centre and the right in our politics, each crying out in turn “That didn’t work”, after every social and economic pendulum-swing solution.
But let’s turn all of this towards something more concrete and specific, and closer to home. What about us and our search for a solution to the problem of our future as a congregation? What do we dream of here? What is our vision? How will the next thing for MtE be “heavenly”? For indeed, that is what the next thing must be to be worthwhile.
In another reflection on our situation late last year, I quoted from a little book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Life Together – in which he makes a powerful statement about ideals and human community:
“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who fashion a visionary ideal of community demand that it be realised by God, by others, and by themselves.
They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge the fellowship and God himself accordingly… They act as if they are the creators of the Christian community, as if their dream binds people together.
When their ideal picture is destroyed, they see the community going to smash. So they become, first accusers of the fellowship, then accusers of God, and finally the despairing accusers of themselves.” (SCM 1954, 17f)
This is to say that it is not a brave person who declares “this, and only this” is how to give shape to heaven, is the future of a Christian community. It is not even a fool who says this. It is a blasphemer who declares that God’s home is not with mortals (Rev 21.3) – that God’s home is not with those whose existence is indelibly marked by brokenness and death, who are prone to get it wrong: even us.
We worship a God who justifies sinners. This is not a declaration that there is a safety net for when we break the rules. To say that God justifies sinners is the rules. “Who-justifies-sinners” is God’s name and not merely what God sometimes happens to do. “Home-is-with-mortals” is God’s name.
The shadow-side of this is that if this God is our God, then we are those in need of being justified. Why? In relation to the need to decide our future together, it is because we mistake planning for hope, our work for God’s.
It is, of course, necessary that tomorrow have some particular shape in our imagination: we must plan. This is so that we have something worth doing today. But we can have no confidence that our planned tomorrow will not amount to a crucifying of the Lord of glory. Instinctively, we know this. It is what causes us so much anxiety in the whole process. We wonder, Will we get it wrong?, with particular ideas in our heads of what “wrong” looks like. That is, we have a clearer sense of hell than of heaven. And we wonder, how will we account for ourselves? Who will accuse us for what we choose and how it works out? Perhaps those who went before us, giving us so much, only to see it lost? Perhaps the Presbytery or Synod, which imagine they could have put the resources to better use? Perhaps those sitting in the row in front of, or behind, you, who advised that we go a different way? Perhaps most powerfully: Does God have a plan for us, which we are supposed to guess? Do we risk failing God in this?
To put the question differently: what is the relationship between what we have to do and what is said from the throne in John’s magnificent vision: It is done? What is done? The “done-ness” is the revelation that God’s home is with mortals. God home is with those who built all this, and then died, leaving it to us to sort out. God’s home is with us who will decide what to do with it all, and will then die. God’s home is with those who will have to live with our decisions before they die.
All this is to say: our decision is not the source of our life. The God named home-is-with-mortals – this God is the source of life.
We are a baptised people. The only death which matters we died in that baptism; there is no condemnation of those whose lives are hidden with Christ in God. Weekly we are fed with the signs of death – broken body and spilt blood – not because we are a cannibalistic death cult but because with this God death has no power but what God gives it.
The decisions before us cause us so much trouble because we are afraid that something will die, that tomorrow will be less than heaven. But God’s home is with mortals, with those who die. There is nothing to fear.
“It is done” declares that death has no power; it is overcome, and there is nothing to fear.
What then are we to do? There is only one option. Let death be behind us by choosing life.
What kind of life? Life together: God’s will done, on earth as it will be in the impossible, promised heaven.
Based on a sermon
preached at MtE April 2016
Related sermons
The worship service for Sunday 19 June 2022 can be viewed by clicking on the image below.
Other worship services can be found in the list below or at the MtE YouTube channel
The order of service can be viewed here.
Trinity Sunday
12/6/2022
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15
Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a pint of beer. The second one orders half a pint of beer. The third asks for half of the last order. The fourth orders half of the last order. The next orders half of the last order and so on it went. The barman pulled two one-pint glasses of beer. Gave one to the first mathematician and told the others to share the other pint among themselves. They didn’t argue about this arrangement because they knew that the halving of each order even an infinity number of times, the amount of beer would not quite reach one pint. It is when thinking of puzzles like this that I don’t feel quite so bad when I can’t get my head around the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
The human mind likes to picture things. We make pictures of things that cannot be seen.
Mindful of our love of visualising everything, God told Moses there had to be a limit to this desire. God got Moses to include this injunction into the Ten Commandments. God decreed thou shalt not draw pictures of me. A little aside – such is our love of images that Cecil B. DeMille made a film in 1956 of the Ten Commandments. Of course, anyone who had read the Bible realised that the film missed what the Bible is about by a long shot. This is the problem. When we make an image of anything or anyone we only get a little bit of it right and most of it wrong.
And God said, ‘Thou shall not paint me!’ So what possessed me to have an icon of the Holy Trinity on the cover of our order of service? There was a season in the history of the church when painting any kind of icon was against church law. Thou shalt not paint any kind of image of God or God’s Son or God’s followers. There shall be no images. Then John of Damascus said:
I have seen God in human form, and my soul was saved… In former times God, who is without form or body, could never be depicted. But now when God is seen in the flesh conversing with humans, I make an image of the god whom I see. I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to take his abode in matter; who worked out my salvation through matter.
So the church said OK you can paint icons, but THOU SHALT NOT PAINT ICONS OF GOD THE FATHER!!! For the most part icon artists have obeyed. They have sneaked a hand poking in from the top to indicate that God the Father is causing the story in the picture to unfold. There have also been a few blatant acts of disobedience. We were visiting old churches in Mystras in the hills above Sparta and I caught a glimpse of a triangular halo. I looked closer and there was an old man with a triangular halo sitting beside a younger man with a halo traditionally associated with Christ and a white dove fluttering between them.
Other examples of this disobedience occurred in Russia despite an injunction of the Acts of the Great Council of Moscow of 1666-1667 that said, ‘To paint icons of the Lord Sabaoth (that is, the Father) with a white beard, holding the only-begotten Son in his lap with a dove between them is altogether absurd and improper…’ Sure enough, I saw an example of this indictment being ignored as late as the early years of the twentieth century when it appeared in an old photo atop an icon screen in a church built in St Petersburg to commemorate 300 years of the Romanov dynasty. The church was destroyed during the Soviet era and is now restored. The offending icon atop the screen has been replaced with one resembling the famous Rublev icon of the Holy Trinity?
How did Rublev get away with painting God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit when it is against church regulation to paint God the Father. He got away with it by painting the three messengers from God who visited Abraham and Sarah to announce they were going to have a baby who would be the father of a nation. He wasn’t the first to paint this bit of scripture. Early versions go back to the early fourth century. Some of us have been to Ravena and seen a mosaic of the story from before 547 CE. Over the centuries some artists put the same kind of halo over the central messenger as was usually given to Christ. In others, Christ’s halo surrounded the three heads – they were interchangeable. There were many other variations to the image according to the imaginations of the artists. In many, Abraham and Sarah were still present bringing food to the visitors.
Theologians, poets, musicians, ecumenical church councils have joined with artists to help the church say what there is to be said and sung and seen about who God is. We know that human minds and senses are way to puny to begin to grasp all that God is. God reveals God’s self to humankind and, by God’s grace, we can see and hear and feel God with us. But if we ever imagine we have perceived it all we are kidding ourselves and our god is much too small.
And yet, on Trinity Sunday, the church pauses to grapple again with this great mystery that the omniscient, omnipotent, invisible, and all other superlatives that might be associated with God and wonder that this God cares for us. It is a kind of genius that prompted the church to abbreviate what it can know about God into statements we call creeds that describes one God as three persons.
When Rublev painted his icon of the hospitality of Abraham, the Russian church decreed that icons of the Holy Trinity would henceforth be modelled on the one painted by Rublev. The church recognised that of all the attempts to paint or sing or describe God, Rublev had got some things right. I will mention only two. Firstly, the table the three are sitting at with a chalice looks remarkably like every communion table or high alter where the Eucharist is celebrated. There is also a space at this table, a place where the worshiper may join in fellowship with the three who are in eternal unity.
Of course all these attempts to understand God are too small. In his hymn, King of glory George Herbert concludes his praise with the line, ‘ev’n eternity’s too short to extol thee’.
In my student days, a visiting theologian from America told of his late-night conversations with a fellow theologian as they grappled together with the mystery of God. He explained that what they had to say on the subject was never complete but always came to a halt, whereupon the host put his recording of JS Bach’s B minor Mass on the turntable and played the Credo, Credo in unum Deum (I believe in one God). No more words. No more argument to finds no winners or loser. Just time spent together enjoying a great artistic composition celebrating God.
On Trinity Sunday the church grapples again with the mystery of God. On every occasion when the liturgy of the church celebrates the Eucharist the worshiper is met again by the mystery of the Holy Trinity in the recitation of the creed and receiving the body and blood of Christ at his table.
The worship service for Sunday 12 June 2022 can be viewed by clicking on the image below.
Other worship services can be found in the list below or at the MtE YouTube channel
The order of service can be viewed here.
Pentecost
5/6/2022
Revelation 21:1-6a
Psalm 104
John 14:12-17, 25-27
In a sentence:
Heaven is no escape from the command to love
Whatever other benefits the lockdowns of 2020-21 might have delivered to us, one was the possibility of driving down the wrong side of the road entirely safely, if still illegally! The traffic disappeared, and getting to the few places we were allowed to go was a breeze.
Alas, the traffic has returned with a vengeance. Yet, though we say “alas”, the traffic jam is surprisingly important for understanding the nature of the promised future we hear about in the book of Revelation.
In Revelation, we have a seer’s vision of the consummation of all things: the end, the goal of God’s work in Christ. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth”. This is fairly straightforward so far as apocalyptic visions go, and something like it is to be expected at this point of the story. But then comes the strange thing: “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”
Why is this strange? The city is the human way of being. The city is the teeming human mass. It is extraordinary and tragic. The city is coffee shops and crazy people on public transport. The city is park benches and sirens in the night. It is soaring architecture and backstreet graffiti. It is movement and exchange. The city is the traffic jam.
The traffic jam is a sacrament of human interconnectedness, although we experience the sacrament in its fallen state as a clash and a choking. The traffic jam is a sign of the way and the degree to which we are all inextricably interconnected and interdependent. The traffic jam occurs because my being at work is made more effective by your being at work at the same time. This is, in turn, more effective if our kids are at all at school at the same time. As the city becomes more successful through this honing of mutual effectiveness, creating more opportunities for interconnection occur, making the traffic worse. The distance over which I can provide my services increases (meaning more time on the road), as does the possibility of being able to afford to send the kids somewhere other than the local school (meaning more time on the road). Each extra dimension of interrelatedness in the city makes it more successful as a city, and harder to be in the city.
The size of the city doesn’t really matter. Theologically, a “city” needs only two people for John’s vision of the new Jerusalem to be pertinent. How can two people have a traffic jam, you ask? Well, marriage, for instance, which also features in our passage today and to which we’ll return in a moment. (But also siblings, neighbours, business partners, etc.). The traffic jam is the sign and the burden of engaged, interactive human life. It is what happens when more than one person has to be in the same place at the same time, when we act upon the fact that we are “made for each other”. Every engaged, interactive life has its traffic jams. Only the sufficiently wealthy and the sufficiently poor are outside the requirement of the traffic jam.
If this is how cities work, John’s vision of a “new” city descending from heaven to earth gives rise to an unexpected question for faith: are there traffic jams in the new Jerusalem, in “heaven”?
The gospel suggests a surprising answer: Yes. And No.
Yes, there are traffic jams because this is a real city; heaven is not everyone getting green lights all the way, although that’s how we might imagine it. Perhaps even stranger than the fact that God sets forth a new city is that it is Jerusalem, the basket case of all cities:
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus cried, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”(Matthew 23.37-39; Luke 13.34f)
This is to say nothing of what has happened there since then, and happens even now. But the point here is not to “pick on” Jerusalem but to understand why it appears here in the vision, and not some brand new, start-it-all-over Utopia. It must be Jerusalem here because God’s promises have to do with a people for whom Jerusalem is heart and soul. It must be Jerusalem because Jerusalem casts out the Christ, and so is the sign of both the failure of God’s people and of our need to be healed. What else are Jesus’ clashes with the religious authorities but gridlock – a dispute over who has the right to be here and now? What else is the crucifixion but road rage?
It is this history, identifiable by the name “Jerusalem,” which is taken up into God and descends again, cleansed. The new heaven and the new earth and the new city are a wiping away of tears, but not a wiping away of the eyes which cry them. The new Jerusalem is Jerusalem, as she should be – is us as we shall be. John expresses this by analogy with marriage: a bride and a groom, complementary and engaged, two parties necessarily in the same place at the same time in order to be their true selves, but now without competition or conflict.
Yes, there are traffic jams in heaven because our interconnectedness, our needing to be in the same place at the same time in order to be our true selves does not go away. This connectedness is the very point of heaven.
But No, this gridlock is different. In our usual daily traffic jams, the city’s purpose of making possible our being for each other becomes the city’s burden. Interrelatedness turns out to be more than we want to bear, even as it is the very thing we need to flourish. This is the communion of sinners, in which we experience the gift of the other person as a curse.
In the traffic jams in John’s heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, the perceived and experienced burden of our interrelatedness is made into a life-giving thing. This is the truly unbelievable and amazing thing, much more so than the mere proposal of a heaven, or even that there is a God who will bring it to pass. It is not “heaven” as a time or place which is to be believed in but what it is said will happen there. What happens in heaven is what connects that time and place to this one, is what allows heaven “then” an impact now: tomorrow, today.
So how is it in heaven? To be in heaven is to be happy to sit in traffic. The communion of saints which occupies heaven is not the collective of those who are “holy” in the sense of somehow having abstracted themselves from the messiness of the world and the kinds of exchanges a world entails. The communion of saints – promised for then and perceptible occasionally even now – is the community which rejoices that its life is a life together, with all that costs and with all the benefits it brings.
The promise of a new Jerusalem is the promise that the bumper-to-bumper grinding of the communion of sinners will be made a communion of saints: our city, our life, but not as we yet know it. The communion of sinners is a life which considers being caught in traffic to be the sign of death. There, other people are hell. The communion of saints is life “in the thick of it”, made enriching and life-giving by the grace of the God who created us for each other and who makes such a life together possible, even if now only as through a glass, darkly. Here the challenge of the needs of others becomes the promise of unexpected joy: other people not as hell but as the possibility of heaven.
This is the vision upon which we wait and towards which we point in words and deeds. The life of the church is to discern and to become, as much in the slow lanes as in the fast, the possibility of heaven.
This is so that we and the world might see how, in the end, all things will be found in God, and God in all things.
Adapted from a sermon previously preached at MtE, Nov 2015
Related sermons
The worship service for Sunday 5 June 2022 can be viewed by clicking on the image below.
Other worship services can be found in the list below or at the MtE YouTube channel
The order of service can be viewed here.
Easter 7
29/5/2022
Revelation 2:8-11a
Psalm 71
Matthew 11:25-30
In a sentence:
Christian discipleship is purposed with being “relevant” – relieving – of the burdens which deny peace and justice
It’s something of an occupational hazard that, from time to time, someone feels that a Christian minister should know, “I’m not religious; I think that when you die, that’s the end, and there’s nothing more.” In this way, religion is reduced to an interest in life after death.
This is an understandable reduction, given how the church has often linked upright living with the reward of eternal life. If we quite can’t conceive of the possibility of what is dead being meaningfully alive again at some time in the future, then the rejection of eternal life leads predictably to the rejection of religion. This doesn’t mean rejecting the moral life but does see religion with its trappings to be an over-dressed moralism. It seems clear that we can be “good” without religion, so why bother? This is a sensible line of thought, so far as it goes (although, on close examination, it doesn’t “go” as far as many seem to think). In this way, religion seems to be shown to be quite “irrelevant” to modern, intentionally this‑worldly existence.
The question of “relevance” has become a touchstone for thinking about what makes for good modern religion among those still at least loosely interested in religious things. We assess our doctrines and liturgies, among other things, in terms of their perceived relevance. Yet we’re not often clear what we mean by “relevant”. Generally, it has to do with vague ideas about whether some belief or practice “makes a difference” – a positive difference. However, things become more precise when we look into the source of the word. Something is literally (etymologically) relevant when it relieves. Relevance is relieving. To say of something – including religion – that it is not relevant is to say that it brings no relief, that it does not “lighten” what burdens we think we carry (to “re‑lieve” is to “make light again”, to bring levity, lightness). A thought, a practice, a conviction is properly relevant when it fills a need, answers a question, relieves a burden.
To reject life after death, then, is to say that it brings no relief from whatever we think weighs us down. And by this, we mean that it brings no relief, here and now, except perhaps as a kind of distraction from where we are, a turning away from the reality and meaning of the present. Indeed, the promise of life after death can make things worse before death, if that promise is used to justify pain and difficulty here and so to justify a refusal to do anything to alleviate that suffering. This reading of promised life after death in nineteenth-century Christian society led to Karl Marx’s famous critique of religion:
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
Religion, that is, works to stupefy the people in the present with promises of being part of a bigger picture in a future which, for most, coincides with their death. In this way, life after death can be weaponised to suppress the possibility of any good in the suffering present. What we have heard from John this morning could certainly be read this way: “Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life” (2.10).
With the mention of Marx here, we see the importance of clarity about how life after death might be relevant – how it might relieve us here and now. It won’t do to reduce heaven to personal pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die for those who had little pie during their lives. Having rejected how talk about eternal life was related to life here and now in the Christian society of his time, Marx developed a powerful alternative understanding of where we are now, where heaven is, and the path between the two.
The power of Marx’s alternative is still active in our very midst today. If we want to explain why Russia is in Ukraine, we could point to Marx; if we want to explain why China is in the Solomon Islands or why North Korea keeps plopping missiles into the Sea of Japan, we could point to Marx. It doesn’t matter whether he would be happy with these developments. The point is that these are the real-world consequences of getting wrong the relationship between life now and any life which might yet come. The dominant reading of heaven’s relationship to the world in Marx’s time didn’t work, and his response to that injustice writes the front pages of our newspapers today.
The fact that, in the end, Marx rejected altogether an interest in life after death – and that we are still in the midst of death – indicates that we aren’t guaranteed peace simply by rejecting life after death. The relationship between today and tomorrow – between the life we have now and the life to come – is no mere “religious” issue. What follows today is at the heart of our life together – whether we imagine ourselves religious or secular. Every politics, whether it imagines itself as religious or secular, has a vision of life at the end
None of this is “relevant” yet, in the sense of being itself “relieving”! The point of teasing out how these ideas have worked for us is to show that, wild though its method is, the book of Revelation’s interest in the life to come is much closer to our own social and political concerns than might first seem to be the case.
Revelation was written to people who were suffering, doubtless often much more profoundly than many of us are at the moment. We might look more closely at Revelation’s martyrs in a week or two, but it is important that what is said to those sufferers is not what Marx heard and saw. Opium is for those we are not able or interested in helping but whom we want to keep quiet, resting in peace. Religion, with its promise of a coming relieving heaven, is here a justification of the wrongful present: it’s OK that you suffer, because there’s a heaven to come.
The book of Revelation, however, speaks a word to suffering people which doesn’t dismiss their suffering but names it as right suffering. It was profoundly wrong that they suffered, and they were right to experience it as such. When John writes, “Be faithful unto death”, he marks his readers’ tribulation as true suffering and deeply unjust. There is no justification of pain and loss in Revelation; those who suffer are to be avenged for the injustice of what has happened (another troubling aspect of Revelation for modern sensibilities!). The One who promises this future in Revelation has no interest in the status quo which makes life so hard. It is an offence to God that God’s people suffer, as much as it is an offence to those who suffer. This is to say that Christian visions of heaven aren’t given to distract us from hell on earth but are to mark it as hell – as wrong. The declaration of suffering as wrong from the point of view of heaven’s future is a judgement on the present and, as such, calls for a response. This means that the difference between any hell now and any heaven to come is not merely black against white but is heaven’s pull against hell. Talk of heaven becomes now not simply the expounding of a comforting beatific vision. Talk of heaven is the beginning of a struggle. Talk of heaven is resistance.
Yet this is not the resistance of the revolutionary. While the Marxists knew that a mere promise of heaven was not answer enough to death, they saw death as its own solution. The communist revolutions which flowed from Marx’ reading of history saw death not only as what we suffer but as the means – the method – for ending that suffering. This dynamic, too, contributes to the front pages of our newspapers: the imagination that the death we are experiencing can be alleviated (note: re‑lief and al‑leve…) by more death. This is doubtless part of what causes a young man to take automatic weapons into a schoolyard, for whatever “relief” it seemed such violence might bring at least to him (Uvalde, May 24 2022).
Against this, and despite the violence of the book of Revelation itself, talk of heaven is an act of peace in the midst of war. We say this because Jesus was an act of peace in the midst of unpeace. Acts of peace in the midst of war are not about life after death but life before death: life in the face of death.
This is relief which names unjustice and unpeace, by demonstrating something entirely different. It is not an easy way, but it is the way of Jesus and his disciples: enduring unto death, so that death itself will not endure. Life in the face of death – what could be more “relevant” than that?
”Come to me”, Jesus says, “all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am relevant, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matthew 11.28-30 alt!).
Related sermons
· 27 September 2020 – The Resurrection of the living